The waterways were quiet. It was an achingly cold but clear night, and Vikram could hear the motor hum as his boat cut through the waves, uninhibited by other traffic. He ran a hand over its sides. He’d had the boat for six weeks and he still felt a frisson of ownership with the touch.
As he steered through the western quarter, graffiti-covered slopes loomed and receded, the vivid images bluish in the moonlight. From the far side of the city a cheer went up, followed by the crackle of fireworks. Vikram looked up, trying to find the umbrellas of light amidst the sky’s star-studded pane, but he saw only a fading glimmer over to the east. The race must have begun.
He fumbled in a pocket for his Sobek scarab. It was slippery in his glove as he switched it on and spoke Adelaide’s name for the second time that evening.
“Hey, it’s me. Look, sorry I can’t make it-but enjoy the show.”
These small appeasements had become regular. They were for him, not her, although she did not know that. Axel’s letter haunted him. Right now, it was concealed beneath the lining of a locked drawer, and Adelaide, unaware of its contents, unaware even of its existence, was urging on her favourite glider with no notion that her brother waited for the white horse to speak.
He would tell her. When it was right.
The quiet struck him again. A lone gleam of light in the distance became a single tower, lanterns glowing at the window-walls. Vikram peered ahead through the shadowy maze of scrapers, and found what always followed such a display: fire on the water surface. They were committing the tower’s dead to the deep.
He switched the motor off and let his boat drift. He could see the bodies piled upon rafts, some already ablaze, others drenched in oil, their foreheads banded with salt so that the ghosts would recognize them as Osiris’s people. There must have been a power-cut, or a flash epidemic.
The mourners threw torches onto the pyres. Flames leapt high. When they were all alight, boats would tow the pyres to the ring-net and cast their cargo out to burn. Vikram had always thought that would be the most terrible of duties, escorting your loved ones to their unsettled grave, the stench and smoke of their passing rich on your tongue.
Now a chorus of voices echoed over the water, keening their grief without words. Heard from afar, the singing did not sound entirely human. The wind was in it, the waves. Out at the ring-net, the ghosts would be gathering.
The pyre blaze grew smaller. Vikram let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. He switched on the motor, welcoming the mechanical hum.
The shelter covered three floors of 307-West. The bunks were eight or ten to a room, narrow with thin mattresses, but they had pillows and blankets, and the rooms were warm. The second floor housed a medical room and the canteen. When Vikram arrived, no one was eating, but the lights were on and he could hear dishes clattering behind the serving hatch.
He found Shadiyah sitting on the end of a bench, both hands around a steaming mug, talking to their single security guard. The Resources division said they could not spare anyone else, although Vikram had noticed an increase in the skadi on the border over the last month.
“What are you doing here?” Shadiyah said. “You’re not on call tonight.” He thought she looked pleased to see him nonetheless.
“Nothing better to do,” he joked. “How’s things?”
“Alright. We had to break up a fight earlier and that raving old dear turned up again. Took offence to one of the nurses, decided she was a Council spy. Calmed down now. We’re full for the night but we just had two kids come in. Brother and sister, I reckon. Boy’s got a nasty knife wound.”
“Shanty kids?”
“Likely as not. I’m going down to the med room now, want to come?”
“Sure.”
They walked down the corridor together, filling one another in on the minutiae of the day. The corridor walls had been painted pale yellow. They were still peeling, but they were cleaner and brighter. Disinfectant masked the underlying stenches brought in with the very poor.
A door to one of the dormitories opened and an old man shuffled out. He had rags wrapped around his feet.
“Osuwa,” he mumbled. “Bright lights-over again. Was the searchlight caught him in a dark hole.”
“Alright, Mr Argele?” called Shadiyah. “Are you looking for someone?”
He peered at them from under bushy eyebrows. His face was a garden gone wild; hair, beard, even his eyelashes seemed overgrown.
“Turn off the searchlight, young woman,” he ordered Shadiyah. “They’ll be here soon. Don’t you know your discipline?”
