Tamaruq (11 page)

She opens the box in Mikkeli’s name first. It is empty except for a folded piece of paper and a necklace. She recognizes the necklace at once: a shark tooth strung on a single cord. The last time she saw it, the necklace was around her twin’s neck.

The letter is a copy. Her brother’s handwriting leaps from the page, blotched here and there with frenzied splatters of ink. She already knows what the letter says: Vikram recited it to her word for word. It is Axel’s goodbye note.

She folds the letter back and slips it into her pocket. As she activates the key on the second box, she notices her hands are trembling.

What the hell did you find, Axel…

Inside is a sheaf of papers, each stamped with a familiar motif. She has seen this symbol before. Six-legged. Translucent-winged.

Operation Whitefly.

She spreads the papers over the table and begins to read.

The papers are in no particular order. They date sporadically from the past fifty years. There are logs of ships approaching the city. Ships from other places. Ships from land. There are execution orders for the crews of those ships. She reads through the list, disbelieving.

Polaris
, 14

Cepheus Blue
, 11

Svetlana
, 7

Draconis V
, 21—

It goes on.

Some of the names have scribbled notes against them.
Some resistance encountered. We had to weight them…
There are references to meetings. Payments made to certain members of the skadi. Records of Osirians who tried to leave the city, but were incarcerated or removed. There are documents signed by the founding family elders.

The names include Leonid Rechnov, Adelaide’s grandfather.

She stops reading, overcome with nausea. Panicking, she looks around the room again. There are no receptacles, nothing but the chair she is sitting on and the table in front of her and the two vaults. She clamps her hand over her mouth, trying to swallow down the rising bile, but her stomach heaves irrepressibly. She grabs Axel’s empty vault and vomits into it.

She slams the lid of the box shut and pushes it away from her. Sweat prickles her skin. She feels contaminated, unclean. It isn’t just the shock, or even the mounting sense of horror over what she has discovered. Worse than that, she can’t ignore the idea that some part of her already knew – or could have known, if she’d only thought to follow the signs.

And now she knows the truth she wishes she had stayed in the west, anonymous, that she had never met Dien, never got sucked into playing at revolution, because that’s what it feels like compared to this: a game.

She thinks of her grandfather, slowly ageing in a brocaded room, a glass of octopya clutched in his trembling fingers. She remembers the intensity in Leonid’s voice as he muttered something she did not, at the time, understand.

Nothing but the white fly.

And then he said something else.

Don’t be too quick to judge me.

He knew, she thinks. He knew I’d find out. Perhaps he knew Axel already had.

The contents of Axel’s vault could bring down the city’s entire infrastructure. The founding families. Adelaide’s family. Regardless of which individuals know what, all of the lines would be discredited. The elders would be stripped of their privileges, put on trial, perhaps even executed under Osirian law.

Her grandfather, who she loves, has signed off on these despicable acts. He’s lied to her. He’s lied to everyone.

Once again the nausea threatens to overcome her. She presses her hands to her mouth, swallowing.

And yet he’s so old now. So frail. She would be surprised if he lived out the year. Does he deserve this exposure, at this stage in his life? Even knowing what he has done, the idea of him being dragged from the Domain and drowned in an execution tank is repellent. Surely he must have believed he was acting out of necessity?

But if Whitefly is still in enforcement, then there must be others who condone it. Her father, Feodor, for certain. Linus? Does Linus know about Whitefly? Linus, who said quite clearly on the o’dio
we must expect the unexpected?

Linus knows.

The taste of bile lingers on her tongue and at the back of her throat. She is trapped in this room, trapped between the truth and the outside world. What in stars’ names is she supposed to do now?

And yet, at the very edge of her fear, barely in focus, there is something else. She felt it before, watching the expedition boat leave. She feels it now. Hope. That because of this – because of this terrible and terrifying truth – there might be something else out there.

There might be land. There might be people.

I wish you could have seen this, Vikram. I wish you could have known.

The minutes count down too quickly as she sits in the white-walled room, wondering what to do.

If she leaves the documents here, and remains silent, she is complicit in a conspiracy that affects every soul in the city.

