The Bridge (3 page)

The night was cold but clear, and there was no one around, which was a relief from always having someone in your face or your back pocket. So I stayed and watched the night go by and the morning come – the light coloring the old brick walls and the windows.

I was thinking about going back in and whether I’d
be seen, and if anyone had even noticed I hadn’t been to bed, when a song came down the path. Fyffe on a morning walk, fair hair swinging side to side, happy, somehow, with the world.

‘Hey, Nik,’ she waved and came over, sat on the bench beside me and gave me her sunny smile. She smelled of soap and linen. ‘You’re up early,’ she said. ‘Usually it’s just me. Isn’t it wonderful?’ She waved an arm at the sky, which was clear and blue, just losing the sunrise colors. No argument from me, but I mustn’t have looked too impressed because she spared me the full-on ‘praise be to God’ speech and said, ‘You shouldn’t feel bad, you know. There must be a reason. There’s always a reason.’

Yeah. Life Lesson No. 1. Hold your nerve when bad stuff happens because there’s a plan and a reason for everything, you just don’t know what it is yet, but you’ll find out one day even if you’re on your death bed when you do.

Well, maybe.

Fyffe hugged her knees and studied me. I didn’t even try to look back. People think Fyffe’s not very sharp because she’s all ‘wow! look at the trees!’ and ‘smell those flowers!’ and arms flung wide at the morning sky. But they’re wrong. She’s smart in ways that are completely out of my league. She can read you with a glance, and you don’t even know you’re being read. So you don’t go near her if you’re trying to pretend things are great when they’re not, because she’ll know.

I rubbed my hands over my face and she said, ‘You look awful.’

‘Yeah … thanks.’

‘So, what now, for you?’

‘Breakfast?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘The army, Fy. The army is what now for me.’ I smiled at her to try to show I didn’t care.

She looked away. ‘It swallows people before they’ve had a life,’ she said.

All too true. We’d got as far as senior school because we were either very rich or very bright. Whichever way, no conscription for us. Until now. Now it was my turn to join everyone who’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and assigned to one of the three Fs: Farms, Factories, Fighting. It used to be that after three years you could opt out of the one you were first sent to. But now, they can keep you fighting as long as they want. Until you’re killed or wounded or way too old to be useful. Which is why, if you don’t get into ISIS, you’re dead. Sometimes for real.

‘Gorton knows,’
said Lou.

‘Yeah? Why do you say that?’

‘Did he act surprised? No.’ Lou blew smoke carefully out the dorm window. ‘Does he care? Probably not. But it makes no sense. And they took Jono. Go figure.’ He tapped ash onto the window sill. ‘Want one?’

I shook my head.

‘You should ask him,’ said Lou. ‘Gorton, I mean.’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not for him to say, apparently.’

‘Well, who the hell can say? Bastard.’

Sunlight poured through the high windows of our dorm room and lit twelve beds, mostly ‘made,’ desks swept clean of junk because it was Wednesday and inspection day, and mirrors stuck with photos of families, girlfriends,
pets, and other hangers-on. I was supposed to be helping Lou with a programming assignment but we hadn’t got very far.

‘You need to know why,’ he said. ‘How’re you going to find out?’

‘No idea.’

‘A little hacking into Records wouldn’t hurt.’

I shook my head.

‘Come on! If not you, then who?’

Over the tops of our trees, I could see across to the hump of Watch Hill where the General sat in his office plotting the city’s next brilliant move. Or maybe not. What if he just paced and frowned as he looked out across Sentinel Square towards the river and didn’t have a clue what to do?

I looked back at Lou. ‘They’ll be hunting for an excuse to chuck me out now. I’ve got no one breathing down their necks to say they have to keep me, and my scholarship is theirs to stop when they want. If they catch me hacking anything, I’m gone.’ I was gone anyway, but I wanted to see out the year if I could.

‘Do you want me to try?’

‘Hacking? You?’

‘Dreams are free. Not hacking, then. I could just nosy around. Ask some people.’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Dr Williams.’

‘
No way!
’

‘No, think about it – it can’t be your grades, and you’re too damn careful to have much of a conduct record. It’s brutal! If you’d known they were going to dump you, you could’ve had a helluva lot more fun. So it’s not grades, it’s not discipline. What’s left?’

