Osiris

37 ¦ ADELAIDE

It took until two o’clock for Goran’s breathing to regulate and his pulse to slow. Adelaide stood under the mezzanine, watching his slack face. The eyelids slumped on their dual-coloured irises, heavy and creased, thin-lashed. The nostrils quivered. It had taken her a full week to remember the drugs she kept stashed in a hidden compartment of her bathroom; another week to summon the courage to use them. Goran woke at the tiniest disturbance. She was surprised he didn’t sleep with his eyes open, like a snake.

She crept forward and placed the soaked cloth delicately over his nose and mouth. He inhaled normally, then with a sudden, violent breath. She shrank back. His lungs sucked in the opiate fumes. She waited. This was where Vikram had first slept. Vikram, who thought she had betrayed him. She made herself entertain the thought, holding it hostage for her heart, testing. She willed herself to care.

Nothing. She had spent the two weeks well. She had been in limbo, floating, in all the gaps between time. She had been lighter than vapour and thinner than air, but she was frozen now.

She was ready.

After a minute she took Goran’s wrist. It was thick, muscle bound, and she had to push her finger deep to feel the pulse. As she expected, it had slowed.

For a further ten minutes she waited, allowing herself to hate him but coldly. Then she unbuttoned his jacket and felt inside the pocket and retrieved her keys and his scarab. She went to her room, put on her outdoor gear and picked up her waterproof haversack. Her boots were rubber soled and noiseless as she walked through the apartment, checking once more under the mezzanine. This time she trussed him, tying his hands together and then his feet, her heart jumping every time he shifted. The apartment was filled with the sounds of his laboured breathing and the oscillating machinery from the floors above. Goran would be in trouble for her escape. She was neither happy nor sorry. She was steel.

She slipped the key into the lock. A bubble of pleasure rose as she heard it turn — but she pushed it down, no time for that. She locked the door from the other side.

“Goodbye, Goran. I hope they give you hell.”

The corridor seemed overlarge after her incarceration. She glanced at the ceiling. As she lay night after night, thinking, plotting, she had wondered who knew about the facility, about the Siberian boat. Did Linus know? Had he lied to her all along? She had considered trying to break into the facility. But it would do no good; the scientists would hand her back to the Rechnovs the moment she was caught. The white fly had to wait.

She ran silently down the stairs, nervous of being trapped in the lift. Her lungs and calf muscles, inactive for too long, protested fiercely at the exertion. Once an apartment door opened and she froze in fear, but it was only a man staggering home drunk.

Surface level. This was the wager: her boat would still be here. There was no reason for them to move it, not with Goran guarding the door. She stepped out into open air. It smelled clearer and crisper than ever before. She walked around the decking, her heart thudding with anticipation.

And yes. There it was. Release gurgled in her chest. This time she let it, but kept her head focused as she stepped into the craft, reached under the seat where the spare key was taped, felt it drop into her palm. The electronic hum of the motor was one of the sweetest sounds she had ever known.

The dashboard flashed up with symbols. The battery was fully charged; she had at least twenty-four hours of driving before she’d need to stop at a charge point. Would charge points be easy to find where she was going? Someone would tell her.

As the boat pulled away from the decking, she allowed herself one glance up. She could make out a glimmer at the top of the scraper which might be from her apartment, or from the facility above. Steering with one hand, she tapped the familiar code into Goran’s scarab. Somewhere in Osiris, Lao’s o’comm rang and rang, but he didn’t answer. He was no use to her anymore. She disconnected from the Reef and hurled Goran’s scarab into the sea.

The water was choppy, crusted with foam. The towers slipped by with maddening slowness. Every impulse told her to increase speed — but it was a quiet night, and she could not attract attention. She avoided the main waterways lit with floating night lamps, and took a winding route through the outskirts. She aimed to reach the border at one of the sub-checkpoints. A transport barge passed her, carrying the stench of a fresh fish haul into the City. A late night waterbus followed it. The windows spilled orange rectangles onto the sea. Adelaide averted her face.

The wind picked up and she took the boat up a speed. Scores of towers lay between her and Goran; she was well away. She tipped back her head and relished the feel of the cold on her face, brittle and clean. Axel, if the delivery girl was to be believed, had spent entire days out on the balcony. Maybe her brother had not been so mad after all. Maybe he had realized what she had come to see: the City was a prison, which must be escaped.

He had to be there. She had scoured the City; there was nowhere left but the west. She could imagine it now: Axel packing his bags. The Whitefly documents — some part of his mind would have known they were important, had made him lock them up safe. And then he had run. Go west. The horses would have told him.

She was always destined to go there. The blind Teller had known it. She had told Adelaide months ago, but Adelaide hadn’t listened.

It has been spoken, sister. Spoken in the salt.

She glanced up at the stars, half hidden by cloud, and imagined Axel watching the same patterns. Waiting for the arrival of his twin.

What took you so long?

That was what he would say.

Twin searchlights beamed across the gap in the border netting, one from either side. There was a gap of seconds before they crossed. On the jetty, about fifty metres away, Adelaide saw the shadow of a guard.

Her heart began to thud. The full realization of what she was doing — what she had done — hit her forcefully. For a moment she was paralysed with doubt. Axel, she thought. Think of Axel. She waited, watching the circular arcs, counting the seconds between their passage. The searchlights crossed and separated, crossed and separated. The guard walked slowly across the jetty. At the edge he stopped, looking about. Adelaide cringed back inside her hood. Then his hands moved away from his gun, and as the searchlight swept over she saw that he was unbuckling his trousers to relieve himself.

Now was her chance. Keeping the motor to an almost inaudible hum, she urged the boat forward into the hundred metre stretch of water.

Manoeuvring between the beams of the searchlight, she used all of her strength to haul the boat this way and that. It seemed to take forever. The searchlight drew near. With a final wrench, the boat slipped past the narrow gap in the netting, only metres from the jetty and, she saw with a shock, a hulking barge.

She bent low to the boat and, not daring to look back, shot into the maze of the west.

On the other side there were no lights. Her thrill of exhilaration dissipated in the odd stillness. She looked about: up at the tower window-walls, ahead at the waterways. Not a glimmer. Vikram had told her about the west’s eternal problems with electricity, but this total darkness could not be right. Could it? She brought the boat’s engine down to a bare minimum and kept her lights off. Now she was crawling forward in near blackness, with only the glow from the retreating City to guide her on her way. It was fading all the time.

Fear gripped her. She was tempted to retreat, to get back into the City and find a friend’s apartment or a Boatel to hole up for the night. She turned the boat around, but the shadow of a bigger craft, crawling along the border, its searchlights seeking out the deepest troughs, made her steer towards the nearest tower.

You’re a Rechnov, she reminded herself. You’ve got no reason to be afraid.

But there was no reason for a Rechnov to be this side of the border, and if Vikram had taught her anything, it was that the Home Guards shot first and investigated afterwards.

A pale lambency drew her south, only to find that the light came not from any artificial source but from the sky itself. Her lips whispered silently as the spectacle became clear: aura australis. The aura dappled the night, shifting from green to yellow and back like a living, chameleon thing. She gazed skyward. Can you see this, Axel?

But as soon as they had appeared, the southern lights retreated. The boat rocked as she shifted her weight. What was down there, far below the surface? For the first time, she felt alien to her terrain.

She carried on, further into the west. The darkness was complete. She had planned to head for Vikram’s old tower, and from there to gain directions to the shelter, but without lights to guide her she had little chance of finding the right way. The lack of noise was beginning to spook her. It was as though the entire community had died.

She decided to navigate towards Vikram’s tower anyway. She had to judge the route based on her knowledge of the city’s contours, and an instinctive awareness of the west’s structural layout. The boat responded dutifully to her steering, although the sea was growing more aggressive and her hands inside their gloves were numb. She flexed her fingers. She could barely feel them. She wondered if her hearing had been similarly impaired by the cold.

A light winked over the waves, flashed against Adelaide’s boat and cut out.

“Psst! Get over here!”

After such a stretch of nothingness, she could hardly believe that the sound was real. But it had been human, that voice. She nosed the boat in its direction. The light winked on and off again, as she grew nearer. Her boat bumped against a decking.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“Stars! Are you crazy? Get inside!”

A hand latched onto Adelaide’s shoulder and tugged. She followed its pull, helpless in the darkness to do anything else, and climbed out of the boat.

“I need to tie up—”

“Pass me the chain, I’ll tie her.”

Adelaide hesitated, loathe to obey the anonymous voice. But neither did she want to return to the inky silence. She pocketed the keys and handed over the chain. Their gloves brushed. If the boat was secured, it was done noiselessly. The stranger’s hand found her arm once more and she was guided across the decking. There was a swish as the doors parted. They went into the tower.

The reek caught her by surprise. She coughed and swallowed the noise.

The voice switched on a penlight. Its tiny glow illuminated a blue hat pulled low over straggly hair, bright eyes in a dirty face. The girl was young; she could not be more than about fourteen. She cupped a hand around the penlight, shielding it between their two bodies.

“What are you doing out there?”

“I got lost,” Adelaide said.

“Lost? You lose track of time, or something?”

“I made a few bad turns, before I knew it…”

“Before you knew it, you were past curfew. You got to be careful, lady! Them boats out there, they don’t listen to excuses!”

“Yeah, I–I know.”

“Lucky I spotted you. I’m on watch here. They say I have seagull eyes. You want to sit with me for a bit? Gets boring on my own.”

“Sure.”

The girl switched off the penlight. Adelaide heard her fumbling with a lever. The tower doors opened with a soft whoosh and the girl settled down in the entrance. Adelaide sat beside her. Stationary, she felt the bitter cold. She wrapped her arms around her, wondering how many hours until daylight.

“You see a light — the slightest light — you tell me,” said the western girl, keeping her voice low. “And if you hear talking and all. That’s the one thing about them skadi.” She spat the word with venom. “They make one hell of a racket — always know when they’re coming.” She added, more bitterly, “Guess you don’t need stealth when you got guns.”

“I’ll keep my ears open,” Adelaide promised. The stars knew she had her own reasons to keep her distance from the Guard. Skadi. She practised the word in her head. In the darkness the watch-girl would not see her lips moving.

It gave her an idea. She rubbed her gloved palms silently over the floor, and then over her face. She didn’t want to think about what was on the decking floor, but she was sure it had dirtied her face.

“They haven’t done this tower yet,” said the girl. “They might tonight. If they come we’ve got to shut this door quick. Ain’t no locking from inside but we got a good warning system. Kind of relay thing.”

“Do the boats come past here often?” Adelaide asked. She could not remember Vikram ever telling her about an alarm system, nor, now she thought about it, of patrol boats going through the western waterways so regularly.

“This neighbourhood there’s one every hour or so,” said the girl. “But they’re getting more often since the greenhouse. You must have been lucky not to meet one. Horrible things. I hate the way they sort of glide by, you know, as if they wasn’t really there.”

“Skadi,” said Adelaide, putting enough contempt into the word to cover, she hoped, any mistake in pronunciation.

“Yeah.”

Waves lifted the decking. Spray landed on Adelaide’s nose and cheeks.

“Have you been on watch long?” she asked.

“Three hours. I’m relieved soon. Gets a bit lonely, you know, but someone’s got to do it. I volunteered.” The girl spoke proudly. “They wanted people who were involved, y’know, last time, but I said I wasn’t old enough last time and you got to start somewhere. Fifteen, ent I? Got a good pair of ears. Heard you, didn’t I? And you got a good quiet boat there. Why were you out so late anyways?”

“I’m looking for my brother. He’s disappeared.”

The girl gave her arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Everyone’s gone disappeared round here. Gone off to take a crack at the skadi, has he?”

“I think so.”

“My little bro’s talkin’ about joining Maak’s people — y’know, Maak. Ma’s got a hell of a time keeping him in. I know how he feels. Sometimes I want to go and join up myself but a knife ent much use against one of them. Not if you only use it once. Reckon I’d be good at stealth work, though.”

Something had happened since Adelaide had been locked up, something nobody had told her about. Home Guard boats belonged on the border, not in the western quarter, not unless there had been violence. What was the greenhouse? Who was Maak? Further questions would betray her ignorance, and her background, but the watch-girl seemed friendly, eager to talk, if Adelaide could find the right angle.

She was about to ask the girl if she knew about Vikram’s aid schemes when they were interrupted.

“Who are you yakking away to down there?”

Adelaide sensed the girl swivel around.

“Oh Drake, hey, this is — y’know I never got your name.”

“It’s Ata.”

“Ata. I’m Liis. She got caught out after curfew.”

“You better hole up here till morning,” said the newcomer. “I wouldn’t risk the bridges now, wind’s getting up.”

“Is, isn’t it?” Liis exclaimed. “I heard people saying a Tarctic’s on the way.”

“A Tarctic?” Adelaide was shocked into speech. She hadn’t bargained on being in the west when a Tarctic struck.

“—’s what they say.”

Liis got to her feet and Adelaide mirrored her. Her hearing was becoming more acute. They went inside. The woman called Drake flicked on a penlight. It seemed brighter this time. Drake smiled. One of her front teeth was completely black.

“She can crash with your folks, Liis?”

“Sure, she can!”

“Great. Good job, girl. You get some sleep now. Night, Ata.”

A creaking lower lift carried them the first twenty-five flights, juddering all the way up. Adelaide was relieved when they got out and groped their way up the lightless stairwell for the next three floors.

“Mind if we sit out here a minute?” Liis asked when they reached her door. “I need a smoke.”

“Sure.” Adelaide perched next to Liis. She heard the rustling of paper as Liis rolled herself a cigarette.

“Do you want one?” Liis asked.

“Please.” Goran had taken all of her cigarillos, which might have been useful here, if only to make contacts. In the flare of the lighter, Adelaide saw Liis’s pale face, the outline of a scratched and chipped door, the stairs pouring away into the blackness. She lit her cigarette. It tasted cheap and dirty but there was a rough sweetness to it, an end of day sweetness. Her lips tingled. She could imagine Axel sitting here, in the nameless dark, only his horses still bright enough to see.

“You know, sometimes I get dead scared out there.” Liis’s voice was a tiny whisper. “Sometimes I get thinking, if I died out there, no one would ever know how, or what happened to me or anything.”

Adelaide put an awkward arm around the girl’s shoulders. Through the layers of clothing, she could feel how thin the girl was.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

Adelaide slept deeply and woke with a jolt. She did not comprehend, at first, where she was — strange faces, people jumping to their feet — a lot of people, more than she had thought a room this size could contain when her head hit the floor last night. Shouts volleyed between them.

“What the hell!”

“What was that—”

“Was that an explosion?”

“—’s the fucking skadi.”

The room vaulted into action. Adelaide scrambled out of the folds of her blanket, heart racing. A man lifted his shirt and checked a knife was at his belt. A woman — Liis’s mother? — gathered together all the bedding. A boy held them in place whilst she yanked them together with her belt. Two smaller children poised by the doorway, wide awake and alert. Liis stuffed things into a rucksack; newspapers, clothes, a pair of boots. Nobody asked who Adelaide was. Nobody cared.

“Ata — grab the other bag,” Liis said breathlessly.

Adelaide picked up the drawstring bag. It was lighter than she expected. In a matter of seconds, the room had been stripped to its peeling walls.

