“They’d be dead,” she said. “Or old. Ancient, by now.” She fell quiet.
“It’s a story, Adelaide.”
“I know,” she said quickly.
“People talk about it mostly when they’re thinking about getting out. You could say it’s like an alarm bell.”
“Maybe Axel heard it.”
“I don’t know. It’s a western thing.”
“He might have thought he could take that flight.”
He did not reply to that because her words rang uncannily close to Mikkeli’s. His best friend, leaning forward over the oars of a rowboat as they scuttled from tower to tower, lit only by the moon. Just imagine, Vikram, that it was true. Would you take that flight? Keli would have. She’d have jumped on board without a glance back, just to get that close to the clouds. And then they’d hop out the boat and bust a lock.
“I said your tea’s gone cold,” said Adelaide.
She was staring at him. He wasn’t sure why he had told her the story. It felt like a betrayal. As if he had given away a piece of the west, its fragile, ethereal psyche. He wanted to take the story back, to tell Adelaide that she wasn’t worthy of their superstitions. Her side of the city had safety; they did not need hope.
Vikram looked at the windows. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The rain’s stopped anyway.”
19 ADELAIDE
Adelaide reached across and groped on the bedside table. Her fingers closed around the plastic body of the stolen horse. It was no more than a few centimetres long, a child’s toy, crudely made. She moved it up and down, emulating the motion of waves, the way she imagined a real one might run. Shadows of her hands and the horse rippled over the walls and ceiling. It was dark outside; the light within the colour of a bruise.
She turned the model over to look into one of its black eyes. Dr Radir, last in a long line of Axel’s psychiatrists, had been the first person to mention horses. According to Radir’s assessment, the hallucinations had begun months, even years before. He said Axel had theories about the horses; elaborate hypotheses about storm omens and contact from outside Osiris.
Rat-a-ta-tat. Rat-a-ta-tat. The music of drums: Axel’s fingers. Sounds like hooves, A. Adelaide sat up. She saw him in the room, standing by the dark pane of the mirror, a shadow in a pool of shadows. He didn’t move. He never moved. He was looking for the balloon.
Where are you, A?
The balloon was gliding through cumulus clouds. Adelaide was back on the balcony, high above the sea, staring over the edge. The sea below fell into a giant crater. At the bottom, so far away she was no more than a speck, Mikkeli was a chromium mermaid. Her tail swished and clicked in the mud. Adelaide looked for Tyr, but he wasn’t there, only Vikram was. She reached for Vikram’s hand. His eyes were murky whirlpools. She wanted to tell him that Mikkeli was there, down in the crater, but her tongue would not work. She had never felt so cold before, and she wasn’t sure she could stand it.
Her eyes flew open. She must have been dreaming. Her skin was tight with goosebumps; the horse was imprisoned in her linked hands.
“Where have you gone?” she whispered. “Damn it, Axel, where have you gone?”
On the other side of her apartment, Vikram was sleeping on the futon under the mezzanine. She imagined his breathing as a tiny hum that ran through the woven rugs, under the doors and along a crack in the floorboards to her ear. What would Feodor say if he knew she had a westerner under her roof? Reduced to terriers, Adelaide? That’s scraping the seabed, even for you.
She hadn’t locked the door. She didn’t like locked doors, and she wasn’t worried by Vikram’s presence. Vikram assumed she thought all westerners were scum, but he didn’t know her. If he did, he would know she never thought about the west at all.
Best, though, to let Vikram think he had won this round. Sometimes impulse led down strange avenues; she had learned to accommodate herself to life’s twists and forks. She heard movement. Perhaps Vikram was still awake, or the scientists were at work upstairs. Then she realized that it was not an interior noise but the rush of rain against the window.
She curled deeper under the duvet, listening. Some people, like Linus, said the rain was changing. They said it sounded more consistent than it used to. When people were desperate they found omens in the blue, pulling boats from the horizon and now balloons out of the sky. Vikram understood this; he had told her the story of the balloon.
Adelaide had lost count of nights passed with only the rain for solace. She knew every version of rain: ice- bound rains and fresh bold showers, rattling hailstorms, delicate snowfalls. It gave her a feeling not of fear but of safety and enclosure. Axel had never understood this snugness, and perhaps in truth she only felt it now, since he was gone, and the rain had become her companion.
She thought of the Roof, frying saufish, drinking Kelpiqua, meeting Jan. She and Axel, drenched and shaking on a towertop after a storm. When they were still living at the Domain, the twins used to go there every night, until Goran caught them. They’d been happy there.
The rain was passing. Linus and the anti-Nucleites were wrong; it came and went according to its own whimsy.
The little horse lay in her upturned palm. She imagined Axel locked inside in his balloon room, sewing bolts and bolts of material. He would have spent hours studying the paths of the winds, devising instruments for navigation; some part of him must remember his love of science. Axel had been preparing for a journey, but to where?
E. J. Swift
Osiris
20 ¦ VIKRAM
H e lay on Adelaide’s futon, a rug pulled over his body-not because he needed it for warmth in her apartment, but to feel the soft luxurious weight of the material. The lights were dimmed, the glass walls darkened, but he could not sleep. He was hot, conscious of a thin sheen of sweat. There was a decanter of water on a table beside him. He poured himself a glass and choked when he discovered it wasn’t water at all, but voqua.
He thought of the coldest he had ever been, trapped in the unremembered quarters on the very edge of the west, certain he was going to die. The towers had fallen into such disrepair that they were more of a sea barrier than a living space. No electricity. Broken bufferglass. Ghosts. One of the towers leaned sideways; monolithic, charred. It had burned once and people had burned in it. It was said that something nameless lurked in its depths, gorging on the foundations.
Stars knew what he’d been doing there; he must have been about twelve. He remembered a tarpaulin. Huddling under it, shaking, his fingers blank with cold. He remembered the rivulets of water that eased their way through the cracks, only to halt as the molecules contracted and froze. The floor inside a maze of glittering snail trails, outside, the sky sagging. It had been too cold to snow.
Snow, in Adelaide’s world, was nothing but a pretty white blanket.
Vikram knew the layout of the apartment. There were only three rooms between himself and the Architect’s granddaughter.
He made himself recall the day Eirik was drowned. He remembered seeing Adelaide and her father, closer than a westerner could have imagined but impossible to reach. Adelaide was unprotected now. He could take her hostage. He could, if he wanted, go into her room, put his hands around her neck, and throttle her. He could strike a fatal blow to Feodor Rechnov right now, here, tonight.
Stop it.