He retreated and shut the door. Vikram and Shadiyah paused, listening for signs that he might have disturbed the other men. But there were no sounds from inside. Just the muffled rumble of the laundry room a few doors down, as the dryers turned in their final cycles.
“Young woman,” echoed Shadiyah. “First compliment of the day.”
Vikram had found his colleague on a boat frying up kelp toast for hungry kids. It was her hands that struck him first. She had been wearing fingerless gloves. Her fingertips were rough skinned, their nails short and slightly yellowed, a blister on her left thumb from the spitting fat. Her hands brought back a jumble of memories: hours spent in line at soup kitchens or fry-boats, waiting to beg for scraps at the end of the day.
Shadiyah told Vikram her story whilst smoke from the grill drifted out of the boat window. She received a negligible amount of funding for her tiny charity. It was a tough business. Her fry-boat was raided every month for its stock. Shadiyah had a sharp mouth and a discerning eye; she was able to distinguish the hungry from the starving.
“And sometimes it’s a fine line,” she’d said, leaning out to hand down a sizzling, paper-wrapped kelp square to one of her beneficiaries. “After all, who this end of town ain’t hungry?”
She turned down his offer of a job instantly. He hadn’t thought that his exposure to the City would show so soon, but perhaps it had already begun to tint him. He came back the next day, and the day after. It took time to persuade her.
It was time well spent. Once she had agreed, Shadiyah took practical charge of the shelter, creating a model on which future projects would follow. Walking through their allotted floors, they had planned everything together from the layout of the building to an information campaign. They printed flyers and people handed them out on the aid scheme boat kitchens.
Shadiyah knocked before entering the medical room.
“It’s only me and Vikram,” she said briskly.
The children’s heads snapped up. Their faces were wary and hard as ice. The boy was perched on the single bed, his toes grazing the floor. In one hand he clutched what looked like a bundle of rags. Vikram realized the medics had cut his jumper away. A clump of t-shirts were peeled back and one of the doctors was applying stitches to a ten centimetre gash across his shoulder, whilst the other held a tray of needles and gauze. The sight of the pinched flesh brought back Vikram’s own knife injury in a flash; he struggled not to avert his eyes.
The girl slunk back against the bed curtain. Her hair was chopped as short as the boy’s. She had a bowl of soup at her mouth and her tongue poked out, mid-lap. Her eyes darted; Vikram, the doctor, the door, the needle, the door, the boy. There was a fading bruise on her cheekbone and scratches on her neck.
“Hey,” said Vikram. “Everything okay?”
At the sound of his voice the girl jerked backwards. The soup slopped in the bowl.
“We’re alright,” said the doctor holding the tray. “It’s a nasty cut, but it’ll heal. Just make sure you keep it clean,” she told the boy. “We’re going to give you some pills and an antibiotic spray. I want you to use it twice a day. Okay?”
There was no reply. All of the muscles in the boy’s shoulders were tense as the other doctor hooked his needle in and out, gradually knitting the exposed flesh together. Anaesthetic must have curbed the pain but not the desire to bolt. Vikram could see the outline of a knife at the boy’s hip. He knew that if anyone tried to take it, the boy’s hand would snap to his side in a second.
“You give it me,” said the girl suddenly. Her voice was a tiny rasp like a match being struck.
“What’s that, puffin?” said Shadiyah.
“Gimme the anti-whatsit. They won’t find it on me.”
Vikram caught the subtle interplay between brother and sister; the boy’s quickly masked glare, the girl’s concealed shrug.
The female doctor, Marete, spoke to the girl. “It’s very important. Don’t give it away, you understand? And don’t sell it. Not to anyone. Or your brother will get really sick.”
For answer, the girl held out her palm. Marete hesitated a moment and looked at the other doctor, who gave a curt nod.
“We’ll go get it,” said Shadiyah. “Standard issue, Hal?”
“Please.”
Vikram and Shadiyah went next door and swiped into the medical supplies room.
“How old do you reckon they are?” he asked.
“The boy says thirteen but I reckon ten or eleven.”
“Did he say how he got the cut?”
