Osiris (40 page)

It had not occurred to Vikram that he might meet with sympathy. He was touched. The nurse pushed the bag into his hand.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. He read her name tag. “Thanks, Yilla.”

“It’s not fair,” she said.

It was paradoxical, he thought, that the first person this side of the border whose empathy he had recognized outright might also be the last.

Yilla escorted him to the lift. At reception he paused for a moment, observing the order of the place. Doctors in white coats held Surfboards with details ready to be checked. Patients waited to be called. He tried to imagine the resources it would take to set up three surgeries like this in the west. It occurred to him for the first time that such order might really be unattainable; he’d been shouting at the Moon.

“Vikram Bai?”

It was one of Linus’s people. Not in uniform but with a face that said skadi
to Vikram as clearly as text. Hoisting the backpack, he followed the man outside. It was late afternoon and the sun hung low in the sky.

The skad
directed him to his boat. He showed Vikram where the decoy tracker was. He gave him a map with the location where he was to meet the rebels in three hours time. Vikram stuffed it into a pocket. The man said good luck, but did not sound as if he meant it, and left him.

The world in his absence had become colossal. Vikram hunkered down in the boat, feeling small and scared. His stomach surged with the movement of the waves.

Boats raced by. There were so many of them and the passengers’ eyes were sharp like birds. He did not 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

T
he 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 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.

“You agreed to show us.”

“Not good to go there, cursed place, why you cross?”

“We have to get across. Where’s the bridge?”

“Don’t show. I tell. You listen, go if you must.”

Adelaide lifted her eyes to this weird specimen, trying to see its face. She sensed her gaze reciprocated.

Nils went over.

The two men and the stranger conversed in low voices. Pekko muttered something under his breath. Nils responded sharply. Pekko nodded. They both glanced at Adelaide.

“What?” she said.

“We’re going up,” Nils said curtly.