H e heard the door handle twist. In the second the door swung open, anticipation dried his throat.
Adelaide Mystik’s face was clean and angry. She was wearing a see-through kimono over something made out of silk and lace. Both garments stopped at her thighs. She did not look like someone who had just woken up, although Vikram had been knocking persistently for the past ten minutes.
“Hello,” he said. “Is this a good time?”
“Who the hell are you?”
She did not look especially vulnerable either.
“My name’s Vikram. I met you once before. Well, not met exactly. Actually you threw me out.”
Her eyes narrowed into mossy crevasses. “Rose Night,” she said. “Linus’s spy. I thought you’d got the message. Now fuck off before I call my security.”
She slammed the door.
Vikram waited. The corridor was impossibly quiet. He could hear his own breathing. He reminded himself that it was almost four in the morning; on this side of the city, people were sleeping, and silence the norm. The twist of apprehension loitered nonetheless.
He plunged his hands into his coat pockets to stop himself fidgeting with a new rip. It was not an unpromising start; it looked as though his insomnia theory was correct, and Adelaide had given him an ultimatum before actually calling for security. He assumed. Noise distracted him, a faint progression of clicks like the second hand of a watch magnified tenfold. It seemed to come from the ceiling. He looked up. The chandelier shone dimly. Who lived above Adelaide Mystik?
Five minutes later he banged on the door again. This time it flew open immediately.
“Who the hell do you think you are? I said fuck off.” She glared at him.
It was the aggression of the girl which convinced Vikram he was safe. Brazen, but theatrical. It lacked the edge of promise.
“Aren’t you curious about why I’m here?”
“No. Double fuck off.”
The door started to shut. Vikram wedged his foot to block it. Through the gap, Adelaide stared down at his dirty boot. Her attitude changed. She arranged herself against the mirrored wall of her hallway, delivering an evil smile. Her lack of fear was almost insulting. He supposed it came hand in hand with her arrogance-as the Architect’s granddaughter, she’d never had to be afraid.
“Have you ever been in jail, what was it-Vikram?”
“For a number of days. And yes, it’s Vikram.”
“What’s it like down there?”
He ignored this. “Contrary to what you might think, I’m not a spy. Not for Linus, or for anyone. I’m here for my own reasons.”
“To be arrested?” she enquired.
Vikram remembered Linus’s reaction the first time Vikram had sought him out. There were similarities between brother and sister, and not just their looks. Confidence rose from them like a costly, seductive perfume.
“That’s up to you,” he said.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “It is.”
She surveyed him speculatively. Something had given him the edge of advantage. She had not called for backup, as he had thought she might. There was a reason for that; she might be unafraid, but presumably she wasn’t stupid. Perhaps she did not trust her own people.
Perhaps she was just bored.
“I’m here because I think you’re the only one who can help me,” he said.
Adelaide cocked her head.
“That’s entirely possible. But you’re missing one crucial element. Why would I want to help you?”
He shrugged, following instinct. “Because you’d be doing something you’ve never done before.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You’d be helping people.”
She looked unimpressed.
“And it would make you look good,” he added.
“I don’t have an issue with the way I look, do you?” she said sweetly, and if he did not meet that gaze he had to look at the rest of her, which was no doubt what she intended. There was only one way to play this game. He stared at her openly for a good ten seconds before replying. The posters did not lie: she was that beautiful.
“Not especially,” he said.
“Good.” There was a pause, and he wondered if he had read her right. Then she said, “Two minutes then.”
Vikram looked past her into the apartment. A lone red petal wilted on the floorboards of the mirrored hallway.
“Can I come in?”
“I’m fond of the doorstep.”
“Fine. But I don’t think you’re very hospitable.”
Adelaide’s eyes snapped with apparent delight at this game. “You’ve lost a good twenty seconds already.”
Inside his coat pockets, Vikram crossed his fingers.
“Listen,” he said. “This city has everything. It wouldn’t take much to give some aid to the people who need it. I know it doesn’t affect you now but one day it might. People are angry, over there, in the bit you forget about. But we do exist. There will be more riots and one day the violence will come here and then you’ll wish you did something about it before. But if you used your influence like Linus said you could-”
“Leave Linus out of it,” Adelaide interrupted. “More. Seconds. Lost.”
