remember outside being this loud. The noise made him dizzy. He clamped his palms over his ears and bent over, putting his head between his knees. The gleaming towers bore down on him.
When he looked up, the world had not shrunk, and he still had to find his way through the waterways. Home. First he had to go home. The notion confused him: should he go east, or west?
Get a grip, Vik. Switch on the ignition. He leaned forward and turned the key.
A part of his consciousness observed the journey dispassionately. He understood that this time, prison would be with him forever. It would haunt him in every glimpse of green, in every wind-bitten cough. It would linger in his fear of small places, and his confusion at the very large. The three week spell had marked him in a way he would never again be able to ignore.
Whatever happens now, I can’t go back.
I’d rather die.
He breathed deeply, watched the water. He was, as Linus Rechnov had informed him, on a tight schedule.
39 ADELAIDE
The storm raged overhead. Purple clouds lurched across the night sky, disgorging sheets of rain. Adelaide stood in an open doorway thirty-six floors above the surface looking at a nylon and fibreglass bridge sheened with water. A bolt of lightning lanced through the rain. She saw gaps yawn between the planks. Clinging to the ropes, halfway across, the figures of Pekko and Rikard tottered forward. The bridge blew back and forth. Adelaide dug her nails into the walls.
You’ve done this before.
They had crossed nine bridges tonight. Bridges made of anything and everything, obstacles lashed together, pitted with holes and rockpools, each less solid than the last.
You just have to take the first step. You can’t let them see you’re scared.
But she could not stop talking. The sounds made little sense, then barely any, then none at all.
“I can’t do it, can’t do it, not that not that not that…”
Behind her, Nils and Drake were growing impatient.
“There’s no other way,” shouted Nils.
“We could blindfold her,” Drake shouted back. “She might go over that way.”
“She’ll panic more if she can’t see.”
“She won’t if she trusts us.”
“She won’t trust either of us.”
“She will if she wants to live.”
The rain splattered the fibreglass boards, making them slippery as ice underfoot.
Don’t look down-don’t Too late. There was the sea, showing the whites of its eyes. Those waves would smash her body against concrete towers. The currents would suck her underwater and rip the air from her lungs.
The wind shrieked through the doorway. Nils was tying a blindfold around her eyes. She did not even try to stop him.
“Listen to me!” Drake’s voice brushed her ear. “Do exactly as I say. If you don’t move when I tell you, you’re going to fall. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Put your left foot forward.”
They stepped onto the bridge. Her foot slid and her heart leapt before the boot sole gripped. She clung to the ropes. The wind lacerated them. Like a baby, Drake nursed her every step of the way.
At the other end they took off her blindfold. She held out her hands automatically for them to retie her wrists. She looked at nobody and nobody said anything.
They took her through another wet, dripping, crumbling stairwell. Upstairs this time. She had overheard them saying that they might be followed by boat; this, it appeared, was the reason they were moving westwards via bridges. The bridges were never on the same level. They had been moving up and across and down and across in a never-ending game of squid and kelp. Each tower was less inhabitable than the last. None of the towers had electricity, and if anyone was living there she did not see them.
When they went into an empty room and stopped she sat on the spot, dead with exhaustion, too tired to look around her or even imagine trying to escape. The floor was wet, as it always was. Icy trickles dripped from the sodden fur of her hood and down her neck.
“Someone check her wrists,” Pekko said curtly. He disappeared. The other three seemed to relax a little, although Nils sat in front of Adelaide and told her to hold out her hands. Pekko had tied the ropes against her skin, so that they could not slip over the material of her gloves, and in spite of the cold she could feel where it rubbed. Nils’s fingers brushed against her wrists as he checked each of the knots.
“Vikram told me you’re a good man,” she muttered.
“And he told me you’re a stupid bitch,” said Nils, but amiably, she thought. “Which of us d’you figure he’s lying to?”
She felt her bonds loosen, then tighten again as he secured them differently. The ropes lay flatter against her skin, and she realized that they would chafe less like that.
“Did he really say that?”
“He did.” Nils paused. “It was a long time ago.”
Adelaide wondered whether he felt sorry for her, and found the prospect more frightening than simple contempt. Nils probably knew what Pekko was planning to do with her.
She gave him a low lashed look, and as he tightened the knots, let her fingers curl up to his wrists.
“That’s not going to work,” Nils said.
“What’s not?”
“Any of your tricks. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you why, and then you can stop trying. I have nothing personal against you. Thousands might, but I don’t. But that girl who was with us before-Ilona-I happen to love her. She sells her body to make a living and in these parts that means one thing-she’s bonded to someone. Because we found you, and on condition that we keep you safe, her cunt of a pimp is going to let her go. So d’you see why you might as well give up now?”
Nils drew the knots taut and let her hands go.
“I guess Vikram was right,” she said.
“Vikram’s underwater because of you,” he said roughly. “The way I see it, you don’t have the right to speak his name.”
“I never meant for him to get hurt. I tried to get him out.”
“Makes no difference to me.”
“Where’s Ilona now?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Why are these towers such a dump, anyway?”
“Because the City screwed us,” said Nils. “Over and over again. You never kept a single promise you made in the last fifty years.”
“Are you going to bargain for me?” she asked.
Whatever Nils might have replied was lost in a fit of hoarse coughing. His eyes streamed, he gasped for breath. Adelaide peered at him more closely.
“You’re sick.”
“Fuck off.”
He went to sit with Drake and Rikard and the three of them conversed in low voices. Adelaide’s hearing had grown sharper, but she could not make out what they were saying above the shrill of the storm.
Her captors were coordinating with other groups, but whenever Pekko took a call on his scarab he talked in secret. She had caught muttered references to the greenhouse and the desalination plant. They let slip no other