The boy opened the door and peeked out. From further down the tower came the sounds of invasion: people running up and down stairs, heavy boots, doors slamming, crashes and yells as doors were kicked in.

“Shit, they’re early,” said the boy. The woman shook his shoulder.

“Come on, move up.”

Adelaide followed Liis’s family, or friends, or room-mates, through the corridor and into the stairwell. This morning it was patchily lit. As they progressed upwards people were opening doors, peering blearily out. Some, like Liis’s group, had already got their belongings together and were also moving up the tower.

Congestion built up, noisy and incoherent. Adelaide had never seen so many people in one space. Their faces were hard and dirty, frightened. Within a couple of flights, she was separated from Liis’s friends and could only see the girl herself, blue hat bobbing in the crowd a little way ahead. She lost Liis momentarily, panicked and shoved forward. Where were they all going? No-one had said, because everyone knew — everyone but Adelaide.

A female voice shouted above the rest. “Liis! Over here!”

Leaning over the handrail from the floor above was the girl with the black tooth. Drake. Liis yelled back and Adelaide located her guide again. She wasn’t far ahead. Adelaide pushed through to her, relief welling, and together they joined Drake. People streamed from above and below, funnelling into a corridor.

“Early raid,” Drake panted. “We better get over the bridge. They’re already at level thirteen.”

“I’ve got me ma and all,” said Liis, gesturing below. In the moving crowd Adelaide saw the gaggle of mother, the boy and the two children. Liis’s mother had the bundle of bedding strapped to her back.

Drake gripped Liis’s arm.

“I know, I know, it’ll be alright, just make sure you get over, they mustn’t find anyone in the network.”

Liis waved at her family. “This way!”

Drake dove into the corridor. Liis followed Drake and Adelaide followed Liis. It was the lightest part of the tower that Adelaide had seen so far. Then she saw that the people in front were framed against a doorway. The light was coming from outside. They were going out of the tower, and there was no glass, no shuttle lines or enclosed bridges.

The queue in front of her dwindled in short bursts. There were twenty people between Adelaide and the exit. There were five. Then two. Liis was no longer in front. She gasped, tried to turn around, and was knocked forward. She was in the doorway.

Before she knew what was happening, her feet had stepped out onto an impossibly narrow metal catwalk. The wind whipped her hair out of its hood. She clutched at the rails and found two slack plastic ropes. She was wobbling on a rail in open air fifty floors above surface.

The bridge fed into the tower opposite. People in front of her were walking sure-footed along the metal. It was a good hundred metres away. The crowd pressed at her back. She almost lost her balance.

“Hey, watch your step!” The yell from behind was impatient. If she didn’t move she’d be pushed.

Adelaide took one diving breath and sprinted. Halfway across she looked down and saw the sea churning below. She saw the metal catwalk, riveted, orange with rust and glued together with stars knew what. She staggered, grabbed the rope, righted herself, ran on. At the other end she fell into a pair of outstretched arms.

The man’s mass was solid, safe. She stayed there, panting as though she had run the length of a shuttle line. She was aware of her rescuer shaking his head.

“Crazy!” he was saying.

Adelaide looked back, expecting Liis to be right behind her, but she could not see the other girl, only the impossible fragility of the bridge. She was not the only one frightened; others were refusing to cross, fighting to get back inside, but still more pushed forward. A man dashed across and Adelaide saw what she had not realized when making her own run — the bridge buckled under his weight. People pointed and cried out. Adelaide spotted Liis at last.

“Liis!”

She waved frantically.

The other girl raised her arm in response and yelled. Adelaide could not hear above the well of noise.

The man who’d caught her was shouting out.

“One at a time! Don’t put too much weight on it! There’s bridges on levels sixty-five and seventy!”

A woman stepped out. Adelaide recognized Drake. She had lost her hat. Drake put one foot on the bridge, paused for a second, and ran. Her boots struck the metal like gunfire. It was gunfire; the skadi were shooting.

Drake was over. Their eyes met in a glimmer of shared experience and then Drake too turned to look back.

“Okay, and another! One more!”

The crowd were no longer listening. Something had made them panic, something that Adelaide could not see. There was a surge and a line of people spilled onto the narrow bridge. Then a second surge and Adelaide’s hands went to her face. They toppled, from the bridge, from the fiftieth-floor doorway, one after another. They went as dominoes did. Over and over. Cries echoed into the gulf.

The bridge groaned. It sagged under the weight of clinging bodies. Some dangled from the underside, holding on by two hands or by one. More were falling. They fell like dolls. The bodies were all sizes, some large, some incredibly small. She could hardly believe that they were real except for the screams.

She saw Liis. The girl was on the bridge, gripping the rope, urging on the woman in front of her. Someone pushed Liis from behind and Liis turned, gesticulated with her free hand, yelled.

The entire construction swayed.

“Liis!”

Adelaide was not sure if she or Drake had shouted. Both of them were staring, side by side, powerless.

“Help! Help us!”

“It’s going, it’s going to break—”

“This way, keep moving, come on, run, get off, run!”

Adelaide’s rescuer was hauling those who had made it bodily inside. Adelaide and Drake were pressed against the interior wall.

There was a crack. At the far end, the rivets holding the bridge gave. The metal construction plunged downwards out of Adelaide’s sight. People scrabbled on the ledge opposite. She saw three, four, five more fall. They grabbed at the feet of those above, who were in turn pushed out by the weight of the blind crowd.

Adelaide’s hands shook against her cheeks. She stopped counting.

Her rescuer threw down a rope. A pair of hands, Drake’s hands, reached for it and Adelaide took hold too, understanding that they must all pull to save anyone left to save. The bridge was still attached to their tower, hanging down out of sight. She heard the metal strain. The man was on his stomach at the ledge. He fed out the rope.

“Grab on!”

They were too late. The metal separated with a hideous, scraping tear. The screams of the falling seemed to reverberate on and on. She heard a burst of gunfire.

“Liis,” she said.

Drake shook her head. The man on his stomach did not move. The message, finally, must have been passed forward in the tower opposite, because the crowd began to retreat, until only a handful of the marooned remained looking out.

“What you got there?” Drake asked. She was looking at the drawstring bag across Adelaide’s body.

“I don’t know — Liis gave—”

Adelaide opened the bag. There were only a couple of items inside, a tobacco pouch and a heart-shaped salt tin. She wanted to cry. The emotion came without warning and she had to blink it away.

“C’mon,” said Drake.

Adelaide followed mindlessly. They were going downstairs now. A musty, sickly sweetish smell. She could see by the faint glimmer from cracks under doors. She kept her eyes on Drake’s boots, solid chunky things, with caterpillar soles, the fraying ends of her jeans tucked into them. The boots moved regularly, though the stairs were uneven. Once Adelaide’s shoes sent a scree of rubble tumbling away and she put out a hand to stop herself slipping. The wall was damp and spongy.

Twenty or so floors down, they turned into a corridor. Drake stopped outside a door that bulged in its frame. She knocked once and opened it without waiting for a reply. She gave Adelaide a nudge inside.

There were two people in the tiny room; one male, bearded, with blue eyes, the other female, with a wing of sheer peroxide hair. The man stared at her, a strange expression on his face. Adelaide stared back, confused.

“Look what I’ve found.” Drake spoke from behind her.

An inkling formed in Adelaide’s head but there was no time for her body to anticipate the blow. Drake’s strike was efficient. In the seconds before losing consciousness, as pain gathered at her temples, Adelaide heard the beginnings of the peculiar conversation that must follow.

“Face like that, can’t mistake it,” said Drake. “Shame really — she seemed…”

38 ¦ VIKRAM

His breath rattled in and out. The blanket was scrunched at his mouth, a futile attempt to keep what little moisture his breath produced as a barrier. All his energy was concentrated on quashing the tickle in his throat. If he gave in to it, his body would implode.

When he moved his wrist, the throat-tickle intensified. His eyes blurred, making tears with the effort of stilling it. He waited for his vision to clear. His watch face loomed large and indistinct. The hour hand pointed to the three, or the four. He lost sight of it; when he next focused it had moved to the other side of the watch face. A figure stood at the end of his bed. He was hallucinating again.

“Hello, Vikram.” The voice stirred a memory. A calm voice, measured and assured. “You’re looking in bad shape. I’m sorry to see that.”

Vikram gazed wonderingly at the man in the elegant suit. He was grey, with slender stripes, like the hide of a tiger shark. The stripes refused to stay put; they swam over the man. What was Linus Rechnov doing in Vikram’s head?

“Can you sit up?”

His own imagination was goading him now. Something strange happened. The figure moved towards him very quickly and took him in a steel grasp. The world lurched. The walls moved. The cell door became vertical.

Vikram gagged. He clamped his teeth, bit down, but it was too late. His chest began to heave. The coughs tore out of him. He spat blood onto the sheets and the filthy material of his trousers.

“Hello! You there!” Linus was shouting. “What’s wrong with him?”

Other people entered the cell, crowding it. He cringed away. A hand came towards him. He tried to get back but it grew, round and pale, ready to engulf him. It clamped his forehead and squeezed.

“High fever.”

“Dunno, looks like TB to me.”

“Don’t you inoculate these people?”

Vikram’s insides churned. Something was chewing on his organs. Fish, probably. Perhaps he was already dead. When he closed his eyes, the idea did not seem so bad — then hands grabbed his shoulders once more. A bilious wave made him faint.

Linus Rechnov was here. There was something important that Vikram had to say to Linus.

“The boats.” He tried to lift his arms, take hold of the other man’s face. It was imperative that Linus understood. “The boats, they don’t come back. Tell me why the boats don’t come back.”

He fumbled at air.

“What’s he saying?”

“He’s raving. Get a sedative.”

Linus flickered, a creeping red darkness around him. His face became smaller and his voice got thinner and thinner.

“Listen to me, Vikram. I am going to get you out of here. I’m going to get you treatment. And then you are going to do something for me. Do you understand? Nod if you understand.”

Vikram’s head fell forward, but it was an involuntary action. His mind had already abandoned the visitation. He was sinking into unconsciousness.

His arms lay immobile on crisp white bed sheets. A needle attached to a plastic bag was stuck in the crook of Vikram’s left elbow, and a clear substance dripped steadily into his blood.

Linus Rechnov sat on a visitor’s chair. Vikram was in hospital, and he had a visitor. He entertained this notion silently, knowing it must lead somewhere, wondering where.

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days.”

Vikram blinked. Three days. The quiet of this place, the calm efficiency of the nurse who had entered earlier, changed the drip, taken his pulse and smiled at him, seemed unearthly. It had taken Vikram a while to realize that these were no longer the phantoms of his mind.

“You’re not well,” Linus said. “I can see that. But we don’t have much time so I have to brief you now. Adelaide has been captured by renegades in the west. They have direct contact with the press and they are using her as leverage. They say her life is on the line if we don’t cooperate.”

His mind reeled.

“Captured? How?”

“They’ve asked for a negotiator.”

Linus let the silence drag out, forcing Vikram to complete the implicated conclusion.

“You want me to negotiate?” His voice did not sound the way he remembered it. It was thicker. Hoarser. It sounded old.

“The rebels have specifically asked that we hand you over. They refuse to allow anyone else to negotiate. No doubt they see your release as another coup for their cause.”

Vikram turned this over. His own instinct was less certain. The aid schemes might have been seen as a terrible failure: this request could be as much about revenge as it seemed to be about rescue. He tried to pull his mind into focus. He needed facts.

“There’s been more riots?”

“Riots, yes, that’s where it started.” Linus was impatient.

“And what do the — the rebels want?” The gauze covering the needle in his arm irritated his skin. He scratched at it.

“With the current shortages, reserve supplies of fish and kelp are being held back. The renegades have demanded the release of these stores.”

“Seems fair to me.”

“You realize that this places me in a highly awkward situation. I have been seen to pledge my support of the west. Of your schemes, in fact. Now those same people have my sister as a hostage.”

“What are you trying to say — I owe you something? I think your sister’s intervention has secured me enough problems for one lifetime, don’t you?”

Linus leaned forward.

“It doesn’t look so good for your people, Vikram.”

Their eyes met and locked. Anger took Vikram by surprise. He could feel the strain the emotion was putting on his body, only beginning to recover. He strove for calm. The facts. Just the facts.

“How did Adelaide get taken hostage?”

“I have no idea. It appears the little fool was in the west.”

“In the west?” He was temporarily stupefied. He had assumed, hazily, some sort of covert raid. What did Adelaide think she was doing in the west? He thought of the last time he had seen her, the reddened eyes, the bald stranger’s words: She’s under house arrest. Adelaide had run away then. From one imprisonment directly into the arms of another. Vikram’s lip curled. It was absolutely typical.

Linus looked away. “I was also… surprised, as you can imagine. It’s not like Adelaide to go slumming it.”

Vikram felt an intense wave of dislike for the man.

“Did you ever show her that letter?”

“The letter has no bearing on the matter,” Linus said testily.

“It might if it made her go off on some insane mission.”

“She hasn’t seen the letter. And why she is in the west is no longer relevant. The fact is, she’s there, she’s been caught, and she’s a bargaining chip. We need her back. The press are all over this.”

Linus had the expression of a man who needed something, needed it badly, but did not want to admit it.

“So what do I get for negotiating for you?”

“You’re out of prison, aren’t you?”

“For good?”

“You’ll get a full pardon and amnesty in the City if you cooperate fully with us.”

“Us?”

“Myself and my father.”

There had to be more to it.

“By amnesty, do you mean Citizenship?”

“Citizenship, amnesty, yes.” Linus’s lips compressed.

“They’re not the same thing.”

“Fine. Citizenship. As long as you cooperate.”

“And by as long as you mean…”

“You understand what I mean, Vikram.”

Linus sat back in the chair and folded his arms. Vikram understood the message, which Linus was so reluctant to spell out. Freedom he had got. That was the bait. Release, and medical care. It put him in debt, too. The drip, the expensive chemicals, the nurse’s smile — all paid for by the Rechnovs. Citizenship he would get, but at a further cost; the cost of being in someone else’s pocket.

“What do you want me to do?”

“We’ve been given a location. You’re to go there alone. When you get there, one of their people will take you to Adelaide.”

“Who am I dealing with? Is it the NWO?”

“No, we believe this is a new network. They’re calling themselves Surface. The leader, or leaders, refuse to give any names, but the ringleader is referred to as the Coordinator. So far, that is all we have managed to ascertain.”

“You’re making deals with people and you don’t even know who they are.”

“It’s a trait with the west,” Linus said smoothly. “You seem to prefer anonymity — a mistake, but there you have it. You’ll be tracked, of course.”

“Tracked?”

“You don’t think I’m actually sending you to negotiate, do you? You’re a bargaining chip yourself. We already tried to arrange a prisoner exchange, but the rebels have refused point blank. They’ve refused all deals. Besides, you might defect.”

“So what you’re really asking is that I betray my own people.”

Linus ignored this.

“Once you’re in, proceed as the rebels expect. They’ll think you’re on their side. Keep your ears open for information. I imagine it will be a simple procedure — they’ll give you a way of contacting us.”

“If they think I’m on their side, why would they use me to negotiate at all?” Vikram interrupted.

