It took until two o’clock for Goran’s breathing to regulate and his pulse to slow. Adelaide stood under the mezzanine, watching his slack face. The eyelids slumped on their dual-coloured irises, heavy and creased, thin-lashed. The nostrils quivered. It had taken her a full week to remember the drugs she kept stashed in a hidden compartment of her bathroom; another week to summon the courage to use them. Goran woke at the tiniest disturbance. She was surprised he didn’t sleep with his eyes open, like a snake.
She crept forward and placed the soaked cloth delicately over his nose and mouth. He inhaled normally, then with a sudden, violent breath. She shrank back. His lungs sucked in the opiate fumes. She waited. This was where Vikram had first slept. Vikram, who thought she had betrayed him. She made herself entertain the thought, holding it hostage for her heart, testing. She willed herself to care.
Nothing. She had spent the two weeks well. She had been in limbo, floating, in all the gaps between time. She had been lighter than vapour and thinner than air, but she was frozen now.
She was ready.
After a minute she took Goran’s wrist. It was thick, muscle bound, and she had to push her finger deep to feel the pulse. As she expected, it had slowed.
For a further ten minutes she waited, allowing herself to hate him but coldly. Then she unbuttoned his jacket and felt inside the pocket and retrieved her keys and his scarab. She went to her room, put on her outdoor gear and picked up her waterproof haversack. Her boots were rubber soled and noiseless as she walked through the apartment, checking once more under the mezzanine. This time she trussed him, tying his hands together and then his feet, her heart jumping every time he shifted. The apartment was filled with the sounds of his laboured breathing and the oscillating machinery from the floors above. Goran would be in trouble for her escape. She was neither happy nor sorry. She was steel.
She slipped the key into the lock. A bubble of pleasure rose as she heard it turn-but she pushed it down, no time for that. She locked the door from the other side.
“Goodbye, Goran. I hope they give you hell.”
The corridor seemed overlarge after her incarceration. She glanced at the ceiling. As she lay night after night, thinking, plotting, she had wondered who knew about the facility, about the Siberian boat. Did Linus know? Had he lied to her all along? She had considered trying to break into the facility. But it would do no good; the scientists would hand her back to the Rechnovs the moment she was caught. The white fly had to wait.
She ran silently down the stairs, nervous of being trapped in the lift. Her lungs and calf muscles, inactive for too long, protested fiercely at the exertion. Once an apartment door opened and she froze in fear, but it was only a man staggering home drunk.
Surface level. This was the wager: her boat would still be here. There was no reason for them to move it, not with Goran guarding the door. She stepped out into open air. It smelled clearer and crisper than ever before. She walked around the decking, her heart thudding with anticipation.
And yes. There it was. Release gurgled in her chest. This time she let it, but kept her head focused as she stepped into the craft, reached under the seat where the spare key was taped, felt it drop into her palm. The electronic hum of the motor was one of the sweetest sounds she had ever known.
The dashboard flashed up with symbols. The battery was fully charged; she had at least twenty-four hours of driving before she’d need to stop at a charge point. Would charge points be easy to find where she was going? Someone would tell her.
As the boat pulled away from the decking, she allowed herself one glance up. She could make out a glimmer at the top of the scraper which might be from her apartment, or from the facility above. Steering with one hand, she tapped the familiar code into Goran’s scarab. Somewhere in Osiris, Lao’s o’comm rang and rang, but he didn’t answer. He was no use to her anymore. She disconnected from the Reef and hurled Goran’s scarab into the sea.
The water was choppy, crusted with foam. The towers slipped by with maddening slowness. Every impulse told her to increase speed-but it was a quiet night, and she could not attract attention. She avoided the main waterways lit with floating night lamps, and took a winding route through the outskirts. She aimed to reach the border at one of the sub-checkpoints. A transport barge passed her, carrying the stench of a fresh fish haul into the City. A late night waterbus followed it. The windows spilled orange rectangles onto the sea. Adelaide averted her face.
