Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  ‘What the fuck took you so long?’

  Dien is fraught with impatience – and something else too. The thirty minutes are long past, and Dien is frightened. She doesn’t like being this side of the border. As they hurry outside, Adelaide feels the same fear infecting her. The sleek beauty of the Osirian architecture rings too bright and false; the windows glint, malevolent, screening the players within. She fights to suppress a surge of paranoia.

  ‘Not here.’

  They barely exchange a word for the duration of the return journey, but Dien keeps herself as close as Adelaide’s shadow. When they reach Dien’s apartment, a few of the activists are engaged in a lively meeting. Dien expels everyone but herself and Adelaide. They disperse with reluctance.

  ‘So? Was it worth it?’

  Adelaide pulls out the necklace.

  ‘This was my brother’s.’

  ‘And?’

  She extracts the letter from her pocket.

  ‘His goodbye note.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  Adelaide hesitates, twisting the shark tooth between thumb and finger. The enamel is smooth, the shark long dead. She thinks of her brother at the moment of writing, the horses cantering at the back of his mind even as he scripted his goodbye. She thinks of the ships who came looking, their carcasses sunk beyond the Atum Shelf with the weighted bones of the crews; the loved ones on land who would wonder, and after a time would try and fail to grieve, because they could not let go of a chance, an obstinate sliver of chance, that something might come back. She thinks of a burning tower, western hands pulling her from the waves, Mikaela’s voice: because you need us. A man with a scalpel and a salt box. Ole’s silent plea. She thinks of Dien’s face, bloodied and swollen, her breath huffing in the icy night, Adelaide’s body a mine of aches. Are you done?

  Dien, who is staring at her now, waiting for an answer.

  She could lie, of course. She could tell Dien anything she wanted and Dien would believe her, because somehow, on that strange and volatile night, they reached an accord.

  But she is done with lies.

  ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘There’s something I need to tell you about. It’s called Operation Whitefly, and it’s been going on for a very long time.’

  When she has finished talking, Dien sits with her hands clasped very tightly together, stupefied into silence. Adelaide has never seen her at a loss for words.

  ‘Fuck,’ says Dien at last. ‘Fuck.’

  She stands up, sits down, and stands up again. She starts to circle the apartment.

  ‘This changes everything.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘This – will bring down the Osiris Council.’

  ‘It would do.’

  Dien pauses briefly by the window-wall. ‘You have to go back and get those papers, Rechnov.’

  ‘My family would be arrested. Possibly killed.’

  ‘Your family deserve to be killed. They’re murderers. Listen to what you’re telling me! They’ve executed entire crews, for stars’ sake. They’ve torpedoed ships.’

  ‘That was a long time ago – most of it happened after the Great Storm. My grandfather is dying.’ She keeps her voice firm. Dien will pounce on any hint of weakness. ‘He won’t last the year.’

  Dien shakes her head.

  ‘Justice comes late. But it’s still justice.’ She nibbles at her lower lip, smudging what’s survived of her lipstick. ‘It’s still justice.’

  ‘Dien. I won’t let them take him.’

  ‘You can’t sit on this. This is our passport to breaking open the border!’

  ‘You think so?’

  Something in Adelaide’s tone stops Dien in her tracks.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘You think because you can expose my family, and a couple of other families, that the Council will suddenly open up the border?’

  ‘If we’re the ones to expose them—’

  ‘No. They’ll clamp down even harder. If they don’t claim it’s a hoax, they’ll twist the whole thing to make out that they were the ones to uncover the conspiracy. They’ll make examples of the Rechnovs, the Dumays and the Ngozis. But the rest – the rest will survive.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ says Dien. But for the first time, she sounds uncertain. Adelaide feels a flicker of sympathy.

  ‘I know the City. I know how they work.’

