Savage City (36 page)

‘You’re telling me!’ said the rider, irritably.

‘We’re going to move some of these vehicles out of the way manually,’ explained Varius. ‘We can’t wait for these people to get in the mood to come back to their cars. It’s going to get even worse before the support units can get here; the junction’s blocked up ahead.’

Sulien thought Varius sounded a little too measured and deliberate for what the situation was supposed to be, but the man was still looking around incredulously at the chaos and did not seem to notice. ‘I guess,’ he said, anxiously.

‘It just needs a few feet that way and you could get through,’ Sulien said.

‘Let’s get the rest of your team over here,’ urged Varius. ‘We need more pairs of hands.’

The three of them walked over to the van. Sulien’s pulse blared with each step closer; it seemed enough to shake the street.
Una, Una, I’m here, I’m here
.

Varius tapped on the window. ‘We need help with this, we’ve got to push these cars over that way,’ said the outrider to the driver inside.

‘I’m Captain Soterius Ater, we’re with the Nomentan Cohort,’ said Varius, displaying his identity pass. ‘You need to be ready to take the first turning; whoever you’ve got in the back needs to come and help.’

The driver was tense in his seat, but he didn’t hesitate. ‘Lads,’ he called, banging on the dividing wall of the van, ‘we’ve got a problem out here; come on.’

And the doors opened at the back. Sulien leant against the side of the van, light-headed, looking away. If he walked around to the rear of the van he might have seen inside, but there was no way to do it that would look natural, and it was just as well. He was not sure the pretence would hold if he saw her.

It would only have been for a second anyway; the men shut and
locked the doors behind them – but Sulien had seen the set of keys at the driver’s waist, where Cleomenes had said it would be.

Varius gestured the other outriders over, led them off towards the deserted cars. Four outriders and two guards. Sulien hung back, slipping round the corner of the van, hoping to be forgotten. Varius was alone in a knot of vigiles and Sulien’s throat tightened to see how precarious this looked. Ahead of them Delir’s fluorescent jacket glowed through the bustle. He was trying to herd people out of the way in earnest now.

Varius and the vigiles spread around a pair of cars, took hold and began to lift.

Sulien stepped forward, opened the passenger door of the van and swung up in beside the driver. The man looked at him in mild confusion and Sulien turned to face him, opening his mouth and taking a breath as if to explain, and drove the syringe through the man’s sleeve into his arm.

The driver jolted in shock. Varius had made Sulien rehearse these dangerous seconds before the drug took effect, but he felt now that he had no need of practice. He had done this before, he remembered, and without a weapon of any kind. He grabbed the man’s hand as it moved for his gun and forced it down, slammed the muzzle of his own weapon against his ribs at the same time.

He whispered, ‘You shut up and keep still and go to sleep, or I’ll kill you.’

At last the man crumpled. Sulien had to cram him down awkwardly under the seat and climb over him, a performance that felt so conspicuous and ungainly it seemed too much to hope that everyone in the street, vigiles and civilians both, would still be too occupied with what they were doing to notice what has going on in the cab. But then he was in the driver’s seat, placing his hands lightly over the controls, and the street was still full of people looking at the ground.

He had to sit and wait, sweating, while Varius and the others struggled to shift the cars. The breeze slapped a ten-sestertium note against the windscreen and Sulien watched it quiver there. Someone, reaching for it, might look inside; there was nothing to stop them.

He drove forward, swift as possible past the panting vigiles and the displaced cars.

Varius’ radio crackled as soon as the van began to move. ‘Ater,’ said Delir, in case the vigiles around Varius were listening, ‘I’ve got a young man unconscious here – might have been trampled.’

‘All right, stand by, I’m on my way,’ answered Varius, and took off as fast as he could towards Delir without breaking into a run as Sulien
turned down the side-street. Behind him, Ziye rolled the second van back into position, blocking the way.