The wind picked up and she took the boat up a speed. Scores of towers lay between her and Goran; she was well away. She tipped back her head and relished the feel of the cold on her face, brittle and clean. Axel, if the delivery girl was to be believed, had spent entire days out on the balcony. Maybe her brother had not been so mad after all. Maybe he had realized what she had come to see: the City was a prison, which must be escaped.
He had to be there. She had scoured the City; there was nowhere left but the west. She could imagine it now: Axel packing his bags. The Whitefly documents-some part of his mind would have known they were important, had made him lock them up safe. And then he had run. Go west. The horses would have told him.
She was always destined to go there. The blind Teller had known it. She had told Adelaide months ago, but Adelaide hadn’t listened.
It has been spoken, sister. Spoken in the salt.
She glanced up at the stars, half hidden by cloud, and imagined Axel watching the same patterns. Waiting for the arrival of his twin.
What took you so long?
That was what he would say.
Twin searchlights beamed across the gap in the border netting, one from either side. There was a gap of seconds before they crossed. On the jetty, about fifty metres away, Adelaide saw the shadow of a guard.
Her heart began to thud. The full realization of what she was doing-what she had done-hit her forcefully. For a moment she was paralysed with doubt. Axel, she thought. Think of Axel. She waited, watching the circular arcs, counting the seconds between their passage. The searchlights crossed and separated, crossed and separated. The guard walked slowly across the jetty. At the edge he stopped, looking about. Adelaide cringed back inside her hood. Then his hands moved away from his gun, and as the searchlight swept over she saw that he was unbuckling his trousers to relieve himself.
Now was her chance. Keeping the motor to an almost inaudible hum, she urged the boat forward into the hundred metre stretch of water.
Manoeuvring between the beams of the searchlight, she used all of her strength to haul the boat this way and that. It seemed to take forever. The searchlight drew near. With a final wrench, the boat slipped past the narrow gap in the netting, only metres from the jetty and, she saw with a shock, a hulking barge.
She bent low to the boat and, not daring to look back, shot into the maze of the west.
On the other side there were no lights. Her thrill of exhilaration dissipated in the odd stillness. She looked about: up at the tower window-walls, ahead at the waterways. Not a glimmer. Vikram had told her about the west’s eternal problems with electricity, but this total darkness could not be right. Could it? She brought the boat’s engine down to a bare minimum and kept her lights off. Now she was crawling forward in near blackness, with only the glow from the retreating City to guide her on her way. It was fading all the time.
Fear gripped her. She was tempted to retreat, to get back into the City and find a friend’s apartment or a Boatel to hole up for the night. She turned the boat around, but the shadow of a bigger craft, crawling along the border, its searchlights seeking out the deepest troughs, made her steer towards the nearest tower.
You’re a Rechnov, she reminded herself. You’ve got no reason to be afraid.
But there was no reason for a Rechnov to be this side of the border, and if Vikram had taught her anything, it was that the Home Guards shot first and investigated afterwards.
A pale lambency drew her south, only to find that the light came not from any artificial source but from the sky itself. Her lips whispered silently as the spectacle became clear: aura australis. The aura dappled the night, shifting from green to yellow and back like a living, chameleon thing. She gazed skyward. Can you see this, Axel?
But as soon as they had appeared, the southern lights retreated. The boat rocked as she shifted her weight. What was down there, far below the surface? For the first time, she felt alien to her terrain.
She carried on, further into the west. The darkness was complete. She had planned to head for Vikram’s old tower, and from there to gain directions to the shelter, but without lights to guide her she had little chance of finding the right way. The lack of noise was beginning to spook her. It was as though the entire community had died.
She decided to navigate towards Vikram’s tower anyway. She had to judge the route based on her knowledge of the city’s contours, and an instinctive awareness of the west’s structural layout. The boat responded dutifully to her steering, although the sea was growing more aggressive and her hands inside their gloves were numb. She flexed her fingers. She could barely feel them. She wondered if her hearing had been similarly impaired by the cold.