He looked at her for a moment, not as he had before, but as though he was searching her out. Testing her. He doubted anyone had ever looked at Adelaide Mystik this way before, and he was not sure how she might react. But she seemed to lean into his gaze. She did not break the silence.
“Have you ever seen anyone dead?” Vikram asked.
“Yes,” she said. “My grandmother.”
“Did you see her die?”
“She died in her sleep. I saw her afterwards.”
“It’s different when you watch them die.”
“Is it.”
“You should know,” he said. “You were at the execution.”
She stared back at him in a way that should have been frank, if she had been capable of frankness. He sensed catacombs beneath her expressions.
“You knew that man?” she asked. “Eirik 9968, you knew him?”
“Not personally.” Once again, a flutter of guilt accompanied the lie. It was impossible to tell whether she believed him.
“Then who died on you? Death seems important to you, so who was it?”
“I’ve known a lot of people who died.”
“It’s never about the many. Nobody’s that philanthropic.”
“Her name was Mikkeli,” he said blankly.
“Ah. A girl.” Adelaide twirled a strand of red hair between two fingers. “And is that why you want to help your people, for this dead girl?”
Her words were probing fingers, digging through his hair and his skull to root around inside. Vikram told himself it did not matter what he said now. Adelaide could have what answers she wanted as long as she helped him.
“Something like that.”
“Something like that,” she repeated. Her gaze idled up and down him. Vikram matched it.
“Yes.”
“And what exactly do you want to do for your westerners?”
“Food. Warmth. Jobs. Hope. Is that concise enough?”
“I’m not sure,” she mused. “I suspect it might turn out to be rather more complicated than that.”
“I could tell you more, but it might take longer than your two minute allocation.”
“You are insolent.” Adelaide toyed with the lace of her nightclothes. “What are you going to do for me in exchange for my voice?”
“What do you need?” He kept his face expressionless. A smile lit up her beautiful, flawless features.
“I’m sure I can find something. Let’s just call it an i.o.u. for now, shall we? Meet me at The Stingray on Friday. Fourteen o’clock. Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
She reached out, past the doorway for the first time, ran her finger lightly along the edge of his jawline. Her face was close to his. She looked incredibly young; only the traces of lines in their making showed she had left her teens behind. Perhaps it was that that made her so unreadable, like a slate yet to be written.
“You know it won’t bring her back,” she said.
It wasn’t a compassionate line. He wondered why she had said it.
“I think I know that.”
“Goodnight then.”
“Goodnight.”
The door shut. There was no sound from the other side, or from upstairs. Vikram stayed for a minute, memorizing the patterns of the wood, and those of the girl behind it.
He waited another hour before the first Undersea train of the morning. He had bribed a man to smuggle him over the border by barge, a quarter of the credit from the two weeks work. The man had hidden him in a cupboard-sized compartment, and when they reached the checkpoint, Vikram had heard skadi guards banging up and down the length of the barge and his heart had leapfrogged. It irked him that Adelaide hadn’t asked how he had got to her, hadn’t cared, even if it was better she didn’t know.
The Undersea was dark and virtually deserted. Vikram had earmarked a hiding place in his carriage, but no one checked the train going back west. When he finally reached 614-West it was still dark and he was burning with a low exhilaration. He debated banging on Nils’s door. Nobody liked to be woken before dawn, though, and he hadn’t decided what to tell Nils when he did see him. Out of habit he tried the lift. Its OUT OF ORDER sign had been graffitied long ago. Vikram was tempted to add his own mark: an affirmation of the night’s work, but he had nothing to scratch or spray with.
He ran up the first couple of flights, then slowed, stopping every few floors to catch his breath. After thirty-six floors he felt leaden with tiredness. He fumbled with the key in the lock-still weak-and collapsed onto a stew of rugs and clothes. He pulled everything over him. He expected to sleep instantly, but his brain thwarted him, spinning into action. He replayed each moment of his conversation with Adelaide. Was she lying awake now, or was she sleeping? If she was sleeping, what was she dreaming? Did she have ground-dreams like everyone else?
