Osiris

by E. J. Swift

  “Yeah, I—I know.”

  “Lucky I spotted you. I’m on watch here. They say I have seagull eyes. You want to sit with me for a bit? Gets boring on my own.”

  “Sure.”

  The girl switched off the penlight. Adelaide heard her fumbling with a lever. The tower doors opened with a soft whoosh and the girl settled down in the entrance. Adelaide sat beside her. Stationary, she felt the bitter cold. She wrapped her arms around her, wondering how many hours until daylight.

  “You see a light—the slightest light—you tell me,” said the western girl, keeping her voice low. “And if you hear talking and all. That’s the one thing about them skadi.” She spat the word with venom. “They make one hell of a racket—always know when they’re coming.” She added, more bitterly, “Guess you don’t need stealth when you got guns.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open,” Adelaide promised. The stars knew she had her own reasons to keep her distance from the Guard. Skadi. She practised the word in her head. In the darkness the watch-girl would not see her lips moving.

  It gave her an idea. She rubbed her gloved palms silently over the floor, and then over her face. She didn’t want to think about what was on the decking floor, but she was sure it had dirtied her face.

  “They haven’t done this tower yet,” said the girl. “They might tonight. If they come we’ve got to shut this door quick. Ain’t no locking from inside but we got a good warning system. Kind of relay thing.”

  “Do the boats come past here often?” Adelaide asked. She could not remember Vikram ever telling her about an alarm system, nor, now she thought about it, of patrol boats going through the western waterways so regularly.

  “This neighbourhood there’s one every hour or so,” said the girl. “But they’re getting more often since the greenhouse. You must have been lucky not to meet one. Horrible things. I hate the way they sort of glide by, you know, as if they wasn’t really there.”

  “Skadi,” said Adelaide, putting enough contempt into the word to cover, she hoped, any mistake in pronunciation.

  “Yeah.”

  Waves lifted the decking. Spray landed on Adelaide’s nose and cheeks.

  “Have you been on watch long?” she asked.

  “Three hours. I’m relieved soon. Gets a bit lonely, you know, but someone’s got to do it. I volunteered.” The girl spoke proudly. “They wanted people who were involved, y’know, last time, but I said I wasn’t old enough last time and you got to start somewhere. Fifteen, ent I? Got a good pair of ears. Heard you, didn’t I? And you got a good quiet boat there. Why were you out so late anyways?”

  “I’m looking for my brother. He’s disappeared.”

  The girl gave her arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Everyone’s gone disappeared round here. Gone off to take a crack at the skadi, has he?”

  “I think so.”

  “My little bro’s talkin’ about joining Maak’s people—y’know, Maak. Ma’s got a hell of a time keeping him in. I know how he feels. Sometimes I want to go and join up myself but a knife ent much use against one of them. Not if you only use it once. Reckon I’d be good at stealth work, though.”

  Something had happened since Adelaide had been locked up, something nobody had told her about. Home Guard boats belonged on the border, not in the western quarter, not unless there had been violence. What was the greenhouse? Who was Maak? Further questions would betray her ignorance, and her background, but the watch-girl seemed friendly, eager to talk, if Adelaide could find the right angle.

  She was about to ask the girl if she knew about Vikram’s aid schemes when they were interrupted.

  “Who are you yakking away to down there?”

  Adelaide sensed the girl swivel around.

  “Oh Drake, hey, this is—y’know I never got your name.”

  “It’s Ata.”

  “Ata. I’m Liis. She got caught out after curfew.”

  “You better hole up here till morning,” said the newcomer. “I wouldn’t risk the bridges now, wind’s getting up.”

  “Is, isn’t it?” Liis exclaimed. “I heard people saying a Tarctic’s on the way.”

  “A Tarctic?” Adelaide was shocked into speech. She hadn’t bargained on being in the west when a Tarctic struck.

  “—’s what they say.”

  Liis got to her feet and Adelaide mirrored her. Her hearing was becoming more acute. They went inside. The woman called Drake flicked on a penlight. It seemed brighter this time. Drake smiled. One of her front teeth was completely black.

