Osiris (osiris project)

by E. J. Swift

  36 VIKRAM

  He opened the door. They grabbed him roughly and threw him face-first against the wall. He heard the contact crack and thought for a moment they had broken his nose but the blood did not come, just quick splitting pain. Someone locked a pair of handcuffs on him. He heard the word arrest. He didn’t listen to the rest because he already knew why they were there. There could only be one reason. They had found out about the break-in.

  “Get me a lawyer,” he said through gritted teeth pushed into the plaster, and a voice warmly close to his ear replied.

  “Airlifts don’t warrant lawyers, Mr Bai.”

  He kicked back at that, catching someone because there was a yelp of pain. They retaliated, knocking his legs out from underneath him. With his hands behind his back and nothing to stop his fall he smashed against the floor. This time his nose did break. The blood gushed from his nostrils and he floundered in it. A boot pushed into the small of his back.

  “Especially those who resist arrest,” he heard. Laughter followed. He could not see a single face but he knew it was the skadi, not the civilian police force. He knew it by their taunts and their glee. Every gut instinct ached to respond. These were the bastards who had killed Mikkeli. Who had killed Eirik. The boot had him pinioned. All he could do was twitch and splutter. He heard the spark of a lighter and smelt cigarette smoke through his blood. Hot ash stung the back of his neck. Half his instinct said gurgle, start to drown, then they’ll have to take you to hospital. But it was only too easy to record an accidental death. Especially an airlift death.

  The skadi were in no hurry. They joked over his head. After a minute the door opened and footsteps rapped the floorboards. A woman crouched at Vikram’s head. Vikram could not see her face, only her shiny black boots, heels just lifted from the floor, beneath a black and white photograph on a Surfboard. The image was grainy but what it contained was unmistakable.

  The woman tapped the Surfboard.

  “This is a still from a section of footage taken from a security camera outside a private residence. Date, April twenty-four, hour, three-oh-five. The residence was and remains under Council jurisdiction. The couple in question use a stolen high-security swipe card to disable the police barrier, then pick the penthouse locks with crude metal before entering and leaving approximately fifty minutes later. This evidence serves as a warrant for arrest and detention. Is this you, Mr Bai?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “I should also add that the evidence in question is sufficient to ensure jail without trial, should it be proven that you have a prior offence.” Her hand came towards his head with a test tube. She held it under his nose. He tried to turn his head away but the blood dripped in. She passed the test tube up to someone standing. “Your DNA will ascertain whether you have a record. Do you have any prior convictions, Mr Bai?”

  “No.” He spat out blood. Not under that name. They would find it anyway. His skin began to crawl with fear. “Listen,” he croaked. “I need to speak to a lawyer. Call Linus Rechnov. He’ll vouch for me. I’m running the New Horizon Movement. I need to speak to people. I need a scarab, I need a lawyer-”

  The officer stood up. “You can take him away.”

  “Listen to me!”

  Two of them hauled him to his feet, nose still streaming. His face throbbed. He could feel where the bone had split.

  The skadi shunted him to the lift, wrestling and kicking. Black space rushed to fill his vision. He was aware of shouting, a terrible screaming, did not realize at first that it was his own voice making that sound. His heels dug trenches in the floor. Pairs of eyes peered curiously from behind their doors as the lift began to bear him inexorably down.

  He saw the porthole looming, the cold unearthly cell. He realized that his noise was words.

  “Not underwater,” he was screaming. The same words, over and over again. “Not underwater, not underwater, not underwater.”

  The fist came towards his temple. There was a pin burst of pain and then nothing.

  / / /

  The teeth chattered in his head. He heard their clicking, one against the other, as if from miles away. His mouth was sore. He could not feel the rest of his face and he could not see. He panicked that he was blind and crawled his hands bit by bit up to his face, expecting to feel the open sightless orbs but it was the skin of his eyelids, clogged and somehow immovable. He thought he heard a voice, then there was an eruption of pain, something cold and wet in the centre of his face. The voice faded. He was deaf as well as blind.

