Osiris (23 page)

Osiris was not a kind city, but to choose to opt out was the strictest of taboos. In the severest cold spells, Vikram had spent the nights with friends, talking through the long dark hours, pinching one another at the first sign of drowsiness, because if sleep came there was no guarantee of ever waking up again. Every sunrise was a miracle. On days like those, you didn’t think about why, or what for. You just clung.

Perhaps that was why Adelaide was so adamant that her brother was alive. To avoid the shame if he had taken his own life.

“You saw something in the penthouse.” Adelaide changed the subject. “Not about Axel. It was the balloon room. When you saw that, you thought of something.”

He was surprised that she had noticed.

“It’s not important,” he said. “You’d think it was silly.”

Denial was a sure way to catch Adelaide’s interest. She poured herself another glass of tea and then topped up his, absently or on purpose, he wasn’t sure which.

“Tell me,” she said.

“There’s a story about a balloon flight.” Vikram shrugged, trying to impress upon her its insignificance, although the tale resonated with him. “When I saw that room, I was reminded of the story. That’s all.”

“Go on.”

She wasn’t looking at him but he sensed the beam of her attention, bouncing off the windows and lancing him in the chest, where another voice was stirring. He felt Mikkeli sit up, shake her spiky mess of hair out of its hood.

“There’s a legend,” he said. “When the rain began in the year of the Great Storms, a balloon set out on a journey to Osiris. There were two passengers. One of them was a girl—an important girl. Some people say she was a ruler or a princess. Others say she was some kind of star.”

A smile flitted over Adelaide’s face.

“Like me.” She raised her coral tea to her lips and sipped without looking at the glass. He had earned her concentration.

“Well,” he said. “More like me, actually. They’d be refugees, wouldn’t they? Anyway, she has different names. She’s also blind. The other passenger is a man. Her guide.”

He heard Mikkeli’s voice in the quiet parlour.
Come on, Vikram, you can do better than this! Where’s the drama?
He couldn’t do her exuberant speech, her exaggerations, but they were both speaking as he continued, because Keli had loved this story and narrated it many times, whispering to Vikram from the bunk above his on nights when the orphanage boat rocked on frightening waves, and Naala’s off-key, drunken singing was drowned by the wind.

“The girl relies totally on the guide. He flies the balloon. He has promised to take her to a safe place—to Osiris, he says.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Nobody knows. Some say south where the ice is, others say deep in the deserts, far up north. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, the man isn’t who he says he is. He’s an assassin.”

Adelaide made an
ooh
shape with her mouth. Vikram paused, making a show of sprinkling a finger-and-thumb full of ginger into his tea. The tiny grains floated for a second, then sank.

“Well? Does he kill her?” Adelaide demanded.

“He poisons her. And then he discovers that she isn’t who she says she is either. She’s a double. An illusion of the real target.”

“So who wins?”

“Nobody wins. He poisons himself in remorse. The legend says there is a cure in Osiris, but they haven’t got here yet. The balloon is still flying. That’s why it’s called the last balloon flight.”

Adelaide licked her index finger and dipped it into the ginger. She sucked thoughtfully.

“They’d be dead,” she said. “Or old. Ancient, by now.” She fell quiet.

“It’s a story, Adelaide.”

“I know,” she said quickly.

“People talk about it mostly when they’re thinking about getting out. You could say it’s like an alarm bell.”

“Maybe Axel heard it.”

“I don’t know. It’s a western thing.”

“He might have thought he could take that flight.”

He did not reply to that because her words rang uncannily close to Mikkeli’s. His best friend, leaning forward over the oars of a rowboat as they scuttled from tower to tower, lit only by the moon.
Just imagine, Vikram, that it was true. Would you take that flight?
Keli would have. She’d have jumped on board without a glance back, just to get that close to the clouds. And then they’d hop out the boat and bust a lock.

“I said your tea’s gone cold,” said Adelaide.

She was staring at him. He wasn’t sure why he had told her the story. It felt like a betrayal. As if he had given away a piece of the west, its fragile, ethereal psyche. He wanted to take the story back, to tell Adelaide that she wasn’t worthy of their superstitions. Her side of the city had safety; they did not need hope.

