Osiris

1 ¦ ADELAIDE

Adelaide first felt something was wrong in the aftermath of the speech. Her father had voiced the formalities, and now those who remained had the chance to speak to the family. The guests were tentative. They offered their sympathy like a gift, of whose appropriateness and reception they were as yet unsure. Buoyed by weqa or coral tea, a few dared to meet Adelaide’s eyes, but most looked at the bridge of her nose or into a space over her shoulder. She watched them hunting for the right words. They wanted to say something. Or at least they wanted to be seen to say something. Unfortunately, none of the usual phrases—we’re so sorry for your loss—were much use. How do you condole for a missing person? How do you grieve?

Her father had managed it very well. It was a month since Axel’s disappearance, and Feodor had staged this event. He named it a service of hope. The phrase was written out on a diminishing supply of cards, by hand: the Rechnov family invites you to a service of hope for our son and brother, Axel. There was no order of ceremony on the cards, but it was firmly established in Feodor’s head. First the assembly, with a pianist providing background music. The repertoire was classical; nothing too well-known, or too sentimental. A few words explaining the situation, for protocol’s sake rather than to fill anybody in. And then Feodor’s speech.

He spoke adeptly, as he always did, his voice carrying to every nook of the panelled suite. The rooms were quiet and graceful, their walls striped with narrow ribbons of mirror, red cedar and sequoia. Subtle lamps drew out the natural richness of the wood, whose polished surface gathered hazy impressions of those who passed. Other than the ferns and a scattering of tables and chairs, the rooms were unadorned. They were also windowless. Adelaide’s brothers had hoped that the informality of a small, intimate space would make for a more congenial atmosphere than was traditionally associated with the Rechnovs.

At the walls, security guards stood rigidly enough to be all but invisible. Only their eyes, constantly roving, revealed alertness.

Adelaide had wedged herself into an alcove. The space was wide enough to seat two people, but Adelaide crammed her legs in too, denying anyone else access. Two things separated her further from proceedings: a lace veil covering the upper half of her face, and the fronds of a metre-high fern. From her semi-hiding place, the rooms, full of figures and reflections, did not look quite real. She couldn’t help hearing her father though.

Incense and cedar permeated the air. Adelaide hadn’t eaten all day; the sweetish smell and lack of food were making her feel nauseous. She loosened her tie and undid the top button of her shirt, and felt a little better.

“…finally, the family would like to thank you for your continual support and your generous messages. We await news of Axel with anticipation, and as always, with hope.” There was a pause. Adelaide knew that Feodor was taking a pinch of salt from a tin and throwing it, in the direction where a window would have been. “Thank you, once again.”

Syncopated claps rang through the rooms. When the sound died out there was a difficult silence, before murmurs and music recommenced. The service, despite the oration, remained unresolved.

Adelaide stayed where she was and wondered what she should do next.

Feodor’s speech had already triggered numerous arguments amongst the family. The idea of the service was despicable to Adelaide. Nothing, she knew, would dissuade the family, but she spoke out nonetheless.

“Nobody understands Axel, not before and certainly not now. Nothing you can say about him is worth saying.”

Those words resounded only a fortnight ago, and they had all been present, sitting around an oval conference table on the ninetieth floor of Skyscraper-193-South. It was neutral ground. Beyond the immense glass window-walls, Osiris lay bathed in a clementine sunset. The city’s conical steel towers were burnished gold, and as a flock of gulls swept past the scraper, their wings caught flashes of red as if they were afire. Adelaide paid no heed to the view; she had seen it all her life. Her attention flicked between her grandfather, her parents, and her two other brothers. Dmitri’s fiancée was not at the table. The Rechnovs were clannish. A matter of blood was a matter for blood.

The meeting was the first time Adelaide had spoken to any of them in months, and she was wary. She seated herself at the south end of the table, deliberately facing everybody else. Her mother’s eyes, the same green as Adelaide’s and Axel’s, pleaded with her for compassion, or perhaps for leniency. Viviana would try to use the catastrophe as a catalyst for reconciliation. Adelaide folded her arms on the table. The wood was cool on her bare skin, but sweat lined the hollows of her palms. A grain of salt for every harsh word, she thought. For every tear.

Feodor cleared his throat. He thanked them all for being there, a sentiment clearly directed at Adelaide as the estranged member of the family. Then her mother stood up. She had the blanched face of someone who had not slept in days. Adelaide hardened herself against sympathy.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Viviana. She stopped, and for a moment it was not clear whether she would continue. Then she seemed to gather her strength. “I’ve been thinking about what we should do,” she said. “And I think — we must have a — a service. Some sort of gathering, so that people can pay their respects. To commemorate Axel.”

It was the wrong choice of word. Adelaide knocked back her chair as she stood, words feverish on her lips.

“How can you even think about saying that? We don’t know Axel’s dead. We have no idea where he is. You just want him gone so you don’t have to worry about him showing you all up any more.”

“Unjust, Adelaide,” said Linus mildly.

“Is it? I don’t think so. Feodor paid for just about every shrink in the city but he wouldn’t set foot in Axel’s home. None of you would. Deny it if you can.”

After that there were tears, and shouting. Only when her accusations ran dry did Adelaide look at her grandfather, his shoulders stooped, weariness articulated by every line in his face. He was still, except for his hands, one resting on top of the other, shivering every now and then like two dry leaves stirred by a breeze. He was old, the Architect, over ninety years old.

Something about her grandfather’s silence induced Adelaide’s own. She returned to her seat, and folded herself inward.

The rest of the family accepted her retirement as a compromise and for an hour they tried to discuss objectively what form of service might be held. Her brothers decided that Feodor must say something. If the entire script could be reported in full, it eliminated the necessity of delivering a press statement. Adelaide listened and said little more. She felt numb. She wished she could expand that emptiness until it filled the cavern in her chest.

Viviana talked about the candles she wanted with a specificity verging on the deranged.

“We’ll have a large red one directly beneath Axel’s photograph, and smaller orange ones surrounding it. I’ll arrange them in a half moon shape, very simple… And then the layout repeated on each table, I suppose it will have to be the same colours, orange and red, or red and orange, we must put the order in with Nina’s…”

“You know, I’m not sure about having the photograph,” said Linus. “It might give the impression Axel’s dead.”

“But how can anyone think about Axel if there’s no reminder of what he looks like?” Viviana’s eyes glistened. “We haven’t seen him… in so long.”

“That is a consideration,” Feodor said. “When was the last time anyone had contact with Axel? A year ago? More?”

He did not say, apart from Adelaide, which would have been a concession. Viviana was incapable of replying. She buried her head in her arms, strangling her sounds of distress. Streaks of grey meandered through the deep red of her hair, almost conquering it at the roots. Adelaide wondered how much of that was a recent development. Her mother was a strong woman; Adelaide could not remember ever seeing her cry.

“I saw Axel eight months ago,” said her grandfather. “After Dr Radir’s last report.”

“Did you? How was—” Feodor stopped himself. “Oh, there’s no point.”

“He was the same,” her grandfather replied.

The last remnants of pink and red light infused the room, rendering its occupants unnaturally soft. The room hushed under this elemental spell, and the heavier mantle that fell with it, of guilt.

“What will you say it is?” Adelaide’s voice startled her, reinserting itself into the discussion almost without her consent. The others looked at her with equal surprise.

“What?”

“What will you call it? I mean — the gathering, or however you’re going to describe it.”

That was when Feodor came up with the phrase service of hope. He said this was the reason they were holding it, so they might as well make their intentions clear. There was no verbal dissent. Viviana got up and went to stand by the window-wall, staring vacantly out as though the regimented rows of skyscrapers would yield the whereabouts of her son. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, her arms cradled. The familiarity of the pose unnerved Adelaide. For the first time that day, she wanted to reach out and pull her mother back.

They progressed inevitably to the content of Feodor’s speech. No-one could work out how to talk about Axel’s life without implying that it was over, which as Feodor pointed out, would be a strategic blunder. At the same time, Viviana was adamant that her son’s achievements should be mentioned. In the end they agreed that Feodor should compose the speech and send it to the others for approval.

Discussion returned to the mundane. Dates and times. Who should be invited. Where it should be held. They hammered through decisions with a rigidity of conduct, faces disciplined tight. Only at the end did anyone raise the question of the Council investigation, and then it was in passing — Dmitri mentioned to Feodor that they had been asked for access to Axel’s bank records. Feodor frowned and said he supposed they couldn’t refuse.

Such easy capitulation infuriated Adelaide, but she saw no profit in expressing it. The choice had been made a long time ago. She no longer warranted a say in Rechnov affairs.

Two weeks later and here she was. From the alcove, she watched the guests circulate, half eavesdropping on their conversations. The whispers made her angry. Axel had been whispered about for too long.

Adelaide’s mother had chosen her candles and arranged them in small clusters on every table. Even grouped together like that, the flames they emitted seemed frail. Viviana sat at the head of one table as if she were holding court, but the glass at her elbow was untouched and she displayed no interest in conversation. A pocket-sized version of the photograph eventually designated inappropriate lay on the table in front of her. From the briefest of glimpses, Adelaide knew that this had been taken some years back. The directness of Axel’s gaze was a shocking memory.

A curious mix of people had come. There were a few wild cards — she noticed Zadiyyah Sobek, head of the electronics corporation, chatting to one of the family Tellers — but most were her father’s crowd, either politicians or other venerated family members. They had split into cliques. The Dumays, of Veerdeland extract, occupied one corner. The Ngozis, descendants of the Pan-Afrikan Solar Corporation, whispered in another. Adelaide’s father and brothers worked the rooms, careful to acknowledge every guest.

The Rechnovs traced their own roots to the Sino-Siberian Federation. At its conception, the City of Osiris had attracted the world’s most brilliant minds, rich and poor, from the northern hemisphere to the south. Looking at the assembled congregation, Adelaide felt that there was little evidence of that intellect visible today, and particularly amongst the Councillors.

With their upright carriage and pinched expressions, they were easy to spot. Some of them wore the formal session surcoat over their suits, the sweeping garments giving them the appearance of doleful bats doused in cherry juice. Linus and Dmitri had already established themselves within the illustrious hallmark of the Council Chambers. Linus’s personal mission was to convert his sister. He liked to dangle words like future and ramifications under Adelaide’s nose, fish on a hook she never bit. As a Rechnov, even a renounced fourth gen one, Adelaide retained the respect, prominence, and wealth afforded all of Osiris’s founders: this was her inheritance.

But she had her own name now. Adelaide Mystik. She had her own set, too. They were known as the Haze. A few of them were here, distinguishable by their roving butterfly wariness and adherence to fashion. Beneath cloche hats, the girls’ lips were matte in red or mulberry. Their diamond-patterned legs shifted as they tested standing in one spot, then another. The boys, usually so at ease, loitered self-consciously amongst the Council members and founding families.

Adelaide saw Jannike, one of her oldest friends, bend over to say something to her mother. Viviana did not glance up.

A smattering of reporters completed the parade. Some of the krill journalists had attempted to glam up their shabby hemlines with a belted coat or a hat, but nothing could disguise their insidious manner. Perhaps it was the proximity of these conflicting factions as much as the event itself that produced such an air of uncertainty. A Councillor bumped into a socialite and both parties blushed and fell silent, alarmed by the prospect of conversation. Under other circumstances, Adelaide might have found the interaction comical.

Her part had been clearly appointed.

“Just show up and don’t cause a scene,” Feodor had said.

“Fine. But that’s all I’m doing.”

“I wouldn’t trust you with anything else.”

“You’re wise,” she said, though she bit her tongue not to let her resentment show.

So she had stayed on the edge of things, waiting with almost malicious intent for another unfortunate to approach and offer some convoluted form of condolence. She imagined herself glittering like some hard bright object. Go on, she willed them. Try me. But fewer and fewer people did. The rest of the family were more accessible, even her mother. Her own friends seemed confused by their leader’s withdrawal from centre stage. They clung together in tiny shoals, chattering over the rims of their glasses.

In the next room, the pianist picked his way through the second half of the programme. A Neon Age interlude drifted into the Broken Ice sonata. Adelaide’s throat tightened. Axel loved this piece. Axel used to play it, badly. Such was the intensity of her longing that she believed, for a second, that she saw her twin standing there — and then she blinked, and the ache of missing was as vast as it had been before.

Adelaide leaned out to get a better look at the performer. It was Ruben Tallak, the composer, who had tutored both her and her brother. Standing alone by the piano was her grandfather.

He had seen her. Slowly, Adelaide extracted herself from the alcove and made her way over, straightening her collar and tie. Her grandfather, though in many ways the most lenient of the family, was meticulous about presentation. Above the lapels of his velvet jacket, his face was an intricate network; a history contained in every line. He held a glass less than half full of an amber weqa. She knew it was because of his shaking hands. He was worried the liquid might spill.

“Alright, Adie,” he said gently.

“I want to go, Grandfather. Please, say I can leave.”

Leonid’s hand rested for a moment on her hair, as it often used to when she was a child. She felt it tremor. She wished that her grandfather could give her a hug. But they were in public, and besides, she had given up that right.

“I’m sorry, Adie. We need you to stay.”

“Leonid.” One of the Councillors approached her grandfather, solemn faced. Adelaide melted away. The Councillor’s pompous tones echoed after her. “Such a tragedy. Barely come of age…”

She stumbled upon other conversations, each flirting sombrely around the same topic, each fading away at her approach.

“Poor Viviana, have you seen her? So wan.”

“She should drink an infusion of red coral tea every night. It may not restore the spirits immediately, but it does energise the body…”

Low murmurs; a group around the canapé table.

“—can’t help noticing that this is the second incident involving a founding family. Has anyone even considered that it could be the same people who killed the Dumays? What if…?”

“My dear, that was almost twenty years ago—”

“Eighteen, to be precise — may they rest with the stars.”

“—and anyway, Kaat was convicted.”

“Actually, she was never officially convicted because she never confessed.”

“A sure sign of guilt… of course I am not saying he is dead, you understand, but one does fear the worst. And it might have been easy, you know, the way he was, to lure—”

Finding Adelaide’s eyes cold upon her, the speaker stopped abruptly.

“Adelaide, my dear—” someone else spoke.

Adelaide turned away. She saw Linus talking to one of the krill, and watched him for a moment, wondering what he was saying. The journalist was listening intently, nodding through Linus’s sentences. Then she reached out and put a hand on his arm. It might have been a gesture of sympathy, nothing more, but Adelaide saw him shrink. And something about Linus’s reluctance struck her as important, as if, having listened to a song a thousand times over, she had suddenly noticed a flat note in the vocal. She continued to survey him for some time before she realized it was not her brother she should be concerned with. The discordance lay elsewhere.

“I’m sorry about Axel.”

The voice from behind her was Tyr, who worked for her father. Generally they would exchange pleasantries, but today she did not turn to look at him. She couldn’t.

“Why? He’s not dead.”

Tyr paused. “I mean the not knowing.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that is something to be sorry about.”

Through the doors, she saw her father was engaged in discussion with a black-suited man she did not recognize.

“Who is that?” she asked Tyr.

“I believe it’s the new man in charge of the investigation.”

Her father was tall, but his companion stood half a head above him, a thin angular streak of a man. His head was inclined politely towards Feodor.

“For Axel?”

“Yes.”

She moved away before Tyr could tell her more, pushing through the mourners, or whatever they thought they were. Feodor saw her coming. She knew he was aware of her intent, half expected him to vanish the visitor away before she had a chance to speak to him. But when she reached them, Feodor made the obligatory introductions.

“This is my daughter, Adelaide. Adie, this is Sanjay Hanif, who took over the investigation when it went to Council.”

There was nothing in this pronouncement out of place, other than the abbreviation, which suggested an affection entirely absent from their relationship. Adelaide contrived an equally fake smile.

“Hello. We’ve not seen you before. I haven’t, anyway.”

“How could you have, Adelaide.” Feodor’s voice was light in its warning. Hanif appeared not to notice. He had dark sombre eyes, a listening face. He reminded her of someone but she could not think who.

“I was only recently assigned,” he said. “I read your statement.”

“I hope you enjoyed it.”

He looked at her curiously. “It was through you the family discovered Axel was missing, was it not?”

“Indirectly. It was the delivery girl, Yonna.”

“A girl you employed.”

“That’s right.”

Feodor interrupted before she could say any more. “It was very important to Adelaide that her brother was well looked after. She undertook a lot of organization on his behalf.”

“It is very important,” Adelaide clarified. “And it’s alright, Feodor, I’ve been through these questions before. I have no objection to going over them again if it helps to find Axel.”

An awkward silence followed. Sanjay Hanif glanced at his watch.

“I’m deeply sorry for what you are all going through,” he said. “Hopefully we will have new information soon. But I’m afraid I cannot stay any longer. Thank you for your time.” He pressed his inner wrist to Feodor’s, then Adelaide’s, in formal greeting. She waited as he stepped swiftly through the crowds, gauging the optimum moment for pursuit. Feodor took her arm.

“You can’t go after him.” The genial tone of this pronouncement did not deceive Adelaide. She had grown up in a public environment; she knew the duality a voice could hold.

“Why not? I have to talk to him.”

Her skin was drained of colour where he gripped it, and there was a nerve twitching just above his left eye that she knew of old. She saw it for the first time the day Axel let out a cage of geckos at one of their parents’ anniversary parties. The twins were six years old. The stunt had earned them both a beating. Open it. You open it! I dared you first. Old friends, these memories. She almost smiled, but a twinge of pain shot through her arm as Feodor’s fingers squeezed harder. She wriggled, trying to free herself without drawing attention to her captive status.

“You promised not to make a scene. Osiris’s eyes are upon the family today. You promised.” Her father was struggling to keep himself in check. His reaction seemed entirely disproportionate to what she wanted. She wondered if he too was remembering the geckos.

“I didn’t know Hanif was going to be here then. Let go of my arm.”

He maintained his grip. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Let me go!”

They stood locked in mounting fury. Words raced through her head: all the things she could and would say to Feodor, after. What right did he have! — how dare he stop her — what did publicity matter, what did the Rechnov name matter? He didn’t care about Axel, never had, none of them had—

The crowds were closing in on Sanjay Hanif. In a moment the doors would do the same. It might be the one opportunity she had to catch him outside of Rechnov supervision, she couldn’t follow beyond the gathering, there were too many krill. She twisted her arm once more, biting her lip to suppress an exclamation. Her eyes grew hot. She despised herself for the tears gathering there, though they were not the product of pain but of frustration. Why could her father not understand that she had to know? She blinked furiously.

Now Hanif was nodding to security. His black-coated figure was sliding away, subsumed by the closing doors. Gone.

“Why was he here?” She wrenched her arm free. Feodor nodded to a passing Councillor. “What was he doing here?” she repeated, louder this time.

“He probably thought it was as good a time as any to introduce himself.”

“What about the rest of us? Why couldn’t I talk to him? Axel’s my twin for stars’ sake!”

“Because this is a public event.” Feodor had subsided into a low hiss. “And we are meant to be presenting an appearance of unity. If you can’t behave yourself for us, then at least do it for your brother. Now pull yourself together.”

