Free The Bridge by Jane Higgins

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 gotin 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. Wewent 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.