Sulien stopped. The street was still as quiet and shadowed as it had been every time they’d scouted it. A little way ahead was the reason they’d chosen this point on the route to the Colosseum: a stairwell leading down to the kitchen door of an eating house for which Varius had handed over a month’s rent in cash. The keys were in Sulien’s pocket. There was a change of clothes for each of them waiting inside, and the main doors of the eating house opened onto a broader, busier street running at an angle to the Via Nomentana. There was a trirota standing ready at the front.

‘Sulien.’ Una’s voice was just inches behind him, high, breathless.

He plucked the set of keys off the driver’s waist and stumbled out of the van, unlocked the doors.

Una was seated on a metal bench at the back of the van, leaning forward, rigid against the restraints that held her. Her eyes were wide, her face racked with tension and shock, but her lips parted in a smile of incredulous excitement.

‘You weren’t meant to do this,’ she said, stammering, as he climbed inside, ‘you weren’t meant to come.’

‘That’s grateful, isn’t it?’ said Sulien, scrambling across to her, pulling out the bolt-cutters. There were no keys for the restraints on the bunch he held; they would have had copies waiting at the Colosseum.

Una let her head drop against the wall behind her, gasping. ‘Hurry,’ she breathed.

Her wrists were fixed together above her head, shackled to a bar on the wall. At first, crouched on the floor of the van at Una’s feet, Sulien noticed the position only with a hurried pang of indignation at the cruelty of it. He clipped through the chains that bound her feet together and tethered them to the floor easily enough, stood up to free her hands.

But he saw now that the cuffs were heavier than anything on which he’d tested the bolt-cutters. He’d expected a length of chain between them, but instead they were joined by a thick, solid block of metal an inch wide. Even before he tried he knew that he couldn’t close the bolt-cutters on that, nor on the bolt that held them to the wall. And when he tried to cut through the cuffs themselves, he couldn’t get the blades between the metal and the cast on her wrist.

They had known about the cast: Cleomenes had mentioned it, and
they’d even seen it on the longvision. None of them had ever thought about it as an obstacle.

Una arched back awkwardly, trying to see what he was doing.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Sulien, absurdly, trying to find a gap between the ratchet and the plaster by holding her wrist against the wall with one hand. Una slid forward to the edge of the seat, trying to give him more room to work.

‘Is that better?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but the points of the blades skidded uselessly on the surface of the cast, nipped at the outer edges of the cuff.

He felt Una going slack, the hopeful tension draining out of her.

‘I’m doing it,’ he insisted. He shifted his grip on the handles, the plastic growing slippery in his hands now, trying to stifle the growing tremble in the muscles of his wrists and fingers. He rested a knee on the bench and repositioned the blades to chew at the plaster of the cast itself. Una flinched and hissed. In desperation he put the cutters to the block between the cuffs, but succeeded only in scoring shallow grooves on the metal.

Una sighed, long and quiet. She said, ‘Sulien.’

‘Shut up.’ He struggled on, dragging, levering, fighting the urge to pound the head of the bolt-cutters against the joint of the cuffs, like a hammer. He couldn’t risk breaking them.

Una said, slowly and reluctantly, ‘It’s not working.’

‘I can’t
do
this if you keep going on at me.’ He put the bolt-cutters to the other cuff and managed at last to chop through it, but that didn’t free her hand; the broken ring still stood rigidly around it. He’d have to cut out a section of the ratchet and the blades had twisted slightly now, and he’d made no progress on the cuff around the cast at all.

‘Sulien,’ said Una again, ‘there’s no time.’

They’d calculated that he should have her out of the van within forty seconds, and it must have been twice, three times that by now. How could this not work, when everything else had, after he’d come so far? He took the gun from his hip and began slamming the butt of it against the bolt, loud, furious gasps coming through clenched teeth. He flung a couple of wild blows at the wall too, barely realising he was doing it.

‘Stop,’ Una was pleading, ‘Sulien, stop it. They’re coming— You’ve got to go.’

