Osiris (16 page)

“Your Rose Infusion, sir.”

Jannike stood before them, grinning. She held aloft a selection of cocktails balanced enticingly on a tray. The tray was angled, with the pink concoction sloping towards the rim of its glass and Linus.

“Oh—thank you, Jannike.”

“You’re welcome.” Jannike performed a curtsy. The tray skidded away, skimming over the tops of heads like an adolescent flying saucer. Adelaide and Linus watched.

“So. Did you like your gatecrasher?”

“You heard about him? Did you, by any chance, send him?”

Linus smiled. “Now why would you think that?”

“Nobody else would give away an invitation.”

“Well, I might have.”

“Rude of you, dear brother. But he was evicted quickly.”

“Did you listen to anything he said?”

The sudden switch in conversational direction annoyed Adelaide. She had been rather enjoying their backhanded banter. Now she had a strong urge to put Linus in his place.

“Why would I want to listen to one of your spies?”

Linus extracted a rose petal from his cocktail and looked for somewhere to put it. Crossly, Adelaide held out her own glass. He dropped it in. “Don’t be absurd. Vikram is trying to encourage the Council to put through a few reforms for the west. You have influence, I thought you might help him.”

Adelaide’s laugh rang out. Several people glanced over as if they might approach, then seeing Linus, retracted the impulse. His presence was beginning to dampen her party. She needed him gone. “Linus, you have a very odd idea about my priorities.”

“You wouldn’t like to annoy the Council?”

“Even if I did, I have other things to think about right now.” They were talking without looking at one another, but his next words changed that.

“Like getting into Axel’s apartment?”

Her eyes narrowed. “So now we get to it.”

“Get to what?”

“Why you’re here. Did Feodor send you?”

“Nobody sent me, Adelaide.” Linus dropped his voice. “I decided to come and talk to you. This investigation is a delicate thing. People are making accusations. The
Daily Flotsam
has even suggested we’ve done away with Axel ourselves because he was an embarrassment.”

“For all I know you might have done,” she said distantly.

Linus’s eyebrows drew together. “It would be a mistake to think I don’t care, Adelaide. He was my brother too.”

“He was nobody’s brother by the end of it.”

“In any case you can’t go around establishing your own private battleground. You’ve got to let it go. We all have.”

She bestowed an insincere smile upon him. “Anything you say, Linus.”

“You’re impossible.” He kept his voice low but it was strained with anger.

“It’s been said before.”

“And you should stop screwing around with Tyr as well.”

She saw the regret flash over her brother’s face a second after he had spoken, but it was too late. Her eyes flicked involuntarily across the room. They were playing poker at the table now. Tyr had a stack of chips in front of him. He was toying with them, letting the disks slip through his fingers in a series of clinks. It was chance, perhaps, that made him catch her eye at that moment. But it might have been something more elusive and unqualified. Understanding sprang between them. Tyr looked away.

Linus lit two cigarettes and passed her one without speaking. The first inhalation grated on her throat. He smoked something different to her. It tasted grey. She drew twice, deeply, before allowing herself to speak.

“How long have you known?”

“I’ve suspected for a while. Tonight confirmed it.”

A cloud of laughter floated up from the poker table. Jannike had appropriated one of the barmen’s jackets. She bent over in mock imitation of a waiter, cocking her head so that the crimson tail dangled over her ear. “Raise you five hundred,” said Kristin. Minota stripped off her bracelet and threw it down. In the corner, one of Adelaide’s musician friends had opened the piano and was playing pre-Neon baroque, oblivious to the DJ or anyone else in the room. Olga was lounging across the top, blowing smoke rings.

There was something awful, she thought, about the idea of prolonged wondering, of surveillance. She would almost rather have been caught in the act.

“You know if our father finds out he’ll be fired,” said Linus.

“I know.”

“You’re selfish.”

“I always have been.”

“There’s too much on the line.”

“For me, too.” She hardly knew what they were saying.

“For everyone. This is an unstable time politically.” Linus lowered his voice. “Adelaide, you must know that the City is on the verge of a resource crisis. Bufferglass and solar skin reserves are all but gone, now we’re having problems at the mining station. This is not a time when the family needs distractions. Now please—if you aren’t prepared to reconsider, let’s just go back to how things were. We’ll stick to our business and you stick to yours.”

Not trusting herself to speak, she stared directly ahead. Linus sighed.