Shadiyah raised her eyebrows to suggest what a ridiculous question this was and Vikram nodded. She was right. He could guess-he could even ask, but he would not find out. They were shanty town kids, by the half-starved look of them. Somebody owned them-one of the dealers, one of the pimps or the gangs. They were lucky to have survived this long.
Vikram opened the medicine cabinet but did not immediately take out the prescriptions.
“I saw a funeral, on my way here.”
She nodded. “Bad business. The skadi raided a tower last night. Suspected insurgents, you know the lines. People resisted. It got messy.”
“No one told me.”
“They wouldn’t, would they.”
He checked the list supplied by the doctors.
“Do you remember Osuwa, Shadiyah?”
She gave him a quick, measured glance.
“Of course I do. I was twelve, I was on the waterbus. I heard the explosion first. Then boats started speeding past. By the time I got to Market Circle everyone knew what had happened.” She sighed. “And that it was only a matter of time before the reprisals. I’m not surprised Mr Argele raves about it, a lot of people went mad after those few weeks.”
“Worse than the last riots?”
Shadiyah leaned against the work surface, her hands wrapped awkwardly around the edge of the bench. “Different. Because it wasn’t just the skadi, and it wasn’t just violence. To give citizens guns, that was a terrible, awful vengeance. The corpses we saw hadn’t just been killed, they were barely people.” There was a brief silence. “I suppose you want to know if I agreed with Osuwa.”
The room seemed a little darker, a little narrower.
“Do you?”
“No, Vik, I don’t condone arbitrary killing. But I won’t deny that there was a part of me, whilst they were hunting us like rats, there was a very large part of me that said they deserved everything they got.”
She straightened, adjusting her headscarf with her usual deft touch.
“They is such an elusive term,” she said.
Vikram found the prescriptions and made a mental note of what they were running low on. After they had delivered the medication, Shadiyah made up two bedrolls in the laundry room whilst Vikram checked the dormitories. In each bunk he made out the hump of a sleeping body. Snores and rattling breath filled the rooms, but tonight everyone was still. Vikram heard Mr Argele mutter a few blurred words in his sleep. He was one of the shelter’s regulars.
They left the children alone to settle in their bedrolls. In the canteen, Vikram reconvened with the doctors. Marete was filling in the record book. He peered over her shoulder.
“You can’t record them as brother and sister.”
“Why not?”
“Population control laws,” said Shadiyah.
“Shit, yes of course.” Marete tore out the page and started again.
“Only one of them is legally entitled to aid,” Vikram reminded her. “We’ve got to be careful. They’ll slash our funding if they know we’re supporting multiple offspring.”
When he left the shelter, the sky was pitch dark with cloud. It felt late, but his watch told him it was only twenty-two thirty. The tarpaulin over the boat was covered in frost. It shimmered like a half-submerged iceberg. He hauled off the tarp and folded it, noticing a man observing him from the window of a tower across the water. The surveillance was unapologetic. He sensed other eyes too, hidden in the darkness of waterways and decking. He knew in that instant that he had become that incalculable thing: an airlift. Something to be watched.
As he turned the ignition key and the boat purred into life, he decided to do something he should have done a long time ago.
The decking around his old tower was thick with boats. He circled until he found a gap to park, secured the boat and because he did not intend to linger, stuffed the tarp into the storage space under the seat. The tower doors parted and a man staggered out, holding his arm and cursing. Two others followed.
“Want to say that again, mate? To my face?”
Vikram slipped past them into the unlit passageways of the building. The shouts and blows of the fight were cut off as the doors slid shut.
Inside, a rancid stench crawled up his nostrils. He tried the lift. There was a clanking sound. He thought at first that it had been fixed, but realized the sound came from another lift much further up. As he began the familiar, gruelling climb, he felt the hierarchy of his senses shifting. He had become too dependent on sight. The smell separated into parts: fish, wet kelp, cigarettes and manta, dirt, mould, old blood, placebo chemicals. Every couple of floors he passed a shadowy form going in the opposite direction, or the backlit tableaux of two people talking in an open doorway. Kids shrieked as they chased one another blind up and down the steps. Vikram moved instinctively, one hand brushing the walls. He could not tell if the bodies he stepped over were catatonic or dead.
