The Bridge (8 page)

We stepped off the bridge onto what must have been a major trucking route once. Maybe it used to be busy with warehouses and truckstop cafes and markets and storage halls. None of that was left. Now a packed dirt road stretched ahead of us, lined with a jumble of low shacks crammed together, rigged from fragments of the original Southside. They’d used chunks of concrete for foundations and sheets of iron for walls and roofs; planks
of wood leaned over doorways, and ramshackle brick chimneys leaked smoke.

For all that it looked like a dump, though, it was humming. Different from the stony silence of the city after dark. This place was alive and peopled: dogs barked and kids yelled and charged about, and people criss-crossed the road ahead of us, talking, calling to each other, laughing, and arguing. Some of them were lighting lamps and hanging them from the roofs of their makeshift shelters; others were building fires on grates by the roadside and huddling round them, warming themselves and cooking. Yes, cooking. The air just about knocked me over with the smell of spices and cooking oil and frying food.

Fish is what I could smell mainly. Fish done in spices and fried up sharp and hot. I’d gone about three steps and taken two breaths of that air before the world started to spin from how light my head was, on account of how empty my stomach was. Fyffe stopped beside me and breathed deep as though filling her lungs would fill her stomach as well. I wondered how hard would it be to filch some fish from a frying pan – pretty hard, because there were a lot of people crowded round each fire, a lot more than you’d think a pan of fish could feed.

‘Sir!’ A voice shouted through the crowd. The commander stopped and stuck an arm out to stop us too. A tall guy, a few years older than me, shouldered his way forward and gave a salute of eye-watering precision. He
was darker than me, and sharply dressed, as though he’d just stepped off the pages of some zine –
Hostyle: For the Fighting Man
.

‘Jeitan.’ The commander returned a salute.

Jeitan said, ‘They’re ready with Tam now, sir. Just waiting on the others.’

‘Right. On my way.’

‘I should have been there, sir.’

The commander shook his head. ‘There’s nothing you could have done. We thought we’d secured the area. However, there is something you can do here.’

‘Sir?’

The commander flicked my shoulder with the back of his hand. ‘I want these two at the Crossing. They’re scavengers from upriver and they think they’re scavenging for free.’ He glared at us. ‘None of this is free. It’s time your kind understood that. Watch and learn.’ He turned back to Jeitan. ‘Take them up the hill and get them cleaned up first. I don’t want them polluting the Crossing.’

‘Sir!’

Jeitan gave a sigh, like, why do I get all the rubbish jobs, and said, ‘Names?’

I blurted out ‘Nik’ before I’d thought better of it, which, two seconds later, I had, but it was out, and too late now. Fyffe, smarter than me, said, ‘Sina.’ No idea where that came from – servants, I guess.

Jeitan said, ‘That’s Commander Vega. You address
him as Sir. Clear?’ We nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘This way!’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Headquarters,’ he said. ‘Shut up and move!’

We pushed through the crowds and down another road lined with shacks – more bits of concrete and sheet-iron stuck together on a whim and a prayer – if they prayed over here, which we were told they did, but who to and how was always a matter of dispute back home. A mess of people from all over had brought with them a crowd of gods; how they’d negotiated religion in the generations they’d been here kept the strategists back home awake nights, mainly with how to set them one group against another.

I kept a lookout for a way to step sideways into the crowd and lose Jeitan, but he stuck to us like shit on a shoe. We passed families sitting in front of their shacks talking and eating. Little kids screamed around waving strips of red cloth, the same color as the bandanas the gangs on the roadblocks had worn, the color we made all the Breken wear as armbands when they got permits to come Cityside.

Lots of people waved to Jeitan and greeted him by name. But there weren’t any victory dances. I thought they’d all be high because they’d done it – they’d broken out, they’d crossed the river, and this time there was no army to push them back and slam the gates. But they were quieter than that, sitting around, talking, hushing the
kids. It wasn’t over yet.

We passed a concrete wall where someone had scrawled
We Are Not Cattle
in jagged white paint. Another wall was stuck with posters listing all the city bridges in black chunky letters: Port, Mol, Bethun, Sentinel, Clare, Torrens, Westwall. With lines struck through each name. Jono was wrong. They’d taken the bridges. Every one.

