was a good hundred metres away. The crowd pressed at her back. She almost lost her balance.
“Hey, watch your step!” The yell from behind was impatient. If she didn’t move she’d be pushed.
Adelaide took one diving breath and sprinted. Halfway across she looked down and saw the sea churning below. She saw the metal catwalk, riveted, orange with rust and glued together with stars knew what. She staggered, grabbed the rope, righted herself, ran on. At the other end she fell into a pair of outstretched arms.
The man’s mass was solid, safe. She stayed there, panting as though she had run the length of a shuttle line. She was aware of her rescuer shaking his head.
“Crazy!” he was saying.
Adelaide looked back, expecting Liis to be right behind her, but she could not see the other girl, only the impossible fragility of the bridge. She was not the only one frightened; others were refusing to cross, fighting to get back inside, but still more pushed forward. A man dashed across and Adelaide saw what she had not realized when making her own run-the bridge buckled under his weight. People pointed and cried out. Adelaide spotted Liis at last.
“Liis!”
She waved frantically.
The other girl raised her arm in response and yelled. Adelaide could not hear above the well of noise.
The man who’d caught her was shouting out.
“One at a time! Don’t put too much weight on it! There’s bridges on levels sixty-five and seventy!”
A woman stepped out. Adelaide recognized Drake. She had lost her hat. Drake put one foot on the bridge, paused for a second, and ran. Her boots struck the metal like gunfire. It was gunfire; the skadi were shooting.
Drake was over. Their eyes met in a glimmer of shared experience and then Drake too turned to look back.
“Okay, and another! One more!”
The crowd were no longer listening. Something had made them panic, something that Adelaide could not see. There was a surge and a line of people spilled onto the narrow bridge. Then a second surge and Adelaide’s hands went to her face. They toppled, from the bridge, from the fiftieth-floor doorway, one after another. They went as dominoes did. Over and over. Cries echoed into the gulf.
The bridge groaned. It sagged under the weight of clinging bodies. Some dangled from the underside, holding on by two hands or by one. More were falling. They fell like dolls. The bodies were all sizes, some large, some incredibly small. She could hardly believe that they were real except for the screams.
She saw Liis. The girl was on the bridge, gripping the rope, urging on the woman in front of her. Someone pushed Liis from behind and Liis turned, gesticulated with her free hand, yelled.
The entire construction swayed.
“Liis!”
Adelaide was not sure if she or Drake had shouted. Both of them were staring, side by side, powerless.
“Help! Help us!”
“It’s going, it’s going to break-”
“This way, keep moving, come on, run, get off, run!”
Adelaide’s rescuer was hauling those who had made it bodily inside. Adelaide and Drake were pressed against the interior wall.
There was a crack. At the far end, the rivets holding the bridge gave. The metal construction plunged downwards out of Adelaide’s sight. People scrabbled on the ledge opposite. She saw three, four, five more fall. They grabbed at the feet of those above, who were in turn pushed out by the weight of the blind crowd.
Adelaide’s hands shook against her cheeks. She stopped counting.
Her rescuer threw down a rope. A pair of hands, Drake’s hands, reached for it and Adelaide took hold too, understanding that they must all pull to save anyone left to save. The bridge was still attached to their tower, hanging down out of sight. She heard the metal strain. The man was on his stomach at the ledge. He fed out the rope.
“Grab on!”
They were too late. The metal separated with a hideous, scraping tear. The screams of the falling seemed to reverberate on and on. She heard a burst of gunfire.
“Liis,” she said.
Drake shook her head. The man on his stomach did not move. The message, finally, must have been passed forward in the tower opposite, because the crowd began to retreat, until only a handful of the marooned remained looking out.
“What you got there?” Drake asked. She was looking at the drawstring bag across Adelaide’s body.
“I don’t know-Liis gave-”
Adelaide opened the bag. There were only a couple of items inside, a tobacco pouch and a heart-shaped salt tin. She wanted to cry. The emotion came without warning and she had to blink it away.
“C’mon,” said Drake.
Adelaide followed mindlessly. They were going downstairs now. A musty, sickly sweetish smell. She could see by the faint glimmer from cracks under doors. She kept her eyes on Drake’s boots, solid chunky things, with caterpillar soles, the fraying ends of her jeans tucked into them. The boots moved regularly, though the stairs were uneven. Once Adelaide’s shoes sent a scree of rubble tumbling away and she put out a hand to stop herself slipping. The wall was damp and spongy.
Twenty or so floors down, they turned into a corridor. Drake stopped outside a door that bulged in its frame. She knocked once and opened it without waiting for a reply. She gave Adelaide a nudge inside.
There were two people in the tiny room; one male, bearded, with blue eyes, the other female, with a wing of sheer peroxide hair. The man stared at her, a strange expression on his face. Adelaide stared back, confused.
“Look what I’ve found.” Drake spoke from behind her.
An inkling formed in Adelaide’s head but there was no time for her body to anticipate the blow. Drake’s strike was efficient. In the seconds before losing consciousness, as pain gathered at her temples, Adelaide heard the beginnings of the peculiar conversation that must follow.
“Face like that, can’t mistake it,” said Drake. “Shame really-she seemed…”
38 VIKRAM
His breath rattled in and out. The blanket was scrunched at his mouth, a futile attempt to keep what little moisture his breath produced as a barrier. All his energy was concentrated on quashing the tickle in his throat. If he gave in to it, his body would implode.
When he moved his wrist, the throat-tickle intensified. His eyes blurred, making tears with the effort of stilling it. He waited for his vision to clear. His watch face loomed large and indistinct. The hour hand pointed to the three, or the four. He lost sight of it; when he next focused it had moved to the other side of the watch face. A figure stood at the end of his bed. He was hallucinating again.
“Hello, Vikram.” The voice stirred a memory. A calm voice, measured and assured. “You’re looking in bad shape. I’m sorry to see that.”
Vikram gazed wonderingly at the man in the elegant suit. He was grey, with slender stripes, like the hide of a tiger shark. The stripes refused to stay put; they swam over the man. What was Linus Rechnov doing in Vikram’s head?
“Can you sit up?”
His own imagination was goading him now. Something strange happened. The figure moved towards him very quickly and took him in a steel grasp. The world lurched. The walls moved. The cell door became vertical.
Vikram gagged. He clamped his teeth, bit down, but it was too late. His chest began to heave. The coughs tore out of him. He spat blood onto the sheets and the filthy material of his trousers.
“Hello! You there!” Linus was shouting. “What’s wrong with him?”
Other people entered the cell, crowding it. He cringed away. A hand came towards him. He tried to get back but it grew, round and pale, ready to engulf him. It clamped his forehead and squeezed.