  His eyelids peeled open, pulling away from their crusts. He blinked, breathed in cold air, blinked again. He was lying on a bunk in a cell. The light was glaucous. It smelled of salt and damp and slow corrosion.

  The space seemed no larger, no smaller than the last time. The walls were concrete. It was empty except for a bucket and the bunk he was lying on. Thin mattress. No pillow. They had patched up his nose, but he could still taste old blood. He touched it with fingertips that withdrew quickly when he felt the tender flesh. Whatever they had done, it was not set properly. His fingers explored upward, over the bump on his right temple. At least they had missed his eye.

  He sensed, somehow, that he was further underwater than before. The porthole was obscured by algae. Fish swimming by were no more than shadows in a murky well.

  His mind jumped between terror and rationale. He lay very still and ordered himself not to scream.

  “Adelaide Rechnov to see you.” The guard’s voice through the shutter was flat.

  “I don’t want to see her.”

  The guard opened the door. Adelaide came in. She was wearing a black trouser suit and tinted glasses and her hair was tied back in a tail. It gave her an androgynous look. Under the light of the cell, the pale peaks of her cheeks and the pointed chin took on a green tinge, watery and opaque. She reminded him of a mythical creature risen from the depths. A siren. An undine. He could smell scent on her, the sharp citrus one she wore sometimes. He had watched her apply that scent to hidden parts of her body.

  “Thank you,” said Adelaide to the guard, a gesture that was also a dismissal. The guard glanced from Vikram to Adelaide and then left. The door clanged shut.

  “Hello, Vikram,” she said.

  He stayed as he was on the bunk, half sitting half crouched, arms balanced on knees and fingers interlocked. Adelaide’s eyes flitted about. They did not pause for long; there wasn’t much to see. The walls, the damp, the bunk. He saw her note the porthole and cursed himself for ever having mentioned it to her. With that weakness he had given her access to something deeply personal. He was a fool.

  “Lovely place you’ve got here,” she said. The joke was absorbed into the stifling air. Adelaide’s handbag dangled at her side. The bag was awkward, out of place. She seemed to realize this, because her fingers clenched and unclenched on its strap. He let her squirm. Her eyes settled on his face and he saw them widen.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  He did not reply. A broken nose was obvious to anyone, and as they hadn’t fixed it properly it would always be crooked now. Adelaide ploughed on.

  “I’m so sorry about this, Vikram. I’m doing everything I can to get you out.”

  “Are you?”

  “You can speak. For a minute there I thought they’d cut out your tongue.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  There was a silence. Adelaide looked as though she might lean against the wall, but thought better of it. He did not suggest she could sit down.

  “So,” she said. “I’ve managed to get you a lawyer, a really good one. She’s going to stop by this afternoon, go through all the technicalities with you, but I’d say you should only be in here a couple more days.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “What?”

  Behind the glasses, confusion rippled across her face, before she regained possession.

  “Sorry, didn’t catch that,” she said. A flash of the real Adelaide at last. The smell
of citrus was overwhelming; making him think of lemons and limes, the tang, the jolt of biting into a lemon slice after voqua. He had to think of her and what she had done.

  He leaned forward.

  “I. Don’t. Want. Your. Help.”

  Adelaide folded her arms across her chest. Even her lips were pale green.

  “Noble as that sentiment may be, Vikram, it’s hardly in your interests, is it? Without me you’re stuck down here for all foreseeable eternity.” Her face softened. “Look. It’s not like you’re going to owe me anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. Think of it as me settling a debt.”

  Her arrogance really was astounding, Vikram told himself. His fingers untangled and locked again. He struggled not to clench them. She had taken enough of him already, he was not going to show her anything.

  “I don’t think you quite understand,” he said. “You’ve got me in enough shit. I don’t want you meddling in my affairs any more.”

  “You were happy enough for me to meddle up until now,” she snapped. “What in hell’s tide’s got into you? I helped you get your schemes through, didn’t I? I put your name on the map.”