“Because they have to negotiate,” Linus said sharply. “I’m not going to play games with you, Vikram. You know as well as I do that the Home Guard could go into the west and crush these riots, and the City would turn a blind eye — more, Citizens would condone such a move. But this time, we can’t, because the rebels have Adelaide and they’ve informed the press. Besides, the Council is anxious to avoid excessive bloodshed. So yes, I think the rebels will be aiming to negotiate, and you, as an airlift, are the obvious choice.”

The word airlift sounded like a vulgarity on Linus’s lips. Vikram did not reply. He noticed a red stain blossoming through the drip gauze.

Linus continued. “You’ll have to make sure that it’s you who brings Adelaide out.”

“Whilst you’re tracking me,” Vikram said dully. He glanced up at the drip. The plastic crinkled inwards as the fluid ran dry. The nurse would be in to replace it soon.

“Precisely. Once you and Adelaide are out, you can leave the rest to the Guard.”

“Skadi.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He smoothed the gauze, trying to stem the blood. “I get it.”

“You’re in agreement, then?”

Vikram paused.

“What about the aid schemes?”

Linus shrugged. “They could be reinstated. Maybe next year. If the rescue operation goes successfully.”

“And if I don’t comply…”

“I only have jurisdiction to remove your sentence under the conditions that you are aiding the Osiris Council.”

It was as he had expected; as he had known, from the start of the conversation. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“Not really, Vikram. No. I’m sorry.”

“When do I leave?”

Linus sat forward. Brisk and matter-of-fact now. “I’m told you need twenty-four hours before you will be fit to travel. A meeting place is being arranged with the rebels for early tomorrow evening. Your boat is already here. It will contain a decoy tracker. You can tell the rebels about that one. Someone is coming to fit you with a secondary device.”

“I want some things from my apartment. My outdoor clothes.”

“We can bring anything you need here.”

“I want to go myself.”

“Fine. You’ll have to leave earlier.”

Linus straightened his necktie. It had a subtle pattern, almost like wings. Something stirred in Vikram’s memory; slowly, he dredged it out. Adelaide. The jacuzzi. The last time he had seen Linus. A phrase that had been spoken by both siblings.

“What’s Whitefly?” Vikram asked.

“Whitefly?” Linus’s polite smile hovered, but instinct told Vikram that he had hit a nerve. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend it doesn’t mean something. You and Adelaide both mentioned Whitefly—”

“Adelaide—” Linus spoke too quickly, broke off just as fast. Adelaide isn’t supposed to know, Vikram thought. He watched Linus gather his composure. “You’re right, it does mean something. Something I wish I’d never been told, frankly. My advice, Vikram — and as you know, I don’t offer my advice arbitrarily — best forget you ever heard the word. You can consider that part of the terms of our agreement.”

Vikram looked at him squarely.

“One other thing, Linus, before you go. Tell me, how does a man so interested in promoting equality end up sending in guns on innocent people? Or was it all a big sham from the start, helping me?”

A shadow crossed Linus’s face. Vikram could not tell if it was anger, shame or simple contempt. He did not expect an answer from the other man, but there was some small satisfaction gained from posing the question.

“You once asked me something very similar, the first time we met,” Linus said at last. “I don’t suppose you remember now. Why would you? You’re not a politician, Vikram. And you’re not a Rechnov either. Take comfort in the fact that you have no knowledge of either.” He checked his watch. “I have to go. I won’t see you until your return. Good luck.” Linus stood, brushing down his suit.

“Any messages?”

“I’m sorry?”

“For your sister.”

For the first time, Linus hesitated. Then he said, “I’ll see her soon enough.”

The nurse prepared a bag of medication. “Take one of these every few hours,” she instructed, holding up a small plastic bottle. “They’ll keep your energy levels up.”

“Thanks.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, shaved and dressed for outdoors. His face felt light. The back of his neck tingled where they had placed the invisible tracker. He did not tell the nurse that taking medication would probably be the last of his concerns.

“If you feel very weak or faint, give yourself a shot of adrenalin. I’ve given you antibiotics too. All the dosages are on the bottles. Read them properly. Your body is still fighting off the infection. Don’t overexert yourself.” She was speaking very fast. He had a sudden sense of the pace at which his life was about to run, and was bewildered by it.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll read them.”

He held out his hand for the bag. The nurse stared at it. Then she blurted, “I think it’s outrageous the way they’ve treated you. Stitched you up. The Rechnovs. After all you’ve done.”

It had not occurred to Vikram that he might meet with sympathy. He was touched. The nurse pushed the bag into his hand.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. He read her name tag. “Thanks, Yilla.”

“It’s not fair,” she said.

It was paradoxical, he thought, that the first person this side of the border whose empathy he had recognized outright might also be the last.

Yilla escorted him to the lift. At reception he paused for a moment, observing the order of the place. Doctors in white coats held Surfboards with details ready to be checked. Patients waited to be called. He tried to imagine the resources it would take to set up three surgeries like this in the west. It occurred to him for the first time that such order might really be unattainable; he’d been shouting at the Moon.

“Vikram Bai?”

It was one of Linus’s people. Not in uniform but with a face that said skadi to Vikram as clearly as text. Hoisting the backpack, he followed the man outside. It was late afternoon and the sun hung low in the sky.

The skad directed him to his boat. He showed Vikram where the decoy tracker was. He gave him a map with the location where he was to meet the rebels in three hours time. Vikram stuffed it into a pocket. The man said good luck, but did not sound as if he meant it, and left him.

The world in his absence had become colossal. Vikram hunkered down in the boat, feeling small and scared. His stomach surged with the movement of the waves.

Boats raced by. There were so many of them and the passengers’ eyes were sharp like birds. He did not remember outside being this loud. The noise made him dizzy. He clamped his palms over his ears and bent over, putting his head between his knees. The gleaming towers bore down on him.

When he looked up, the world had not shrunk, and he still had to find his way through the waterways. Home. First he had to go home. The notion confused him: should he go east, or west?

Get a grip, Vik. Switch on the ignition. He leaned forward and turned the key.

A part of his consciousness observed the journey dispassionately. He understood that this time, prison would be with him forever. It would haunt him in every glimpse of green, in every wind-bitten cough. It would linger in his fear of small places, and his confusion at the very large. The three week spell had marked him in a way he would never again be able to ignore.

Whatever happens now, I can’t go back.

I’d rather die.

He breathed deeply, watched the water. He was, as Linus Rechnov had informed him, on a tight schedule.

39 ¦ ADELAIDE

The storm raged overhead. Purple clouds lurched across the night sky, disgorging sheets of rain. Adelaide stood in an open doorway thirty-six floors above the surface looking at a nylon and fibreglass bridge sheened with water. A bolt of lightning lanced through the rain. She saw gaps yawn between the planks. Clinging to the ropes, halfway across, the figures of Pekko and Rikard tottered forward. The bridge blew back and forth. Adelaide dug her nails into the walls.

You’ve done this before.

They had crossed nine bridges tonight. Bridges made of anything and everything, obstacles lashed together, pitted with holes and rockpools, each less solid than the last.

You just have to take the first step. You can’t let them see you’re scared.

But she could not stop talking. The sounds made little sense, then barely any, then none at all.

“I can’t do it, can’t do it, not that not that not that…”

Behind her, Nils and Drake were growing impatient.

“There’s no other way,” shouted Nils.

“We could blindfold her,” Drake shouted back. “She might go over that way.”

“She’ll panic more if she can’t see.”

“She won’t if she trusts us.”

“She won’t trust either of us.”

“She will if she wants to live.”

The rain splattered the fibreglass boards, making them slippery as ice underfoot.

Don’t look down — don’t—

Too late. There was the sea, showing the whites of its eyes. Those waves would smash her body against concrete towers. The currents would suck her underwater and rip the air from her lungs.

The wind shrieked through the doorway. Nils was tying a blindfold around her eyes. She did not even try to stop him.

“Listen to me!” Drake’s voice brushed her ear. “Do exactly as I say. If you don’t move when I tell you, you’re going to fall. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Put your left foot forward.”

They stepped onto the bridge. Her foot slid and her heart leapt before the boot sole gripped. She clung to the ropes. The wind lacerated them. Like a baby, Drake nursed her every step of the way.

At the other end they took off her blindfold. She held out her hands automatically for them to retie her wrists. She looked at nobody and nobody said anything.

They took her through another wet, dripping, crumbling stairwell. Upstairs this time. She had overheard them saying that they might be followed by boat; this, it appeared, was the reason they were moving westwards via bridges. The bridges were never on the same level. They had been moving up and across and down and across in a never-ending game of squid and kelp. Each tower was less inhabitable than the last. None of the towers had electricity, and if anyone was living there she did not see them.

When they went into an empty room and stopped she sat on the spot, dead with exhaustion, too tired to look around her or even imagine trying to escape. The floor was wet, as it always was. Icy trickles dripped from the sodden fur of her hood and down her neck.

“Someone check her wrists,” Pekko said curtly. He disappeared. The other three seemed to relax a little, although Nils sat in front of Adelaide and told her to hold out her hands. Pekko had tied the ropes against her skin, so that they could not slip over the material of her gloves, and in spite of the cold she could feel where it rubbed. Nils’s fingers brushed against her wrists as he checked each of the knots.

“Vikram told me you’re a good man,” she muttered.

“And he told me you’re a stupid bitch,” said Nils, but amiably, she thought. “Which of us d’you figure he’s lying to?”

She felt her bonds loosen, then tighten again as he secured them differently. The ropes lay flatter against her skin, and she realized that they would chafe less like that.

“Did he really say that?”

“He did.” Nils paused. “It was a long time ago.”

Adelaide wondered whether he felt sorry for her, and found the prospect more frightening than simple contempt. Nils probably knew what Pekko was planning to do with her.

She gave him a low lashed look, and as he tightened the knots, let her fingers curl up to his wrists.

“That’s not going to work,” Nils said.

“What’s not?”

“Any of your tricks. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you why, and then you can stop trying. I have nothing personal against you. Thousands might, but I don’t. But that girl who was with us before — Ilona — I happen to love her. She sells her body to make a living and in these parts that means one thing — she’s bonded to someone. Because we found you, and on condition that we keep you safe, her cunt of a pimp is going to let her go. So d’you see why you might as well give up now?”

Nils drew the knots taut and let her hands go.

“I guess Vikram was right,” she said.

“Vikram’s underwater because of you,” he said roughly. “The way I see it, you don’t have the right to speak his name.”

“I never meant for him to get hurt. I tried to get him out.”

“Makes no difference to me.”

“Where’s Ilona now?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Why are these towers such a dump, anyway?”

“Because the City screwed us,” said Nils. “Over and over again. You never kept a single promise you made in the last fifty years.”

“Are you going to bargain for me?” she asked.

Whatever Nils might have replied was lost in a fit of hoarse coughing. His eyes streamed, he gasped for breath. Adelaide peered at him more closely.

“You’re sick.”

“Fuck off.”

He went to sit with Drake and Rikard and the three of them conversed in low voices. Adelaide’s hearing had grown sharper, but she could not make out what they were saying above the shrill of the storm.

Her captors were coordinating with other groups, but whenever Pekko took a call on his scarab he talked in secret. She had caught muttered references to the greenhouse and the desalination plant. They let slip no other information. She knew only that an insurrection was under way, and that she had become a part of it. She was the pawn.

The journey seemed to have taken aeons, but it was still dark. She could only have been awake for a matter of hours.

She had regained consciousness in the bottom of a boat, lying on her side, a tarpaulin covering her body to the nose. Her wrists and ankles were tied. When she tried to move she found that they were roped together. Her temples throbbed.

The splash of waves was strange from her position below the waterline, broken with knocks. The clacks were rhythmical. She realized they came from oars.

Her captors talked over her. Their heads were swollen lollipops against the fading sky. It swayed above her, the colour of a turning bruise, purple bleeding into sludgy green. The clouds looked ready to burst.

“—heard anything from Ilona?”

“Still waiting on Maak for a location.”

“She’ll be alright, Nils.”

“I know, but I could’ve—”

“You know why.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that a…?”

“No. Waterbus.”

The last voice was Drake. She was sitting in the stern. Her boots were close to Adelaide’s head, close enough to see, in the disappearing light, the beaten quality of the leather under its waterproof waxing. A few wiry curls escaped the outline of her hood, nodding in the wind. Adelaide was concealed from the worst of the wind’s blast which bagged and billowed the others’ clothes.

The man with the beard was one of the two rowers. The other was a burly man whose hood was pulled forward over his face. Their arms worked in strong, regular motion. The fourth occupant, seated at the prow, wore no hood. His hair was shaved down to stubble and she wondered how he could stand the cold.

She noticed the bulge of guns in their clothes. They held them close, but not in the easy, caressing manner of the skadi. They held them as though they were scared to let the weapons go. That worried her more.

They passed beneath a bridge. Footsteps sprinted over with a hollow boom. A pair of dangling feet, a jeer and a missile splashing the water, not far from the boat. Then they were past. Peering back, Adelaide saw teeth ridged the underside of the bridge. Icicles. She could just make out other bridges higher up, like faint webbing in the dusk.

She tried to lift her head. The effort caused an explosion of pain behind her eyes, and drew the attention of the man with the shaved head. He observed her coldly, unblinkingly.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Shut up.”

Those two quiet syllables held a world of hatred.

“Will you just tell me where we’re going?”

“I said shut up. If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you. Do you understand? Don’t speak, nod.”

Mute, terrified, she dipped her head.

“Blindfold her.”

Drake’s hands reached down. Adelaide saw the other girl’s eyes intent on the task, before the material enfolded her vision. With the loss of sight, her internal compass clicked off. The boat’s uneven motion nauseated her. Open your ears, she reminded herself. They were her most useful tool now.

Night would be setting in. She remembered the girl Liis saying something about a curfew, but she did not want to think about Liis, Liis who had fallen, lost Liis. Adelaide did not know what had happened to her family. She knew nothing about the girl at all, except that she had been fighting for something she believed in, and now she was dead.

On the backs of her eyelids she watched them fall again, slowly this time. Apart from Goran, Adelaide had little experience with the Home Guard, but if all of them were like Goran, then she knew what had happened after. Goran was a man who enjoyed cruelty. He understood it as a science. Those falling bodies were not people to the Guard. They were target practice.

As the oars dipped and rose she had caught her captor’s names. Rikard, the burly man, Nils, the one Drake had led her too. And Pekko.

From her journey in the boat to where they rested now, she had gained an idea of the group’s dynamic. Pekko was in charge. She sensed his surveillance, a brooding pulse in the darkness. Instinctively, she understood that all of his resentment and rage towards the City was now conditioned into a sole desire: to spill her blood. She heard it in his voice, a rigidly controlled hunger when he spoke about her. She saw it in the way he took out his knife, and scraped it back and forth over a loose bit of metal.

She tried to speak to him.

“What do you want? My family can pay.”

She knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. Pekko looked at her speculatively, as though she was an insect, one that he would like to flatten and lick the blood that came out.

“You Rechnovs…” he said slowly. “All you do is take, and glory in the taking.” He stripped off his glove, held up his left hand, and she saw that the last two fingers had been crudely amputated. “You know how I lost these? No, it wasn’t in the riots. It was the cold, a long time before. Stars, I despise your family. I think I despise you even more. You know, in the west you’re a laughingstock. But you’re dangerous too, dangerous like the senile are dangerous, because they’re so stupid they can’t see what they’re doing. Money? What use is money to me? But I’ll watch them crawl, your Rechnov clan. I’ll watch their attempts to get you back.”

