The man who wanted to kill her had taken away the light. Adelaide’s wrists hurt. They were fastened to the piping with steel rings, but she could not see the steel or the piping. The room was black. Water dripped in a corner. She curled in the same position she’d been in for the past hours, or days, or however long, face buried in her knees, her arms raised overhead to where they were fastened. She knew that it would hurt too much to move, so she didn’t.
In the dark, she wandered through childhood haunts: through the hidden dens in the Domain, the space under her bunk bed, her grandfather’s room with the marmalade cat. She went to the Roof and drank Kelpiqua, giggled and gulped and watched Axel standing on his hands, grinning at her upside-down.
The Roof receded, flying away from them at impossible speed. Axel bowed to thunderous applause and went behind a curtain, so she followed him but he wasn’t there, Tyr was, and after that she found Tyr in every place but home.
And then Tyr, too, went behind the curtain and there was only Vikram, the man from the ice, who would always be alone, as she would, as they were both destined to be. The crater in the ocean gaped, and there was the chromium mermaid, but this time the mermaid was Adelaide. Adelaide’s tail swished. Here, in the molten sea mud, the truth awaited her with a silver smile.
She had always been chasing her own tail. Even if Axel were alive, even if she did find him, she was not recovering her brother. She was recovering what he had become.
Everyone she cared about had disappeared. Axel, Tyr, even Vikram. She was a curse. She was bad luck. She ran on.
On, along the gleaming shuttle lines, over the glass funnel bridges, from the lowest underwater boutiques to the roof garden parties at the top of the world, up and down, in lifts and through stairwells, until she reached the butterfly farm. The path twisted before her feet. The farm had become colossal, and its glass walls were made of diamonds. What was she doing? She was searching for Axel. She ran on. She called his name. Axel! Axel, where in Osiris are you? He was playing hide and seek again. He had been playing for too long now, and it wasn’t funny.
She sat on a bench and sobbed because she could not find him. The butterfly farm moved away; it was attached to a boat, a boat that had travelled for months and for miles, a boat whose murdered crew lay in a graveyard at the bed of the ocean, where their bones rattled as they sang of their own slow decomposition. Adelaide held onto the dream. She held it tight because she was cold, colder than she had ever been, and she did not want to wake and find out what the cold had done.
Something crawled along her cheek, towards her nose. She thought it was a butterfly. But it was an insect, an invader from the real world. A white fly. She hunched her shoulder to knock it aside.
Now sounds raked at the dream, threatening to pull her into consciousness. She clung tighter to the spirit world. A door, opening onto the butterfly farm with an ungentle scrape, and there were people framed within it, and voices. The man who wanted to kill her was there. The girl with the black tooth was there.
She saw Vikram last. He had been walking the vaults of her dreams with the others; it made sense that he was here, allied with the cold. He had a green tinge. The cell had stuck to his skin, as it had stuck to hers when she left him last.
One of them spoke. She ran further into the butterfly farm. She saw the Red Pierrot balanced on a leaf, saw its wings opening and closing. It fluttered into the air and she followed it. Even when the man with the shaven head took her chin and she shivered and he lifted her face to stare into her dream-drugged eyes with his own, she saw only the red and black and white spots, the symmetry.
Vikram was in front of her. She kept very still. If she did not move he would not see her, and he mustn’t see her, not yet. She hid behind the flowers. Vikram spoke her name. His lips moved. There was a look in his eyes, an unfamiliar, broken look that she knew she must remember, but even as she frowned he dissolved into the foliage.
She found herself fully conscious, and she knew that the dream world had gone for good; she had woken up.
“Vik?” she whispered.
Her eyes were wide open but saw nothing. She was cold, so cold. Colder than she’d ever been.
“Vik!”
There was no light, because she had missed him. The room was empty. Vikram had gone.