  “She can crash with your folks, Liis?”

  “Sure, she can!”

  “Great. Good job, girl. You get some sleep now. Night, Ata.”

  A creaking lower lift carried them the first twenty-five flights, juddering all the way up. Adelaide was relieved when they got out and groped their way up the lightless stairwell for the next three floors.

  “Mind if we sit out here a minute?” Liis asked when they reached her door. “I need a smoke.”

  “Sure.” Adelaide perched next to Liis. She heard the rustling of paper as Liis rolled herself a cigarette.

  “Do you want one?” Liis asked.

  “Please.” Goran had taken all of her cigarillos, which might have been useful here, if only to make contacts. In the flare of the lighter, Adelaide saw Liis’s pale face, the outline of a scratched and chipped door, the stairs pouring away into the blackness. She lit her cigarette. It tasted cheap and dirty but there was a rough sweetness to it, an end of day sweetness. Her lips tingled. She could imagine Axel sitting here, in the nameless dark, only his horses still bright enough to see.

  “You know, sometimes I get dead scared out there.” Liis’s voice was a tiny whisper. “Sometimes I get thinking, if I died out there, no one would ever know how, or what happened to me or anything.”

  Adelaide put an awkward arm around the girl’s shoulders. Through the layers of clothing, she could feel how thin the girl was.

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  Adelaide slept deeply and woke with a jolt. She did not comprehend, at first, where she was—strange faces, people jumping to their feet—a lot of people, more than she had thought a room this size could contain when her head hit the floor last night. Shouts volleyed between them.

  “What the hell!”

  “What was that—”

  “Was that an explosion?”

  “—’s the fucking skadi.”

  The room vaulted into action. Adelaide scrambled out of the folds of her blanket, heart racing. A man lifted his shirt and checked a knife was at his belt. A woman—Liis’s mother?—gathered together all the bedding. A boy held them in place whilst she yanked them together with her belt. Two smaller children poised by the doorway, wide awake and alert. Liis stuffed things into a rucksack; newspapers, clothes, a pair of boots. Nobody asked who Adelaide was. Nobody cared.

  “Ata—grab the other bag,” Liis said breathlessly.

  Adelaide picked up the drawstring bag. It was lighter than she expected. In a matter of seconds, the room had been stripped to its peeling walls.

  The boy opened the door and peeked out. From further down the tower came the sounds of invasion: people running up and down stairs, heavy boots, doors slamming, crashes and yells as doors were kicked in.

  “Shit, they’re early,” said the boy. The woman shook his shoulder.

  “Come on, move up.”

  Adelaide followed Liis’s family, or friends, or room-mates, through the corridor and into the stairwell. This morning it was patchily lit. As they progressed upwards people were opening doors, peering blearily out. Some, like Liis’s group, had already got their belongings together and were also moving up the tower.

  Congestion built up, noisy and incoherent. Adelaide had never seen so many people in one space. Their faces were hard and dirty, frightened. Within a couple of flights, she was separated from Liis’s friends and could only see the girl herself, blue hat bobbing in the crowd a little way ahead. She lost L
iis momentarily, panicked and shoved forward. Where were they all going? No-one had said, because everyone knew—everyone but Adelaide.

  A female voice shouted above the rest. “Liis! Over here!”

  Leaning over the handrail from the floor above was the girl with the black tooth. Drake. Liis yelled back and Adelaide located her guide again. She wasn’t far ahead. Adelaide pushed through to her, relief welling, and together they joined Drake. People streamed from above and below, funnelling into a corridor.

  “Early raid,” Drake panted. “We better get over the bridge. They’re already at level thirteen.”

  “I’ve got me ma and all,” said Liis, gesturing below. In the moving crowd Adelaide saw the gaggle of mother, the boy and the two children. Liis’s mother had the bundle of bedding strapped to her back.

  Drake gripped Liis’s arm.

  “I know, I know, it’ll be alright, just make sure you get over, they mustn’t find anyone in the network.”

  Liis waved at her family. “This way!”