He drew the knots tight and smiled.

“I wonder how hard they’ll try?”

She had hoped that Vikram’s name might act as a kind of talisman for her safety, or even a potential exchange which would release them both. It had met with anger, resentment and suspicion. Pekko grew sullen at any reference to Vikram’s ties with Citizens. For him, her relationship with Vikram was akin to debasement for the west. Nils merely sneered.

Whilst they waited for Pekko to come back, Rikard opened his pack and distributed kelp squares. He came over and gave her one, then offered her the water flask. He went back to the others without a word. He had never spoken to her. The kelp was stale and hard but compact. She chewed steadily. Her tongue drained the salt from it and left her sucking thirstily.

She gazed out of the window-wall. Panes of bufferglass had broken away and were boarded up. What remained was filthy. Lightning flashed and she glimpsed the tower opposite. Confused, inexplicably afraid, she forgot her hunger and stopped, the kelp square half eaten in her hand. Her teeth chattered, but she did not notice. Another flash lit up outside. Thunder rumbled close by.

“It’s leaning,” she said. Nils shot her a glance. “The tower. It’s leaning.”

“Something’s eating the foundations,” he said shortly.

“Something?”

“Unhappy spirits. It burned once, that tower. An electrical fault, so they said. It was when the first refugees came. People were inside it. They burned too. Stands to reason their spirits haunt the place.” Nils glanced towards the window-wall. “Other people say it’s a monster.”

Adelaide stared where the slanted tower had been. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Good,” Nils said blankly. “Because that’s where we’re going next.”

She could not suppress a shiver. Something about the tower chilled her. She had an unshakeable sense of premonition.

Pekko returned. He flashed his torch in her face and then onto her hands, as he always did when he had been gone for more than a minute. There was someone with him; a stooped figure in shapeless rags, who could have been male or female. The voice, when it spoke, was a hoarse rasp.

“No more bridges. Only seventieth.”

“What’s the seventieth?” Nils asked.

The figure shuffled back reluctantly. Pekko caught its arm.

“You agreed to show us.”

“Not good to go there, cursed place, why you cross?”

“We have to get across. Where’s the bridge?”

“Don’t show. I tell. You listen, go if you must.”

Adelaide lifted her eyes to this weird specimen, trying to see its face. She sensed her gaze reciprocated.

Nils went over.

The two men and the stranger conversed in low voices. Pekko muttered something under his breath. Nils responded sharply. Pekko nodded. They both glanced at Adelaide.

“What?” she said.

“We’re going up,” Nils said curtly.

The would-have-been guide disappeared as abruptly as he had come.

The five of them climbed to the seventieth floor and reached a door that careened on one hinge. Pekko flashed about a torch. The room was empty, completely empty, even without litter. There was a two metre gash where part of the window-wall had been ripped away. Icy sleet blew inside. It was freezing.

“Stars,” muttered Nils. He was wheezing.

“Great bridge,” Adelaide ventured. She had to get Nils on side.

“Oh, you’ll like the bridge,” said Pekko, a nasty grin curling his lips. He reached overhead and tugged on a length of rope which was attached to a metal ring in the wall.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the bridge,” Pekko said.

Adelaide stared, uncomprehending. She looked at the metal ring, the thick tarred knots, the rope which ran close to the ceiling and out.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

The others looked equally unhappy. Drake and Nils exchanged glances. Rikard pulled on the rope, testing its strength.

“Pekko, you’d better go first,” said Nils at last. “We don’t want her running off on the other side.”

Pekko nodded. From his rucksack he took a tangle of rope and began fashioning it into some kind of harness. Adelaide watched his hands at work under the torchlight with a sick fascination. She glanced through the gaping wall. Now the leaning tower was invisible. Thunder rumbled again.

“I’m not going over a rope,” she said. “We’re seventy floors above sea level, are you all crazy? Did you hear what that — that man said downstairs, he said this place is cursed. I’m not going there and I’m definitely not going on that bit of string. It looks ready to snap.”

“Leave it,” muttered Nils.

“None of you want to use it either, this is fucking insane!”

She stared at Drake but Drake looked away.

“Would you gag her, please,” said Pekko, continuing to work with the ropes. “She’s doing my head in.”

“With pleasure,” Nils retorted. “Don’t struggle,” he said, as the material pulled once again at the corners of her mouth. “Or I’ll use tape instead, and that’s more unpleasant to get off.”

Her nose sucked in air frantically. Pekko had slipped on his harness; a rudimentary construction which tightened under his arms and around his chest. He reached up and hooked it onto the rope. His face betrayed no fear; only the single-minded, merciless determination that was as much a part of him as his shaven skull. Nils checked all of the knots. He reached up and gave the rope a tug.

“You’re good.”

Pekko stepped up to the gap. He stood on the ledge, sleet lashing his face. Adelaide felt her heart treble. Pekko leapt and vanished.

She gave a moan of horror. Pekko had drowned, and Nils was about to send her after him.

Nils peered across the chasm. He gave a shout, and flashed a torch twice. An answering light blinked. Pekko had made it across. A minute later the harness came spinning back across the rope. Nils reeled it in.

“You’re next.”

She tried to make a bolt for it but they anticipated the move. She didn’t even make it to the door. Nils pulled the harness over her head. She fought him, struggling with every weapon she had left. Her forehead contacted with his collar bone. She heard him grunt. Then Drake put a knee into the small of her back and she went down. She felt the harness tightening around her chest.

“Come on,” said Nils. “Just get it over with.”

She didn’t move so he wrenched her to her feet. The harness fastened to the slimy rope. She tried to speak but even if the gag hadn’t been there, only gibberish would have come out. Her body was dysfunctional with fear. Nils dragged her towards the window-wall. Her shoes scraped on the buckling floor. Thunder and lightning split the sky and illuminated the leaning tower. She was a foot away from the edge — her toes were at the brink — over it — blackness above and below—

Nils untied her hands.

“I’d hold on if I were you,” said Drake from behind.

She gripped the rope. It was the only thing between her and death.

I don’t want to drown. Oh stars, I don’t want to drown. Give me any end other than that…

Hail fell in a gulf of oblivion.

Another rumble, another sheet of lightning flared. Nils’s shove sent her spinning out. She closed her eyes against the onslaught of sleet and wind. Thunder growled and her scream was muffled by the gag and the elements. She saw the lightning that followed on the backs of her eyelids. She thought she’d been hit.

Arms were around her. She collapsed into the ungiving mass. She could not understand that her feet were on a solid structure; she couldn’t support herself.

“Get up,” said Pekko.

She opened her eyes. She was on the other side. Pekko, taking no risks, was retying her wrists before he untied the harness. He flashed the torch back across the brink. She saw tiny dots, Nils responding. Pekko sent the harness back.

Adelaide cringed away from the gap and from Pekko. The wall here had disintegrated even more than in the other tower.

“I wouldn’t run anywhere,” Pekko said. “The whole tower is structurally unsound. Listen. You can hear it eroding.”

His voice echoed in the empty room. There were no lights. The floor was uneven underfoot, littered with unnameable, crunching debris. When she listened, she heard a deep, unearthly moaning. There’s something eating the foundations.

Nils landed walking. He must have done this before, she thought numbly. Nils stripped off the harness and passed it to Pekko, who sent it back for the others.

Nils switched on a torch. It lit the planes of his face weirdly.

“Welcome to the unremembered quarters.”

40 ¦ VIKRAM

The snow came down from the sky in dizzy swirls and collected in the well of the boat. It stuck to the hood and the shoulders of Vikram’s coat. He hunched over, shivering. At the prow a red lantern produced a dim glow. Every few minutes Vikram leaned forward and brushed the flakes away from its casing. The lantern was his signal.

The westerners, Surface Level or whoever they were, were late. He could not think of them as enemies, but neither could he think of them as friends. He had no idea who he was about to meet.

He should have a plan. He should have a decision, at least. But he had nothing. The invisible circle on the back of his neck seemed to pulse gently. He knew it was only his own circulation. He was the only person who could feel that mark. No-one else could translate its soft message: traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor.

If that was the decision.

Something bumped against his boat. He glanced down and made out a broken square from a raft rack, covered with two inches of snow. He reached over the side to push it away.

Two hands grabbed his shoulders, toppling him backwards. He lashed out. His elbow contacted — something — someone. A cry was stifled. The return blow, hard and fast, caught him in the ribs. He wheezed. A hand clamped over his mouth, halving his air. He struggled and wrenched the wrist away — a surprisingly thin wrist — but his assailant already had an arm against his throat and was dragging him backwards. Vikram reached around and punched behind him. The blow returned a muffled grunt. They were at the edge of the boat. Vikram tilted backwards and he realized his assailant was using Vikram’s own body weight as an anchor.

They tumbled overboard together, hitting the water with a compact splash. Vikram went under. The cold immersed him. His lungs seared with salt. He broke surface, gasping. Snowflakes poured onto his face. Arms wrapped once more around his chest and a voice whispered in his ear, “Quiet now. We’re getting you out.”

The cold was paralysing. He could not find the energy to speak, let alone fight. The assailant’s legs kicked under him with strong movements. He was towed steadily away from the boat.

One moment he was looking at the boat, the next a billowing sphere of flames. A fiery cloud blossomed — it seemed to hang, for a few, infinite seconds — and then a shower of sparks rained over the surface. Hot ash sprayed Vikram’s face. He did not think to wipe it away. He barely noticed his assailant hauling him into another vehicle. He was staring, mute, at the spot where his boat had been. The backs of his eyes prickled, and he felt a rush of sadness.

“Lie low,” whispered the voice again. “You were being followed. They will come to see what has happened.”

It was just a boat. He knew that. Vikram turned his head away from the destruction and saw his opponent’s face in the last of the firelight.

“Ilona?”

Incredulity wiped out anything else. The girl, Nils’s girl, was crouched low inside the boat. It was a tiny boat, and Ilona was inches from Vikram. She spoke urgently.

“Tell me Vikram, this is very important. They will be using you to find us. There was probably a tracker on board your boat. Is there one on you?”

“Ilona, what the hell are you—”

“Are they tracking you, Vikram?”

“Yes. Yes of course they are. Back of the neck. You can only feel it if you know it’s there. It’s like a disc…”

He pulled down his scarves and felt the cold thrill against the patch of bare skin. Ilona took something out of a pocket. He felt her gloved fingers push against his neck before the air numbed his skin to all sensation.

“What are you doing?”

“Dampening it. Done.” She pulled the scarves back up. “Keep low.”

“Where are we going?”

“The unremembered quarters.”

“Why are we going there?”

“That’s where Adelaide is. Don’t worry. Nils is there.”

“Nils? What’s he got to do—”

“No more questions, Vikram.”

Ilona began to row. His journey continued in silence. The shock was impacting on him now, physical and mental. Fate was playing havoc with his soul tonight. He felt sick.

Every few towers, Ilona eased into an offshoot waterway and stopped.

“Look.” She pointed. Vikram saw the dull shadow of a patrol boat crawling past. Searchlights arced from their prows.

“If a searchlight comes over, get in the water,” Ilona muttered. “These days they shoot dead bodies for fun.”

The night had come alive at last. The blizzard was pierced by intermittent gunfire. Muffled by the snowfall, it was difficult to pinpoint from where the sounds came. Vikram was full of questions, but all of Ilona’s concentration was on the boat. The air felt choked with halted conflict.

He saw Mikkeli, perched on the end of the coracle, her feet trailing in the water. She was made entirely of snowflakes and foam.

Keli? Is that you?

Oh, I’m here Vik. I’m with you every step of the way. Always have been.

Stay with me, Keli.

But she didn’t speak again. Soon she too drifted away from the raft, and the faint plash of Ilona’s oars in the snow-filled night was the only proof that they were both alive.

“Ilona? Is Drake safe?”

“Yes.”

“What about—”

But she wouldn’t know Shadiyah, or Marete and Hal, or Hella, or old Mr Argele.

They were approaching the unremembered quarters. Not even the shanty-boats or the dealers came here, only the dregs of destitution. These quarters were cursed.

“We’re here,” said Ilona.

The crooked tower loomed overhead, an absence where the snow did not fall. This was the one they said was inhabited, not by people, but by something else. The one that had burned. He imagined the ghosts clinging to the walls, their hands like suckered amphibians. He thought he heard them whisper. About him? To him?

There was no decking. Part of the wall was broken and the sea surged inside. Ilona steered the boat through the gap. Inside, the sound of her oars echoed back at them and water ran off the walls in small streams.

How could he possibly get Adelaide out without a boat? And shouldn’t Linus have known that the rebels would find the tracker?

Ilona rowed through the flooded rooms until they reached the stairwell. She switched on a torch and secured the craft to the rusting rail.

“This way. We’ve blocked the other stairwells, this is the only way up.”

Vikram followed her up the crumbling steps. The water logged in his upper clothing was beginning to freeze and he crackled when he moved. Every step was an effort. Ilona held the torch in front of them. They progressed slowly. Everywhere Vikram looked the building was falling to bits. Black powder fell away when he brushed the walls. Despite the freezing temperature, the smell of stale dead things reached his nose. Preserved carcasses of half-eaten animals lined the steps. Ten flights up Ilona’s torch flared on a man sitting bolt upright, his eyes wide and accusing but no life left in their gaze.

They kept going past the corpse. Vikram’s muscles were trembling with fatigue. He lost track of the floors and was disorientated by the time Ilona said, “This is us.”

She knocked on the door. There was a pause, then an answering knock from the other side. Ilona replied with a more complicated pattern. Vikram heard the sounds of furniture shifting and then the door scraped open.

“Vik!”

Something hard and furry flung itself at him. He disentangled himself from the pair of arms and found himself looking at the dark eyes and slightly squashed nose of Drake. She was grinning from ear to ear. His answering smile was wobbly with relief.

“I told you he’d make it,” Drake flung back over her shoulder. “Get inside, Vik, you’re freezing.”

The room was dark except for the torchlight and the glow of a heater, around which the others were gathered, bulked up in shapeless layers of wool and hide. Ilona went straight over to Nils. He lifted his hand to his shoulder and she squeezed it and Nils said something to her Vikram didn’t hear. He recognized Rikard, the guy Drake had said hello to that night in the bar. So there’d been something to it after all, or there was now. There was a third man that he did not know.

Rikard and the stranger were staring at Vikram openly, but Nils did not look at him.

“Hi, Nils.”

“Vik.”

For a moment, the tension between the two men was like salt on a wound. Slowly, Nils stood up and crossed the room. Nils hesitated. Then he lifted his arms and engulfed Vikram in a hug.

“You got out,” said Nils. His voice was gruff.

“You got me out, it seems.”

Nils glanced around.

“Yeah, well, long story.”

Vikram had the same sinking sensation he had felt talking to Linus. There was something else going on here, something he did not yet understand. Drake’s grin began to falter.

“Long time no see, Vik,” said Rikard. Hostility there, Vikram thought. He met the other man’s eyes squarely.

“Yeah, it’s been a while.”

“You dealt with the boat?” The third man spoke to Ilona, curtly, but his eyes flicked to Vikram. He wore no hood or a hat and his head was shorn; he was either immune to the cold, or it was a statement.