If she takes them out of this room, the documents will be in Dien’s hands, for Dien to do whatever Dien thinks is right.

She knows the western woman won’t hesitate to use them.

Finally she takes Axel’s necklace and pulls it over her head, tucking the cord under her clothes. The shark tooth nestles against her sternum. Then she stuffs the Whitefly papers back into Mikkeli’s vault and calls the guard.

‘What the fuck took you so long?’

Dien is fraught with impatience – and something else too. The thirty minutes are long past, and Dien is frightened. She doesn’t like being this side of the border. As they hurry outside, Adelaide feels the same fear infecting her. The sleek beauty of the Osirian architecture rings too bright and false; the windows glint, malevolent, screening the players within. She fights to suppress a surge of paranoia.

‘Not here.’

They barely exchange a word for the duration of the return journey, but Dien keeps herself as close as Adelaide’s shadow. When they reach Dien’s apartment, a few of the activists are engaged in a lively meeting. Dien expels everyone but herself and Adelaide. They disperse with reluctance.

‘So? Was it worth it?’

Adelaide pulls out the necklace.

‘This was my brother’s.’

‘And?’

She extracts the letter from her pocket.

‘His goodbye note.’

‘Is that it?’

Adelaide hesitates, twisting the shark tooth between thumb and finger. The enamel is smooth, the shark long dead. She thinks of her brother at the moment of writing, the horses cantering at the back of his mind even as he scripted his goodbye. She thinks of the ships who came looking, their carcasses sunk beyond the Atum Shelf with the weighted bones of the crews; the loved ones on land who would wonder, and after a time would try and fail to grieve, because they could not let go of a chance, an obstinate sliver of chance, that something might come back. She thinks of a burning tower, western hands pulling her from the waves, Mikaela’s voice:
because you need us
. A man with a scalpel and a salt box. Ole’s silent plea. She thinks of Dien’s face, bloodied and swollen, her breath huffing in the icy night, Adelaide’s body a mine of aches.
Are you done?

Dien, who is staring at her now, waiting for an answer.

She could lie, of course. She could tell Dien anything she wanted and Dien would believe her, because somehow, on that strange and volatile night, they reached an accord.

But she is done with lies.

‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘There’s something I need to tell you about. It’s called Operation Whitefly, and it’s been going on for a very long time.’

When she has finished talking, Dien sits with her hands clasped very tightly together, stupefied into silence. Adelaide has never seen her at a loss for words.

‘Fuck,’ says Dien at last. ‘Fuck.’

She stands up, sits down, and stands up again. She starts to circle the apartment.

‘This changes everything.’

‘I know.’

‘This – will bring down the Osiris Council.’

‘It would do.’

Dien pauses briefly by the window-wall. ‘You have to go back and get those papers, Rechnov.’

‘My family would be arrested. Possibly killed.’

‘Your family deserve to be killed. They’re murderers. Listen to what you’re telling me! They’ve executed entire crews, for stars’ sake. They’ve torpedoed ships.’

‘That was a long time ago – most of it happened after the Great Storm. My grandfather is dying.’ She keeps her voice firm. Dien will pounce on any hint of weakness. ‘He won’t last the year.’

Dien shakes her head.

‘Justice comes late. But it’s still justice.’ She nibbles at her lower lip, smudging what’s survived of her lipstick. ‘It’s still justice.’

‘Dien. I won’t let them take him.’

‘You can’t sit on this. This is our passport to breaking open the border!’

‘You think so?’

Something in Adelaide’s tone stops Dien in her tracks.

‘Of course it is.’

‘You think because you can expose my family, and a couple of other families, that the Council will suddenly open up the border?’

‘If we’re the ones to expose them—’

‘No. They’ll clamp down even harder. If they don’t claim it’s a hoax, they’ll twist the whole thing to make out that they were the ones to uncover the conspiracy. They’ll make examples of the Rechnovs, the Dumays and the Ngozis. But the rest – the rest will survive.’

‘You’re wrong,’ says Dien. But for the first time, she sounds uncertain. Adelaide feels a flicker of sympathy.