I shrugged.

‘Jeez. What d’you think?’ Lou tapped his head.

‘Oh, great. So I’m psychotic?’

‘Well … you are sitting in a third-floor window in the middle of a city in the middle of a war. In full view of anyone with a telescopic sight.’

‘Where?’

He pointed a finger, trailing smoke. ‘There’s snipers out there, remember?’

‘Rumors of snipers.’

‘And where will that attitude get you? Nowhere you want to be. They’ve got, what, twelve years of records on you?’

‘So?’

‘So, who knows what they’ve made of them?’

‘Do I look psychotic to you?’

‘Only sometimes.’

‘Funny.’

‘Course it would help if you weren’t caught out and about all night.’

‘I wasn’t caught.’

‘And that’s down to me covering for you.’

‘Maybe I was in the infirmary, being psychotic.’

‘Fy said she saw you. She said you’d been out all night and you looked like shit.’

‘Fy said that?’

He grinned. ‘It’s what she meant.’ The lunch bell rang. ‘Oh, great.’ He picked up his assignment.

‘Give it here,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

It was weird. One minute they’re falling all over you and you’ve got extra assignments and one-on-one tutoring and all kinds of people checking that you’re okay and worried that they’re working you too hard but they want to push you because you’ve got ‘such promise’, and the next minute, nothing. Just nothing. I could’ve put my feet on a desk, lit a cigarette, and thumbed through a comic and they wouldn’t have cared. The difference between me and Lou is he would’ve done all that just to see what would happen. But I’d been schooled in school too long. Lou called me careful, and he was right. I always had been.

Part of that was, while I wasn’t the only brown face in school, I was the only one without back-up. The Hendrys, sure, they sent hampers and gave me a home in the holidays sometimes. But all I had keeping me there was my scholarship and a record that said ‘not too much of a problem’ or words to that effect. But now that I wasn’t an asset, had I turned into a problem? I didn’t know. I did
my work and most of Lou’s, and watched them ignore me.

Lou nosed around, like he promised, and came up with nothing. He reported this at lunch one day, a week or so after Victory Day. Bella smiled pouty lips at him and called him a novice, a rookie, and a greenhorn. ‘Watch and learn,’ she said. And off she went to do her own investigations, hips swinging, black ponytail bobbing. Lou groaned.

Fyffe rolled her eyes. ‘Could you try not to drool in the soup there, Lou?’

We didn’t see Dash, or Jono. They were in training with the two ISIS agents who were living in while they took a look at their new recruits. They all sat at a separate table in the dining hall, spent the days in the staff labs, and morning and evening were out on the assault course in the back fields. Dash seemed to be doing okay. She gave Fyffe the thumbs up when she thought I wasn’t looking, and she looked high on it all.

I volunteered for library detail. Dr Bonn arched an eyebrow but spared me the knowing smile. ‘You can tidy up Nanotech.’ So I got to watch the recruits, because from the shelves of dusty old volumes on Nanotech, History of, Level Three, you could see the assault course.

Late one afternoon Sol Hendry came wandering by. I tried to look busy shelving books. How Lou had a brother like Sol was one of life’s genuine mysteries. He was a serious little kid with fair hair, big brown eyes, and
a flair for mathematics. He’d only been at school a few terms and he was shy, not much of a talker, but he often turned up quietly at my shoulder to ask if I could make a number puzzle for him, and could I make it harder than last time, please.

‘Hi Sol,’ I said. ‘How’s things?’

He shrugged, hauled
Nanobots: Fear and Fantasy in Classic Science Fiction
off the shelf and leafed through it. I gave up pretending to work and stared out the window. Dash looked like she was born to the training. Fit, fast, graceful. By the end of it she’d be better still. Lethal.

Sol spoke behind me. ‘Why do you have to go away?’

‘Who says I’m going away?’

‘Everyone. Dr Stapleton. He said you’ll be gone soon. Into the army.’

‘Did he? Well, what would he know?’

‘I don’t see why you have to go. Fy said my dad will find you a job. But Lou said it’s not as easy as that. Do you want to go in the army?’

‘What else did Dr Stapleton say?’