  Drake dove into the corridor. Liis followed Drake and Adelaide followed Liis. It was the lightest part of the tower that Adelaide had seen so far. Then she saw that the people in front were framed against a doorway. The light was coming from outside. They were going out of the tower, and there was no glass, no shuttle lines or enclosed bridges.

  The queue in front of her dwindled in short bursts. There were twenty people between Adelaide and the exit. There were five. Then two. Liis was no longer in front. She gasped, tried to turn around, and was knocked forward. She was in the doorway.

  Before she knew what was happening, her feet had stepped out onto an impossibly narrow metal catwalk. The wind whipped her hair out of its hood. She clutched at the rails and found two slack plastic ropes. She was wobbling on a rail in open air fifty floors above surface.

  The bridge fed into the tower opposite. People in front of her were walking sure-footed along the metal. It was a good hundred metres away. The crowd pressed at her back. She almost lost her balance.

  “Hey, watch your step!” The yell from behind was impatient. If she didn’t move she’d be pushed.

  Adelaide took one diving breath and sprinted. Halfway across she looked down and saw the sea churning below. She saw the metal catwalk, riveted, orange with rust and glued together with stars knew what. She staggered, grabbed the rope, righted herself, ran on. At the other end she fell into a pair of outstretched arms.

  The man’s mass was solid, safe. She stayed there, panting as though she had run the length of a shuttle line. She was aware of her rescuer shaking his head.

  “Crazy!” he was saying.

  Adelaide looked back, expecting Liis to be right behind her, but she could not see the other girl, only the impossible fragility of the bridge. She was not the only one frightened; others were refusing to cross, fighting to get back inside, but still more pushed forward. A man dashed across and Adelaide saw what she had not realized when making her own run—the bridge buckled under his weight. People pointed and cried out. Adelaide spotted Liis at last.

  “Liis!”

  She waved frantically.

  The other girl raised her arm in response and yelled. Adelaide could not hear above the well of noise.

  The man who’d caught her was shouting out.

  “One at a time! Don’t put too much weight on it! There’s bridges on levels sixty-five and seventy!”

  A woman stepped out. Adelaide recognized Drake. She had lost her hat. Drake put one foot on the bridge, paused for a second, and ran. Her boots struck the metal like gunfire. It was gunfire; the skadi were shooting.

  Drake was over. Their eyes met in a glimmer of shared experience and then Drake too turned to look back.

  “Okay, and another! One more!”

  The crowd were no longer listening. Something had made them panic, something that Adelaide could not see. There was a surge and a line of people spilled onto the narrow bridge. Then a second surge and Adelaide’s hands went to her face. They toppled, from the bridge, from the fiftieth-floor doorway, one after another. They went as dominoes did. Over and over. Cries echoed into the gulf.

  The bridge groaned. It sagged under the weight of clinging bodies. Some dangled from the underside, holding on by two hands or by one. More were falling. They fell like dolls. The bodies were all sizes, some large, some incredibly small. She could hardly believe that they were real except for the screams.

  She saw Liis. The girl was on the bridge, gripping the rope, urging on the woman in front of her. Someone pushed Liis from behind and Liis turned, gesticulated with her free hand, yelled.

  The entire construction swayed.

  “Liis!”

  Adelaide was not sure if she or Drake had shouted. Both of them were staring, side by side, powerless.

  “Help! Help us!”

  “It’s going, it’s going to break—”

  “This way, keep moving, come on, run, get off, run!”

  Adelaide’s rescuer was hauling those who had made it bodily inside. Adelaide and Drake were pressed against the interior wall.

  There was a crack. At the far end, the rivets holding the bridge gave. The metal construction plunged downwards out of Adelaide’s sight. People scrabbled on the ledge opposite. She saw three, four, five more fall. They grabbed at the feet of those above, who were in turn pushed out by the weight of the blind crowd.

  Adelaide’s hands shook against her cheeks. She stopped counting.

  Her rescuer threw down a rope. A pair of hands, Drake’s hands, reached for it and Adelaide took hold too, understanding that they must all pull to save anyone left to save. The bridge was still attached to their tower, hanging down out of sight. She heard the metal strain. The man was on his stomach at the ledge. He fed out the rope.