We were climbing by then. Not a steep hill, but from it we could look back towards the Mol. Hundreds of tiny lights were blinking into life across the patchwork of iron roofing that spread out from the bridge. No blackout here. They must’ve been confident that they’d hit the city hard. We passed other walls stuck with posters –
Unlock the Mol
and
Free Movement for All –
marked with the logo of a globe with an arrow circling it. That was the CFM logo, the Campaign for Free Movement. I remembered Stapleton drawing it on the wall-screen in class one day and saying, ‘This is all you need to know about CFM: it’s a militant coalition pushing for a unified city, north and south of the river. According to their propaganda, they want a Breken voice in the governance of such a city. That’s a lie, of course. What they intend is a unified city under Breken command.’

The
R
of Remnant was also plastered everywhere – another faction. ‘Fanatics,’ Stapleton had said. ‘Committed to building “a renewed and holy paradise” on both banks of the river.’

CFM were godless heathens; Remnant were heretics. Take your pick who you’d rather be blown up by.

‘Hey!’ Jeitan snapped his fingers at us. ‘In here.’ He pointed us past two guards on a gate set in a high wire fence. Fyffe and I stopped in our tracks. Breken headquarters, in Moldam at least, was a rambling monster of a building that looked, oh so familiar: we’d come back to school. Some architect must have done a two-for-one deal: two storeys high, three wings, stone steps leading up to a huge wooden door, and a clock tower rising above that. The clock face was smashed and a lot of windows were boarded up and the brick walls were pockmarked all over; someone – or someone’s army – had shot it up and the war had run over it a few times. But it was unmistakeable. Except that instead of the green lawns and trees of school, it was surrounded by ranks of modular, box-like buildings that must have been barracks for their squads from the look of the people coming and going.

‘Hurry up!’ said Jeitan. Fyffe gripped my hand and we walked inside. Floodlights, powered down to maybe thirty per cent, lit the grounds in a dim, patchy way: enough that we could see that the place was churning with people with a purpose. They all seemed to be looking miles ahead of themselves and in a hurry to get there. We were nearly bowled on the steps by a great hulk of a guy lugging a bundle of newspapers under each arm, then by a kid with a box brimful of those red armbands. When we finally got
in the door, the foyer was full of people crowding around a desk. The woman behind the desk was trying to organize some of them into task groups and give map directions to others, while answering questions and a phone.

When we got to the front of the crowd, she looked up at Jeitan and sighed. ‘Things are happening at last, so everyone wants to help. It’s chaos. Still, we mustn’t complain.’

‘Make way!’ Behind us, two boys pushed through carrying boards stacked high with flatbreads and sausages. ‘You’re late,’ she said to them. ‘Get a move on! Now, Jeitan. What do you need?’

I stared after the sausages until they disappeared around a corner, while Jeitan recounted his sad story about landing this babysitting job because Commander Vega was consciousness-raising again, so could he please access the stores to find us some clothes? The woman looked me over like I was an insect. She looked at Fyffe with a slightly more kindly eye, then fished keys from a drawer. She summoned a female equivalent of Jeitan to take Fyffe away and called, ‘Right. Who’s next?’

I opened my mouth to protest, but Fyffe went without a backward glance, head high, undaunted. Jeitan called after them, ‘Back here in ten!’ Then he marched me along a high-ceilinged corridor stacked with chairs and mattresses and folded-up trestle tables; the air was thick with the smell of cigarettes and unwashed bodies. We
went past a lot of shut doors and stairways and boarded-up passageways, all eerily familiar. I tried not to look like I was curious, but I was looking all around and trying to feel if Sol could be there. He’d be terrified. I wondered if they had anyone primed to calm him down, maybe try and talk to him. Not that he’d say anything, even in Anglo. When he arrived at school he spent his whole first term sitting on the sidelines watching Lou from behind that thick fringe of fair hair and saying nothing. If you caught him looking and winked at him, he’d look away as if he hadn’t seen you. Then one day he gave this half a smile before he looked away, and by half-year he was grinning right back. They wouldn’t wait for that here, though. Would they even ask his name? Would he tell them?

