“Adelaide! Get out!”
The porthole loomed once more. He saw the skadi banging on his door in the middle of the night.
“Adelaide!” he yelled.
Still she lingered. He saw her touch a broken rivet on the wall.
“Fuck!”
Tiny but ominous on her finger, Vikram saw a bead of blood. His eyes snapped to the broken glass, which now carried the indelible mark of Adelaide’s DNA.
“Wipe it off! Use your sleeve, clean it!”
She obeyed. He hauled her forcibly through the domino rooms of the penthouse, past the broken clock, the cabinets, past the plants and the stacks of shoeboxes, out the front door into the hall. Adelaide slammed the door shut. He checked his watch. Sixty seconds.
“Lock up!” hissed Adelaide. “You have to lock up. Otherwise they’ll know!”
A string of expletives exploded in Vikram’s throat. He ripped the picks from his back pocket and with fumbling fingers shoved the first into the lower lock. He couldn’t see it. He could only see the porthole. His hand shook. Adelaide ran. He heard her footsteps clatter down the first ten steps and knew she was safe. At that moment he hated her.
Forty seconds. The corridor was shrinking again. He closed his eyes and listened to the lock. Tiny movements. Forget the porthole. Forget Adelaide. Forget everything but the way the metal works.
Listen. Just listen.
The lock clicked. He whipped the swipe card through the yellow bar and threw himself into the stairwell. Out of camera range. Six seconds. He counted, slowly, as the slender hand completed its circuit. When it reached the twelve he looked up at the buried mole of the camera in the ceiling. A red light blinked, just once, as if the tiny machine was waking up.
Adelaide crouched further down the stairs, her face electric. Their eyes connected. The tension between them was like the trembling space between polar magnets.
She ran.
That’s right. Run. Because if I get my hands on you now—
The thought prompted his body to move. It was only in motion that he realized the full extent of his rage. He hurtled down the stairs, chasing after her. In their efforts to make no noise they moved in contortionist shapes, half flying, half falling. Above his own straining lungs he heard the intake of her breath, the faint squeak as she grabbed the banister rail and vaulted a corner. Her blue overshoes landed with a crackle of plastic.
Thirty-one floors down she skidded to a halt.
“I thought we weren’t going to make it,” she said. Her face was pink with exertion.
“We?” he repeated.
Adelaide was bent double, breathing dramatically. Her face stretched in a grin. It was a game for her, he thought. He kept a deliberate metre away, trying to slow his own breathing. Cross that border and he might not be able to stop his hands from fastening around her neck.
“You ran,” he said. “You fucking ran.” His throat ached with the effort of keeping his voice down. If anyone came out and questioned him, he had fake ID and no City pass. He had to get somewhere safe.
“Of course I ran,” said Adelaide. “I’m not going to get caught.”
“Except for your blood.” That shut her up, but only temporarily. He could see her mind working, figuring out how to turn the situation around.
He didn’t give her the chance. “
We’d
better get out of here.”
“There’s a storm started, genius. I can’t take the boat back to my scraper now.”
“Great. We’re stranded.”
His temples were splitting. Adelaide stretched up again, hands over her head, her spine arching.
“You might be,” she said. “I’m going to the tea parlour on floor sixteen.”
“Fine.” He didn’t care where they went as long as it was down, as far away from the penthouse as it was possible to go. “Then we’re taking the lift.”
“You can go home if you want,” said Adelaide.
Vikram jabbed the call button. Deep in the belly of the skyscraper, he heard a distant rumble as the lift started its journey.
“I’m not going anywhere until my side of the bargain’s settled,” he said. “I’ve risked enough for you today. How the hell do you think I can get over the border at four in the morning?”
Adelaide shrugged.
“The Undersea?”
“The Undersea doesn’t stop here. If you’d ever taken it you’d know that.”
“Why would I want to take the Undersea? Anyway, you can’t stay at my apartment.”
Vikram gave her an insincere smile. Clearly she hadn’t thought things through. The mechanics of it. What she was going to do with him in the lag time between her side of the bargain and his. For his part, he’d had no intention of spending any more time with her than necessary. But if he could bear it, an opportunity presented itself: to get even.
“Afraid I’m going to have to,” he said.
