Authors: Jane Higgins
‘But look,’ I said, ‘if they’ve stolen something from over the river, maybe they haven’t sold it yet.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So what if we cross check Remnant names with records of known dealers and traffickers?’
‘Later. Get off there before Levkova comes back.’
‘When later?’
‘After the hearing. Get off there now!’
When Fyffe came back from the township she was all fired up. At the evening meal, which that day wasn’t half bad – a chunk of grainy bread and a bowl of thick potato-and-bacon soup – she led me to an empty table in the corner of the dining hall. Jeitan eyed us from the food queue but left us alone.
Fy spoke fast and soft in Anglo. ‘The supplies officer here is a dealer. He spent the day organizing something, I’m sure. He thinks I’m slow – that’s why I’m the one to go with him – but I’m sure he’s creaming off medicines from the shipment and selling them.’ She paused and tore her bread into pieces, then went on in Breken. ‘It’s terrible. People here need those supplies. That boy, last night – they ran out of medicine for him. If he was over the river he’d still be alive. And if they weren’t dealing in their medicines here, he might still be alive too. His mother just cried and cried.’ Fy scowled and ate her soup.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘One of the people the supplies
man talked to looked familiar. I’m sure he was one of the men who took Sol. Almost sure. So I followed him –’
‘You what? Are you crazy?’
‘– but I lost him. I’m going back tomorrow.’
‘Jeez, Fy. D’you think he saw you?’
She shook her head. ‘I was careful.’
‘Can you wait for me before you go following people? I think Jeitan might help us, but we have to wait till after the hearing. Don’t do anything drastic, okay?’
Near midnight Levkova told me to finish up and bring her the work I’d been doing. She said, ‘You and Lanya – I have not heard the full story, I think?’ I shuffled paper and didn’t answer. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The hearing will be ugly. You will be on the wrong side no matter what you say.’ Another pause. ‘What will you say?’
That I’m out of here, is what I wanted to say. That if you people are so desperate to tear each other apart, couldn’t you concentrate on doing that and leave those of us on the other side of the river alone?
‘Well?’ she asked.
I dropped the papers onto her desk. ‘That I stumbled on an argument I knew nothing about. That I barely spoke to either of them. That this is so obviously a set-up I can’t believe anyone is taking it seriously. That it has nothing
at all
to do with me. Will that work?’
‘Of course. If you were talking to reasonable people.’
‘No, then. So what happens next?’
‘They will try to cast you out.’ She looked at me. ‘To you that might just seem like moving on. What can they take from you that you haven’t already lost? Not a home. Or belongings. Even your name – you’d invent another one, wouldn’t you? But the borderlands are deadly this time of year, for the weather as much as the bandits. I think the best we can hope is that Lanya won’t accuse you and the Council sends you back to Gilgate.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Some would say that’s worse than being cast out. Anyway, then you can go and leave us to our madness.’ She picked up the papers. ‘Thank you, Nik. I am sorry. The misjudgment was Lanya’s not yours.’
‘She gave me some bread and fish. How can that be wrong?’
‘She’s a Maker. Surely even Gilgate has kept its Makers?’
When I didn’t answer she shook her head. ‘Have things become so degraded that even the dead are left to cross alone? Our Makers fast in all things in the hours before a Crossing – they take no food, submit to no touch, and should not even speak. Lanya most certainly should not have been arguing with Coly.’
The phone on her desk beeped. She pressed a button. ‘Levkova.’
‘You sent for Jeitan, ma’am?’ A woman’s voice.
‘I did.’
‘Not available, I’m afraid.’
Levkova took her finger off the button and frowned at me. ‘Who can I trust?’ She pressed the button again and said, ‘All right. Send me Rémy or Joseph.’
She turned back to me. ‘One last thing. They will ask you tomorrow what you’ve been doing here. What will you tell them?’
There are moments, now and then, when the world you thought you had sorted spins ninety degrees on its heel and when it stops you see everything slant. When Levkova asked me that, with an edge in her voice, I had one of those moments. From the start she’d told me not to talk to anyone about what I was doing in CommSec. And here she was, not wanting the Council to know. I heard Jeitan in my head talking about Levkova and Vega:
they think if they’re found to be investigating Remnant it will undermine solidarity in the uprising
. And I knew. Those comms I’d spent the last few days trying, and failing, to break hadn’t come from over the river at all. They weren’t encrypted Anglo. They’d come from here. Encrypted Breken. These people were spying on their own.