Floor thirty-five was dark and quiet. He stepped up to his old door with the key, before he realized that it was ajar.
He pushed the door. It swung open, slowly and noisily. He saw bodies lumped in the gloom, heard the hiss of breath. A figure scrambled to its feet, pale steel in one hand. Cold sliced along his old scar.
“Get out.” The voice was female.
Vikram stood still.
“I said get out,” she repeated. She levelled the knife.
“I don’t mean any harm,” he said. “I used to live here. I left some things.”
He caught a glimpse of white eye, smelt the fear on her. She would not hesitate to sink that knife.
“I never saw you before,” she said. “And if you wake my kids I’ll see no-one else does, either.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. It’s your place now, that’s fine. There’s just one thing I wanted-my salt tin.”
There was a pause. He saw movement in the sleeping forms beyond her and he sensed her dual attention on them and him.
“Weren’t any salt tin when I got here.” The knife shook but she did not drop her wrist.
“It was a silver thing, about the size of a fist.”
“I said it weren’t here. Think I’d lie? Not likely to be angering the dead when I’ve got four mouths to feed, am I? You get out of here now.”
He backed away, hands raised. She pushed the door to. He knew she was waiting on the other side, listening for his departure.
The door did not close properly. He never had repaired the lock. The woman had broken in, or someone else had before her. She was entitled to the room.
Ten floors down there was a glow under Nils’s door. For several minutes Vikram stood in the corridor, uncertain and not sure of the reason for it. Finally he knocked. The door opened and Nils gave a roar of surprise.
“Vik! Wondered when you’d turn up. Come in, come in. Meet Ilona. Ilona, sweetheart, it’s Vikram, I told you about him, remember?”
Nils’s room was a pool of warmth. He had a heater burning, an unusual extravagance. Vikram realized it must be for the benefit of the girl. She was enveloped in one of Nils’s jumpers. A bleached wing of hair fell across her face.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hey,” he said.
Nils hauled him into the room and shut the door by leaning on it. Vikram realized his friend was on the way to being drunk.
“Have a drink, have a drink. We’re celebrating tonight, aren’t we Ilona?”
Ilona did not say anything more, and exactly what they were celebrating was left unclear. Vikram sat on the floor and took the proffered bottle. Greasy papers were balled up in the corner, but the smell of food couldn’t quite mask the stale ash and human reek beneath. He had never noticed those things before. He had a sudden desire to join Nils in his inebriation. He took a draught from the bottle.
“I just went up to the old place.”
Nils gestured to a corner.
“Your stuff’s there. Figured you might not be back for a while so I broke in before anyone else did.”
Vikram looked at the little bundle. His salt tin was there. He felt a flush of guilt.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t be stupid, you’d have done the same for me.”
“I should have been round weeks ago.”
“Been busy, from what I heard. I knew you’d be along sooner or later. C’mon, have a drink, tell me how it’s been going.”
Seduced by the rough edge of the liquor and the heater’s warmth, Vikram filled Nils in on the past six weeks. Ilona maintained her silence, watching him from behind the dyed curtain of hair. There was something about her, something obvious, that was eluding Vikram.
“What do you think?” he asked, when he had finished. “Have we made any impact?”
He was eager to recruit his friend. Straddling two communities was a lonely position; he needed allies. Nils, with one arm draped around Ilona’s shoulders, looked thoughtful.
“It’s early days.”
“That doesn’t sound positive.”
“No-it’s just… It’s going to be a hard winter, Vik. Of course people need food and shelter. But there’s so many of them now, I mean, where do you even start.”
“I think people are scared to ask for help.”
“And Adelaide Mystik-that might have been a good thing and a bad thing. She’s a bit of a joke this side of town. I mean, you know that, right.”
“Nils, I needed her.”
