Chapter TenWestfield

The Rakers came off Westfield Bridge like pigeons off a statue.

We were on the Embankment, a long straight road along the river with warehouses on one side and a low stone wall on the other, and I'd been telling myself for a mile that it was the safest stretch of the whole route home. No roofs close enough to drop off. No drains. Just the wall, the brown water, and the bridge ahead, a big old iron thing painted green, with Westfield on the far side.

Then the bridge moved.

Not the bridge. The things on it. Dozens of grey, folded shapes that had been sitting along the girders like a row of umbrellas, all unfolding at once and dropping onto the road.

"Rakers!" Kieran shouted from the back of the ambulance, which was the only place Ferreira would let him ride. "Loads of them!"

Medic Fourteen stopped. Behind it, the convoy stopped. Thirty-eight people from St Brendan's, thirty-odd of them on foot, some of them barely able to walk, with fingers still slightly too long and faces still slightly wrong. Claire was in the ambulance next to Jonah. Dez and Priya were at the front with me. Rook and Marcus were at the back, because the back was where things came from.

Until now.

"Everyone against the wall!" I shouted. "Wall, wall, sit down, heads down!"

They sat down against the wall. Priya stepped out into the road. Dez stepped out beside her with the fire extinguisher he'd taken from St Brendan's, because he'd started collecting them. And the Rakers came down the Embankment towards us in a long grey wave.

Rook went past me at a run.

Not towards the Rakers. Past them. He'd seen something I hadn't: a gap. A space down the left side of the road, between the Rakers and the stone wall, and beyond it the bridge, and beyond the bridge, Westfield. His shield was up and his hammer was swinging, and he was going for it.

"Rook!" I yelled. "Rook!"

He didn't stop. Of course he didn't. His daughter was on the other side of that river, two streets back, on the third floor. He'd been standing on walls all day to look at her building. Now there was nothing between him and it but a gap and a lot of grey things.

The gap closed.

I saw three Rakers turn and come down on him from the girders. I saw his shield go up and one go over it. I saw him go down on the tarmac at the foot of the bridge with something grey and long-armed on his back.

---

I was running before I'd decided anything. I remember running, and I remember not caring that I was. My arms were back. They'd come back properly about an hour ago, sitting on the stairs at St Brendan's while Ferreira checked the nosebleed, hot and prickling at first and then just arms again. I had two waves in them, maybe, and I didn't trust either.

Marcus got there first. He hit the Raker on Rook's back with his shield like a man swatting a wasp with a dinner tray, and it went over the stone wall into the river, and Rook's shield went with it. He never got it back. Then he stood over Rook with his shield up and took the next one full in the chest.

I dropped to my knees beside Rook.

He was bleeding from his back in three long lines, deep, through his jacket. One of them was in the wrong place, low on the left side, right where a kidney is. The blood was dark and coming fast.

"Get off," he said. He was trying to get up. "Get off me, Okafor. The bridge."

"You're bleeding out."

"I can see the building."

"I know you can." I put both hands on the wound. Pressure. He shouted. "Rook, listen to me. Listen. If you go over that bridge now, like this, you'll die on it. You'll die halfway across. And she'll still be over there, and she'll still be on her own."

He stopped struggling.

"You'll die on the bridge," I said again, "and she'll still be over there."

Maybe it was the words, maybe the blood loss. He lay still. And I held, and pushed, and Pressure Point went into him one point at a time, the kidney first, then the long cuts either side of it. It wasn't a wave. I didn't need a wave. I just needed to not let go.

+40. Held.

When I took my hands off, he was lying on his back on the tarmac looking up at the green iron girders of Westfield Bridge, with his chest going up and down.

"I hate you," he said.

"That's fine."

"I could see the building, Okafor."

"I know," I said. "We'll go. Properly. With a plan. All of us. I said so this morning, and I meant it."

He closed his eyes. "When?"

"When we can get there alive."

He didn't answer. But he didn't get up, either.

