Osiris (osiris project)

by E. J. Swift

  “What happened to you?”

  He looked down and saw that the blood had seeped through his jacket and there was dried blood all over his right hand.

  “I’m okay. Marete patched me up.”

  She took his bloodied hand and led him inside, easing the jacket carefully from his shoulders and placing it on the back of the futon. A month ago she wouldn’t have let it touch the floor. She lifted his bandaged arm.

  “Do you remember the guy I told you about last week?” he said. “The one using the shelter, that we weren’t sure was genuine?”

  “I remember. He did this?”

  “He was an ex-Juraj gang member. Shadiyah caught him trying to recruit some kids. When we challenged him, he pulled a knife.”

  “Stars, Vik. Does it hurt? Have they given you painkillers?”

  “Marete gave me a local anaesthetic.”

  He didn’t tell her of the terror that had blocked his throat when he saw the knife, not for himself but for the people he worked with, the people sleeping in their beds that he was meant to be protecting. It was terror that had delayed his responses for a full two seconds. That was the reason he had been injured; he’d been too slow.

  “I don’t like to think of you in this kind of danger,” said Adelaide.

  “Our security man caught him. The police have taken him away now.”

  “You’re shivering.”

  “I’m cold.”

  But he could feel himself sweating; his head felt like it was on fire.

  “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  After she had washed the dried blood from his hands, she coaxed him into the bath and they sat opposite one another, her ankles resting on his thighs. Adelaide turned on the jacuzzi and foam billowed on the surface of the bubbling water. She was trying to help but he could not relax.

  “Being here-all this luxury-it makes me feel so guilty,” he said.

  “Hush. Think about what you do every day. You’ve earned it, far more than anyone else I know.”

  “It’s difficult to think like that when you see people freezing to death.”

  “Not the ones who come to your shelters.”

  “Not all of them.”

  Now that he was back in Adelaide’s world, Adelaide’s life, something was bothering him.

  “You know that guy we were talking to at the party last week? The one that works for your father?”

  Adelaide drew circles in the bubbles.

  “You mean Tyr? What about him?”

  Vikram tried to recall the scene, the smooth expression of the man’s face, the same man who had thrown him out of here all those weeks ago.

  “This might sound weird but… I got the impression that he was spying on you. If he tries to get anything out of you about the aid schemes, you will tell me?”

  “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about, Vik.”

  “He works for your father. Your father hates me.”

  “Alright. I’ll keep an eye on Tyr.”

  “Thank you.”

  He sank lower amidst the bubbles. He wanted nothing more than to let his mind unravel, drift, forget.

  “You still look worried,” said Adelaide.

  “I am worried. I’m worried about the aid schemes. That they’re not doing enough.”

  “Would more money help? We could canvas. Approach private funders. We could do other things.”

  “I don’t think it would make a difference. I mean, yes, of course we can use more money, it’s just-I think the problem’s deeper than that.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I don’t know. This sounds crazy, but sometimes Adelaide, I honestly think people want me to fail.”

  “Then you’ll prove them wrong.”

  “I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I was insane to think I could make a difference.”

  “Vik.” She leaned forward and ran her hands up his good arm. “I understand. You know, it’s like when Axel-when he vanished. I thought, Osiris is so huge. How on earth will I begin to look for him? But you have to start somewhere.”

  She smiled at him, encouraging, and he nodded tiredly. She was right.

  “I had a letter from my mother today,” she said. “Viviana is disowning me.”

  “Will you be able to tell the difference?”

  He wondered after he’d spoken if the question sounded callous, but Adelaide did not look offended.

  “Not really. But it’s more of a statement, coming from her. She said she was disgusted with my behaviour at the dinner party.”

  “I was proud of what you said.”

  “It was unwise.” Her wet fingers trailed his chest as she leaned back, mirroring him. “But you know, Vik-more and more I can’t bring myself to care. About any of it. I missed Gudrun’s party last week. She’ll take it as a snub but I couldn’t bear to stand there, seeing the same faces, hearing the same conversations… Jan’s calling me every day about organising her twenty-second, I keep making promises and I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Then don’t. Let them fend for themselves.”

  She ran her toes down the inside of his thigh.

  “That’s not very altruistic, is it?”

  Vikram captured her nudging foot in his hands. There were calluses on the tendon where one of her absurd shoes had rubbed. Adelaide wriggled her toes, trying to free herself.

  “That tickles!”

  “Do you hate being tickled?” he asked.

  “Ye- no. No, I don’t. Stop it!”

  He moved his finger slowly along the inside of her foot. Adelaide solved her dilemma by sloshing water at him. He cupped a plume of foam and sent it back. Adelaide returned a larger plume. They sank back and she rested her ankles once again on his legs.

  “Adelaide, there’s something I need to-”

  “Vikram, have you ever heard-”

  The sound of popping bubbles filled the room. Steam was beginning to varnish the tinted window-wall.

  “What is it?” Vikram asked.

  “You say first.”

  “No, you go.”

  Adelaide pushed a damp strand of hair behind her ear. She was wearing her serious face.