Vikram looked at the windows. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The rain’s stopped anyway.”

19 ¦ ADELAIDE

A
delaide reached across and groped on the bedside table. Her fingers closed around the plastic body of the stolen horse. It was no more than a few centimetres long, a child’s toy, crudely made. She moved it up and down, emulating the motion of waves, the way she imagined a real one might run. Shadows of her hands and the horse rippled over the walls and ceiling. It was dark outside; the light within the colour of a bruise.

She turned the model over to look into one of its black eyes. Dr Radir, last in a long line of Axel’s psychiatrists, had been the first person to mention horses. According to Radir’s assessment, the hallucinations had begun months, even years before. He said Axel had theories about the horses; elaborate hypotheses about storm omens and contact from outside Osiris.

Rat-a-ta-tat. Rat-a-ta-tat.
The music of drums: Axel’s fingers.
Sounds like hooves, A.
Adelaide sat up. She saw him in the room, standing by the dark pane of the mirror, a shadow in a pool of shadows. He didn’t move. He never moved. He was looking for the balloon.

Where are you, A?

The balloon was gliding through cumulus clouds. Adelaide was back on the balcony, high above the sea, staring over the edge. The sea below fell into a giant crater. At the bottom, so far away she was no more than a speck, Mikkeli was a chromium mermaid. Her tail swished and clicked in the mud. Adelaide looked for Tyr, but he wasn’t there, only Vikram was. She reached for Vikram’s hand. His eyes were murky whirlpools. She wanted to tell him that Mikkeli was there, down in the crater, but her tongue would not work. She had never felt so cold before, and she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

Her eyes flew open. She must have been dreaming. Her skin was tight with goosebumps; the horse was imprisoned in her linked hands.

“Where have you gone?” she whispered. “Damn it, Axel, where have you gone?”

On the other side of her apartment, Vikram was sleeping on the futon under the mezzanine. She imagined his breathing as a tiny hum that ran through the woven rugs, under the doors and along a crack in the floorboards to her ear. What would Feodor say if he knew she had a westerner under her roof?
Reduced to terriers, Adelaide? That’s scraping the seabed, even for you.

She hadn’t locked the door. She didn’t like locked doors, and she wasn’t worried by Vikram’s presence. Vikram assumed she thought all westerners were scum, but he didn’t know her. If he did, he would know she never thought about the west at all.

Best, though, to let Vikram think he had won this round. Sometimes impulse led down strange avenues; she had learned to accommodate herself to life’s twists and forks. She heard movement. Perhaps Vikram was still awake, or the scientists were at work upstairs. Then she realized that it was not an interior noise but the rush of rain against the window.

She curled deeper under the duvet, listening. Some people, like Linus, said the rain was changing. They said it sounded more consistent than it used to. When people were desperate they found omens in the blue, pulling boats from the horizon and now balloons out of the sky. Vikram understood this; he had told her the story of the balloon.

Adelaide had lost count of nights passed with only the rain for solace. She knew every version of rain: ice-bound rains and fresh bold showers, rattling hailstorms, delicate snowfalls. It gave her a feeling not of fear but of safety and enclosure. Axel had never understood this snugness, and perhaps in truth she only felt it now, since he was gone, and the rain had become her companion.

She thought of the Roof, frying saufish, drinking Kelpiqua, meeting Jan. She and Axel, drenched and shaking on a towertop after a storm. When they were still living at the Domain, the twins used to go there every night, until Goran caught them. They’d been happy there.

The rain was passing. Linus and the anti-Nucleites were wrong; it came and went according to its own whimsy.

The little horse lay in her upturned palm. She imagined Axel locked inside in his balloon room, sewing bolts and bolts of material. He would have spent hours studying the paths of the winds, devising instruments for navigation; some part of him must remember his love of science. Axel had been preparing for a journey, but to where?