“It’s gone,” Ilona said.

“You’ve checked him for trackers?”

“One on the neck. Dampened. I can’t get it off, those things stick.”

“That’s Pekko,” Drake murmured.

“What do you mean stick?” Vikram said uneasily.

Pekko gazed at him. “The Citizens use semi-implants as trackers. Don’t worry. You’ll get it off once we’re done here.”

An icy pool was forming around Vikram’s feet. The heater was beginning to melt the ice in his clothes. Its warmth, coming out of the cold, was almost an assault. He was starting to feel giddy.

“So what’s going on?” he asked. “You’ve got Adelaide here?”

Drake’s smile dropped away. Nils frowned. Suddenly Vikram wondered if even his best friends did not trust him. He was acutely aware of his appearance. His clothes, even wrecked by water, had a different cut. His hair felt clipped and wrong. He had a stamp on the back of his neck.

Pekko broke the silence.

“Nils, check him again, get him new clothes.” He gave the orders in this cell, then. Was Pekko the coordinator that Linus had described?

“Oh—” as they turned to move. “And don’t touch this wall — it’s live.”

Vikram glanced back. Pekko was standing, his hands thrust into his pockets, a smile curving his lips but not parting them. Vikram looked at the wall. It was damp. He thought he saw a spark, but in the murky light and his current state of disorientation, he could not be certain of what he was seeing.

“Sure,” he said.

Nils took a torch and led Vikram into the adjacent room. The torch flickered over rows and rows of metre-high counters. The strip lighting over each unit was broken, the glass long stolen and wires dangling down, frozen into twisting spirals. Vikram recognised the layout of the space. He had seen it in working greenhouses.

“We’re using this for storage,” said Nils, indicating a unit where a few blankets were folded and stacked. There were sealed containers of food, a toolbox, a couple of pans, a disconnected Neptune.

The door swung closed behind them. Vikram grabbed Nils’s arm.

“What’s going on in there?”

“It’s a fucking awkward situation,” Nils hissed.

“Then tell me about it!”

“They don’t trust you. Pekko. Rikard. The people running this show. Here, change into these.”

Nils handed him a bundle. Vikram stripped off his dripping clothes, retrieving the medicine given him by the nurse, and changed quickly. The new clothes were shabby and didn’t fit well, but they were warm. Someone must have placed them near the heater before he arrived. Drake, probably.

“Why did they get me out if they don’t trust me?”

“Because you’re one of ours.”

“Precisely!”

Nils hesitated. “The Citizens must have offered you a deal.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Pekko thought you might have — accepted.”

“Who the hell’s Pekko, anyway? I thought there was some kind of rebellion group — is it just you guys?”

Nils leant against the door and folded his arms.

“Vik, this is more complicated than you realize. Pekko’s in charge here. And it’s not just us, he’s working for Maak. Remember Maak? The guy Mikkeli used to take deliveries for? He’s way up the ladder now. They call the group Surface, as though it’s a movement, like Horizon, but it’s not. It’s Maak — or his people — that own Ilona. He probably brought down Juraj. And he’s orchestrating this uprising. They’re playing a game, Vik. It’s about more than territory now, it’s about people. Getting Adelaide — and now you back — it’s a statement, you see. I mean, there’s never been a hostage situation before. Why d’you think we’re holed up like lice in this cursed place?” Nils spat on the ground to ward off any spirits that might be listening. “You should also know that Pekko hates Citizens,” he said. “Pathologically.”

“So I’m a Citizen now, am I?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you trust me?” Nils did not reply. “Nils, do you trust me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, course I do.” Nils scooped up the pile of Vikram’s old clothes and began to wring them out. “I suppose we’ll have to burn these.”

“Great, we can have a fire.”

“Look, just be careful, okay? You’ve been away for a while. Things have been happening. Riots have been on the cards for a good while now.”

“Yeah, well, I wish you’d said something before.”

Nils shrugged.

I wasn’t here, thought Vikram.

“You look terrible,” Nils said. “I guess it was hell in there.”

Silence fell between him; Vikram trying to find a way to communicate what could not be explained, Nils no doubt trying to imagine a place which could not be imagined.

“Thanks for getting me out,” Vikram said. “I was going mad.”

“Yeah.” Nils’s eyes dropped. “You can guarantee Pekko wants something from you. He likes making people do things. That’s why he sent Ilona to get you, not me or Drake — as if she has to prove herself before they’ll let her go.”

“Right.”

It came as no real surprise. He felt only resignation, and a dull ache, where another hook had been planted in his body for someone else to pull upon, in yet another direction. Linus Rechnov, Maak and Pekko — between them they would tear him apart.

They were about to go back when Vikram said, “Where is Adelaide, anyway?”

Nils scowled. “In another room. She’s a pain in the ass.”

Vikram forced a laugh. “You think so, huh?”

“Never stops talking,” Nils mumbled. He stopped. “Vikram, tell me honestly. Have you got a thing for that girl?”

“Honestly? No.”

Nils looked at him and Vikram wasn’t sure his friend believed the lie.

“Why?”

Nils did not answer.

They gathered around the heater, Nils and Ilona huddled together, Drake next to Vikram. Scraps of material and a scissored tarpaulin had been wedged into every crack around the window-wall board, but there was still a draught at Vikram’s back. Damp char was everywhere. The others had tried to sweep the floor but the stuff came off on his clothes and all of them were sooted with it.

“Can someone explain the situation?” he asked. “I didn’t get much out of the Citizens.”

“It’s fragile,” said Pekko tersely. Vikram kept his gaze neutral. Clearly he was gaining no votes of confidence from Pekko. “The city is withholding kelp and fish supplies. We’re already on rations and rumour has it supplies are running out, so as you can imagine, panic’s set in. I hear Market Circle yesterday was a bomb site.”

Rikard was warming a flask by the heater. He sipped from it, testing the temperature, then put it back.

“What about our fishing boats?”

“Skadi curfew,” said Nils. “One or two boats are getting out but it’s a risky business. We’ve already lost one.”

“And the uprising? Coordinated or independent?”

“There’re three cells,” Nils explained. “All answering to Maak. An inside team are guarding our lines to the desalination plant, so we won’t have a repeat of last time.” Drake’s eyes lifted to Vikram’s, and he knew that all three of them were thinking of Mikkeli’s last insane action. “A second group have taken S-801-W, the greenhouse. And we’ve got the Rechnov girl.”

“The bargaining chip.”

“Exactly.”

Logistically, it was not a bad plan. Maak, or whoever was orchestrating the cells, had obviously taken previous mistakes into account. It sounded like they were serious. Rikard tested the contents of the flask again, and passed around a thin, salty broth.

“So what are we asking for?”

“Release of the fish and kelp boats, and the skadi to withdraw. For now.”

“D’you think they’ll accept?”

“They’ve let you out,” drawled Pekko.

“If they think you are dead, that’s an advantage,” said Ilona. “It shows we have the edge.”

“We’ll offer them a deal,” said Pekko. “The girl in exchange for our demands. Which will be incremental. Really, she’s very useful. But I suppose you’ve discovered that already.”

“We’re rigging an exchange site,” said Drake, too quickly. “Coordinating with Sorren, at the greenhouse.”

“Sounds like everything’s under control,” said Vikram.

“Oh, it is.” Pekko smiled. “As you see, whilst you’ve been fraternizing with Citizens, we’ve been busy with the real business of revolution. So why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the show.”

He kept his mouth shut and his ears open. The smaller room of the tower was the hub: this was where they ate, slept, and contacted the other cells. Pekko had a scarab and Vikram guessed that Maak’s black market contacts had been at work. The heater was wired to a damp hole in the wall, hooked onto a rogue current. The electricity must run up an insulated vein in the tower from deep underground, or perhaps there was still some life in the burnt solar skin. Every few minutes a drop of water ran down the wall and Vikram saw blue sparks leap from the hole. He got used to it after a while. The sparks and the mistrust.

They huddled around the heater, playing cards. Every hour, someone went to check on Adelaide, and everyone else got up and stretched. Wary of Nils’s words, Vikram was careful not to ask about Adelaide in front of Pekko. Once he caught Drake aside and managed to say, “Is she okay?” Drake shrugged and said, “What do you think?” and then Pekko was looking at them and he couldn’t say anything more.

A couple of hours after he arrived, Rikard organized food, warming a few of the cans on the heater. It was a processed stew, the contents unidentifiable, and not enough of it. Vikram ate slowly. The stew lodged in his stomach, an indigestible lump.

Pekko’s scarab buzzed whilst they were eating. The noise sounded odd, its robotic repeat echoing around the room. Pekko went into the storeroom to answer the o’comm. Drake rolled her eyes at Vikram, but he noticed that she checked straight after to see if Rikard had seen the look. Rikard was the unknown quantity. Vikram remembered nothing about the man except for his face; he’d known a lot of people involved in the last riots.

He had also noticed that Nils was coughing a lot, and trying to hide it.

When they had finished eating, Rikard collected up the empty cans and set to work cleaning them in a bowl of drip-water. The set of his back said quite clearly that he wished for no assistance.

Pekko came back. Vikram waited for him to explain, but the man said nothing, just picked up his can and spooned up the remainder of his food. Finally Nils asked, with a hint of irritation, “Was that Sorren’s cell?”

“Tomorrow,” said Pekko.

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll be talking to the Citizens—” he spat the word, his immobile face revealing a brief flicker of disgust. “Tomorrow.”

Vikram slept badly. The torches were off and shadows materialized from under the heater’s glow. The night was filled with the sounds of breathing, of small creatures. He thought of his first night indoors, he and Nils, Keli and Drake. He remembered sharing plans, ambitions, talking other nonsense, a story of Drake’s — something to do with a raft rack dare and a man with velvet eyes, Drake and Keli giggling. He woke in fits and starts, thinking he was there, with them. When he remembered that one of them was dead, the glass in his chest was as sharp as it had been three years ago. He woke later thinking he was in a bed, that the rough sacking was cotton sheets, and that if he rolled over he would touch the drowsy limbs of a red-haired girl. He threw out an arm and found damp floor. The sacking smelled of mould. She was not far, that girl, a matter of metres away, lying against the same hard floor.

Silently his lips formed her name: Adelaide.

When he woke again, a trickle of grey light was seeping through a crack in the boarded window-wall. He watched the wall turn from grey to brownish green to sickly yellow. It was a new day, and he already wished it were over.

41 ¦ ADELAIDE

The man who wanted to kill her had taken away the light. Adelaide’s wrists hurt. They were fastened to the piping with steel rings, but she could not see the steel or the piping. The room was black. Water dripped in a corner. She curled in the same position she’d been in for the past hours, or days, or however long, face buried in her knees, her arms raised overhead to where they were fastened. She knew that it would hurt too much to move, so she didn’t.

In the dark, she wandered through childhood haunts: through the hidden dens in the Domain, the space under her bunk bed, her grandfather’s room with the marmalade cat. She went to the Roof and drank Kelpiqua, giggled and gulped and watched Axel standing on his hands, grinning at her upside-down.

The Roof receded, flying away from them at impossible speed. Axel bowed to thunderous applause and went behind a curtain, so she followed him but he wasn’t there, Tyr was, and after that she found Tyr in every place but home.

And then Tyr, too, went behind the curtain and there was only Vikram, the man from the ice, who would always be alone, as she would, as they were both destined to be. The crater in the ocean gaped, and there was the chromium mermaid, but this time the mermaid was Adelaide. Adelaide’s tail swished. Here, in the molten sea mud, the truth awaited her with a silver smile.

She had always been chasing her own tail. Even if Axel were alive, even if she did find him, she was not recovering her brother. She was recovering what he had become.

Everyone she cared about had disappeared. Axel, Tyr, even Vikram. She was a curse. She was bad luck. She ran on.

On, along the gleaming shuttle lines, over the glass funnel bridges, from the lowest underwater boutiques to the roof garden parties at the top of the world, up and down, in lifts and through stairwells, until she reached the butterfly farm. The path twisted before her feet. The farm had become colossal, and its glass walls were made of diamonds. What was she doing? She was searching for Axel. She ran on. She called his name. Axel! Axel, where in Osiris are you? He was playing hide and seek again. He had been playing for too long now, and it wasn’t funny.

She sat on a bench and sobbed because she could not find him. The butterfly farm moved away; it was attached to a boat, a boat that had travelled for months and for miles, a boat whose murdered crew lay in a graveyard at the bed of the ocean, where their bones rattled as they sang of their own slow decomposition. Adelaide held onto the dream. She held it tight because she was cold, colder than she had ever been, and she did not want to wake and find out what the cold had done.

Something crawled along her cheek, towards her nose. She thought it was a butterfly. But it was an insect, an invader from the real world. A white fly. She hunched her shoulder to knock it aside.

Now sounds raked at the dream, threatening to pull her into consciousness. She clung tighter to the spirit world. A door, opening onto the butterfly farm with an ungentle scrape, and there were people framed within it, and voices. The man who wanted to kill her was there. The girl with the black tooth was there.

She saw Vikram last. He had been walking the vaults of her dreams with the others; it made sense that he was here, allied with the cold. He had a green tinge. The cell had stuck to his skin, as it had stuck to hers when she left him last.

One of them spoke. She ran further into the butterfly farm. She saw the Red Pierrot balanced on a leaf, saw its wings opening and closing. It fluttered into the air and she followed it. Even when the man with the shaven head took her chin and she shivered and he lifted her face to stare into her dream-drugged eyes with his own, she saw only the red and black and white spots, the symmetry.

Vikram was in front of her. She kept very still. If she did not move he would not see her, and he mustn’t see her, not yet. She hid behind the flowers. Vikram spoke her name. His lips moved. There was a look in his eyes, an unfamiliar, broken look that she knew she must remember, but even as she frowned he dissolved into the foliage.

She found herself fully conscious, and she knew that the dream world had gone for good; she had woken up.

“Vik?” she whispered.

Her eyes were wide open but saw nothing. She was cold, so cold. Colder than she’d ever been.

“Vik!”

There was no light, because she had missed him. The room was empty. Vikram had gone.

42 ¦ VIKRAM

Pekko stood behind him, his disdain like a burn between Vikram’s shoulder blades.

“Talk to her.”

Adelaide seemed half-dead. Vikram crouched in front of her, looked right into her eyes as he said her name. There was no response but the drowsy flicker of her eyelashes, as though she was drugged.

As they closed the door on the tiny room, Adelaide’s presence stayed with him, as if she had become a part of his own pulse. He could not set aside the image of her face under Pekko’s torchlight. Somehow, he had to protect her.

One of them was always on watch. They patrolled the circumference of the tower, walking through the empty laboratories, past the torched counters, around metal twisted into weird sculptures and the traces of clumsily adapted sleeping spaces. Ilona and Rikard went to check that their blockades were still in place in the other stairwells. Peering out of the dirt filmed window-walls, they watched for any sign of skadi vehicles. The only boats they saw were fish barges heading out to sea.

Pekko contacted the other cells. He reported that they were holding out. The second cell had arranged a call to the Citizens which they would link to Pekko later in the day. The others played cards. They made up a game with a motley collection of chess, Shells and Sharkbait rules. Buried in the dirt, Vikram found a necklace carved out of bone. The string had rotted. When he lifted it the beads scuttled away. He collected them up and they used the pieces for counters.

