A gun clicked at his head and he willed the skad to shoot before rage and grief ignited and he moved so fast he caught the man behind him by surprise. Punched him hard across the temples. They fought briefly. More figures spilled from the tower. Hands seized Vikram, wrenched his arms behind his back, shoved him forward until his chin struck the decking. Handcuffs nicked his skin. He heard the words western and scum and he felt their kicks, each a fresh pool of acute pain but he was beyond it, so far beyond.
Silver bars of frost were already forming on Mikkeli’s lashes.
“I got her out of the water,” he said. “But she was already dead.”
Adelaide’s face was intent. Her eyes glistened with tears or reflected light. She leaned forward to put her hand on his knee. “There was nothing you could do.”
“Maybe.”
“Sometimes you lose people and there’s nothing you can do.”
“It was a stupid plan. We should never have agreed to it.”
Adelaide was shaking her head.
“Ifs,” she said. “Ifs are no hope. They are the things Osiris has decided cannot be, and yet we dwell on them as if they were ever possibilities.”
“You talk about this city as if it’s the world.”
“It is the world.”
“Your brother didn’t believe that.” He spoke without thinking and Adelaide looked at him sharply. “Why else would he want a balloon?” he said quickly. “He wants to leave. He must do.”
She said nothing. He felt the weight of Axel’s letter. Tell her. Now’s the time. He needed to ease his mind of at least one burden. On the brink of speech, he paused. But when he spoke, the words altered.
“I promised Mikkeli, you know. That other people wouldn’t have to die…” He broke off. “I think she might have preferred vengeance.”
The look they exchanged, a ghost of a smile, was neither happy nor sad. Vikram reached out and pulled her to him. He slipped his hands under the silk of her shirt, over the contours of her ribcage. Her head fell back and her eyes closed. He unhooked the clasp of her bra. It was a body that had never known hunger, had barely known cold. Sometimes he despised her for its ignorance. He kissed the hollow of her throat, her navel, the boundary of lace at her hips. Whilst their limbs tangled and her body shuddered he wondered if his hate might show. In eyes or touch, or distance. In the air between their lips. Only when she was still did he embrace her. He was wide awake and he suspected that she was too, though her eyes remained closed. Neither of them moved.
The anime had finished. An archive reel played out on the o’vis in black and white.
Later, when Adelaide had fallen sleep, he carried her to the bed and pulled the covers over her hips. She mumbled something and rolled over. She hated to be held. If he fell asleep holding her he would wake to find she had shrugged him away, as though she feared the slightest and most human of constraints would cage her indelibly. He admired her resolution; he scorned her for not knowing the value of physical warmth.
Adelaide’s hair was screwed up under her cheek and against the bed. Looking at her, Vikram realized what had been bothering him about Ilona. It was her hair. Bleached, sheerly straight, it had been deliberately cut and coloured. The only place where girls wore their hair like that was on the shanty town boats. Which meant that Ilona belonged to somebody and Nils was playing a dangerous game.
Vikram rolled onto his side and gazed at Adelaide’s squashed, sleeping face. Now he felt a rush of tenderness. She lay on her front, limbs akimbo, stomach caving into the muddled sheets. He pressed his ear to the hollow between her shoulder blades and listened to the stubborn pulse of her heart. Adelaide was like the rainbow- fish whose tails she said glowed in the dark. The bright things were always hunted in the end.
“Morning, Vikram.” His assistant popped her head around the office partition. She was bulked up in coat, earmuffs and hat. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep.
Vikram glanced up from the Neptune and caught sight of the clock. Nine already. He had been in over an hour. “Morning Hella.”
“Did you see the race?”
“I missed it, actually.”
“Oh.” Her expression faltered. “It was interesting,” she settled. “You want a tea?”
“You’re a mind-reader.”
“Aren’t I?” she said. Still a bit shy.
He heard her putting the pot on in their cupboard of a kitchen, and the clink of a spoon as she prepared the glasses with ginger. Hella was another airlift. They were both nervous to begin with. The first week there was a major misunderstanding over transport arrangements for the boat kitchens. Seven crates of squid were lost to raiders. After blaming one another and shouting it out, they seemed to be settling into a rhythm.
Vikram stretched his arms over his head and felt his bones click. The figures on the Neptune gazed blandly out. He had never dreamed the Council would want so much administration. It seemed pointless in light of what he could be doing; scouting a location for the next shelter or recruiting staff, even handing out kelp rations on one of the boat kitchens. Adelaide said that this was their way of keeping him in check. She was probably right.
Hella entered with two steaming glasses. She gave one to him and cupped the other.
“So how was your evening?” she asked.
Last night’s events seemed unreal. Even Adelaide, whom he had left sprawled on his bed, sex and raqua lingering on her breath.
“It was a long night, actually. I dropped by the shelter. Mr Argele was there.”
“Oh, Mr Argele. What did he have to say for himself?”
“He called Shadiyah ‘young woman.’”
Hella giggled. “Bet she loved that.”
“I think she did, actually. How were the gliders?”
After they’d dissected the race from start to finish, Hella with hindsight, Vikram with imagination, his assistant went back to the other side of the partition. She took off her earmuffs, put in the earpiece, and put the earmuffs back on. The o’comm did not buzz that often. Most of their calls were outgoing.
He had an inkling that Hella had applied for the position because she could not quite reconcile her good fortune in escaping the mire. It was guts and hard work that had got her out, but that was not enough to shift the guilt. He knew because he felt it too. Every morning, they crossed the border to this cramped fifty-ninth floor office just inside the western quarter. Every evening, they could return to safe ground. Hella led a quiet life. She told Vikram she never saw her old friends.
Shadiyah called him mid-morning.
“Your birds have flown.”
“At least they came.”
“I hope they don’t get punished for it. Someone’s going to see the stitches and ask questions. If they take those antibiotics away, he’ll die within weeks. That’s if frostbite doesn’t do for him. Or pneumonia. Or hypothermia. Or the flu.”
Vikram leaned back in his chair.
“Shadiyah,” he began. “Why-”
“Don’t,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t ask. I know what you’re thinking. I’ll end up alone, frozen to death, or drowning in some flooded cell. But there’s community here, on our side, if you make it that way.”
The morning edged onward. One by one, lights in the opposite tower winked off. Vikram thought of Nils, who would probably be curled up with the girl, sleeping off his hangover. He thought about the choices he had made in Mikkeli’s name, in Eirik’s name, and wondered who they were really for, what they really meant. But they were past choices. This was his life now.
29 ADELAIDE
