Osiris (13 page)

They heard the child crying, Ari trying to comfort it, then yelling at the intruder. The yells ceased abruptly.

They ran out into the corridor. Other people were gathered there, shapeless figures in the gloom. Eyes peered from behind doors pushed ajar. The door next to Nils’s had been kicked closed. Vikram glanced at his friend. From inside he recognised the bangs and crashes of systematic destruction. He stepped towards the door.

“Don’t—” said someone.

“What?”

“It’s one of Juraj’s men. We don’t want trouble round here.”

“I don’t care who it is,” said Nils. “That’s my fucking neighbour.”

Vikram shouldered the door. It collapsed immediately, swinging open on one hinge. Inside, the intruder had Ari by the hair. The child cringed against the boarded window-wall.

The intruder barely glanced at Vikram.

“Get out.”

“Leave her alone.”

“She owes Juraj. This isn’t your business.”

“The man who used to live here owes Juraj.” Nils spoke from behind Vikram. “He cleared out six weeks ago. She doesn’t have what you want.”

“Makes no difference to Juraj,” said the man. The knuckles were white where he gripped the woman’s hair. His face was obscured by greasy tangles. Vikram couldn’t read the man’s eyes but he saw the outline of a knife at his belt.

“I heard Juraj was dead,” he said evenly. The man stiffened.

“I guess you heard wrong.”

Vikram’s hand went to his own hip.

“Look, there’s no need for this to get ugly.”

The man did turn now, assessing Vikram, seeing Nils poised behind him. He gave the woman a last shove against the wall and walked out, kicking the broken door viciously behind him.

Vikram looked around. The room was in chaos. The child watched him with mute, swollen eyes from behind a thick dark fringe. Tear trails had made streaks in a dirty face.

Nils was helping Ari to her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her neck where her head had hit the wall.

“You’re hurt,” said Nils.

Ari pressed her fingers gingerly to the back of her head, and then her face. A bruise was coming up on her temple. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

Vikram set a table upright. “We’ll give you a hand with this.”

“I’m alright. Really.” As they lingered, unsure, she added, “I just want to sort this out. Please, leave me be.”

On the way out Nils pulled the door back into its frame. There were low mutterings from the spectators.

“Think you should stay at mine for a few days?” Vikram asked.

“What’s the point? If anyone bothers coming back, it’ll take them all of two seconds to find out where you live.”

“Alright. Keep an eye out though.” Back in Nils’s partition, the cards were still on the floor in a neat brick. Through the wall they could hear Ari rearranging the room, dragging things into place.

“What do you want to play?” Nils asked eventually.

“Start you with a hand of piranha.”

Nils scooted over the pack. “Juraj and the rest are getting out of hand. Soon they’ll be trying to impose tariffs on every quarter in the west.”

“If he is alive. More likely than not it’s his underlings cashing in before the news is out.”

“Makes no difference if he’s dead or not. There’ll be someone else in his place within the week.”

“Won’t stop with the gangs though. We’ll all get caught up in it.” He paused. “What was her boyfriend running?”

“Soft stuff, soap and sugar, at least publicly. But judging by the argument before she kicked him out, that was a cover. Sounded like he was dealing in weapons.”

“Through the skadi?”

“How else? The bastards aren’t incorruptible.”

Vikram shuffled, distributed, reshuffled. As game followed game, the inanimate faces of the cards took on strange personalities. The Jack of Spades fell into Vikram’s hand three times until he began to see its presence as an omen. Signs and portents were everywhere in this city. Some people said the sea itself was a judgement. That the city was cursed for its sins, past and present. And it was easy, when the lower levels were flooded for the fourth time in a month and children drowned in their own beds—it was easy, he thought, to wring your hands and blame the heavens, because nobody else was there to listen to your woes.

“Your deal,” said Nils.

“Yeah. Sorry.” He shuffled with a snap and cut the deck.

Now there was shouting from upstairs. Human clamour sounded loud to Vikram now; it used to be nothing to his ears. Naala’s boat, where he’d grown up, was both a refuge and a morgue. The first winter he could remember, three kids had gone to sleep and in the night they’d died. The others had woken to find them, curled up like shells, a greyish tinge to their hardened skins. After that he was afraid to go to sleep.