“Sure, it was the only way.” Nils leaned forward, his eyes glittering. “But there’s talk, Vik. First the fishing bans. One of our boats got gunned down by fucking skadi last week for so-called illegal hunting. They didn’t even have any fucking fish. Skadi raided a tower last night, said there was a threat to the gliding race but we all know that’s bullshit. Now there’re rumours of another kelp shortage. You’ve got contacts now, you tell me Vik, is it true?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard.”
But if it’s true, he thought-then we’re already too late.
“You want to help? I could use a good man, Nils.”
Nils hesitated. “I’ve got-a few things to take care of.” Vikram waited but Nils did not elaborate. Instead, he reached forward to punch Vikram on the arm. “Keep a hotspot for me, though.”
“I will.” Vikram was disappointed. He glanced at Ilona, who dropped her eyes. “I should be getting back. You have company.”
Nils squeezed the girl’s shoulder affectionately. “I do.”
They stood up. Vikram noticed, at waist height behind Ilona, a large hole hacked into the wall. Copper wires dangled from it. Vikram pointed.
“What-”
Nils waved a hand. “Oh, that, that. Trying to find a vein.”
“Well don’t fucking electrocute yourself.”
“No.” Nils scowled at the hole. “Got the wrong damn spot. Current’s to the left.” He put a hand on Vikram’s shoulder. Vikram felt his friend’s weight, too light for a drunk man. Nils’s eyes were beginning to glaze.
“Anyway. We won’t abandon you. If it all goes wrong, there’s backup. You should know that, Vik.”
A tremor crossed Ilona’s face. It was so fast, Vikram thought he might have imagined it. Her hair obscured any expression.
“Backup?”
His friend offered only a lazy smile.
“Always,” he said. “What d’you take us for? Night, Vik.”
Vikram angled the water directly onto his face, powered drops battering his eyelids and cheeks. He turned the temperature up one setting, then another, until it was almost too hot to bear. He emerged ready to embrace what remained of the night. Adelaide had called and he’d told her to come over.
A Sobek o’vis lay in its box. Linus Rechov had sent it to him as a home warming gift. Vikram poured himself a mug of chilled water and settled down to unpack its mysteries. He had unrolled the screen and attached it to the wall when Adelaide arrived. The flickering images provoked a squeal of excitement. Vikram swilled out his only other mug and opened a bottle of raqua whilst Adelaide settled on the lone square of carpet.
She pointed to the anime; a human diver with scaled skin undulating through still water.
“They asked me to do the voice for that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It was when Axel-when he started forgetting.”
Vikram sank into the sofa and muted the o’vis. They clanked mugs.
“How was the race?”
“Oh, predictable. I won some money. It might get you another boat.”
There had been one collision, she said, the wings got tangled but nobody died. She gave a little hiccoughing laugh when she said this, and he wondered if she was ever scared going to the races, after what had happened to the Dumays. As she talked her eyes roved the room, checking for changes.
“New salt-tin?”
“Old salt-tin,” he corrected, and in answer to her raised eyebrows, “I went back to the western place.”
Adelaide clapped her hands and drew her legs into a lotus, her attentive pose. “You went back! That explains it. I knew you were preoccupied.”
“Mm.”
“Was it strange? Ghosts of the past?”
“A few,” he acknowledged.
“You never did tell me what happened to her.”
“Who?” Vikram stalled.
“Your friend,” she said. “Mikkeli.”
It sounded odd, Keli’s name, on Adelaide’s lips. She pronounced it like a talisman.
“She was shot,” he said. “The skadi killed her.” He glanced at Adelaide. The lamp’s shadow bisected her face. He was inclined to talk, but he looked away again. “It was towards the end of the riots. The Guards were driving us back tower by tower. They’d cut off the lines to a desalination plant. Everyone was worn out, we knew they’d won, though nobody wanted to admit it.”
He stared at the folds of the curtain.
“Anyway, Mikkeli said we’d try one last thing. If she could sneak in and turn the supply pipe back on, we could make a final push. It was a mad plan, but Mik was like that. Me and Nils both said we’d do it, but she insisted she had the best chance, and she was usually right. She got inside the control tower. The rest of us were nearby, waiting for her signal. I was meant to be getting her away. It was before dawn so everything was grey, you couldn’t see much. I waited, but no signal came. And then she appeared.”