She threw him one look of derision and walked away. The gathering did not permit her to walk far, but the gesture felt right. She wanted the numbness back. She craved its anaesthetic. How stupid she was to even attend this pathetic event. Their father was wrong, Axel would not want her to behave. Axel would scorn everything about his service of hope: the pomp, the speech, the piano. She imagined him appearing like a magician from under the instrument’s lid, hopping onto the stool, striking a jaunty note whilst the guests stared, flabbergasted. “Did you miss me, A?” he’d say.

At least, the old Axel would have done.

That sense of the off-key clanged again. Even her own role today was unforgivable.

By the refreshments table, two of the Ngozi girls had given up discussing Axel and had moved on to the next prominent item of society’s speculation: the execution of the westerner Eirik 9968.

“Are you attending?”

“Well, I’m not sure. Aunt Mbeke says we all should and I suppose she’s right. It might be a bit unpleasant though.”

“I shouldn’t worry. We’ll be miles away from the westies.”

“I suppose. And I’m quite intrigued to see, you know, what he looks like.”

“You should have said. Dad could have got us into the trial. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it either.”

Eirik 9968 was the last thing that Adelaide wanted to hear about. There was something eagerly nasty in the girls’ fascination with the execution that told her they had been talking about her twin in exactly the same way.

Ignoring them both, she took an open bottle of weqa from the table and went to the next room where earlier she had noticed a balcony door. She slipped out. It wasn’t a large balcony, only a few metres wide, a cuboid sanctuary seventy-eight floors above sea-level. She sank to the ground, knees drawn to her chest and her back to the closed door, shivering violently. The regulation strip of soil in front of the railings supported trembling plants. Autumn had arrived. It was freezing.

The veil itched her skin. She tore the hat off, feeling the pins in her hair come loose, and flicked the hat over the balcony rail. The sunshine made her blink.

Osiris lay before her, a shimmering metropolis sunk shin deep into the ocean. Before dawn, mist obscured the entire city, enveloping the thousands of pyramid skyscrapers in its damp, arcane touch. It was noon now, and the fog had mostly dissipated. Deceptive sunshine polished the tapering structures of glass and metal, turning the bridges and shuttle lines that webbed them into silver threads. The solar skins of the towers greedily reaped this bounty of heat and light.

Adelaide took a gulp of weqa. The wine had a sharp, tangy taste. She read the bottle label: seaweed farmed from the northern kelp forests. In Osiris, every possession or belonging or simple luxury was representative of an achievement. Adelaide ate avocados that germinated under artificial light. She smoked cigarillos rolled from tobacco nurtured in the greenhouses of Skyscraper-334-North. Nestling in the heights of the eastern quarter, the Rechnovs lived off the produce of Osiris ingenuity, first sown over one hundred and forty years ago with the establishment of the Osiris Board in remote Alaska.

It had been drilled into her since birth: Osiris’s history, the Rechnov history. She had never felt further from it.

In the distance she saw a man abseiling down one of the gardens. His yellow jacket wove steadily through the green canvas. He was probably repairing storm damage. Adelaide lit a cigarillo. The nicotine rush caught her by surprise, and for a second she had the peculiar sensation that the city was melting, its majestic horizon stretching and reforming into new, unexpected shapes. She reached for the sculpted bars of the balcony railings and pushed her face between a spiral and a serpentine curve. The metal chilled her skin.

The building opposite was a tightrope walk away. Several floors down, a shuttle line fed into its belly like an intravenous tube, and snaked out the other side to continue its journey through the eastern district.

Adelaide pulled herself up and folded her arms along the balcony rail, resting her chin upon them. Ahead and behind, to left and right, the pyramids marched away in ordered lines. The sea rushed between them. From this height the waterways looked harmless, like washes of blue tinted paint. But in the sometime erratic progress of the boating traffic, there was a hint of the sea’s underlying menace.

She thought, as she did at least ten times a day, about the last time that she had seen her brother.

It was midweek. Adelaide had been to a fencing class in the studio fifteen floors down from her apartment. Her muscles were stiffening after the workout and sweat still clung to her body. She was running late to meet Jannike for lunch. She didn’t hurry, though. Inside, she was never seen to rush. Outside she rushed everywhere, on speedboats, on jet skis and on waterbikes. Adelaide had cultivated this image over the years.

On that particular day, the lift swished up through the core of the skyscraper and she got out on the ninety-ninth floor. When she entered her apartment, a figure was standing by the glass wall, facing out. None of the lights were on and darkness lined the flat like velvet. But she knew it was Axel because of his stillness.

She flicked the wall switch.

“You found your key then?”

That was definitely her opening line. Not said in an accusing way. By that stage, resignation had become the dominant frame of mind with her twin.

He said something odd. Have you heard about the balloon? Or maybe it was, did you read about the balloon flight? It might even have been, what do you know about the balloon?

Nothing worth paying attention to, anyway. Axel talked in riddles; he no longer made sense. Adelaide was late and the need to take a shower was pressing on her with her own damp odour.

“No,” she said. “Are you alright? Do you need anything?” If he did he didn’t tell her. He repeated the same question about the balloon. He did not turn. Fraying strands of denim, inches long, trailed on the floor behind his bare feet. His gaze was fixed beyond the glass, but there was no view. Osiris was held hostage by fog.

The tips of his hair, the same bright red as hers, attracted motes of light like a crown. She had a strange sense that he was smiling.

“I’m going to change,” she said. “I have to meet someone. You know where everything is, A.”

In the bathroom she peeled off her jogging pants and Urchin tank top and threw them carelessly on the floor. She stepped into the shower before the water had time to heat, gasping at the dousing. After, she wrapped herself in her kimono and went through to her bedroom. Carefully applying a sweep of scarlet lipstick, she almost forgot about Axel.

When she came back he was gone. He had left the front door ajar. She pounded it shut, purely for her own satisfaction, because she was sure he was nowhere near by and even if he was, the noise would have meant nothing to him. She went for lunch in the Hummingbird Café in S-771-E. Jannike was late too and had a tale about a faulty shuttle pod or some other transport problem. They ordered weqa. She remembered choosing the bottle because her staple choice was out of stock, and it was the first time she had read the wine list in several months of patronage. It was likely she had eaten bird.

That was the last time she saw Axel. A month had passed in the way that the months always passed, and sometimes she thought about him more and sometimes less, and then he was gone. It occurred to her, shivering in the glacial air, that it was impossible to say exactly when he had vanished.

She realized now who Sanjay Hanif had reminded her of: it was Dr Radir, the most recent of her twin’s consultants. Radir had failed to diagnose Axel with a condition. He said he had never treated anyone like Axel.

Adelaide let the cigarillo fall. She knew the reason she was out here. It was that nameless thing people did when they felt bereft of decision: waiting, seeing. There was something about Osiris that demanded this act of looking out, perhaps because there was nothing beyond the city to find. It was the behaviour of a fool. She had unearthed a fracture and did not know what to do with it.

One other resource remained open to her.

She took her scarab out of her purse and slipped in a jewelled earpiece. Then she entered the code that she had memorised two days ago. The o’comm at the other end buzzed twice before it was answered.

The voice that responded was curt but unremarkable.

“Yes?”

“My name is Adelaide Mystik. We spoke earlier this week.”

“Yes. You’ve decided?”

“I’d like to go ahead.”

“Very well.”

“You understand that this remains outside of my family’s jurisdiction?”

“I guarantee discretion.”

“Use this number only if you have to contact me. If I don’t respond, don’t speak. The funds will be with you within the hour. Start with the hospitals. I’ll relay Axel’s photograph to your scarab.”

“There are plenty of photographs of Axel Rechnov.”

“Not recent ones,” she said.

There was a pause.

“Send the photograph,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I want to meet,” she said quickly. “Let’s say Friday, the week after the execution. That should give you enough time. Eleven o’clock at the butterfly farm.”

“As you wish.”

The scarab emitted a tiny beep as the investigator disconnected from the Reef.

Adelaide brought up the last recorded image she had of Axel. He wasn’t looking at the camera. The miniature screen showed his pallor, the way his cheeks caved his face. It showed what remained. She entered the investigator’s code once more. Axel’s face hung there for a moment in profile before the picture blinked and the scarab went dark.

Her fingers fumbled as she put away the scarab, numb with cold. Nonetheless she stayed outside, exhausting the weqa, until the guests went away and she could leave.

2 ¦ VIKRAM

Vikram’s watch ticked off the seconds with silent, calculated precision. It was nearing half ten o’clock; the appointed time of Eirik’s death was eleven. Vikram had already been here for over an hour. The boats had gathered early.

His hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists, catching shreds of torn lining in the pockets of his coat. Something had changed when he woke today. A tight band squeezed his chest, constricting the airflow and his heart. He could not have said what it meant; for so long he had felt only a blankness tinged with fear.

He stood at the boat rail of a rusting waterbus anchored far back in the crowd. The Council had chosen to stage the execution near the north end of the border, where four soaring towers cornered an impromptu square. On the western side, the sea was carpeted with boats, every craft jammed with westerners who had congregated, whether to witness a spectacle or out of disbelief that it would be carried through, Vikram could not tell. Apart from a few officials and the skadi, there were no Citizens on the surface. They were all inside, locked away behind window-walls, or listening to a reporter describe the scene on their o’dios.

“Mind if we squeeze in here?”

The man was a head shorter than Vikram, his breath misting in the cold, steering a child of perhaps eight in front of him. Vikram moved along the rail.

“Sure.”

What could he say? He glanced at the kid, a boy, whose expression was open and curious. He wanted to ask the man if it was right the boy should witness such a thing, but to draw any attention was risky. There was always a chance that one of the skadi might recognise him. They did as they pleased, and in the event of any trouble, Vikram’s record would count against him. The thought of going back underwater was enough to bring sweat trickling down his back.

“They say he’s the NWO leader,” said the man. “Eirik 9968. They say he’s number one. What do you reckon?”

“I don’t know.”

He could have said a lot of things. He could have said that he had known Eirik like a brother, once. But between the rumours and the krill speculation and what Drake and Nils had told him, he no longer knew what or who to believe.

The kid pointed to the tank, sat on the deck of a barge a hundred metres away, beyond the front line of western boats. Behind it, the border rose out of the waves, its rippling mesh wet and dripping with seaweed.

“Is that it?” said the kid.

“That’s it.”

“Where’s the prisoner?”

“They’ll bring him out soon.”

Soon. In a matter of minutes, he had to watch Eirik die. Vikram thought he might cry, or shout out, or be sick. If he only knew if the man was guilty or not! He drew in a deep breath. When he exhaled the air came out loud, too loud, the woman on his other side turned her head to look. He had thought that his face was blank, but you never knew what really showed. Vikram had seen fear and horror spark in the most hardened of features: the emotion sudden and unexpected, like electric light in a dark window.

Keep yourself empty, he thought. A pebble at the bottom of the ocean. A bit of kelp. When it’s happened it’s over, done. Then you move on.

That was what the three of them had agreed, him and Nils and Drake. They would go to the execution, because they couldn’t stay away. But they would do nothing. There was nothing they could do.

Eirik’s sentence had finally been announced in early summer, eight months after Vikram was let out of jail. There had not been a public execution since the six Osuwa criminals were shot at the border twenty-eight years ago, for an alleged act of terrorism at the university. Even Vikram knew that Eirik had committed no acts of terrorism. The Citizens were going to execute him anyway.

Was the City actually scared of the west? How could they be, when there wasn’t a single coherent movement or activist group? The west was in chaos, crippled by food shortages and drug trafficking and the continual power failures. The shanty towns were terrorised by gangs who imposed illegal levees and warred continually amongst themselves. Once every few months there might be a straggly protest at the border, mute and seemingly purposeless, but it didn’t take a Councillor to work out that the west was in no position to threaten anyone.

Twenty minutes before eleven. The back of Vikram’s neck tingled with the bitter cold. He pulled up his scarf. In a couple of weeks, he’d need two to go outside.

It was an incongruously clear, pretty day, the sky palest blue and utterly empty. Under its expanse Vikram felt the unsettling jumble of freedom and an at times incapacitating terror of losing it again, which had dogged him ever since he got out. Around the towers, waves slapped the decking with light, almost playful gestures. The waterbus he stood upon with twenty other westerners rose on the swell.

A skadi boat glided down the edge of the crowd. They had a fleet of barges and speeders, and they had strung a line of buoys to fence in the western boats. The skadi were dressed bulkily in their habitual black. They were all armed with guns and tasers. One of them had a speakerphone.

“You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats. Any attempted action will meet with severe punishment.”

The execution boat, anchored between the western crowds and the City, was a squat, ugly craft, surrounded by clear water and painted entirely black except for the prow, where someone had daubed two white orbs and the teeth of a shark. The deck was flat. On it, the transparent cube reflected the towers on either side and the people and the empty waiting sky.

The wind blew spray into Vikram’s face and he licked the salt from his chapped lips. It stung, an unwelcome reminder that he was really here. He was alive, and awake.

The speakerphone crackled. “You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats…”

Vikram was nine years old when Mikkeli first brought him to the border. From his earliest memories, he had heard people talking about the infamous waterway. It was a subject which made voices change, and sometimes faces too. In Vikram’s young world, which consisted mostly of places he could not go or things he could not do, this barrier dividing the west from the City was a concept at once as solid and as transient as the sky.

On that day Mikkeli had blagged two passes on a waterbus and sneaked Vikram up to a balcony sixty floors above surface. Once they were safely installed, she unwrapped a package of fried squid and kelp. She said that someone had given her the food, which was a lie. Vikram knew Mikkeli had stolen it because he had heard the fry-boat woman yelling at them earlier as they ran away over the raft rack.

They shared the squid rings, greasy and chewy on the inside but coated with thick, salty batter. Mikkeli gave Vikram most of the kelp squares. She pointed outwards.

“Look over there,” she said. “See them towers?”

“Yeah. They’re all silver.” That was his first impression of the City. Silver and glorious, like the morning sun on the waves.

“We can’t go there,” said Mikkeli. Her voice sounded strange. Vikram could not work out if she was cross or if she might actually cry. He thought about what Mikkeli had said and decided that there must be a reason for it.

“Why can’t we go there?”

“’Cause we’re westerners, that’s why. We’re not allowed.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause it’s the rules. The Council’s rules.” Mikkeli spat over the balcony rail. Vikram leaned forward to see the gob of spit fly and Mikkeli grabbed his collar and pulled him back.

“Who’s the Council, Keli?”

“Stupid old gulls, Naala says. Stupid gulls who make stupid rules. You see, Vik, our mum’s and dad’s folks, they weren’t born here. They came from some place else.”

“I know that. I’m not an idiot.”

“No, you’re clever, that’s why I’m telling you this. “’Cause it’s important. And it’s not fair. Why do we get left in this dump and them Citizens got heating and ’lectricity that works all the time and you know what else they’ve got? They’ve got the o’vis.” The yearning in Mikkeli’s voice reminded Vikram of hours spent waiting outside the fry-boats, smelling the smell of hot squid, knowing that it would be long past twilight before leftovers. “Naala actually saw an o’vis once. She said it’s amazing. You can watch ancient filmreels the Neons made; the newsreel and animés and everything.”

“What’s the newsreel?”

“This announcer thing they got, tells you information and stuff, like if someone dies, everyone knows ’cause it’s on the feed…”

Mikkeli talked on. She told him weird and wonderful stories of a fabulous world where people went to parties and wore beautiful clothes and watched acrobats and then stuffed themselves with weqa and fish until they vomited.

People didn’t get sick in the City, she said. They didn’t get horrible coughs and die in the night.

The Citizens did peculiar things. They kept animals in their rooms — as pets. They wore coats with bird feathers inside. They had gliders.

If they wanted to come to west Osiris, which they didn’t, they were allowed to whenever they liked.

Vikram listened. He looked at the sleek, silver towers. The shuttle lines looked like jets of blue fire leaping from one gigantic cone to the next. Fire was one of Vikram’s favourite things in his limited world.

“Can’t we just go to look around?” he asked.

“No. Look down there — careful! Naala’d murder me… See that net coming out the water? Goes down as far as the sea mud. People say the Tellers tied it, right at the centre of the earth. But that’s all lies. The Council wanted to keep us out so the skadi put it there.”

“We can’t go ever? Not when we’re older?” Vikram wanted to be sure.

“Did you listen to what I said? Never ever. You try and cross that waterway down there without a tag that says you’re a Citizen, the skadi shoot you—zap! Just like that. They hate us, they call us dogs. Look, look, there’s a boat of ’em going past right there, that dirty black speeder. Naala told me it all. I wasn’t even meant to bring you with me, it’s that dangerous.”

Vikram saw a gull fly past the nearest tower on the other side. The light, reflected from a window, turned the bird for a second into living gold. Everything that was beautiful belonged to the Citizens.

“Then why did you?” he said angrily. “Why did you bring me?”

It seemed like the most unfair thing that Mikkeli had ever done. But Mikkeli was unimpressed at his outburst.

“Because Vik, one day someone’s got to do something about it, and it might as well be us. Right?”

He looked from the waterway, where the low-lying skadi boat was gliding past one of the silver cones, and back to Mikkeli. Last week, she had stolen a new garment: a yellow hood. Within its furry halo her face was deadly serious.

Vikram would have done anything for Mikkeli.

“Alright,” he said. “How?”

Nine minutes to eleven. Vikram shivered uncontrollably. He could not take his eyes off the boat. With its unkind mission, the vessel itself seemed to have acquired a mesmerising power. Each of its component parts was imbued with more than simple menace; the cracked graffiti eyes, the crew posed at stiff attention, gun barrels protruding from their shoulders, the waves lapping and the creak of the hull. There was something inherently wrong about the scene. The boat’s natural purpose had been reversed. It would no longer protect life; it carried a tomb, clear and silent.

The kid on Vikram’s right fidgeted, looked up at his father.

“Not long now,” said the man.

Vikram wondered if there was anyone in the crowd who had plans to break Eirik out. He felt the tension of the crowd, really felt it, the way he’d sensed unease three years ago, the day the riots began. Who else had Eirik known? Did he have allies? Colleagues? Were there members of the New Western Osiris Front in the crowd? Had they ever been anything more than a rumour, or had all of those dissidents quietly disappeared after the riots were crushed? Perhaps everyone present today was simply relieved that a scapegoat had been found and that it wasn’t them.

He gauged the thickness of the glass construction, wondering if a single shot would break it. He remembered, distantly, the feel of a gun in his hand, that sense of absolute power and invulnerability. It had proved false, like everything else.

The skadi would have prepared thoroughly. They always did.

Only another few minutes. There was no sign of Eirik.

“Maybe they’ll cancel it,” said the woman next to Vikram.

He looked at her properly for the first time. She was old, at least fifty, and wheezing in the cold air. She probably had tuberculosis. He remembered Mikkeli’s lilting voice—people don’t get sick in the City, Vik. He wanted to ask the woman her name, but could not trust himself to know even this tiny piece of personal information.

“It’s just an act,” he said — whether to convince himself or the woman he did not know.

The crowd murmured impatiently. Where was the condemned man?

Vikram had not seen Eirik since before the riots. Even if he had wanted to, prisoners were allowed no visitors. Underwater, the information that Vikram overheard came in drips and leaks. A whisper, across cells, that Eirik had confessed. Months later, in the breakfast line, rumours of the tribunal.

