“What is it?”
“You’re a smart girl. Young, impulsive. You must be wise as well. Don’t be too quick to judge, when the time comes. Don’t be too quick to judge me.”
“Why would I judge you, Grandfather?”
He squeezed her hand with his trembling one.
“Adelaide.” Her name alone seemed to cost him a great effort. She was startled to see the change in his expression-as though he were abruptly battling great pain.
“Grandfather, do you need the morphine? Where is it?”
The words rushed out of him.
“Adie, the truth is this family has done some terrible things. Terrible things.”
“Do you mean the execution, is that it? You mean the west?” Her heart pounded. “Axel?”
Leonid shook his head, impatiently. Still clinging to Adelaide’s hand, he pulled her very close. He lowered his voice to a whisper.
“I have to tell you something, Adie. I have to tell you. There was a boat. Years and years ago. Long before you were born. But after-after the Silence. There was a boat.”
A tingling sensation spread from Adelaide’s scalp, to her neck, one by one down her vertebrae. When she spoke, she struggled to keep her voice steady.
“I don’t understand. There were no boats after the Silence. There was no contact.”
There couldn’t have been.
“That’s what they all think. But there was one. It came many miles-an inconceivable feat of seafaring! They had been at sea for over two hundred days. And they got almost as far as the ring-net. And then-everyone on board-every one of them-killed! Shot in the dark. The boat was sunk, out beyond the Atum Shelf. We couldn’t let them go. We couldn’t bring them in. It was a great secret, d’you see, a secret. No-one can ever know about that boat. No-one. No-one can find out.”
He’s starting to ramble, she realized. He’s old. He’s old, and his imagination is bringing dark things into the room. That’s what it is. It must be. And yet “Where was the boat from, Grandfather?”
There was an almost cunning look about the old man now.
“The Boreal States,” he whispered. “From Siberia. They came to look-”
A cough seized his throat.
“Grandfather.” Her own voice was trembling now. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Nothing more to tell.” He coughed. “Nothing but the white-”
His eyes bulged. Adelaide ran to get him a glass of water. She held it to his lips, but the coughs still hacked at his throat, and he could not swallow.
“I’ll get someone-”
“No.” He grabbed her wrist. “No-no.” The fit subsided. He drank a little water. The gulps resounded in the room. The cat’s purrs grew stronger. “Nothing but the white fly,” Leonid muttered.
“You’re talking in riddles, Grandfather. What is the white fly?”
He interrupted. “No, that’s not important. Not what I meant to say at all. What I meant to say is, whatever our family has done, they would not hurt Axel. No one would ever hurt your brother. Believe that, if you believe nothing else.” His face was open again; relaxed and smiling. She could not quite believe that the last couple of minutes had been real.
Leonid tapped her hand. “Goran is upstairs. I know his tread. Go now, Adie, if you don’t want them to find you.”
“But the boat-”
“What boat? What are you talking about?” He looked confused. “Remember, my girl, my darling girl. No decision is lightly undertaken. Reversal is-impossible.”
“I’ll remember.” She was worried and frightened, and wanted to say more, but there seemed no conceivable response. She doubted her own sanity. She needed to get out. “I promise. Goodbye, Grandfather.”
She checked there was nobody in the corridor outside before shutting the door behind her. She was no closer to finding out what had happened to Axel; if he had left or if he had been taken. And now, it appeared, there were other secrets that her grandfather wanted her to know-secrets, if he was to be believed, too terrible to speak. Secrets that had walked the deepest trenches of his mind for years, the way cantering horses had followed Axel across the waves.
There was no sign of Goran.
Barefoot, Adelaide ran down the staircase. The Domain was quiet, as though it awaited a long overdue arrival. Or a departure, she thought.
“Axel?” she whispered. Her voice echoed back at her: Axel Axel Axel Axel. She called again, louder.
“Axel!”
Nothing. She stepped out of the front door and was faintly surprised, as always, to find the lift before her. The cables clunked. The glass car began to rise. Adelaide slipped on her shoes, leaving the straps undone. She had a terrifying sense of things diminishing. A pan of events from before her time receding into the distance, like stills from an archive reel being blotted out: pixel by pixel, image by image. At the very end, last to disappear, was a tiny Siberian boat.
30 VIKRAM
Winter had Osiris under siege. Daylight was fleeting. The entire city glittered, like an ice ship dredged up from a century’s slumber in the deeps. At the shelter, people arrived with ice in their hair and beards. The doctors treated cases of frostbite. Sometimes they had to cut off fingers, toes, parts of limbs. The nights were loud and long with the sounds of hacking coughs. Vikram and Shadiyah did the bed rounds with extra blankets, tucking them tightly around the thin shivering bodies, feeding bowls of soup where hands were too shaky to hold a spoon. Not everyone who came in made it through to the morning.
Late one night he arrived at the Red Rooms. Adelaide opened the door and exclaimed.
“What happened to you?”
He looked down and saw that the blood had seeped through his jacket and there was dried blood all over his right hand.
“I’m okay. Marete patched me up.”
She took his bloodied hand and led him inside, easing the jacket carefully from his shoulders and placing it on the back of the futon. A month ago she wouldn’t have let it touch the floor. She lifted his bandaged arm.
“Do you remember the guy I told you about last week?” he said. “The one using the shelter, that we weren’t sure was genuine?”
“I remember. He did this?”
“He was an ex-Juraj gang member. Shadiyah caught him trying to recruit some kids. When we challenged him, he pulled a knife.”
“Stars, Vik. Does it hurt? Have they given you painkillers?”
“Marete gave me a local anaesthetic.”
He didn’t tell her of the terror that had blocked his throat when he saw the knife, not for himself but for the people he worked with, the people sleeping in their beds that he was meant to be protecting. It was terror that had delayed his responses for a full two seconds. That was the reason he had been injured; he’d been too slow.
“I don’t like to think of you in this kind of danger,” said Adelaide.
“Our security man caught him. The police have taken him away now.”
“You’re shivering.”
“I’m cold.”
But he could feel himself sweating; his head felt like it was on fire.
“Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
After she had washed the dried blood from his hands, she coaxed him into the bath and they sat opposite one another, her ankles resting on his thighs. Adelaide turned on the jacuzzi and foam billowed on the surface of the
