Free The Bridge by Jane Higgins Page A

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 theground 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.

CHAPTER 14
    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 baggytrousers. 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