Nils called Rikard on a point.

“That was five.”

“It was a six.”

“It was a five, I saw it tip.”

“It was a fucking six.”

“Guys, come on!” Drake grabbed the die. “Just throw it again.”

Around lunch time, Rikard handed out kelp squares. Vikram knew that he should be hungry but his stomach felt like air. He had to force himself to eat. Afterwards, he swallowed a few of the pills surreptitiously.

Vikram’s memories of the last riots were all vivid, fast-paced scenes — images of action, of violence, of cold clear mornings and wet nightfalls peppered with the clash of Home Guard guns. Perhaps there had been waiting too. Perhaps he had forgotten. He itched for information, for any news. He would have slid easily into the group’s routines.

He spoke to Pekko.

“Why don’t you let me take a patrol? Split the shifts between us?”

Pekko looked at him and said, “I don’t think so.”

“I want to help.”

“It’s not negotiable.”

As they threw down hand after hand of Pirahna and Sharkbait, he went through every possible and impossible solution in his head. Vikram would not — he could not betray his friends. The act was unthinkable. That did not mean he wasn’t searching for a way to get Adelaide out. Could one of fishing boats help him — could he get out a message? What if he let Adelaide escape, told her to hide in the tower until it was all over? Could he make it look like she’d got out by herself?

By mid-afternoon, he was exhausted. He curled up for a rest. He was only going to doze for thirty minutes but slept for several hours. The lost time worried him. His body never used to crash out with such dangerous oblivion.

When he woke, Pekko was out of the room. Vikram stretched his stiff, groggy limbs, easing cracks out of his knee and elbow joints. He winced as he kneaded the circulation into his muscles. He smelled tobacco. Nils lay on his side, dragging on a cigarette, hacking after every inhalation. Vikram had an instant craving for one of Adelaide’s cigarillos, their warm, woody, complex taste, even their acrid afterbite. Next to Nils, Ilona was filing down her nails with a bit of metal. On the other side of the heater, Rikard and Drake sat talking quietly.

“My brother’s over with Maak’s people,” Rikard was saying.

“Is he your real brother?”

“No. Good as, though.”

“Course. What does he think?”

“Same as us. That it’s changed. Used to be about equality, but everyone knows that isn’t coming. Says there’s been a lot of talk in the last year. About changing policy.”

“In Surface?”

“Everywhere.”

“I suppose your brother sees a lot of Maak, working with them.”

Rikard had clearly seen that Vikram was awake, but he answered Drake nonetheless. “I don’t think anyone sees too much of the man.”

“Who is Maak?” Vikram asked. His voice came out hoarse and crackly, and he cleared his throat.

“Who is he, or who was he?” said Rikard.

“Both.”

Rikard stretched out his legs. “He used to be a petty dealer. Greenhouse drugs, bit of manta on the side. Rose up to second in the Juraj gang. According to legend, he killed Juraj, then hacked him up and used the body parts for fish bait.”

“But Juraj burned. On a pyre. We saw it.”

“Not his limbs. Maak kept the limbs. But the fire fight — that was him, yeah. Crazed. A lot of Juraj’s supporters died that night, shot to bits by the skadi. Conveniently for Maak.”

“It’s true,” said Ilona. “When we heard about it, us girls on the boats, we were pleased at first. Juraj did terrible things to the girls.”

Nils squeezed her hand.

“But Maak is no better than Juraj,” Ilona added. “He burns people alive. He loves to burn things. He made a girl unconscious, then put her on a pyre all soaked in oil. When she woke up she was on fire. We all heard the screams.”

Drake scoffed. “I never heard that. They’re making things up to scare you.”

“I heard the screams,” Ilona insisted.

Rikard gave a lopsided smile. “Anyway, however Maak killed the old man, he’s merged the Juraj and the Roch gangs. Now he’s just known as the Coordinator.”

“Except that he’s never seen. The man’s like a ghost,” Nils put in.

“The Coordinator.” So Linus Rechnov had been right about one thing. “But what does he coordinate?”

“Violence,” said Rikard. “Assassinations. Hostages. That’s the way it’s going.”

“It’s not about justice any more,” said Drake. “It’s about war. That’s the choice people have made.”

“We never had a choice,” said Nils abruptly. “They made it for us. They make the same choice every time they slaughter one of us.”

“But we don’t have the resources to fight them, never mind attack them,” Drake said. “We never have.”

“That’s why Maak wants insiders,” said Rikard. “He’s taking on old principles. The man thinks like an Osuwite — the NWO radicals didn’t go far enough for him.”

Nils exhaled a trickle of smoke through his nostrils. “D’you reckon it was the NWO who killed the Dumays, Rikard?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Could have been anyone,” said Drake. “You know what I think? I think the Rechnovs did it. Them or the Ngozis.” She held her hands over the heater, rubbing them together. “Makes perfect sense. They wanted everyone to hate the west, so they killed off two of their own.”

“Could well be,” Rikard nodded. “Why don’t you ask the girl?”

Drake laughed. “Adelaide? She don’t know anything.”

Rikard looked at Vikram, as if for confirmation. Vikram thought of his last conversation with Linus. He thought of the man’s reaction when he said Whitefly. But Adelaide hadn’t known about that either; she’d been fishing for information. Once again, he thought of her drugged, ice-bound eyes. There had to be a way to get her out without compromising the others. Adelaide would listen to him. If he told her to hide, she’d hide.

“Honestly,” he said. “I don’t think she does.”

When Pekko returned, his face was agitated. He stood in the doorway, surveying them all, until one by one their conversations dropped away. His hands, buried in his pockets, clenched and unclenched. At first it was not clear whether the news was good or bad. Then a smile twisted Pekko’s mouth.

“We have a location for the exchange,” he said.

Everyone spoke at once.

“When, Pekko?”

“Who did you speak to?”

“What did they say?”

Pekko came to sit by the heater, not next to anyone but in a space of his own. He was clearly relishing his moment of triumph.

“Tomorrow, two hours after sun-up. S-294-W. They’ve promised to withdraw the patrol force. They’re sending the food supplies.”

Rikard rattled two die between his hands.

“Will they expect to see the girl before they release the boats?”

Pekko barked with laughter.

“The girl’s going nowhere near the place. All we have to do is sit tight and let Sorren’s cell take care of it. They’ll seize the supplies. If the Citizens complain we can always send them a bit of the girl. A finger, for example.”

Excitedly, the group discussed the logistics. Vikram said nothing. The back of his neck tingled where the dampened tracker was lodged. Implanted, Pekko had said. What in hell’s tide had Linus put on him? Had he really imagined Vikram would trust Linus to keep his side of the bargain?

“I’ll go check on Adelaide,” said Ilona, as if she could read his thoughts.

“Already done,” Pekko shot over his shoulder. He grinned. “Not in the best state, our little princess. Learning how the real folk live.”

His eyes slid to Vikram: a slow, thoughtful look.

Sunset fell. Vikram accompanied Nils on his watch. They felt their way around the circumference of the window-wall, peering through the opaque glass for the telltale lights of skadi boats. The wind had dropped. On the other side of the tower, they stood watching the sea. The moon glimmered faintly on the waves.

Vikram spoke softly to Nils. “Do you blame me for going to the City?”

“You did what any of us would have done.”

“That’s not a no.”

“You’re still pedantic. Anyway, it’s what Mikkeli would have wanted.”

“She did?”

“Of course. It was her great plan. You were always the clever one. She had ambitions, that girl.”

“But that’s what Keli wanted. And she’s gone. It’s us that’s still here.”

Nils’s sigh was heavy. “Of course I can’t blame you, Vik. You were doing good stuff with those schemes.”

“Didn’t work.”

“Not your fault. Things were already in motion.” Nils paused. “Drake and I agreed we’d try and keep you out of it.”

“What? Why?”

“C’mon, Vik. After last time…”

“You were trying to protect me.” Of course they were, he thought. He’d have done the same, had their situations been reversed.

“Well I guess that didn’t work either,” said Nils. “I don’t know what to think any more. Seems like people just keep vanishing. Keli. You. And it eats away at you. Makes you start to wonder about things.”

“What kind of things?”

“What’s ahead. I mean really ahead. I do think of those days, Vik — Horizon, Eirik, all the things he used to talk about — and he really, properly believed them. But it seems like madness. I don’t know what we thought would happen. Maybe back then, everything seemed — well, further away. Like we could beat it. But it’s here, isn’t it. I realized that when they drowned Eirik. I mean, this is it. I’m standing here with a gun and we’ve taken a Rechov hostage. A Rechnov, for stars’ sake.”

Vikram had no answer. He understood what Nils meant. He had seen Adelaide, and he had a choice to make. He could not delay much longer.

Outside, there was nothing but a vacuum.

He said, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the coughing.”

“Stars, it’s nothing.”

“I’ve got City medicine. I’ll give you some.”

“It’s not serious.”

The lie hung between them, Vikram not knowing what to say, Nils clearly wishing the issue closed. Instead, Vikram asked, “What are they going to do with Adelaide?”

“It’s up to Maak. He’s in charge.”

Vikram could not see Nils’s face, but he heard the tension in his voice.

“Pekko wants her dead, doesn’t he?”

“It’s not Pekko’s decision. If Maak has any sense, he’ll strike a real bargain. We could get a lot out of that girl. We got you out of jail because of her, didn’t we?”

“And what if Pekko doesn’t listen to Maak?”

Nils’s silence was all the answer Vikram needed.

He lay awake through the hours of Pekko’s watch and then through Drake’s. Pekko fell asleep, his breathing quick and even. Drake got up and went on patrol. Vikram’s mind wandered. He found himself revisiting the ships rusting away in the harbour, all the expedition boats that had left Osiris, years before he was born. For the first time it struck him as peculiar that none of them had ever come back. Not a single one.

The Rechnovs had a secret. What if no-one was meant to leave? What if “Whitefly” was the key to enforcing that?

The wind moaned and rattled the boards in the window-wall. He shook aside the thought. It was only ghosts whispering in his ear. Their malice was childish.

Drake returned. He watched her face, tinged red with the glow of the heater. She huddled over it, her hands resting on her knees and her chin upon her hands.

“What time is it?” he muttered.

“About half four. Get some sleep, Vik.”

“I can’t. My mind’s too awake. D’you remember the story of the last balloon flight, Drake?”

She gave him a tired smile. He sensed she had been lost in her own thoughts. Perhaps now was not the time for his. “The one Keli talks about. Yeah, I remember. It’s not a good story though, really, is it.”

“No. I guess not.”

He lay back once more, watching a drop of moisture form on the ceiling until it fell onto the heater with a hiss. Even though the plaster was crumbling and the tower was falling apart, the sight of the water did not fill him with horror as it had done in the cell. For the first time, he felt the full relief of his escape.

I’d rather die than go back.

“Keli said the balloon would appear one day,” said Drake softly. “A huge, bright, striped balloon, floating through the sky.”

She fell silent again. He noticed the lapse into the past tense, as though Drake was too tired to pretend any longer, to offer respect because respect could not restore the dead.

He glanced across at Nils and Ilona. They slept side by side, Nils’s arm hugging Ilona’s tiny body tightly against him.

But if I can’t go back, then there’s something I have to do.

Vikram got up and stepped stealthily around the sleeping bodies of the others.

“Drake. I need to see Adelaide.”

Drake’s eyes darted towards the door, towards the room where Adelaide was being held. She looked back at him and her forehead was creased.

“Vik—”

“It’s alright,” he said quietly. “I know.”

He slipped away before she could protest.

He turned the handle and pushed it open. The sour smell of confinement wafted out.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “I’m going to switch on the torch.”

There was no reply. He could not tell if she was awake or asleep. He flicked on the torch. She was in a foetal position, her face hidden as it had been before. Her wrists were tiny in the ring of the handcuffs and the joints of her hands were swollen. He felt a surge of pity.

“Adelaide. I’ve brought you a light. And something to eat.”

No response. He moved the beam of the torch directly upon her.

“It’s Vikram,” he tried.

He shut the door and put the torch on the ground. He knelt in front of Adelaide to set down the two flasks he had brought. She looked to be carved out of stone.

He touched her arm lightly and she shuddered. A sigh of relief escaped him. She was still alive. Now he needed her conscious.

“Adelaide. Look at me, if you can.”

Still she gave no answer, so he took her shoulders and turned her towards him. Her head drooped. He pushed aside the tangled hair. Her eyes were slits. Vikram brought the flask of water to her lips and dribbled a little into her mouth. She gasped and began to shake.

“Woke me,” she mumbled. “Woke… me…”

“You need to drink,” he ordered. “Water first. Open your mouth.” He tilted the flask once more. “Swallow. Good.”

He saw the effect of the liquid with every drop. She had been lapsing into hypothermia. It was lucky she had City clothes, ripped and filthy but locking in some crucial insulation. Next, he took the flask of broth. She choked on the first mouthful. Her eyes sprang open, suddenly bright. She glared at him. He knew that glare. He had seen it in other people, in westerners, in visitors to the shelter; the helpless defiance of the already defeated. He pushed the flask mercilessly against her mouth.

“Drink. If you don’t drink this your body is going to shut down and you’ll collapse. You mustn’t go to sleep. You have to stay alert.”

“Nothing… keep me awake.”

“I won’t leave you on your own again. You’re getting sick.”

He examined her properly, with a curious sense of reversal. Had Adelaide’s brother looked at Vikram with this same, scientific scrutiny? Assessing his body’s deterioration, its potential for one final surge of activity? The skin around her eyes was shiny and tender, but her face had lost weight. With her bone structure newly close to the surface, she had the freakish beauty of the otherworldly.

He took a bit of wire he’d found on the floor from his pocket and inserted it into the handcuff lock. It took only a minute to release them. He massaged her wrists to revive the circulation. She winced. He took an adrenalin syringe out of its plastic packaging and rolled up her sleeve. He found a vein in the crook of her elbow, inserted the needle, squeezed the fluid out.

“My leg got hurt.”

He looked down. Her trousers had ripped and there was a six inch gash down her calf. The surrounding flesh was swollen with infection.

“Went through… a bridge…”

Shit, he thought. That would slow her, if she got the chance to run. But he said nothing, dug out a couple of the antibiotic pills from the nurse’s bag and pushed them between her lips. He put the water flask into her hands and to her mouth again. Water trickled down her chin. She wiped it away. The gesture took a long time.

“Why did you come here?” he said. It sounded harsher than he had meant.

She blinked.

“What — what is — this place?”

“It’s the unremembered quarters.”

She put down the flask. The adrenalin would take effect soon. Her pulse would quicken. Darts of pain would spark in her limbs as sensation returned alongside full consciousness. He had experienced it many times; it would be new to her.

“Why did you come?” he repeated.

She wrapped her arms once more around her body. “Cold.”

“I know. Adelaide—”

“Why did I come. To the west, you mean. To your city.”

“It was madness,” he said roughly.

“Then I came because I’m mad.” She attempted a smile. He saw a bead of blood forming on her lips where the skin had flaked and cracked. He took her right hand and began to knead her muscles through the fabric of the glove. He worked steadily up the arm, towards her shoulder.

“There’s no point in playing games now.” He kept his voice even.

“Then let me out of here, and stop… talking to me.”

“I can’t let you out. You’re the only leverage they have.”

“They?”

His eyes flicked to hers. “We.”