‘I know the City. I know how they work.’

‘So what? You think we should ignore this? Let your arsehole family get away with it, while you and I carry on as if nothing’s happened?’ Dien delivers a vicious kick to the bufferglass, and looks as if she’s about to follow it up with her fist, before thinking better of it. ‘Hell’s teeth!’ she shouts.

‘No, I’m not saying that. We can’t do that.’

‘Then what do you propose, Rechnov? What the fuck do you propose?’

‘We need a meeting with Linus.’

‘Your brother?’

‘Get him to come to the west. Listen. There’s one more thing. The distress signal, the one no one has ever answered? There’s a reason for that. Whitefly started blocking it, less than a year after the Great Storm. We need to get that signal back out – let people know we’re still here. And for that, we need Linus.’

Dien looks disgusted.

‘I need a fucking drink.’

Raqua was never Adelaide’s drink of choice, but she savours it now, both the fiery taste on her tongue and the burn that drops right to the stomach. Across the room, Dien sits on the floor, her back to the window-wall. She has switched off her scarab. Dusk is falling but Dien leaves the lights off, and doesn’t move, and Adelaide knows better than to disturb her. In the gathering gloom, all the events of the last few weeks seem to bleed together. The days adrift. The man who tried to assault her. Dien. The meet. The gatherings that followed. The crowds of westerners. The vault.

‘How did he find all this?’

Dien’s voice is low and slurred.

‘How did your brother know?’

‘I don’t know.’ Adelaide’s thoughts turn with difficulty to Axel. The slow, insidious progress of his illness, the vacancies that had opened up in his mind where before there had been dervishes of thought. ‘I don’t know when Axel discovered this. I don’t know if it was the thing that made him go mad, or if he didn’t even know what it was.’

‘You said something, at the meet. You said something about horses. That he saw things.’

‘He had hallucinations.’

‘You said you saw them sometimes too.’

‘Maybe.’ She doesn’t like to think too much about that other woman, Ata. The one who had given up, in a way that seems inconceivable now. ‘Or maybe I just expected to see them.’

‘There are other people like Axel, you know. In the west. He wasn’t unique.’

Adelaide can no longer make out the features of Dien’s face, only her silhouette against the meagre light through the window-wall.

‘People who have visions,’ says Dien. ‘People who kill themselves. It happens all the time, but no one talks about it. If people knew there was something else out there – that there was land, something to give them hope…’

Adelaide speaks gently.

‘You’ve asked me about Axel, now answer me something. I asked you, before, why you were doing this. You said there were a lot of reasons.’

‘And you want to know what they are.’

‘I want to understand.’

‘I wasn’t lying, Rechnov. There are a lot of reasons. But it’s not like you’re probably thinking. It’s not like I can just list them, or there’s some dramatic event that changed everything. Here, pass me the raqua, will you?’

Adelaide refills both their glasses, and passes one to Dien. She waits.

‘It’s – a thousand little things,’ says Dien. She takes a gulp of the raqua. ‘You know, most people just want to get on with things as best they can, without hurting anyone else. And I was like that. For a long time, I was like that. I had my job and it wasn’t easy, I worked long hours, overtime that wasn’t paid, but I was good at it. I knew I was good at it. What do you call that, Rechnov? Job satisfaction.’ She laughs, but not unkindly. ‘Well, you wouldn’t know, and that’s just what you were born to. Your luck. But yeah. I started noticing things, little things, everyday things. Friends who had run-ins with the skadi for no good reason, just because a skad was bored and wanted to kick off. Having to wait five weeks to get an electrician out, or another patient in the morgue because we didn’t have the right meds. It wasn’t worse than before, I was just noticing it. And then I couldn’t stop noticing it. And one day I turned around and realized I wasn’t the person I’d been a year ago, or two years ago, or whenever I’d last – taken stock. But, having got to that point, I did have to admit that there wasn’t a reset button. I could carry on doing what I was doing and driving myself slowly mad, or I could do something about it. After that… it was only a matter of time before I ended up with this crowd.’

She drains her glass.

‘There you go, Rechnov. There’s your story.’