A light winked over the waves, flashed against Adelaide’s boat and cut out.
“Psst! Get over here!”
After such a stretch of nothingness, she could hardly believe that the sound was real. But it had been human, that voice. She nosed the boat in its direction. The light winked on and off again, as she grew nearer. Her boat bumped against a decking.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“Stars! Are you crazy? Get inside!”
A hand latched onto Adelaide’s shoulder and tugged. She followed its pull, helpless in the darkness to do anything else, and climbed out of the boat.
“I need to tie up-”
“Pass me the chain, I’ll tie her.”
Adelaide hesitated, loathe to obey the anonymous voice. But neither did she want to return to the inky silence. She pocketed the keys and handed over the chain. Their gloves brushed. If the boat was secured, it was done noiselessly. The stranger’s hand found her arm once more and she was guided across the decking. There was a swish as the doors parted. They went into the tower.
The reek caught her by surprise. She coughed and swallowed the noise.
The voice switched on a penlight. Its tiny glow illuminated a blue hat pulled low over straggly hair, bright eyes in a dirty face. The girl was young; she could not be more than about fourteen. She cupped a hand around the penlight, shielding it between their two bodies.
“What are you doing out there?”
“I got lost,” Adelaide said.
“Lost? You lose track of time, or something?”
“I made a few bad turns, before I knew it…”
“Before you knew it, you were past curfew. You got to be careful, lady! Them boats out there, they don’t listen to excuses!”
“Yeah, I–I know.”
“Lucky I spotted you. I’m on watch here. They say I have seagull eyes. You want to sit with me for a bit? Gets boring on my own.”
“Sure.”
The girl switched off the penlight. Adelaide heard her fumbling with a lever. The tower doors opened with a soft whoosh and the girl settled down in the entrance. Adelaide sat beside her. Stationary, she felt the bitter cold. She wrapped her arms around her, wondering how many hours until daylight.
“You see a light-the slightest light-you tell me,” said the western girl, keeping her voice low. “And if you hear talking and all. That’s the one thing about them skadi. ” She spat the word with venom. “They make one hell of a racket-always know when they’re coming.” She added, more bitterly, “Guess you don’t need stealth when you got guns.”
“I’ll keep my ears open,” Adelaide promised. The stars knew she had her own reasons to keep her distance from the Guard. Skadi. She practised the word in her head. In the darkness the watch-girl would not see her lips moving.
It gave her an idea. She rubbed her gloved palms silently over the floor, and then over her face. She didn’t want to think about what was on the decking floor, but she was sure it had dirtied her face.
“They haven’t done this tower yet,” said the girl. “They might tonight. If they come we’ve got to shut this door quick. Ain’t no locking from inside but we got a good warning system. Kind of relay thing.”
“Do the boats come past here often?” Adelaide asked. She could not remember Vikram ever telling her about an alarm system, nor, now she thought about it, of patrol boats going through the western waterways so regularly.
“This neighbourhood there’s one every hour or so,” said the girl. “But they’re getting more often since the greenhouse. You must have been lucky not to meet one. Horrible things. I hate the way they sort of glide by, you know, as if they wasn’t really there.”
“ Skadi,” said Adelaide, putting enough contempt into the word to cover, she hoped, any mistake in pronunciation.
“Yeah.”
Waves lifted the decking. Spray landed on Adelaide’s nose and cheeks.
“Have you been on watch long?” she asked.
“Three hours. I’m relieved soon. Gets a bit lonely, you know, but someone’s got to do it. I volunteered.” The girl spoke proudly. “They wanted people who were involved, y’know, last time, but I said I wasn’t old enough last time and you got to start somewhere. Fifteen, ent I? Got a good pair of ears. Heard you, didn’t I? And you got a good quiet boat there. Why were you out so late anyways?”
