She would have screamed if the flat side of the knife hadn’t crushed her throat. Rikard stood in the gloom of the shadows, a metre away, expressionless. The others ran in moments after Pekko.
“I have no qualms about this,” said Pekko. He gripped the knife tighter in his three fingers. A spasm coursed through her body. His other arm was locked tight around her chest, pinning her arms, holding a gun.
“Pekko, we’ve got bigger problems, you can’t-” Drake went straight to the window. She crouched, her gun angled down but her eyes flicking back to the interlocked figures.
“She’s the only leverage we have,” said Pekko. “Move away from the window, Drake.”
“Adelaide, keep still.” Vikram took a step towards them.
“Move away from the window, Drake!”
“Not whilst they’re down there,” she said grimly.
She began to fire, in ordered bursts.
“Fuck.”
Nils joined her. Rikard and Ilona took the other gap. Each shot exploded in Adelaide’s skull.
“Pekko, let her go,” Vikram said. Pekko raised his gun to point at Vikram.
“We’re dead anyway,” said Pekko. “I just want you to watch her go first.”
“Let her go. She can help us. We can still negotiate-”
Pekko laughed. His ribcage shook with laughter.
“They’re about to blow this place up, and you’re talking about negotiation?”
She could picture the black-hulled boats in formation on the sea. Through the ripped boards, strips of cold grey light filtered into the room. The sun was rising.
Pekko held the knife to her throat. Vikram faced them. The others fired repeatedly. Her eyes were on the floor and she saw amongst the blankets they’d discarded when they ran downstairs a pile of yellowish globes. Drake ducked back from the window-wall. The globes dislodged and rolled across the floor.
It was not the end that she had imagined. There would be no burial rites, no flaming pyre. There would be no sea journey. Just a flash of silver, and shortly after, an incineration.
I won’t join the ghosts, she thought. And then, You didn’t want to anyway. A trapped thing? That’s not for you. And then. What then? Nothing.
I know you now, Axel. I’m you and you’re me. Who asked you to jump off the boat that day? I did. The madness is in us both. I’ve got horses of my own, they just don’t look like horses. That’s what Osiris is. It makes madmen of us.
Pekko twisted the knife. Her blood pulsed where it pushed.
Vikram was still talking, but she no longer heard what he said. She only heard the tone of his voice, familiar, like worn-down sandpaper.
A flare of light from outside lit up his outline and she saw his expression, the horror, regret and sorrow. I could have loved you, she thought. Maybe I do. In that second, the lance of orange signalling what would come, she saw connections converging like lines of chalk: Second Grandmother’s diary; Axel’s suicide and the drowning of Eirik 9968; the border and the horses; the white fly and the Siberian boat “Adelaide-” he said.