Free Havoc by Jane Higgins

at last.
    Near the Mol on Cityside the riverwall plunges straight into the water without a
riverbank, but the wall has mooring rings and ladders running up to street level.
We bobbed there in the shelter of the wall for a while, listening for activity on
the street above us, and looking back towards Southside. The sun had tipped over
the horizon and was sending long glancing beams into Moldam and onto the water, lifting
the mist.
    â€˜Are we leaving the boat here?’ asked Lanya. ‘What if it’s not here when we come
back?’
    â€˜There’s a phrase for that,’ I said. ‘Something about crossing that bridge when we
come to it?’
    She gave me a tiny smile. ‘Unless they’ve blown it up.’
    â€˜Right,’ said Sandor to me. ‘You lead, we’ll follow.’
    Lanya looked at him. ‘You say we ,’ she said. ‘But you’re not coming with us.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ he said, ‘I am.’
    â€˜Aren’t you going off to make your fortune?’ she said.
    â€˜I intend to, princess. But you said you’re going to a market, and that means food.
I’m coming with you that far.’ He looked at me. ‘You armed?’
    I shook my head. ‘Are you?’
    He held up his hand. A small gun sat neatly in his palm.
    â€˜Brilliant,’ I said. ‘If they do a stop-and-search on us and find that, we’re dead,
so you better ditch it fast if things go bad.’ I looked at Lanya. ‘You?’
    â€˜It’s a very thin knife,’ she said. ‘They won’t find it. Why do you think I wear
boots that are too big for me? Don’t fret. Come on, we’re following you. Anglo all
the way from now on.’
    I climbed the ladder and peered over the wall: up the street and down, the place
was empty. We’d been lucky again. We wouldn’t keep being lucky—the world wasn’t like
that—but for now I was taking any and all the good luck that came our way. I motioned
the others to follow and we scrambled up and over the wall.
    We were in Cityside.

CHAPTER 11
    â€˜We’re way too obvious here,’ I said.
    We hurried across bare courtyards that used to hum with breakfast crowds grabbing
coffee before racing up Bethun Hill to the banks and trading houses or over to Sentinel
to push paper for the army. Now the bars and cafes were shuttered with metal grilles
and roller doors that looked like they’d been clamped down for months. They were
all plastered with posters: Lights Out After Dark! and Break the Breken! and Report
Deserters: Reward! And across all of that was a giant scrawl of commentary from people
with plenty to say and plenty of spray paint to say it with.
    We walked along the waterfront watching for trouble, but the place looked abandoned.
Everything was shut and there was no one around except a few old guys sifting through
rubbish bins. Even the remote watchers were absent because someone had gone down
the riverside strip and smashed every cc-camera within reach. I wondered if there
were cameras higher up, untouched, looking out across the water and whether a bored
functionary sitting in a pokey little office had registered us coming ashore. I
looked back to tell the others to hurry up.
    Sandor had stopped.
    â€˜Sandor! We don’t have time!’
    â€˜Look!’ He pointed at a wall of posters. ‘It’s our girl.’
    Lanya and I went back to see. A dozen images of a girl’s face smiled out at us, with Have You Seen Nomu? blasting across the top and Reward! across the bottom and a number
to call.
    â€˜Same name,’ I said.
    But this girl had masses of long wavy hair and a face like a model in an ad, all
bright lips and sculpted cheekbones. Hard to match her with the Nomu I’d found with
the ultra-short hair, the too-thin face and the huge, terrified eyes.
    â€˜It’s her,’ said Sandor. ‘Looks like she’s from here, after