“I’m looking for my brother. He’s disappeared.”
The girl gave her arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Everyone’s gone disappeared round here. Gone off to take a crack at the skadi, has he?”
“I think so.”
“My little bro’s talkin’ about joining Maak’s people-y’know, Maak. Ma’s got a hell of a time keeping him in. I know how he feels. Sometimes I want to go and join up myself but a knife ent much use against one of them. Not if you only use it once. Reckon I’d be good at stealth work, though.”
Something had happened since Adelaide had been locked up, something nobody had told her about. Home Guard boats belonged on the border, not in the western quarter, not unless there had been violence. What was the greenhouse? Who was Maak? Further questions would betray her ignorance, and her background, but the watch-girl seemed friendly, eager to talk, if Adelaide could find the right angle.
She was about to ask the girl if she knew about Vikram’s aid schemes when they were interrupted.
“Who are you yakking away to down there?”
Adelaide sensed the girl swivel around.
“Oh Drake, hey, this is-y’know I never got your name.”
“It’s Ata.”
“Ata. I’m Liis. She got caught out after curfew.”
“You better hole up here till morning,” said the newcomer. “I wouldn’t risk the bridges now, wind’s getting up.”
“Is, isn’t it?” Liis exclaimed. “I heard people saying a Tarctic’s on the way.”
“A Tarctic?” Adelaide was shocked into speech. She hadn’t bargained on being in the west when a Tarctic struck.
“-’s what they say.”
Liis got to her feet and Adelaide mirrored her. Her hearing was becoming more acute. They went inside. The woman called Drake flicked on a penlight. It seemed brighter this time. Drake smiled. One of her front teeth was completely black.
“She can crash with your folks, Liis?”
“Sure, she can!”
“Great. Good job, girl. You get some sleep now. Night, Ata.”
A creaking lower lift carried them the first twenty-five flights, juddering all the way up. Adelaide was relieved when they got out and groped their way up the lightless stairwell for the next three floors.
“Mind if we sit out here a minute?” Liis asked when they reached her door. “I need a smoke.”
“Sure.” Adelaide perched next to Liis. She heard the rustling of paper as Liis rolled herself a cigarette.
“Do you want one?” Liis asked.
“Please.” Goran had taken all of her cigarillos, which might have been useful here, if only to make contacts. In the flare of the lighter, Adelaide saw Liis’s pale face, the outline of a scratched and chipped door, the stairs pouring away into the blackness. She lit her cigarette. It tasted cheap and dirty but there was a rough sweetness to it, an end of day sweetness. Her lips tingled. She could imagine Axel sitting here, in the nameless dark, only his horses still bright enough to see.
“You know, sometimes I get dead scared out there.” Liis’s voice was a tiny whisper. “Sometimes I get thinking, if I died out there, no one would ever know how, or what happened to me or anything.”
Adelaide put an awkward arm around the girl’s shoulders. Through the layers of clothing, she could feel how thin the girl was.
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
Adelaide slept deeply and woke with a jolt. She did not comprehend, at first, where she was-strange faces, people jumping to their feet-a lot of people, more than she had thought a room this size could contain when her head hit the floor last night. Shouts volleyed between them.
“What the hell!”
“What was that-”
“Was that an explosion?”
“-’s the fucking skadi.”
The room vaulted into action. Adelaide scrambled out of the folds of her blanket, heart racing. A man lifted his shirt and checked a knife was at his belt. A woman-Liis’s mother? — gathered together all the bedding. A boy held them in place whilst she yanked them together with her belt. Two smaller children poised by the doorway, wide awake and alert. Liis stuffed things into a rucksack; newspapers, clothes, a pair of boots. Nobody asked who Adelaide was. Nobody cared.
“Ata-grab the other bag,” Liis said breathlessly.