“I’m not sure you’re so sure.”

Vikram’s thumbs paused. “Those people out there have been my life. Whatever’s happened, I owe them mine and everything that’s part of it.”

“I suppose my father made you a good offer.”

“I didn’t see Feodor. I saw Linus.”

“Even better. Don’t tell me it hasn’t played on your mind. Especially here. There’s only death here. And cold. So cold. You don’t like the cold, Vik.”

The abbreviation dropped from her mouth, easily, a little sadly. How hard it is, he thought, to let go the trappings of intimacy. He knew this girl; he knew the patterns of her skin beneath the dirt, the conundrum of freckles. He knew the hiccups in her breathing cycle. He knew the smell of her, as though she was made from sea-stuff, as she would one day return to it. He knew that in the aftermath of a nightmare, her eyelids flew open and she would stare at the ceiling, oxygen stopped in her lungs, before she let go the breath.

They knew each other’s loss. That was what had drawn them together; two spirits reaching into the past, whose fingertips had touched in searching.

Adelaide was shivering. Vikram’s hands had stopped moving, circling her upper arm. He let her go.

“I’m used to the cold,” he said.

“You told me you like fire. Love fire, you said.”

“I told you a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”

Adelaide lifted her eyes to his. They were bright with moisture, like oysters glistening in their shells.

“Shame,” she said softly. “I thought perhaps you were going to bust me out after all.”

“We need you,” he said. “You’re too valuable.”

Again she smiled, and the bead of blood spread. He suppressed the impulse to wipe it away.

“Don’t overestimate me. I’m as much use to them dead as I am alive. Not the best ending for the Rechnovs, two children down, but I’d become a martyr. They’re very marketable. And then other people would do other things, and gradually, they’d forget me. There’s always someone to come after.”

There was no doubt as she spoke; her tone was absolute certainty. She tilted her head to one side, looking at him as though curious to know if there could be any opposition. Single-minded, but always sure. If he loved one thing about her, it must be that. He inhabited a world of greys and doubts, a world that constantly shrank and receded. Adelaide held it still. She had made herself blinkered because she refused to look at alternatives.

Except in coming here.

“Why did you come, Adelaide?”

“I don’t think, Vikram, that you truly wish to know. Things weren’t so… agreeable… between us, when we parted last.”

“What did you expect?” he flashed. “I was sent underwater because of you. You can’t understand what it does to you, that place.”

“I tried to get you out,” she insisted.

“You had no chance. Your own family locked you up, you were fooling us both. You’re an idiot.”

A slow dripping in the corner reminded him of time ticking down.

“I’m cold,” said Adelaide.

He pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her, resting his chin on her head. One of her hands curled around his wrist. She was too weak for tricks. He was holding what was left of Adelaide Mystik. Or Adelaide Rechnov, or whoever she was. She felt fragile, strangely malleable, and tense all at once. She felt like the scent of dried roses.

Instinctively, he tightened his arms.

“That better?”

“I was never this cold before. You were, weren’t you.”

“Yes. Yes, I’ve been this cold. Lots of times.”

He had told himself there was a way out, a way to save her and to save them. He could ask himself what Keli would have done, what Eirik would have done, even what his old self would have done. But all of those people, one way or another, were already a part of him. The decision was his own to live with — or not.

If he got her out — if he took her back east, and Linus kept his word — the guilt would corrode him from the inside out. Sooner or later he would blame Adelaide, and eventually, he would hate her.

He pressed his lips against her dirty hair. Between the roots, her scalp was chalk white.

“It was my destiny to come here,” Adelaide whispered.

Vikram’s throat was tight. He swallowed, quietly, so she would not hear. “You, of all people, make your own destiny.”

“It’s written in the stars. It’s written in the salt.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Teller told me. And Second Grandmother, a long time ago.”

“That’s why you came to the west? Because of some stupid prediction?”

“I had to come. I had to follow Axel.”

“You think he’s here.”

She didn’t answer. His eyes were wet and he blinked the moisture away. He owed her the truth, at least.

“He’s not, Adelaide. I know that because… he wrote to you. He wrote you a letter.”

The silence stretched out.

“It was before we went to Council. A woman came to your apartment with a letter for you. I don’t know who she was — a westerner, I think. An airlift. She gave me the letter. I read it.”

“And what did this letter say?” Adelaide’s voice was a tumble of hard little stones.

He told it to her, word by word, sentence by sentence. The image it of was glued to his mind. He saw Axel’s handwriting, the green loops of the ys and the gs, the paper folded into a horse’s head. Adelaide was shaking.

“Where is it?”

“I gave it to Linus.”

“Oh.”

“Adie—”

“Don’t.”

“He was saying goodbye. Adelaide, it was a suicide note.”

“Don’t you dare judge him.”

“I’m not judging him. I’m not saying that what he did was wrong.”

“He would never do that. He couldn’t—”

“I’m sorry. But I think the letter makes it clear. There was no conspiracy. Axel was ill, you told me that yourself.”

She wrenched away from him. Her face crumpled.

“Don’t you say his name. Axel would never do that. He would never leave me. Don’t you understand, Vik? Axel would never leave me.”

“I’m so sorry, Adie.”

“Get out!” Her voice broke. “Did you come in here to torment me? Is this another of your people’s games? Get out!”

Vikram felt numb. Seeing her face, he wished now that he had not said anything. What had been the point? If Pekko had his way, Adelaide Mystik would be dead by daylight.

43 ¦ ADELAIDE

Vikram backed away but he did not leave.

“Stop looking at me,” she said, but no sound came out. The words stuck in a pump that refused to work. A dam built there. The ache swelled, spread through her lungs and throat until it packed against the backs of her eyes.

She tried to shut out the images; the penthouse, the balcony, her brother sitting on the rails, standing, believing that he could fly. She would not believe it. But more images came. The room full of balloons. Radir’s reports. The horses, always the horses. Axel, on the balcony, his red hair bright on a dull day. Axel, aged sixteen, leaping from a boat, his arms wide to embrace the unknown shock of the sea.

Vikram was speaking.

“If you ever get out of here, go to Branch 18 of the Silk Vault. There’s a deposit box under the name of Mikkeli, only you and I have access to it. I put a copy of the letter there. There was something with it. A necklace, with a shark tooth. It’s in the deposit box.”

“Axel,” she whispered.

Her dream came back to her, looking for him, not finding him. She was bad luck. She knew the truth about Axel in the same moment as she knew the truth about herself. Even the sting of humiliation attached to his suicide gave way to incredulity — not at Axel’s actions, but at her own blindness. Axel had skipped out of life. That had been her twin’s final stunt.

She thought of the argument in Feodor’s office months ago, demanding the keys, convinced that her father’s refusal was proof of complicity. He had known something after all: he had known the truth, and if there had been any evidence of suicide in Axel’s penthouse, she could be sure he would have erased it before anyone else got there. The Rechnov name always came first.

She felt hollow.

“I should have told you before,” said Vikram. “I tried to, so many times. I meant to. I just…”

The tears that had fallen dried on her cheeks. She did not know who they were for. She thought of her brother’s body sinking to the ocean floor and she knew the fish had stripped it to the bone.

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said.

A dull thud, as though something had struck the tower deep underwater, resonated through the walls. The floor shook beneath them.

She froze.

“What…?”

They stood, motionless. The second shake knocked them sideways. The torch went out. Plaster tumbled down the walls, clouds of dust rising in the aftermath. She heard Vikram scrabbling for the torch. The light flicked on, illuminating their dust-coated faces.

“A quake…?” Her uncertain response failed to convince even herself. Vikram shook his head. His face was grim.

“Skadi,” he said. “They’ve found us.”

She stared at him. Her brain, as numb as ice, gave way to a dawning comprehension.

“They’re tracking you,” she said.

Vikram’s hand went to the back of his neck.

“No, Ilona found it, she dampened it…”

“That doesn’t do anything, Vik, the tracker’s in your blood. It’s a classic security bluff — I’m so sorry.”

He turned very pale. They stared at each other. She did not question what his original intent had been. In this moment, everything was changing. She wiped the moisture from her cheeks. He helped her to her feet.

The door blasted open.

“Vik, get back to the other room, they’ve found us.” It was Nils. He grabbed her arm. She saw a look pass between him and Vikram, but neither of them had time for words. “She’s coming too.”

With Nils’s hand gripping her upper arm she hobbled through the corridor. Pain shot up her legs, her bad leg throbbed. She held onto the sensation. For now, at least, she was alive. Vikram grabbed her elbow, supporting her. Nils pulled her into the room where they had first arrived. Breaking daylight filtered inside, illuminating the dishevelled bedding, the broken benches and grow-boxes, the guns. Drake had torn away part of the boarding and was stationed at a gap in the window-wall. The large-barrelled gun in her arms angled downwards. Rikard was on the other side in an identical pose. Ilona was checking her weapon. Pekko barked into a scarab. When he saw them, he dropped the scarab and launched himself at Vikram, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him violently.

“This is your fault! You brought them here!”

Vikram landed a fist into Pekko’s stomach. Adelaide jerked forward but Nils held her fast. Pekko let go of Vikram. A cold rage locked in his eyes. The next second his gun was pointing at Vikram’s head.

“Traitor,” he spat.

“Don’t you dare!” yelled Drake. Ilona’s head jerked up and her hands stilled. Rikard’s eyes glanced away from the window-wall only for a second.

“I had no idea they would find us,” Vikram snarled. His face was contorted with equal rage. His hands dropped at his sides, fists clenched but helpless. The gun pushed into Vikram’s temple. The two men were inches apart. Blood rushed to Adelaide’s face.

“Pekko he’s telling the truth! He didn’t know. The tracker’s not on his neck, it’s in his blood. That’s how they always find people.”

“And why didn’t you say something before, Citizen?” The gun did not move. Pekko’s voice was quiet now, quiet and cold. “Instead of playing mad and half-dead.”

“I’d hardly tell you anything if I thought I was going to be rescued, would I?”

Pekko’s grip on the gun tightened.

“Would I?” she shouted.

Nils spoke with forced calmness. “Pekko, there’s no time for this now. They’re sending skadi into the building. We’re going to have to defend the floor. We need posts. Vikram’s with us. If he’s not, the skadi will kill him anyway.”

The tension between Pekko and Vikram was electric. Adelaide’s heart thumped in her chest. She did not dare to say anything further.

It was none of them, but a voice from outside that made Pekko lower the gun. The skadi spoke through a tannoy. Travelling up from the surface, the words sounded distorted.

“You are surrounded. You have ten minutes to release the hostage, or we will send enforcements in. No prisoners will be taken. I repeat, you are surrounded…”

Releasing Vikram, Pekko moved with sudden speed. She saw his intent and ducked a fraction too late to avoid him altogether; the barrel of the gun struck her shoulder. She fell against the wall, winded by the strength of the blow.

“Tie her up!” yelled Pekko.

Nils secured her wrists, but loosely.

“Keep your head down or you’ll get killed,” he muttered. “The tower’s surrounded by skadi. I don’t think they’re here to negotiate.”

Over Nils’s shoulder she met Vikram’s eyes, bright with anguish and fury.

Pekko scooped up the scarab and pressed it hard to his ear. His face was taut with tension.

“Sorren, what’s going on? How long until you get here?”

All eyes were on Pekko now.

“We’ve got at least a dozen skadi vehicles down there, I’ve got zero contact with the plant. What the fuck d’you mean you can’t — Sorren?”

Pekko paused, took the scarab from his ear, shook it.

“Sorren? Sorren. I can’t hear you. Get Maak on for me. You got that? Get Maak. Sorren—”

He lowered the scarab. Tinny pops came out of its speaker. Static mingled with raised voices, with shouts. Nobody said anything. Pekko, facing away from them all, seemed to have frozen. Then he switched off the scarab and slid it into a pocket. He did not spare Adelaide another glance.

The ten minutes passed slowly. Adelaide knew that there was no point in asking if the skadi would negotiate. There were no further announcements. Finally Drake said that the skadi were moving in. Rikard was allocated to guard Adelaide. None of it felt real. She watched the others leave the room, and was conscious only of a quiet disbelief.

44 ¦ VIKRAM

They ran down the treacherous stairs as the skadi ran up. There was no caution from the skadi; they had no need for subtlety now.

The weapon in Vikram’s hands was heavier than the one he’d held last time. One part of his mind looked at its specification and noted the weight, the heft, the resistance of the trigger whilst the other listened to the mounting skadi steps and wondered where Pekko had got their guns from, if he had bribed a skad, or if the Rochs had supplied them.

They had one advantage, being upstairs and the skadi being down, and knowing the place as the skadi did not, but it would only be an advantage whilst the enemy kept the attack inside.

“Everyone take one of these.” Pekko passed gas masks to the others and threw one at Vikram. He pulled it over his head and wiped a sleeve over the smeary visor.

They waited, halfway between their base and the surface. They took up positions overlooking a landing where the corridor spilled into a narrow funnel. They would see the skadi approach before the skadi could see them. They waited.

He could hear the shallowness of the others’ breathing. A tiny cough from Drake, suppressed. Pekko fidgeting with the safety catch of his gun.

He heard pounding boots. The sound drummed like Vikram’s own heartbeat. Like Juraj’s crazed escort of rafters on the night of the firefight.

They were coming.

The first man appeared. Black gear, mask, rifle. He hurled a canister and retreated. A swirl of gas rose up, the canister hissing as it expelled its contents. Drake touched her mask nervously. Vikram felt his chest constrict and forced himself to breathe.

Without warning Pekko opened fire, screaming as he did so. Skadi emerged through the dispelling gas. When Vikram started shooting he felt nothing but inevitability, as though he’d walked a full circle and found himself exactly where he had started: home. He squeezed the trigger and the gun flashed and the bolts slapped into the heads of oncoming men.

You don’t make your own luck, he thought. That’s all a lie.

The confined space exploded with ricocheting gunfire. The sound was phenomenal. There was no light, no true darkness. A whirl of grey shadows, moving, running, flying to the ground where they stopped, dead or injured. He heard Nils hiss and knew his friend was hit but Nils kept shooting. Vikram did not see the eyes of any of the men he killed, except one who looked straight in his direction as though he could see Vikram, really see him, not just the mouth of his gun from his concealed hole.

He did not count the men as they funnelled into the death-trap. He reminded himself that each man was a skad, without any comprehension of the worth of a life. He reminded himself he was fighting for his own life and that of his friends. Then his mind went blank and his muscles took over.

They heard the sounds of the skadi running up other stairwells, only to discover that the way was blocked with rubble and there was no route up except via the five of them.

A point came when they realized all the shots were coming from their side and ceased. They waited and listened for a second wave. It didn’t come.

Nils’s breathing came heavily through the quiet. Vikram heard mutterings between Nils and Ilona as they examined the damage. None of them yet dared to move from their stations, fearful of a skadi trick.

“What’s happening?” whispered Drake. “Why are they withdrawing?”

Vikram could only think of one reason. He looked at Drake and she looked back at him, scared.

“Why would they go?” she said, not bothering to keep her voice down now.

Nils and Ilona came out into the open.

“They’re not going to get any more of their people killed,” Nils said. His arm hung useless at his side, bloody and clumsily bandaged, but he appeared otherwise unhurt. “They don’t need to.”

“Where’s Pekko?” asked Drake.