Levkova looked up. ‘Well?’
‘Filing?’ I said.
Her mouth twitched. ‘Filing. Yes. What’s your other name?’
‘Why?’
‘No reason. Curious. Your parents?’
‘I didn’t know them.’
She nodded. ‘You’re a good person, Nik. Who’d have guessed it?’
Remember that, I thought. Remember that if you ever find out where I’m from.
There was a knock on the door and my Jeitan substitute peered in. ‘Joseph,’ said Levkova. ‘Take him straight to Shed 3. No detours.’ She turned to me. ‘Off you go. And watch your back.’
But it wasn’t my back I needed to watch.
Joseph led me out into the night
and promptly disappeared. And I walked straight into somebody’s fist. Yes, I should have seen it coming, but I thought they wouldn’t bother. I’d already served Remnant’s purposes by walking in on Lanya’s fight on Saturday night. The hearing would get me banished and the Pathmakers branded as ‘unclean.’ There wasn’t much else I could do for them.
I don’t know how many there were. Four? Four hundred? The first punch knocked the breath out of me. Something soft dropped over my head, the lights went out and I gagged on a mouthful of cloth.
Couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.
Someone behind me grabbed my arms and a fist landed in my gut. I doubled over, gasping, then straightened up fast as I could, heaved my shoulder upwards
and connected with something, a jaw maybe. Its owner grunted, twisted my arms up my back then hurled me forwards. I hit the ground hard, on knee and shoulder. Pain went ringing through me. Still couldn’t breathe or see. I tore at the cloth around my head, but a boot rammed into my ribs, folding me up. Another one landed hard on my back. I ripped the cloth off my head in time to see a boot swinging towards my face.
I woke up in the dark with a thumping head.
Lay still and listened. Heard nothing. Tried to sit up and couldn’t. Panicked. Realized after a moment that I wasn’t tied up after all, just so cold and so sore that nothing wanted to move. I lay there and thought about going to sleep, but a vestige of sense in my brain told me I was cold and getting colder and colder, so
shift
. I managed to half sit up, and not to throw up – a triumph in its own way – and eventually got myself semi-upright. I crawled about, found a wall to lean on and inspected the damage.
I had a lump on my temple that was tight and sore but my face seemed to be in one piece. The rest of me, not great. Pain around ribs, shoulder, gut and back. And my shirt was wet. I sniffed at it, hoping it wasn’t blood. It smelled like alcohol. Someone in my welcoming party had been drinking and had upended their cheap vodka all over me. At least they hadn’t bashed my head in with the bottle – look on the bright side.
I struggled to my feet. Got there without throwing
up or falling over, and looked around – the sort of looking you do when you think you’ve suddenly gone blind.
Directly ahead of me was a single faint line of gray light, a crack in a door maybe: I wondered if it came from the floodlit compound, or a lit street down in the town. I made my way around the walls towards it, fell over a few things – tools, bags of something, cement, I think – swore a lot, but got there in the end. It was a door, locked. I tried shaking it but it didn’t even creak on a hinge. I yelled a few times, or tried to, but it came out feeble as hell because my ribs objected to anything louder than breathing.
I sat on a sack of cement, leaned against the wall and hated everyone, individually and collectively, on this side of the stinking river. Including myself. I was a miserable failure at finding Sol. And at looking after Fy. I could see the thread between Sol and us stretching and thinning to breaking point as he moved further and further out of reach.
For a while I drifted in and out of sleep, but the cold and the nightmares kept waking me up. To take my mind off them, I went looking for a puzzle, a problem, an unfinished proof, anything that would occupy my brain until daylight, or someone in search of a wrench, arrived.
I found one ready-made: the pages I’d been staring at over the last week. I went back to the words I thought might be bridge names and tried decoding for Breken rather than Anglo. It was like a homework extension
exercise: ‘For those with no friends and no social life to speak of, decipher the following code. Conditions: you must do this in a language not your own while in a vaguely concussed state of mind. You may have all night. You may not ask for help.’ But I was so cold and so angry those words took on a kind of desperate clarity that kept me occupied until – I don’t know how many hours later – I heard the door being unlocked.