He hadn’t been sure about Eirik at first. It had always been the four of them: Vikram and Mikkeli, Nils and Drake. Mikkeli, as the oldest, was the leader. None of them had family; they had grown up on the boat and later they lived together in a single room. They squabbled and got into fights, they tried and sometimes succeeded in finding work and eventually, when their circumstances could no longer be viewed entirely as a joke, they had talked, talked seriously, and they had founded the New Horizon Movement. Their ideas were popular. Others joined. The talks grew to meetings of fifteen or twenty people, but they were always the core.

One night, Mikkeli brought Eirik back to talk to them. Vikram remembered Eirik walking into their favoured bar for the first time, tossing his coat onto the table, drawing up an empty keg.

They had been in the middle of a heated discussion. When Eirik sat down, they all stopped talking. The silence was expectant.

“Well,” Eirik said. And looked at them all. A canny, knowing look, but somehow gleeful, as though he was pleased with life and what it offered, and even how it found him. “Well.”

He remembered Mikkeli, sidling forward, a shyness about her. Vikram had never seen her like that before.

“This is Eirik,” she announced. “He wants to hear about Horizon.”

Vikram was suspicious. He could tell that Nils and Drake felt the same way, sensed them bristling beside him.

“Show him the letters, Vik,” said Mikkeli. She spoke to Eirik. “Every week we send a letter to the Council. Vik does the writing for us. He’s the smart one.”

Vikram was embarrassed.

“He doesn’t want to see those, Keli.”

“Oh go on.”

“That’s our business,” Nils interjected. “We don’t know who this guy is. No offence, Eirik.”

Eirik smiled. “None taken. How about we all get a drink instead?”

Later, Eirik took Vikram aside.

“I didn’t want to make you feel awkward, Vikram, but I’d be interested to see what Horizon sends to the Council. There’s too much talk of violence out there. It’s understandable but it won’t work. We need to use our heads.”

“He’s a spy,” said Nils, when Mikkeli and Eirik had left and Vikram relayed what had been said to the others.

“He’s almost forty.” Drake emptied the dregs of a tankard into her mouth.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Old, but no grey hair,” she said simply. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

“Clearly Keli does,” said Nils sourly.

“I’m not sure he is a spy.” Vikram was thoughtful.

“Must be.”

“But he looks like us.”

Eirik had what they all had — the unmistakeable taint of the west. It wasn’t just the general shabbiness and the permanent smell of salt from water travel and poor diet. It was something in the eyes. Part wariness, part resignation; a continual expectation of the worst, as though by acknowledging, almost welcoming the worst of their situation, they could somehow ward off the reality. According to the only survey ever carried out in the west, by the Colnat Initiative, life expectancy in the west was an average of forty-three. The years before, filled with sickness and unemployment, would become increasingly harsh. They all carried this knowledge on their faces, and the only time Vikram actually noticed it was when he saw someone who did not look like that. Like the skadi.

Eirik came back. One by one he won them over. Part of the lure was undoubtedly that Eirik knew how to talk.

“You people are exactly who I’ve been looking for,” he said.

When Vikram showed him the transcripts of their letters, Eirik was visibly excited.

“These are great ideas! Joint fishing missions, that’ll appeal to the anti-Nucleites, they’re desperate to get further out of the city. And if you rephrased a few things — you don’t mind me making suggestions? Like here, you talk about reducing security at checkpoints — what you want to say is border reconciliation. It’s all about the jargon.”

Vikram wrote it down.

“How do you know this stuff? Who taught you?”

“You learn to pick things up. Odd jobs in the City — I always scan their newsfeed. Listen to them talking. Know your enemy, Vikram. It’s the oldest rule in the universe.”

Then he began asking questions. So now we know what we want — how are we going to get it? It was we, right from the start. That had made them feel good. And it was a valid question, to which none of them yet had an answer. This was what they sat around arguing about for nights on end. They had been happy enough doing that for a while, with Vikram composing the letters, and occasional suggestions that they might organise a protest. Mikkeli had come up with a series of slogans. But after Eirik showed up they started noticing other things — like the fact that one electric bulb did not produce adequate light even in the summer, and that no amount of well-written words could assuage the fact that none of them had had a decent meal in weeks.

“We need to engage with the early justice groups,” said Eirik. “Get right back to the start. The Western Repatriation Movement, they were good people — you know about them? They sent the first official refugee delegate to the Council, seven years after the Great Storms and the first immigrants arrived. The Council made promises, of course. The western quarter’s only temporary, they said. Give us eighteen months to restructure the city, we’ll find you somewhere decent to live. Eighteen months go by, the delegates return, they warn the Council that people are getting angry, and the Council places them under house arrest — idiotic move but they were probably scared shitless. That’s what led to the rise of the New Osiris Affiliation, and they led to the second wave of riots, and what happened at the Greenhouse, and finally, thirty-nine years ago, to the border. That border’s as old as I am. We’ve grown up together.”

He sat back and held their eyes, one by one, steadily.

“Everything,” he said. “Has a root.”

Eirik’s voice was thoughtful and inevitable like a tide. They could listen to him for hours. It seemed that Mikkeli’s adulation had proved well founded. They had followed her and she had needed someone to believe in as much as the rest of them. It was only Eirik himself who seemed to wander, fleet as foam, unhindered by such petty concerns as doubt.

As the weeks passed, Vikram noticed shifts in attitude. At first it was small things. There was less attention to the letters. Instead of helping him dictate, the others might talk about an incident at the border. A man who had been detained at the checkpoint for forty-eight hours without reason. A woman, beaten up, who had lost an eye. Phrases crept into conversation: if only I’d been there. Vikram found himself only too happy to join in.

The lack of response to the Council missives began to feel like a personal insult. Did they even read what was sent? Was there any point in writing at all?

He started revisiting old childhood haunts, by the border. The towers on the other side seemed brighter and more blinding than ever and his hands would itch with inactivity.

He clearly remembered turning to Nils one day and saying, “If something happened this winter — if people decided to riot — what would you do?”

Nils said without a flicker of hesitation, “I’d kill as many of those skadi bastards as I could.”

“Not Citizens though.”

“Course not Citizens. What d’you take me for?”

And then came the morning of strange quiet, the day the riots began. The day that everything fell apart and the skadi came for Eirik. The City published findings that they said proved Eirik was NWO. He’d gone from group to group, they said, winning trust, gaining followers. Recruiting. They gave him a number.

For Eirik, after three years in a seabed cell, death might be a relief. He wondered if Mikkeli’s ghost had lingered with the other man whilst he was underwater, the way she had with Vikram, presenting him with her lifeless body over and over again, the tattered yellow hood that fell back from her face drenched to ochre. Did Eirik even know she was dead?

The second hand edged past eleven o’clock. Something was happening. Birds, alert to the change in mood, began to swirl overhead. A curious gull dove low over the boats. Of course the birds would come today.

The hatch on the execution boat had opened. A skadi officer emerged. He came to stand at the rail, hands clasped behind him. Wide sunglasses wrapped around his head caught the sun as he turned this way and that.

The officer barked an order. Eirik was led out from below deck. He must have been kept there all along, in darkness. Vikram strained his eyes, desperate for a glimpse of Eirik’s face, but it was concealed behind a dark hood, part of a prisoner’s suit.

A frisson went through the crowd.

“That’s him… that’s Eirik 9968…”

Eirik seemed to move as one in a dream. His hands were manacled in front of him. The man leading him gave tiny jerks upon the chains, and Vikram could hear their clank beneath the ever present rush of the ocean and the whispers of the audience.

The executioner checked the tank. He rapped the glass on each side and on the roof. Two skadi on either side of Eirik held his arms. They turned him towards the western crowd, but his head flopped on his chest, and his face remained in shadow.

He’s drugged, Vikram realized. He felt anger stirring at their cowardice, mixed with a horrible relief that Eirik would barely be conscious.

The air keened as a dozen loudspeakers were switched on. The wheezing woman next to Vikram covered her ears. The man to his right squeezed his boy’s shoulders. Vikram wanted to wrench the kid away and cover up his eyes. In the next breath he thought no, he should see this. He should know what the Citizens do to us.

A voice began to speak. The tone was clipped and robotic.

“The man known as Eirik 9968 has been sentenced for his actions against the city state of Osiris. He is found guilty of the following crimes: denouncing the Osiris Council, organising collective violence against the City, inciting aggressive action in westerners, acts of personal terrorism, assault and mass murder. In particular he is convicted for his role in reviving the illegal New Western Osiris Front, the organisation responsible for the atrocities committed at Oswua University in the year twenty-three eighty-eight, and for leading and instigating the July riots three years ago. He is judged responsible for both the deaths of Citizens and the necessary reprisals against the west.”

Eirik made no reaction to this speech. His posture was bowed and defeated. It was doubtful whether he had even heard the accusations. Confronted with that small, lone figure between two cities, all Vikram could think of was Eirik sat cross-legged in Nils’s room, leaning forward, gesticulating as he spoke, his face intense and serious, half illuminated by the flickering light. Look, it’s not enough to know the history — we’ve got to know how these people think. Why won’t they take us seriously — why won’t they answer Vik’s letters? Because we don’t use their language and we don’t understand their systems. We don’t know who they really are.

The memory was so strong it made him giddy. Vikram could hear Eirik’s voice perfectly; he could see that room, smell the empty wrappers of squid and kelp. His head swam.

Instinct told him the truth. In that moment he knew, with absolute and shocking conviction, that everything that had been said about Eirik was a lie. Because Eirik, who did know the language, had been a threat. He might actually have made people listen. And the City couldn’t let anything threaten the divide, so the City were going to remove him.

Maybe Eirik had helped to feed the riots. Did it matter? It was not a terrorist who had thrown the first fire torch. It was an ordinary westerner like Vikram, who had been up against the border and everything it represented too many times, and in a single moment of frustration had cracked. Anyone could have started the riots.

The officer on the boat drew himself up, concluding his speech.

“For this long and atrocious history of criminal activity, the Osiris Council has condemned Eirik 9968 to death by drowning.”

The kid leaned forward over the boat rail, eyes wide and eager.

Vikram felt a rising panic. It couldn’t happen. Eirik was innocent. Vikram knew he was innocent. Where were Nils and Drake? If he could find them — he had to explain. It was as though he had emerged from hibernation. How could he ever have imagined that Eirik could be involved with the NWO? The idea was insane. What had he been thinking?

There was still time for a miracle. The speaker would reverse his statement. He would declare that the execution had been a warning to the west, and Eirik would be freed. They couldn’t — they couldn’t kill him.

He willed Eirik to look his way. A moment of contact — he needed Eirik to know he was here—

“Pardon.”

The call came from the other side of the crowd. Quiet at first. Then another voice joined in.

“Pardon.”

The call rose, each voice creating a new bubble of sound. Vikram added his own plea, but his throat was tight and his voice hoarse and barely audible.

“Pardon. Pardon.”

The executioner stepped forward and zipped up the hooded suit, concealing Eirik’s face completely.

No—

One of the guards opened a door in the tank. They pushed Eirik inside. He fell against the side of the tank and slumped to the floor. The skad banged the door shut. Vikram felt the reverberations shudder all the way down his spine. You didn’t believe him, they said. You didn’t believe him, believe him, believe him…

Wild ideas raced through his head. If he could get to the tank underwater — hold his breath long enough to swim—

Chatter skittered through the crowd, small sounds of distress, quickly choked, others muttering in anticipation. The people around him were faceless and alien. The man on his right had lifted the kid to sit on his shoulders and someone behind was complaining that their view was blocked. Vikram could not see Nils or Drake anywhere. He was on his own.

Two skadi went to their stations at the pumps. The executioner checked his watch, gave a curt nod. A stifling quiet fell over the crowd.

It was so still that Vikram could hear water guzzling through the bilges. The first load splashed into the tank.

He heard disjointed words behind him.

“I can’t watch—”

“Don’t look. Come here, just don’t look—”

“Dad, the water’s going in — I can see it—”

Behind the glass the water trickled, greenish in colour. It foamed and swirled with the pressure. Strands of floating kelp were sucked inside. A small fish was flung out of the pipe. Eirik lay prone against the tank wall, his hands still manacled.

Stars—

Help him!

The water gathered around Eirik’s legs. At last he seemed to stir. The shock of the icy water must have jerked him from his state of comatose. He moved his head. He drew his knees to his chest. Every movement he made was infinitely slow.

“It’s going to take ten minutes,” said someone on the next boat.

“Ten? Fifteen at least.”

“No, not fifteen. Not as long as that.”

“I’ll bet you on it.”

A girl began to scream, a long and eerie sound, rising and falling. A skad lifted his rifle and fired a warning shot into the air. The scream stopped abruptly. The crowd rippled with alarm. He saw several people duck, some hunching protectively over their neighbours, but no one shouted; no one dared to protest. It would have to be Vikram. If he spoke up, he could incite the crowd — they must be angry enough to act — surely they must want to stop this — surely they didn’t believe, as Vikram had—

His body had turned to lead. Some part of his mind knew that this was self-preservation. That there was nothing he could do for Eirik now. He could only give Eirik the dignity of a witness. Someone to remember, to throw salt in Eirik’s name.

The skadi bent and straightened as they worked the pumps, first in time, then in an almost comical seesaw motion. One paused to wipe his brow before he bent to the task again.

“Get on with it!” a westerner shouted.

“Why don’t they just shoot him?” muttered a girl on Vikram’s boat.

The water swilled, a foot high.

The woman beside Vikram gasped and let out a long sigh as she fainted, her weight a sudden heaviness against his own too-light frame. The man lifted the kid off his shoulders to help Vikram support the woman and the kid climbed up onto the boat rail to see better and stared and stared.

The girl who had spoken before knelt to give the woman water. The woman’s eyelids were violet. Her lashes fluttered as she regained consciousness.

“Is she alright?” Vikram’s voice came out ragged. He cleared his throat. The noise sounded as loud as a slap.

“I’ll look after her,” whispered the girl. Her eyes met Vikram’s and for a moment held, whilst a slight frown creased her forehead. He froze, suddenly terrified that she had recognised him. Did he look like an insurgent? Could she ever have seen him with Eirik? He turned stiffly away.

“Dad, look, the water’s up to his neck,” said the kid. “He’s going to die now.”

“They’re killing him.” Vikram couldn’t stop himself. It was important that he said this, that this definition, at least, stayed with the kid, even if his father gave Vikram a peculiar glance and placed his hands protectively on the boy’s shoulders.

Eirik tried to stand but slipped and crashed back. He tried again. His legs could not support the weight of his torso.

“Well you know… if the NWO really had come back… maybe it’s better this way…”

“You think..?”

“The skadi would have crucified us… if you were old enough to remember what happened after Osuwa, you’d know…”

“Please, don’t talk about Osuwa.”

The snippets of conversation drifted from all sides like small feathers. Vikram could no longer tell where they came from.

The water lapped at Eirik’s chin. He got clumsily onto his knees. The movement must be an exertion. Perhaps he was in dreadful pain. The black overalls hid his body; whatever previous tortures had been inflicted upon him were invisible. Vikram imagined the prison guards entering Eirik’s cell, taunting him, with words at first, the jeers giving way to cigarette burns, blows, worse. He winced.

Time was winding down. The two skadi at the pumps seemed to move in slow motion. What kind of man could kill another in this way? Vikram looked around at the crowd. Every one of them was complicit. He was complicit himself, because to do nothing was to aid in the working of the pumps.

Eirik floundered on his knees. His gloved hands slipped at the sides of the tanks. He fumbled to remove the gloves and they came adrift. Vikram saw Eirik’s bare hands slide against the glass, feeling to his left and right, reaching up to the top of the tank, finding this too blocked.

Vikram folded over the rail, his head buried against his clenched hands. He did not care now who saw. He wanted to cry. But his eyes remained obstinately dry, and even if the tears had come he knew that they would be for himself, for his own stupidity and his failure to believe in a friend, as much as for Eirik who in many ways was already dead. The impulse shamed him. He lifted his head; he would make himself watch the end. It was the last thing he could offer Eirik.

He heard the skadi at the pumps grunting with exertion. The water level rose and rose. It reached Eirik’s shoulders. Eirik was trying to undo the hood. His bound hands flapped ineffectually around his head. He didn’t seem able to bend his fingers.

The crowd, sensing a conclusion, were growing voluble. From all sides a chorus lifted, the voices louder now and more aggressive. Shouts and insults, wailing, overlapping. The skadi fired a barrage of warning shots into the water. A girl, perhaps the same girl, started screaming. This time no one stopped her. Vikram’s boat rocked; the crowd was pushing at the barrier, jeering at the skadi. The man beside Vikram pulled his kid roughly from the rail and told him to keep his head down. Skadi boats sped down the crowd barrier, whipping around, racing back again. Spray hid the execution boat momentarily. The boat in front moved sideways, blocking Vikram. He had to crane to see what was happening.

The tank was almost full, and Eirik was fully conscious. His body convulsed like a bird hooked in a net. His feet thrashed the water white. He was floating on his back, head half submerged below the last few inches of air.

That’s enough, he thought numbly. Just stop now. There’s still time, the lesson’s learned. He could live—

“Oh, but there’s never enough time, Vik, that’s why you have to take it—”

Mikkeli was speaking. No, Mikkeli was dead. Her body limp and sodden on the decking. Frost already forming on her eyelashes.

“You have to take it from someone else!”

Mikkeli’s ghost laughed, that big, slightly dirty laugh. She cocked her head at Eirik and winked, once. Ice splintered in Vikram’s ribs.

“That’s right,” said Eirik. “She’s right. If you steal anything, steal time.”

In the tank, the last inch of air disappeared.

Vikram imagined Eirik’s mouth forced open as his lungs battled for oxygen. Water pouring in. Water like acid, water to burn away words. He had seen this in his dreams, his own body and those of friends, turning over and over. This was just a dream. It must be a dream.

Eirik’s limbs jerked in spasms. His hands and feet pounded the ceiling of the tank. He was asphyxiating.

The crowd fell silent. Vikram heard dry whimpers, or was it laughter? The girl behind him, crouched by her mother. The kid had gone quiet.

A gull wheeled overhead. Its screech trailed across the bleached out sky. Eirik threshed, knocking the glass of the tank with dull thuds.

Vikram could only observe. The waves moved, and the sun shone on the water, but time had finally stopped.

The body stilled.

What floated in a tank of seawater was no longer Eirik. Eirik’s spirit had been torn loose. He was out there with the ghosts now, a half thing condemned to the waves.

The body, face down, rotated half a circle, drifted slowly back again. It bobbed against the tank ceiling. The arms hung loosely down, Eirik’s bare hands indistinct shapes in the subsiding water. There was nothing but silence in the two crowds. The silence pressed on the space between Vikram’s shoulder blades. He hunched over the rail like an old man.

On the barge, a medic stepped forward. Two skadi slid open the ceiling of the tank with a grating noise. Some of the water splashed over and they stepped quickly back, as though it were poisonous.

The medic reached into the tank and lifted Eirik’s arms. He had to tip over the body first, and the movement dislodged more water. The medic rolled up Eirik’s sleeve. Vikram saw him examine a red band around the elbow. He nodded, looked at his watch, and said something to the officer wearing the sunglasses.

The loudspeakers crackled.

“The convict Eirik 9968 is pronounced dead, at oh-eleven hundred hours and thirteen minutes.”