He remembered the first night he had spent in a building, feeling sick with stagnancy and wide awake. Through the night he heard the breathing of the other three more distinctly than ever before. Nils’s smokers’ rasp. Mik’s gurgles. Drake’s long clear inhalations.

Mikkeli never said what stunt she had pulled to get the room, but Vikram suspected it had to do with the packages she sometimes delivered for a man named Maak. She collected the packages from the shanty towns. She took them to locations whose owners never had names, only yellowed eyes and mouths that liked to argue over previously negotiated bargains. Mikkeli didn’t like Vikram coming along. He understood why the first time he saw a man pull a knife on her.

He had a feeling, looking back now, that Mikkeli’s packages had probably contained weapons too.

It was shortly after that Vikram began his stints on the illegal fishing boats. Decisions and answers came easily then. He realized, as time went on, that things had degrees. Degrees of hurt and degrees of shame.

The Jack of Spades was in his hand. It was his turn. He had no idea how long he had been lost in contemplation, but Nils said nothing and Vikram suspected his friend was similarly absent tonight. You make your own luck, he thought. He played the Jack. It was a reckless move. He lost the game.

The bottle of raqua was almost dry, and they gathered up the cards for the night. Then, because it was late and he was a little drunk, Vikram asked, “You ever think about getting out of here, Nils?”

“Out of where? Six-fourteen? “Course I do.”

“I meant out of Osiris.”

It was a question each of them had posed to the other, a number of times, over the years. The sea got inside your head. Its currents pulled you, this way and that way. That was why you had to keep people around you, at least one—to act as ballast when the tide got too strong. Nils glanced at him. His forehead creased.

“Now that is crazy talk. You want to start fishing again? Not all those boats come back. Dangerous business, fishing.”

“Maybe they don’t go far enough.”

“They’re looking for fish, Vik. Anyone who went looking for land got eaten by sharks or drowned. Nothing out there to find.”

“They might’ve ended up on land, for all we know. What if it’s out there, what if it’s there to find… just waiting for us. Waiting for us to be brave enough.”

“And what if it is? What do you think you’d find? Rocks? Sand? You can’t eat sand. Can’t eat wind, either.”

“But you’d know. You’d know.”

He had a vision of wind blowing across an empty plateau. Not a creature in sight, just desiccated rock stretching on and on. Why was it so alluring?

“Wouldn’t you like to see the land your folks came from?” he asked.

“Vik. I know what it looks like. Everyone knows that whatever land is left, it’s toxic. Fire. Corpses. Plague and insects, man. Hell on Earth.”

Vikram nodded. He knew, but sometimes he couldn’t believe it.

Nils reached across and gave his arm a friendly shake.

“You’re drunk.”

Vikram couldn’t deny it. His limbs felt like cotton wool. Neither he nor Nils could afford to build up a tolerance to alcohol. Vikram reached into his pocket and pulled out the invitation.

“What’s that?” Nils asked. Vikram passed him the card. The Rose Night was two days away, he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.

Nils looked at the card. He grinned.

“Where did you get this?”

“Linus Rechnov.”

“That guy you followed?”

“He’s Adelaide Mystik’s brother, isn’t he. Well, estranged brother. The other one’s most likely dead, if you believe what the krill say.”

“The twin was a nutter. Family probably did away with him. Why would Adelaide Mystik’s brother give you an invitation to some random party?”

“He said I needed a patron.”

Spoken out loud, it sounded even sillier than it had in Vikram’s head. Nils looked suitably dubious.

“It was you that followed him, right? So you caught him unawares. He probably thought you were out to assassinate him. He didn’t know what to do, so he’s palmed you off on his sister.”

Vikram shook his head. “No. It wasn’t like that. He’s—” He sought for a way to describe Linus Rechnov, but suitable words eluded him. “He’s too smart,” he concluded lamely.

“Smart? He’s a Citizen. Defective at birth.”

“Fine. So what if I go? And what if it’s a trick? Or a weird joke, I don’t know. At the time I thought he sounded genuine, but now...”

“No, you’re right. Citizens have reasons for everything. Still.” Nils turned the card over in his hands. He scratched the watermark with one nail. “It’s one hell of an opportunity.”