Adelaide picked up the drawstring bag. It was lighter than she expected. In a matter of seconds, the room had been stripped to its peeling walls.
The boy opened the door and peeked out. From further down the tower came the sounds of invasion: people running up and down stairs, heavy boots, doors slamming, crashes and yells as doors were kicked in.
“Shit, they’re early,” said the boy. The woman shook his shoulder.
“Come on, move up.”
Adelaide followed Liis’s family, or friends, or room-mates, through the corridor and into the stairwell. This morning it was patchily lit. As they progressed upwards people were opening doors, peering blearily out. Some, like Liis’s group, had already got their belongings together and were also moving up the tower.
Congestion built up, noisy and incoherent. Adelaide had never seen so many people in one space. Their faces were hard and dirty, frightened. Within a couple of flights, she was separated from Liis’s friends and could only see the girl herself, blue hat bobbing in the crowd a little way ahead. She lost Liis momentarily, panicked and shoved forward. Where were they all going? No-one had said, because everyone knew-everyone but Adelaide.
A female voice shouted above the rest. “Liis! Over here!”
Leaning over the handrail from the floor above was the girl with the black tooth. Drake. Liis yelled back and Adelaide located her guide again. She wasn’t far ahead. Adelaide pushed through to her, relief welling, and together they joined Drake. People streamed from above and below, funnelling into a corridor.
“Early raid,” Drake panted. “We better get over the bridge. They’re already at level thirteen.”
“I’ve got me ma and all,” said Liis, gesturing below. In the moving crowd Adelaide saw the gaggle of mother, the boy and the two children. Liis’s mother had the bundle of bedding strapped to her back.
Drake gripped Liis’s arm.
“I know, I know, it’ll be alright, just make sure you get over, they mustn’t find anyone in the network.”
Liis waved at her family. “This way!”
Drake dove into the corridor. Liis followed Drake and Adelaide followed Liis. It was the lightest part of the tower that Adelaide had seen so far. Then she saw that the people in front were framed against a doorway. The light was coming from outside. They were going out of the tower, and there was no glass, no shuttle lines or enclosed bridges.
The queue in front of her dwindled in short bursts. There were twenty people between Adelaide and the exit. There were five. Then two. Liis was no longer in front. She gasped, tried to turn around, and was knocked forward. She was in the doorway.
Before she knew what was happening, her feet had stepped out onto an impossibly narrow metal catwalk. The wind whipped her hair out of its hood. She clutched at the rails and found two slack plastic ropes. She was wobbling on a rail in open air fifty floors above surface.
The bridge fed into the tower opposite. People in front of her were walking sure-footed along the metal. It was a good hundred metres away. The crowd pressed at her back. She almost lost her balance.
“Hey, watch your step!” The yell from behind was impatient. If she didn’t move she’d be pushed.
Adelaide took one diving breath and sprinted. Halfway across she looked down and saw the sea churning below. She saw the metal catwalk, riveted, orange with rust and glued together with stars knew what. She staggered, grabbed the rope, righted herself, ran on. At the other end she fell into a pair of outstretched arms.
The man’s mass was solid, safe. She stayed there, panting as though she had run the length of a shuttle line. She was aware of her rescuer shaking his head.
“Crazy!” he was saying.
Adelaide looked back, expecting Liis to be right behind her, but she could not see the other girl, only the impossible fragility of the bridge. She was not the only one frightened; others were refusing to cross, fighting to get back inside, but still more pushed forward. A man dashed across and Adelaide saw what she had not realized when making her own run-the bridge buckled under his weight. People pointed and cried out. Adelaide spotted Liis at last.
“Liis!”
She waved frantically.
The other girl raised her arm in response and yelled. Adelaide could not hear above the well of noise.
The man who’d caught her was shouting out.
“One at a time! Don’t put too much weight on it! There’s bridges on levels sixty-five and seventy!”