Sol put
Nanobots
back on the shelf – in the right place. Sol, the perfectionist. ‘That we should do our work and not talk to people who’ll be going soon. That’s mean, hey? I think it’s mean.’ This judgment delivered, he shrugged Stapleton off and said, ‘Do you want to play football?’

‘Sol, my friend, what a good idea.’

By the time the bell went for dinner he and I were
three goals up against Lou and Sol’s mate, Izzy. We’d yelled ourselves hoarse and I almost didn’t care about the ISIS woman standing under the oaks watching us.

Just like she’d promised
, Bella sailed into the girl-infested swamp that is school gossip, in which sharper guys than me have vanished without trace and maybe you’d find their bones years later cast up on some shore, still with an air of surprise that they’d been crazy enough to stray there in the first place. Bella moved through it untroubled, gathering whispers of this and rumors of that, and she might have stooped, now and then, to something as ungainly as an ear to the ground, but I think she had people for that.

She came back the next day with nothing. No news, not a rumor, not a whisper. Lou grinned through an entire afternoon of calculus on the back of that.

‘Ha!’ he said at dinner. ‘See? Not so easy after all.’

‘But there can’t be
nothing
!’ said Bella. ‘Believe me – there can’t be. Nothing is strange. It’s much stranger than
something.’ Her horn-rims flashed at me and I felt like saying sorry for denting her reputation.

I’d had enough by the end of dinner and as soon as it was dark outside I made for the kitchen. But this time I wasn’t quick enough to get out before anyone could say,
Where the hell do you think you’re going, Stais?
because someone said exactly that as I opened the door. Dr Williams. He stood in the pantry doorway with bread in one hand and a plate of corned beef in the other. ‘Well?’

All the halfway decent excuses I could have made evaporated from my brain and I was left with, ‘Out, sir.’

‘I can see that.’ He made himself a sandwich while I squirmed. ‘You know we’re in lockdown?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You know why we’re in lockdown?’

I looked out the door. The dark smelled smoky and damp, and I could hear dead leaves rattling in the wind.

‘Stais! Where were you going?’

I considered bolting, but if I did that I wouldn’t get back, and I wasn’t ready to go yet. I closed the door. ‘Not far, sir. Just want some air.’

I waited for a pronouncement of punishment or expulsion or doom or something, but he just stood there, eating his sandwich and eyeing me. When he’d finished, he said, ‘Come with me.’

He led me through the dorm, past talk and laughter
in common rooms and silence in study rooms. He nodded to the occasional teacher and told off the occasional loiterer, unlocked the staff-only door into the library and marched across its deserted ground floor with me trekking behind him. In the foyer the spotlit flag looked as though it was floating in the darkness. We arrived at last in the staff wing and he stopped at the infirmary.

‘But, sir,’ I said, ‘I’m not sick. Can’t I just have a detention and –’

‘In.’ The place smelled of disinfectant and liniment. He opened some glass-panelled doors leading into a walled garden about ten paces square. ‘Air,’ he said. ‘Such as it is.’ I went through and he closed the doors and went to work at his desk.

I blew out a long breath, looked back to check that he wasn’t watching and thought about scaling the wall. But it was quiet in the garden and whatever was planted there made the air fresh and clean.

I lay on a bench and looked up at the dust of stars and space going on and on forever. We went there once. Humanity, I mean. Well, not there exactly: we got to the moon, and to Mars, but got lost on our way to Jupiter’s moons. As the oil ran out at home and the water wars began, we crept back to ourselves, to our squabbles and our sicknesses and our dying planet – like we’d pulled a blanket over our heads and not looked up ever again. I lay there and watched it – the stars and the space
between – and wondered what it would be like to go there. How quiet would it be? And how dark?

Around me I could hear the school settling. When the bell clanged for Silence, I got up, kissed the talisman round my neck for luck, and went inside to ask Dr Williams a question.

He was working at a desk in a pool of lamplight. ‘Better?’

‘Thanks, sir.’

‘Good. I’ll call Security to take you back.’ He reached for the phone.

‘Sir? Can I ask you something?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Do you know why they didn’t pick me?’

He put the phone down and studied me with his bedside-manner frown: his official version that was friendly but reminded you of your lowly student status. ‘I can’t talk to you about that,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. If it’s any help, I can tell you that you are as stable and sensible as any other senior student here – more than many, in fact.’