by E. J. Swift
The man says, ‘I think you should come.’
‘Well…’
‘No, I think you should.’
‘We’ll see. We’ll see.’
‘I helped organize it. Don’t you want to know more? Aren’t you interested?’
‘Of course I am, you know I am. Go on. You tell me.’
‘It’s a demonstration. Something big, exciting. There’ll be a lot of people there.’
‘You know we don’t go in for that sort of thing.’
‘It’s important. You should be there. It’s about integration. You can’t not be there.’
Mikaela makes a non-committal noise and the man repeats himself. ‘You can’t not be there.’
‘Really, I don’t think—’
‘You don’t think? You’re right, you don’t think.’ The man’s voice grows louder. ‘You don’t think about anything other than yourselves. Call yourselves westerners? You know what, you deserve to stay here when the border opens.’
She feels a rush of anger towards this person, whoever he is. How dare he speak to Mikaela in that way?
‘We don’t call ourselves anything,’ says Mikaela. She does not rise to the other’s anger and her voice remains gentle. ‘We just want to get on with our lives. Be careful, Oskar. You know we worry about you with those people.’
Then she hears the sound of something being hit. The table, she thinks. The table she polished this morning. She imagines the strange man’s palm smacking it, his sweat now smearing the clean surface, polluting it, and her anger grows.
She hears him say, ‘This is a joke.’
Footsteps, hurried, across the apartment. She backs away, alarmed, but it is too late. The door slams open. The young man is in the doorway, his coat buttoned to the throat implying he never intended to stay for long. He stares at her, his face flushed with anger.
‘Who the hell are you?’
She backs away, panicked. She can’t think. She can’t think! She hears Mikaela coming to the door, wants to say no, don’t acknowledge me, don’t say a word, but her throat is stoppered.
‘Ata?’ says Mikaela Larsson.
The man is still staring at her.
‘Ata?’ he repeats.
Danger, she thinks. Danger. Run. Get out. Get out now.
But she can’t move. She’s transfixed in his glare. The handle of the bag is slippery in her sweating palm. She can feel the damp weight of the kelp.
‘This is Ata,’ says Mikaela. ‘She’s been staying with us.’
No. No—
‘Since when?’
‘Since the night the tower collapsed.’
Please stop – you don’t realize—
‘The tower—’
‘We found her, Oskar. In the water. She was in trauma. Don’t raise your voice, it upsets her—’
She sees the change in the young man’s face. The hint of recognition, the confusion as he struggles to place her.
‘Ata,’ says the man again, a disbelieving note in his voice. ‘Take those glasses off a minute?’
He reaches out a hand. She doesn’t know what his intent is but the movement is enough, it’s the impetus her body needs. She turns and runs. Behind her she hears his shout, Hey! and Mikaela Larsson calling after her, but she’s already in the stairwell. Her chest is tight. It’s hard to breathe. She races down the stairs, blundering into people, ricocheting against the walls, unaware of any pain as she connects with concrete. She can hear the man, Oskar’s, voice.
‘Hey, Ata! Where are you going?’
He’s following. Did he recognize her? Could he?
There’s a bridge ten floors down. She ducks into a corridor and heads for it. He won’t know which way she’s gone. He’ll have to guess.
She steps out of the tower onto the narrow catwalk that constitutes a bridge this side of the border, clutching at the rusting handrails for balance. The tail of a winter wind hits her face, whipping through the inadequate western clothing and chilling her at once. The sea churns coldly in the waterway below. Ahead of her on the bridge is a young child. She watches where the child steps and places her feet in the exact same spaces. They are agile as birds, the kids here, and it is this that will give her away, any hint of hesitation, the suggestion that she has not spent her entire life balancing on rickety bridges constructed from salvage that might at any moment give way beneath her feet.
Fifty metres to the next tower. She crosses the bridge. She does not look back. She ducks into the tower. The lift is a trap; she takes the stairs to the surface. A waterbus is pulling in and she elbows her way onto it, using the few peng left over from the kelp to pay for her ticket. She goes below, and sits, head down, heart racing. Black spots dance in front of her eyes. The motor starts up, sending shudders through the boat.