‘Get down,’ Sulien said, placing the point of the gun against the fixture.

Una shouted, ‘No, don’t!’ But Sulien pushed her down and to the side, trying at once to force her head as far from her chained wrists as
possible, and to lower his body over her, covering her. He turned his face away and fired.

The bang seemed to come from everywhere at once. Una jerked and cried out and hot shocks of pain burst along his arm and in his side. Sulien grabbed for the cuffs to check them first, before even caring how badly he or Una might be hurt.

The plate between the cuffs was scuffed and dented, that was all.

The driver’s radio fizzled in the cab: ‘Castus. Please respond. Castus. Where are you?’

The bullet had shattered on the metal, sending pieces ricocheting around the van. They were both bleeding, Una from her left hand and the side of her neck. Her cast was scorched, and a flake of metal was embedded in the plaster; the skin on her other wrist was red and burnt. Sulien stood there, gazing at the damage, blankly conscious that he could have killed them both. The word ‘lucky’ turned over in his mind with vast, clumsy weight. The gashes to his waist and forearm were bleeding freely and burned with a bright, lively pain. He felt, suddenly, how long it had been since he had really slept.

Una said, ‘You can still help me.’

He looked down at her. She stared at him, a clear look as inescapable as gravity, and he realised he was holding the gun just inches from her face.

He could not speak even to say, ‘No.’ He shook his head, dizzily, and backed away, shutting his eyes.

Una advised in a relentless whisper, ‘Just don’t think about it. And don’t look at me.’

Without answering, Sulien shoved the gun back roughly into its holster and grabbed for the bolt-cutters again, sawed and levered at the cuffs. He seized both her wrists, smearing his blood and hers over the metal and plaster, and dragged, crying now, as if sheer desperation would give him the strength to pull the shackles straight out of the wall. Una’s hands clenched, tried to wrest away from his. He knew he was hurting her, he didn’t care—

‘Please,’ she said.

And his sinews gave way all at once, his hands dropped from the cuffs and he sank to his knees in front of her. He put his hands to her shoulder and her face and tried to answer. It should not have been difficult to explain something as simple and essential as the fact that he couldn’t kill her, ever, and it was unconscionable that she should ask. And yet as his eyes squeezed shut on an acid swell of tears, for a second he did picture himself doing it, and it did look possible. But he
could do nothing now but cling to her and shake his head, unable to say a thing.

Una was straining tight against the restraints again, trembling. She said in a rush, ‘All right, all right! You don’t have to. You don’t have to— I’ll be all right. But you can’t stay now, they’re coming.’

‘I’ll come back,’ Sulien got out, finally tearing through the obstruction in his throat. ‘I’ll get you out of the Colosseum. I’ll come back.’

Una’s jaw tightened and a tremor puckered through her, but her mouth tugged into a smile, and she nodded. ‘Fine. Just hurry.’

He held her quickly, then lunged across the floor to push open the doors. The van Ziye had left as a barricade at the end was shifting, unseen hands pushing it aside, and there was a shriek of sirens from somewhere – the other end of the street. But if he was fast enough . . . He felt for the keys to the kitchen in his pocket.

Una had said what she knew she had to, to get him to leave.

He wiped his eyes. After the relative dark inside the van, the pale strip of sky above the street was strangely bright and soft, dappled with shadow. He thought of Lal, who would be hurrying through the city, thinking of him.

He turned, slowly, and looked back at Una.

Una stiffened. ‘Go on, run. For God’s sake, Sulien.’

Sulien exhaled, and let his shoulders drop. He pulled the door of the van closed.

‘I can’t,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve left it too long. I won’t get away.’

Una rose up, dragging against the cuffs, breathing hard, her face distorted and masklike with horror. ‘No.’

Sulien sat down on the bench beside her. ‘It’s all right.’

‘At least try, please at least fucking
try
,’ gasped Una. ‘You have to.’

‘No,’ he said, and put his arms round her. ‘I don’t.’