“We?” he repeated.
Adelaide was bent double, breathing dramatically. Her face stretched in a grin. It was a game for her, he thought. He kept a deliberate metre away, trying to slow his own breathing. Cross that border and he might not be able to stop his hands from fastening around her neck.
“You ran,” he said. “You fucking ran.” His throat ached with the effort of keeping his voice down. If anyone came out and questioned him, he had fake ID and no City pass. He had to get somewhere safe.
“Of course I ran,” said Adelaide. “I’m not going to get caught.”
“Except for your blood.” That shut her up, but only temporarily. He could see her mind working, figuring out how to turn the situation around. He didn’t give her the chance. “ We’d better get out of here.”
“There’s a storm started, genius. I can’t take the boat back to my scraper now.”
“Great. We’re stranded.”
His temples were splitting. Adelaide stretched up again, hands over her head, her spine arching.
“You might be,” she said. “I’m going to the tea parlour on floor sixteen.”
“Fine.” He didn’t care where they went as long as it was down, as far away from the penthouse as it was possible to go. “Then we’re taking the lift.”
“You can go home if you want,” said Adelaide.
Vikram jabbed the call button. Deep in the belly of the skyscraper, he heard a distant rumble as the lift started its journey.
“I’m not going anywhere until my side of the bargain’s settled,” he said. “I’ve risked enough for you today. How the hell do you think I can get over the border at four in the morning?”
Adelaide shrugged.
“The Undersea?”
“The Undersea doesn’t stop here. If you’d ever taken it you’d know that.”
“Why would I want to take the Undersea? Anyway, you can’t stay at my apartment.”
Vikram gave her an insincere smile. Clearly she hadn’t thought things through. The mechanics of it. What she was going to do with him in the lag time between her side of the bargain and his. For his part, he’d had no intention of spending any more time with her than necessary. But if he could bear it, an opportunity presented itself: to get even.
“Afraid I’m going to have to,” he said.
“Nobody stays at my apartment.”
“Then I’ll be the first. Don’t worry, I won’t rob you.”
There was a low ping and the lift doors slid open. Vikram stepped inside. Adelaide stayed still, her mouth set.
“You getting in or not?” he asked.
She got in. Once again they stood side by side, repeated in the mirrors. Their faces echoed the rigid stance of their bodies. He was a head taller than her. This small, biological victory gave him some satisfaction.
Perhaps noticing the same thing, Adelaide’s scowl deepened.
“Don’t think you’ve won,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think anything so childish,” he shot back.
Adelaide’s tea parlour had the dreamy, slow-motion atmosphere of a daylight facility still operating in the middle of the night. Purple lanterns hung in clusters, illuminating the low level tables, cushion seats, ink paintings on silk and the dividing mesh screens. Around a corner was an adolescent girl, folding paper napkins into a menagerie of birds. Adelaide gave the girl a wide berth. The old man near the entrance wore a full tuxedo, and glanced up nervously at every clink of a spoon. A woman in a large green hat, ostensibly reading a newspaper, would now and then recount some portion of it to the rest of the room. On the other side was a man with a cat on a lead. The cat had its own glass.
Vikram and Adelaide sat opposite one another in one section. Nobody seemed interested in them.
“The red coral tea, sir.”
The deferential did not go unnoticed. Vikram smiled his thanks. Adelaide fixed the proprietor with cold eyes. The proprietor, a tiny Asian woman with her hair in a chignon, ignored the look and placed a tray carefully on the table.
The teapot was flat and heavy with an s-shaped spout. It was accompanied by a small bowl of powdered ginger. Adelaide, very deliberately, took the pot and poured tea into one of two round-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pale amber. She blew ripples across the top of it before allowing a tentative few drops over the barrier of her lips.
Vikram poured and gingered his own tea. The scorching temperature did not affect him; hot beverages had kept him alive on many nights. Despite himself, his anger was fading under the dual influence of warmth and relief. They hadn’t been caught. The aroma of fresh tea, the soft drifts of rising steam and the intermittent sounds of human habitation relaxed him. He was safe. Even Adelaide’s pettiness with the tea seemed trifling. It was good tea too, the sort that would find its way onto the black market in the west.
“Me and Axel used to come here,” she said. “It was our local. Axel loves the Chinese because they keep their Mandarin, and he’s always been into Old World languages. Do people keep their languages in the west, Vikram?”
“Some do. But it makes it harder to get by.” And why make it harder than it already is, he thought.
“Axel used to speak bits of Mandarin with the servers and then we’d sit and make up stories about everyone else. You get some right crazies in here. You know, I can’t help wondering if he’s ever come back without me. Where would you hide, Vikram, if you wanted to escape?”
“Depends what you mean by escape.”
“Disappear, then.”
“When people go missing in the west they turn up dead or not at all, which generally means they’re being eaten by fish. I guess that’s one way to disappear.”
He spoke without thinking and expected an angry glower, but Adelaide was looking up at the misty windows. The rain still pounded on the exterior walls. Her cheeks were flushed.
“No, he’s alive.”
The question was too obvious not to be posed. Besides, Vikram was curious. He had made up his mind even before the break-in that Axel must be dead; seeing the penthouse had only confirmed his thoughts. One way or another, the boy had found his way to the sea.
“Why do you think he’s alive?”
“I don’t think. I know.”
She was staring at him now with an air of expectancy, almost as though she wanted evidence of his disbelief. Something to pounce on. Her fixed gaze was like that of the cat on the lead. She had a cat’s detached nonchalance, he thought, a curious immunity to violence. She put her associates unquestioningly in the position of the mouse.
“How can you know?” he said. Adelaide clicked her tongue.
“Intuition. He’s my twin, so I know. We have a connection. It isn’t like a connection that you have with other people. You just-know.”
Vikram thought of the photograph in her bedroom.
“What’s he like, your brother?”
Adelaide smiled. For the first time, it was a genuine smile.
“He was clever,” she said. “Really smart. Maths, oceanology-he was great at those things. And he was smart when it came to people too, especially the family. I used to get angry with them, but Axel always calmed us down. He’d know before I did when I was about to flip. He was always there. The two of us, it needed two of us, really, against the rest of the tribe.”
She ran a restless hand through her hair. The woollen hat was tossed aside on a cushion. She seemed embarrassed, almost cross about what she had said, and he suspected that she did not often talk about Axel. Strange that she should choose him-but it had been a strange night. “Anyway,” she said lightly. “He changed.”
“What happened?”
“He forgot things. Small things at first. He started mixing up names, and dates. Then it was bigger things.