A woman stepped out. Adelaide recognized Drake. She had lost her hat. Drake put one foot on the bridge, paused for a second, and ran. Her boots struck the metal like gunfire. It was gunfire; the skadi were shooting.
Drake was over. Their eyes met in a glimmer of shared experience and then Drake too turned to look back.
“Okay, and another! One more!”
The crowd were no longer listening. Something had made them panic, something that Adelaide could not see. There was a surge and a line of people spilled onto the narrow bridge. Then a second surge and Adelaide’s hands went to her face. They toppled, from the bridge, from the fiftieth-floor doorway, one after another. They went as dominoes did. Over and over. Cries echoed into the gulf.
The bridge groaned. It sagged under the weight of clinging bodies. Some dangled from the underside, holding on by two hands or by one. More were falling. They fell like dolls. The bodies were all sizes, some large, some incredibly small. She could hardly believe that they were real except for the screams.
She saw Liis. The girl was on the bridge, gripping the rope, urging on the woman in front of her. Someone pushed Liis from behind and Liis turned, gesticulated with her free hand, yelled.
The entire construction swayed.
“Liis!”
Adelaide was not sure if she or Drake had shouted. Both of them were staring, side by side, powerless.
“Help! Help us!”
“It’s going, it’s going to break-”
“This way, keep moving, come on, run, get off, run!”
Adelaide’s rescuer was hauling those who had made it bodily inside. Adelaide and Drake were pressed against the interior wall.
There was a crack. At the far end, the rivets holding the bridge gave. The metal construction plunged downwards out of Adelaide’s sight. People scrabbled on the ledge opposite. She saw three, four, five more fall. They grabbed at the feet of those above, who were in turn pushed out by the weight of the blind crowd.
Adelaide’s hands shook against her cheeks. She stopped counting.
Her rescuer threw down a rope. A pair of hands, Drake’s hands, reached for it and Adelaide took hold too, understanding that they must all pull to save anyone left to save. The bridge was still attached to their tower, hanging down out of sight. She heard the metal strain. The man was on his stomach at the ledge. He fed out the rope.
“Grab on!”
They were too late. The metal separated with a hideous, scraping tear. The screams of the falling seemed to reverberate on and on. She heard a burst of gunfire.
“Liis,” she said.
Drake shook her head. The man on his stomach did not move. The message, finally, must have been passed forward in the tower opposite, because the crowd began to retreat, until only a handful of the marooned remained looking out.
“What you got there?” Drake asked. She was looking at the drawstring bag across Adelaide’s body.
“I don’t know-Liis gave-”
Adelaide opened the bag. There were only a couple of items inside, a tobacco pouch and a heart-shaped salt tin. She wanted to cry. The emotion came without warning and she had to blink it away.
“C’mon,” said Drake.
Adelaide followed mindlessly. They were going downstairs now. A musty, sickly sweetish smell. She could see by the faint glimmer from cracks under doors. She kept her eyes on Drake’s boots, solid chunky things, with caterpillar soles, the fraying ends of her jeans tucked into them. The boots moved regularly, though the stairs were uneven. Once Adelaide’s shoes sent a scree of rubble tumbling away and she put out a hand to stop herself slipping. The wall was damp and spongy.
Twenty or so floors down, they turned into a corridor. Drake stopped outside a door that bulged in its frame. She knocked once and opened it without waiting for a reply. She gave Adelaide a nudge inside.
There were two people in the tiny room; one male, bearded, with blue eyes, the other female, with a wing of sheer peroxide hair. The man stared at her, a strange expression on his face. Adelaide stared back, confused.
“Look what I’ve found.” Drake spoke from behind her.
An inkling formed in Adelaide’s head but there was no time for her body to anticipate the blow. Drake’s strike was efficient. In the seconds before losing consciousness, as pain gathered at her temples, Adelaide heard the beginnings of the peculiar conversation that must follow.
“Face like that, can’t mistake it,” said Drake. “Shame really-she seemed…”