Vikram stared at the body. He felt the steel band that had gripped his chest all day dissolve at last, and with it, the past three years. He was back on the decking, holding Mikkeli’s body. The pain was as sharp and as real as it had been on that day, but this time he knew that it would not disappear. It expanded in his ribs like a lungful of broken glass.

The City had won. They had won at the moment they arrested Eirik. They had won when Mikkeli burst into Vikram’s room, yelling, “Vik, get out, they’ve taken Eirik and we’re next!” He had found it so easy to believe in Eirik’s guilt. Underwater, that belief had manifested as rot, slowly eroding the will to survive — and for what? So that he could watch the New Horizon Movement die with a clear conscience?

Did he know himself at all?

The skadi had not replaced the lid of the tank. Their procedure from this point seemed unclear; they were standing about uncertainly. A seagull landed on the rim of the tank and a skad butted it away with his rifle. The medic had gone below deck.

The show was over. Vikram needed to get out. There were too many people. One by one, the other passengers came into focus, like ghosts emerging from the mist. The waterbus was hemmed in on every side.

“What will they do with the body?” the kid was asking.

Vikram crouched to see if the woman who had fainted was recovering. Some of her colour had returned. Recognising him, she gave a weak smile.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need more water?”

“Thank you — I’m sorry, it was the crowds and so — so horrible — it’s over now?”

“It’s over.”

He wondered what were her reasons for coming today.

There was a scuffle at the front of the crowd. A man had pulled his row boat a little way out, past the barrier of buoys. He was pointing at the tank and yelling. Vikram could make out one word, over and over again. Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!

Seagulls screeched overhead. Their cries merged with the man’s—Murderers! Murderers!

Another boat nudged forward. Others were urging the protestor to get back. Now the skadi had seen what was happening. Three of their own boats began powering towards the barrier.

A noise like scraping metal sheets came out of the loudspeakers, before the sound settled into speech.

“All westerners get behind the barrier. Get behind the barrier now.”

“Get back, you idiot,” Vikram muttered.

The skadi arrowed in. A shark-faced prow rammed the rowboat. The protestor clutched the rocking sides of the boat and managed to stay afloat.

“Murderers!” he yelled.

“Get back!” Vikram wasn’t the only one who called out. The shouts converged from every side. It was impossible to know who was saying what, whether they were yelling at the protestor to save himself or at the skadi to retreat.

Still defiant, the protestor raised his arm.

“Mur—”

Vikram saw a parallel movement as the barrel of a rifle took aim at the man’s head.

There was a single shot.

A red fog filled Vikram’s head.

He never knew who made the first move. Maybe it was him after all. Maybe it was Nils or Drake, or someone else in the crowd. He locked his gaze on the speeder where the skad was now lowering his rifle. Vikram had only one intention. He was going to get to that boat. And when he got to it—

The red fog had him. He took no time to consider the ramifications of his actions. His movements seemed ahead of him as he leapt agilely over the rail of the waterbus, landing in the stern of a smaller rower. It rocked with the impact.

A hand grabbed his shoulder.

“What the fuck—”

Vikram was already gone. Scrambling from boat to boat, he bounded across the unstable carpet. Some tried to stop him. Others joined the push forward. The weight of the crowd was all around him, no longer dormant but a physical, surging force. Gaps of sea widened before his feet. He saw the waves surge as he jumped from boat to boat.

Boats crashed into one another. He was close. There were only three rows between him and the skadi speeder.

He could see the body of the protestor, slumped over the side of the rowboat. He clambered up onto the deck of a waterbus. Over the railings. He hit the deck rolling, vaulted over the other side, dropped onto the abandoned flat of a raft. He could see the skadi faces. He could almost see their eyes.

And then he saw another figure, someone making the exact manoeuvres that he was. Drake. She was headed for the same boat, and a skad had his rifle trained on her lanky figure.

Vikram almost lost his balance using the end of a canoe as a stepping stone. He took a flying leap onto a motor boat.

The skad’s rifle lifted.

Drake saw it. She faltered.

She was one boat ahead of him, on the buoy line between west and skadi. Vikram gathered all of his breath and jumped. He slammed into her. Her body flew sideways. He spun from the boat and plunged into the water.

Explosions boomed above. He opened his eyes underwater. Silvery bubble trails criss-crossed the water where the skadi were shooting freely. Drake’s face was a few metres away. Her arms arrowed as she dove towards him.

A man plunged into the water. His eyes were bared. A red flower bloomed in the water from a leak in his chest.

Stars, what are you doing, get out!

Vikram followed Drake’s lead, diving low, swimming underwater until his lungs were ready to burst.

They were under the boats. The dark was almost total, the occasional slice of light slashing weirdly down. His hands brushed hulls jagged with barnacles, slick with algae. They needed an exit. There was nothing. His lungs burned.

He felt a tug on his ankle. Drake, behind him. She jabbed her hand upwards. He saw the darker shadows of the hulls and understood. They were beneath two small boats, and there was a tiny gap where the sterns almost met. He contracted his body, wedged himself between the two slopes and pushed with his feet. Drake joined him. The space widened, marginally, then enough for her to slither up. He saw her boots exit the water. The boats knocked together once more.

His vision went fuzzy. The water was black.

A hand reached down and pulled his hair. He broke surface and gulped in huge draughts of oxygen. Water trickled from his nostrils. He grasped the sides of the two boats and hauled himself out. He managed to swing his legs free just as the boats collided once more. The crash resounded. His ears were ringing; above surface the noise was mayhem, gunfire, shouts, screams, crashes—

He saw one boat forced beneath another. A man was crushed to death.

He saw a skad fall backwards with a knife lodged in his throat. Other skadi were pulling masks over their faces, launching canisters into the air. Gas. There was no way of avoiding it.

Drake was beside him. They were lying side by side on one end of a small fishing craft. The other occupants took no notice of them. They were engaged in their own vendetta, pointing and yelling at the skadi. Vikram and Drake exchanged no looks, no words. We’re idiots, Vikram thought. We’re bloody idiots.

He had been turned inside out in a day.

Breathing in chemicals, the gas worked fast. One by one his limbs seized until he lay, immobile except for his eyes.

Drenched, nauseous with the gas, Vikram finally allowed himself to look up.

He had landed up at the other end of the western crowd. Beyond the netting, directly across the square, rose one of the City towers. It was silver and fleeced in greenery. Two floors above the surface was a balcony, and on the balcony, watching, were the elite of Osiris.

He could see the man who had sentenced Eirik to death. Vikram knew who he was. Everyone in the west knew who he was. The man’s name was Feodor Rechnov, Councillor. Head of the first founding family in everything but name. His face was many metres away, disguised and protected by the faint shimmer of a defensive sonar shield. But Vikram knew those features as well as he knew his own.

Two younger men stood next to Feodor: the sons. They were slighter replicas of their father, well-dressed and rigidly postured. The daughter stood between them. Her famous red hair was covered, but her face was as white as salt.

Vikram wondered how Feodor Rechnov would feel if it were one of his own three children floating face down in the tank. Knowing, as every person in Osiris knew, the mechanics of drowning. Knowing that the body would be bloated. That if you pushed down on the chest, white foam would leak from the mouth and nostrils. The face would have swollen just enough to distort a memory that had been, until that moment, familiar as the skin on your own hand.

He wondered what Feodor would feel, unzipping the corpse of his son or his daughter. If he would grieve. If the man was capable of grief.

Sounds swept overhead — a whistle, shrill; the whoosh of a boat throwing up spray. Each separate noise seemed to arc through the air, leaving its echo like a sparkler or a yard of ribbon, so that the sky was painted in sound. Vikram sensed, throbbing distantly, just waiting for the gas’s effect to fade, the scrapes and bruises that caked his body. It was the same sounds, the same aches, the same red fog from three years before.

Time was unravelling. Keli was here. Eirik was here. Everyone was talking at once, past and present and future, a collision of time. With a final effort, Vikram wrenched his eyes back to the balcony.

The Rechnovs were leaving.

For a few precious moments, his head was clear. All we were was a breeze against a cyclone, he thought. The ideals argued and laughed over, the late-night plans laid so optimistically — they had really believed in themselves. He only saw it now, when it was too late. Because without a political platform, without visibility and words, they had nothing. The New Horizon Movement had never stood a chance.

Watching Feodor Rechnov turn away, Vikram felt a current shift inside of himself. A realization, distant but imperative.

This was where it had to stop. On a strange, pale skied autumn day, the City had crossed a line. And Vikram had woken up. Really woken up. The glass shards jostled in his chest, minute needles of memory and of pain. He knew that he would carry them now forever. Eirik was the first but he would not be the last. Everything they had been through, everything they had done — the starving winters, the riots and the border protests, his best friend’s death and Eirik’s execution — all of that was worthless unless they could convince one man to listen.

Then he thought: this is the west. There is no we. So it’s up to me. If I want to change anything, I have to start again. I have to rewrite the rules.

The chemicals in the gas seeped steadily through his veins with every breath he drew. Beside him, Drake lay inert. Dizziness overtook Vikram at last. His eyes closed, and his mind moved quietly away.

3 ¦ ADELAIDE

She had never seen anyone die before. Death was meant to be sudden. The condemned man clawed at the glass. He slipped and tried to get up and fell back down and the water erupted in bubbles as his hands smacked the water.

His panic was infectious. It made the air thick, the sea restless with cloud-capped waves. Overhead, colonies of birds formed dark helices as they swirled, some diving low over the crowd of western boats. Adelaide’s lungs tightened. She knew it was false; she could still breathe. In a matter of minutes that man would never be able to breathe again, and anyway his suffering should not affect her — if she felt anything, it ought to be satisfaction at justice being done. She knew all of this, but she stepped back, prepared then and there to leave.

A shoulder blocked her passage. She was wedged between Dmitri and Feodor, two solid boulders. Her eldest brother’s expression was inscrutable, even bored. On her other side, Feodor wore his usual faint scowl, intended to suggest burdens of responsibility far beyond the public imagination.

The man slipped again in the tank. How long would it take?

There would have been documents. Administration. The trial had been going on for years, so long that Adelaide could barely remember when it had begun. Somewhere along the line, a decision had been made to produce the showcase on the surface. Who had taken that final step — who had written drowning against the execution order? One of Feodor’s cronies? Was it her father himself?

The thought made her shiver; a chill that was nothing to do with the cold summer air. It was sickening. She wished she could faint, she would have welcomed nausea, but her legs continued to hold her up.

“You can’t expect me to watch this.”

She spoke quietly, but she knew they all heard.

“You can’t leave, Adelaide.” Dmitri was brusque. “If you leave now, that’s more of a statement than not coming at all.”

“But it’s monstrous,” she hissed.

“It’s not pleasant for any of us,” said Feodor. His lips barely moved as he spoke. “Public service rarely is. You should know that by now.”

“Then why isn’t mother here?”

“She’s not feeling well. And your grandfather, before you ask, is far too frail to stand for so long in the cold. You have no such excuse.”

“Think of what this man has done, Adelaide.” Linus’s voice was tight. He doesn’t like it either, she thought. But he’s still here. He contributed to this. “Think of the lives he has taken.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I know what he has done.”

She had seen the reports. Everyone in Osiris had seen the reports. Eirik 9968 had confessed to acts far more atrocious than what was being done to him today. He had killed people with bare hands and with knives; Eirik 9968 had not shown mercy. There were charges of false confessions eked from force-fed drugs; scarrings on the soles of feet.

There was a strange precision in the scene below: the four corners of the square, the buoys and the Home Guard speedboats cordoning the western crowd; a barge, solitary oblong in gunmetal water, its glass cube catching the light. The hooded figure stumbling within it.

He’s guilty. He deserves this. He must deserve it.

Except that his sentence had been orchestrated by her father. Glancing once more at his set, determined profile, she was suddenly certain that the method of execution was Feodor’s choice.

The Ngozis and the Dumays were grouped at the other end of the balcony. Each founding family formed a tight core. If one of them wished to leave, she could go with them. It only took an ally.

No one met her gaze.

A gun was fired and Adelaide jumped. The westerners were growing restless. The waterline was at the man’s neck.

She couldn’t watch any longer. She held her breath, trying to bring on a fit of dizziness. She waited for lines to split her vision, removing what was before her eyes, but nothing happened. She had to draw breath. When she exhaled, the air came out shakily.

“Adelaide?” Linus had noticed.

“I need to leave,” she said. “I’m going to have to leave.”

“Then do. If that’s really what you want.” Feodor’s voice was casual, but she heard the subtext. You know the consequences.

She thought of the investigator and the transaction that had just been made from her bank account. She thought of the resources she would need.

I can’t abandon Axel.

The water in the tank rose. She focussed on the boat, counted the teeth of its shark face. They ran in two zigzag rows, thirty in the top, twenty seven in the bottom. But the tank drew her back. She watched it the way you walked in a ground-dream, observing the phenomenon but knowing, even as your foot brushed the grass, that the scene could not be real.

Adelaide had seen live fish pulled from the water in restaurants that writhed the way the dying man did now.

In his final moments she felt oddly absent, as though she were observing herself from a long way off. The man was drowning, and there were lines being drawn before her. She felt the chalk on her back. She felt very cold. She thought of the day of the Great Silence — the day they said the world had drowned. There were connections to be made, but she would not make them. One level of consciousness, the part that would allow her to sleep through future nights, the part that allowed her to breathe when the man down there could not, closed her mind quietly down. That was survival. Perhaps the condemned man had played the same trick, the night before, sitting in his cell. Had he wanted to remember everything or nothing?

The man was drowned. He floated to the top of the tank. Where his face would have been the zipped up hood pressed against the glass.

The frothing water subsided. He drifted. The tank looked serene.

She heard his name again on the loudspeaker. Eirik 9968.

What he was—

What he isn’t—

The birds circled and she shivered.

The medic pronounced him dead. She sensed a shift in the western crowd, their hostility sharpening.

A small rowboat ventured past the buoys. The rower was standing upright, shouting.

“What’s he saying?” Dmitri asked.

“He’s calling us murderers,” said Feodor.

A rippling movement ran through the crowd. The mass altered; as she watched, transfixed, the hundreds of individual figures turned into one vast contraction, heaving and surging towards the Home Guard boats. The Guards began to fire. At first they aimed into the air. Then they sprayed the water before the barrier with warning shots.

“Shit—” Linus swore. “Tell them to stop firing.”

Dmitri grabbed Adelaide’s shoulder and pushed her down. She got to her feet impatiently.

“I’m alright, Dmitri—”

She was pushed back.

“Keep down, Adelaide—”

Security formed a line in front of them all, blocking everyone’s view except Feodor’s. Linus, still standing, strained to see between their shoulders.

“Linus! Linus, what’s going on?”

“You’re perfectly safe.” The head of security spoke to Feodor. “The barrier is secure.”

“Then move,” snapped Feodor. “The last thing we want is for the terriers to think we’re afraid of them.”

The security reinforcements stepped aside and Adelaide got to her feet. In the chaos below, she began to see lines within the crowd. A man ran over the boats as though they were nothing more than an inconvenient obstacle course. Go on, she willed him. But there was nowhere for him to go. Others were making similar dashes — like rays returning to the sun, they were all set to converge on a point at the barrier. She followed, horrified but fascinated, as they drew nearer.

The Guards will kill them—

At the last moment, the man she had first noticed veered sharply to the left. He collided with another figure. They toppled into the sea and went under. She waited for them to surface, but they did not reappear. Water foamed where they had fallen. The noise of boats crashing together was punctuated by screams and gunshots.

“They’ll have to use gas,” remarked Dmitri. His hands, clasped behind him, were fidgeting. Adelaide could tell that he wanted to brush down his suit, but that would look indecorous. All three Rechnov men stood stiffly.

“They should have used it ten minutes ago,” said Feodor irritably. “Look at that rabble — and people question my judgement over today.”

The gas subdued the crowd. The Home Guard speeders continued to steam up and down the line. They had rounded up a few westerners on another boat and were systematically handcuffing them.

The mat of lifeless boats rocked as one. Vehicles at the edge gradually separated off and slunk back into the channels of drab western towers. A waterbus, tipping smaller boats aside, was trying to nudge a pathway out of the centre.

“What will they do now?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” said Dmitri. “Stars, it’s freezing out here. We must be done by now.”

Feodor glanced across at the Ngozis, who were being shepherded back inside. He nodded gruffly.

“Goran will take you back, Adelaide.”

“I don’t need an escort,” she said coldly. She hated Goran, and the way he crept about the family lodgings like a soft amphibian.

Feodor looked like he might hit her, but Linus stepped in. “Let her go, Father.”

“Thank you, Linus.”

A blast of wind hurried her inside. She collected her handbag from a carrier girl. She never came this far west; she would have to take the Crocodile shuttle line.

“Adelaide.” Linus caught up with her in the stairwell outside. His tone was stern but not unkind. She gave him a blank look. There was no point in offering words. Words were ammunition.

Linus hesitated before speaking again.

“Empty threats are useless,” he said at last. “I may not always agree with Father’s policies, but sometimes action is inevitable. I just want you to know that I wish it hadn’t been necessary.”

“I see.”

“And Adelaide.” His voice was different this time.

“What?”

“Be careful.”

“Why should I need to be careful, Linus?”

Her brother did not answer, but she did not require a reply. Her thoughts were elsewhere. The dead were dead, but the missing were still out there, waiting to be found. The investigator she had employed was even now at work. In seven days, they would meet.

The shuttle lines were busy on her way home. As the pod skimmed east through its glowing chute, Adelaide leaned against the smooth fibreglass sides, watching her reflection flicker. She wondered who else on board had been watching the execution.

She wondered what Eirik 9968’s last thought had been.

I’d remember — I’d have to remember—

Axel, crouched in a myriad of broken glass.

Hiding behind a curtain, in the Domain with Axel, at the theatre with Tyr.

The Roof. The double-A parties.

Horses’ hooves.

Don’t think.

She knew that from tomorrow she could not remember this day. She would relive it as she drank her late night voqua and watched without taking in a reel on the o’vis. If she slept tonight, the scene would haunt her dreams. But after tomorrow, today had to go. Today had never happened.

4 ¦ VIKRAM

Vikram woke to a morning that was almost colourless in its brightness. He stretched, gradually persuading his reluctant limbs to leave blankets that were warm with body heat. The window-wall was wet with condensation and he wiped a patch clear. His hand came back dirty with grease.

In a couple of months, ice would freeze the window-wall shut. Days would come when he barely left the flat. He had let the place go. Mould sprouted in a corner of the ceiling and meandered down the walls. The tiny room pressed on his sanity.

With a jolt, he remembered that today was different. Today he was going east. Into the City.

His heartbeat quickened even as he tried to relax.

Can I really do this? Do I even want to?

You don’t have a choice, he told himself firmly. He’d screwed up the order when it was delivered by hand — reading its solid formal prose had filled him with rage. But later he’d smoothed the letter out, read it again, thought about the implications. He’d wanted a political opportunity and here it was. Clearly it was no coincidence that after twelve months of writing letters, he had been granted an audience with the Council less than a week after the execution — but that did not give him an excuse.

The mayhem surrounding Eirik’s death must have struck a chord with the City as well as the west. Vikram — what was left of Horizon — was finally being taken seriously.