  “And then you sent me right back where I belong, didn’t you?”

  He was standing, moving towards her. He slammed his palm against the wall inches from her head. She flinched. His hand stayed there, trapping her. With his other hand he ripped the glasses from her face. They clattered on the floor behind him. Pinned, Adelaide looked him right in the eye. There was redness, swelling, and for a moment he thought she had been crying, but that was impossible. Adelaide never cried.

  “I didn’t put you here, Vikram.”

  They were head to head now, close enough to see the tiniest contractions of the irises. Close enough to kiss. He looked at her mouth. Her lips were suffering from a lack of care, colourless and chapped. Still he remembered their feel and wanted to kick the wall and her too.

  “How do I know you didn’t set me up?”

  She shook her head. She looked bewildered. He reminded himself that she had spent most of her life acting.

  “Why would I set you up? I’d only be screwing myself as well.”

  “As opposed to screwing me?”

  “Grow up.”

  He knew he deserved that, but he could not shake the belief that she had screwed him over, one way or another. Someone was to blame and it had better be her. His other hand flashed to her throat. He could see the vein pulsing there. Adelaide Mystik had given him nothing and taken what he had.

  “Listen to me,” she said, her voice restricted. “I know what I told you when we made that deal. I warned you. I told you not to trust me.”

  “And you were right,” he snarled.

  “I’m telling you the opposite now.”

  He placed his hand under her jaw and lifted it, appraising her in a cold, deliberate manner. There were dark shadows under her eyes; nightmares or nights without sleep. He imagined her tossing and turning in the empty width of that bed. The lilac silk sheets wrapping around her limbs. Her body sticky with sweat in the tropical heating.

  “Not looking so hot, Adelaide,” he said softly.

  He felt the tension in her jaw, sensed she was gathering her resources for a crushing rejoinder. Her shoulders lifted a little.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”

  He almost laughed. He had to hold his face under tight rein. He knew he had been successful because disappointment flickered in her eyes and they dropped. He had never known Adelaide to drop her eyes.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said. She slumped against the wall.

  “Got somewhere better to be? Don’t let me keep you.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  The plea made him incandescent. He had to move away before he hit her.

  “Oh, I understand you perfectly! You think I have a rat’s ass chance of getting out of here in the next twelve months? You’re fucking crazy. You asked me once what it’s like down here. Well, look at it! Take a fucking good look, Adelaide! Getting claustrophobic yet?” He gave the metal bunk a vicious kick. Adelaide was frozen against the wall. He stepped towards her. “Not yet, perhaps. It takes all of a good hour to sink in. But after that, you’ll stop feeling normal. That porthole drives you mad. You start thinking of ways you could get out, except there aren’t any. Thinking you could somehow swim out, except you’d drown. And then you start to think you are drowning. You’ve played at that, haven’t you Adelaide? You’ve played at drowning. Did you think it was fun? Think it was a game?”

  The door opened. Out of defiance, Vikram did not move, waiting for them to order him away from her, wanting until the last second that pale face at the mercy of his accusing stare. But it wasn’t who he thought. The big, muscular man in the doorway was not a guard; he wore a dark blue suit and his head was shaved to nothing. Vikram had never seen him before.

  “I told you I didn’t have much time.” Adelaide turned to the newcomer, her face beseeching. “Just give me five more minutes-”

  For answer the man took a rough hold of her wrist and yanked her towards him. She stumbled.

  “Your brother said time’s up, Miss Rechnov.”

  “It’s Mystik. ”

  “Rechnov since I’ve known you. She’s under house arrest,” he said casually to Vikram. “Daddy’s orders, isn’t it AD?”

  Vikram stared at the man. Adelaide’s elbow hit hard and fast. Her antagonist doubled over. Then he straightened, cleared his face of all expression, and hauled Adelaide out of the cell. The door slammed before Vikram could anticipate it. He heard a crack like someone being hit. If it was her she did not cry out.

