information. She knew only that an insurrection was under way, and that she had become a part of it. She was the pawn.
The journey seemed to have taken aeons, but it was still dark. She could only have been awake for a matter of hours.
She had regained consciousness in the bottom of a boat, lying on her side, a tarpaulin covering her body to the nose. Her wrists and ankles were tied. When she tried to move she found that they were roped together. Her temples throbbed.
The splash of waves was strange from her position below the waterline, broken with knocks. The clacks were rhythmical. She realized they came from oars.
Her captors talked over her. Their heads were swollen lollipops against the fading sky. It swayed above her, the colour of a turning bruise, purple bleeding into sludgy green. The clouds looked ready to burst.
“-heard anything from Ilona?”
“Still waiting on Maak for a location.”
“She’ll be alright, Nils.”
“I know, but I could’ve-”
“You know why.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a…?”
“No. Waterbus.”
The last voice was Drake. She was sitting in the stern. Her boots were close to Adelaide’s head, close enough to see, in the disappearing light, the beaten quality of the leather under its waterproof waxing. A few wiry curls escaped the outline of her hood, nodding in the wind. Adelaide was concealed from the worst of the wind’s blast which bagged and billowed the others’ clothes.
The man with the beard was one of the two rowers. The other was a burly man whose hood was pulled forward over his face. Their arms worked in strong, regular motion. The fourth occupant, seated at the prow, wore no hood. His hair was shaved down to stubble and she wondered how he could stand the cold.
She noticed the bulge of guns in their clothes. They held them close, but not in the easy, caressing manner of the skadi. They held them as though they were scared to let the weapons go. That worried her more.
They passed beneath a bridge. Footsteps sprinted over with a hollow boom. A pair of dangling feet, a jeer and a missile splashing the water, not far from the boat. Then they were past. Peering back, Adelaide saw teeth ridged the underside of the bridge. Icicles. She could just make out other bridges higher up, like faint webbing in the dusk.
She tried to lift her head. The effort caused an explosion of pain behind her eyes, and drew the attention of the man with the shaved head. He observed her coldly, unblinkingly.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Shut up.”
Those two quiet syllables held a world of hatred.
“Will you just tell me where we’re going?”
“I said shut up. If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you. Do you understand? Don’t speak, nod.”
Mute, terrified, she dipped her head.
“Blindfold her.”
Drake’s hands reached down. Adelaide saw the other girl’s eyes intent on the task, before the material enfolded her vision. With the loss of sight, her internal compass clicked off. The boat’s uneven motion nauseated her. Open your ears, she reminded herself. They were her most useful tool now.
Night would be setting in. She remembered the girl Liis saying something about a curfew, but she did not want to think about Liis, Liis who had fallen, lost Liis. Adelaide did not know what had happened to her family. She knew nothing about the girl at all, except that she had been fighting for something she believed in, and now she was dead.
On the backs of her eyelids she watched them fall again, slowly this time. Apart from Goran, Adelaide had little experience with the Home Guard, but if all of them were like Goran, then she knew what had happened after. Goran was a man who enjoyed cruelty. He understood it as a science. Those falling bodies were not people to the Guard. They were target practice.
As the oars dipped and rose she had caught her captor’s names. Rikard, the burly man, Nils, the one Drake had led her too. And Pekko.
From her journey in the boat to where they rested now, she had gained an idea of the group’s dynamic. Pekko was in charge. She sensed his surveillance, a brooding pulse in the darkness. Instinctively, she understood that all of his resentment and rage towards the City was now conditioned into a sole desire: to spill her blood. She heard it in his voice, a rigidly controlled hunger when he spoke about her. She saw it in the way he took out his knife, and scraped it back and forth over a loose bit of metal.
She tried to speak to him.
“What do you want? My family can pay.”
She knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. Pekko looked at her speculatively, as though she was an insect, one that he would like to flatten and lick the blood that came out.
“You Rechnovs…” he said slowly. “All you do is take, and glory in the taking.” He stripped off his glove, held up his left hand, and she saw that the last two fingers had been crudely amputated. “You know how I lost these? No, it wasn’t in the riots. It was the cold, a long time before. Stars, I despise your family. I think I despise you even more. You know, in the west you’re a laughingstock. But you’re dangerous too, dangerous like the senile are dangerous, because they’re so stupid they can’t see what they’re doing. Money? What use is money to me? But I’ll watch them crawl, your Rechnov clan. I’ll watch their attempts to get you back.”
He drew the knots tight and smiled.
“I wonder how hard they’ll try?”
She had hoped that Vikram’s name might act as a kind of talisman for her safety, or even a potential exchange which would release them both. It had met with anger, resentment and suspicion. Pekko grew sullen at any reference to Vikram’s ties with Citizens. For him, her relationship with Vikram was akin to debasement for the west. Nils merely sneered.
Whilst they waited for Pekko to come back, Rikard opened his pack and distributed kelp squares. He came over and gave her one, then offered her the water flask. He went back to the others without a word. He had never spoken to her. The kelp was stale and hard but compact. She chewed steadily. Her tongue drained the salt from it and left her sucking thirstily.
She gazed out of the window-wall. Panes of bufferglass had broken away and were boarded up. What remained was filthy. Lightning flashed and she glimpsed the tower opposite. Confused, inexplicably afraid, she forgot her hunger and stopped, the kelp square half eaten in her hand. Her teeth chattered, but she did not notice. Another flash lit up outside. Thunder rumbled close by.
“It’s leaning,” she said. Nils shot her a glance. “The tower. It’s leaning.”
“Something’s eating the foundations,” he said shortly.
“Something?”
“Unhappy spirits. It burned once, that tower. An electrical fault, so they said. It was when the first refugees came. People were inside it. They burned too. Stands to reason their spirits haunt the place.” Nils glanced towards the window-wall. “Other people say it’s a monster.”
Adelaide stared where the slanted tower had been. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Good,” Nils said blankly. “Because that’s where we’re going next.”
She could not suppress a shiver. Something about the tower chilled her. She had an unshakeable sense of premonition.
Pekko returned. He flashed his torch in her face and then onto her hands, as he always did when he had been gone for more than a minute. There was someone with him; a stooped figure in shapeless rags, who could have been male or female. The voice, when it spoke, was a hoarse rasp.
“No more bridges. Only seventieth.”
“What’s the seventieth?” Nils asked.
The figure shuffled back reluctantly. Pekko caught its arm.
