smaller. This has happened before, you know how prison messes with your head. But this time it was happening faster. As the cell grew closer and the puddle grew larger, he recognized the seeds: fear that he would never get out, and worse, fear that he would not want to. He knew how it ended. Osiris became too terrible to envisage. The city’s hand clenched cold around your heart and you preferred to stay submerged, away from sunlight and eyes that might stare.
Finally, like the man five cells around, you no longer cared for your own convictions and you found a way to hang yourself.
Her undine spirit haunted him. He replayed her, opening the door in black lace, telling tales of the rainbow- fish with her viridescent eyes wide, the slope of her back rising and falling, slumped in sleep against the lilac sheets. He watched the waterbike leap over the waves and her hair stream in a banner behind her. He felt the warm unconscious weight of her pushing on his chest. The smell of lemons and limes permeated the cell, for a day or so. Then he had to hunt for it on the air. Then it was just an idea.
Sometimes he heard his breathing and thought that it was hers. He saw her floating, face down in the water and she was both herself and Mikkeli, water and ice, the two fused in some halfway state between liquid and frozen. A bird rested on each of their backs. Its beak plunged. Their lungs had forgotten how to breathe.
The puddle grew. He had heard you could drown in an inch of water.
The woman in the cell next door wailed. At least, he thought it was her, but it might be Mikkeli howling with a chorus of ghosts out by the ring-net, or it could be Adelaide. If Adelaide existed.
Perhaps he had never left jail. He had been here all the time; everything had been a protracted dream, the produce of his brain, a diversion, a defence mechanism. He marvelled at the power of his own invention. He had conjured Adelaide out of adverts and headlines from years before the riots. Here she was walking along a red carpet. Clear voqua poured onto a mountain of ice which imprisoned her in a great column and melted from the inside out. He watched her drown. She turned blue.
His lungs were thick; he lay on the bed, too weak to move. Black lace curled around the door frame and produced twine that grew into her mouth and pierced the back of her head. Her hair writhed and bound her to the waterbike. She was pulled beneath the surface with it. On the seabed he watched fish turn her to mud. She stretched out a dissolving finger and he knew that when she touched him he would turn to mud too.
Her touch was liquid. The mud took his hands first, and last his eyes.
His ground-dreams wrapped around his nightmares. He began to think of land. A boat would come, a lost boat, a found boat. It would take him away from Osiris. Away from staring eyes. Better to die on the open ocean, with clean air on his skin and the sun on his face.
Adelaide whispered to him.
And when I come back we can find the sand. You’ll like that.
I will, he said. I will.
No more mazes, no more clouds.
Another drip landed in the puddle. Everything returned to the sea.
PART FOUR
37 ADELAIDE
It took until two o’clock for Goran’s breathing to regulate and his pulse to slow. Adelaide stood under the mezzanine, watching his slack face. The eyelids slumped on their dual-coloured irises, heavy and creased, thin- lashed. The nostrils quivered. It had taken her a full week to remember the drugs she kept stashed in a hidden compartment of her bathroom; another week to summon the courage to use them. Goran woke at the tiniest disturbance. She was surprised he didn’t sleep with his eyes open, like a snake.
She crept forward and placed the soaked cloth delicately over his nose and mouth. He inhaled normally, then with a sudden, violent breath. She shrank back. His lungs sucked in the opiate fumes. She waited. This was where Vikram had first slept. Vikram, who thought she had betrayed him. She made herself entertain the thought, holding it hostage for her heart, testing. She willed herself to care.
Nothing. She had spent the two weeks well. She had been in limbo, floating, in all the gaps between time. She had been lighter than vapour and thinner than air, but she was frozen now.
She was ready.
After a minute she took Goran’s wrist. It was thick, muscle bound, and she had to push her finger deep to feel the pulse. As she expected, it had slowed.
For a further ten minutes she waited, allowing herself to hate him but coldly. Then she unbuttoned his jacket and felt inside the pocket and retrieved her keys and his scarab. She went to her room, put on her outdoor gear and picked up her waterproof haversack. Her boots were rubber soled and noiseless as she walked through the apartment, checking once more under the mezzanine. This time she trussed him, tying his hands together and then his feet, her heart jumping every time he shifted. The apartment was filled with the sounds of his laboured breathing and the oscillating machinery from the floors above. Goran would be in trouble for her escape. She was neither happy nor sorry. She was steel.
She slipped the key into the lock. A bubble of pleasure rose as she heard it turn-but she pushed it down, no time for that. She locked the door from the other side.
“Goodbye, Goran. I hope they give you hell.”
The corridor seemed overlarge after her incarceration. She glanced at the ceiling. As she lay night after night, thinking, plotting, she had wondered who knew about the facility, about the Siberian boat. Did Linus know? Had he lied to her all along? She had considered trying to break into the facility. But it would do no good; the scientists would hand her back to the Rechnovs the moment she was caught. The white fly had to wait.
She ran silently down the stairs, nervous of being trapped in the lift. Her lungs and calf muscles, inactive for too long, protested fiercely at the exertion. Once an apartment door opened and she froze in fear, but it was only a man staggering home drunk.
Surface level. This was the wager: her boat would still be here. There was no reason for them to move it, not with Goran guarding the door. She stepped out into open air. It smelled clearer and crisper than ever before. She walked around the decking, her heart thudding with anticipation.
And yes. There it was. Release gurgled in her chest. This time she let it, but kept her head focused as she stepped into the craft, reached under the seat where the spare key was taped, felt it drop into her palm. The electronic hum of the motor was one of the sweetest sounds she had ever known.
The dashboard flashed up with symbols. The battery was fully charged; she had at least twenty-four hours of driving before she’d need to stop at a charge point. Would charge points be easy to find where she was going? Someone would tell her.
As the boat pulled away from the decking, she allowed herself one glance up. She could make out a glimmer at the top of the scraper which might be from her apartment, or from the facility above. Steering with one hand, she tapped the familiar code into Goran’s scarab. Somewhere in Osiris, Lao’s o’comm rang and rang, but he didn’t answer. He was no use to her anymore. She disconnected from the Reef and hurled Goran’s scarab into the sea.
The water was choppy, crusted with foam. The towers slipped by with maddening slowness. Every impulse told her to increase speed-but it was a quiet night, and she could not attract attention. She avoided the main waterways lit with floating night lamps, and took a winding route through the outskirts. She aimed to reach the border at one of the sub-checkpoints. A transport barge passed her, carrying the stench of a fresh fish haul into the City. A late night waterbus followed it. The windows spilled orange rectangles onto the sea. Adelaide averted her face.
The wind picked up and she took the boat up a speed. Scores of towers lay between her and Goran; she was well away. She tipped back her head and relished the feel of the cold on her face, brittle and clean. Axel, if the delivery girl was to be believed, had spent entire days out on the balcony. Maybe her brother had not been so mad after all. Maybe he had realized what she had come to see: the City was a prison, which must be escaped.
He had to be there. She had scoured the City; there was nowhere left but the west. She could imagine it