“Nobody stays at my apartment.”
“Then I’ll be the first. Don’t worry, I won’t rob you.”
There was a low ping and the lift doors slid open. Vikram stepped inside. Adelaide stayed still, her mouth set.
“You getting in or not?” he asked.
She got in. Once again they stood side by side, repeated in the mirrors. Their faces echoed the rigid stance of their bodies. He was a head taller than her. This small, biological victory gave him some satisfaction.
Perhaps noticing the same thing, Adelaide’s scowl deepened.
“Don’t think you’ve won,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think anything so childish,” he shot back.
/ / /
Adelaide’s tea parlour had the dreamy, slow-motion atmosphere of a daylight facility still operating in the middle of the night. Purple lanterns hung in clusters, illuminating the low level tables, cushion seats, ink paintings on silk and the dividing mesh screens. Around a corner was an adolescent girl, folding paper napkins into a menagerie of birds. Adelaide gave the girl a wide berth. The old man near the entrance wore a full tuxedo, and glanced up nervously at every clink of a spoon. A woman in a large green hat, ostensibly reading a newspaper, would now and then recount some portion of it to the rest of the room. On the other side was a man with a cat on a lead. The cat had its own glass.
Vikram and Adelaide sat opposite one another in one section. Nobody seemed interested in them.
“The red coral tea, sir.”
The deferential did not go unnoticed. Vikram smiled his thanks. Adelaide fixed the proprietor with cold eyes. The proprietor, a tiny Asian woman with her hair in a chignon, ignored the look and placed a tray carefully on the table.
The teapot was flat and heavy with an s-shaped spout. It was accompanied by a small bowl of powdered ginger. Adelaide, very deliberately, took the pot and poured tea into one of two round-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pale amber. She blew ripples across the top of it before allowing a tentative few drops over the barrier of her lips.
Vikram poured and gingered his own tea. The scorching temperature did not affect him; hot beverages had kept him alive on many nights. Despite himself, his anger was fading under the dual influence of warmth and relief. They hadn’t been caught. The aroma of fresh tea, the soft drifts of rising steam and the intermittent sounds of human habitation relaxed him. He was safe. Even Adelaide’s pettiness with the tea seemed trifling. It was good tea too, the sort that would find its way onto the black market in the west.
“Me and Axel used to come here,” she said. “It was our local. Axel loves the Chinese because they keep their Mandarin, and he’s always been into Old World languages. Do people keep their languages in the west, Vikram?”
“Some do. But it makes it harder to get by.” And why make it harder than it already is, he thought.
“Axel used to speak bits of Mandarin with the servers and then we’d sit and make up stories about everyone else. You get some right crazies in here. You know, I can’t help wondering if he’s ever come back without me. Where would you hide, Vikram, if you wanted to escape?”
“Depends what you mean by escape.”
“Disappear, then.”
“When people go missing in the west they turn up dead or not at all, which generally means they’re being eaten by fish. I guess that’s one way to disappear.”
He spoke without thinking and expected an angry glower, but Adelaide was looking up at the misty windows. The rain still pounded on the exterior walls. Her cheeks were flushed.
“No, he’s alive.”
The question was too obvious not to be posed. Besides, Vikram was curious. He had made up his mind even before the break-in that Axel must be dead; seeing the penthouse had only confirmed his thoughts. One way or another, the boy had found his way to the sea.
“Why do you think he’s alive?”
“I don’t think. I know.”
She was staring at him now with an air of expectancy, almost as though she wanted evidence of his disbelief. Something to pounce on. Her fixed gaze was like that of the cat on the lead. She had a cat’s detached nonchalance, he thought, a curious immunity to violence. She put her associates unquestioningly in the position of the mouse.
“How can you know?” he said. Adelaide clicked her tongue.
“Intuition. He’s my twin, so I know. We have a connection. It isn’t like a connection that you have with other people. You just—know.”
Vikram thought of the photograph in her bedroom.
“What’s he like, your brother?”
Adelaide smiled. For the first time, it was a genuine smile.
“He was clever,” she said. “Really smart. Maths, oceanology—he was great at those things. And he was smart when it came to people too, especially the family. I used to get angry with them, but Axel always calmed us down. He’d know before I did when I was about to flip. He was always there. The two of us, it needed two of us, really, against the rest of the tribe.”
