Osiris

by E. J. Swift

  When she got back to the party Minota was in the middle of recounting the same anecdote about the goose and the lover to a giddied circle. A mirror was on the table. Tyr lounged on the other side, his long legs stretched out, laughing. There were new arrivals. The apartment was heaving, most people now standing, many dancing.

  “There you are, Adelaide!”

  It was Jannike, with two glasses of pink punch. Jan’s hair supported a spectacular headpiece that curled over her forehead in a furry cerise tail. Adelaide had a flashback of Axel two years ago, solemnly fixing a dried seahorse to Jan’s head and assuring her it was the latest trick.

  “Darling, the most incredible party!” said Jan. “You really have surpassed yourself this time, absolutely everybody’s here. I met this rather handsome but most peculiar boy outside your bedroom. Said he was a biker, but Udur doesn’t know him. And Linus! What a surprise!”

  The mention of her brother distracted Adelaide from Jannike’s previous comment.

  “Linus? He’s not here?”

  “Yes, over there. How on earth did you lure him out?”

  “He never said he was coming.” Adelaide scanned the room until she found her brother. He had clearly come straight from work, dressed in a formal suit with no flair to it at all. People moving in his direction swerved away when they clocked who it was. Adelaide was not surprised. Linus was hardly stimulating conversation and besides, everyone knew the siblings shunned one another. “What does he think he’s doing here, Jan?”

  “Well, darling, he was chatting away—maybe not chatting exactly, but when I asked him something he responded with words. Maybe there’s hope for him yet, what do you think?” Jannike pursed her lips, assessing the situation.

  “I suppose I ought to talk to him.” Adelaide stared at her older brother with equal fascination. Yes, she had sent him an invitation, but that was a long running, only half funny joke between them. She could not work out whether to be angry or amused.

  “Give him a line,” Jannike suggested. “Say, he doesn’t even have a drink. I’ll get him one, what does he take?”

  “Get him a Rose Infusion. He needs sweetening up.”

  “Never fear, angel. Janko will come and save you in a minute.”

  Skirting the window-wall, Adelaide managed to cross the room unmolested. Linus caught her eye as she reached the halfway point. His eyes creased with amusement. She reminded herself that the Rechnovs were game players; his presence must be approached as a challenge.

  “Evening, Adelaide. Made it through the hyenas?”

  “I’d prefer jaguars, if Osiris had any,” she said. Reaching up to his collar, she undid the necktie, pulled it off, and tossed it onto a nearby plant. “Better. Don’t you know it’s cabaret night?”

  “I thought it was rose night.”

  “Rose night, cabaret theme. Anyway, this is a rare sighting. What brings you to this end of town?”

  Linus looked bemused, perhaps by the disappearance of his necktie. “You sent me an invitation, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but you chuck my cards in the recycler.”

  “Not always. Sometimes I find a more appropriate use for them.”

  Adelaide gave him a suspicious look.

  “Tell me,” said Linus. “How much does it cost you to host these things? Or should I say, how much does it cost us?”

  “Why, does the bottomless pit of family bank have a previously undiscovered floor?”

  “Not as far as I know. Dmitri guards the accounts. If he gets in touch, you’ll know bankruptcy is imminent.”

  “I’ve not seen Dmitri for months.”

  “Then I dare say you have a few more parties’ worth.” Linus retrieved his necktie from the plant. He rolled it into a neat snail shell and tucked it into his jacket pocket. Adelaide frowned.

  “I hope you aren’t going to be admonishing tonight. I’d have to effect your removal.”

  “I promise to behave,” he said. “If only because I’m too scared of your security detail.”

  “I thought I sensed a latent air of terror about you.”

  “I like the decor, by the way. Very dramatic. Although I can’t help feeling a little sorry for all the women getting second-rate flowers, now that you’ve used up a month’s worth of rose stock.”

  Adelaide scoffed. “Old World values.”

  “So why did you choose roses for tonight?”

  She looked at him. Was he serious? “Aesthetics.”

  “Your Rose Infusion, sir.”

  Jannike stood before them, grinning. She held aloft a selection of cocktails balanced enticingly on a tray. The tray was angled, with the pink concoction sloping towards the rim of its glass and Linus.

  “Oh—thank you, Jannike.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jannike performed a curtsy. The tray skidded away, skimming over the tops of heads like an adolescent flying saucer. Adelaide and Linus watched.

  “So. Did you like your gatecrasher?”

  “You heard about him? Did you, by any chance, send him?”

  Linus smiled. “Now why would you think that?”

  “Nobody else would give away an invitation.”

  “Well, I might have.”

  “Rude of you, dear brother. But he was evicted quickly.”

  “Did you listen to anything he said?”

  The sudden switch in conversational direction annoyed Adelaide. She had been rather enjoying their backhanded banter. Now she had a strong urge to put Linus in his place.

  “Why would I want to listen to one of your spies?”

  Linus extracted a rose petal from his cocktail and looked for somewhere to put it. Crossly, Adelaide held out her own glass. He dropped it in. “Don’t be absurd. Vikram is trying to encourage the Council to put through a few reforms for the west. You have influence, I thought you might help him.”

  Adelaide’s laugh rang out. Several people glanced over as if they might approach, then seeing Linus, retracted the impulse. His presence was beginning to dampen her party. She needed him gone. “Linus, you have a very odd idea about my priorities.”

  “You wouldn’t like to annoy the Council?”

  “Even if I did, I have other things to think about right now.” They were talking without looking at one another, but his next words changed that.

  “Like getting into Axel’s apartment?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So now we get to it.”

  “Get to what?”

  “Why you’re here. Did Feodor send you?”

  “Nobody sent me, Adelaide.” Linus dropped his voice. “I decided to come and talk to you. This investigation is a delicate thing. People are making accusations. The Daily Flotsam has even suggested we’ve done away with Axel ourselves because he was an embarrassment.”

  “For all I know you might have done,” she said distantly.

  Linus’s eyebrows drew together. “It would be a mistake to think I don’t care, Adelaide. He was my brother too.”

  “He was nobody’s brother by the end of it.”

  “In any case you can’t go around establishing your own private battleground. You’ve got to let it go. We all have.”

  She bestowed an insincere smile upon him. “Anything you say, Linus.”

  “You’re impossible.” He kept his voice low but it was strained with anger.

  “It’s been said before.”

  “And you should stop screwing around with Tyr as well.”

  She saw the regret flash over her brother’s face a second after he had spoken, but it was too late. Her eyes flicked involuntarily across the room. They were playing poker at the table now. Tyr had a stack of chips in front of him. He was toying with them, letting the disks slip through his fingers in a series of clinks. It was chance, perhaps, that made him catch her eye at that moment. But it might have been something more elusive and unqualified. Understanding sprang between them. Tyr looked away.

  Linus lit two cigarettes and passed her one without speaking. The first inhalation grat
ed on her throat. He smoked something different to her. It tasted grey. She drew twice, deeply, before allowing herself to speak.

  “How long have you known?”

  “I’ve suspected for a while. Tonight confirmed it.”

  A cloud of laughter floated up from the poker table. Jannike had appropriated one of the barmen’s jackets. She bent over in mock imitation of a waiter, cocking her head so that the crimson tail dangled over her ear. “Raise you five hundred,” said Kristin. Minota stripped off her bracelet and threw it down. In the corner, one of Adelaide’s musician friends had opened the piano and was playing pre-Neon baroque, oblivious to the DJ or anyone else in the room. Olga was lounging across the top, blowing smoke rings.

  There was something awful, she thought, about the idea of prolonged wondering, of surveillance. She would almost rather have been caught in the act.

  “You know if our father finds out he’ll be fired,” said Linus.

  “I know.”

  “You’re selfish.”

  “I always have been.”

  “There’s too much on the line.”

  “For me, too.” She hardly knew what they were saying.

  “For everyone. This is an unstable time politically.” Linus lowered his voice. “Adelaide, you must know that the City is on the verge of a resource crisis. Bufferglass and solar skin reserves are all but gone, now we’re having problems at the mining station. This is not a time when the family needs distractions. Now please—if you aren’t prepared to reconsider, let’s just go back to how things were. We’ll stick to our business and you stick to yours.”

  Not trusting herself to speak, she stared directly ahead. Linus sighed.

  “I have to go. I’ve got a meeting at nine o’clock in the morning and I need to be awake for it.”

  “Of course. Thank you for coming.”

  Many hours later, when the party was over and she was sitting alone in its debris, Adelaide would have to admire the finesse of Linus’s attack. He might have played his trump card too early. He had played it well nonetheless. But watching him leave, all she felt was sick, as if every last gasp of oxygen had been squeezed from her body.

  12 ¦ VIKRAM

  “So Vik does his spiel, tells her how we’re all living in shit, dying of cold and drowning down here, and Miz Adelaide Mystik goes, get this, she goes, thank you for coming. Thank you for coming! Can you believe it!” Nils laughed until it turned into a spluttering cough. He tapped the passing bar girl on the shoulder. “Get us another jug of that, will you?”

  The boarded-up den was packed and beginning to get rowdy. Vikram, Nils and Drake hunched on either side of the makeshift table: a door propped over empty kegs. Drake had her feet up. She was wearing her prized boots, huge and chunky, their soles two inches thick and ridged like a series of fins. A naked electric bulb swung overhead, casting wild shadows, making the drunk feel drunker.

  “Stuck up cow,” said Drake. She drew luxuriously on a skinny roll-up and sighed out an equally emaciated trail of smoke. “Surprised you didn’t punch her, Vik.”

  “I was tempted,” Vikram said.

  “Thank you for coming.” Nils put on a high pitched, whiny voice. “What a bitch.” He shook his head admiringly. Nils’s reaction was predictable. He was disappointed Vikram had seen so little of Adelaide, but she was exactly as Nils had imagined.

  Drake elbowed a man who was trying to inhale the smoke from her cigarette. “So, did you get a good look at her apartment? I bet it’s massive, right?”

  Vikram shook his head. “You can’t imagine.”

  “Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine the whole thing.” There was a derisive, bitter tone to Drake’s voice. Vikram understood it completely, but he wished suddenly that it was not there.

  “I talked to this one girl,” he said. “She seemed alright.”

  “Alright?” Drake gave a snort of disbelief. “How alright?”

  Vikram couldn’t say that Jannike hadn’t given him away without explaining that he’d been in Adelaide’s bedroom, so he just shrugged. Now he thought about it, perhaps she had given him away.

  The bar girl came back with a cracked jug and dumped it in the middle of the bench. Some of the contents splashed over.

  Nils jumped to his feet. “Hey, watch what you’re doing!”

  Vikram reached up and put a hand on Nils’s arm until his friend sat down. The bar girl stalked off without a word.

  “That Miz Mystik could take a leaf or two out of her book,” Drake commented.

  “Maybe she already did,” Vikram tried, half-heartedly, to join in on the joke. He had given his friends the bare facts. He’d told them about the extravagance of the Red Rooms, his brief conversation with the guests, what Tyr had said at the end. He hadn’t told them about western rag. He could not explain the chagrin he had felt. For Nils, Vikram’s expulsion was a great escape, to be recounted and exaggerated in company. It was not an unflattering version, but every time Nils retold the story, it echoed falser in Vikram’s mind.

  The wind banged against the boarded bufferglass. Above them, the light bulb flung back and forth.

  “Whipping up a ghost-grabber,” Drake said, hooking one ankle over the other. She widened her eyes spookily. Vikram glanced at the window-wall. Watch out, the orphanage boat-keeper used to say, or the Tarctic will get you.

  “Better not be,” Nils grumbled. “We’ll be stuck here all night.”

  “Better get another jug.” Drake stuck her arm into the air and twisted her face into an expression of mild pain. “Oy, waiter! Are you there?” She and Nils convulsed.

  A heavy-set man in a woollen hat paused by their table. His face was familiar but Vikram couldn’t place him.

  “Drake. Thought I heard your voice.”

  “Hey, man, good to see you. Working the Friday shift?”

  “Maybe, maybe. You?”

  “Same as always.”

  The man nodded to Nils and Vikram and moved on before they had a chance to return the greeting.

  “Who was that?” Vikram asked.

  “Rikard. You remember Rikard? He was with us three years ago.”

  “Think Keli knows him,” Nils added.

  Rikard. The face sharpened into memory; their paths must have crossed. It was possible he had never even spoken to the man, but there had been so many people back then.

  “I didn’t realize you were still in touch with that crowd,” he said.

  “I’m not. He’s started crewing the boats occasionally, I ran into him a few weeks back.”

  Vikram looked at the soles of Drake’s boots, the ridges packed with waterproof wax and fish scales. He was terrified that one day she would be caught on an illegal fish run and either killed or flung underwater, but it was pointless voicing that fear. Instead he asked, “What happened to your tooth?”

  He thought she had lost one of the front ones, but when she grinned he saw that the tooth had turned entirely black.

  “Some bastard tried to nick my boots while I was asleep.”

  “I’ll buy you a gold one for midwinter,” Nils offered.

  “You’re so generous, you. I’ll have a pair of ruby earrings while you’re at it. And maybe a bunch of, what was it, roses too—for my hair.” Drake screwed up a handful of wiry curls. “What d’you think?”

  Vikram drained his mug.

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny you two.”

  When they left the den, much later, the wind had dropped and they had finished several jugs. Vikram stepped outside ahead of the others. The first bridge, thirty floors up, was a rumpled construction lashed together out of planks, boards, squares of fibreglass, broken bufferglass panes, metal sheets and whole and partial boats. Dirty water welled in the pit of a kayak, dripping erratically down.

  Vikram climbed easily over the treacherous walkway. The bridge rocked beneath him, regularly, like a pendulum. He sensed movement in the sky above, the clouds scudding away on high winds. A glimmer of light drew his gaze south. He followed it, fou
nd clear sky and there, on the horizon, a phenomenon. Ribbons of gauze undulated in the stratosphere: green and yellow, flickering, shimmering. The lights always meant something. Sickness. Death. Was that where his failure to engage that lofty girl would end? He was afraid, but the strange evanescent beauty drew him in spite of his fear. He could have sat on the bridge for hours, with no company but the sea hissing somewhere below.

  The others came out, giggling. Drake couldn’t walk properly. She had her arms out wide. She was flapping them. Nils steered her.

  “Stars!” Nils stopped, gazing up. “Look at the lights!”

  “Aura Australis,” said Drake expertly. She hiccoughed. Only an innate sense of balance was keeping her upright.

  “How d’you know that?”

  “Someone told me.”

  Drake misjudged a step. Her boot stuck in a hole. Nils hauled her out.

  “Who?”

  “Dunno. Someone… educated.”

  She moved close to Nils and whispered something in his ear. Nils shook his head. Drake whispered again, more urgently.

  “What’s up?” Vikram called.

  Nils cupped a playful hand over Drake’s mouth.

  “She’s pissed.”

  They reached Vikram. He took Drake’s other arm and they progressed slowly along the bridge. Behind him, the Australis lights pulsed. But the dizzy laughter of the others swept him onward, pulling him back into the mesh of the group, where he belonged.

  Vikram lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the wind and thinking about the three of them, bound together by strange layers of history. They had once been five; they should always have been four. He tried to imagine what Mikkeli would have done. Keli wouldn’t have accepted defeat, and nor could Vikram.

  “Now you know what you’re up against,” she’d say. “So work out how to fight it.”

  He had thought, in the first bewildering days when he was released from jail, that he would miss her all the time. But it didn’t happen like that. She intruded on his thoughts at specific times, with specific actions. He found that he missed her more outside. In boats, always, and when he caught a glimpse of a mismatched, roguish face. Sometimes he told himself that it really was Keli, and as long as he didn’t follow her, she would stay alive. He realized that the dead didn’t go away. They lingered.