He made himself as presentable as he could, washing with cold water from a bucket and pulling on the best clothes he possessed. He used his knife and a sliver of mirror to shave. Brown eyes glanced back at him, a tiny scar above the right. Wariness was their resting expression. Couldn’t change that if he tried. His coat was a shapeless affair that would not impress anybody, but he was damned if he would sacrifice warmth for appearance. In any case, the coat came with Vikram, or Vikram had come with the coat. Somebody once told him it belonged to his father, and it might have done, but it might have belonged to some anonymous figure who had no connection to him at all.

He wound a scarf around his neck and rooted through his bag for gloves. He found only one. It seemed impossible to have lost the other amongst so few belongings, but time was tight and he had to leave without them. On the way out, he noticed again that the lock was weak.

It was a long trek downstairs. The lower lift had failed last month and so far nobody in the skyscraper had managed to lure out an engineer. The stairwells and corridors were busy. People sat smoking on the stairs and lounged in empty door frames, idly reiterating yesterday’s conversations. He smelled the distinctive aroma of manta. Eyes grazed Vikram as he passed. He kept his watch hidden beneath his sleeve. He could have flogged it for several hundred peng or a few City credits, but he loved the watch and he wouldn’t give it up until he was desperate.

Ten floors down, he banged on an even less secure door. There was no response. He banged again, and this time heard an answering curse and someone staggering across the room. The door opened and Nils peered out. His eyes were bleary. A week-long beard shadowed his jaw.

“Vik. What are you doing here? It’s morning.”

“I’m going to the Eye Tower,” Vikram said. “To speak to the Council. The order came through two days ago, remember?”

Nils looked surprised. “I thought you weren’t going to go… I mean, after…”

Neither of them said Eirik’s name.

“I changed my mind,” said Vikram shortly.

“Oh. Okay.”

“You coming?”

Nils yawned. “Think you might be better off on your own.” There was a crash from the floor above. Nils winced and roared, “Shut the fuck up!” He turned back to Vikram, forced a laugh. “Floor twenty-six. I’m moving to twenty-nine, I hear they’ve got a working shower. Anyway, good luck, I suppose. You nervous?”

“Not exactly. What can they do to me?”

“Wouldn’t like to guess. Send you underwater?”

“Tried that already.”

The light-hearted tone fell flat. Nils’s fingers curled around the doorframe.

“Well, let me know how it goes. I’ll catch you later.”

The door shut. Another crash came from upstairs, followed by a yell. Vikram jogged down the remaining twenty-five floors to ocean level. He thought about Nils’s reaction. He wasn’t sure that his friend was entirely happy with Vikram’s decision — he hadn’t said so, not outright, but there had been an ambivalence in his eyes that was unlike Nils.

Outside, the cold punched him like a Tarctic wind. He cinched the belt of his coat tighter; the buckle was broken and it kept slipping. The floating deck that encircled each tower shifted beneath his feet. A man was shouting that his boat had been blocked in, but nobody could find the owner of the vehicle responsible. Squinting in the bright light, Vikram made his way to the east side of the decking, where a vandalized signpost marked the waterbus stop.

The queue jostled around him. As the decking rose and fell on the swells, those waiting kept their balance as one. He found himself looking at other people more carefully than usual. They were all ages and all heights, because the majority of westerners were unemployed, surviving on handouts from the City and their wits. Under hats and hoods the odd Boreal face stood out amongst the southerners, but they were all dressed the same, bulked up with as many layers as they could beg, borrow or otherwise acquire. Could he tell the Council that people had to steal clothes in order to keep warm, or would they assume that everyone in the west was a thief?

A cry went up as the waterbus was sighted. The surge forward knocked him off balance. He suppressed the desire to shove back and used the momentum to inch his way past a mother clutching a child in each hand.

The ticket collector stood wide across the boarding gate. The waterbus pulled in with tantalizing slowness. Vikram saw a girl in a yellow scarf duck under a man’s arm and sidle around an old woman. His heart jumped with the thought that it was Mikkeli, before he remembered, again, that it was impossible. The ticket collector braced himself as he unlocked the barrier.

Vikram pushed a few peng into the ticket collector’s hand and fought his way into a place at the prow. On the landing stage, a squabble broke out among those left behind. As the waterbus angled around the circumference of 221-West, Vikram saw the man who had complained about being blocked in, crouched in his own boat, in the process of setting loose the offending vehicle. He was striking at the chain with a pickaxe.

The waterbus nosed into the main channel of the waterway. Vikram huddled over the rail watching the spit of spray. The western quarter of the city had never been finished, and when he glanced up he saw clumsily made, open bridges connecting building to building. Many of the graffitied towers were ringed by boats, homes to the very poor. On the outskirts, boats lined up like dominoes. Nobody could say for sure what was concealed within the rotting hulls. People went to the shanty-boat towns for drugs or women. They didn’t always come back.

He had to find a way to describe all of those problems. For months, he’d been composing a speech in his head. Now the carefully arranged lines were void. Events had overtaken him. He had to focus on the things that could be changed. He had to ignore what they had done to Eirik.

It was Drake who had told him to start writing again. Gotta have a purpose, Vik. Gotta have something to do. The subject of most of Vikram’s letters, and his primary focus today, was to ask for a winter aid programme. The most important thing he could secure would be repairs and insulation in the worst of the buildings. In winter, cold killed as many people as starvation. The last riots had been sparked by the City holding back food reserves. He would ask for kitchen boats too. And for restoration work to begin in the unremembered quarters.

How would the Council react? Would they deny the situation, pretend it was less severe? He was ready to argue.

He tried to recall Eirik’s advice, so readily available at the time, now distant through time and suppression. Eirik would have known exactly what to say.

At Market Circle, the hub of the western quarter, the ocean was almost invisible under its cover of boat traders and traffic. Vikram ducked as a gull skimmed low overhead. It came to rest atop a fry-boat selling hot squid, where many of the birds gathered, shuffling. Their cries pierced the clamour of human voices — selling, haggling, shrieking — that pursued the waterbus as it barged a way through the congestion.

People carried on. They had no choice.

On the other side of Market Circle, the waterbus began to lose passengers. It chugged past greenhouse towers and a recycling depot. Down a waterway clustered with rusting houseboats was Desalination Plant W-03, around which the decking bobbed quietly, as though nothing had ever happened. Still Vikram imagined he heard the splash, and he kept his eyes forward. They were approaching the border.

By the time the waterbus was in weapon range, only five people remained on board. Nervously, Vikram felt in his pocket for his day pass and the letter detailing his appointment with the Council. His ID had stood up to previous scrutiny, but he could never feel quite safe.

A narrow gap in the border mesh, barely wide enough to squeeze a waterbus through, allowed a clear glimpse of the glittering City. The checkpoint jetty ran out from the base of 774-West. Skadi boots rapped the decking. The skadi cradled their rifles with the loose, easy attachment one might assign to a fifth limb. They laughed and joked amongst themselves, but when their attention went westward, their expressions lapsed into something between inscrutability and a strange taut hunger. Vikram glanced quickly around and saw that the other passengers were trying to look as blank and dull as possible.

“Papers.”

There were two inspecting officers. The first vaulted the waterbus rail and strode across the deck. His coat, heavy and black, swung deliberately free, revealing both a hand pistol and patches of storm-flecked camouflage. He checked the driver’s licence first. The rifle muzzle fell lazily at his side. Vikram was intensely aware of it. When his turn came, he held out his ID and the letter in silence.

The officer read it, his eyebrows raised. He let out a fat laugh.

“Council, eh?”

Vikram nodded.

“What the hell d’you think you’re doing there?”

Vikram was not sure if it was a rhetorical question or not, and judged it best to keep quiet. But one of the passengers gave him a tiny nudge, and when he looked up he found the officer still staring.

“I’m giving a presentation,” he said.

The officer laughed again, but with less humour this time. “Fuck presentations,” he said. “And fuck the Council. Or maybe that’s what you’ll have to do. Fuck them.” The idea clearly amused him, and this time his mirth was shared by a couple of men on the jetty. “You’re wasting your time, terrier,” he declared, and offered Vikram a jab in the thigh with his gun before ambling on to the next passenger, a young girl. Vikram had passed.

But there was a dispute over the girl’s papers, and they were delayed for twenty minutes while the officer sent one of his subordinates to make a call. He filled the time by pointing out targets for his men — a floating crate, a resting seabird. Shots crackled sporadically. The bird rose with a squawk of alarm. The skad who’d missed swore. It was typical of a skad to shoot birds for entertainment.

Vikram tried not to look at the men too closely, wary of recognising or being recognised. There was a large part of him that wanted to. The part that did idiotic things. The part that followed naked impulse.

Witnessing the execution had been more than stupid. It had stirred up old grievances that he had barely begun to control. He folded his arms, squeezing with his fingers until it hurt. He had a chance with the Council. And they had to listen — now, they had to listen.

The man came back with the order for clearance. Frowning, the second officer, still seated in a deckchair on the jetty, beckoned him over. The two conferred. Then the second officer pointed.

“You. Over here.”

His target was unclear, and the five passengers looked nervously down. He beckoned.

“You. Woman in the green scarf. Here.”

“That’s you, gullhead.” The officer still on deck hauled the woman out of the line. “Off the boat.”

“My papers are in order,” she protested.

“That’s for us to say.”

Vikram kept his eyes on the deck.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Get off, bitch, and you’ll find out. Or do you want me to throw you off?”

The woman’s face crumpled. As she climbed over the rail Vikram saw her hands were shaking. The officer followed her onto the jetty and waved the waterbus on. As he turned away, Vikram saw that his scarf was deliberately wrapped low to reveal the eye tattoo on the back of his neck.

The driver let out a ripple of curses as soon as the boat was out of earshot, whilst the other passengers grumbled. Vikram watched the forlorn figure of the woman left behind growing smaller. She was arguing with the officer. He hoped they wouldn’t hurt her. They always had that hunger in their eyes. As the waterbus crossed over the border, he had to fight back creeping tendrils of fear. The last time he had been at the mercy of Citizens, they’d put him underwater.

The old song came to him:

He knew what it was like to disappear.

“I’m half an hour late now,” one man said irritably. Yet again, Vikram checked his watch.

The passengers retreated into silence. Trust was a risk: best stick to your own problems. Vikram returned to the rail. The morning’s brightness had already dissolved and a fine rain was beginning to fall, dampening his clothes. The cold burrowed deep into his gloveless hands.

He watched a covered ferry glide past. The boat was in good repair, but passengers looked cross and miserable with their lot. Glancing up, Vikram saw the preferred highways: shuttle lines weaving from scraper to scraper, another network every twenty floors, all interlinking to form a vast, complex web. Within their translucent skeins, shuttle pods moved like beads of mercury on a string. He tried to imagine what it must be like to cross the city in one of those tubes, the feeling of enclosure, of privilege.

Ahead, the terminus was in sight. Vikram took a second waterbus, and within minutes found himself walking up one of the ten platforms which extended from 900-East like the points of a star.

The Eye Tower was the tallest skyscraper in Osiris and the most magnificent. Vikram had only ever seen pictures of it. Upon entering, he was thoroughly scanned and searched. Vikram showed the letter once again. Released into the building, he climbed two empty floors. It was a standard flood control device, although he saw no signs of water intrusion.

At the lobby, he stopped.

The riot of colour before him was giddying. Sunk into the floor was a vermilion mosaic, reflected many times over in the gigantic, gold-hued mirrors. Coniferous trees stretched up into the open core of the tower. Vikram stood on the mosaic tiles, under the trees, gazing up at the rough patterns of their bark, the slender needles that looked like tufts of hair. He touched one. It pricked his finger. It was real.

Surrounding the central lifts was an aquarium, two metres thick and fat with wildlife. As high as Vikram could see, the spiralling stairways and balconies looked in upon its undulating creatures.

He stepped into the lift with a bundle of people. He was the only one dressed in outdoor clothes. After initial glances at him, the Citizens averted their eyes diplomatically, one woman patting down her pale pink blouse as if it might have been dirtied by their brief proximity. As the lift swept upward he watched the fish floating in their glass jail. They were every colour of the rainbow: beautiful, darting things, but Vikram had an instant antipathy to the aquarium. It was still a cage.

He checked his watch furtively. In just under an hour he would be delivering his statement, persuading the Council that west Osiris was not just a convenient scrap heap, but a valid part of the City’s society. Could he describe the daily life of westerner? How could he explain freezing to death to people who had never been cold? The question occupied him all the way to the hundred and eleventh floor, through further security checks, into reception and within eyeshot of the vast doors to the Chambers, which were flanked by four uniformed guards.

He waited for nearly two hours before they admitted him. A receptionist told him that talks had been going on since ten o’clock, but offered no explanation for the delay. She showed him to a quiet room with a bowl of fruit piled luxuriously high and a machine that pulped the fruit to a juice. He peeled an orange. Its scent filled the air. He ate the fruit slowly, remembering that the few times Mikkeli had been able to get an orange, she insisted on removing the peel in one long coil whilst they all waited for a share, intoxicated by the scent.

“They’re ready for you.”

The interruption startled him. A woman stood in the doorway, looking expectant. She took his arm and steered him carefully, as if she expected him to break and run.

“The speaker will announce you,” she whispered. “Then you can speak. You have a presentation prepared?”

Vikram nodded. Of sorts. “I wasn’t given much notice—”

“I hear you’ve been writing letters for quite a time! I’m sure you have plenty to say. Turn and smile, will you?”

She swung him around. There was a flash. Vikram realized he had been photographed. He winced instinctively.

“That’s great, Syrah,” said a young man with floppy hair. They moved on.

“After your presentation, do not speak. The Council will debate. You don’t speak. Understand?”

“But what if I—”

“It’s protocol. Understand? It’s very important that you understand before I let you in there.”

He forced a smile. “Don’t speak. I get it. Thanks for the briefing.”

“You’re welcome.” She brushed his jumper down. He was acutely aware of its fraying edges and the grease he couldn’t wash out. “You look — oh well. You first.” She gave him a little push.

When he walked into the Chambers, his shoes cast hollow echoes. The room was round and windowless, formed entirely of pale stone with a smooth, polished texture and darker capillaries. Slender columns supported an empty balcony running its circumference. The ceiling arched up and up into a perfect dome. There were paintings on its panels, of sirens and dark-finned fish. He had never seen anything like it, and the thought that he might never again made him sad in a way he did not recognize.

The woman hassled him forward. He was taken to a podium. Now he saw the austere faces of the Council, assembled in rising crescent rows. The Speaker’s voice boomed from somewhere above and behind him.

“This is Mr Bai, who has requested to address you on some of the issues concerning west Osiris. He speaks on behalf of pressure group Horizon.”

It annoyed Vikram that they labelled it a pressure group rather than a reform group, but as Horizon’s sole remaining representative, he was hardly in a position to argue. From Eirik’s lessons, Vikram knew that the last group to be granted a hearing with the Council was the now dissolved Osiris Integration Movement, and their history was blemished.

As for the title, Vikram had no surname as far as he knew. He had made one up for his previous communications and for the purpose of today. In jail, like Eirik, he had been allotted a number.

“Please begin, Mr Bai,” said the Speaker. Vikram resisted the temptation to turn around.

“I’m not going to speak about Eirik 9968 today,” he said. When he spoke Eirik’s name a flicker of distaste ran around the Chambers, but Vikram’s voice remained steady. That gave him the courage to continue.

“Our opinions will hardly be the same and it seems pointless to resurrect a debate which has already been decided. Instead, I’d like to tell you about the real west — the west you know nothing about.”

He found that the acoustics of the Chambers carried his voice well. After a few minutes he almost forgot that he was addressing the Council, Osiris’s ruling elite. As their faces separated into individual imprints, he tried to force them out of their aloof curiosity. Primarily he spoke about poverty. He told them of diseases that scurried through the shanty towns and raced up the towers, claiming children and adults alike. The people he had seen coughing up their lungs with tuberculosis. The shortages of food and clothing. He described how a man looked when he froze to death. He told them of the hospice that struggled to care for those who had lost limbs to frostbite. He didn’t linger over crime, but told the Council what they already knew, that it was fuelled primarily by the needs of people who had nothing, and would not decrease until they had something. Then he laid out his arguments: what was needed now. An emergency winter aid programme. More accommodation, repair works and insulation for the uninhabitable buildings.

Then, because Eirik and Mikkeli had taught him that unless you demanded everything you got nothing, he tossed in his firework.

“Finally, Councillors, I would like to propose what some of you might think of as revolutionary.” There went the understatement of the year, he thought. “West Osiris is cordoned off from the rest of the city. We are separated from your facilities and your people by a military border. We are practically quarantined. I think the border has been here long enough, and I’m not the only one. It has to go.”

The cries of outrage were rising even as he uttered that last incendiary sentence.

“Is that all, Mr Bai?” the speaker nudged. Vikram heard a few sniggers from around the Chambers.

“And as soon as possible,” he shouted. He glanced back at the speaker. “That’s all for now.” His heart was beating fast. He sat down with no small sense of exhilaration.

“Open to the floor,” declared the speaker.

Furious debate was already under way, but the Council appeared to have certain rules and now one woman stood up to speak officially.

“The very notion of demilitarizing the border is preposterous,” she said. “Mr Bai may not wish to speak of Eirik 9968—indeed I am surprised he dares mention the name — but I shall not flinch from it. The execution was a warning. Why was a warning necessary? Because the west have grown out of control. They cannot maintain order within their own quarter, never mind letting their violent antics rampant on the City.”

Vikram was ready to retort, but she raised her hand and her voice.

“I think one word is enough to reinforce my argument — Osuwa. Two skyscrapers blown open to the elements. And targeting the University — a place of learning, of mutual respect, not to mention those people trapped in the shuttle line where the explosion was set…”

“That was twenty-nine years ago,” argued someone else.

“We learn from history,” she snapped. “It has a clear enough line for us to read. First the greenhouse. Then Osuwa University and the New Western Osiris Front. The one occasion we did lower security, what happened? Alain and Helene Dumay were assassinated in broad daylight at the gliding race.”

“Grete Kaat was a rogue sympathiser.”

“Then we are even more at threat. If a rogue can murder a member of a founding family, just imagine what organized terrorists can do.”

“What about three years ago? You can’t say security was lax then, but it didn’t prevent riots.”

Another man stood up. “The June riots are precisely the reason we have to remain on our guard. Those attacks were completely unprovoked. Civilian lives were lost. We cannot allow any further incidents.”

Disregarding his instructions, Vikram leaned forward, his hands clenched together to stop any other physical movement that might betray him.

“People were starving that winter,” he said quietly. “They were desperate. They’ll be desperate again if you don’t help them. And Horizon is not another NWO, if that’s what you’re implying. Ninety-nine per cent of westerners completely condemn the NWO. So don’t insult us.”

“Mr Bai, you have had your chance to speak. It is now the Council’s turn.”

The Councillor who had spoken gave Vikram a cursory glance. “The westerner seems to be implying further violence is not only possible but probable. And he suggests we open our borders?”

“It’s worth considering the root causes of the June riots,” another voice said coolly. Vikram couldn’t locate the speaker.

“The rioters were westerners,” shouted the first woman. “What more do you need to hear? And they’ve had enough help from us. We have more important problems. The mining station on the north shelf, for a start. I’ve heard reports of serious machine malfunctions.”

