Something struck him on the cheek. He looked up. Hail. Cursing the weather’s erratic switches, thrusting the card into his coat pocket, he retreated indoors.
Two guards were approaching down the corridor.
“Time’s up, kid. Out with you.”
They marched him back to the lift. Hands folded in front, eyes averted, they accompanied Vikram down the hundred floors, across the mosaic-tiled lobby, past the evergreen trees and down again through the flood control floors. They opened the doors for him to go outside. As he passed, one of them grabbed his collar.
“Hey-don’t forget to check out your picture in the newsreel.”
The other grinned inanely.
“We don’t have your damn newsreel in the west,” Vikram flung back. “Don’t you know anything?”
The doors hissed shut. Vikram was left at the waterbus terminus, watching the next load of passengers embark in the freezing hail.
5 ADELAIDE
The Rechnov offices were quieter than she remembered. Through doors left ajar or windows with the blinds half drawn, she caught glimpses of her father’s employees. They were smartly but plainly dressed, their workstations clean, uncluttered. These days, amidst the eternal rumours that bits of the City were falling apart, she supposed the company was more concerned with maintenance than creativity.
Occasionally, seeing her shadow pass, a worker glanced up. Some dropped their eyes, others stared overtly. She hadn’t been invited.
Her meeting with the investigator was in two days time. What she expected to uncover here today she was not yet sure, only that she was following instinct, and instinct was tracing a path backwards.
In an empty foyer that smelled of decomposing ideas, she passed the things that had never been built, forever imprisoned behind glass frames. Plans for an underwater shuttle network. A piece of concept art for a hotel like a bubble on the seabed, the date marked in the bottom right corner-Summer 2366. A mere twelve months before Storm Year.
It was a strange feeling to think that this image was half a century old, its creator probably dead. He might even have been born outside Osiris; walked on land and seen places that no longer existed. Axel had been obsessed with the Old World at one stage, and the idea of rediscovering it. For weeks on end he had pestered Feodor with questions. What had happened to the land? Why had everyone come to Osiris and why could no one leave?
Feodor, who liked to lecture, told them that Osiris was built because the world was collapsing. Even before the Great Storm, the old lands had been crippled by disasters. Floods, famine, plagues made by scientists, war, drought-earthquakes that ripped the land to pieces. The twins wouldn’t know, but a long time ago there used to be giant discs drifting in the sky-s’lites, they called them. S’lites looked like stars. They took photographs, and connected scarabs in an enormous web spanning halfway across the globe. Back in the Neon Age, said Feodor, everyone knew everything about everyone else in the world. They had machines inside their heads. The sky was full of giant mirrors and cloud spraying monsters. Some of them were planning to live on the Moon. But all that was before the Blackout.
Now, a city like Osiris, entirely self-sustaining, was a stroke of pure genius (partly by the people on the Osiris Board, but ultimately, said Feodor, by their grandfather and his father Alexei before him, who travelled all the way across the Boreal States on the back of a grain cart so that he could enter the architectural competition). There should have been many more Osiris cities. They could have saved lives. But the city came too late, and when the Great Storm arrived, the few refugees that escaped land’s terrible plagues only confirmed the worst.
Nobody has ever answered Osiris’s distress signal, Feodor told them finally, because nobody is left to answer. He shook his head, a tired, resigned gesture. He only wished it were otherwise.
Looking at the faded plans, Adelaide remembered that speech very clearly. It was the only time she had ever supported Feodor rather than Axel.
She strode down the corridor, purposeful now. She was reaching for the brass handle of Feodor’s office when Tyr stepped out of the adjacent room and manoeuvred himself in front of the door. He must have seen her coming on camera.
“Feodor’s at a press conference,” he said.
“Feeding that insatiable desire for publicity, is he?”
“He’s delivering a statement on the west. They had a westerner in the Chambers this morning. Someone has to put a positive spin on it.” Tyr surveyed her blandly. “He’s not due back any time soon.”
“I can wait. In here.”
She took a step forward. Tyr did not move. They faced one another, close enough to see blemishes, lines, embryonic beneath the skin. Close enough to touch. Green stilettos put Adelaide almost on a level height with Tyr. A clump of his hair stuck out over his forehead, light brown, streaked with honey. She fought the urge to push it back into place. Her own resolution was mirrored in the set of his jaw, the slight contraction of the irises. His eyes were the colour of dusk, and held its ambiguity.
Stalemate suspended them for a few seconds. Then Tyr shrugged.
“Your call.”
“Thank you.”
He opened the door in a twofold gesture, pushing it ajar, and as she stepped forward holding it there before opening it all the way. Adelaide ignored the bait.
“I’ll take a coral tea,” she called over her shoulder. “Strong. Plenty of ginger.”
“I know how you take your tea,” said Tyr.
The door swung shut, cutting him off.
Adelaide looked about, remembering. The room contained the accumulated possessions of three proud and quite different men, none of them able to erase the presence of their predecessor. Alexei’s bookshelves squeezed between Leonid’s maps, their edges neatly aligned. The floor was dwarfed by Feodor’s huge table, itself covered in architectural drawings, and beneath or in places upon them, in tea glass rings. Adelaide slung her handbag on top.
She crossed the room to the Neptune. Its oceanscreen showed deep sea beyond the submerged island and the Atum Shelf. The image was three-dimensional and opalescent. It seemed to pulse. There was no sign of the city’s underworld: no plateauing pyramid bases, pipelines or energy turbines; nothing to reveal human intrusion at all.
“You old-fashioned fool,” Adelaide said aloud.
She placed one hand flat against the activation strip. Nothing happened. The Neptune must be programmed to respond to Feodor’s fingerprints. She tried the drawers to his desk. They were also locked.
Tyr entered without knocking. He had been working with the Rechnovs for some years now and had acquired certain family privileges. Feodor trusted him implicitly. Tyr gave her an incalculable glance and placed her teaglass on a table beside a leather armchair. He stood there until she moved away from Feodor’s desk.
Adelaide lifted the glass to her nose, inhaling the steam as ritual dictated, then blew lightly across the liquid. They surveyed one another without pretence.
“Do you have a Surfboard?” she asked.
“A Surfboard? No.”
“I thought there might be some reading material to occupy those of us who have to wait upon Feodor.”
“I’ll suggest it to him,” Tyr said.
When he had gone, she seated herself in the armchair, and hooked one shoe across the opposite knee. Her foot jiggled. She waited. After a moment she grew bored of waiting, and crossed the room to the sideboard jammed against the bookcase. She relieved it of one of the more expensive raquas and poured herself a triple measure.
She went to stand by the maps, the raqua in her right hand, untouched. Most were plans of Osiris, but there was was one that showed the Old World land masses. It was a beautiful and very rare object. Adelaide traced the outlines with one finger, thinking of Axel’s questions.
It was stranger than she had expected to be here. She remembered when she was younger occasionally