Yes, leave. Leave now. Please. Please.
The boat pulls away. She doesn’t know where it is going and doesn’t care. The place that was safe is no longer safe.
She should never have gone outside. She thought the disguise was enough, but it only takes one person who follows the newsreels, and it’s over.
The waterbus reaches a terminus somewhere near the south-western edge of the city. Here there are wide interstices of daylight between the conical towers and through them the sea stretches away into the distance, its grip unbroken except for the occasional fishing or military boat.
Adelaide disembarks with the rest of the passengers. It is only then she realizes the waterbus has remained busy to the end of the route. She looks up at their destination. The terminus appears like any other tower in the west, its drab grey slopes pocked with indents from unidentified sources, graffitied landscapes layered over grime, with no obvious signs to indicate what or who might be found inside.
On the decking westerners mill about, some pushing into the queue for the returning waterbuses, others smoking thinly rolled cigarettes, watching the buses, idly exchanging conversation. She finds it hard to guess the ages of westerners, who often look older than their years, but there is a full spectrum here, from young children clinging to the legs of their minders to old faces furrowed with lines and tempered by the harsh climate. Something jumps into her mind, something Vikram said once, about the average life expectancy this side of the city, and she has to close off the thought quickly, to prevent the whirlpool. She enters the tower with a stream of other passengers.
Inside is a heaving marketplace; a tower full of winding corridors opening abruptly into dimly lit hallways, where walls and ceilings have been knocked through, and partitions lean at dubious angles. She is swept into the flow of prospectors. Vendors grin up at her from the tightly jammed, competing stalls. Their grins seem identical, mass-produced – the grins of toothed fish. At every pace merchandise is dangled under her nose. Salt boxes and other amulets she does not recognize, pieces of mirror, jars of undefined substances, recalibrated scarabs and tobacco pouches with barely concealed slips of milaine inserted inside. She jerks back as something wet and wriggling is thrust in front of her face. It’s an octopus, still alive, on a platter. To her right, from the same stall, she sees a bucket full of creatures clambering over one another, their claws gaining the lip of the bucket but never quite managing to escape. The reek is abominable, the smell of rotting seafood and bodies in too-close proximity, a whiff of manta fumes drifting through, everything overlaid with a mask of cheap incense which fills the halls with bluish, hazy smoke.
A woman in white Teller garb and cheap plastic clogs totters down an aisle, grabbing at the clothes of the market-goers and imparting nuggets of wisdom into their ears. Adelaide swerves away as the Teller approaches, but she is not quick enough: the Teller has caught her eye and veers purposefully, inevitably, towards her. She will make herself more visible if she tries to evade the woman. The Teller grabs her shoulder and brings her mouth close to Adelaide’s ear. She can smell the alcohol on the Teller’s breath.
‘Osiris is a lost city,’ mutters the Teller. Adelaide jolts back as if struck,
but the Teller clings on, nails digging into her shoulder.
‘She has lost the world and the world has lost her.’
In close proximity, she can see the hems of the Teller’s robe are stained with dirt. The skin of her face is peppered with spots and shiny with grease. Everything about the woman is repulsive to her, and yet she cannot move, pinned as much by the rasping voice as by the need to remain invisible.
‘Not dead,’ says the Teller. ‘Not dead yet.’ She laughs drunkenly. With a gesture that is almost tender, she strokes a finger down Adelaide’s cheek. ‘I can spy a heretic. I can smell them! When did you last perform the salt?’ The Teller hiccups, and covers her mouth with a giggle. Her fingers tighten. ‘Not lately, not lately. They’re not dead yet, the ghosts. They’ll deny it, but it’s true, you know.’
The Teller darts quick, paranoid glances around them. She lowers her voice.
‘Something is coming. The ghosts have roused it.’
Adelaide stares. She wants to ask, what? What is coming? But the words won’t come and the Teller now bears a guilty expression, as though she has already said too much. She reels away, reaching out to clutch at her next victim, repeating her mantra.
