Havoc Read Free Page A

so, wouldn’t you. But no.’
    â€˜Sure sound like it.’
    â€˜Yeah, well, the man who brought me up came from Gilgate.’ That was Macey. He’d been
a security guard at Tornmoor, a Southsider, and as close to a parent as I’d had for
the last decade.
    â€˜Where you from then?’ Teo asked.
    â€˜Different places. You?’
    â€˜I’m from here. Are you Nik Stais?’
    That shut me up for a second. ‘Yeah. I am. How’d you know?’
    â€˜Heard of you. You were on the bridge with Suzannah.’
    Suzannah Montier. Southside’s leader-in-waiting. She’d achieved first name status
with everyone. Much loved. Lost. Even the stain of her blood on the Mol was being
washed away right now at the bottom of the river.
    Teo was saying, ‘It was supposed to be a swap, wasn’t it: Cityside were gonna give
us Suzannah back.’
    â€˜For my friend, Sol, yeah.’
    â€˜But they both died.’
    â€˜That’s right. How did you hear about that?’
    â€˜Everyone knows. You were the last one that seen her alive.’
    I shook my head and looked at where the bridge had been. ‘I found her. After. I sat
with her—like you’re doing now.’
    Teo was watching me. ‘You’re from Cityside.’
    This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. I looked around wishing Lanya would
turn up, hoping she was okay, but everything shantyside of us was still going off
with sirens and fires and yelling, and everything riverside of us was quiet. Almost
everything.
    â€˜Listen!’ I said. ‘Do you hear that?’
    A sound, high pitched and wordless, pealed out of the dark.
    â€˜It’s a cat,’ said Teo.
    I wasn’t so sure. It was coming from the bridge, but it couldn’t be, because there
was nothing there—only mangled iron and yawning blackness. And this sound: something
was yowling from the ruins.
    I stood up. ‘I’m going to look.’

CHAPTER 03
    â€˜It’s just a cat,’ Teo called after me. ‘You should leave it. Leave it!’
    He meant, stay off the riverbank. No one goes there, except the scavengers, and them
illegally. It’s forbidden ground, officially, because it’s littered with river mines
and sometimes with the bodies of people who have tried to swim or row across. But
that’s also why, unofficially, it’s out of bounds. Lost souls wander there—that’s
what people will tell you and they’re dead serious.
    I needed a torch, but all I had was half the moon riding a rim of cloud low in the
sky upriver and even that was disappearing behind a haze of smoke. I walked over
to the bent uprights that had held the gates. The short strip—ten or so metres—of
what was left of the Mol gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond it the water shone black
and disturbed, sucking at the gravel on the bank. The creature sound got louder.
I dropped flat and peered underneath. I was looking through a jungle of bent and
broken iron beams and piled-up concrete slabs. Right in the middle stood a thin stick
of a figure. It was lifting its face to the moon and calling out over and over as
if all that was left of the bridge was this ghost howling at the city.
    But it wasn’t a ghost, or a cat. It was a girl.
    I leaned further out and called, ‘Hey! You! Grab my hand. I’ll pull you up.’
    The howling stopped, then started up again.
    Behind me came a clatter of activity: the medics had arrived. One of them came over
to look at the remains of the bridge and swore softly. Then he saw me.
    â€˜Oi! You! Get off that!’
    I peered over my shoulder at him. ‘There’s someone under here. A girl. I’m going
to get her.’
    â€˜This whole lot’s gonna go! Listen to it!’
    â€˜I’ll be quick.’
    I scrambled back off the bridge, clambered over the broken stones and wire of the
riverwall and slid down the bank. I peered into the crisscross iron