She ran a restless hand through her hair. The woollen hat was tossed aside on a cushion. She seemed embarrassed, almost cross about what she had said, and he suspected that she did not often talk about Axel. Strange that she should choose him—but it had been a strange night. “Anyway,” she said lightly. “He changed.”
“What happened?”
“He forgot things. Small things at first. He started mixing up names, and dates. Then it was bigger things. People. Places. Oceanology. It all seemed to happen very quickly. But it stemmed from the Incident.”
He looked at her questioningly. “The Incident?”
“Oh… It was my mother’s birthday party. A big, public, Rechnov event, on an extremely large boat.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you can imagine. We were sixteen. We always hated those events, but we tolerated them, I suppose. But this time, Axel was acting oddly. He was making no effort to be polite. He kept staring at people in a very fixated, very intense way, as if there was something wrong with them. I thought it was funny to start with, but he kept—staring. Then just walking off when someone was talking to him. And later—there was the speech.”
She sighed. Not wanting to deter her, Vikram said nothing. Adelaide stirred her tea for a moment before continuing.
“Feodor was about to make one of his pompous speeches. He was standing at the head of the boat, my mother at his side, the picture of respectability. He never got the chance to speak. Axel leapt up in front of all these people, pushed our parents aside—it was almost comical, in a way—‘Ladies and gentlemen’, he began. Very proper. He winked at me, and I laughed. I remember, I did laugh. But then he started talking about all of these other things, things that made no sense, things even I had to admit sounded crazy… it was awful. When he finished, he bowed, three times. You can imagine the silence. Finally, he took this running leap, and he jumped off the boat.”
“He jumped off the boat?”
“Into the sea, yes. It was so cold. We could hear him, whooping, splashing the water. They had to send someone in to pull him out. He was drenched—that beautiful suit, completely wrecked—shivering all over—and he was still laughing. He came and hugged me. It was like hugging an ice sculpture. ‘Oh A,’ he said. ‘Look at their hopeless, broken faces. Did you ever see such a desolate sight?’ I took him home. He was hospitalised with pneumonia the next day.” She frowned. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“So why are you?”
“I don’t know.” She took a sip of tea, and set the cup back without a clink. “What about your girl? Mikkeli, wasn’t it? What was she like?”
He felt indebted to answer. “She wasn’t my girl,” he said. “Not like that. We grew up together. She looked out for me. She was smart, too.” He smiled wryly. “Not like your brother. She was a thief.”
Adelaide smiled back. “I like that.”
“Anyway, she died.” Vikram almost said
too
, but caught himself in time. He stretched out his legs under the low table and realized that both of them still had the plastic sheaths on their feet. He removed his and discreetly stuffed them into his boots.
The girl with the origami was taking her booty from table to table, depositing a napkin bird on each polished surface. When she reached them, Adelaide spoke sharply.
“We don’t want that.”
The girl ignored her and placed a bird on a saucer. She moved dreamily onto the next table. Vikram picked up the offering. Its folds were clean and crisp. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t like birds.”
“You don’t like—” He glanced at her and grinned with the realization. “Oh. You’re scared of them.”
Adelaide scowled blackly.
“It’s alright, you’re not the only one I’ve met with a phobia.” He tucked the origami into his pocket. “I won’t tell.”
The girl, having finished her rounds, paid for her tea and left.
“Where do you think Axel is?” Vikram asked bluntly.
“He may have gone somewhere. Somewhere he feels safe, until I can find him. That could be anywhere, with Axel.” Adelaide hesitated. She checked around them and lowered her voice. “But I have to consider the possibility that he’s been taken somewhere. By someone who wants him out the way.”
Stars, he thought, the girl’s deluded.
“Then I hope it’s the first option,” he said.
Vikram’s certainty was equally strong. The way he saw it, Axel’s death could have been accidental or deliberate. If it was deliberate, presumably the Rechnovs had decided the boy was too much of an embarrassment, and had him removed. They were an important family with a big reputation at stake. Vikram had no doubt that they were capable of it. Or, Axel had chosen to die, in which case it was better for all the Rechnovs if his body was never found.