bloated. That if you pushed down on the chest, white foam would leak from the mouth and nostrils. The face would have swollen just enough to distort a memory that had been, until that moment, familiar as the skin on your own hand.
He wondered what Feodor would feel, unzipping the corpse of his son or his daughter. If he would grieve. If the man was capable of grief.
Sounds swept overhead-a whistle, shrill; the whoosh of a boat throwing up spray. Each separate noise seemed to arc through the air, leaving its echo like a sparkler or a yard of ribbon, so that the sky was painted in sound. Vikram sensed, throbbing distantly, just waiting for the gas’s effect to fade, the scrapes and bruises that caked his body. It was the same sounds, the same aches, the same red fog from three years before.
Time was unravelling. Keli was here. Eirik was here. Everyone was talking at once, past and present and future, a collision of time. With a final effort, Vikram wrenched his eyes back to the balcony.
The Rechnovs were leaving.
For a few precious moments, his head was clear. All we were was a breeze against a cyclone, he thought. The ideals argued and laughed over, the late-night plans laid so optimistically-they had really believed in themselves. He only saw it now, when it was too late. Because without a political platform, without visibility and words, they had nothing. The New Horizon Movement had never stood a chance.
Watching Feodor Rechnov turn away, Vikram felt a current shift inside of himself. A realization, distant but imperative.
This was where it had to stop. On a strange, pale skied autumn day, the City had crossed a line. And Vikram had woken up. Really woken up. The glass shards jostled in his chest, minute needles of memory and of pain. He knew that he would carry them now forever. Eirik was the first but he would not be the last. Everything they had been through, everything they had done-the starving winters, the riots and the border protests, his best friend’s death and Eirik’s execution-all of that was worthless unless they could convince one man to listen.
Then he thought: this is the west. There is no we. So it’s up to me. If I want to change anything, I have to start again. I have to rewrite the rules.
The chemicals in the gas seeped steadily through his veins with every breath he drew. Beside him, Drake lay inert. Dizziness overtook Vikram at last. His eyes closed, and his mind moved quietly away.
3 ADELAIDE
She had never seen anyone die before. Death was meant to be sudden. The condemned man clawed at the glass. He slipped and tried to get up and fell back down and the water erupted in bubbles as his hands smacked the water.
His panic was infectious. It made the air thick, the sea restless with cloud-capped waves. Overhead, colonies of birds formed dark helices as they swirled, some diving low over the crowd of western boats. Adelaide’s lungs tightened. She knew it was false; she could still breathe. In a matter of minutes that man would never be able to breathe again, and anyway his suffering should not affect her-if she felt anything, it ought to be satisfaction at justice being done. She knew all of this, but she stepped back, prepared then and there to leave.
A shoulder blocked her passage. She was wedged between Dmitri and Feodor, two solid boulders. Her eldest brother’s expression was inscrutable, even bored. On her other side, Feodor wore his usual faint scowl, intended to suggest burdens of responsibility far beyond the public imagination.
The man slipped again in the tank. How long would it take?
There would have been documents. Administration. The trial had been going on for years, so long that Adelaide could barely remember when it had begun. Somewhere along the line, a decision had been made to produce the showcase on the surface. Who had taken that final step-who had written drowning against the execution order? One of Feodor’s cronies? Was it her father himself?
The thought made her shiver; a chill that was nothing to do with the cold summer air. It was sickening. She wished she could faint, she would have welcomed nausea, but her legs continued to hold her up.
“You can’t expect me to watch this.”
She spoke quietly, but she knew they all heard.
“You can’t leave, Adelaide.” Dmitri was brusque. “If you leave now, that’s more of a statement than not coming at all.”
“But it’s monstrous,” she hissed.
“It’s not pleasant for any of us,” said Feodor. His lips barely moved as he spoke. “Public service rarely is. You should know that by now.”
“Then why isn’t mother here?”
“She’s not feeling well. And your grandfather, before you ask, is far too frail to stand for so long in the cold. You have no such excuse.”
“Think of what this man has done, Adelaide.” Linus’s voice was tight. He doesn’t like it either, she thought. But he’s still here. He contributed to this. “Think of the lives he has taken.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I know what he has done.”
She had seen the reports. Everyone in Osiris had seen the reports. Eirik 9968 had confessed to acts far more atrocious than what was being done to him today. He had killed people with bare hands and with knives; Eirik 9968 had not shown mercy. There were charges of false confessions eked from force-fed drugs; scarrings on the soles of feet.
There was a strange precision in the scene below: the four corners of the square, the buoys and the Home Guard speedboats cordoning the western crowd; a barge, solitary oblong in gunmetal water, its glass cube catching the light. The hooded figure stumbling within it.
He’s guilty. He deserves this. He must deserve it.
Except that his sentence had been orchestrated by her father. Glancing once more at his set, determined profile, she was suddenly certain that the method of execution was Feodor’s choice.
The Ngozis and the Dumays were grouped at the other end of the balcony. Each founding family formed a tight core. If one of them wished to leave, she could go with them. It only took an ally.
No one met her gaze.
A gun was fired and Adelaide jumped. The westerners were growing restless. The waterline was at the man’s neck.
She couldn’t watch any longer. She held her breath, trying to bring on a fit of dizziness. She waited for lines to split her vision, removing what was before her eyes, but nothing happened. She had to draw breath. When she exhaled, the air came out shakily.
“Adelaide?” Linus had noticed.
“I need to leave,” she said. “I’m going to have to leave.”
“Then do. If that’s really what you want.” Feodor’s voice was casual, but she heard the subtext. You know the consequences.
She thought of the investigator and the transaction that had just been made from her bank account. She thought of the resources she would need.
I can’t abandon Axel.
The water in the tank rose. She focussed on the boat, counted the teeth of its shark face. They ran in two zigzag rows, thirty in the top, twenty seven in the bottom. But the tank drew her back. She watched it the way you walked in a ground-dream, observing the phenomenon but knowing, even as your foot brushed the grass, that the scene could not be real.
Adelaide had seen live fish pulled from the water in restaurants that writhed the way the dying man did now.
In his final moments she felt oddly absent, as though she were observing herself from a long way off. The man was drowning, and there were lines being drawn before her. She felt the chalk on her back. She felt very cold. She thought of the day of the Great Silence-the day they said the world had drowned. There were connections to be made, but she would not make them. One level of consciousness, the part that would allow her to sleep through future nights, the part that allowed her to breathe when the man down there could not, closed her mind quietly