  “Grab on!”

  They were too late. The metal separated with a hideous, scraping tear. The screams of the falling seemed to reverberate on and on. She heard a burst of gunfire.

  “Liis,” she said.

  Drake shook her head. The man on his stomach did not move. The message, finally, must have been passed forward in the tower opposite, because the crowd began to retreat, until only a handful of the marooned remained looking out.

  “What you got there?” Drake asked. She was looking at the drawstring bag across Adelaide’s body.

  “I don’t know—Liis gave—”

  Adelaide opened the bag. There were only a couple of items inside, a tobacco pouch and a heart-shaped salt tin. She wanted to cry. The emotion came without warning and she had to blink it away.

  “C’mon,” said Drake.

  Adelaide followed mindlessly. They were going downstairs now. A musty, sickly sweetish smell. She could see by the faint glimmer from cracks under doors. She kept her eyes on Drake’s boots, solid chunky things, with caterpillar soles, the fraying ends of her jeans tucked into them. The boots moved regularly, though the stairs were uneven. Once Adelaide’s shoes sent a scree of rubble tumbling away and she put out a hand to stop herself slipping. The wall was damp and spongy.

  Twenty or so floors down, they turned into a corridor. Drake stopped outside a door that bulged in its frame. She knocked once and opened it without waiting for a reply. She gave Adelaide a nudge inside.

  There were two people in the tiny room; one male, bearded, with blue eyes, the other female, with a wing of sheer peroxide hair. The man stared at her, a strange expression on his face. Adelaide stared back, confused.

  “Look what I’ve found.” Drake spoke from behind her.

  An inkling formed in Adelaide’s head but there was no time for her body to anticipate the blow. Drake’s strike was efficient. In the seconds before losing consciousness, as pain gathered at her temples, Adelaide heard the beginnings of the peculiar conversation that must follow.

  “Face like that, can’t mistake it,” said Drake. “Shame really—she seemed…”

  38 ¦ VIKRAM

  His breath rattled in and out. The blanket was scr
unched at his mouth, a futile attempt to keep what little moisture his breath produced as a barrier. All his energy was concentrated on quashing the tickle in his throat. If he gave in to it, his body would implode.

  When he moved his wrist, the throat-tickle intensified. His eyes blurred, making tears with the effort of stilling it. He waited for his vision to clear. His watch face loomed large and indistinct. The hour hand pointed to the three, or the four. He lost sight of it; when he next focused it had moved to the other side of the watch face. A figure stood at the end of his bed. He was hallucinating again.

  “Hello, Vikram.” The voice stirred a memory. A calm voice, measured and assured. “You’re looking in bad shape. I’m sorry to see that.”

  Vikram gazed wonderingly at the man in the elegant suit. He was grey, with slender stripes, like the hide of a tiger shark. The stripes refused to stay put; they swam over the man. What was Linus Rechnov doing in Vikram’s head?

  “Can you sit up?”

  His own imagination was goading him now. Something strange happened. The figure moved towards him very quickly and took him in a steel grasp. The world lurched. The walls moved. The cell door became vertical.

  Vikram gagged. He clamped his teeth, bit down, but it was too late. His chest began to heave. The coughs tore out of him. He spat blood onto the sheets and the filthy material of his trousers.

  “Hello! You there!” Linus was shouting. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Other people entered the cell, crowding it. He cringed away. A hand came towards him. He tried to get back but it grew, round and pale, ready to engulf him. It clamped his forehead and squeezed.

  “High fever.”

  “Dunno, looks like TB to me.”

  “Don’t you inoculate these people?”

  Vikram’s insides churned. Something was chewing on his organs. Fish, probably. Perhaps he was already dead. When he closed his eyes, the idea did not seem so bad—then hands grabbed his shoulders once more. A bilious wave made him faint.

  Linus Rechnov was here. There was something important that Vikram had to say to Linus.

  “The boats.” He tried to lift his arms, take hold of the other man’s face. It was imperative that Linus understood. “The boats, they don’t come back. Tell me why the boats don’t come back.”