Vikram was alerted by the sound of footsteps. Turning, he saw the other man was already running back up the stairs. He swore and pelted after him.

45 ¦ ADELAIDE

She would have screamed if the flat side of the knife hadn’t crushed her throat. Rikard stood in the gloom of the shadows, a metre away, expressionless. The others ran in moments after Pekko.

“I have no qualms about this,” said Pekko. He gripped the knife tighter in his three fingers. A spasm coursed through her body. His other arm was locked tight around her chest, pinning her arms, holding a gun.

“Pekko, we’ve got bigger problems, you can’t—” Drake went straight to the window. She crouched, her gun angled down but her eyes flicking back to the interlocked figures.

“She’s the only leverage we have,” said Pekko. “Move away from the window, Drake.”

“Adelaide, keep still.” Vikram took a step towards them.

“Move away from the window, Drake!”

“Not whilst they’re down there,” she said grimly.

She began to fire, in ordered bursts.

“Fuck.”

Nils joined her. Rikard and Ilona took the other gap. Each shot exploded in Adelaide’s skull.

“Pekko, let her go,” Vikram said. Pekko raised his gun to point at Vikram.

“We’re dead anyway,” said Pekko. “I just want you to watch her go first.”

“Let her go. She can help us. We can still negotiate—”

Pekko laughed. His ribcage shook with laughter.

“They’re about to blow this place up, and you’re talking about negotiation?”

She could picture the black-hulled boats in formation on the sea. Through the ripped boards, strips of cold grey light filtered into the room. The sun was rising.

Pekko held the knife to her throat. Vikram faced them. The others fired repeatedly. Her eyes were on the floor and she saw amongst the blankets they’d discarded when they ran downstairs a pile of yellowish globes. Drake ducked back from the window-wall. The globes dislodged and rolled across the floor.

It was not the end that she had imagined. There would be no burial rites, no flaming pyre. There would be no sea journey. Just a flash of silver, and shortly after, an incineration.

I won’t join the ghosts, she thought. And then, You didn’t want to anyway. A trapped thing? That’s not for you. And then. What then? Nothing.

I know you now, Axel. I’m you and you’re me. Who asked you to jump off the boat that day? I did. The madness is in us both. I’ve got horses of my own, they just don’t look like horses. That’s what Osiris is. It makes madmen of us.

Pekko twisted the knife. Her blood pulsed where it pushed.

Vikram was still talking, but she no longer heard what he said. She only heard the tone of his voice, familiar, like worn-down sandpaper.

A flare of light from outside lit up his outline and she saw his expression, the horror, regret and sorrow. I could have loved you, she thought. Maybe I do. In that second, the lance of orange signalling what would come, she saw connections converging like lines of chalk: Second Grandmother’s diary; Axel’s suicide and the drowning of Eirik 9968; the border and the horses; the white fly and the Siberian boat—

“Adelaide—” he said.

46 ¦ VIKRAM

The explosion knocked the world from under him and the air from his lungs. He was thrown to the floor, choking. He smelled fresh fire and knew the hit had been close. Rubble rained from the ceiling. Part of it had caved in.

Shapes moved. He heard Pekko groan. He sensed movement, Adelaide, raising her head, lifting her body slowly from the ground. There was a familiar sound and Pekko grunted and he knew what she had done. He felt her eyes searching for him but she would see nothing in the dust. He had one insane impulse to crawl forward, take her face in his and kiss her, whisper a goodbye. There was no time.

“Adelaide, run!” he shouted hoarsely.

47 ¦ ADELAIDE

She found herself on the floor, coughing, a ringing in her ears. The air was thick with dust. She felt slick blood at her throat where Pekko’s knife had grazed. Her eyes burned. She could hardly see.

She wriggled forward. Her hand closed over metal: the knife. Pekko grabbed her ankle. She kicked but he hung on. She jabbed the knife behind her, felt it sink, stick, could not see where. Pekko made a noise. The grip on her ankle loosened. Blood dripped on her hand.

“Adelaide, run!”

Vikram’s voice propelled her onward. She found her feet. The door was before her. She wrenched it open and ran.

48 ¦ VIKRAM

Scrabbling on the floor. Pekko, a knife sticking out of his shoulder, lurched to his feet. He raised his gun, but it never fired. Nils was too quick. He swung his own weapon and hit the other man squarely on the temple. Pekko collapsed once more and was still.

“I never liked him anyway,” said Nils, as though Pekko was the problem they now faced, but Vikram understood that the gesture was more than that. Nils no longer cared about what Pekko could do. Very soon it wouldn’t matter.

“Rikard’s dead.” Drake’s voice came through the gloom. As the dust settled, Vikram saw Pekko’s body, inert, and Rikard’s slumped by the window-wall. There was a two metre hole in the ceiling. The others were standing, bruised but alive. Their faces were dirty and scared.

“We can still run,” Ilona said. Nobody moved.

“They’ll kill anyone who comes out of this tower,” said Vikram. “Adelaide—”

“She’s got a chance,” Nils said. “If they recognize her.” Nils turned to Ilona. “Lona, we’ve only got a few minutes before they strike again. You go. Catch up with Adelaide, take your chances together.”

The girl shook her head. “Not without you.”

He remembered a conversation with Adelaide, lazing in her jacuzzi, surrounded by soft white bubbles. It seemed impossible that it could have happened mere months ago.

“You don’t have any family, do you?” she’d asked, with that abrupt intimacy she sometimes offered, or demanded.

“How would you know?”

“Because it’s written here.” She touched, with a wet fingertip, the violet skin beneath his eyes. He realized she’d said it because she felt the same way.

If he could save one person, it had to be her. There was no-one else he could stand in front of now. He could not help Nils, or Drake, and they could not help him. All of them knew it; sensed their fates, Mikkeli’s fate, in the way they tensed, reforming. Ever since that day they had been marked. Mikkeli had shown them all that was possible. A gesture, a story to pass on. He had told Adelaide that she controlled her own life, believed the same of himself — but here he was, caught in a crumbling tower in the smoke and the flames.

You didn’t make your own luck. Things happened; they had no rules, no order. Would it hurt to burn? He’d never thought of burning. No, the smoke would take him first. He’d asphyxiate, or suffocate under the rubble.

Drake hiked her gun.

“Right then,” she said. “Let’s take out a few of these bastards.”

He picked up his own weapon. Barrel still warm. He snapped in a new cell.

They gathered at the broken window-wall. Nils and Ilona on one side, Vikram and Drake on the other. Dawn had fully broken. A flotilla of skadi boats encircled the tower below, dark blights on the sunrise sparkled water.

He remembered their faces under the light of a single electric bulb, in his memory now so young. He remembered the fierceness with which they had argued their beliefs. Horizon, Keli’s dream, their ideals. He felt a moment of gladness for those times shared. The smile in his mind lingered even as the sharpness of loss overcame him, for the stymied future, for the lives that might have been.

Mikkeli was crouched in the heater, her skin crackling as she burned. “Come on Vik,” she said. “Being dead’s not so bad. You get to haunt the living, don’t you?”

Nils took the first shot. They took it in rounds, firing without speaking, each bolt a hotness against their faces, none of them acknowledging that most of their attempts would find no mark.

In the last seconds, Vikram thought that he heard footsteps, running footsteps. Perhaps it was Adelaide, making her escape through the tortuous stairs of the unremembered quarters. Perhaps it was another Mikkeli, grown and old, her bare feet slip-slapping the road she walked in her dreams, the road lined with a wall, the fields verdant beyond. Or perhaps it was his own ground-dream. This was the noise of his feet on the beach, sinking into golden grains, dampened by the sea’s light rush. Onto the pebbles and into the grasses. The grasses brushing against his sun-drenched skin. A glimpse of what lay beyond—

He squeezed Drake’s hand; met Nils’s eyes. The contact felt impersonal, as though they’d all sunk into their own worlds, already let go of this life.

Don’t give up, he thought. You can’t give up yet.

But that wasn’t the way Osiris went.

49 ¦ ADELAIDE

She skidded down the impossible stairways. Twice the ice stole her footing. She toppled, hit the wall, barely kept her balance.

The tower she had thought dead and dormant was waking up. Shapeless piles turned into figures. As flames began to lick at the tower’s exterior, comatose creatures found a scrap of life to haul them to their feet. They moved as one, towards the stairwells, a current of sluggish limbs.

Her breath was torn. Blood rushed in her ears. Vikram was calling. Was he calling? Was he following? He must be.

New voices. What’s going on? It’s burning, the tower’s burning! Panicked screams. The stairwells filled. Cats and rats emerging from crannies, streaming ahead. The acrid smell of smoke beginning to filter down through the building.

Fire! The tower’s on fire — it’s the skadi, the skadi are here—

Not running now, she was fighting, using elbows and fists to barge her way down another flight and another. Hot with sweat and the crush and then she realized it wasn’t that. It wasn’t people. It was the heat of flames.

It’s happening again, it’s burning!

A woman in front of her held a baby. The child wailed, the two of them rocking and keening whilst the human tide pushed downwards.

Doors banging.

Not doors, gunshots.

She didn’t know what floor she was on. She shouldn’t have run. The keening woman stopped and sat in the middle of the crush. She couldn’t go back. Someone tried to take the child from the woman but she resisted and the child’s small body was tugged between them. Adelaide tried to help the woman move. The woman lashed out and Adelaide tumbled half a flight.

A kick to her bad leg. The pain almost paralysed her. She clawed herself upright.

A colossal rumble from above. Cries, one person to the next—

It’s coming down! The tower’s coming down!

Adelaide fought her way out of the stairwell, back into the deserted maze. She ran from room to room. Light streamed inside, half-blinding her. Now, when she needed a broken window-wall, there were none. She ran back and forth. Surely this was the same room, hadn’t she been here before?

Finally she found a gap, sharded with glass and dripping ice, barely large enough for her head to fit through. In one corner was a heater, still hot. She swung it at the grimy window-wall. The bufferglass cracked, but did not give. Her palms burned. Again and again she pounded.

The window-wall gave in a rain of bufferglass. Particles showered her hair and clothes. She leaned out and gasped.

She was fifteen floors above the sea, facing the volcanic city. Below, she saw the skadi boats, black dots circling the tower’s base. Above her, the fire. Plumes of smoke rose in other areas of the city. The sky was red and utterly cloudless.

The remaining lights in the city flickered and went out. She knew what that meant. The Guard were rerouting energy. She saw a hive of activity at the base of the adjacent tower, the mouth of a huge cannon, angled upwards. She had heard of these monsters but never seen one until now. The cannon jerked as it began to spit out liquid fire. She, like Vikram, had been deemed dispensable. Who had given the order? Had the skadi overridden her family, or had the Rechnovs consigned her to Axel’s fate?

Flames licked at the tower wall, billowing from broken portals. A piece of burning junk rushed past, narrowly avoiding her head. She ducked back. Beneath her, the foundations growled. Stars, the tower was coming down.

She inched towards the edge. Fear paralysed her.

Somewhere up there was Vikram. No, he couldn’t be, they must have deserted their stations by now — they must see it was futile?

But what if he hadn’t—

She took a step back, prepared to turn and run back up — she’d deserted him once, she couldn’t do it again — but he’d told her to go—

The floor shook beneath her. Her feet slid apart.

She leapt, and was surprised for an instant to find herself falling, as though she might have flown after all. The wind flung her limbs wide. The world somersaulted. She strained to point her feet towards the waves — the waves, the sea, so close now — take a breath! she thought, take a deep breath now—

She smashed into the water. Icy shock, a burn like lye. It coursed up her spine and then she was under.

Water filled her mouth. Her legs flailed. She pushed one toe against the other heel, trying to get rid of her boots. It was stuck, it wouldn’t budge, she needed air—

Her head broke surface. She dragged in oxygen but another wave pushed her back under. She tugged at the boot, got it free. Her coat weighed her down. She grappled with it before her shoulders shrugged free, then her hands, and she hauled herself once more to the surface—

Oxygen and noise and light—

Currents tugged her below. Her arms were no match for the ocean. Bubbles streamed from her mouth. Her lungs burned. She couldn’t fight it for long. She got the next lungful of air and screamed for help. She saw a boat, close enough to reach her. The hull gained and they hadn’t seen her. She floundered to the left to avoid being hit, heard shouts on board, the air full of cries and the smell of fire. Other boats, not far away. Their occupants standing transfixed, the searchlights redundant echoes on the tower—

Get away, swim, get away—

Under. Arms and legs barely moving, her body numb everywhere but her heart and lungs. She opened her eyes. Flares of light through the water. Was this how Axel died? Drowning, like Eirik 9968 had drowned, like Adelaide was going to. Had he thought of her at all, falling, dying? Did he have time to think? Did the sea take him quickly? Did he open his mouth to welcome the water?

She drifted.

They were drowning, she and Axel. They did everything together. It made sense that they would die together.

But Axel’s not here.

She kicked. She broke surface, heaved. Water streamed from her mouth. She spat, gulped in air. She would live. She would.

Fighting to stay afloat, she saw a terrible and unreal sight. The leaning tower began to shudder. Ablaze, it collapsed in on itself like a castle made of sand. One moment it was there, black and burning. The next there was only a strip of lightening sky.

The sea boiled. She screamed.

Vikram!

Hands hauled her out of the water. She fell back into the stern of a boat. She lay prostrate, unable to speak, staring at the space where the tower had been.

“It’s alright, we’ve got you.”

“Breathe easy now, cough up that water.”

Two westerners leaned over her, a man and a woman. Their faces were thin and anxious.

The sound came then, a high, eerie, keening sound. She did not realize at first that the noise came from her. Even when she knew, she found that she could not stop, even when the woman crouched close to her, patted her shoulder gently, and the boat sped away from that absence on the horizon, from the fire on the surface, everything growing smaller, everything fading.

“It’s alright,” they said. “You’re safe now. You’re out.”

50 ¦ ADELAIDE

In the night, the bodies that they found were piled onto rafts. They stiffened and frosted. The flames would unglue them. The mourners gathered in boats and wept, but no words, no tears passed Adelaide’s lips or eyes. She watched as a woman with long grey hair was ferried from raft to raft. The woman drew a line of salt on their foreheads and then she poured oil onto the human pyres.

The mourners threw burning torches through the air. Flames leapt from the oil; embraced the hands and feet and faces of the dead. They wore no shoes. Their shoes had been taken for others to use. Her rescuers said they would not mind.

The fires crackled and spat. She watched the flames unravelling vessels that had held running blood, flickering consciousness; returning matter to the ashes and salt it had once been. The bodies, none of which she had recognized as his, were swarmed by smoke.

Austral lights glimmered overhead. In another week it would be midwinter night. Four boats towed the pyres away. They glided on their final journeys, the cradles of fire dimmer and dimmer, out to the ring-net. She wanted to call out — stop! Don’t take them! Don’t exile them. Just in case he was there. In case he could not get back in.

Now a soft keening filled the air. It was a sound like none Adelaide had heard before, neither crying nor song. The wind was in it, the waves. The ghosts, too.

She imagined Vikram’s ghost was standing beside her, seeing what she saw, hearing what she heard. He asked, “What do you want to do?”

She looked at the tiny lights on the ocean surface.

“I have to get into the Silk Vault. There’s something there that I need to see.”

“And then?”

“I want to disappear.”