He saw it again. The way he saw it almost every night in his dreams. He watched Mikkeli exit the tower and walk to the edge of the decking. Her yellow hood obscured her face. In one hand she had a gun. She stayed there, motionless. Why didn’t she move? She was exposed.
Mikkeli’s hands lifted, very slowly, to her head. She still clutched the gun. He realized what was happening. Someone else was on the decking. They had Keli hostage, but she wouldn’t give up her weapon. What was their plan? To flush out the rest of the rebels? But Keli would have a plan too; she always had a plan. Vikram urged his boat closer.
It was the music he heard first-an assault of bass driven metal. A motor boat skidded around the corner. It was thronged with skadi. Their guns were a fifth limb. In the predawn light they seemed to dance, all five limbs contorting in crazed shapes. The music splintered the cold, cold day, like breaking glass. Gunshots cracked. Mikkeli dropped instantly. She toppled into the water and gunfire peppered the sea and her body. The skadi hurtled on with whoops and cheers.
Vikram threw himself over the side of the boat. The cold was shocking. The waves fought him as he splashed through the freezing water. He reached Mikkeli at last, wrapped his arms around her body and hauled both of them onto the decking. He put both hands on her chest and pumped. Blood and seawater leaked from her mouth and nose. He put his mouth to hers and forced his breath into her. For an incredible second he heard her gurgle, but it wasn’t her, or if it was it was the last sound she made.
A gun clicked at his head and he willed the skad to shoot before rage and grief ignited and he moved so fast he caught the man behind him by surprise. Punched him hard across the temples. They fought briefly. More figures spilled from the tower. Hands seized Vikram, wrenched his arms behind his back, shoved him forward until his chin struck the decking. Handcuffs nicked his skin. He heard the words western and scum and he felt their kicks, each a fresh pool of acute pain but he was beyond it, so far beyond.
Silver bars of frost were already forming on Mikkeli’s lashes.
“I got her out of the water,” he said. “But she was already dead.”
Adelaide’s face was intent. Her eyes glistened with tears or reflected light. She leaned forward to put her hand on his knee. “There was nothing you could do.”
“Maybe.”
“Sometimes you lose people and there’s nothing you can do.”
“It was a stupid plan. We should never have agreed to it.”
Adelaide was shaking her head.
“Ifs,” she said. “Ifs are no hope. They are the things Osiris has decided cannot be, and yet we dwell on them as if they were ever possibilities.”
“You talk about this city as if it’s the world.”
“It is the world.”
“Your brother didn’t believe that.” He spoke without thinking and Adelaide looked at him sharply. “Why else would he want a balloon?” he said quickly. “He wants to leave. He must do.”
She said nothing. He felt the weight of Axel’s letter. Tell her. Now’s the time. He needed to ease his mind of at least one burden. On the brink of speech, he paused. But when he spoke, the words altered.
“I promised Mikkeli, you know. That other people wouldn’t have to die…” He broke off. “I think she might have preferred vengeance.”
The look they exchanged, a ghost of a smile, was neither happy nor sad. Vikram reached out and pulled her to him. He slipped his hands under the silk of her shirt, over the contours of her ribcage. Her head fell back and her eyes closed. He unhooked the clasp of her bra. It was a body that had never known hunger, had barely known cold. Sometimes he despised her for its ignorance. He kissed the hollow of her throat, her navel, the boundary of lace at her hips. Whilst their limbs tangled and her body shuddered he wondered if his hate might show. In eyes or touch, or distance. In the air between their lips. Only when she was still did he embrace her. He was wide awake and he suspected that she was too, though her eyes remained closed. Neither of them moved.
The anime had finished. An archive reel played out on the o’vis in black and white.
Later, when Adelaide had fallen sleep, he carried her to the bed and pulled the covers over her hips. She mumbled something and rolled over. She hated to be held. If he fell asleep holding her he would wake to find she had shrugged him away, as though she feared the slightest and most human of constraints would cage her indelibly. He admired her resolution; he scorned her for not knowing the value of physical warmth.