Behind us, Priya was setting the Embankment on fire, very carefully, in short bursts that she called out before she threw them. Dez had planted himself in the gap Rook had tried to use, between the Rakers and the people sitting against the wall, and was doing the one thing a Bulwark does: not moving. Two Rakers hit him in a row and bounced off, and the second one got an extinguisher in its folded face for the trouble. Nothing got past him to the wall. Tash and two volunteers from Gale Street came running down the road from the far end, sent by Bell when Jonah radioed ahead, and one of the volunteers, a girl of about eighteen called Jaz with a cricket bat, took a claw across the arm saving an old man from St Brendan's.

I did her too. Moderate. +10. Held. She looked at her closed arm, and then at me, and said, "Are you her? The medic?"

"I'm a medic," I said. "Possibly not the."

---

We got back to Gale Street at half past four.

Sam was at the front of the station. He'd been there all afternoon, Mrs Adeyemi told me later. On a plastic chair behind the burnt-out car, with Leo from the red hatchback sitting next to him, and a tin of biscuits, and a lot of patience. When Medic Fourteen came round the corner with Jonah driving and the convoy walking behind it, Sam stood up on his chair to see.

Claire got out of the ambulance before it had fully stopped.

She couldn't run very well yet. Her legs still weren't right, and her hands were still a little too long, and she'd been crying for most of the drive in a quiet, steady way that Jonah had told me later he'd decided to leave alone. She half fell out of the passenger door and caught herself on the bonnet.

Sam came over the barricade like it wasn't there.

I don't think they said much. I think mostly it was his name and her name, over and over, and him holding on to the green parka with both fists, and her saying your leg, your leg, what happened to your leg, and Sam saying Mo fixed it, in a voice that was very muffled by coat.

I stood on the pavement and watched, and I didn't cry this time. I'd done enough of that.

Mrs Adeyemi came out and stood beside me, with her reading glasses on their chain.

"Thirty-nine admissions," she said. "To a police station canteen."

"Sorry."

"Sorry isn't a bed." "Go and sit down before you fall down. That's not advice, Miss Okafor. That's the nurse in charge."

I didn't sit down straight away. I went to find Jonah first.

He was still in the driver's seat of Medic Fourteen, engine off, both hands on the wheel, looking at nothing through the hole where the windscreen had been. Ferreira had checked his pupils twice on the way back and told him he needed a CT scan, and then they'd both laughed in a slightly unhinged way, because there wasn't a working CT scanner in the city.

"You all right?" I said.

"No." He didn't look round. "Good. I'd be mad if I was."

That was my line. Well, it was his line first. I leaned on the door.

"I nearly lost you," I said. "I saw you walking like your head hurt, all day, and I thought later. That's on me."

"It's on me. I hid it." "Don't you dare learn that from me."

"Too late."

"Yeah." He almost smiled. "I know." He opened the door and climbed out, slowly, holding on to it. "Somebody's going to have to. And you're going to need a crew of two again, aren't you? For the next one."

"Probably."

"Then I'm your crew," he said, and walked off towards the canteen to find tea.

---

I sat down on the stairs, where Faisal had been sitting that morning, and for the first time since 3:12 I took my phone out of my pocket and looked at it properly.

It still worked. Sort of. No signal, no internet. But the voice notes from my mum were still there. She lives in Sheffield, which this week might as well have been the moon. Eleven of them, from the last three weeks. I'd never had time to play a single one.

I played the oldest.

Mara. It's Mummy. You didn't call after your first shift, so I've decided you're too tired. A kettle in the background. Thirty years of midwifery in her voice. When you're frightened, and you will be frightened, don't think about everything. You'll drown. Do the thing in front of you. Then do the next thing. That's all the job is, darling. That's all it ever was. Another pause. And eat something. Love you. Call me.

I listened to it twice.

Seventy. I'd counted on the walk back. Twenty-seven from Harbour General. Hana and the young PC at the barricade this morning. Ray from the pharmacy. Thirty-eight from St Brendan's, and Jonah, who I was finally going to let myself count. Jaz on the Embankment.

Seventy people.

Nine hundred and thirty to go.