“Greatly exaggerated reports—”

“Not from what I’ve heard—”

“The west is under our jurisdiction,” argued someone else. “We have a responsibility—”

“We have a responsibility to our own people, not to put them at risk.”

“Exactly, do we want a repeat of three years ago?”

“I hardly think an aid programme is going to incite riots.” It was the cool voice, cutting across his colleagues again. Vikram searched for its origin. The speaker was a young man sitting several rows back. He leaned forward to emphasize his point. As he did, the light caught a hint of red in his hair, and Vikram suffered a shock of recognition. He had seen this man at the execution. He had been standing next to Feodor. It was one of the Rechnov sons.

There was a brief silence.

Then someone said tentatively, “There’re no spare resources for that kind of programme.”

“It has nothing to do with the border anyway.”

“Actually, it has everything to do with it,” the young Rechnov said. “I happen to agree with Mr Bai. The border should be demilitarized. However, I would be a fool to imagine that such a move might be taken today, by this Council. Nor do I think that the time is right. First the west needs development and support, and that is where the proposed winter aid programme through Mr Bai’s group comes in. Otherwise we will have another angry mob on our hands — no, Hildur, I am not talking about the NWO, seeing as we have zero evidence to support any current underground activity, I am talking about ordinary people growing angry — angry enough to act — and who can blame them?”

“And where do the resources for this aid programme come from?” A new voice, strong and powerful, spoke up from the opposite side of the room. This time it was easy to locate the speaker. All heads turned towards him. Vikram followed their direction and recognized this man instantly.

Nausea rose in his throat. Had he known, all along, that Feodor Rechnov would be here today? Probably. He hadn’t permitted himself to think about it.

Feodor was an imposing figure; Vikram had seen that before. Now, so much closer, he could see the grey threads in the thick hair, the slightly sallow complexion, and eyes that settled comfortably, with a keen relish, on any opponent, daring them to outstare.

But he doesn’t know me, he thought. I’m an alien to him.

“A simple case of reallocation,” said the son again. “The resources are there, we require only a good mathematician and a little imagination.”

“I see. And may I ask if you envisage the west developing further — perhaps to the same standards as the rest of the city?”

“Is there a reason why not? Is it Osiris doctrine to promote starvation and hypothermia?”

“I take your point,” said Feodor. The chambers had hushed for this debate between Rechnov and Rechnov. If he hadn’t known who they were, Vikram would have suspected he was observing a pair of regular antagonists. It made no sense. “Clearly we are not advocating poverty. Our city was not built with that intent — far from it. Nonetheless, Osiris has changed. We have been stretched beyond our resources, and we cannot offer the west the lifestyle of the City. False hope is a dangerous tool to employ.”

“You’re a defeatist, Feodor,” said the young man. His tone was dismissive, and Vikram allowed himself a small smile.

“I am a realist,” the other replied. “That is our job, to be realistic. To implement the feasible. East and west can never be integrated. Draw up your aid programmes if it appeases your conscience, but I guarantee the consequences will be more problematic than you imagine.”

“Consequences are always problematic. That doesn’t mean we should shy away from action. I tell you, we may choose to forget history, but it has not forgotten us, and nor will the west if we persist in flaunting our ignorance. We have executed one man — the threat, as some would say, has been eliminated. Now is our opportunity to show the west we can be generous.”

The younger Rechnov’s name was Linus, Vikram remembered. He looked more like the infamous sister than the father.

Feodor pressed on. “Do you honestly believe that any kind of integration could be accomplished without mutual tragedy?”

“If it were dealt with sensitively, I see no reason why tragedy should be the result.”

Restlessness pervaded the chambers now. Vikram sensed the debate slipping away into personal territory. Evidently he was not the only one, because the woman who had first spoken stood again.

“It is pointless spending hours going over these issues today when clearly the matter requires further research. I suggest we move onto other items on the agenda?”

A cheer echoed her. Vikram dragged his attention away from the two Rechnovs.

“What do you mean, other research? How much research does it take to see that people are dying of cold?”

“Mr Bai, you have been warned once.”

Half the Council were on their feet, raising their voices over one another as they argued.

“Actually, we’re neglecting an opportunity here. What we really need is a larger budget for the western defence perimeter. Personally, I’d recommend a twelve point five increase.”

“Twelve point five? Eleven should do it.”

“Eleven, twelve. We can discuss figures later. What we’ve got to do is streamline entry procedures. With that kind of budget we can develop waiting zones, double the checkpoints.”

“Exactly. We could even filter some of the allocation into the western task force. Surely Mr Bai will be happy with that.”

“There might be provision for a few places in schools, if it were passed by the parental boards…”

“That’s already covered by the Colnat Foundation—”

“No, no, no. The perimeter’s the important thing, I tell you.”

The speaker leaned over his podium to speak to Vikram. “Thank you, Mr Bai. Your presentation was most enlightening.”

“But we haven’t even started! You didn’t decide anything—”

“Mr Bai—”

The tug upon his arm was light but firm.

“No!” Vikram’s voice came out as a shout. The female Councillor was still on her feet. She turned to him, her face smooth and flat and devoid of emotion. Something about her complete inflexibility dissolved his reserve. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I want to talk about Eirik 9968.”

“Oh yes? Do enlighten us.”

Vikram did not heed her sarcasm. He was only aware of Feodor’s heavy, brooding gaze. But he looked at the woman.

“I want to know why you killed him.”

She gave a little shrug. “I haven’t killed anyone, my poor friend.”

“Then who did?”

“I think you’ll find it was a matter of City justice.” Her lips parted in a flat half smile. “Why? Colleague of yours?”

“I didn’t know him.”

“So you say.”

“I said I didn’t know him.”

Very deliberately, she crossed her arms.

“I don’t believe you came here about the west at all. I think you came about the execution. What are you after — revenge?” She glanced over her shoulder. “I take it he was searched before you let him in here?”

Vikram gripped the podium.

“I came because there was no reason for that execution to happen and there’s no reason it ever should again — if you fucking do something to help us.”

“How dare you speak to me in that manner!” But Vikram could see that she was delighted at his outburst and it made him angrier.

“Hildur, enough.” Feodor Rechnov cut through the woman’s protests. Slowly, his gaze lifted to Vikram. “I believe this debate is at an end.”

Vikram didn’t care any more. He felt reckless and giddy.

“It was you, wasn’t it? You killed him. You gave the order.”

“I sanctioned a Council decision. You may go and tell that, if you wish, to your friends in the west. And when you do, remind them that the mode of execution is in good repair and that if anyone wishes to follow Eirik 9968, they know where their path will end.”

“He was innocent. He did nothing but fight for the rights of people he owed no allegiance to.”

“Then he and I have something in common. How ironic.”

“You have nothing in common with Eirik. You murdered an innocent man.”

“He was an inciter, a terrorist and a common killer. And if you don’t want to be taken as one too, Mr Bai, I suggest you reacquaint yourself with silence and leave this session. Speaker, I urge this house to order.”

The tug on Vikram’s arm grew persistent. He kept his eyes locked on Feodor; all of his burning rage channelled into one single focus.

“I hope your sleep is haunted by ghosts,” he said.

“Remove him.”

“Mr Bai!”

“I hope they come to you in your sleep and tell you how they died.”

Feodor remained unmoved. Vikram’s minder had an inexorable grip on his hand. Now there were other hands, on his arm, on his shoulders, pulling him away from the podium. In seconds, the faces of the Council were obscured from his view. The clamour inside the Chambers was muffled as the great wooden doors swung closed. Doors like that would never be made again. Vikram stared at this sign of wealth in mute fury, first at Feodor Rechnov, and then, increasingly, at himself.

He had been in front of the Council — and he had lost them. How had he lost them? How had he lost control?

“They never do, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

His minder was still with him. A woman in a narrow suit. She smiled sympathetically. She had no reason to be sympathetic. It felt like pity.

“Decide anything. They don’t decide anything. Try again next month. Persistence can get results.”

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been writing letters for? How long I’ve been petitioning, just to speak? Twelve months. That’s an entire year. How long d’you think it’ll take to get another hearing?”

She shrugged. “That’s the way it goes. I might say you were foolish to lose your temper.”

“You might say a lot of things,” he snapped.

He realized she was waiting for him to leave, no doubt under instructions to ensure he did not cause a scene. He tried once more.

“I can come back later. Talk to them again. You could help.”

“I don’t think so. Not today.”

“Tomorrow then.”

She did not reply. The doormen were exchanging glances. He strode angrily away, only to hear the woman running after him. “Don’t forget your coat,” she said. “It’s cold out.”

It was a kind gesture but it annoyed Vikram all the more to have to turn around and go back to the cloakroom. The attendant returned his unsightly coat. He yanked it on and heard the lining rip.

Helpless anger rumbled in the pit of his stomach. It was a warning. He knew what that rage could do and there was a reason he had worked so hard to still it. Images he had thought long banished rose up one by one. Mikkeli with a gun. Mikkeli floating. Her body shedding water when he pulled it onto the decking.

Where had those events lead? To a green cell and a flooded tank. Mikkeli was dead. Eirik was dead. And Vikram had sabotaged his one chance in front of the Council. He had failed all of them.

A security guard was walking towards him. Anger wouldn’t help now. He needed strategy. He needed time.

He turned back to the cloakroom. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The attendant eyed him warily. Vikram clutched his stomach.

“I think I might be sick…”

With a look of distaste, the attendant jabbed a finger. “It’s that way.”

He walked meekly past the guards to the end of the hallway and out through the secondary doors. He was back in the main corridor. There were no windows, just soft lighting and soft carpeting, his worn down boots noiseless upon it.

He went left towards the lifts. No one was about. Fifty metres along was a statue of an early Teller, and just behind it, a small cubic space with glass cabinets housing Neon Age relics on either side. It was said that back then, people had lived to one hundred and fifty years, and they looked the same as they did at fifteen, their skin fresh and beautiful, their organs plucked from their bodies and replaced with newly grown ones. In this way they had achieved immortality, until the Blackout.

He slipped around the statue. The alcove overlooked the interior of the scraper. He could see the shadow of the lifts moving up and down inside the aquarium, people trapped in a watery world. It was a bizarrely pretty parody of imprisonment.

He turned away and studied the cabinets instead.

Engraved and personalised hologrammic device, he read. Twenty-second century, Alaskan.

He thought of Mikkeli’s precious map, pictured Alaska on it. The map had been their great secret. At night they had spent hours poring over the outlines of land, guessing where their ancestors had come from, until Naala found the map and said it was illegal and burned it in front of them. There were no maps in the cabinet.

The Eye Tower’s security was surprisingly lax. He had been searched at the border and on the way into the tower and the Chambers, but for all the Councillors knew he could be part of a larger conspiracy. He could be here to scope out the building. He might have a partner armed with explosives. Evidently they felt confident that he posed no kind of threat.

They were right. He didn’t. Not today.

Strategy was patience. Vikram settled on the floor, leaning gently against the cabinet. He would wait.

The City clock chimed three times on the hour; a deep, austere vibration. Vikram started. He’d let his mind wander. He heard what he was listening for: the sound of the great doors being levered open and well-shoed feet hurrying out of the Chambers.

The Councillors spilled into the corridor. Vikram watched them sweep by, oblivious to his presence in the alcove. Feodor passed, deep in conversation, and Vikram lowered his eyes in case a sense of mutual animosity should draw the other man’s gaze. He could not see the younger Rechnov. In the rush Vikram was afraid he had missed him, but then he spotted the sleek, charcoal-suited figure, a heavy coat slung over his arm, the auburn tint in his hazel hair.

Linus was one of the last out and he was alone. Two pieces of luck, which was more than Vikram deserved.

Linus turned right. Vikram waited for the last stragglers to amble pass and hurried after him.

The young man walked briskly, Vikram following a short distance behind. The corridor curved gradually and Vikram lost sense of how far round they had come. Linus went through a set of doors. The skyscraper was even larger than Vikram had supposed. Within its outer ring was a maze of tiny corridors. These too were carpeted, with wall-hung lamps and decorations which Vikram had no time to look at; portraits and long lists of names.

A little way ahead, Linus stopped. He put on his coat and did up each of the buttons and a feather collar. Then he disappeared through a door.

Vikram followed, opened the door and stepped silently out onto a balcony.

He was at least a hundred floors above surface. The skyline was spectacular: a medley of pyramid tops, flat, pointed and asymmetric, swathed in nylon mist. The wind met him ferociously. Another day, he would have admired the view, but today he had no time for it.

Linus was leaning against the wall, his feet casually crossed. A coil of smoke rose from the glowing cigarette reversed in one gloved hand. The upturned collar cut sharp angles across his jaw. Vikram guessed that the coat was lined with feathers too.

He shut the door gently behind him.

“Mind if I join you?”

Linus looked around. Surprise flickered for a moment in his eyes. Then it vanished, to be replaced by a cool, relaxed assessment.

“Not at all,” he said. He had a face that contained both strength and delicacy; the Rechnovs were undeniably a good-looking family.

Vikram took out his own cigarettes. His hands, lacking mittens, had become paws. The cellulose packaging of his cigarettes almost defeated him. His fingertips skidded on the top of the first tube, fighting to extract one from many.

“Shit.”

He saw the cigarette fall before he felt it depart his fingers. It wasn’t as if he could afford to throw them away. He brought the packet to his lips and teased out another with his tongue. The smell of oranges lingered on his fingers.

Linus passed him a lighter. Vikram cupped the flame and passed it back. They stood in silence.

“You must have been waiting some time,” said Linus at last.

“Twelve months.”

The Councillor gave him a quizzical look.

“Since I began writing letters. But that’s not what you meant.”

“No.”

“You’re wondering why I followed you.”

“I could take an educated guess.”

Vikram gestured. “Please do.”

Linus exhaled a thin stream of smoke. In his smart coat, he was well protected against the cold, and he appeared in no rush.

“I’m sorry that your case was not considered. It would appear that the hearing today was something of a formality.”

“You’re on the Council.”

“Yes. Well, in an advisory capacity — that’s all it’s really here for now.”

“Maybe with more preparation — more evidence…”

“Actually, it’s nothing to do with preparation. You could do as much work, amass as many studies as you like. The outcome would be the same. It always has been, ever since the earliest attempts of the WRM — the Western Repatriation Movement, back in seventy-four.” I know who they were, thought Vikram, but he refrained from interrupting.

“Not that the NWO has helped your cause, sadly.” The Councillor paused, apparently musing over the issue. “I’m Linus, by the way. And I know who you are. Obviously.”

“Linus, nice to meet you,” Vikram muttered. Introductions weren’t really his thing; perhaps it was there that he had stumbled. Choosing the wrong name, or something. They pressed wrists anyway, his own skin fish-bone dry with the cold, the material of Linus’s glove smooth and unidentifiable. “I have to ask — why do you say that? About the Council? When you’re on it, I mean.”

“Oh, there’s many reasons. What you’re proposing — radical social reform — it doesn’t really sit with the Council any more. They tried it already.”

“They used to be more philanthropic.”

“They used to be younger,” Linus said. He must be quite young himself, in his late twenties, Vikram thought. Fourth generation, anyway. Linus seemed to sense the scrutiny, because he raised one eyebrow. “You don’t agree?”

“If you mean that age affects resolution and liberality, then yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“You’re what — twenty six? Twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-five.” The age Mikkeli had been.

Linus laughed. “Young, anyway. That’s the thing. You remind these people of themselves a long time ago. They know they lack that conviction now and it shames them. And just in case you’re wondering, the man I was duelling with earlier is Feodor Rechnov. My father.”

Vikram did not mention that he already knew the connection. He was not confident that he could keep his voice free of emotion.

Linus seemed unaware of any tension. “Then again, you have to remember what some of them have been through. What they’ve lost.”

“That’s too convenient an excuse. At least let someone else try.”

“Someone like you?”

Vikram shrugged. “Maybe.”

Linus retrieved a silver case from his coat pocket. He took out two cigarettes and offered one to Vikram.

“Thanks.” Vikram slipped his own packet away.

“Not a problem.”

Again the lighter was passed. Vikram cupped the flame and drew deeply on the cigarette. It brought on a rush of light-headedness. Evidently tobacco was rolled stronger in the City, or it had less junk in it.

Linus inhaled gently. There were no lines around his mouth. Vikram wished he could tell what the other man was thinking. There was something unnerving about the controlled politeness, as though Linus were prepared to tell Vikram anything, secure in the knowledge that if he felt the information were even fractionally at risk, he could have the westerner tossed over the balcony without a second thought.

The cold was beginning to penetrate through Vikram’s thinner coat. The preliminaries were over. He would get no clues from a Rechnov.

“I need your help,” he said.

“After today’s exhibition, I suppose you do.” There was no judgement in Linus’s voice, only dry fact.

“You’re a Councillor. You must have influence.”

“Very little, I’m afraid.”

“But you spoke up today. For the west.”

“I did. As you saw, it was a futile case.”

“Then tell me what I need to do. You know these people. I don’t.”

“Oh, I admire anyone who will stand up and take on the Council. But you’re wasting your time.”

“Thanks.” Vikram stared moodily out. “That’s really useful.”

“There are other routes, of course,” Linus continued. “Less orthodox routes.”

“Such as?”

“Find yourself a patron; someone rich and popular.” Linus finished his cigarette. He stubbed it out carefully on the rail. “Someone like Adelaide Mystik, perhaps.”

“Adelaide Mystik? You mean—” He stopped, confused by the oblique reference. “Why would I talk to her? She’s a — she doesn’t do anything.”

“Exactly. Like most celebrities, she doesn’t do anything. Therefore I would imagine she has time to do many things, if approached the right way. And she’s influential.” Linus looked thoughtful. “Yes. Talk to her. Don’t say I suggested it — just turn up as if it was your own idea.”

Vikram felt wrong-footed, but could not pinpoint where or how it had happened. Instead he asked, “Why would a Rechnov support the west?”

Linus’s smile was slow and closed. “An interesting question. One that would require time to answer. I don’t have time. But I do have a query for you. Did you know Eirik 9968?”

“Would it make a difference if I did?”

“Not to me.”

“Well, I didn’t know him. Not to speak to.”

The lie slid easily off his tongue. It occurred to him that if he said it enough times, he might begin to believe it, that knowledge of another person was as frail as mist.

“He was wrongly numbered, I believe. Assigned a 68. He should have been a 65, for Tasmayn. Not that it makes a difference now. Funny the way that our origins are disregarded nowadays.”

The snippet of information could only have been dropped as a test. Vikram kept his face impassive.

“What’s the name of that stone, inside the Chambers?”

“Stone?”

“Yes. The pillars.”

“Oh. It’s called marble. Rather beautiful, isn’t it. Mined in quarries over a century ago. Finally shipped across from Patagonia. Quite a feat.” Linus paused. “Ah yes. This might help you — I won’t need it.” He handed Vikram a card. “Good luck. Don’t freeze out here.”

The door closed on him before Vikram could reply.

Find yourself a patron. Linus’s turn of phrase rang oddly in his wake. Not someone like my sister, but someone like Adelaide Mystik. As though Adelaide were a completely separate entity. It didn’t sound like a recommendation. Then again, what did Vikram know about these people?

