Osiris (osiris project)

by E. J. Swift

  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 good
bye. There was no time.

  “Adelaide, run!” he shouted hoarsely.

  47 ADELAIDE

  S he 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, angle
d 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?