We came to a storeroom where Jeitan grabbed some clothes and some boots, and then to a washroom fitted with decrepit showerheads stuck high in cracked-tile walls. I took the chunk of soap he gave me, turned on the tapful of stone-cold water, and I washed away four days of smoke and grime and dust and blood. Four days. That’s how long it had taken for everything to go up in flames. When I’d finished, my old clothes were gone.

The new clothes were just what I’d seen on all of them – not a strict uniform where everyone’s the same, but a dark shirt, trousers, jacket, and boots. They weren’t new either; they were threadbare and patched and not what you’d call warm. I could feel every bump in the
ground through the soles of the boots. It didn’t take much imagination to work out that whoever had worn these before probably wasn’t walking around anymore.

But for all the drama of standing up in a dead guy’s clothes and trying to sense where Sol might be and worrying about Fyffe, what I was thinking about was food, because the world was spinning again. I crouched down just as Jeitan looked in to see why I wasn’t hurrying up like he’d ordered. ‘Now what?’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Just hungry.’

‘Everyone’s hungry. Come on!’

‘Okay, okay.’

‘How long since you ate?’

‘Um. Yesterday morning.’

‘Not much of a scavenger, are you.’ Which was perceptive of him but, since he wasn’t fronting up with any actual food, not very helpful.

Fyffe and her minder arrived back in the foyer just after we did. They’d given her some black squad clothes that were too big for her and made her look more fragile than ever. Her hair, pulled back hard with a tie, shone gold in the dim generator light. The graze on her forehead was patched. She smiled and gave me a nod.

‘Come on!’ said Jeitan. So we followed him out of the compound and back through the crowds towards the Mol.

Tamsin was her name
. The one I saw shot on Moldam Road. They brought her back over the Mol that night in a procession they called a Crossing. A slow march, her body carried on the shoulders of six others. The Mol was lined with militia and one of them led the way, carrying a light.

Down off the bridge where we were, it was like the whole of Moldam township had turned out, holding any kind of light they could find. Everywhere I looked, faces flickered, watchful, waiting. There was no hum from Cityside. You could hear the river lapping and, above it, the boots of the people on the bridge. Around us people shuffled now and then, and occasionally a kid squawked and was shushed. But mostly the crowd held still.

When the procession reached the Southside gateway it stopped. The crowd parted and a woman came forward. She was tall and dark – black skin, black tunic, and baggy
trousers. She stood in front of the ones carrying the body and everyone seemed to hold their breath. Then she sang. Just her, alone, calling out to the night, calling home the dead. And, I swear, the Mol sang back, because I was standing close and I heard the ironwork ring. When she stopped there was deep silence. Then the whole mass of them sang back. It just about knocked me off my feet.

The bearers of the body stepped off the Mol; that’s when I saw there wasn’t one body, there were five. We turned to follow them, me and Fyffe and Jeitan and about ten thousand other people. I held Fyffe’s hand and stood still, letting an old man and woman go ahead of us, and a guy with a toddler on his shoulders, and a woman with a small girl. By then I couldn’t see Jeitan anymore. We’d worked our way to the edge of the procession and now it flowed on without us, carrying its song and its dead away to whatever end they made for militants killed in war. I nudged Fyffe, and we slipped into a narrow space between two shacks and wound our way upriver.

After about half an hour of threading through crooked alleys that had no pattern to them we’d traveled beyond the shantytown into a more ordered set-up of streets. The houses were two- or three-storey terrace blocks, like haunted versions of houses over the river: walls were cracked and growing moss and ivy; windows were shattered and boarded up; balconies were rotted through, trailing greenery, and clotted with rubbish.

We tried listening at doorways and peering in windows but everything was dark and quiet. After about an hour flitting from house to house like a couple of ghosts, we sat down in a doorway. ‘How will we find him in this?’ said Fyffe.

There was silence all around us as though the whole of Southside had clamped its mouth shut on the secret of where Sol was. As we sat there, I got to thinking the place really was haunted, that everyone had gone over the bridge and into the city and left us behind with the dead. The dead were here because they’d been brought over in a Crossing, so here is where they had to stay. And as we walked we’d meet them round a corner or see them opening a door or watching from a broken window. And maybe we’d see our own dead too: Lou with his face half burned away and Bella, pale and bloody, wandering the streets.