I waited for someone to appear
but no one did, so I stumbled over and gave the door a push. Daylight came crashing in. It hammered my eyes and I threw up, which left me gasping. I crawled outside and put my face to the sun. I sat there with my eyes closed, letting the warmth soak into me and unknit the knots in my bones. Mending. The air was warm; it was one of those autumn mornings that made you want to skip class and head up to the heath. A shadow fell on me. I opened an eye.
‘Jeitan,’ I croaked. My mouth felt like paper. ‘Looking sharp, as always. Can you stand out of my sun?’
‘What the hell are you doing here? The hearing has started. They sent me to get you and you’ve been bloody nowhere. Come on!’
I shook my head.
He crouched in front of me. ‘Gods, you stink! You’re
drunk! You’re not fronting up like this.’
‘Don’t intend to. I’m not going.’
‘Don’t be funny. They’ll drag you in there if they have to.’ He looked furious. ‘Alcohol’s forbidden here. You must know that?’
Right. Like knives.
‘And you know what’s at stake!’
I closed my eyes. ‘I don’t care. It’s your fight. Go away and fight it without me. Just get out of my sun.’
‘Not a chance. You are going to that hearing.’ The voice of conviction, unfortunately. ‘Come on, you’re getting cleaned up.’
I thought about just staying put, but I knew he really would drag me there if he had to. And I hurt too much for that. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go if you do me a favor.’
‘A what? You can’t be serious.’
‘I am, though.’
He sighed. ‘What do you want?’
‘Ask at the hearing about Remnant’s windfall.’
‘What? Why?’
‘It’ll take the heat off me.’
‘Council doesn’t work that way. Levkova might raise it. I asked her to. But I doubt she will.’
‘You and your lines of command. How do you ever get anything done? Okay, let’s go and see.’
He shadowed me to my shed, shoved a spare set of clothes at me and pushed me into the washroom. I peeled
off my alcohol-sodden gear, winced a bit, craved a hot, or even a luke-warm shower, dragged on clean clothes and emerged to a watch-tapping Jeitan. ‘You still look like shit,’ he said.
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
‘And you’re walking like someone stood on you.’ When I didn’t answer he said, ‘Are you going to tell me this isn’t just the after-effects of cheap juice?’ I couldn’t see the point in having this argument and besides I was trying to focus on why I’d ever thought turning up for the hearing was a good idea.
Remnant, of course. I had to find out what I could about them, and get a look at their leaders. And I had to hope that someone would challenge them on their rumored windfall. And I had to avoid getting either cast out or shipped off to Gilgate.
Jeitan was busy grumbling. ‘Go on. Tell me. One of your drinking buddies take a swing at you? Who was it? What did you do to deserve it?’
But we’d arrived and I didn’t need to answer.
We stopped at the end of a long corridor that was almost empty. We were at the end of the south wing of the main building and we seemed to have left behind all the people hurtling about clutching urgent memos or waving the latest incoming from over the bridge. A bored guard slouched in front of a heavy wooden door. He nodded to
Jeitan and frisked me. Felt like he hit every bruise. And he found Coly’s knife.
‘Ah,’ said Jeitan, as if this confirmed his high opinion of me. ‘Anything else?’
‘No,’ I said.
He gave me a what-are-you-hiding? sort of look.
‘Nothing!’ I said.
But he shook his head. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? Someone took a swing at you. Come on.’ He pushed open the door. ‘In.’ He nodded for the guard to follow us.
Levkova was there. And Commander Vega. They were sitting at a long table with a motley collection of others – twelve in all. Lanya stood at the head of the table flanked by a tall, fine-boned woman, a Pathmaker for sure. When we came in everyone turned, like puppets on a single string, to stare at us.
This was their Council room, but in its doppelganger over the river I knew it as the staff library. And maybe it had been a library here too: empty shelves lined the walls and the air had that musty old-book smell. The room was all dark wood, real wood. Tall windows reached up to a high ceiling but all except two were boarded up. Sunlight poured through those two onto the table, casting the rest of the room into shadow. No rugs, pictures, or books in sight. The room was stripped, like the rest of that place, hunkered down without extras of any kind. Battle-ready.