---

Before dusk, I went up to the radio room and told Sergeant Bell everything. When I'd finished she went to the whiteboard.

She rubbed the line off St Brendan's with her thumb, the way she'd done for Harbour General. Then she looked at the rest of the names. The Royal. Northfield Infirmary. The care homes, the GP surgeries. Every line still there.

Under them she wrote the line that had been missing all day: Harbour General: 20+ staff, unaccounted. Then, at the bottom of the board, two words and a question mark.

Westfield Holding?

"I don't know what happens to them over there," I said. "I only know it hadn't finished in the basement. Thirty-eight came back when we got to them in time. Iron's not for another two and a half days. Maybe that's long enough for the rest."

She capped the pen and tucked it behind her ear, next to the other one.

"You sound," she said, "like someone who's going to do something stupid."

"Yes," I said.

"Good." She turned back to the board. "I'll get you the maps."

---

The System came at dusk.

Not to me. To everyone. All over the station, people looked up at the same moment: from the canteen, from the custody suite, from the children's corner where Sam had finally fallen asleep against his mum. Out of the front windows, the sky over Harbour City had gone a deep, bruised orange, and across it, huge and pale, in letters the size of tower blocks, the System was writing.

Ember Tier evaluation in progress.

Districts held: 2.

Harbour General. Warden: M. Okafor.

St Brendan's. Warden: M. Okafor.

Everyone in the radio room turned and looked at me. Sergeant Bell. Faisal with his grandad mug. Priya, who said "Warden," in a voice of pure delight. Dez, who just put a hand on my shoulder and left it there.

Rook was the last to look. He was sitting on a desk by the window, his back strapped up in Ferreira's careful bandages, the cuts closed and the bruised muscle underneath them not, and he looked at the sky and kept looking before he looked at me.

"Warden," he said.

"I didn't ask for it."

"No. You never do." He turned his mug round in his hands. "Six of us cleared the whole north side of Harbour City last night. Killed everything that moved. You know what the sky says we held?" He tipped his head at the window. "Nothing. Not a street. Not a car park. It doesn't care what you kill, Okafor. It cares what you keep."

He didn't say it like an accusation. He said it flatly, a fact, the way he'd said everything that morning. But his voice was different. Quieter.

And then my own screen came, the one only I could see.

[Triage Warden · Lv 10 · Ember Tier · CAP] · Held: 2,332 XP
Warden (2 districts): Stem the Tide +1 wave
City integrity: 58% → 55%

Something warm settled into my arms, from the shoulders down, the opposite of the numbness. A fourth wave. A real one, not a trickle. And two thousand three hundred and thirty-two points of something, waiting for Friday, when Iron came and the cap came off.

But the last line was going down. We'd brought back thirty-nine people and cleared a whole hospital, and it was still going down.

Because the others were still going somewhere. All of them, every name on the Porter's list, every trolley that had gone down to Holding before we got there. Twenty-odd from St Brendan's alone, and how many from the Royal, from Northfield, from all the other dark hospitals on Sergeant Bell's whiteboard. All of them, sent to the same place.

Westfield Holding.

Then a second screen came. It slid in at the edge of my vision, quiet and dim, the way LAST LIGHT had in the Children's Wing.

Rival path detected: THE KEEPING
Holder: A. Adair, Westfield

I read it twice. Then I read it again, because I was sure I'd got it wrong.

A. Adair.

I looked up. Rook was still at the window, mug going cold, staring at the far side of the river. He hadn't seen the screen. He couldn't. It was only for me.

I opened my mouth to tell him. I didn't know how.

The radio on the desk beside him crackled.

Not the tone. Not static. A voice. A girl's voice, young and clear and very, very calm, coming through on the Gale Street channel as if she'd always known the frequency.

"Dad?" she said. "Dad, it's me. I know you're trying to come. Please don't." A pause. Polite. Patient. Like a receptionist. "Everyone's safe here now. I'm looking after them. Nobody gets hurt any more."

The mug slipped out of Rook's hand and broke on the floor.

He didn't look at it.

Over the river, in the bruised orange sky, the clock said 59:14.