“To get myself chucked in jail?”

“More to spy,” said Nils. “Maybe this Linus guy, whether he realizes it or not, has a point. If we can’t beat them with guns and letters don’t get through, try something else. Try infiltration.”

“I’m not sure that’s what he meant either,” said Vikram.

“What does it matter? Go along, have a laugh. Eirik would love it.” Nils fell silent for a moment, but quickly recovered. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get to meet the mad bad Adelaide herself. Well worth a spell in jail.”

Vikram raised his eyebrows. Nils shrugged.

“Worth a day in jail?”

“Clearly you’ve never been underwater,” Vikram said dryly. Nils said nothing in response. He could not. The cell, with its green light and clogged porthole, was one memory they did not share. Time in a cell had made Vikram calm, dangerously calm. He had beaten down his anger so successfully that it had become an alien thing to him, unknown, and now unpredictable.

As the last few weeks had demonstrated. Perhaps, he thought, it was a warning. That for every hurdle put before him, there would always be a greater one behind it. At that moment, he knew that he’d always intended to go to Adelaide Mystik’s party.

9 ¦ ADELAIDE

“S
o tell me, Adie. Why exactly did you want to meet here?”

Tyr had to stoop to see into the mirror. He twitched the points of his collar carefully into shape, frowning slightly as he did so.

“Bit too dirty for you, is it?”

“I would have thought it was filthy by your standards.”

Tyr’s hair was sticking up in spikes. He scooped some water from the sink and smoothed it back. Each gesture made him a fraction more her father’s man. Adelaide hated the transformation. She stretched out languidly on the bed, aware that he could see her in the mirror.

“What a peculiar idea you have about me, Tyr. Seeing as you won’t come to my apartment—”

“Because it’s too much of a risk—”

“And as I can’t come to yours—”

“Similarly. Which is why we usually meet in dark bars or the back rooms of reasonably classy clubs, not dingy hotel bedrooms.”

“Are you complaining?”

He scratched distractedly at a bit of stubble. “Just commentating. Because I know the way your mind works.”

Adelaide offered him a brilliant smile.

“And that confirms it,” he said dryly.

“Alright,” she allowed. “We’re here because I have it on good authority that Sanjay Hanif’s office is across the water.”

She didn’t tell Tyr that she had grown impatient waiting for results, legitimately or via Lao. Nor that she had been calling Hanif’s office persistently for the last week. Each time she had met with the decided tones of Hanif’s secretary, and each time the secretary refused to tell her where the offices were located. Adelaide’s assurances of discretion had been unpersuasive, so she had recorded their last conversation and persuaded an acquaintance to trace it. The voiceprint located Hanif in a suite of low key, thirty-ninth floor offices in the industrial northern quarter, surrounded by greenhouses and factories, and directly opposite the Anemone Hotel.

She didn’t tell Tyr that she had already walked across the bridge four floors above and back down the stairwell of the scraper on the other side, gone to the floor above Hanif’s, worked out where his offices were, stood there imagining the discussions going on below, almost convinced, once, that she heard the burr of Hanif’s voice. She knew it would sound ridiculous. She didn’t know how to explain that she could not stay away; she had to do something, even if something was nothing.

Tyr went to the window, twitched aside the curtain, and looked across at the tower opposite.

“Shit.”

“Don’t fret. They have no idea I’ve found them.”

He let the curtain fall and turned back to look at the room with new eyes. She saw him register the supplies of Coralade and poppy-head crunches stacked on the bureau. A pair of Haakan binoculars propped on a chair. She half expected him to be angry. She had already prepared her response, but she saw only worry in his face.

“Adie, how is this helping? What can you possibly learn from sitting here watching them?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m here.”

Tyr sat on the edge of the bed. “Look. Everyone says Sanjay Hanif is very good at what he does. And equally as important, he isn’t corrupt. You have to trust him to do his work.”

“Tyr, I just want to know what he’s doing. I want to help. I’m the only one who believes Axel is alive, I know that. I can see it in your faces. Even you. But you’re wrong, you’re all wrong. Because I’d know if he was dead.” She pressed a hand between her ribs. “I’d feel it—here. You couldn’t understand unless you had a twin.”