He recalled the Rechnovs, gathered on the balcony to watch the skadi execute Eirik. Their family portrait seemed even stranger now than it had done last week. There were four fourth-gen siblings, he knew. Vikram wondered if that had been calculated prescience in light of the later population control laws. Linus was evidently on the Council. There was the other brother, and then the infamous twins. Axel, the ex-jet set boy who’d disappeared. And the daughter. Beautiful, catastrophic Adelaide, who refused to use her family’s name and headed up socialite group the Haze in a whirl of parties and social misdemeanours. Crazy Adelaide, mad like her brother, mad in the way that could only end badly. Last famously captured necking from a bottle at Axel’s remembrance service, or whatever the feed had called it, because the kid was surely dead. And Linus was suggesting that Vikram solicit her help?

Vikram looked at the card. It sat snugly in the palm of his hand, about the size of a playing card, but thicker. The card was red with a pink rose motif, and running across it in gold type was the inscription.

The back was watermarked. It had an Old World feel to it, pre-Neon, even.

Something struck him on the cheek. He looked up. Hail. Cursing the weather’s erratic switches, thrusting the card into his coat pocket, he retreated indoors.

Two guards were approaching down the corridor.

“Time’s up, kid. Out with you.”

They marched him back to the lift. Hands folded in front, eyes averted, they accompanied Vikram down the hundred floors, across the mosaic-tiled lobby, past the evergreen trees and down again through the flood control floors. They opened the doors for him to go outside. As he passed, one of them grabbed his collar.

“Hey — don’t forget to check out your picture in the newsreel.”

The other grinned inanely.

“We don’t have your damn newsreel in the west,” Vikram flung back. “Don’t you know anything?”

The doors hissed shut. Vikram was left at the waterbus terminus, watching the next load of passengers embark in the freezing hail.

5 ¦ ADELAIDE

The Rechnov offices were quieter than she remembered. Through doors left ajar or windows with the blinds half drawn, she caught glimpses of her father’s employees. They were smartly but plainly dressed, their workstations clean, uncluttered. These days, amidst the eternal rumours that bits of the City were falling apart, she supposed the company was more concerned with maintenance than creativity.

Occasionally, seeing her shadow pass, a worker glanced up. Some dropped their eyes, others stared overtly. She hadn’t been invited.

Her meeting with the investigator was in two days time. What she expected to uncover here today she was not yet sure, only that she was following instinct, and instinct was tracing a path backwards.

In an empty foyer that smelled of decomposing ideas, she passed the things that had never been built, forever imprisoned behind glass frames. Plans for an underwater shuttle network. A piece of concept art for a hotel like a bubble on the seabed, the date marked in the bottom right corner — Summer 2366. A mere twelve months before Storm Year.

It was a strange feeling to think that this image was half a century old, its creator probably dead. He might even have been born outside Osiris; walked on land and seen places that no longer existed. Axel had been obsessed with the Old World at one stage, and the idea of rediscovering it. For weeks on end he had pestered Feodor with questions. What had happened to the land? Why had everyone come to Osiris and why could no one leave?

Feodor, who liked to lecture, told them that Osiris was built because the world was collapsing. Even before the Great Storm, the old lands had been crippled by disasters. Floods, famine, plagues made by scientists, war, drought — earthquakes that ripped the land to pieces. The twins wouldn’t know, but a long time ago there used to be giant discs drifting in the sky — s’lites, they called them. S’lites looked like stars. They took photographs, and connected scarabs in an enormous web spanning halfway across the globe. Back in the Neon Age, said Feodor, everyone knew everything about everyone else in the world. They had machines inside their heads. The sky was full of giant mirrors and cloud spraying monsters. Some of them were planning to live on the Moon. But all that was before the Blackout.

Now, a city like Osiris, entirely self-sustaining, was a stroke of pure genius (partly by the people on the Osiris Board, but ultimately, said Feodor, by their grandfather and his father Alexei before him, who travelled all the way across the Boreal States on the back of a grain cart so that he could enter the architectural competition). There should have been many more Osiris cities. They could have saved lives. But the city came too late, and when the Great Storm arrived, the few refugees that escaped land’s terrible plagues only confirmed the worst.

Nobody has ever answered Osiris’s distress signal, Feodor told them finally, because nobody is left to answer. He shook his head, a tired, resigned gesture. He only wished it were otherwise.

Looking at the faded plans, Adelaide remembered that speech very clearly. It was the only time she had ever supported Feodor rather than Axel.

She strode down the corridor, purposeful now. She was reaching for the brass handle of Feodor’s office when Tyr stepped out of the adjacent room and manoeuvred himself in front of the door. He must have seen her coming on camera.

“Feodor’s at a press conference,” he said.

“Feeding that insatiable desire for publicity, is he?”

“He’s delivering a statement on the west. They had a westerner in the Chambers this morning. Someone has to put a positive spin on it.” Tyr surveyed her blandly. “He’s not due back any time soon.”

“I can wait. In here.”

She took a step forward. Tyr did not move. They faced one another, close enough to see blemishes, lines, embryonic beneath the skin. Close enough to touch. Green stilettos put Adelaide almost on a level height with Tyr. A clump of his hair stuck out over his forehead, light brown, streaked with honey. She fought the urge to push it back into place. Her own resolution was mirrored in the set of his jaw, the slight contraction of the irises. His eyes were the colour of dusk, and held its ambiguity.

Stalemate suspended them for a few seconds. Then Tyr shrugged.

“Your call.”

“Thank you.”

He opened the door in a twofold gesture, pushing it ajar, and as she stepped forward holding it there before opening it all the way. Adelaide ignored the bait.

“I’ll take a coral tea,” she called over her shoulder. “Strong. Plenty of ginger.”

“I know how you take your tea,” said Tyr.

The door swung shut, cutting him off.

Adelaide looked about, remembering. The room contained the accumulated possessions of three proud and quite different men, none of them able to erase the presence of their predecessor. Alexei’s bookshelves squeezed between Leonid’s maps, their edges neatly aligned. The floor was dwarfed by Feodor’s huge table, itself covered in architectural drawings, and beneath or in places upon them, in tea glass rings. Adelaide slung her handbag on top.

She crossed the room to the Neptune. Its oceanscreen showed deep sea beyond the submerged island and the Atum Shelf. The image was three-dimensional and opalescent. It seemed to pulse. There was no sign of the city’s underworld: no plateauing pyramid bases, pipelines or energy turbines; nothing to reveal human intrusion at all.

“You old-fashioned fool,” Adelaide said aloud.

She placed one hand flat against the activation strip. Nothing happened. The Neptune must be programmed to respond to Feodor’s fingerprints. She tried the drawers to his desk. They were also locked.

Tyr entered without knocking. He had been working with the Rechnovs for some years now and had acquired certain family privileges. Feodor trusted him implicitly. Tyr gave her an incalculable glance and placed her teaglass on a table beside a leather armchair. He stood there until she moved away from Feodor’s desk.

Adelaide lifted the glass to her nose, inhaling the steam as ritual dictated, then blew lightly across the liquid. They surveyed one another without pretence.

“Do you have a Surfboard?” she asked.

“A Surfboard? No.”

“I thought there might be some reading material to occupy those of us who have to wait upon Feodor.”

“I’ll suggest it to him,” Tyr said.

When he had gone, she seated herself in the armchair, and hooked one shoe across the opposite knee. Her foot jiggled. She waited. After a moment she grew bored of waiting, and crossed the room to the sideboard jammed against the bookcase. She relieved it of one of the more expensive raquas and poured herself a triple measure.

She went to stand by the maps, the raqua in her right hand, untouched. Most were plans of Osiris, but there was was one that showed the Old World land masses. It was a beautiful and very rare object. Adelaide traced the outlines with one finger, thinking of Axel’s questions.

It was stranger than she had expected to be here. She remembered when she was younger occasionally visiting the premises, feeling awed by the vastness of her father’s territory and the operation he commanded. This office had seemed like a sanctum then. The twins’ four feet had dangled over the edges of the chairs. The adults discussed complex matters whilst the twins whispered; the room was thick with the shadows of their long gone whispers.

Her eyes flicked to the Neptune again. Over two weeks had passed since the Service of Hope, and there was no further information about Axel. If Feodor knew anything — via Sanjay Hanif, or independently — the clues would be on that machine. Adelaide was not sure exactly what those clues might be. She was not even sure, yet, of what she suspected.

She heard noises from outside, voices followed by urgent footsteps. She ran her tongue over dry lips, suddenly nervous of what the meeting might bring.

The door opened to admit her father.

“Afternoon, Adelaide. What are you doing here?” His gaze took in her, by the maps, and the raqua, as she had known it would. “You’re aware of the time, I presume.”

“I was waiting. So yes.”

“Impudent as ever.”

She sucked in a breath. Three words and she was biting her tongue. Expressionless, she swilled the amber liquid in the glass, watching the moon-shaped tidemark left by the alcohol.

“To your continued health, Feodor,” she said finally, and drank the contents. Her throat burned. Not just a cheap stunt, but that was a waste of good raqua if it did not rile him the way she needed.

She sensed her father’s infuriation as he crossed the room to a chair by the table, leaning both hands heavily upon its back. He still bore the signs of a strong physique, though years and work had etched their marks. His face was lined, more than it might have been for a man his age. It was a face that took its time before succumbing to the necessity of conversation.

“You’ll have to forgive my lateness.” His voice, used to public speaking, sounded trapped in the office. It took on other nuances too — sarcasm, and flashes of contempt. “As Tyr no doubt informed you, I’ve been in the Chambers all morning. An absurdly unproductive session. Hildur Pek has been kicking up a storm about the ring-net, as if anyone is worrying about sharks right now. Then we had some western lunatic speaking. Stars knows where they got him from, I suppose it’s hard to find literates over there. Practically demanded that we demilitarize the border, and Linus — Linus! — supported him, would you believe.”

“I didn’t come to talk about Linus.”

“No.” Feodor’s face closed. “No, you didn’t, did you. Well, Adelaide? I’ve had to leave a press conference because Tyr informs me you’ve materialized in my office. I can’t just drop everything to attend to your whims.”

“Here you are though,” she said.

The look he shot her was half fury, half despair. Their mutual dependency filled the air, hanging like a veil between them. Feodor, she knew, would never be able to accept Adelaide’s defection from the family. Whereas Viviana, much as she might pretend otherwise, had not been sorry to lose her only daughter. The rift had come as a relief to them both.

“You made me go to that hideous execution last week,” she said. “Even though I hated it. Even though watching it made me sick.”

“Stars, don’t bring that up. I’ve heard enough about the damn execution for one day.”

“I want the keys to the penthouse.”

“Is that a property request?” he said sardonically.

“No, Daddy, it’s not.” It was not an affectionate term, and she knew its power. The first tinges of colour crept into Feodor’s cheeks.

“Then why would you ask for the keys when you know I have handed them over to the committee?”

“All of them?”

Feodor’s eyes flicked to the window-wall before resettling upon his daughter.

“Except for the set which must have been with Axel, yes, all of them.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“As if he’s not coming back.”

“I’m sorry, Adelaide.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s been over six weeks. We’ve consulted the most eminent Tellers.”

“So?”

Feodor looked sombrely at his hands. She rallied.

“There must be another set. You would never have given up the only one.”

His heavy eyelids lifted. “Accuse me of falsehoods if you wish. The keys to the penthouse are with the investigating committee, as requested when we reported Axel’s disappearance. I expect Hanif will retain them until the investigation is closed. Until then, no one is allowed access, not even family.”

“You’re lying.”

Feodor gave a faint smile. She cursed herself silently, knowing she had tripped on the most obvious of wires, unable to retract her step. She should have been used to the lies. It was a Rechnov trademark; they talked themselves into belief.

“Look,” she persisted. “The penthouse is one of our properties. There’s always another way in. That’s one of grandfather’s tricks.”

“Oh, be reasonable. Even if I indulge your bizarre conspiracy theories, as if I have time to play games about locked doors — do you not think that Hanif will have accounted for such a possibility? If he wishes to seal off the penthouse, I guarantee it will be guarded by more than a key.”

“And we both know you could get past such obstacles, if you wanted to.”

Her father gave her a haughty glance.

“Are you suggesting I break the decrees of the Council I serve?”

“I’m suggesting you put your son before your work.”

The nerve above his eye began to twitch. “There is such a thing as integrity, Adelaide. But let’s forget the practicalities for a second and talk about the premise. What in Osiris do you expect to achieve by going through Axel’s belongings? The last time you were there—”

“Precisely.” She leaned forward. “It’s months since any of us have been inside. I need to see what’s there, if there’re any clues to what happened. I’d have thought you would want to see too.”

“I’ve no desire to visit.” Feodor shook his head. “It’s a cursed place.”

“Of course. I forgot.” Her own anger was growing. “It’s an embarrassment to you. My brother is an embarrassment.”

The colour flooded Feodor’s cheeks.

“Do you think you are the only one suffering here?” His voice rose. Adelaide swallowed. “Have you considered your mother for one second? Have you spoken to her once since the Service of Hope? You have no idea what it’s like to lose a child. And if you carry on the way you are I don’t suppose you ever will. You might learn something from this tragedy, Adelaide, and address your own lifestyle, instead of attacking other people’s.”

She was on her feet before she knew it. “Don’t talk to me about my actions! You’ve had nothing to do with me or Axel for years. That’s the way we all wanted it, that’s the way we got it.”

“Because of your own stubbornness, Adelaide!”

“You pushed us out — after Axel — after the incident—”

“I’m not going to dredge this up. You renounced the family name. Your grandfather’s name. And not just you, you had to drag Axel along too—”

“I didn’t drag him anywhere. You wanted him examined. You were going to do tests. We had no choice!”

They glared at one another. Feodor’s knuckles clenched white on the back of the chair. She fought for control of her voice.

“I’ve come here to ask you to help. Axel is my twin. I have to know. Why can’t you see that?” She willed him to understand. To delay a verdict she did not want to make.

“There are qualified people investigating what happened. And I think, if we are honest, we both know what they are going to find out.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Adelaide—”

“They never found his body.”

“The earth is full of unburied souls.” Feodor lifted his hands: a gesture of resignation. “Listen to me. It does no good to mull over these things. And besides, this is a delicate situation. Decorum is required. There are procedures. You must not — you will not — start making ripples. Hanif has everything in hand. He will inform me the moment—”

“Please. I won’t take anything, I won’t touch anything, I just want to look—”

“He will inform me the moment new information arises. I am sure it will not be long.”

She fell still. On the Neptune o’screen, the forked tail of a fish disappeared beyond the edges of the frame. She reached out a finger, tracing its exit. Nebulous ideas, suspicions that had led her to this day and this request, tightened in her head and bound.

“How can you be so confident?” she murmured.

Feodor shifted his weight, flexing and refolding his hands around the back of the chair. “Adelaide. Perhaps this is difficult for you to understand, having been so close to your brother, but this — disappearance. In some ways, it is not, perhaps, entirely unexpected. The shock is no less, but the mind… the mind can sometimes anticipate, without knowing…”

Adelaide’s chest constricted with outrage. “Are you trying to imply that he—”

“No!” Feodor looked, for once, truly scandalized. “Don’t insult me. Axel was still a Rechnov, he would never — Let me finish. I am talking about accidents. An accident… Nothing more.” He took a deep breath, visibly gathering himself. “Now what I need you to do, Adelaide, is give me your word you will take this matter no further. Come back. Come back to the Domain. We will survive this as a family. We must not forsake one another in our grief.”

“I can’t grieve for someone who isn’t dead.”

Even as she spoke, she felt a dull flicker of recognition within herself. Grieving was exactly what she had been doing for the past year. But there was no longer time for that.

Feodor let out a long sigh, as if to say only the deeply misguided could still have hope, and for them, he was powerless.

“Ask the stars for guidance, if you will not accept mine. And drop this crusade. It will not bring him back.”

A shaft of sunlight fell across the room, whiting the image on the Neptune. The machine whirred gently.

“You won’t help me,” she said. The words fell slowly, hand in hand with the confirmation. If Feodor wouldn’t help her, he had to be hiding something. What did he know that she didn’t? Had the Rechnovs already been inside the penthouse? Had they found something? She imagined Feodor and Linus going through Axel’s things, discussing their strategy, agreeing that under no circumstances would they tell Adelaide.

“Even if I did have access — which I do not — I cannot possibly let you interfere with an investigation. All Councillors are under oath to the City. You know that. We have duties beyond the personal, and you, as my daughter, are implicit in that.”

She kept her face, her voice, carefully neutral. “I understand.”

“Good. Your mother is holding a Council dinner tomorrow tonight. She sent you an invitation.” The blood had drained from his cheeks. He was the politician again, calm and ordered.

“I received it.”

“Then we shall see you there.”

“Get me the keys and maybe I’ll come.”

Feodor made a sound of disgust.

“Oh, go back to the Haze, Adelaide. You make it impossible.”

She made everything impossible. That had been the line for a long time now. Slowly, Adelaide crossed the room and picked up her handbag from the table. As she turned to leave there was a knock at the door.

“Yes?” barked Feodor.

She expected it to be Tyr, but someone else entered the room. A wide, bald man in a chocolate suit. He had dual toned eyes, one green and one brown. They slid towards Adelaide. On the back of his neck he had a third eye, a tattoo. Blue.

Goran was ex-Home Guard. Some of the Guard had been conscripted, in the early days, but Goran had volunteered. He was occasionally referred to as her father’s bodyguard, but it was unspoken knowledge that his job extended beyond protection. The twins had always been scared of him; she was not sure if it was the clothes that did not quite conceal his gun, or the way such a robust man managed to make himself into a shadow, appearing and disappearing seemingly as he chose.

Goran stood inside the door, his hands hidden behind his back.

“Good afternoon, Miss Rechnov,” he said. Some of the warmth seemed to leave the air.

“Hello,” she muttered. She glanced at her father. “Thanks for the drink.” Already her voice was retracting, back from the Rechnovs and their mire of lies, slowly back into what she had made herself. Another breath and she was there.

“Now don’t trouble yourself,” said Adelaide Mystik. “I’ll see myself out.”

Goran smiled. Whatever he had to say to Feodor was said after the door closed.

“Did you get what you wanted?” Tyr asked. Adelaide stopped.

“If I didn’t, would you get it for me, Tyr?”

He pretended to think about this. “Probably not,” he said, with a slow smile that took in more of her than was warranted.

“Then what use are you to me?” she said haughtily.

They were close again, inches, maybe centimetres between them. She ran her gaze over what was offered; the honeyed hair, the aquiline features. His face was highlighted by two days stubble and a darkness under the eyes, both of which were engineered — the one with a carefully applied razor, the other through his milaine habit. In the curve of his lips were tiny lines. Each containing a memory of all the places his mouth had grazed her body. Bruised her, sometimes. His hand drifted down to her hip, connected, pushed her hard against the door. Almost enough to knock it ajar.

“Some use,” he said. “Apparently.”

“No more than any other lover,” she said, and this time she thrust past him with a force that was intentionally violent.

6 ¦ VIKRAM

There were no delays on the return journey, but the waterbus paused before crossing the checkpoint, bobbing patiently in a swell. Vikram heard the music first, then the roar of the engine. A patrol boat streaked down the waterway towards them and he averted his eyes. The patrol boat bombed with music. Within its beat he heard the sound of laughter, present and past. He shut his ears against it. The boat flashed past. Its noise faded. The skadi would be joyriding up and down the border all night.

