She shook her head. She looked bewildered. He reminded himself that she had spent most of her life acting.
“Why would I set you up? I’d only be screwing myself as well.”
“As opposed to screwing me?”
“Grow up.”
He knew he deserved that, but he could not shake the belief that she had screwed him over, one way or another. Someone was to blame and it had better be her. His other hand flashed to her throat. He could see the vein pulsing there. Adelaide Mystik had given him nothing and taken what he had.
“Listen to me,” she said, her voice restricted. “I know what I told you when we made that deal. I warned you. I told you not to trust me.”
“And you were right,” he snarled.
“I’m telling you the opposite now.”
He placed his hand under her jaw and lifted it, appraising her in a cold, deliberate manner. There were dark shadows under her eyes; nightmares or nights without sleep. He imagined her tossing and turning in the empty width of that bed. The lilac silk sheets wrapping around her limbs. Her body sticky with sweat in the tropical heating.
“Not looking so hot, Adelaide,” he said softly.
He felt the tension in her jaw, sensed she was gathering her resources for a crushing rejoinder. Her shoulders lifted a little.
“Well,” she said. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”
He almost laughed. He had to hold his face under tight rein. He knew he had been successful because disappointment flickered in her eyes and they dropped. He had never known Adelaide to drop her eyes.
“I don’t have much time,” she said. She slumped against the wall.
“Got somewhere better to be? Don’t let me keep you.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
The plea made him incandescent. He had to move away before he hit her.
“Oh, I understand you perfectly! You think I have a rat’s ass chance of getting out of here in the next twelve months? You’re fucking crazy. You asked me once what it’s like down here. Well, look at it! Take a fucking good look, Adelaide! Getting claustrophobic yet?” He gave the metal bunk a vicious kick. Adelaide was frozen against the wall. He stepped towards her. “Not yet, perhaps. It takes all of a good hour to sink in. But after that, you’ll stop feeling normal. That porthole drives you mad. You start thinking of ways you could get out, except there aren’t any. Thinking you could somehow swim out, except you’d drown. And then you start to think you are drowning. You’ve played at that, haven’t you Adelaide? You’ve played at drowning. Did you think it was fun? Think it was a game?”
The door opened. Out of defiance, Vikram did not move, waiting for them to order him away from her, wanting until the last second that pale face at the mercy of his accusing stare. But it wasn’t who he thought. The big, muscular man in the doorway was not a guard; he wore a dark blue suit and his head was shaved to nothing. Vikram had never seen him before.
“I told you I didn’t have much time.” Adelaide turned to the newcomer, her face beseeching. “Just give me five more minutes-”
For answer the man took a rough hold of her wrist and yanked her towards him. She stumbled.
“Your brother said time’s up, Miss Rechnov.”
“It’s Mystik. ”
“Rechnov since I’ve known you. She’s under house arrest,” he said casually to Vikram. “Daddy’s orders, isn’t it AD?”
Vikram stared at the man. Adelaide’s elbow hit hard and fast. Her antagonist doubled over. Then he straightened, cleared his face of all expression, and hauled Adelaide out of the cell. The door slammed before Vikram could anticipate it. He heard a crack like someone being hit. If it was her she did not cry out.
Good girl, he thought automatically. The noise reverberated in his ears. Was it just prison playing tricks? He wanted to pull her back, examine her face anew for signs of proof. Don’t you understand, he wanted to say. Don’t you understand, I have my pride too. But she was gone. He felt stunned, incapable of rational thought. His anger was wasted. He had been waiting for her to show up, he realized, so he could say everything he wanted to say, but he had expected to get answers. Someone-he did not know who-had denied him that.
Adelaide was gone. She was really gone. The eerie light settled upon him like a shawl and in his solitary green cell he shivered.
He watched the drop of water forming on the ceiling. Steadily, it grew. It bulged from the damp concrete, swelling, tugging at its life cord until finally it parted and fell- plink — into the puddle in the corner of the cell.
The puddle, when he arrived, had measured about four centimetres across. Over the last-how many? — days, it had stretched to seven. The puddle terrified him. From its meagre beginnings he saw the ocean grow and grow and surge through the porthole to flood the cell. He saw himself drown. He saw the water rising and himself swimming up with it as he cried out for help but none came. He swam from one side of the cell to another, pushing against the walls. Inch by inch his airspace receded. His mouth pressed against the ceiling which had turned to glass, he sucked in his last gasp of oxygen and then he was in a tank full of ocean and there was no more breathing.
It happened when he had been staring at the porthole. The glass broke and the water rushed in. The visions were short and abrupt. The longer versions waited until he slept. When the cell was full of water, his lungs burning and his consciousness prepared to switch off, he woke, hyperventilating. He lived his dying again and again.
Sometimes, when the water crashed in, he saw Adelaide’s body inside it, turning over and over like a fish.
Time fluxed. The outside world, with its catalogues of sunrise, sunset, hail and snow, was estranged from him. The lighting was the same dim green twenty-four hours a day. When he was let out to eat the light in the hallway flickered, but in his cell it never changed.
He knew, from his last stint underwater, that his skin was draining of colour and his arteries were growing sluggish. He did sets of exercises twice a day, with the damp floor against his palms and his back. He ran on the spot but the buildup of trapped momentum made him want to slam himself against the wall. Sometimes he did so, screaming with the impact. His shoulders and hips swelled in purple bruises. From the condensation and the cold he developed a shiver and a hacking cough. He watched carefully for specks of blood: the first signs of tuberculosis.
Every twelve hours he scratched half a cross into the wall. He hung his watch on the stub of a nail. If they were worried about suicide they would have filed the nail down; it was, he speculated, just substantial enough to kill yourself. He pondered how it might be done, the best angle, the most likely site. The base of the skull, probably. They had left it for the same reason the cell was concrete and he had been allowed to keep his watch, which he could choke on. A person who committed suicide was not worth preserving until the end of their prison sentence.
A man five cells around from Vikram managed to hang himself. When he heard the news Vikram tried to imagine how the man might have done it. What had he hung from? What had he used? A shoelace? A belt? He took off his own belt and examined it, felt the metal studs and the taut length of it.
As he lay in the green, faces edged into his mind, old friends, members of Horizon, Nils, Shadiyah, Jannike, Linus, the brother and sister in the shelter, Hella. He had lost not one but two lives. Bad enough to be an airlift, but what happened when you had to cross back? He saw himself leaving prison, staggering into daylight like a manta addict. He could not go to any of those people. He would be as rootless as he had been in the orphanage before Mikkeli found him, a buoy cut loose from its moorings and cast out on the open sea.
It’s not a lovers’ city, said Adelaide, and she was right, in the end. Osiris mocked such fragility. I don’t love Adelaide, he wanted to say. Don’t punish me for what I have not done. He heard repeated the cell door shut and the crack that followed it and imagined the action that must have made it. Her theories of Axel’s murder took up residence in the cell with him. He spoke to Rechnov murderers. Asked them how they had done it. He whispered lines of the letter to himself. The white horse will talk first.
He started from fits of dozing to find himself battering the concrete with his fists. The cell was growing