“I have to go. I’ve got a meeting at nine o’clock in the morning and I need to be awake for it.”

“Of course. Thank you for coming.”

Many hours later, when the party was over and she was sitting alone in its debris, Adelaide would have to admire the finesse of Linus’s attack. He might have played his trump card too early. He had played it well nonetheless. But watching him leave, all she felt was sick, as if every last gasp of oxygen had been squeezed from her body.

12 ¦ VIKRAM

“S
o Vik does his spiel, tells her how we’re all living in shit, dying of cold and drowning down here, and Miz Adelaide Mystik
goes, get this, she goes,
thank you for coming.
Thank you for coming! Can you believe it!” Nils laughed until it turned into a spluttering cough. He tapped the passing bar girl on the shoulder. “Get us another jug of that, will you?”

The boarded-up den was packed and beginning to get rowdy. Vikram, Nils and Drake hunched on either side of the makeshift table: a door propped over empty kegs. Drake had her feet up. She was wearing her prized boots, huge and chunky, their soles two inches thick and ridged like a series of fins. A naked electric bulb swung overhead, casting wild shadows, making the drunk feel drunker.

“Stuck up cow,” said Drake. She drew luxuriously on a skinny roll-up and sighed out an equally emaciated trail of smoke. “Surprised you didn’t punch her, Vik.”

“I was tempted,” Vikram said.

“
Thank you for coming.
” Nils put on a high pitched, whiny voice. “What a bitch.” He shook his head admiringly. Nils’s reaction was predictable. He was disappointed Vikram had seen so little of Adelaide, but she was exactly as Nils had imagined.

Drake elbowed a man who was trying to inhale the smoke from her cigarette. “So, did you get a good look at her apartment? I bet it’s massive, right?”

Vikram shook his head. “You can’t imagine.”

“Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine the whole thing.” There was a derisive, bitter tone to Drake’s voice. Vikram understood it completely, but he wished suddenly that it was not there.

“I talked to this one girl,” he said. “She seemed alright.”

“Alright?” Drake gave a snort of disbelief. “How
alright?”

Vikram couldn’t say that Jannike hadn’t given him away without explaining that he’d been in Adelaide’s bedroom, so he just shrugged. Now he thought about it, perhaps she had given him away.

The bar girl came back with a cracked jug and dumped it in the middle of the bench. Some of the contents splashed over.

Nils jumped to his feet. “Hey, watch what you’re doing!”

Vikram reached up and put a hand on Nils’s arm until his friend sat down. The bar girl stalked off without a word.

“That Miz Mystik could take a leaf or two out of her book,” Drake commented.

“Maybe she already did,” Vikram tried, half-heartedly, to join in on the joke. He had given his friends the bare facts. He’d told them about the extravagance of the Red Rooms, his brief conversation with the guests, what Tyr had said at the end. He hadn’t told them about
western rag.
He could not explain the chagrin he had felt. For Nils, Vikram’s expulsion was a great escape, to be recounted and exaggerated in company. It was not an unflattering version, but every time Nils retold the story, it echoed falser in Vikram’s mind.

The wind banged against the boarded bufferglass. Above them, the light bulb flung back and forth.

“Whipping up a ghost-grabber,” Drake said, hooking one ankle over the other. She widened her eyes spookily. Vikram glanced at the window-wall. Watch out, the orphanage boat-keeper used to say, or the Tarctic will get you.

“Better not be,” Nils grumbled. “We’ll be stuck here all night.”

“Better get another jug.” Drake stuck her arm into the air and twisted her face into an expression of mild pain. “Oy, waiter! Are you there?” She and Nils convulsed.

A heavy-set man in a woollen hat paused by their table. His face was familiar but Vikram couldn’t place him.

“Drake. Thought I heard your voice.”

“Hey, man, good to see you. Working the Friday shift?”

“Maybe, maybe. You?”

“Same as always.”

The man nodded to Nils and Vikram and moved on before they had a chance to return the greeting.

“Who was that?” Vikram asked.

“Rikard. You remember Rikard? He was with us three years ago.”

“Think Keli knows him,” Nils added.

Rikard. The face sharpened into memory; their paths must have crossed. It was possible he had never even spoken to the man, but there had been so many people back then.

“I didn’t realize you were still in touch with that crowd,” he said.

“I’m not. He’s started crewing the boats occasionally, I ran into him a few weeks back.”