‘Not dead, no, not dead yet. The ghosts are not dead yet.’
The white-garbed figure recedes into the crowd. For a moment Adelaide remains where she is, very still, until the motion of the crowd pushes her too deeper inside.
The sheer volume of people makes the tower unbearably hot, causing her glasses to steam up continually. This is good, she tells herself. People are good, the more the better. In the crowd you can disappear. Everyone here is on the hunt. Their eyes are alert and animated, exaggeratedly so; they seem to her like people on the o’vis, in those old Neon reels she used to watch, alone in her City apartment, dulled by voqua, as though life was difficult, problematic, then. Voqua. She hasn’t drunk alcohol since she crossed the border. Not since her father’s bodyguard – no. Don’t think about that. The thought of alcohol glitters. Perhaps it would make her feel something. Perhaps it would give her a purpose, even if the purpose were oblivion. All around her, people are moving. Not dead yet. Their concerns are now her concerns; like them, her focus must be to survive, but she will always be an intruder, not wanted here, and reliant on camouflage to avoid detection.
She walks the height of the tower, floor by floor, barely noticing the ache in her feet. She counts the remaining peng in her pocket. There is enough to get herself something to eat. Her stomach churns at the thought of food. She needs to wait, to spin the money out. What is she going to do now? She can’t go back to the Larssons. She has no credit, no belongings but the clothes she is wearing. She’s alone.
She keeps wandering until the stalls begin to shut down. Evening brings a different crowd, one intent on liquor and gaming. She watches as objects are exchanged, City things, petty there but of value here, and realizes that what she is witnessing is the black market. In one hall there is a pit where huge rats are taken out of cages and set against one another. She can hear the scrabble of their claws and the shrill squeaking and she can see flecks of blood where their teeth sink into haunches and bellies. She stares, transfixed by the vicious struggle of the creatures. Bets are called, money changes hands. There are arguments. Heated words. A rat whimpers in a pool of blood.
She hasn’t been there long when a fight breaks out. She is too slow to spot what is coming, or to move; the first thing she knows is the weight of a woman crashing into her. She falls and lands awkwardly. All at once the hall is full of noise and limbs lashing out. She rolls out of the way just in time to avoid a boot in her ribs. The grey blur of a rat scurrying away. Through the commotion she senses eyes upon her.
Dizzy, overwhelmed, she goes outside and manages to sidle onto the waterbus without paying for a ticket. It’s getting late and she doesn’t know where to go. She stays up on deck and the western towers slip by in the dusk, barely lit, gargantuan and prophetic against the deepening sky. It’s cold, bitter, end-of-winter cold. The conductor calls the stops: Ess-two-seven-four-west, ess-two-seven-five-west. His voice is hoarse and thick with phlegm. Ess-two-seven-six-west. Ess-two-seven-seven-west.
She sees the light from a fry-boat hatch parked at a tower decking, and it is only then that she remembers the kelp. She still has the kelp. All day the bag has been in her hand and somehow she has clung on to it, even during that fight. She scrambles to get off at the stop with the fry-boat, and approaches the vendor, resolute. The vendor is chatting with a customer. She waits for the man to notice her. When she has his attention, she taps her throat, which has become her sign for muteness, and holds the bag of kelp to the hatch. They haggle. The man says it is stale. She shakes her head and squeezes the bag.
She gets half the price she paid for it this morning, but it is peng in her pocket, and the vendor also gives her a bag of leftover weed squares and a few hot squid rings. The transaction brings a glow of pleasure to her cheeks. She holds on to it, telling herself over and over that this is a victory: her first in this hostile new world. She sits on the decking trying not to eat too quickly, feeling faint with the sudden influx of protein. But soon enough the dusk is swallowed into the night. The fry-boat packs up and drives off to another tower, and with its departure her elation fades.
She gazes up at the dilapidated tower. Washing hangs down from the windows, strung from lines, the clothing shapeless in the dark. Its owners are out or they have forgotten it or they are not coming back. She goes inside. There is no security on western towers. Further up, people are sitting in the stairwells, smoking manta, their eyes glazed and sated. She chooses a level with a bridge out so she can run if she has to and curls up, chilled and exhausted, in the stairwell. Now she can feel the deep ache in her feet and calves.
Slumped against the wall, she chases sleep half-heartedly, and through the night she senses other people coming and going. Drunks stagger back from the bridge, uncertain of their footing. There are other homeless, shuffling up and down the stairwells. She wakes from bad dreams, crying, her lips mouthing I’m-sorry I’m-so-sorry but no sound, still no sound. She wakes again to find hands on her body.
She lurches upright. Fingers slip from her pockets and the thief darts from her side, but she is too late. The peng she earned from the sale of the kelp is gone.
The thought comes and will not retreat. He is dead. He is dead because of her. Vikram is dead. Not dead yet. No, but he is. She wants to hit that stupid, drunk Teller, sink her teeth into the woman like a rat from the pit. The whirlpool advances. The floor opens up and she falls into the whirlpool, through all the floors of the tower above the surface and below it, where the ocean sucks you down, down, and the core of the earth opens up to swallow you whole. She stays like this, cheek to the filthy floor, listening to the low, atonal humming of the manta addicts, the restless footsteps up and down the tower, the crank of the lift. Flickering lights emit a static, intermittent burr. After a time it all becomes part of a single disconnected symphony, and her thoughts revolve in kind.
Dead.
Not dead yet.
Dead.
Not dead yet.
Vikram’s dead.
She keeps on the move. Sleeping in different towers, never quite in step with the daylight world. More than once she is woken by the pounding boots of skadi soldiers, and the other homeless get to their feet and they shift as one, a loose, amorphous mass, like a shoal ejected from their coral. One day a boy gives her a cigarette, and they smoke together companionably, in silence. Another day her hat is stolen while she rests. She becomes aware that there are striations even within this side of the city. There are towers where the homeless are permitted to sleep. There are other towers where the residents will kick you if you so much as park your buttocks on a step, and each day the residents go doggedly to their jobs at the plants or to queue for a western work party. There is talk of the shanties, clusters of boats roped together like a crust of scum over the sea, out near the unremembered q
uarters, on the very edge of the city. It’s a place even the homeless don’t want to go.
The days are spent walking, through the towers, over uneven raft racks and swaying, precarious bridges, where the sea glints invitingly below. Everywhere she goes its voice is with her, soft and sibilant. She remembers the horses of Axel’s hallucinations, and finds they have a plausibility now that they did not have before. Once or twice she thinks she glimpses them: a white flank, or the turn of a long head, its eye black and portentous.
At twilight she gathers with other homeless at the fry-boats to beg for scraps. At first the corrosive ache in her stomach is at the front of everything, and then it becomes a dullness, always present, but a mundane part of existence. Some days she is too tired to go anywhere and stays where she slept, breathing in the fumes of the manta addicts.
Her movements become furtive. Calculated. Scraps are not enough so she watches the food of others. Her first attempt at stealing is a disaster. As her fingers close around the food she hears a shout. Faces turn towards her. She drops the food and sprints away over the raft rack, loses her balance and falls into the water. Her heart jerks. The cold is terrifying. She loses her glasses, sees them float for a precious second and thrashes about, trying to grab them. Too late. She drags herself spluttering onto the raft rack. A hand comes down upon her throat.
‘Try stealing from me or mine again and I’ll fucking cut you.’
The man pushes her back under the water and holds her there until she thinks her lungs will burst. Just as her vision starts to go black, he lifts her out, and up, to her feet. She sees his face, scarred, and his neck, bare, encircled with a tattoo of interlinking chains. Then he launches her from the raft rack. She crashes back, goes under, fights for the surface. The man is striding away. As she struggles back to the rack, she can hear the jeers of onlookers. She grabs the rack, gasping for breath, her heart still racing. A kid ducks close to her and mutters, what the hell you thinking trying to steal from a Roch, are you insane, and she thinks: I can’t afford this. I have to learn faster.