  Good girl, he thought automatically. The noise reverberated in his ears. Was it just prison playing tricks? He wanted to pull her back, examine her face anew for signs of proof. Don’t you understand, he wanted to say. Don’t you understand, I have my pride too. But she was gone. He felt stunned, incapable of rational thought. His anger was wasted. He had been waiting for her to show up, he realized, so he could say everything he wanted to say, but he had expected to get answers. Someone-he did not know who-had denied him that.

  Adelaide was gone. She was really gone. The eerie light settled upon him like a shawl and in his solitary green cell he shivered.

  He watched the drop of water forming on the ceiling. Steadily, it grew. It bulged from the damp concrete, swelling, tugging at its life cord until finally it parted and fell- plink — into the puddle in the corner of the cell.

  The puddle, when he arrived, had measured about four centimetres across. Over the last-how many? — days, it had stretched to seven. The puddle terrified him. From its meagre beginnings he saw the ocean grow and grow and surge through the porthole to flood the cell. He saw himself drown. He saw the water rising and himself swimming up with it as he cried out for help but none came. He swam from one side of the cell to another, pushing against the walls. Inch by inch his airspace receded. His mouth pressed against the ceiling which had turned to glass, he sucked in his last gasp of oxygen and then he was in a tank full of ocean and there was no more breathing.

  It happened when he had been staring at the porthole. The glass broke and the water rushed in. The visions were short and abrupt. The longer versions waited until he slept. When the cell was full of water, his lungs burning and his consciousness prepared to switch off, he woke, hyperventilating. He lived his dying again and again.

  Sometimes, when the water crashed in, he saw Adelaide’s body inside it, turning over and over like a fish.

  Time fluxed. The outside world, with its catalogues of sunrise, sunset, hail and snow, was estranged from him. The lighting was the same dim green twenty-four hours a day. When he was let out to eat the light in the hallway flickered, but in his cell it never changed.

  He knew, from his last stint underwater, that his skin was draining of colour and his arteries were growing sluggish. He did sets of exercises twice a day, with the damp
floor against his palms and his back. He ran on the spot but the buildup of trapped momentum made him want to slam himself against the wall. Sometimes he did so, screaming with the impact. His shoulders and hips swelled in purple bruises. From the condensation and the cold he developed a shiver and a hacking cough. He watched carefully for specks of blood: the first signs of tuberculosis.

  Every twelve hours he scratched half a cross into the wall. He hung his watch on the stub of a nail. If they were worried about suicide they would have filed the nail down; it was, he speculated, just substantial enough to kill yourself. He pondered how it might be done, the best angle, the most likely site. The base of the skull, probably. They had left it for the same reason the cell was concrete and he had been allowed to keep his watch, which he could choke on. A person who committed suicide was not worth preserving until the end of their prison sentence.

  A man five cells around from Vikram managed to hang himself. When he heard the news Vikram tried to imagine how the man might have done it. What had he hung from? What had he used? A shoelace? A belt? He took off his own belt and examined it, felt the metal studs and the taut length of it.

  As he lay in the green, faces edged into his mind, old friends, members of Horizon, Nils, Shadiyah, Jannike, Linus, the brother and sister in the shelter, Hella. He had lost not one but two lives. Bad enough to be an airlift, but what happened when you had to cross back? He saw himself leaving prison, staggering into daylight like a manta addict. He could not go to any of those people. He would be as rootless as he had been in the orphanage before Mikkeli found him, a buoy cut loose from its moorings and cast out on the open sea.

  It’s not a lovers’ city, said Adelaide, and she was right, in the end. Osiris mocked such fragility. I don’t love Adelaide, he wanted to say. Don’t punish me for what I have not done. He heard repeated the cell door shut and the crack that followed it and imagined the action that must have made it. Her theories of Axel’s murder took up residence in the cell with him. He spoke to Rechnov murderers. Asked them how they had done it. He whispered lines of the letter to himself. The white horse will talk first.