Rikard. The face sharpened into memory; their paths must have crossed. It was possible he had never even spoken to the man, but there had been so many people back then.
“I didn’t realize you were still in touch with that crowd,” he said.
“I’m not. He’s started crewing the boats occasionally, I ran into him a few weeks back.”
Vikram looked at the soles of Drake’s boots, the ridges packed with waterproof wax and fish scales. He was terrified that one day she would be caught on an illegal fish run and either killed or flung underwater, but it was pointless voicing that fear. Instead he asked, “What happened to your tooth?”
He thought she had lost one of the front ones, but when she grinned he saw that the tooth had turned entirely black.
“Some bastard tried to nick my boots while I was asleep.”
“I’ll buy you a gold one for midwinter,” Nils offered.
“You’re so generous, you. I’ll have a pair of ruby earrings while you’re at it. And maybe a bunch of, what was it, roses too-for my hair.” Drake screwed up a handful of wiry curls. “What d’you think?”
Vikram drained his mug.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny you two.”
When they left the den, much later, the wind had dropped and they had finished several jugs. Vikram stepped outside ahead of the others. The first bridge, thirty floors up, was a rumpled construction lashed together out of planks, boards, squares of fibreglass, broken bufferglass panes, metal sheets and whole and partial boats. Dirty water welled in the pit of a kayak, dripping erratically down.
Vikram climbed easily over the treacherous walkway. The bridge rocked beneath him, regularly, like a pendulum. He sensed movement in the sky above, the clouds scudding away on high winds. A glimmer of light drew his gaze south. He followed it, found clear sky and there, on the horizon, a phenomenon. Ribbons of gauze undulated in the stratosphere: green and yellow, flickering, shimmering. The lights always meant something. Sickness. Death. Was that where his failure to engage that lofty girl would end? He was afraid, but the strange evanescent beauty drew him in spite of his fear. He could have sat on the bridge for hours, with no company but the sea hissing somewhere below.
The others came out, giggling. Drake couldn’t walk properly. She had her arms out wide. She was flapping them. Nils steered her.
“Stars!” Nils stopped, gazing up. “Look at the lights!”
“Aura Australis,” said Drake expertly. She hiccoughed. Only an innate sense of balance was keeping her upright.
“How d’you know that?”
“Someone told me.”
Drake misjudged a step. Her boot stuck in a hole. Nils hauled her out.
“Who?”
“Dunno. Someone… educated.”
She moved close to Nils and whispered something in his ear. Nils shook his head. Drake whispered again, more urgently.
“What’s up?” Vikram called.
Nils cupped a playful hand over Drake’s mouth.
“She’s pissed.”
They reached Vikram. He took Drake’s other arm and they progressed slowly along the bridge. Behind him, the Australis lights pulsed. But the dizzy laughter of the others swept him onward, pulling him back into the mesh of the group, where he belonged.
Vikram lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the wind and thinking about the three of them, bound together by strange layers of history. They had once been five; they should always have been four. He tried to imagine what Mikkeli would have done. Keli wouldn’t have accepted defeat, and nor could Vikram.
“Now you know what you’re up against,” she’d say. “So work out how to fight it.”
He had thought, in the first bewildering days when he was released from jail, that he would miss her all the time. But it didn’t happen like that. She intruded on his thoughts at specific times, with specific actions. He found that he missed her more outside. In boats, always, and when he caught a glimpse of a mismatched, roguish face. Sometimes he told himself that it really was Keli, and as long as he didn’t follow her, she would stay alive. He realized that the dead didn’t go away. They lingered.
Vikram had made her a promise. He had done it with rites, made an incision in his own skin and sealed it with salt. As much as to himself, he owed it to Mikkeli to pursue every avenue.
In the dirty bufferglass reflection he saw her nod approvingly. “That’s right,” she said. “You’re not going to let that bitch get the better of you, are you?”
When the labouring work came to an end Vikram began his research. He went first to the recycling depot. The caretaker was old, with soft indoor skin and a frostbite scar where one ear was missing. He was mostly deaf, but insisted on taking Vikram on a tour of the depot. They looked into room after room full of City junk, the old man mumbling things that Vikram could not understand, pointing at the piles of unsorted plastic and broken parts that were waiting to be disassembled, melted down and returned to the Makers that had produced them.
When they reached a room of discarded Neptunes, Vikram stopped. Some of the machines still worked. He pulled up story after story about the Rechnovs on the cracked screens. The old man peered curiously over his shoulder. He touched a creased fingertip to the fuzzy picture of Adelaide, stroked the line of her hair.
“They call her the flame.”
His voice was like crackling paper.
“Yes. Yes I’m looking for stuff on her. Can you help me?”
The caretaker grinned, showing blackened gums, and beckoned. Vikram followed his shuffling progress to a room where discarded paper newspapers and pamphlets, which had been a fad for a few years in the City and were still used in the west, were piled high in precarious stacks. The caretaker let him take what he wanted.
Back at 614-West, he holed up in his room. The papers were thin and had curled with the damp air. Some were full of holes where small creatures had chewed through. He ran a finger down columns of print, marvelling as always that something so flimsy could come from something as solid and compact as rock.
At first Vikram tried to organize the information, making notes in the margins of articles, scribbling ideas on a patch of the wall. The krill loved Adelaide: she was a tabloid goldmine. Vikram couldn’t say exactly what he was looking for, but he wanted to extract some nugget of truth from the speculation. The cuttings grew too many; soon they made an overflowing pile on the floor.
He wanted to dismiss her. She had everything. She was clever though; she had all but renounced her family without losing any of her inherited privileges. Then she had established her reign as undisputed leader of the Haze. The parties grew bigger and wilder and still the city forgave her. The media chronicled her exploits in tones of indulgence, the Daily Flotsam with a more malicious glee. She never gave interviews.
He found a ten-page feature on the Rechnov family. Here they were lined up in a formal portrait: the Architect and his wife, now deceased, Feodor and Viviana Rechnov, the four children. The same proud, haughty faces, an extended version of the representation at Eirik’s execution. Vikram thought this quite naturally, and realized with a shock that he was able to consider the execution almost abstractly. It still enraged him, and the guilt remained, but Eirik’s death had become part of a sum; immersed into a greater mission.
In the older pictures, Adelaide was always beside her brother, identical with their oversized shades and their smiles full of open confidence. Here they were at some party or other. Getting out of a shuttle pod, late at night and drunk. Axel in a hang-glider. Adelaide jet-skiing. The pair of them on the roof of the Eye Tower, preparing to abseil past the Council Chambers. Vikram thought of the single photograph in Adelaide’s bedroom.
Something very odd had happened to Axel. Vikram had never paid much attention: these people were fairy tales to him. Now he examined the pictures with renewed interest. In one photo, Axel’s eyes were averted from the lens while his sister stared directly, accusingly ahead. Was there something protective in the way she stepped forward before Axel, her fingers at his elbow as though she’d just let go his arm?
Vikram tossed the photo aside. He was forgetting his original mission: to find Adelaide’s weaknesses and work out how to use them. He settled down with yet another article and began to read.
Hours later, the window-wall had drained of light but he had gathered several pieces of information that he could assume were factual. His eyes strained. Lost in thought, he had barely noticed the onset of dusk. He took a
