choking. He smelled fresh fire and knew the hit had been close. Rubble rained from the ceiling. Part of it had caved in.
Shapes moved. He heard Pekko groan. He sensed movement, Adelaide, raising her head, lifting her body slowly from the ground. There was a familiar sound and Pekko grunted and he knew what she had done. He felt her eyes searching for him but she would see nothing in the dust. He had one insane impulse to crawl forward, take her face in his and kiss her, whisper a goodbye. There was no time.
“Adelaide, run!” he shouted hoarsely.
47 ADELAIDE
S he found herself on the floor, coughing, a ringing in her ears. The air was thick with dust. She felt slick blood at her throat where Pekko’s knife had grazed. Her eyes burned. She could hardly see.
She wriggled forward. Her hand closed over metal: the knife. Pekko grabbed her ankle. She kicked but he hung on. She jabbed the knife behind her, felt it sink, stick, could not see where. Pekko made a noise. The grip on her ankle loosened. Blood dripped on her hand.
“Adelaide, run!”
Vikram’s voice propelled her onward. She found her feet. The door was before her. She wrenched it open and ran.
48 VIKRAM
Scrabbling on the floor. Pekko, a knife sticking out of his shoulder, lurched to his feet. He raised his gun, but it never fired. Nils was too quick. He swung his own weapon and hit the other man squarely on the temple. Pekko collapsed once more and was still.
“I never liked him anyway,” said Nils, as though Pekko was the problem they now faced, but Vikram understood that the gesture was more than that. Nils no longer cared about what Pekko could do. Very soon it wouldn’t matter.
“Rikard’s dead.” Drake’s voice came through the gloom. As the dust settled, Vikram saw Pekko’s body, inert, and Rikard’s slumped by the window-wall. There was a two metre hole in the ceiling. The others were standing, bruised but alive. Their faces were dirty and scared.
“We can still run,” Ilona said. Nobody moved.
“They’ll kill anyone who comes out of this tower,” said Vikram. “Adelaide-”
“She’s got a chance,” Nils said. “If they recognize her.” Nils turned to Ilona. “Lona, we’ve only got a few minutes before they strike again. You go. Catch up with Adelaide, take your chances together.”
The girl shook her head. “Not without you.”
He remembered a conversation with Adelaide, lazing in her jacuzzi, surrounded by soft white bubbles. It seemed impossible that it could have happened mere months ago.
“You don’t have any family, do you?” she’d asked, with that abrupt intimacy she sometimes offered, or demanded.
“How would you know?”
“Because it’s written here.” She touched, with a wet fingertip, the violet skin beneath his eyes. He realized she’d said it because she felt the same way.
If he could save one person, it had to be her. There was no-one else he could stand in front of now. He could not help Nils, or Drake, and they could not help him. All of them knew it; sensed their fates, Mikkeli’s fate, in the way they tensed, reforming. Ever since that day they had been marked. Mikkeli had shown them all that was possible. A gesture, a story to pass on. He had told Adelaide that she controlled her own life, believed the same of himself-but here he was, caught in a crumbling tower in the smoke and the flames.
You didn’t make your own luck. Things happened; they had no rules, no order. Would it hurt to burn? He’d never thought of burning. No, the smoke would take him first. He’d asphyxiate, or suffocate under the rubble.
Drake hiked her gun.
“Right then,” she said. “Let’s take out a few of these bastards.”
He picked up his own weapon. Barrel still warm. He snapped in a new cell.
They gathered at the broken window-wall. Nils and Ilona on one side, Vikram and Drake on the other. Dawn had fully broken. A flotilla of skadi boats encircled the tower below, dark blights on the sunrise sparkled water.
He remembered their faces under the light of a single electric bulb, in his memory now so young. He remembered the fierceness with which they had argued their beliefs. Horizon, Keli’s dream, their ideals. He felt a moment of gladness for those times shared. The smile in his mind lingered even as the sharpness of loss overcame him, for the stymied future, for the lives that might have been.
Mikkeli was crouched in the heater, her skin crackling as she burned. “Come on Vik,” she said. “Being dead’s not so bad. You get to haunt the living, don’t you?”
Nils took the first shot. They took it in rounds, firing without speaking, each bolt a hotness against their faces, none of them acknowledging that most of their attempts would find no mark.
In the last seconds, Vikram thought that he heard footsteps, running footsteps. Perhaps it was Adelaide, making her escape through the tortuous stairs of the unremembered quarters. Perhaps it was another Mikkeli, grown and old, her bare feet slip-slapping the road she walked in her dreams, the road lined with a wall, the fields verdant beyond. Or perhaps it was his own ground-dream. This was the noise of his feet on the beach, sinking into golden grains, dampened by the sea’s light rush. Onto the pebbles and into the grasses. The grasses brushing against his sun-drenched skin. A glimpse of what lay beyond He squeezed Drake’s hand; met Nils’s eyes. The contact felt impersonal, as though they’d all sunk into their own worlds, already let go of this life.
Don’t give up, he thought. You can’t give up yet.
But that wasn’t the way Osiris went.
49 ADELAIDE
She skidded down the impossible stairways. Twice the ice stole her footing. She toppled, hit the wall, barely kept her balance.
The tower she had thought dead and dormant was waking up. Shapeless piles turned into figures. As flames began to lick at the tower’s exterior, comatose creatures found a scrap of life to haul them to their feet. They moved as one, towards the stairwells, a current of sluggish limbs.
Her breath was torn. Blood rushed in her ears. Vikram was calling. Was he calling? Was he following? He must be.
New voices. What’s going on? It’s burning, the tower’s burning! Panicked screams. The stairwells filled. Cats and rats emerging from crannies, streaming ahead. The acrid smell of smoke beginning to filter down through the building.
Fire! The tower’s on fire-it’s the skadi, the skadi are here Not running now, she was fighting, using elbows and fists to barge her way down another flight and another. Hot with sweat and the crush and then she realized it wasn’t that. It wasn’t people. It was the heat of flames.
It’s happening again, it’s burning!
A woman in front of her held a baby. The child wailed, the two of them rocking and keening whilst the human tide pushed downwards.
Doors banging.
Not doors, gunshots.
She didn’t know what floor she was on. She shouldn’t have run. The keening woman stopped and sat in the