  ‘So what? You think we should ignore this? Let your arsehole family get away with it, while you and I carry on as if nothing’s happened?’ Dien delivers a vicious kick to the bufferglass, and looks as if she’s about to follow it up with her fist, before thinking better of it. ‘Hell’s teeth!’ she shouts.

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. We can’t do that.’

  ‘Then what do you propose, Rechnov? What the fuck do you propose?’

  ‘We need a meeting with Linus.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Get him to come to the west. Listen. There’s one more thing. The distress signal, the one no one has ever answered? There’s a reason for that. Whitefly started blocking it, less than a year after the Great Storm. We need to get that signal back out – let people know we’re still here. And for that, we need Linus.’

  Dien looks disgusted.

  ‘I need a fucking drink.’

  Raqua was never Adelaide’s drink of choice, but she savours it now, both the fiery taste on her tongue and the burn that drops right to the stomach. Across the room, Dien sits on the floor, her back to the window-wall. She has switched off her scarab. Dusk is falling but Dien leaves the lights off, and doesn’t move, and Adelaide knows better than to disturb her. In the gathering gloom, all the events of the last few weeks seem to bleed together. The days adrift. The man who tried to assault her. Dien. The meet. The gatherings that followed. The crowds of westerners. The vault.

  ‘How did he find all this?’

  Dien’s voice is low and slurred.

  ‘How did your brother know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Adelaide’s thoughts turn with difficulty to Axel. The slow, insidious progress of his illness, the vacancies that had opened up in his mind where before there had been dervishes of thought. ‘I don’t know when Axel discovered this. I don’t know if it was the thing that made him go mad, or if he didn’t even know what it was.’

  ‘You said something, at the meet. You said something about horses. That he saw things.’

  ‘He had hallucinations.’

  ‘You said you saw them sometimes too.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She doesn’t like to think too much about that other woman, Ata. The one who had given up, in a way that seems inconceivable now. ‘Or maybe I just expected to see them.’

  ‘There are other people like Axel, you know. In the west. He wasn’t unique.’

  Adelaide can no longer make out the features of Dien’s face, only her silhouette against the meagre light through the window-wall.

  ‘People who have visions,’ says Dien. ‘People who kill themselves. It happens all the time, but no one talks about it. If people knew there was something else out there – that there was land, something to give them hope…’

  Adelaide speaks gently.

  ‘You’ve asked me about Axel, now answer me something. I asked you, before, why you were doing this. You said there were a lot of reasons.’

  ‘And you want to know what they are.’

  ‘I want to understand.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying, Rechnov. There are a lot of reasons. But it’s not like you’re probably thinking. It’s not like I can just list them, or there’s some dramatic event that changed everything. Here, pass me the raqua, will you?’

  Adelaide refills both their glasses, and passes one to Dien. She waits.

  ‘It’s – a thousand little things,’ says Dien. She takes a gulp of the raqua. ‘You know, most people just want to get on with things as best they can, without hurting anyone else. And I was like that. For a long time, I was like that. I had my job and it wasn’t easy, I worked
long hours, overtime that wasn’t paid, but I was good at it. I knew I was good at it. What do you call that, Rechnov? Job satisfaction.’ She laughs, but not unkindly. ‘Well, you wouldn’t know, and that’s just what you were born to. Your luck. But yeah. I started noticing things, little things, everyday things. Friends who had run-ins with the skadi for no good reason, just because a skad was bored and wanted to kick off. Having to wait five weeks to get an electrician out, or another patient in the morgue because we didn’t have the right meds. It wasn’t worse than before, I was just noticing it. And then I couldn’t stop noticing it. And one day I turned around and realized I wasn’t the person I’d been a year ago, or two years ago, or whenever I’d last – taken stock. But, having got to that point, I did have to admit that there wasn’t a reset button. I could carry on doing what I was doing and driving myself slowly mad, or I could do something about it. After that… it was only a matter of time before I ended up with this crowd.’

  She drains her glass.

  ‘There you go, Rechnov. There’s your story.’

