pinch of salt from his tin and threw it at the window.
What to do? By all accounts, Adelaide Mystik was particular in her habits. She opened her flat once a year for the Rose Night. Other than that, the Red Rooms were closed off to visitors. As an honorary member of the Gardeners’ Guild and a sporadic landscape designer, Adelaide was occasionally seen on botanical sites. For lunch, she frequented four or five select restaurants, and she dined late at night from an equally exclusive list. She was glimpsed in the famous bars and nightclubs of the Strobe. She took a lot of milaine and she drank.
Crucially, Adelaide was inaccessible without the aid of credit. Vikram didn’t have credit, so he was going to have to tackle her at home. There was one detail that had caught his attention. It was in a magazine interview with one of Adelaide’s alleged rivals.
Adelaide’s an insomniac, he read. That’s why she parties all night, because she can’t sleep. It’s nothing to do with stamina.
The by-line was attributed to a journalist called Magda Linn. The rest of the interview was useless; if Vikram hadn’t seen the sleeping pills beside Adelaide’s bed, he would have ignored it.
The next morning, when he reviewed his plan in the light of day, it seemed flimsy. Tangling with Adelaide Mystik was getting into political games; games whose rules he did not know and whose outcomes he could not predict.
He did not confide in Nils. He was probably wasting his time anyway. Linus’s idea was a good one but impractical, exactly the sort of thing a Citizen would suggest. Maybe Vikram should stop trying to decipher the bizarre world of the Rechnovs and go back to what he knew: to protests and waterway violence. He understood violence. Its mechanics, its randomness. Its lack of mercy. He thought of Drake’s casual hello to Rikard and wondered if there might be anything more to the connection than she claimed. He dismissed the idea. They’d known a lot of people back then; it was impossible to avoid running into a face from the past.
He began to work out the practicalities of the plan. His pass had expired, he would have to sneak across the border. By Undersea or by boat? Either way he’d have to bribe someone.
Night, then. Night held his best chance. From a practical viewpoint, there would be fewer people about. But he also reasoned that Adelaide, on some level, must be like everyone else. At four or five in the morning, furthest from the warmth of the sun, her body would be at its lowest ebb. Her heart would slow, her lungs shallow. In those hours, dark thoughts often invaded the mind. This was the time to find her, when she was vulnerable.
13 ADELAIDE
The curtain, a waterfall of white velvet, was lifted at one side by an invisible hand. The assistant extended his arm silently, inviting them to go through. Adelaide folded her arms and gave Jannike a pointed look.
“Off you go.”
“Come on, Adie. I paid three hundred lys for this appointment.”
“Three hundred lys! For a single consultation! It says here she’s only been Guild ratified for the last five years.” Adelaide pointed to the Teller’s certificate, prominently displayed on a stand. “You’ve been conned, Miss Ko.”
“I haven’t, she’s the best. She has contacts outside Osiris.”
“Who with, the ghosts?”
“No! Anyone can contact the ghosts. She finds living souls, on land.”
“Then she’s definitely a fraud.”
“What if she could contact Axel?” Jannike said boldly. Adelaide stared at her, so intensely that she might have unnerved another woman. Jannike’s brown eyes gazed back, unperturbed. There was little that could rattle Jan. The hidden hand holding the curtain jostled it, a reminder that time was booked and bookings were money.
Adelaide and Jannike stared at one another for a fraction longer. Then both girls ducked under the curtain. It swung back into place behind them. Adelaide blinked, surprised by an intense brightness.
There was only one visible source of light. It was star-shaped, sunk into the floor, and emitted a silvery glow that steeped the tent. As Adelaide’s eyes adjusted, she realized they were in a triangular enclosure lined with the same velvet drapes. Sitting on the other side of the star-light was the Teller. Her legs were crossed. She was clothed in a pyramid of folds.
“Sit,” she said.
The two girls perched obediently, echoing the Teller’s pose.
“There are two of you,” said the Teller.
“I’ve just come to watch,” Adelaide said.
“Your hand,” instructed the Teller, and Jannike put hers forward promptly. The Teller reached for it. Her hand brushed past Jan’s before connecting with it. As she leaned forward over the star-light Adelaide saw her eyes. They were milky white, blank inside of blank. Adelaide had an unnerving sense of pitching forward into water. Her vision grew cloudy, as though she had swum into the unplumbed depths of a kelp forest, chasing the tail of a fish which each time she neared it shot further away into the weed.
The woman was blind. She was young, too, without lines or wrinkles, the youngest Teller Adelaide had ever seen.
Beside her, Jan tensed as her hand was enclosed.
“There will be deceit,” said the Teller.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Look to those close to you. Your friends shall become stronger but so shall your enemies.”
“How about me?” said Jan. “How about all the beautiful sirens out there waiting for me to swim into their lives?”
“You are impatient,” said the Teller.
“Yes I am.”
Adelaide half listened as the Teller predicted Jannike’s near future; read her palm lines and the channels of her wrist veins, then handed her a salt vial and told her to scatter the grains. The whited out tent was soporific.
“And you, my sister.” The Teller’s hand trembled, midair, seeking what her eyes could not. “You have already been told your fate.”
Adelaide realized she was being addressed.
“I’ve been told many fates,” she said. “None of them match.”
“It has been spoken, sister, spoken in the salt. The place you shall go to. Not yet, perhaps. It cannot be forced. But when you are ready, you shall go willingly.”
“Where’s she going?” Jannike asked. The Teller’s head bowed.
“It has been spoken.”
“What about Axel?” Jan nudged Adelaide. “Go on, ask!”
“For the boy, nothing.”
Adelaide was taken aback by the abruptness of the response.
“What do you mean?” She leaned forward, eager now, and gripped the woman’s hand. It was incredibly thin. She could feel the web of bones shifting in the scoop of the palm. “Can you see where my brother is?”
The Teller’s eyelids lowered in a mockery of demureness.
“Has Axel left Osiris?”
“Nobody leaves Osiris.” The Teller’s voice took on a chanting quality, and a higher harmonic pierced the low hum, eerily, so that it sounded as though two voices emerged from her swathed throat. “Osiris is a lost city. She has lost the world and the world has lost her. Thus it was ordained, thus it is.”
“That old rant,” said Jannike. Adelaide knew that Jan’s eyes were rolling upwards, although she also sensed the other girl’s interest in what had not been said. Adelaide was equally annoyed by the retreat into seer speech.
“If he hasn’t left, then where is he?” she pressed. She turned to Jan. “I want to see her alone.”
“I thought she was a fraud?”
