Osiris

by E. J. Swift

  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.

  No. She remembered her grandfather’s words. No one would ever hurt your brother. She had to believe that.

  Her twin was still alive; the connection was there, she felt it. Some part of him must have known the power of those documents. He’d left on purpose. He’d gone into hiding until she found him.

  And then?

  The answer was obvious. And then he planned to leave Osiris. With her. Because if there had been one boat, might not there have been others? Who else was out there, waiting to be found?

  She kept walking. The path through the farm was circular; soon she was back to where she had started. Through the foliage she saw the external walls of the tower, their hexagonal pattern repeated over and over again. Endless repetition, the way a wheel turned, or a horse’s hooves beat.

  She could not get away from one inescapable fact. If her grandfather was telling the truth, if there really had been a boat—then everything Adelaide had ever been told was a lie.

  32 ¦ VIKRAM

  A light mist trickled into the harbour as their speedboat approached. It blurred the hulls, red with rust, of gigantic ships whose load lines sat high above the water. It touched cool fingers to Vikram’s face. Only the cries of circling gulls broke the silence, and there was nobody present to hear them, except for Vikram and Adelaide, and Adelaide’s boatman.

  The craft pulled up alongside a jetty which sloped down into the water. A maze of piers and walkways crisscrossed the harbour. Most were visible; some, more dangerously, were submerged. Vikram and Adelaide climbed out. They wore thermal wetsuits: Vikram’s red, Adelaide’s green. Adelaide’s hair swirled in the wind as she crouched to say something to the boatman. Vikram stood motionless, struck by the stillness, and the quiet.

  “Let’s go!”

  Adelaide started walking. Vikram gave chase and they ran, shrieking, to the jetty’s edge. The sea before them had a brownish hue; their forms were murky shadows.

  “You know smugglers used to come here,” said Adelaide. “Before the border.”

  “Maybe they still do.”

  “No. It’s deserted now. Sometimes this place gives me—a queer feeling.”

  They turned back and crossed a bridge into a floating cabin. Inside sat two identical waterbikes, sleek and silver. At the sight of those beautiful crafts, Vikram felt a surge in his head like the release of a pressure valve.

  It had been building over the last few weeks. Subtly, so subtly that at first he barely recognized them, the responsibilities had been lining up: to the west and to the City. He needed this break.

  Adelaide had mounted her bike. “What are you waiting for?”

  He climbed onto the other bike and squeezed the handlebars, as she did. The motor hummed into life. They eased the bikes down a ramp and bobbed into the water, the aerodynamic bodies lying low. They emerged on the opposite side of the cabin, out into the mist.

  Adelaide leaned over and grabbed Vikram’s handlebars. She had tucked her hair under a green hood.

  “You ready?” she said.

  Vikram pulled a pair of goggles over his eyes. “Absolutely.”

  “Watch out for floating junk. This place is a scrap heap.”

  She squeezed the handlebars, increasing the power. He did the same and felt the engine reverberating. Ripples of froth welled around both crafts. They leapt forward.

  Out of the fog loomed the vast shapes of forsaken ships. Vikram glanced up as they skirted the length of a tanker. Its parts creaked like old bones. The hull was bleached with salt and green with algae. Despite their physical deterioration, the ships seemed to him to be sleeping, still semi-conscious.

  The bike veered close to the hull on a wave. He edged left, maintaining a wider corridor. Ahead he watched the streamlined shape of Adelaide and her bike weaving under the shadows of the abandoned vessels. Several times he had to angle around debris or nudge the bike over a hidden walkway. The air on his face was freezing but it was good to be out here, with the elements, on his own terms. Winter and work had been choking him.

  They passed between the last two ships, prows angled together to form a gateway. Before them lay the open sea. The mist was clearing. Some way ahead, Adelaide stopped and wheeled around.

  “I’ll race you to the ring-net!”

  She was already leaping forward in the water, streaking away so fast that the spray almost obscured her completely. He gave chase. The wind battled him, the waterbike bucked and rolled beneath him and at first he felt almost sick, but then he got used to it, and was aware only of speed.

  Minutes passed but it felt like nothing. He was filled with exhilaration. He opened his mouth and had to shout, not words, just joyful noise.

  Suddenly there it was, a vast dark wall rising twenty metres out of the water. It loomed closer and closer. The sea soaked him. Salt was bright in his mouth. Adelaide wasn’t far ahead now, swivelling left and right and left again, over the waves, down into the troughs. Glancing up he saw it for the first time in daylight, a series of interlocking chains: the ring-net. He was on Adelaide’s tail, in her slipstream, close enough to hear her laugh above the sea and the wind and th
e metallic music. Then she cut sharply to the right and he was under it. Horror clenched him. He was going to crash. He wrenched the handlebars with all his strength, panic sucking the oxygen from his lungs. The Dolphin careered right until he was practically lying along the waves, and the engine cut.

  He wrested the bike upright, sucking in air, scared and exhilarated in equal measure. Five metres away, Adelaide’s waterbike was also at rest. She leaned over and touched the ring-net with one hand. He knew she was grinning.

  “I won!” she shouted.

  He looked up. The chains of the ring-net clinked and chimed, the whole construction rippling like a ponderous sheet of material. The metal was covered in algae. The net stretched from outpost to outpost in a giant fence, but wherever they were, the nearest one was too far away to see. So was the border, which ran up to the ring-net. He looked beyond Adelaide. The green lights he’d seen before illuminated the ring-net’s path. It curved away as far as he could see, cutting through the ocean until it was lost in the distance.

  “Quite colossal, isn’t it?” Adelaide cried. “Keeps out the sharks.”

  “Not always,” he yelled back. Adelaide nudged her Dolphin the short distance to him, and took hold of his handlebars once again. They rose and fell together on the waves.

  “What?”

  Beneath the goggles her face was pink and glowing.

  “I said not always,” he repeated. “I saw sharks when I was underwater.”

  Her mouth opened dramatically.

  “Big ones?”

  “Big enough.”

  He felt a sense of menace, knowing what was on the other side of the net, and yet knowing nothing at the same time. The significance of the net overwhelmed him. Even here, in the middle of the ocean, with as much space around him as he could have desired, he was both locked in and locked out.

  “If anything got through the net now we wouldn’t know anyway. Not since the alarm system broke.”

  Vikram stared at the interlocking chains.

  “It doesn’t work?”

  “Hasn’t for years. My grandfather told me. Can’t even zap a shark.”

  She pushed a button on his handlebars, then on hers. The Dolphins turned luminous. Against the brightness, the rest of the sea turned black. He realized it was already nearing dusk, and he was cold.

  “You’ve not looked back,” Adelaide said. “Axel never looked back. Always out there, beyond the net.”

  “You came out here together?”

  “We did everything together.”

  She was looking past him, back the other way. He spun the Dolphin around. With the onset of dusk it was difficult to distinguish the outlines of the towers; he saw only a geometric construction of light. Osiris a blazing star in the crepuscular ocean. If anyone had been left to find us, he thought, it wouldn’t have been hard.

  “Have you ever gone past the ring-net?” he asked Adelaide. She did not respond, gazing at the City with an intensity that was uncanny. He repeated his question. He thought she hadn’t heard, but as she gunned her Dolphin into life she yelled, “There’s nothing out there.”

  They sped back across no-man’s-land. He felt the gridlock of the City pulling him in. Adelaide poised rigidly on her bike, her head pushing forward. He saw huge waves breaking against her bike, and prepared himself for the same impact. It never came. It took him a few seconds to realize she must be deliberately colliding with the swells. At the same time he realized she had speeded up.

  They were approaching the harbour. Vikram accelerated. His bike skimmed the sea like a petrel, almost flying now. Adelaide remained ahead. He could see the gateway from where they had ridden out before, the two ships pointed towards one another. The gap seemed narrower, and she was travelling far faster, hurtling at impossible speed, plunging her bike nose first, leaping up again, almost invisible behind a mask of spray.

  “Adelaide!” he shouted.

  She shot across the final stretch of water.

  The bike and the hull smashed together. She was a bolt of green through the air—his own bike was charging forward, some part of his brain telling him to slow down and she was falling, almost gracefully. She was face down in the water. She didn’t move.

  The waves raised her and lowered her, and her body bumped once against the ship’s side.

  Vikram surged his bike forward. His heartbeat trebled in his chest. He leaned into the water and grabbed her arm, pulled her almost viciously towards him. Her body was cold and awkward. Not again, not Adelaide too. The suit, he told himself, it’s just the suit, she’s warm inside it. Please, not Adelaide too. The bike tipped as he hauled her up, both arms around her. Stars, if she was dead they would never believe he hadn’t killed her. He pressed his hands beneath her ribs and jerked, once, twice. They’d drown him the way they’d drowned Eirik. Please breathe. Her chest heaved and her mouth opened and water poured out. She gasped, choked, spat. Spasms racked her body.

  He pushed her goggles up. Her eyes wheeled crazily, then settled on his face. She tried to say something. It might have been “A.”

  “Adelaide,” he said weakly.

  “I’m okay,” she rasped. “I’m fine.” She glared up at him. “I’m fine!”

  Relief gave way to anger in a blink.

  “Your bike fucking isn’t, though, is it?”

  The Dolphin floated listlessly on its side, handles twisted. Its light had gone out.

  “What the fuck were you doing?” he shouted.

  Adelaide’s head was shaking. He was clasping her so tightly she could barely move. Her body was shaking too and he felt each tremor hard against his ribs.

  “Let me go.” Her teeth chattered.

  “You’re going to have to ride back on my bike.”

  “It’s not your bike,” she said. “It’s Axel’s.”

  He wanted to hit her. He looked around him and saw the waves slapping against the ships. Seagulls rose from their perches to circle overhead. Adelaide gasped as the birds came into her line of sight.

  “We have to get back,” he said. “Can you climb on behind me?”

  She hauled herself up, wrapped her arms around his waist. One of the birds dove low and she screamed and lashed out at it.

  “Leave it alone!”

  “I hate them.”

  “It’s not going to hurt you.”

  He nudged the bike across to the other Dolphin and tried to start it but they both knew that it was futile.

  “The speedboat can pick it up,” she said.

  But a storm was coming in and they knew that as well. Vikram did not respond. If he opened his mouth he would say unforgivable things. He wove back through the harbour with grim determination. When they reached the pier the man in the speedboat gave a shout of mingled relief and alarm.

  “What happened to the other bike?”

  “It broke,” said Adelaide shortly. They climbed into the speedboat stern, shivering. The boat took off at once. Incoming hail chased them all the way back, sweeping across the ocean and the harbour before it slammed into the walls of the pyramids. The deluge caught them moments before they banged to a halt against the first decking they found. Adelaide leapt out and darted inside. Storm sirens began a wailing crescendo. The boatman cursed as he secured the craft with fingers already deadened by the cold, Vikram straining to hold the boat steady. Hailstones whipped against them. The decking was treacherous with ice, and they almost slipped running inside. Vikram heaved the doors shut.

  The sirens ceased. The door sealed with a soft hiss. Vikram listened to the barrage, gasping for breath, praying that none of his friends were outside.

  They were on an empty floor. Lifts and stairs ran up the back of the tower, a couple of flat trolleys were parked by the lift. Faint sounds of machinery, the lifts and other workings, filtered down the building.

  “We’ll have to wait it out,” said the boatman. His voice echoed in the open space. “Unless you two want to hop on a shuttle line?”

  Vikram glanced down a
t the puddle forming around his feet. A watery trail crossed the concrete floor to the other side of the tower, where Adelaide sat on the first steps of the stairwell, arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes were cloudy.

  “We’ll wait,” he said. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “Probably some kind of storage place,” said the boatman.

  Vikram slumped against the wall. It was warm compared to outside, but Adelaide should get dry or she’d catch hypothermia. She didn’t look like she wanted to move though, and he told himself it was her own stupid fault. Nils had been right about her.

  He had seen his friend a couple of days ago. Vikram was holding a meeting of representatives from the west who would be heading up work parties in the spring. He’d asked Nils to come, but Nils was being oddly cagey, and had only shown up afterwards. He had brought fish from Market Circle. They drank coral tea and ate the fish with their fingers in Vikram’s office.

  “What’s your new place like?” Nils asked.

  “You know. Big. Clean. It’s nice.”

  “I bet.”

  “When are you going to come and see it?”

  Nils wiped his fingers on the already greasy paper.

  “Whenever you have the time.”

  “I always have the time.”

  “I thought you were all taken up with the crazy girl these days.”

  “She can be demanding,” Vikram acknowledged. Nils laughed.

  “Fucking Citizens, huh. So what’s she really like? You still think she’s a bitch?”

  A bone was stuck in Vikram’s teeth. He worked his tongue, trying to free it. He wanted to explain that there was a connection between himself and Adelaide, but could not find the words to justify it.

  “She has her moments.”

  He hesitated. Nils, taking a large bite of white fish and batter, raised an eyebrow.

  “I think she has a secret. Something she’s not telling.”

  “Are you kidding me? She’s a Rechnov, they probably have more skeletons than they have closets, and that’s saying something. What, you think she’s going to bare her soul to you?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just—” He stopped. It was no good, he did not even know what he meant himself. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. I found something. A letter. It’s from Axel to Adelaide.”