Adelaide’s hair was screwed up under her cheek and against the bed. Looking at her, Vikram realized what had been bothering him about Ilona. It was her hair. Bleached, sheerly straight, it had been deliberately cut and coloured. The only place where girls wore their hair like that was on the shanty town boats. Which meant that Ilona belonged to somebody and Nils was playing a dangerous game.
Vikram rolled onto his side and gazed at Adelaide’s squashed, sleeping face. Now he felt a rush of tenderness. She lay on her front, limbs akimbo, stomach caving into the muddled sheets. He pressed his ear to the hollow between her shoulder blades and listened to the stubborn pulse of her heart. Adelaide was like the rainbow-fish whose tails she said glowed in the dark. The bright things were always hunted in the end.
“Morning, Vikram.” His assistant popped her head around the office partition. She was bulked up in coat, earmuffs and hat. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep.
Vikram glanced up from the Neptune and caught sight of the clock. Nine already. He had been in over an hour. “Morning Hella.”
“Did you see the race?”
“I missed it, actually.”
“Oh.” Her expression faltered. “It was interesting,” she settled. “You want a tea?”
“You’re a mind-reader.”
“Aren’t I?” she said. Still a bit shy.
He heard her putting the pot on in their cupboard of a kitchen, and the clink of a spoon as she prepared the glasses with ginger. Hella was another airlift. They were both nervous to begin with. The first week there was a major misunderstanding over transport arrangements for the boat kitchens. Seven crates of squid were lost to raiders. After blaming one another and shouting it out, they seemed to be settling into a rhythm.
Vikram stretched his arms over his head and felt his bones click. The figures on the Neptune gazed blandly out. He had never dreamed the Council would want so much administration. It seemed pointless in light of what he could be doing; scouting a location for the next shelter or recruiting staff, even handing out kelp rations on one of the boat kitchens. Adelaide said that this was their way of keeping him in check. She was probably right.
Hella entered with two steaming glasses. She gave one to him and cupped the other.
“So how was your evening?” she asked.
Last night’s events seemed unreal. Even Adelaide, whom he had left sprawled on his bed, sex and raqua lingering on her breath.
“It was a long night, actually. I dropped by the shelter. Mr Argele was there.”
“Oh, Mr Argele. What did he have to say for himself?”
“He called Shadiyah ‘young woman.’”
Hella giggled. “Bet she loved that.”
“I think she did, actually. How were the gliders?”
After they’d dissected the race from start to finish, Hella with hindsight, Vikram with imagination, his assistant went back to the other side of the partition. She took off her earmuffs, put in the earpiece, and put the earmuffs back on. The o’comm did not buzz that often. Most of their calls were outgoing.
He had an inkling that Hella had applied for the position because she could not quite reconcile her good fortune in escaping the mire. It was guts and hard work that had got her out, but that was not enough to shift the guilt. He knew because he felt it too. Every morning, they crossed the border to this cramped fifty-ninth floor office just inside the western quarter. Every evening, they could return to safe ground. Hella led a quiet life. She told Vikram she never saw her old friends.
Shadiyah called him mid-morning.
“Your birds have flown.”
“At least they came.”
“I hope they don’t get punished for it. Someone’s going to see the stitches and ask questions. If they take those antibiotics away, he’ll die within weeks. That’s if frostbite doesn’t do for him. Or pneumonia. Or hypothermia. Or the flu.”
Vikram leaned back in his chair.
“Shadiyah,” he began. “Why-”
“Don’t,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t ask. I know what you’re thinking. I’ll end up alone, frozen to death, or drowning in some flooded cell. But there’s community here, on our side, if you make it that way.”
The morning edged onward. One by one, lights in the opposite tower winked off. Vikram thought of Nils, who would probably be curled up with the girl, sleeping off his hangover. He thought about the choices he had made in Mikkeli’s name, in Eirik’s name, and wondered who they were really for, what they really meant. But they were past choices. This was his life now.