He had seen his friend a couple of days ago. Vikram was holding a meeting of representatives from the west who would be heading up work parties in the spring. He’d asked Nils to come, but Nils was being oddly cagey, and had only shown up afterwards. He had brought fish from Market Circle. They drank coral tea and ate the fish with their fingers in Vikram’s office.
“What’s your new place like?” Nils asked.
“You know. Big. Clean. It’s nice.”
“I bet.”
“When are you going to come and see it?”
Nils wiped his fingers on the already greasy paper.
“Whenever you have the time.”
“I always have the time.”
“I thought you were all taken up with the crazy girl these days.”
“She can be demanding,” Vikram acknowledged. Nils laughed.
“Fucking Citizens, huh. So what’s she really like? You still think she’s a bitch?”
A bone was stuck in Vikram’s teeth. He worked his tongue, trying to free it. He wanted to explain that there was a connection between himself and Adelaide, but could not find the words to justify it.
“She has her moments.”
He hesitated. Nils, taking a large bite of white fish and batter, raised an eyebrow.
“I think she has a secret. Something she’s not telling.”
“Are you kidding me? She’s a Rechnov, they probably have more skeletons than they have closets, and that’s saying something. What, you think she’s going to bare her soul to you?”
“No, of course not. It’s just-” He stopped. It was no good, he did not even know what he meant himself. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. I found something. A letter. It’s from Axel to Adelaide.”
Saying it aloud, he felt the heat of it, transferred from pocket to drawer to pocket and back, burning a hole in every garment it touched. Nils shrugged.
“So give it to Adelaide.”
“It’s a goodbye note. You know what that means.”
“Then you’d better burn it,” said Nils.
“I can’t burn it, it’s probably the last thing he ever wrote.”
“Exactly. You want to be caught with that on your hands?”
Vikram’s hand went to his jacket.
“Actually, I have it here-”
“Are you crazy?” Nils hissed. “You’re walking around with a dead guy’s-you know, I don’t even want to know what it says. Burn it. Here.” Nils delved into his jeans and produced a lighter. He flicked it on. “Get rid of it now.”
“I thought you could look after it. Until I decide what to do.”
Nils wiped up a few last crumbs of batter and scrunched up the paper. He tossed it into the bin.
“Think again. I’m not touching it. You give it to me, I’ll burn it for you. I want nothing to do with their pretentious society.”
“What I am going to do with it then? I can’t give it to Adelaide.”
“Why not? It’s her letter.”
“You don’t get it. If I give it to her, she’ll stop working with me. The only reason she’s helping me is because she needs to find out what happened to her brother.”
“And what if it’s a fake?” Nils demanded. “What if it’s a plant? Where did you even find the bloody thing?”
“This woman turned up at the door. Said if Axel went away, she’d been instructed to deliver this. Adelaide wasn’t there and I was.”
Nils shook his head. “Fucking hell. You’re meant to be the smart one.”
“I can’t tell Adelaide.”
“Why not? So she stops seeing you, so what? They’re not going to take away your flat.”
“I still need her. I can still use her.”
Nils gave him a shrewd look. “I think you’ve gone past that.”
“She’s not a bad person, Nils.”
“Fine, I believe you. Does that make her any less dangerous? You can’t trust these people, Vik. They’re eels, they’d turn on you in a second. Take you in, and spit you right back out. You should be trying to set yourself up, not holding out for some celebrity pin-up.”
Vikram was angry at that. After all, Nils had encouraged him to go to the Rose Night in the first place. He was the one who’d suggested meeting Adelaide.
“You’re determined not to give her a chance.”
“How can I when I’ve never even met her?” Nils protested.
“You don’t want to meet her.”
“Well, she don’t want to meet me. You see her coming down here? Dazzling us all with her presence? I don’t think so. This is a game for her. And you knew that, before.” Nils paused. The rest of the sentence, unsaid, hung in the air. “Look, Vik, I don’t mean any harm. Maybe you really like this woman for whatever reasons I don’t get. But if you’re asking me for advice-and it seems like you are-I say you’ve got two options. You give her the letter and take the consequences, or you destroy it right now and pretend you never saw it. Your call.”
Vikram fell silent. Nils didn’t understand that the choice was much more subtle, more complicated than that. Vikram couldn’t just destroy the final words of a dead man. It would be wrong. But neither could he show them to Adelaide. She was the only thing guiding him through this nest of eels. He couldn’t lose her. Not yet.
Nils clapped him on the arm.
“Look, I’ve got to go. Just-” He broke off. His voice when he spoke again was strained. “Just don’t forget what these people have done. Not just Eirik and Mikkeli. Osuwa, even the greenhouse, they’re not that long ago. For all we know, our families died in the reprisals. Maybe at the hands of people you’ve met,” he said pointedly.
Vikram winced. “Osuwa is complicated.”
“What happened afterwards isn’t. Giving Citizens guns? Murdering children? You know what they say. When the executions took place you could hear the shots right the way to the edge of the city, it was that quiet. Sound of a guilty conscience, I say.”
Nils gave him a hard, almost a challenging look. He was driving the conversation into territory Vikram wasn’t sure he wanted to cover. Not today.
He thought of what Shadiyah had said. They is an elusive term. But she had also told him something else: home was in the west.
“We could torture ourselves forever wondering about our families,” he said. “But what good will it do us? Or them. It doesn’t help them. They’re beyond our help.”
Nils shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Come over and see the new place,” said Vikram. “We can talk properly then.” He wrapped up the remains of his fish. Suddenly he wasn’t hungry.
“Sure.” Nils still sounded reluctant.
“You don’t want to?”
“No, it’s not that.” Nils screwed up his face in admission. “I’ve been sort of seeing that girl.”
“The one I met? Ilona?”
“Yeah. Her.”
It was Vikram’s turn to be worried. He had hoped that Ilona was a one-off occurrence.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Nils.
“Do you?”
“The answer’s yes. She works on the boats.”
Vikram remembered the dyed wing of hair. The averted gaze. “You mean she’s a prostitute.”
“She’s a nice girl.”
“It’s not that she isn’t nice and you know it. It’s that she could get in real trouble for seeing you. You know