Tyr’s hand came to rest, warm, on her ankle. She took his wrist.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But Hanif can’t operate on a hunch.”

“Unlike Tellers, I suppose.”

“Unlike Tellers.”

“And why should Hanif get access to the penthouse? What right does he have to go through Axel’s things? He doesn’t know Axel. I hate the idea of them going in there, touching things, when they haven’t even spoken to me—to anyone...”

“You think they’ll judge him.”

“They won’t understand him.”

“Can you blame them? Adie, he threw you out of your own apartment.”

“He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Because he was ill.” She glared at him until he corrected himself. “Is ill. Alright, let’s say he’s alive. What’s happened to him? Where do you think he is?”

“Maybe something scared him, maybe he’s gone into hiding. What if someone kidnapped him?”

“What for? There’d have been a ransom demand by now.”

“They might be playing a long game.”

“They couldn’t get in. The security on that tower is impenetrable to outsiders.”

Outsiders, yes, she thought. But not to someone who knew him. Or to an aerialist.

“What if they came in through the balcony? Abseiled, used a glider?”

“Now you’re in animé territory.”

“Am I?”

Tyr put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. But you’ll drive yourself mad wondering. You’ve gone through enough over Axel already, Adie, I don’t want to see you hurt any more.”

She placed her hands on his shoulders, massaging gently.

“Has Feodor said anything about the investigation?”

“You know I’d tell you if he had.”

“You could ask how it’s going.”

“It’s better if he confides in me. Trust me, I know your father well enough by now.”

She knew they were both thinking about the day she had come to the offices. The strange middle ground that Tyr walked between her and her father. She was suddenly afraid that the day might come when he had to choose, or when she had to choose. The truth was that all liaisons were a transaction at heart. With every intimacy gained, the ground was paved for what could be lost.

She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his temple. “You don’t have to go.”

“I wish I didn’t.”

His tone was sombre and there was something in his expression that she wasn’t sure she liked. She took his face in her hand and turned it towards her, forcing him to meet her eyes. Her tone when she spoke was playful.

“Don’t say you’re feeling sorry for me, Tyr.”

He responded in kind.

“How could I? You’re a spoiled, selfish—shall I go on?” Adelaide threw a pillow at him. “—ruthless, soulless, grouchy bitch.”

“Grouchy?”

“Maybe not grouchy. But the rest.”

“Don’t forget it.”

Tyr brushed a strand of hair from her face.

“Believe me,” he said. “I won’t. Now I really have to go.”

After the door closed Adelaide listened to his footsteps fading down the corridor outside. Her bare legs felt cold. The hotel’s heating probably hadn’t been serviced in years. Adelaide pulled on her trousers, tucking in the candy-striped shirt and cinching the belt tight. She didn’t trust the shower. Besides, she enjoyed the feeling that they had marked one another; that each carried the other’s imprint. She liked the feeling of secrecy as she went back into the public world, on the shuttle lines, into the shops, the restaurants, wearing Tyr’s sweat on her skin.

She opened the curtains and picked up the binoculars once more. The Sobek Electronics logo blinked innocently from the top of the adjacent factory. Across the waterway, a blonde woman sat at a desk with a headset. Adelaide tried to decipher the glowing display on a large notice board behind her, but the zoom function on the binoculars was not quite powerful enough. She caught a brief glimpse of Sanjay Hanif. He was wearing black again. What were they discussing in there? Shouldn’t Hanif be out searching for Axel?

It had been fun, tracking down Hanif’s office. Fun inviting Tyr over. But Adelaide was angry with herself. Here she was acting as if her twin’s disappearance was some kind of game, a game that he himself had instigated. But it couldn’t be. The Axel who had disappeared was not the Axel she had lost. That man—that boy—was long gone. All she could hope to recover was his shadow.

She had to start thinking like Axel. What would her twin do? What had been going through his head in those last few weeks? If he had run away, then why?

The Rose Night was two days away. She would give Lao another week. If he had no further information, he would have to help her get into the penthouse. There, she would find clues that Sanjay Hanif and his secretary had no chance of deciphering. After all, Adelaide knew that apartment better than anybody. She used to live there.