Vikram’s dream was always the same: a stretch of golden sand. A beach. He walked along it, at first near the surf where it was damp, and then inland, past tufts of vegetation. The vegetation gave way to waving grasses. Where the grasses grew through the sand there were pebbles, smooth and white. In the dream he picked one up, one by one, and dropped them into a bucket that never filled.
Vikram lay awake a little longer. Sounds dulled by memory now crept back to taunt his hope of sleep. An itinerant banging from the floor above. The stamp of footsteps up and down stairs. Shouting. Always a dispute somewhere that could only be resolved when one throat grew too hoarse to continue or a raised fist brought an end. Beneath it, the ever present chatter of a city that had not known unconsciousness for a long time. Osiris articulated itself in waves of vocals, rising, falling, meandering through his subconscious like the disparate moods of the sea.
He was woken by persistent hammering. Dozy with dreams, he stumbled to the door. A flashlight temporarily blinded him, then dispelled the darkness of the room. Behind the torch he made out the faces of Nils and Drake. Drake’s wayward hair was squashed beneath two woollen hats and a hood. She was grinning.
“How d’you fancy collecting an iceberg?”
Vikram stared at them both.
“What time is it?”
“Dunno. ’bout nineteen o’clock?”
“Shit.” He’d slept right through the day. He rubbed his eyes, replaying Drake’s previous words. “Iceberg? You mean?”
“I mean there’s a space on the boat if you want…”
She wiggled the flashlight helpfully. Vikram located the water bucket. It was still a quarter full. He splashed his face, pulled his own coat out of the bedding and slung it over his shoulders. “I’m in.”
Twenty minutes later, they were aboard a motor boat in pursuit of three industrial barges. Above them, the Moon moved in and out of its cloud cover. The sea was calm and dark. Vikram stayed by the rail with Nils, keeping out of the way of the crew. There were six of them including Drake, but no one else he recognized.
“Can you hear it?” Nils whispered.
Vikram listened. Beyond the engine motor, he heard a metallic susurration, like the sound of pooling chains. Ahead of them, high above sea level, a line of green lights stretched to left and right. He nudged Nils and pointed. It had been years since either man had passed the ring-net, but Vikram knew that Nils was thinking the same thing as him, that those were no lights: they were the glowing eyes of the dead.
The net was invisible in the darkness, but the windows of one of its watchtowers shone. The fleet of barges approached. Heavy clanking told Vikram that a curtain of the ring-net was lifting. The barges slid past the watchtower, slipping under the gap in the net. The smaller western boat followed in the swell. As they passed beneath, Nils’s and Drake’s faces were bathed in the green glow from the capping beacons. Vikram held up his hands. His gloves were tipped with the same green. The chains clinked in a tug of wind. Then they were through, the other side of the boundary.
Osiris waters lay behind them.
Vikram felt suddenly hollow. Who knew what had really happened to all those boats that left the city and disappeared? If only they had left a trail, a length of string that could be followed, hand over hand, by those that might wish to go after. Vikram leaned forward, straining his eyes. The Moon had gone behind a cloud.
The boats drove out for twenty minutes before they began to slow. Everyone on board fell silent. There was no noise except the sea, the humming motor, and a dull creaking.
Ahead, the sea turned entirely white.
“Is that…?” Vikram murmured.
“Yeah,” said Drake. “That’s it.”
The phosphorous island stretched away beyond the barges’ searchlights. The boats continued cautiously and came to rest at a point where the ice cut away smoothly, a sloping three metre cliff rising from the waves. Searchlights trained upon it. The air filled with the whirr of gears and engines.
Two platforms extended horizontally from the first of the boats. They were crowded with men and machinery. When the platforms reached the ice field, the workers clambered onto it, unloading their equipment with practised efficiency. Against the ice they looked like busy black insects.
Vikram watched in fascination as the process he had heard explained but never seen began. The crew dragged giant lasers into position. Through the night they would cut the ice sheet into many separate pieces, then tow them inside the ring-net. The freshwater bergs would relieve the load of the desal plants, which guzzled energy.
The lasers began their work, with a noise like metal plates scraping together. A shout went up on Drake’s boat.
“That’s it! That’s our bit!”
Everyone on board ran to the rail. The boat keeled. The deck juddered underfoot as two small harpoons, trailing cables, fired across the water and embedded in the ice.
“Who’s first?” yelled the skipper.
Drake gave Vikram and Nils a harness and a head-torch each. “Go on,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Don’t let go unless you fancy a dunking.”
They exchanged grins. Vikram fastened the strap of the head-torch and switched it on. A pale beam illuminated the rail and the cables. Another member of the crew showed him how to hook his harness onto the cable. Vikram climbed over the rail and pitched forward.
A shove sent him swinging across the gulf. Air rushed at his face; he was flying. The head-torch picked out the wave trenches and the foam-flecked caps. His boots dipped the water. He brought his knees to his chest. The ice loomed. He stuck his feet out in front and landed with a crunch.
Nils’s boots thudded down a second later. Vikram reached over and grabbed his friend’s hand. Holding onto the cables, they clambered up the remainder of the slope, and stopped.
It was as though they had stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The ice was pitted and cracked, sheer blank slates giving way to hillocks and gaping craters. Fifty metres away, the laser beams were working their way across the sheet, a flicker of lightning marking their progress. The noise was phenomenal.
Vikram stamped on the ice. It was rock hard. Beneath the groan of the severing pack, he heard water lapping against its edges. Land must sound like this.
Others had joined them. Drake took a running leap and skidded eight metres before landing on her arse. Vikram whooped. They moved, at first cautiously, then throwing themselves around the ice. Their head-torches made peculiar shadows of the uneven surface and their own figures. They twisted to make even weirder, eldritch shapes. The ice glinted pale blue. The Moon came out from behind a cloud and turned it greenish yellow. It smelled raw and new, of the untouched and the untouchable. It had never held human imprints before.
Nils shouted. He’d found a long, sheer slope. The three of them sat in a row at the top, Vikram in front, then Drake, then Nils. They yelled a countdown.
“Three-two-one-go!”
They flew down the slope, as one, then as three, as Drake lost her grip and Vikram shot on ahead. At the bottom they curled up, toppled on their backs, helpless with laughter. The sky above was a jigsaw of cloud and stars. They regained their breaths slowly.
For as long as Vikram had known, since the beginnings of Osiris, the ice had come. Legend told of a land beneath it, a land free from storms and safe from flooding. It had a name, so rare, so precious, it was never spoken above a whisper. ’Tarctica. The southern land. It would cast off its frozen shell and one day, when all the ice had gone, the Citizens of Osiris would find a new home. So the legend went.
The laser rays continued their work. At last, with an ear splitting crack, the segment claimed by Drake’s boat broke away. A fissure yawned, then it was a chasm, then a valley of ocean. Drake’s boat was already towing away the section of ice, heading back inside the ring-net and leaving the flotilla of barges to continue their dismantling work until dawn.
The ice was moored between two towers on the outskirts of the western quarter and that night there was a carnival. Westerners came out in droves. People danced and performed theatrical charades. A band of acrobats tumbled, stood on their hands, and walked across a tightrope that had once been somebody’s clothesline and still had a pair of leggings pegged to it. Statues, crude and artistic, were sculpted out of the hillocks. Fry-boat kitchens chugged out of the city to set up shop around the edge of the ice. The vendors leaned out of their hatches, shouting their wares of squid or saufish in amicable rivalry. Other westerners arrived in tiny skiffs, hacking off blocks of ice with pickaxes and towing them back into the west.
Nils produced a bottle of raqua and the three of them wandered about the ice, passing the bottle back and forth and admiring the spectacles. They settled at the edge of a crater where a crowd had gathered around a group of musicians. In the centre, a heater was wedged into a small pit. The smell of frying saufish and kelp dispersed through the foreign scent of the ice and skinny dogs came to lap at the meltwater.
Through the remainder of the night and the daylight that followed, Vikram almost forgot about his private mission. Sometimes, whilst they were laughing at each other’s drunken antics, he felt the pang of a missing part, because Mikkeli should have been there to complete their quartet. And then Adelaide Mystik drifted back into view, her green eyes becoming the lights from the ring-net, the gaze of the dead.
“Look out!”
They had been on the ice for twenty-four hours when Vikram saw a man at the edge of the field hurl himself to one side. A moment later, a harpoon sunk a foot deep in the patch of ice where he had been standing. A second harpoon struck the ice five metres along, then another.
Nils got unsteadily to his feet.
“Fucking hell, it’s the fucking skadi.”
They could see the boats crouched a little way from the ice field. Struck by panic, other revellers leapt to avoid the deadly spikes. Some fell into the water. Hands reached down to rescue them but some were pulled in after and washed away from the field, caught by invisible currents. In the darkness, Vikram heard their cries growing fainter and fainter.
“Come back! Come back!”
In the confusion, it was a minute before Vikram realized that they were moving away from the towers. Already a stretch of freezing water lay between the ice field and safety. Some of the revellers refused to move, or were too intoxicated to perceive the danger. They leapt and cartwheeled, hurling fire beacons into the air. Dogs barked, small bodies racing up and down the field. The skadi fired a second wave of harpoons. Beneath the yells and clinking chains and the noise of straining ice, Vikram heard something new: a deep, rhythmical thudding.
“Drake! Where’s your boat?”
“I don’t know! I can’t see it!”
The fry-boat kitchens were unhitching and pulling away. A man threw himself onto one of the roofs. He slipped and crashed into the sea with a shriek. Other than the abandoned torches subsiding on the ice, there was no light. But Vikram could hear the sea. The gap between ice field and towers was widening.
A figure lurched towards them, arms whirling overhead.
“It’s the end of the world! Swim, swim, the ghosts are coming, swim for your lives!”
Vikram turned to Nils and Drake.
“Come on, we need a boat.”
They ran towards the nearest fry-boat, whose vendor was clumsily packing away her wares, catching one another as they stumbled over abandoned bottles or melt holes. Again Vikram heard that deep, rhythmic thudding. It sounded like drums. The sound was metallic, a clanging, resonant thunder, accompanied by throaty cries.
With no warning, the sky lightened. The sea and the ice turned to shimmering gold. Instinctively all three of them dropped. Belly down, Vikram peered out across the water.
From between two towers emerged a monster of fire. Its flames shot three storeys high into the air. Smoke spewed from its core. The fug billowed before it, reaching over the ice. As it moved forward, ash rained down on the ocean.
It was a boat, and it was entirely aflame. From the prow of the thing protruded the effigy of a colossal shark fashioned from wires. The wires glowed white with the heat. Flames jetted from the gaping mouth.
“Lights of australis,” whispered Drake. “What is that?”
“Its Juraj’s gang,” said Nils softly.
The burning barge had an escort. On either side, nine rafts rode low in the water. Each platform was stacked with drums upon which their crews hammered out a relentless beat. Vikram felt each boom in the ice beneath his stomach.
“That’s not all,” he said. “It’s Juraj. What’s left of him.”
Mesmerised, they could only stare. As the blazing craft drew closer, Vikram saw that the carcass of one boat had been dragged on top of another. At its peak, the gang lord’s body was strapped to a crudely erected mast. As the flesh shrivelled and peeled away, Juraj’s skeleton emerged like a warped chrysalis, the bones black and distorted.
He had no limbs. They had been removed. In place of limbs he had crude prosthetics, longer than arms and legs could be, and spouting fire.
Tapers of flame fell upon the raft drummers. They kept beating. The rest of Juraj’s gang were dancing maniacally on the rafts as they accompanied their dead leader to his final grave. As they approached the ice field, their yowls filled the night. The drums grew louder and louder, faster and faster.
“They’re catching up,” said Nils.
Vikram swore. “They’re sending it at the skadi.”
The skadi, at last realizing their danger, began to shoot. The pyre glided forward. The rafts let out a shrilling chorus of ai-ai-ai! The drums pounded. Now the skadi were frantically trying to retract their harpoons. But the spears were embedded and the tow ropes were metal chains. The skadi barges were tethered to the ice field. The pyre was moving faster than they could tow.
The drummers whooped.
Ai-ai-ai! Ai-ai-ai!
Almost leisurely, two crafts drifted towards one another.
Juraj’s pyre ploughed into the first skadi barge. The flames reached out. Vikram clapped his hands over his ears.
The explosion was deafening.
Debris rained on top of them. Burning embers sizzled where they hit the ice. He curled into a ball, arms protecting his head, feeling the sting as something struck his back.
Vikram was the first to recover. Ears ringing, he helped the others to their feet. Drake was bleeding. Vikram led them to the edge of the ice field, ducking the sprays of gunfire. In a matter of minutes, the sea would be swarming with skadi boats.
He saw a stray shot catch one of the fry-boat vendors still struggling to unmoor. The woman was flung backwards in a spray of blood. Bent double, they ran towards her boat.
Nils started up the motor whilst Vikram and Drake hauled the dead woman out onto the ice. There was nothing they could do for her now. As they steered away from the ice floe, he heard bolts striking the boat roof. The night blazed with fire and searchlights. The drums and the cries grew ever more frantic. The ice, gleaming yellow beneath the flames, was spotted with inert bodies.
As they pulled away from the battleground, Vikram saw something like a comet streak through the air from the rafts and explode alongside another skadi boat.
Drake was visibly shaking.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
They were drawing near to the first tower when dazzling white light blinded Vikram. A speeder lay directly in their path. Vikram veered the boat sharply right. The searchlight followed. He increased their speed. The light lost them momentarily, then switched off.
He could hear the drone of the smaller, higher performance motor as the speeder approached.
Grimly, Vikram began to lurch the boat in a zigzag pattern. It was large and unwieldy and he could hear its sides groan with the strain. The sea was getting choppier too. Bad news for the speeder and worse news for them. The fry-boat was not designed to be out on open water, and now they were a good half kilometre from the towers, moving further away from the fire fight.
Nils swore as he leaned out of the hatch, watching for the speeder. Shadows scooted past. He thought it was the other boat, but now it had vanished entirely. The noise of the waves masked the two motors. He could sense the other boat out there. Waiting. Listening.
“Vik, I can’t see them.” Nils whispered this time. He came to stand beside Vikram. Drake took up position at the hatch.
“Where the hell are they?” muttered Vikram.
He reduced the engine power. They were almost drifting now. So was the speeder.
Residue noise from the fire fight echoed across the water. From a distance, it looked like a strange ritual, a dance between flames on the water surface. Vikram could not tell who was winning.
“Why don’t they just open fire?” hissed Drake.
“They want prisoners,” said Vikram. “Juraj’s gang are so crazed they won’t stop until they’re all dead. The skadi need examples.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Run for it.”
Nils nodded. “It’s our best chance.”
“Hang on tight.”
He took a firm grip himself as he swung the boat back towards the city and hit full throttle. Instantly the searchlight flickered back on, some hundred metres away, and began roving the waves.
The boat lurched forward, jamming into the encroaching waves. Vikram wrested the craft first one way, then the next. Crates of kelp and fish shunted from side to side. His elbow cracked against metal, sending bolts of pain up to his temples. Spray dashed in his face. In seconds he was drenched.
“Where are they Drake?” he yelled. Drake hung precariously out of the hatch.
“Right on our tail, seventy metres,” she yelled back.
“Watch out now, you’re coming into the city.” Nils, clinging on beside him, could see a little better.
“You’ll have to direct me.”
He was steering blind now. He could only trust Nils’s directions. He sensed the first towers looming up on either side as they barrelled back into the maze of the city. A shot glanced off the roof.
“Fifty metres!” Drake shouted.
“Shit.”
Vikram began to weave. Their only chance now lay in using the towers as cover.
“Listen. You two have to get out. I’m taking this over the border.”
“You’re what?” Nils hung on as the boat lurched.
“I have to get over the border tonight. I can’t explain.”
“It’s that bloody girl, isn’t it? That Rechnov woman?”
“This is the best chance I have. All the skadi are back there, the border will be as close to unguarded as it ever is.”
“Vik-”
“Just do it, will you? They won’t follow you.”
“Yes, they’ll follow you, you idiot-we should stick together!”
“Come on,” said Drake. She staggered up the boat. “Nils, come on. Tell us when, Vik. And good luck.”
Nils was shaking his head, plainly furious, but Vikram had no more time. As they approached Market Circle, he choked the throttle, slowing the boat just enough to skid past a decking. Nils and Drake leapt from the hatch and dropped flat to the decking. Vikram powered ahead once more. He risked a glance back and saw that the speeder had followed him. Nils and Drake were safe.
Now it was just the two boats. Vikram’s only advantage was that he knew the western waterways. He closed his eyes momentarily, allowing instinct to take over. Through Market Circle. Out the other side. This part of the west was quiet. He was following the route taken by the waterbus on the day he went to the Council. As he approached the border, the speeder was hard on his tail, but his assumption had been correct-there were only two skadi boats stationed at the checkpoint.
Setting the boat on a direct course through the gap in the border net, Vikram ducked low. The shooting came late; the border guards had not expected his clumsy vehicle to charge. He hurtled straight through, searchlights sweeping overhead.
He was in the City.
The speeder was chasing him, and now one of the border boats as well. He kept the fry-boat straight. He had to get out fast, but they would not be able to shoot so easily deep in Citizen territory. He chose a residential tower-swung the boat in close and leapt from the fully powered vehicle. He hit the decking hard, hurting his ankle, and rolled. Jumping to his feet, running to the doors, he pounded the open button. The doors slid apart and Vikram darted inside. He heard a shout as the skadi spotted his exit, and then the doors slid shut.
He was inside a clean, low lit lobby with four lifts. He ignored them and ran into the stairwell. The skadi would be following.
He raced up the stairs until he heard the sounds of them entering the building. Now he had to be silent. He removed his dripping shoes and socks and carried them. He moved on up in bare feet, as quietly as possible, unaware if his pursuers were doing the same. His heart was pounding so fiercely he was sure they must hear it. There was no shortage of electricity in the City; every floor had the same low night lighting. No dark corners to hide in.
Ten floors up, he came out of the stairwell and ventured into the corridors. He limped past the numbered doors of apartments. He was acutely aware of his appearance, tattered and soaked. He had a fresh cut on his temple which he could feel now was bleeding. His only hope was that at whatever time of night it was, the Citizens who lived here were all sleeping.
And then he saw it-so simple, so easy. The fire alarm.
He kept going, through the heart of the tower, looking for a stairwell on the other side. First he needed somewhere to hide. With every step, he felt the fear of capture heighten. Sweat lined the inside of his clothes. He didn’t dare look back. What if there were cameras? What if they were lying in wait?
He kept going up until he found what he was looking for-a cleaning room, full of mops and buckets, with enough space for a skinny man. He limped back into the corridors. The fire alarms were posted at every level. He took a deep breath, glanced once around the silent corridors, and smashed it with his good elbow.
The noise was shrill and instant. Vikram ran back to the cleaning room and slipped inside, pulling the door to. From his tiny prison, he listened to the sounds of the tower waking up. Running footsteps pattered on the carpets as people evacuated their rooms. Their voices were groggy and confused.
“What’s happening?”
“Where is it, where’s the fire?”
“Orla, get back here now, don’t run!”
They streamed past him. An age seemed to pass before they had all gone. When the noise had faded, Vikram slipped out and continued back up the stairs. He had no doubt that the fire fighters would be investigating that floor within minutes. The skadi would guess who the culprit had been, but the confusion had bought him time.
He kept going, fighting a great flood of weariness, until he saw the sign for a bridge. He urged himself on. Just as far as the next tower. Walking across the closed, windowless bridge he felt trapped and nervous, and hurried through the tunnel as quickly as he could persuade his exhausted limbs to move. In the morning he was going to have to find himself some clothes that would pass in the City, and track down Adelaide’s restaurant-but for now all he wanted was a bolthole to curl up in for the night.
He took the lift. When it reached the first level underwater he felt the hairs raising on the back of his neck, but he doubted the skadi would expect him to go down; they knew the horror underwater held for ex-prisoners. The Undersea station was silent and deserted. Vikram ran down the giant escalators, feeling the damp chill of tunnels blasted out of rock below the seabed. Salt trails ran down the cracks between display boards flashing up taglines for skating exhibitions, electro recitals, the annual gliding race, gold-level Guild ratified Tellers, the annual gliding race. They were all months out-of-date. On the dusty screens, the letters scrambled themselves and fingers beckoned. Adelaide Mystik’s virtual eyes followed him as she lifted a Sobek scarab in the palm of her hand, her lips o-shaped to blow him a kiss.
The dripping walls of the platform were streaked with lichen. The weight of the ocean bore down upon him, and his head pounded. The idea of spending more than a few minutes minutes here was terrifying, but he needed to hide. He jumped onto the tracks and walked into the tunnel.