“Out everyone, out, out, you too Adie, OUT!”
This wasn’t meant to happen.
They went to the Strobe. The first liquid cascaded into her mouth like oxygen as the music bombed her skull. She kept it on her tongue. She wanted to burn. Then she swallowed and swallowed until the glass was empty. She lifted her glass and the server leaned over to refill it. She repeated the ritual twice. When she swam away from the bar, the world was the way it usually was-bright and shifting. A boy dressed as a puff-fish snorkelled past. The sight of the ruptured scales made her feel nauseous. She found Jannike on a pink plastic float. Jannike slid off the float and they water-danced. Two reeds. Her limbs weird in the water. The music was phenomenal. Someone gave them fin-shaped pills which they put on each other’s wrists and licked off. Her vision fizzled. The music grew louder. Quieter when she slipped underwater.
“Fu-u-ck.” Jannike’s voice filtered down, strangely elongated. “Magda Linn’s here.”
Adelaide opened her eyes underwater. Her hair swirled around her head. A girl’s legs scissored slowly in the neon blitzed water. Red lights. Green lights. White flashing lights that were not part of the club’s rigging but somehow lost in it.
“How-she-get-?” Jannike burbled. Adelaide surfaced.
Where there had been people there was space. The large pool bare and strip-lit, littered with the debris of the night-plastic glasses, stolen bikinis, deflated floats. Overhead, the multicoloured spotlights had swivelled to a halt, but the tower still rotated and lights from outside swept in bars over the pool. Jannike’s elbow hooked into Adelaide’s. The tug of Jan’s arm. Bouncers herded out the stragglers. Voices echoed in the open space.
“Where to, Jan?”
“The late lounge, Adie.”
An ankle twisted. Not sure if it was hers or Jan’s but they almost fell. She felt the pain for both of them. Flashing lights, right in their faces. Look this way, girls! Lovely!
The waterbeds engulfed them like a dream. A woman brought two pipes. The smoke made haloes of their heads. Jannike’s lips struggled through the crusts of their lipstick.
“What’s the matter, Adie? I know something’s the matter.”
Adelaide knew Jannike would forget this night. She would forget it too. Part of her already had.
“My family are murderers,” she said. “A boat came and they killed everyone on it.”
“Yeah?”
“And I biked into a ship. I don’t know what I was doing-I had this idea that Axel might be hiding there, and if he saw-he’d have to come find me-but he didn’t so he couldn’t be there, he’s got to be in the west, it’s the only place left-”
“I’m old, Adie. I’m twenty-two. I’m ancient.”
“That’s half a life, in the west.”
“Stars, Adie.” Jannike drew deeply on the pipe and halfway through exhaling, yawned deeply. “I tell you I’m old, ancient old, and you come out with… you know what’s weird, I can’t work out… how Magda Linn managed to get in…”
Her eyes turned upwards in her head. Adelaide did not understand at first that her friend was unconscious. Then Jannike’s pipe clattered to the floor and she knew she should pick it up, but she could only stare at it, the pipe lying useless on the crisscross matting, until the proprietress came to retrieve it and gave Jannike a glance, and then lay the pipe, extinguished, on a round wooden dish beside her. Adelaide inhaled and somewhere in that one breath time unfolded and dissolved.
Hours later she walked home. She climbed over the barrier and walked along the double snail trails of the Pharaoh shuttle line, from the south quarter to the east quarter, where she walked twenty flights upstairs to jump the barrier to the Sphinx line. Her sandals made blisters on her feet. She took the shoes off and walked barefoot. The silver tracks were cool. Her fingers stretched out to touch the convex, translucent wall.
Once a night shuttle streaked past, blind and pilotless, and she pressed her spine to the bufferglass and cringed her stomach inward in the slipstream blast.
She passed a siding where a group of shuttle pods were lodged. Lights were on in the repair stations behind and she heard the sounds of machinery. A man in overalls carrying a tool kit came around a shuttle. He stared at her. Grease darkened patches of his face. She gazed back at him, clutching her shoes tightly. Neither of them spoke. He passed an arm over his face and then he got to the ground and slid under the shuttle and his hand shot out and grabbed a tool and disappeared again.
Dawn began to crack the night’s rigid cocoon. The city was rousing. Maintenance men and cleaners collected behind the barriers of the stations, smoking a last cigarette before the day’s work began.
“Hey! Hey, miss! What you doing down there?”
She looked around, then up. A man stood on a platform. She squinted.
“You’re on the shuttle line,” he said.
Adelaide did not reply. He reached out a hand. She let him help her up onto the platform where he peered closer at her face but she turned her head away.
“What scraper is this?”
“S-one-nineteen,” came the reply, and Adelaide knew she was close, now, to her destination.
She padded out of the platform to where a vendor was setting up his stand, laying out energy bars and fruit. The newsreel ran across a screen attached to the stand. His eyes followed her as she climbed the stairs to the footpath that ran over the line. Stumbling now, her feet guided her along the last few stops.
The key was the wrong shape for the lock and it took her several tries to force it in. A shadow passed as the lift went up, past her floor to the meteorological facility. The door gave way at last. She fell forward into the hall of mirrors. Home.
Dream fragments chased one another through her head; Jannike, aged thirteen, arguing with Feodor. Lightning struck both of them and burned their faces but neither died, they kept arguing, and she realized it wasn’t Feodor but the man from the border with no face, the water parting to receive his body, and white horses were running on the sea, leaping one over the back of the other. Their hooves made a horrendous noise, drumming the ocean with a tattoo that called the world to arms.
Adelaide woke suddenly. She was in bed, face down. She had forgotten to darken the window-wall and the room was full of lancing sunbeams. She screwed up her eyes. The noise of galloping hooves resolved into a persistent banging. There was someone at the door. Someone insistent.
Turning her head, she saw how the night had ended. The decanter, empty, an arm’s length away. The glass knocked onto its side. A bottle of pills she hoped she hadn’t taken and the grey dune of the ashtray. The smell of stale ash was a physical assault.
Adelaide groaned. She sat up just before she thought of Tyr and then she reeled forward, head to knees, and thought she might be sick there and then. Her mouth tasted of sour milk. She caught a glance of herself in the mirror; make-up blackening her eyes, her hair latticed. She pulled on her kimono, scrubbed her teeth and splashed water into her face before going to the door. Every bang drove another nail into her skull.
Tyr? Vikram? Her heart squeezed.
She slid the bolt across and opened the door a crack. Disappointment barbed her.
“Linus?”
He barged through the gap. In one white knuckled hand he clutched his briefcase.
“Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.”
“I’ve been sleeping.” She followed him back into the apartment, massaging her temples.
“Your beeper’s off-”
“I never use that thing.”
“I’ve been calling since eight o’clock, you don’t answer, I only just managed to get out of the office. Father’s been fielding questions all afternoon. Even Mother came up here and knocked, nobody could get hold of you-”
His voice was bringing on her headache in full force, and with it, everything that sleep had let her forget. She tried to concentrate. She had to get rid of him.
“I was out, Linus. Then I was sleeping. My scarab’s probably run dry. What’s going on?”
Linus glared at her. A wisp of morning shadow on his upper lip and jaw. Linus was always clean shaven.
He propped his briefcase on the table and yanked it open. The contents spilled onto the floor. Linus grabbed a