When the waterbus crossed the lane into the west, the squalor struck Vikram with something akin to surprise. Graffiti looked stark and lewd on structures that must once have shone. The clamour of traffic was phenomenal: Boat horns, collisions, gulls screeching, yells of abuse. Even the sea smelled saltier. For a few seconds his head swam with sensory overload and then it was normal once more.

In normalcy he saw, stretching out like the sea itself, the dreary march of the days ahead. Each washing over him as relentless as the currents. He saw how every day would be a new fight; to keep free of the gangs, the manta wars and the insurgent games; to find food enough to survive the winter and clothes to keep from freezing. He saw the riots that would come as surely as would the storms. He saw friends beaten by the skadi. The tank towed back to the border packed with swollen corpses. He saw the winter freeze ravaging the old, children hardened into crime until they wore unkindness as a resin on their skin. He saw the slow thick bleed of anger. He saw that it would take him apart, bit by bit, until he was an alien even to himself.

The outline of the invitation was sharp in his pocket. They were leaving the City behind. There was no sign of the woman who had been detained earlier.

The air seemed to quake. When he looked back, a twelve-year-old Mikkeli was perched on top of the border net. She weighed less than a tuft of pine and her voice was a fingertip brushing bark.

“Truth is, Vik, I come back here a lot,” she said. “All the time. Just like you used to, over and over and over again.”

She stuck her ankles through the mesh and hung upside-down, pulling faces.

About fifty metres away, the brown curve of a human arm broke the water. As the waterbus grew closer, the hump of the body was discernible under the wash of the waves. It had long been stripped of clothes. Not far from the body, a seagull rested, wings furled. It eyed the corpse speculatively. Each time the sea brought the bird closer, it uttered a squawk, as though fearful the dead thing might suddenly spring to life; a cheap trick for a hungry gull.

Just over a week ago, whilst the gas dispersed through the western crowd, the skadi had drained the execution tank. They dragged out Eirik’s body by his feet and stuffed it into a plastic sack. Then they took the body away.

Vikram watched the seagull coasting on the waves. As though sensing his surveillance, the bird cocked its head and seemed to look directly at him. He would have ignored the look, except that many gulls were the carriers of dead souls, the souls of sailors and sea folk. They were all sea people in this city, and he felt in that moment the shiver of a connection across the gulf. Were the dead reprimanding him now?

He thought of Linus’s feathered coat, wondered how it felt to keep the birds so close, and if they minded. The gull’s head swivelled. Its beak dipped, pecking at its own feathers. It was still a bird, and it had to eat. A wave moved it within a metre of the corpse. The beak snapped up. Vikram turned away, unwilling to see the moment where it conquered its fear.

7 ¦ ADELAIDE

Adelaide chose a secluded spot off the main pathway. She sat on the end of a stone bench, careful not to disturb a dozing Admiral. As she settled in, the butterflies swarmed about her, their minute feet brushing against her arm. Light poured from the glass dome of the roof and filtered through the tropical foliage.

Her contact was due on the hour. She waited, moisture collecting on her skin from the hot, damp air. The farm was quiet today, but there were always a few wandering visitors. A man in lightly tinted glasses was walking down the path towards her. Adelaide checked her watch. A minute before eleven and no one else was nearby.

The man was Patagonian, his hair substantially flecked with grey. Dressed in a casual shirt and well-tailored trousers, he looked like a family man, respectable, with a professional occupation — perhaps a doctor or an engineer, out for a stroll on his day off. It was possible, Adelaide mused, that he really did have a wife and children — then she put the idea aside. The line of work must be too obscure.

The investigator sat at the other end of the bench without exchanging a glance. He took out a Surfboard. For a minute or so, she heard only the sounds of his fingertips manipulating the screen. Palm leaves rustled; a little way away, a stream trickled over veined pebbles.

“Ms Mystik, I presume.” His gaze was fixed on the Surfboard. His lips barely moved.

“Yes.”

“You can refer to me as Lao.” He took off his glasses and polished them on a square silk cloth. “A favourite place of yours, this?”

“My grandmother used to bring us here as children.”

“Did Axel come here often also?”

“Not lately.”

Lao focused on his screen.

“Your brother is not in the hospitals.”

She followed Lao’s lead, pretending to examine the butterfly that had alighted on her wrist. Its underside was tricoloured, a striking pattern of red, white and black. Red Pierrot. Adelaide loved them because Second Grandmother had loved them, and for their own ethereal beauty. Perhaps, too, it was their immaculate symmetry that she loved, two sides of the same, like Adelaide and Axel.

“Did you speak to the staff?”

“I have checked admissions records and spoken to all of the receptionist staff in the accident and emergency units. None of them recognises the image that you sent.”

“I suppose that’s good news.”

“I also checked the morgues. I should ask you, at this stage, Ms Rechnov—”

“Mystik.”

“As you wish. Ms Mystik. I should ask you exactly what your suspicions are regarding your brother’s disappearance?”

“At this stage, I should say that I’m not sure.”

A small girl in a polka dot frock ran past, followed by the mother at a more sedate pace. Lao waited for them to disappear down the pathway. He gave a little cough.

“Let me be blunt, Ms Mystik. A full-scale search operation has already been mounted. I understand that it cost a substantial proportion of the Council’s security budget. The sea has been searched. There have been raids on suspected gang members in the west. The public operation, in short, has been intensive. This leaves us with three possibilities. One, your brother is hiding. Two, he is hidden. Or three, he is dead and it has been engineered that his body will never be found. Do you suspect murder?”

“Murder is a dangerous accusation, Mr Lao.” Her voice, surprising her, came out as calm as his.

“A large part of my job is to find lies. My experience of working with high profile cases is that the perpetrators do not like to dirty their hands. If certain acts have been committed, someone — somewhere — will have seen something. They will have been paid, or intimidated, to keep quiet. You need to find out if your family are lying.”

“They are lying. At least, my father is lying. I asked him for the keys to Axel’s penthouse. He told me they have all been handed over to Hanif.”

“And you have proof that this is untrue?”

“I know my family, Mr Lao. We have more sets of keys than we own greenhouse shares. My father would never have relinquished access so easily, which means he is lying.”

Lao nodded. “Tell me about your brother. His state of mind.”

Adelaide stared at a flower with large, velvety petals, twined about the trunk of a lemon tree.

“I’m sure you’ve read more than you need to know.”

“I prefer to hear from the client directly. Please try to be as objective as possible.”

“Very well. My brother — Axel — he’s not himself. That is — he’s ill, but the doctors can’t agree on a diagnosis. Some days he’s perfectly lucid, they say. Other days…” She watched an insect crawl inside the flower head. “He can be paranoid. Delusional.”

“He is unpredictable?”

“Yes.”

“Is he violent?”

She hesitated. “No.”

Lao had finished polishing his glasses. He put them back on. “You don’t have to be defensive, Ms Mystik. I am not here to judge character. I just need the facts. If your brother is the type to become embroiled in an argument, for example, that might have a bearing on the case.”

Adelaide let out a shaky breath.

“He’s never intentionally violent,” she said. “Not to people. But he sees things. He thinks he sees horses. And — hears them.”

“He hears them talking?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to discuss the horses. She wished she hadn’t mentioned them.

Lao tapped his Surfboard. He was waiting.

“Sometimes his behaviour is compulsive,” she allowed.

“Such as?”

“He does things — like — I don’t know. Once he told me to come to his boat and he had this basket full of white cloths. He said we had to fix them to the towers. We went all through the quarter, tacking up these stupid white cloths. It started raining but he wouldn’t let us stop. He said it had to be done that day. He was adamant.”

She remembered the glitter in Axel’s eyes, the puzzled expressions of those they passed.

“He’s not well,” she repeated.

“What about habits? Routines?”

She shook her head.

“Superstitions? Does he visit Tellers?”

“Not any more. He’s always been dismissive of them.”

“What about his regular contacts?”

“Very few. In the last few months he’s hardly left the penthouse. There’s myself, the cleaner, and a girl that does his shopping. But he has been known to wander, you see. Sometimes he appears in my flat — he has my key. But he might have visited anyone.”

“And the last time you saw him?”

She thought of that quiet figure waiting in her apartment.

“Nothing remarkable.”

Behind their glasses Lao’s eyes flicked about, scanning the leafy pathways where the butterflies spun in the artificial light.

“Are there any other conflicts within the family? Tensions? Grudges?”

“There are conflicts in every family,” she said, although she did not know that this was true, having had little enough exposure to other families. Her own set, the Haze, was mostly composed of those who had spurned their families, like herself. Lao gave her a sharp glance, as though he knew this, though he couldn’t, of course. She collected her thoughts.

“Feodor — my father — and Linus — they’ve had their differences. But only over political agendas. They’re all in league when it comes to family status and loyalty. Myself and Axel are estranged from the rest — not that it makes a difference to Axel these days.”

“But your family continue to bankroll you.” The investigator’s tone was bland. She mirrored it.

“Yes. Under the condition that I attend public functions like the one last week. Call me frivolous, Mr Lao. I daresay I am. But I like my lifestyle and I know when to compromise.”

“Your mother? I’ve heard it said she’s an intelligent woman.”

“She is. And completely allied with my father.”

“And your oldest brother — Dmitri?”

“Similarly. His fiancée is proof enough of that.”

“What are the Rechnovs’ relationships with the other venerated families — the Dumays and the Ngozis?”

“We didn’t all play together as children at midsummer, if that’s what you mean. The families are politically aligned but there are no strong personal ties. The Dumays keep themselves to themselves since the assassinations. My grandfather was very close to the other elders, Celine Dumay and Emeke Ngozi, but since they died the links have been purely strategic. Forgive me, Mr Lao, but surely this is information you can acquire equally well elsewhere? I try to spend as little time as possible thinking about my family.”

“As I said, I prefer to speak to the source. And if we are to succeed, Ms Mystik, you may have to devote a little more time than you are accustomed to thinking about your relations.” Lao put his Surfboard away. “I suggest that we proceed as follows. As the hospitals have yielded no leads, I will commence with further enquiries into those who last saw your brother.”

“Sanjay Hanif has done the same.”

“Hanif will not be paying them. I don’t doubt his ability as a detective, Ms Mystik, but results are always better with a little financial encouragement.”

She gave a half smile. “That is why I employed you. You will, naturally, receive a bonus payment in the event of a successful conclusion.”

“And what do you class as a successful conclusion?”

“Finding my brother. Alive.”

“Then I hope I shall locate him speedily.” He rose. “I’ll be in touch.”

The bath rose out of the black tiles like an island, round and white. Adelaide dipped her fingers into the searing water, then plunged both feet in and stood, gasping. Tropical scents rose with the steam. Breathing in slowly, she lowered herself into the bath until she was submerged to her neck.

She loved her monochrome bathroom. Like her bedroom, it faced east. Her apartment was on the very edge of the city and in daylight, the view from the bathroom was the wilderness beyond Osiris; endless sea merging into endless sky. It was evening now. The window-wall was darkened and held only the room’s reflection.

After a few minutes she leaned over and flicked the jacuzzi setting. She shifted to rest directly over a stream. The bubbles rippled up around her thighs and between her legs. She let her head fall back, sinking into daydreams. The water sloshed gently. She might not need company, but everyone needed physicality. Denying that urge was as foolish as believing there was life outside Osiris: it demonstrated only a basic disregard for fact.

Her hand drifted down, lazily, absently, and her breath snagged. It was not really her touch, it was Tyr’s. Their liaison had spanned some five years, but the forbidden meetings, restricted by time and place, still had an airless excitement. Sometimes she felt as though he was stitched into the fabric of her body, her responses a preordained thing. But nothing more than sex would ever lie between them. They both took other lovers; that way they averted suspicion.

The last time it had been at the theatre. With only a red curtain and the distraction of the play to cover them, he had kissed her mouth, her neck, the border of her backless dress. Her fingers lingered on the same spots. She felt every place his tongue had touched tingling again, as though the hot, scented jacuzzi tide had the potency of renewal.

In public, they used the studied banter of two rivals. Tyr worked for her father, and Adelaide hated him, so it was not a hard script for either of them to enact. She enjoyed their coded battles. But she was wary too, of the power folded into the layered phrases, the potential each of them held as a wrecker of the other’s life. Tyr would be in attendance at the Rose Night, which Adelaide traditionally held on the second Thursday of February. Her mind straddled the various possibilities of a rendezvous. Which stage in the evening might she slip away. Where they could fuck.

She slid down into the bath, out of the bubble stream. With the loss of sensation she felt her mind pulling back. She closed her eyes and remembered the theatre; the audience hushed, the sumptuous velvet of the curtain, the frisson when they kissed. She wanted the moment back. It was too late; her mind was roving now, tomorrow morning already panning out. A series of tasks. She needed to order the rose stock. In the afternoon she had a tasting session with the owner of Narwhal, who was devising the cocktail recipes.

The invitations for Rose Night had just been sent out. She imagined the squeals of delight from those receiving them. Adelaide’s guest list was the most envied publication in fourth gen Osiris. To have your name on the list was a statement: it linked the owner with dynamism and charisma, with Adelaide. In the early days, the era of the Double-A Parties, the twins had done the list together. Now it was just Adelaide.

The bath was beginning to cool. Not quite ready to depart, she leaned over and unleashed a gush of water from the taps. The hot current engulfed her feet before it bled into the rest of the pool and the temperature evened out into a pleasant shawl. Adelaide scooped up a handful of foam and held it to her face, listening to the bubbles popping against her skin.

She mulled over the meeting with Lao. The things he’d said. The things he’d implied.

Could she trust the investigator? Lao had no reason to lie to her, unlike her father. She could not escape the issue of the keys. Why would Feodor deny her access? Regardless of the press attached to Axel’s disappearance, it was hardly beyond his capabilities to find some way of sneaking her into the penthouse. No, she decided. There was more to it than public appearances. There were things he wasn’t telling her.

Adelaide had long thought her father capable of anything. But thinking a thing was not necessarily the same as believing it. Her mind skidded down the turbulent paths of suspicion. She must force herself to examine all angles. Lao had said there were three possibilities: Axel was hidden, in hiding, or dead. It was hard to imagine who would benefit from Axel’s death — if he had been killed for political reasons, the assassins would have brandished his body in public. Axel had long been a source of embarrassment to the Rechnovs, but murder — she let out a shaky breath — she could not bring herself to believe that they would murder her twin. Incarceration was more the family style. Secrets and lies. They could have locked him up in some anonymous Rechnov apartment.

Or he could be hiding. Axel was — she had to be honest with herself — not in a clear state mind.

If only she could get into the penthouse. There were no friends or confidantes to whom Axel might have entrusted a spare set of keys. Even in the old days, his relationships were superficial. He had never seemed to need people, except for Adelaide. Before.

She slid further under the bathwater, until her hair swilled around her shoulders and only her face remained above. It felt cold and exposed. She remembered Axel, hiding in a similar fashion under the bedclothes, because he was afraid of the storms. Adelaide was afraid of birds. She’d mocked her twin, they’d mocked one another, until their grandfather came to Axel’s rescue. Tell us a story, she’d begged. Tell us about the storms. And through the wind and the rain outside they listened to the slow resonant timbre of his voice as he told them about the year of the Great Storm, and how the refugees came to Osiris to escape the doomed, poisoned lands, from Patagonia, from Afrika, from India and Zeeland, even from the far flung Boreal States in the north, and how disease flew through the city like a dragon so they had to stay in the west, in quarantine. What then, she asked, what then? And he said, after the Great Storm came the Great Silence. We lost contact with the world. The people who left the City never came back. They were lost.

All of them? Asked Axel.

All of them.

When Adelaide got out of the bath it was dark. The water swilled away in languid spirals. She thought of the tank being drained the day Eirik 9968 was executed and she closed the door on the bathroom so as not to hear the noise.

She walked barefoot around the window-walls of her apartment, switching on lights, remembering something funny Second Grandmother said once about her old land-house having square rooms. How boring, said Adelaide. How functional, said Second Grandmother.

Adelaide was seized with a sudden longing to hear Second Grandmother speaking. She called on her o’musaique and selected an excerpt at random from the transcripts. The machine glowed pale violet and Second Grandmother’s light, softly accented voice filled the room.

We knew, that day, that the end of the world had come. We read it in the sands and in one another’s eyes. The Neon Age (as they used to call it on the beam, when I was girl) was truly over.

Adelaide sat on the edge of her futon. Her skin was still damp under her kimono and between her toes. On the glass-topped table before her was a ceramic bowl with her keys in it, and a silver pot. Adelaide drew the pot towards her, frowning as she noticed signs of tarnish on the lid. She used a corner of her kimono to polish the metal.

And that’s when we got on the boats. I had nothing with me. No belongings and no people. My family were dead. I was leaving behind fire and ash. As we crowded onto the boat, the beach was ablaze. I remember the sky — yellow, like malarial eyes. There were deaths. There were so many deaths. Some bodies had been desecrated, others were still fresh and ripe with blood. Not just through sickness, there were killings too, of course. I had spent much of the last two years in hiding. Even now I will not speak of those things.

I was terrified of the ocean. I knew that the sea sunk many more boats than the precious few it allowed to pass. I might be hurled from the boat and drown. I would be alone, in the vastest plain on Earth — the saltwater. But my terror of land and all it contained was even greater — so I fled, as we all did, with death in the surf beside us.

I did not imagine what I would find.

There was a slight cough, and Second Grandmother said, Autumn seventy-two, end of transcript fourteen.

A shadow made Adelaide glance up; a night bird sweeping past the window-wall. She tensed, hunched over, until it had passed. Even then she could feel its presence, as though those sharp avian eyes were fixed upon her, watching.

She thought of Second Grandmother, speaking carefully into a microphone. She thought of Axel standing at the glass, his back to her, watching space. He always had questions, her twin, so many questions, could never accept that some things just were. His later visitations might have spooked anyone else, but Adelaide had grown used to the intrusion. She came to expect it. The person that came into her apartment and stared out of windows was not really her brother. They shared the same constellation of freckles, and they had the same calibre voice, but there the resemblance ended.

It was only since he disappeared that she had felt the tug again. Before, there was the gap. What had been and what now was. As though while he was physically present, she could ignore the strange thing that had happened to him. But now he was gone, the old connection had ignited once more. Its flame was tiny. She had to shield it in both hands. Blowing gently upon it, watching the baby fires curl and evolve into dragon shapes, that suspicion, as fragile and nebulous as a bubble, hardened into certainty. Axel was alive. He might have been taken, hidden, locked away — but she was certain her twin was alive.

She just had to find him.

A distant whirr of machinery caused her to glance up at the ceiling. The three floors above her apartment were home to a private scientific facility that housed an array of sensors and telescopes trained on the stars. Sometimes she heard noises in the night. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of someone passing in the lift, coming down from, or travelling up to the final floors.

The noise stopped. The apartment was silent once more. Adelaide gave the silver pot a final wipe. From it she took a pinch of salt, and threw it at the window to ward off the dead. Each night, out by the ring-net, the ghosts gathered in their millions, keeping silent vigil over the city.

But not you Axel, she thought. Not you.