  ‘Thank you. For telling me. I needed to hear it.’

  Dien laughs.

  ‘You’re surprising, I’ll give you that. I never expected to tolerate you.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  The stiffness in Adelaide’s spine is a deep ache, as though she and Dien have been here for a long time, for longer than logic dictates; for years, decades, they have been in this room, having this conversation.

  ‘Dien. We will expose this, I promise you. But we’ll do it together. It’s our best chance of reconciliation between west and City. I’ve trusted you. I’ve done what you’ve asked. You have to trust me now.’

  ‘Looks like I don’t have much choice.’

  ‘No. You don’t.’

  She hears Dien sigh, a soft expulsion of breath. The sound brings an unnerving sense of premonition, and she gets to her feet, aware of being drunker than she expected, suddenly craving light.

  Her world has changed, and changed again. The gulf of what she and Dien know and what the rest of the city do not. She feels it in everything she undertakes, from a purchase of coral tea from the vendor on Wintervine waterway, to her latest rallying speech to another packed, sweaty bar where the press of crowds is at once exhilarating and terrifying. With the burden of their shared knowledge, she and Dien have become conspirators. However dark the secret, there is a thrill in this collusion, a sense of pitting themselves against the world that reminds her of the early days with Vikram. The comparison is odd and confusing. Dien and Vikram might be from the same place, even share some philosophies, but in all other ways they are aeons apart. A small, insidious whisper at the back of her mind starts and will not be ceased: was it even Vikram she fell in love with? Or only the idea of him, born from the romance of unison, of going to war together?

  The other activists treat her now with a wary acceptance. They have invited a shark into their home, one who professes itself friendly but cannot be trusted not to revert to form.

  Her speeches are printed on flyers and handed out on the waterways. To the west, she has another name. The Silverfish. One day she sees a new graffiti on the wall of a tower, a leaping fish in metallic paint, and her heart jumps with something like pride.

  They agree how they will play it. Dien will act as the Silverfish while Adelaide listens in from the next room. The level of traction Dien can gain with Linus will decide whether Adelaide needs to step in. She is reluctant to show her face; to reveal herself will compromise their position.

  Dien has selected a safehouse close to the border with easy escape routes in all directions, each assigned a guard.

  Linus, as Adelaide predicted, brings his people to the tower but leaves them outside.

  Dien is pacing. She looks nervous. It occurs to Adelaide that Dien would not have let this show in front of her, before.

  ‘You can deal with him,’ says Adelaide. ‘He’s only my brother.’

  Dien gives her a look and mutters, ‘Exactly.’

  Adelaide takes up her assigned place in the next room. Minutes later she hears a rap at the door and the sound of footsteps entering. For a few excruciating seconds there is silence. Adelaide imagines the two evaluating one another. She hopes desperately that her assessment of Linus is correct. If this goes wrong, it is all on her.

  ‘The Silverfish, I believe?’

  Even prepared, the sound of her brother’s voice comes as a shock. The last time she saw Linus, she was begging him not to leave her alone with their father’s bodyguard, while he locked her into the penthouse. The memory stiffens her resolution. Linus is going to help them today. She’ll make sure of it.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Dien sounds calm, assured. Good. She’s got a grip on herself.

  ‘You asked me to come here, and here I am. Alone, as requested.’

  ‘You brought your people to the tower.’

  ‘If you know anything about me, you should know I’m not stupid.’

  ‘That’s why I contacted you, and not anyone else.’

  ‘Should I be flattered?’

  Adelaide can’t suppress a smile. So very Linus.

  ‘Not really,’ says Dien. ‘It’s more a case of limited options.’

  She hears the scrape of a chair being drawn up. She can imagine him sitting there, one leg neatly crossed over the other, brain ticking away behind a face that can never quite escape the imperious.

  ‘There’s something we know about,’ says Dien. ‘Something I think you know about too. Something that would be… very unfortunate, if it came out.’