  “Vik, you won’t fall in love with me, will you?”

  He laughed. “No.” He thought about turning the question on her, teasingly, but she had a habit of only getting her own jokes.

  “It would be a shame if you did,” she said. “Because I can’t care about anybody.”

  “I can see how that would be inconvenient.” He flicked foam at her. “I’ll try and restrain my passion for you for as long as possible.”

  “Don’t be a gull. I have a reason, you know.”

  He sensed that she was, in her convoluted way, trying to tell him something. He remembered knocking on her door in the middle of the night, a stranger who might have been anyone, an amusement for an insomniac girl. Here he was in the austere beauty of her bathroom, their skin brushing, almost fused by the distortions of water. There must have been a transition, a moment of impasse. He searched his memory; he could not find it.

  “Well, what’s the reason?”

  “Osiris-Osiris demands some sacrifice on our part. It’s not a lovers’ city. That’s the price we pay for our hospitality here.”

  “Is that your doctrine?”

  “It has to be.”

  “I can’t agree.” Osiris takes so much from us, he thought. Surely what Adelaide was talking about-intimacy, companionship in the night-was one of the few things they could hope for.

  “What’s your doctrine?” she asked.

  “I don’t see things as clear-cut as you do.”

  “Things aren’t always complicated. Sometimes they just are.” Adelaide popped a bubble with one fingernail. “Anyway, I interrupted you, before. What were you going to say?”

  Vikram thought of Axel’s letter. He should tell Adelaide. Stars, he should really tell her. Now was as good a time as ever.

  She smiled at him, waiti
ng. He tugged her leg, pulling her towards him. Her body slid underwater until he could see only her hair, spreading out in a three dimensional fan through the bubbles. She resurfaced in front of him, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. He kissed her back. “Nothing important,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, what were you going to say before? You changed your question.”

  “Oh. That. I was going to ask if you’d ever heard of something called white fly.”

  “What’s white fly?”

  “Just a phrase I heard and I didn’t know what it was. I wondered if it was a western thing?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Adelaide twisted in the water so that she could lie against his chest. He poured a globule of shampoo into his hand and began to lather her hair.

  “That feels nice. You know Vik, what you’re doing-it’s really, really important. You mustn’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “I’m glad you think so. Without your blessing, I probably would have quit the entire programme.”

  “Ha ha. No, I mean it.”

  His hands, massaging her scalp, slowed. Despite his efforts to keep it dry, the bandage on his arm was soaked and had turned pale pink. He could see tiny strands of red diffusing through the water.

  “Adelaide, what are you doing with me? Honestly?”

  She had her eyes closed, so as not to get soap in them.

  “You can’t ask me that.”

  “I just did.”

  “Well, I can’t answer. I told you I wouldn’t lie, didn’t I?”

  Vikram rinsed the soap from her hair, watching the water turn opaque.

  “What are you doing with me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “But you know what, Adie? You could do so many things, if you wanted to. Not what your family wants. Not like Linus, or Dmitri. But things that make a real difference. Think about that, will you?”

  Hours later when it was still dark he woke and Adelaide was sitting upright, her body pale in the twisted sheets, her eyes wide and staring.

  “Adie, what is it?”

  “I had a nightmare.”

  He put a hand gently on her shoulder. Her skin was covered with sweat.

  “Tell me.”

  “There was this giant thing-crawling, crawling everywhere, up the towers and over the bridges, and I knew wherever I ran, however fast, it would find me. It had these twitching-feelers, and its wings made a noise-an awful scraping noise. It plucked people out of the towers and grabbed them in its mouth and then it flew them out past the ring-net and into the sea and it-drowned them.”

  He squeezed her shoulder.

  “It’s just a dream. It’s over now.”

  “A dream?” Her voice was uncertain, barely audible.

  “Monsters in the night, Adie.”

  He pulled her against him and they lay down, his body curled around hers. Her back was cool and damp. For minutes, hours, he held her like that while she trembled, unprotesting, and he wondered what it was that could make her so afraid when he’d never known her to be scared of anything.

  31 ADELAIDE

  As Lao sat down next to her on the bench, five or six butterflies rose in a small explosion of colour. Lao ignored them. He went through the usual routine of taking out his Surfboard. She knew that he was scanning the paths from behind his dark glasses, listening carefully for sounds of eavesdroppers.

  “Lovely afternoon,” he said pleasantly.

  “You said you had information. Did you check Radir’s client list?”

  “I do, and I did. I managed to track down the woman who worked for your brother. Not either of the two that you employed, but another. I was right. She is an airlift.”

  “She worked for him? Was she one of Radir’s patients?”

  “She wasn’t on his list, unless she used a pseudonym. Lots of them do. However there is a connection. At one stage she worked as a cleaner for the reef farm, which is, as you know, adjacent to Radir’s offices. I would venture to hypothesise that this is how they met.”

  Adelaide felt a spark of triumph.

  “I want to meet her.”

  “You can’t. She was very reluctant to talk, very scared. She spoke to me only on the condition that this was the last contact she had with any of the Rechnovs. I gave her my word.”