Vikram looked at the soles of Drake’s boots, the ridges packed with waterproof wax and fish scales. He was terrified that one day she would be caught on an illegal fish run and either killed or flung underwater, but it was pointless voicing that fear. Instead he asked, “What happened to your tooth?”

He thought she had lost one of the front ones, but when she grinned he saw that the tooth had turned entirely black.

“Some bastard tried to nick my boots while I was asleep.”

“I’ll buy you a gold one for midwinter,” Nils offered.

“You’re so generous, you. I’ll have a pair of ruby earrings while you’re at it. And maybe a bunch of, what was it,
roses
too—for my hair.” Drake screwed up a handful of wiry curls. “What d’you think?”

Vikram drained his mug.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny you two.”

When they left the den, much later, the wind had dropped and they had finished several jugs. Vikram stepped outside ahead of the others. The first bridge, thirty floors up, was a rumpled construction lashed together out of planks, boards, squares of fibreglass, broken bufferglass panes, metal sheets and whole and partial boats. Dirty water welled in the pit of a kayak, dripping erratically down.

Vikram climbed easily over the treacherous walkway. The bridge rocked beneath him, regularly, like a pendulum. He sensed movement in the sky above, the clouds scudding away on high winds. A glimmer of light drew his gaze south. He followed it, found clear sky and there, on the horizon, a phenomenon. Ribbons of gauze undulated in the stratosphere: green and yellow, flickering, shimmering. The lights always meant something. Sickness. Death. Was that where his failure to engage that lofty girl would end? He was afraid, but the strange evanescent beauty drew him in spite of his fear. He could have sat on the bridge for hours, with no company but the sea hissing somewhere below.

The others came out, giggling. Drake couldn’t walk properly. She had her arms out wide. She was flapping them. Nils steered her.

“Stars!” Nils stopped, gazing up. “Look at the lights!”

“Aura Australis,” said Drake expertly. She hiccoughed. Only an innate sense of balance was keeping her upright.

“How d’you know that?”

“Someone told me.”

Drake misjudged a step. Her boot stuck in a hole. Nils hauled her out.

“Who?”

“Dunno. Someone… educated.”

She moved close to Nils and whispered something in his ear. Nils shook his head. Drake whispered again, more urgently.

“What’s up?” Vikram called.

Nils cupped a playful hand over Drake’s mouth.

“She’s pissed.”

They reached Vikram. He took Drake’s other arm and they progressed slowly along the bridge. Behind him, the Australis lights pulsed. But the dizzy laughter of the others swept him onward, pulling him back into the mesh of the group, where he belonged.

Vikram lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the wind and thinking about the three of them, bound together by strange layers of history. They had once been five; they should always have been four. He tried to imagine what Mikkeli would have done. Keli wouldn’t have accepted defeat, and nor could Vikram.

“Now you know what you’re up against,” she’d say. “So work out how to fight it.”

He had thought, in the first bewildering days when he was released from jail, that he would miss her all the time. But it didn’t happen like that. She intruded on his thoughts at specific times, with specific actions. He found that he missed her more outside. In boats, always, and when he caught a glimpse of a mismatched, roguish face. Sometimes he told himself that it really was Keli, and as long as he didn’t follow her, she would stay alive. He realized that the dead didn’t go away. They lingered.

Vikram had made her a promise. He had done it with rites, made an incision in his own skin and sealed it with salt. As much as to himself, he owed it to Mikkeli to pursue every avenue.

In the dirty bufferglass reflection he saw her nod approvingly. “That’s right,” she said. “You’re not going to let that bitch get the better of you, are you?”

When the labouring work came to an end Vikram began his research. He went first to the recycling depot. The caretaker was old, with soft indoor skin and a frostbite scar where one ear was missing. He was mostly deaf, but insisted on taking Vikram on a tour of the depot. They looked into room after room full of City junk, the old man mumbling things that Vikram could not understand, pointing at the piles of unsorted plastic and broken parts that were waiting to be disassembled, melted down and returned to the Makers that had produced them.

When they reached a room of discarded Neptunes, Vikram stopped. Some of the machines still worked. He pulled up story after story about the Rechnovs on the cracked screens. The old man peered curiously over his shoulder. He touched a creased fingertip to the fuzzy picture of Adelaide, stroked the line of her hair.

“They call her the flame.”

His voice was like crackling paper.

“Yes. Yes I’m looking for stuff on her. Can you help me?”