  ‘Get to your point.’

  ‘Before I do, I’d better tell you that I’m not the only one who knows about this information. If you do anything – if anything happens to me, after this meeting – I’ve issued instructions for it to be released at once. And trust me, this is going to be of great interest to the public – your side and mine.’

  Linus sighs.

  ‘Of course.’

  Now Adelaide wishes she could see his face. He must be running through the possibilities. Clearly it is some kind of scandal. Has Whitefly occurred to him? Is he even now mounting his defence?

  ‘Operation Whitefly,’ says Dien.

  A beat. Another.

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ says Linus.

  But there is a rigidity in his tone. She can hear it, even if Dien can’t.

  ‘We both know that’s a lie, Linus Rechnov. You know a hell of a lot about Operation Whitefly.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to explain yourself.’

  ‘We’ve got papers,’ says Dien. ‘Documentation. And, wow, it has some interesting things to say. There’s a lot about boats. Boats coming to this city, but never leaving it. People going missing, because they’ve been shot to pieces by skadi. And it’s been going on for years. A whole conspiracy set up to keep us believing there’s no one else out there. Names are mentioned, Linus Rechnov.’

  Linus laughs. ‘It sounds like a spectacular theory.’

  Dien ignores him.

  ‘Let me see, who is mentioned? Oh yes. Your grandfather. The Architect, Leonid Rechnov. He features rather prominently. Then there’s your father, Feodor Rechnov. Such a beloved politician, isn’t he…’

  ‘You don’t have these papers here, I suppose?’

  ‘If you know anything about me, you should know I’m not stupid.’

  Linus does not rise to the barb.

  ‘Again, how convenient.’

  ‘Even if they were a forgery – which we both know they’re not, however long you sit there denying it – you’re a politician, aren’t you, Linus? Don’t you know that the story – the rumour – is always enough? To destroy you?’

  Don’t get carried away, thinks Adelaide. You’ve got to step carefully. He’s clever, cleverer than you think.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t have enemies,’ Dien continues. ‘I don’t believe everyone your side of the city worships
the Rechnovs. There must be plenty of folk who’d like to take up the mantle of “founding family”—’

  Linus cuts in smoothly. ‘I’m very sorry, but if this story is all you have—’

  ‘Get in here! He’s going to call for backup!’

  That wasn’t their agreed signal. Adelaide scrambles to her feet, propelled by the urgency in Dien’s voice.

  The shock on Linus’s face when she enters the room is unmistakable. He is standing, clearly about to make some kind of move, and with a jolt of apprehension, Adelaide remembers the invisible tracker placed on Vikram. Dien’s eyes meet Adelaide’s across the room.

  ‘Sorry. I couldn’t risk him doing a runner.’

  ‘It’s all right. You didn’t have a choice.’

  Adelaide turns her attention to Linus. He’s aged. Even in these few months, it’s noticeable. There’s grey at his temples, and the lines around his mouth and eyes have deepened. Worry lines, she thinks. She wonders if he’s thinking the same of her – but then, to him she’s a dead woman.

  ‘Hello, brother dear.’

  Linus sinks heavily into his chair. His mouth works, seeking words, before he gives up and settles on surveillance, taking in her hair, her face, her attire, a dazed expression continuing to occupy his features.

  ‘Adelaide,’ he says at last. And then, ‘The Silverfish.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She waits.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  Adelaide waves.

  ‘Surprise.’

  Linus’s brow contracts.

  ‘I knew something didn’t add up. She—’ He nods towards Dien. ‘She wasn’t right.’

  ‘Hey, watch your mouth,’ Dien interjects.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Adelaide says softly. ‘He’s trying to remind you I’m from the City.’

  ‘Already? He doesn’t mess around, does he?’

  ‘No.’

  She watches Linus watching her, noticing the dynamic between her and Dien, trying to work out how he can play it.

  ‘That’s why we need him,’ she says.

  Linus rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes.