by E. J. Swift
Saying it aloud, he felt the heat of it, transferred from pocket to drawer to pocket and back, burning a hole in every garment it touched. Nils shrugged.
“So give it to Adelaide.”
“It’s a goodbye note. You know what that means.”
“Then you’d better burn it,” said Nils.
“I can’t burn it, it’s probably the last thing he ever wrote.”
“Exactly. You want to be caught with that on your hands?”
Vikram’s hand went to his jacket.
“Actually, I have it here—”
“Are you crazy?” Nils hissed. “You’re walking around with a dead guy’s—you know, I don’t even want to know what it says. Burn it. Here.” Nils delved into his jeans and produced a lighter. He flicked it on. “Get rid of it now.”
“I thought you could look after it. Until I decide what to do.”
Nils wiped up a few last crumbs of batter and scrunched up the paper. He tossed it into the bin.
“Think again. I’m not touching it. You give it to me, I’ll burn it for you. I want nothing to do with their pretentious society.”
“What I am going to do with it then? I can’t give it to Adelaide.”
“Why not? It’s her letter.”
“You don’t get it. If I give it to her, she’ll stop working with me. The only reason she’s helping me is because she needs to find out what happened to her brother.”
“And what if it’s a fake?” Nils demanded. “What if it’s a plant? Where did you even find the bloody thing?”
“This woman turned up at the door. Said if Axel went away, she’d been instructed to deliver this. Adelaide wasn’t there and I was.”
Nils shook his head. “Fucking hell. You’re meant to be the smart one.”
“I can’t tell Adelaide.”
“Why not? So she stops seeing you, so what? They’re not going to take away your flat.”
“I still need her. I can still use her.”
Nils gave him a shrewd look. “I think you’ve gone past that.”
“She’s not a bad person, Nils.”
“Fine, I believe you. Does that make her any less dangerous? You can’t trust these people, Vik. They’re eels, they’d turn on you in a second. Take you in, and spit you right back out. You should be trying to set yourself up, not holding out for some celebrity pin-up.”
Vikram was angry at that. After all, Nils had encouraged him to go to the Rose Night in the first place. He was the one who’d suggested meeting Adelaide.
“You’re determined not to give her a chance.”
“How can I when I’ve never even met her?” Nils protested.
“You don’t want to meet her.”
“Well, she don’t want to meet me. You see her coming down here? Dazzling us all with her presence? I don’t think so. This is a game for her. And you knew that, before.” Nils paused. The rest of the sentence, unsaid, hung in the air. “Look, Vik, I don’t mean any harm. Maybe you really like this woman for whatever reasons I don’t get. But if you’re asking me for advice—and it seems like you are—I say you’ve got two options. You give her the letter and take the consequences, or you destroy it right now and pretend you never saw it. Your call.”
Vikram fell silent. Nils didn’t understand that the choice was much more subtle, more complicated than that. Vikram couldn’t just destroy the final words of a dead man. It would be wrong. But neither could he show them to Adelaide. She was the only thing guiding him through this nest of eels. He couldn’t lose her. Not yet.
Nils clapped him on the arm.
“Look, I’ve got to go. Just—” He broke off. His voice when he spoke again was strained. “Just don’t forget what these people have done. Not just Eirik and Mikkeli. Osuwa, even the greenhouse, they’re not that long ago. For all we know, our families died in the reprisals. Maybe at the hands of people you’ve met,” he said pointedly.
Vikram winced. “Osuwa is complicated.”
“What happened afterwards isn’t. Giving Citizens guns? Murdering children? You know what they say. When the executions took place you could hear the shots right the way to the edge of the city, it was that quiet. Sound of a guilty conscience, I say.”
Nils gave him a hard, almost a challenging look. He was driving the conversation into territory Vikram wasn’t sure he wanted to cover. Not today.
He thought of what Shadiyah had said. They is an elusive term. But she had also told him something else: home was in the west.
“We could torture ourselves forever wondering about our families,” he said. “But what good will it do us? Or them. It doesn’t help them. They’re beyond our help.”
Nils shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Come over and see the new place,” said Vikram. “We can talk properly then.” He wrapped up the remains of his fish. Suddenly he wasn’t hungry.
“Sure.” Nils still sounded reluctant.
“You don’t want to?”
“No, it’s not that.” Nils screwed up his face in admission. “I’ve been sort of seeing that girl.”
“The one I met? Ilona?”
“Yeah. Her.”
It was Vikram’s turn to be worried. He had hoped that Ilona was a one-off occurrence.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Nils.
“Do you?”
“The answer’s yes. She works on the boats.”
Vikram remembered the dyed wing of hair. The averted gaze. “You mean she’s a prostitute.”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“It’s not that she isn’t nice and you know it. It’s that she could get in real trouble for seeing you. You know what the shanty town’s like, you’ve seen the corpses, what happens to those girls, we both have.”
Nils’s shoulders quivered. He squared them.
“I like her. I want to get her out.”
“Well, why didn’t you say before? I’ll help you, we’ll sort something out—”
Nils shook his head then bent double in a sudden convulsion of phlegmy coughs. Vikram stared at him.
“Are you alright? That doesn’t sound good.”
“I’m fine—” Nils cleared his throat. It was a loud, tearing sound.
“Are you sure?”
I’m fine. And I know you would help me. But I want to get her out. Myself.” He glanced at Vikram, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Anyway, I think you’ve got enough to deal with.”
They parted, each looking a little wearier than when they had met an hour before.
/ / /
The squall passed over the northern quarter, leaving a clear icy night. The boatman dropped them at the waterbike centre, where Adelaide stalked into the changing rooms without saying a word. Vikram followed her. He wanted an explanation, any kind of response. She gave none. She went to her locker and began taking out her clothes. The ordinariness of the action was too much for Vikram.
“Well?” he exploded. “Are you going to tell me exactly what you thought you were doing out there? You could have been killed!”
Finally she spoke.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Vikram. You think I haven’t had accidents before? The sea’s unpredictable. I know what I’m doing.”
Vikram banged open his own locker and yanked out his jeans. He began to change as quickly as possible.
“If I hadn’t been there you would have drowned!”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” she snapped. “I wasn’t drowning. You didn’t give me a chance to drown before you yanked me out the water. I practically dislocated my shoulder.”
“So next time I should leave you there, should I?”
“Maybe you should,” she said. “Maybe you should just keep out of my affairs.”
“You’re the one that wanted to go out there.”
“And you wanted to come. So stop acting like you’ve done me some kind of favour.”
He shook his head. “You’re an ungrateful bitch.”
; Adelaide shrugged. “Told you that when I met you.” She presented him with her back.
He wanted to take hold of her shoulders and rattle her until the truth came out with her teeth. She began to peel off her wetsuit, top to bottom, stripping as though he wasn’t there. She hung up the suit and walked naked into the showers. A moment later he heard the patter of water on her skin.
The first night he stayed in her bedroom, she’d passed out on him. He’d smelt the fumes of alcohol on her breath, seen almost invisible particles of green powder on her upper lip. She slept the deep, dead sleep of a body that rarely let go consciousness, and when it did, surrendered completely.
They had each set out to use the other, but the ties had become more complex than that. Now they were tangled in each other’s lives.
He could smell the perfume of her shampoo rising with the hot water. She stepped out of the shower, towelling her hair. Everything about her actions said unconcern, but he didn’t believe it. He couldn’t.
“I thought by now you trusted me,” he said. Adelaide sighed, as though she was surprised to find him still there. She rooted through her bag for a hairbrush, and attacked her hair with fierce strokes.
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“It didn’t look like an accident.”
She whipped round to face him. He saw then what there was to see, the anger and the fear.
“You know nothing about biking, Vikram.”
“I know what I saw,” he shot back. “So were you showing off, is that it? Or have you got some kind of death wish?”
Adelaide’s hands clenched. “You insult me now? You’d accuse me of that, would you, accuse me of that—monstrosity? Go on, spit it out, say what you want to say!”
He looked at her.
“You fucking bastard.” She hurled the hairbrush at him. It slammed against the metal locker and clattered to the floor. He bent and picked it up. There were dozens of strands of her hair caught in its bristles. Her face challenged him to lob it back.
He took a step away from the locker. “Why don’t you answer the question.”
Adelaide turned away. When she spoke, her words ricocheted off the wall.
“I snagged on a current. The bike veered. That’s all there is to it. And don’t you ever suggest that again.”
She began to dress, twisting her arms behind her to hook up her bra and then her suspender belt. He had thought of the garments as camouflage, but the nights he’d spent holding that body naked had given him no further insights.
He tried one more time.
“Just tell me what happened. I want to understand—I have to understand. Or I’m out. Done.”
Adelaide slipped into her heels. From head to toe, she looked immaculate. When she spoke, her voice was as stripped as it had been when she had said goodbye to him that very first time.
“You must really hate my family, Vikram. I am aware of this. What I don’t get is, why don’t you hate me too? After all, we’ve done some pretty terrible things, haven’t we? Even I don’t know the half of it.”
“I’m not talking about your fucking family, Adelaide, I’m talking about you.”
Adelaide continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “So you probably do hate me too. You’ve probably hated me all along. This isn’t really anything to do with the biking, is it? This is about you and me. And the truth is, there is no you and me. Oh, you’ve been entertaining for a while, I’ll grant you that. But sooner or later, it had to end. It might as well be now.”
She paused only to draw breath. It was as though she had become a mouth; every other part of her diminished.
“You know what, Vikram? I’ve been so caught up in your miserable activities, I’ve almost forgotten about what’s important to me. Well, enough. I’ve got my own mission. I’m going to find my brother, and I’m not going to let anything distract me. Especially not some righteous westie trying to tell me how to run my life.”
She flung each word at him like a specially prepared, poison tipped dart. He ignored their impact. Like all wounds, the sting would come later. But he couldn’t suppress his rage. He almost blurted out about the letter, the truth about her brother, but some reserve of caution held him back. There was an alternative, and if Adelaide wanted to play dirty, he’d send it straight back at her.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly. “Maybe we should be talking about how I hate your family. While we’re at it, maybe we should talk about how you’re exactly like them. You can give yourself a new name, but you can’t change yourself, can you Adelaide? However hard you try to get away from it, you’re just another Rechnov liar.”
He knew that would hit home. He saw her eyes narrow and he pushed his advantage.
“You told me once that lying was the one thing you couldn’t stand. But if we’re honest, it’s the thing you do best, isn’t it?”
Her mask remained intact, but he knew her better now. He could hear the tiniest crack in her voice when she spoke again.
“If we’re really being honest here, I have to say that you’re delusional. Do you imagine anyone takes you seriously? You think your schemes will make one jot of difference? The Council will never remove the border. You’re up against my lying bastard family, Vik, and they will never, never let you win.”
He felt that. He felt it now, and he would feel it more later.
He had to get out.
“I feel sorry for you, Adie.”
“Don’t you dare call me that!”
“I’m done. Goodbye.”
He hiked his bag onto his shoulder. Axel’s letter was crumpled in the inside pocket of his coat. As he walked out, his lungs burned as though he were breathing in acid. But he had made his decision, and Adelaide had clearly made up her own mind. If she wouldn’t give him his answers, he wouldn’t give her hers.
33 ¦ ADELAIDE
She switched on the changing room’s hose and ran the jet of water rhythmically over the red suit and the green, first up and down, then in horizontal passes. The drain guzzled gently. With their lolling hoods and missing hands and feet, the suits reminded her of gutted fish. She thought of the executed man. She turned them over to wash the other sides. When she reached up to put the red suit back on its hook, she found she could not take the step away. Her legs had become rubber too.
She squatted on the tiles and pressed her face against the suit. The hose still bubbled in her hand, drenching her clothes. Her shoes sat in the scummy water running towards the drain. Now the gargling was vociferous. No, it wasn’t the drain. The noise was in her own throat. She pressed her face close to the damp material, closer, until it hurt.
The tears streamed faster, but tears would not repair the damage she was doing, to Axel, to Vikram. Tears would not make the vault disappear, or spare the repercussions if Lao had, somehow, already found a way in. Tears were useless.
The noise subsided. With the silence that followed came a raw clarity. She lifted her head. For a long time she stared at the wall. She knew, as clearly as if she had been told, where she had to go. In the kelp forest, a sliver of mercury paused. The fish was waiting.
She hung the suits side by side to dry. In the changing room mirrors she caught a glimpse of her face. It was blotched with red, ugly. It didn’t matter. She knew where she was going now. There was only one place left.
34 ¦ VIKRAM
Linus’s secretary ushered Vikram into the office. Linus was at his Neptune, his eyes flicking back and forth as he scanned the body of text. Some report or other, Vikram supposed. As Vikram came in, Linus stroked the activation strip and the screen went black.
“Vikram, good to see you. Can I get you a drink?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Linus dismissed the secretary with a nod of his head. He rolled over a chair.
“Please, have a seat. What can I do for you?”
There was a sense of the mechanical about Linus’s office. It contained mathematical lines, faintly humming machines. The walls held graphs and
charts. The only other colour was a yellow rosette stuck to the window-wall. Vikram recognized it: one of Adelaide’s invitations.
“Are you going to that?”
Linus looked and laughed.
“Certainly not. Adelaide and I have a deal.”
Surprise must have shown in Vikram’s face, because Linus added, “She sends me invites and I ignore them. It’s a very simple arrangement. A little odd to outsiders, perhaps.” Linus clasped his hands. “But Adelaide is still a Rechnov, whether she wants to be or not. Oh, she can play at society. She may even have some social influence, through that set of hers, and I admit that she’s popular with the press. Eventually, though, she’ll come back to us. She won’t be able to help it.”
Vikram kept his face still. Linus’s words did not make him feel any better about what he was about to do; on the contrary, he was inclined to delay the decision. But it had to done. He could not allow Adelaide to jeopardise everything that he had worked for.
“So what is it you actually do here?” he asked. “Apart from attending Council meetings, that is.”
“You don’t think that’s enough?” Linus allowed himself an ironic smile. “I can see your point. Well, when I’m not haranguing old men who should have left the Chambers years ago, I liaise with the meteorological office.” He waved his arm in an encompassing gesture. “These charts are weather maps.”
“You’re mapping the weather?” Vikram stared curiously at the nearest chart. Linus watched him.
“It didn’t use to be a phenomenon.”
“Will it work?”
“One day. It would be easier, of course, if we had access outside. But for that to happen, we have to change mindsets, and Osirisers are stubborn. They believe they are living in the last city on earth—it has quite a ring to it, of course.” Linus looked thoughtfully at the Neptune. “Almost…glamorous. But not true.”
Vikram had a sudden sense of the scale of Linus’s ambition. He wondered what future role Linus had in mind for himself—revolutionary charter of weather? Discoverer of distant shores? At this moment, on the verge of giving away Axel’s secret, Vikram felt less certain of Linus than he was of Adelaide. But he was angry, and he needed someone on his side.