The caretaker grinned, showing blackened gums, and beckoned. Vikram followed his shuffling progress to a room where discarded paper newspapers and pamphlets, which had been a fad for a few years in the City and were still used in the west, were piled high in precarious stacks. The caretaker let him take what he wanted.

Back at 614-West, he holed up in his room. The papers were thin and had curled with the damp air. Some were full of holes where small creatures had chewed through. He ran a finger down columns of print, marvelling as always that something so flimsy could come from something as solid and compact as rock.

At first Vikram tried to organize the information, making notes in the margins of articles, scribbling ideas on a patch of the wall. The krill loved Adelaide: she was a tabloid goldmine. Vikram couldn’t say exactly what he was looking for, but he wanted to extract some nugget of truth from the speculation. The cuttings grew too many; soon they made an overflowing pile on the floor.

He wanted to dismiss her. She had everything. She was clever though; she had all but renounced her family without losing any of her inherited privileges. Then she had established her reign as undisputed leader of the Haze. The parties grew bigger and wilder and still the city forgave her. The media chronicled her exploits in tones of indulgence,
the
Daily Flotsam
with a more malicious glee. She never gave interviews.

He found a ten-page feature on the Rechnov family. Here they were lined up in a formal portrait: the Architect and his wife, now deceased, Feodor and Viviana Rechnov, the four children. The same proud, haughty faces, an extended version of the representation at Eirik’s execution. Vikram thought this quite naturally, and realized with a shock that he was able to consider the execution almost abstractly. It still enraged him, and the guilt remained, but Eirik’s death had become part of a sum; immersed into a greater mission.

In the older pictures, Adelaide was always beside her brother, identical with their oversized shades and their smiles full of open confidence. Here they were at some party or other. Getting out of a shuttle pod, late at night and drunk. Axel in a hang-glider. Adelaide jet-skiing. The pair of them on the roof of the Eye Tower, preparing to abseil past the Council Chambers. Vikram thought of the single photograph in Adelaide’s bedroom.

Something very odd had happened to Axel. Vikram had never paid much attention: these people were fairy tales to him. Now he examined the pictures with renewed interest. In one photo, Axel’s eyes were averted from the lens while his sister stared directly, accusingly ahead. Was there something protective in the way she stepped forward before Axel, her fingers at his elbow as though she’d just let go his arm?

Vikram tossed the photo aside. He was forgetting his original mission: to find Adelaide’s weaknesses and work out how to use them. He settled down with yet another article and began to read.

Hours later, the window-wall had drained of light but he had gathered several pieces of information that he could assume were factual. His eyes strained. Lost in thought, he had barely noticed the onset of dusk. He took a pinch of salt from his tin and threw it at the window.

What to do? By all accounts, Adelaide Mystik was particular in her habits. She opened her flat once a year for the Rose Night. Other than that, the Red Rooms were closed off to visitors. As an honorary member of the Gardeners’ Guild and a sporadic landscape designer, Adelaide was occasionally seen on botanical sites. For lunch, she frequented four or five select restaurants, and she dined late at night from an equally exclusive list. She was glimpsed in the famous bars and nightclubs of the Strobe. She took a lot of milaine and she drank.

Crucially, Adelaide was inaccessible without the aid of credit. Vikram didn’t have credit, so he was going to have to tackle her at home. There was one detail that had caught his attention. It was in a magazine interview with one of Adelaide’s alleged rivals.

Adelaide’s an insomniac,
he read.
That’s why she parties all night, because she can’t sleep. It’s nothing to do with stamina.

The by-line was attributed to a journalist called Magda Linn. The rest of the interview was useless; if Vikram hadn’t seen the sleeping pills beside Adelaide’s bed, he would have ignored it.

The next morning, when he reviewed his plan in the light of day, it seemed flimsy. Tangling with Adelaide Mystik was getting into political games; games whose rules he did not know and whose outcomes he could not predict.

He did not confide in Nils. He was probably wasting his time anyway. Linus’s idea was a good one but impractical, exactly the sort of thing a Citizen would suggest. Maybe Vikram should stop trying to decipher the bizarre world of the Rechnovs and go back to what he knew: to protests and waterway violence. He understood violence. Its mechanics, its randomness. Its lack of mercy. He thought of Drake’s casual hello to Rikard and wondered if there might be anything more to the connection than she claimed. He dismissed the idea. They’d known a lot of people back then; it was impossible to avoid running into a face from the past.