20 ¦ VIKRAM

H
e lay on Adelaide’s futon, a rug pulled over his body—not because he needed it for warmth in her apartment, but to feel the soft luxurious weight of the material. The lights were dimmed, the glass walls darkened, but he could not sleep. He was hot, conscious of a thin sheen of sweat. There was a decanter of water on a table beside him. He poured himself a glass and choked when he discovered it wasn’t water at all, but voqua.

He thought of the coldest he had ever been, trapped in the unremembered quarters on the very edge of the west, certain he was going to die. The towers had fallen into such disrepair that they were more of a sea barrier than a living space. No electricity. Broken bufferglass. Ghosts. One of the towers leaned sideways; monolithic, charred. It had burned once and people had burned in it. It was said that something nameless lurked in its depths, gorging on the foundations.

Stars knew what he’d been doing there; he must have been about twelve. He remembered a tarpaulin. Huddling under it, shaking, his fingers blank with cold. He remembered the rivulets of water that eased their way through the cracks, only to halt as the molecules contracted and froze. The floor inside a maze of glittering snail trails, outside, the sky sagging. It had been too cold to snow.

Snow, in Adelaide’s world, was nothing but a pretty white blanket.

Vikram knew the layout of the apartment. There were only three rooms between himself and the Architect’s granddaughter.

He made himself recall the day Eirik was drowned. He remembered seeing Adelaide and her father, closer than a westerner could have imagined but impossible to reach. Adelaide was unprotected now. He could take her hostage. He could, if he wanted, go into her room, put his hands around her neck, and throttle her. He could strike a fatal blow to Feodor Rechnov right now, here, tonight.

Stop it.

He shoved the idea away in horror. It was as far from Horizon’s ideals as the stars; he could hardly believe the thought had crossed his mind.

But it was an opportunity—he could not deny that. He would never have a chance like this again. Now—while she was sleeping. It wasn’t what Horizon had been about, but hadn’t that all changed? And he couldn’t trust Adelaide, she had told him that herself. Now she’d got what she wanted, what guarantee did he have that she would carry out her side of the bargain?

She almost let you get caught tonight. She could turn you in just because she feels like it. Sticking with her isn’t worth the risk.

For all you know, the skadi could be on their way over right now.

Eirik, Mikkeli—they would have thought about it. There was no doubt that to many in the west, the act would make Vikram a hero.

Stars, what was he thinking! And yet…

Go on
, another part of him urged.
Do it. It’s what they all want.

He pushed aside the rug. He could feel his knife sheath where it lay against his thigh. It could be done bloodily or it could be done with bare hands. For a more poetic justice, he could drown Adelaide Rechnov in her own bath.

That would be the best way. A clear signal to the City. Explicable, and understandable.

For a moment his own coldness froze him. And then he saw Mikkeli in her yellow hood. She came in through the window-wall and she walked across Adelaide Mystik’s floor and sat on the piano lid. She was still twelve.

“You’re not going to let that bitch get the better of you, are you?” she said. Foam dribbled from her lips. Her voice was as dead and as empty as surf.

You know it’s what they all want. And it’s so easy.

He sat up and walked silently through the study into the kitchen, closing each door behind him to block off her escape route. Moonlight fell across the white tablecloth and crystal glasses in the dining room. The outline of the next door was a grey line around its pale panels.

He stood looking at it. The only sounds he could identify were the thud of his heart and the drumming of his pulse in his ears. If he went through that door, he would be taking a step that could not be reversed.

The door opened. Adelaide came out, one hand rubbing her eyelids. When she saw him she stopped.

Their eyes met for a long time.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

“I need some water.”

He saw Eirik, in the tank, his mouth open. Perhaps she did too.

She said, “Do you want a glass?”

“Yes, please.”

She walked around the table. She passed within a few inches of him. He recognized the effort it must have cost her, because she had seen his face. He turned and followed her into the kitchen, watched her bare legs crossing the tiles. She opened the fridge door. The light flooded her slender body, crouching naked beneath the slip of lilac. She took out a jug and poured two glasses of chilled water. Face averted, she placed one on the sideboard for Vikram.

“Sleep well,” she said. She took her own glass of water and went back through the empty dining room and shut the door.