running out, so as you can imagine, panic’s set in. I hear Market Circle yesterday was a bomb site.”
Rikard was warming a flask by the heater. He sipped from it, testing the temperature, then put it back.
“What about our fishing boats?”
“Skadi curfew,” said Nils. “One or two boats are getting out but it’s a risky business. We’ve already lost one.”
“And the uprising? Coordinated or independent?”
“There’re three cells,” Nils explained. “All answering to Maak. An inside team are guarding our lines to the desalination plant, so we won’t have a repeat of last time.” Drake’s eyes lifted to Vikram’s, and he knew that all three of them were thinking of Mikkeli’s last insane action. “A second group have taken S-801-W, the greenhouse. And we’ve got the Rechnov girl.”
“The bargaining chip.”
“Exactly.”
Logistically, it was not a bad plan. Maak, or whoever was orchestrating the cells, had obviously taken previous mistakes into account. It sounded like they were serious. Rikard tested the contents of the flask again, and passed around a thin, salty broth.
“So what are we asking for?”
“Release of the fish and kelp boats, and the skadi to withdraw. For now.”
“D’you think they’ll accept?”
“They’ve let you out,” drawled Pekko.
“If they think you are dead, that’s an advantage,” said Ilona. “It shows we have the edge.”
“We’ll offer them a deal,” said Pekko. “The girl in exchange for our demands. Which will be incremental. Really, she’s very useful. But I suppose you’ve discovered that already.”
“We’re rigging an exchange site,” said Drake, too quickly. “Coordinating with Sorren, at the greenhouse.”
“Sounds like everything’s under control,” said Vikram.
“Oh, it is.” Pekko smiled. “As you see, whilst you’ve been fraternizing with Citizens, we’ve been busy with the real business of revolution. So why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the show.”
He kept his mouth shut and his ears open. The smaller room of the tower was the hub: this was where they ate, slept, and contacted the other cells. Pekko had a scarab and Vikram guessed that Maak’s black market contacts had been at work. The heater was wired to a damp hole in the wall, hooked onto a rogue current. The electricity must run up an insulated vein in the tower from deep underground, or perhaps there was still some life in the burnt solar skin. Every few minutes a drop of water ran down the wall and Vikram saw blue sparks leap from the hole. He got used to it after a while. The sparks and the mistrust.
They huddled around the heater, playing cards. Every hour, someone went to check on Adelaide, and everyone else got up and stretched. Wary of Nils’s words, Vikram was careful not to ask about Adelaide in front of Pekko. Once he caught Drake aside and managed to say, “Is she okay?” Drake shrugged and said, “What do you think?” and then Pekko was looking at them and he couldn’t say anything more.
A couple of hours after he arrived, Rikard organized food, warming a few of the cans on the heater. It was a processed stew, the contents unidentifiable, and not enough of it. Vikram ate slowly. The stew lodged in his stomach, an indigestible lump.
Pekko’s scarab buzzed whilst they were eating. The noise sounded odd, its robotic repeat echoing around the room. Pekko went into the storeroom to answer the o’comm. Drake rolled her eyes at Vikram, but he noticed that she checked straight after to see if Rikard had seen the look. Rikard was the unknown quantity. Vikram remembered nothing about the man except for his face; he’d known a lot of people involved in the last riots.
He had also noticed that Nils was coughing a lot, and trying to hide it.
When they had finished eating, Rikard collected up the empty cans and set to work cleaning them in a bowl of drip-water. The set of his back said quite clearly that he wished for no assistance.
Pekko came back. Vikram waited for him to explain, but the man said nothing, just picked up his can and spooned up the remainder of his food. Finally Nils asked, with a hint of irritation, “Was that Sorren’s cell?”
“Tomorrow,” said Pekko.
“Tomorrow?”
“I’ll be talking to the Citizens-” he spat the word, his immobile face revealing a brief flicker of disgust. “Tomorrow.”
/ / /
Vikram slept badly. The torches were off and shadows materialized from under the heater’s glow. The night was filled with the sounds of breathing, of small creatures. He thought of his first night indoors, he and Nils, Keli and Drake. He remembered sharing plans, ambitions, talking other nonsense, a story of Drake’s-something to do with a raft rack dare and a man with velvet eyes, Drake and Keli giggling. He woke in fits and starts, thinking he was there, with them. When he remembered that one of them was dead, the glass in his chest was as sharp as it had been three years ago. He woke later thinking he was in a bed, that the rough sacking was cotton sheets, and that if he rolled over he would touch the drowsy limbs of a red-haired girl. He threw out an arm and found damp floor. The sacking smelled of mould. She was not far, that girl, a matter of metres away, lying against the same hard floor.
Silently his lips formed her name: Adelaide.
When he woke again, a trickle of grey light was seeping through a crack in the boarded window-wall. He watched the wall turn from grey to brownish green to sickly yellow. It was a new day, and he already wished it were over.
41 ADELAIDE
The man who wanted to kill her had taken away the light. Adelaide’s wrists hurt. They were fastened to the piping with steel rings, but she could not see the steel or the piping. The room was black. Water dripped in a corner. She curled in the same position she’d been in for the past hours, or days, or however long, face buried in her knees, her arms raised overhead to where they were fastened. She knew that it would hurt too much to move, so she didn’t.
In the dark, she wandered through childhood haunts: through the hidden dens in the Domain, the space under her bunk bed, her grandfather’s room with the marmalade cat. She went to the Roof and drank Kelpiqua, giggled and gulped and watched Axel standing on his hands, grinning at her upside-down.
The Roof receded, flying away from them at impossible speed. Axel bowed to thunderous applause and went behind a curtain, so she followed him but he wasn’t there, Tyr was, and after that she found Tyr in every place but home.
And then Tyr, too, went behind the curtain and there was only Vikram, the man from the ice, who would always be alone, as she would, as they were both destined to be. The crater in the ocean gaped, and there was the chromium mermaid, but this time the mermaid was Adelaide. Adelaide’s tail swished. Here, in the molten sea mud, the truth awaited her with a silver smile.
She had always been chasing her own tail. Even if Axel were alive, even if she did find him, she was not recovering her brother. She was recovering what he had become.
Everyone she cared about had disappeared. Axel, Tyr, even Vikram. She was a curse. She was bad luck. She ran on.
On, along the gleaming shuttle lines, over the glass funnel bridges, from the lowest underwater boutiques to the roof garden parties at the top of the world, up and down, in lifts and through stairwells, until she reached the butterfly farm. The path twisted before her feet. The farm had become colossal, and its glass walls were made of diamonds. What was she doing? She was searching for Axel. She ran on. She called his name. Axel! Axel, where in Osiris are you? He was playing hide and seek again. He had been playing for too long now, and it wasn’t funny.
She sat on a bench and sobbed because she could not find him. The butterfly farm moved away; it was attached to a boat, a boat that had travelled for months and for miles, a boat whose murdered crew lay in a graveyard at the bed of the ocean, where their bones rattled as they sang of their own slow decomposition.