  “You had no right to do that,” she said furiously.

  Lao removed his glasses, polished them, put them back on.

  “I have recovered all the relevant information, Miss Mystik. This woman ran errands for your brother, odd things which sound, to be frank, the product of insanity. There was one particular incident, however, that I believe is of import. Axel came across some documents. Paper documents, I should add. He had them with him when she arrived one day at the penthouse-this was some months ago. Usually, she said, Axel was exceptionally secretive, and would have hidden the documents from her sight. But he was excited. Elated, she said. He told her straight away that he had found something for the horses.”

  A Red Pierrot landed on Adelaide’s hand. She stared at its spots.

  “That could have been anything.”

  “So one might think.” Lao cleared his throat; a small, anticipatory noise. “But the woman had a glimpse of the papers before he put them into an envelope. She said they looked official. There was an unusual motif in the top right corner-an insect-and each paper was stamped with the same legend: Operation Whitefly. Does that mean anything to you?”

  In the warm, sticky heat, Adelaide felt suddenly clammy. She shook her head, intensely grateful for her own dark glasses. Not by a flicker in her face could she let Lao see her recognition.

  “Axel told her he had been instructed to take the papers to the Silk Vault, for safekeeping.”

  “He means that the horses told him.”

  “Either way, we must assume that he took them there.”

  Lao looked at her expectantly. She realized that an answer was necessary.

  “Well? What do we do now?”

  “I cannot make enquiries about a vault in Axel Rechnov’s name-or under an alias, for that matter-without raising Hanif’s awareness. This line of investigation, should you choose to pursue it, will take time. We will have to bribe someone on the inside of the vault. I will have to identify a suitable candidate, which will involve background research-among other things.”

  “And? If it does exist?”

  “I will not be able to access it. I imagine, however, that you might.”

  She looked at him quickly. “Because there’s always a secondary holder.”

  Lao flicked a Monarch from his knee. “That is correct. Presumably it will be yourself. I suspect, Ms Mystik, that whatever lies within that vault may offer us valuable clues as to why Axel disappeared-or why, we have to consider, he was removed.”

  “But the woman said he was acting for the horses. Axel probably had no idea what he had found. Anyway, ‘Operation Whitefly’-it could be anything-or nothing at all.”

  “Precisely. Whether Axel realized or not, finding those documents could have placed him in danger.” For the first time, Lao looked at her straight on. “Do you want to proceed?”

  Adelaide met the blank discs of Lao’s shades. She could not decide if there was a note of glee in his voice-the delight of discovery. Whitefly thudded in her head like a hammer.

  Think, Adelaide.

  If there was a vault, and if there was anything inside, Lao would expect to be party to it. And if what Axel had found had anything to do with what her grandfather had been talking about-she was potentially in a very dangerous position herself.

  She could leave the vault be. That would be the safest option. She could pull Lao off the case altogether. But could she guarantee that his suspicions had not been raised? That he might not try to find the vault on his own?

  “Find out if the vault exists. Do what you have to do. Let me know as soon as you have news.�
��

  “It will cost, of course. My fee and the insider’s. You will trust me to negotiate the price?”

  “Of course. Money is no object. I want you to do something else as well.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want you to search the prisons.”

  “You think he may be underwater?”

  “I don’t know what I think.” She struggled to keep her voice from rising. “Just search them. All of them.”

  “Very well.” He tapped the Surfboard. “I’ll-”

  “You’ll be in touch.”

  Lao left first. He walked off in his usual easy, inconspicuous manner. After he’d gone she wandered through the garden, hoping to lose her thoughts in the succulent lure of the greenery. She ducked under a low hanging branch and into a canopied grove. The rustle of wings filled the air. The husks of cocoons hung from branches, split down the middle where the insects had crawled out.

  She noticed a scattering of dead butterflies on the ground. Some were entire, perfect but motionless. Others had lost a wing. One was flapping. She crouched and scooped it up, careful not to handle its wings because the membrane was so thin, the scales would fall away at a touch. It lay in her palms, barely moving. It could not fly. She did not know what to do with it and after a moment she laid it back upon the ground.

  There was a boat, Adie… an inconceivable feat of seafaring!

  As she walked on, more dead ones littered the edges of the path. The thoughts that she had struggled to suppress ever since visiting the Domain rushed back to the front of her mind. Why had her grandfather told her about the Siberian boat? Did he want to be found out, or did he want the family to be found out-who else was in on this secret? Her father? Her mother? Linus? And if the family had authorised the massacre of an entire crew of Siberians, what else were they capable of?

  She thought of the vault, of Axel holding documents that he did not understand, or only understood when he was lucid. She imagined him sitting on the balcony, smiling that half smile, when assassins broke in. Or perhaps he’d been afraid, perhaps he’d tried to hide-alone and muddled, unable to escape, running from room to room. Perhaps they’d dragged him away screaming, thrown him into an underwater cell where no one would ever hear him scream again.

  Perhaps they’d killed him after all.