Adelaide chose a secluded spot off the main pathway. She sat on the end of a stone bench, careful not to disturb a dozing Admiral. As she settled in, the butterflies swarmed about her, their minute feet brushing against her arm. Light poured from the glass dome of the roof and filtered through the tropical foliage.
Her contact was due on the hour. She waited, moisture collecting on her skin from the hot, damp air. The farm was quiet today, but there were always a few wandering visitors. A man in lightly tinted glasses was walking down the path towards her. Adelaide checked her watch. A minute before eleven and no one else was nearby.
The man was Patagonian, his hair substantially flecked with grey. Dressed in a casual shirt and well-tailored trousers, he looked like a family man, respectable, with a professional occupation-perhaps a doctor or an engineer, out for a stroll on his day off. It was possible, Adelaide mused, that he really did have a wife and children-then she put the idea aside. The line of work must be too obscure.
The investigator sat at the other end of the bench without exchanging a glance. He took out a Surfboard. For a minute or so, she heard only the sounds of his fingertips manipulating the screen. Palm leaves rustled; a little way away, a stream trickled over veined pebbles.
“Ms Mystik, I presume.” His gaze was fixed on the Surfboard. His lips barely moved.
“Yes.”
“You can refer to me as Lao.” He took off his glasses and polished them on a square silk cloth. “A favourite place of yours, this?”
“My grandmother used to bring us here as children.”
“Did Axel come here often also?”
“Not lately.”
Lao focused on his screen.
“Your brother is not in the hospitals.”
She followed Lao’s lead, pretending to examine the butterfly that had alighted on her wrist. Its underside was tricoloured, a striking pattern of red, white and black. Red Pierrot. Adelaide loved them because Second Grandmother had loved them, and for their own ethereal beauty. Perhaps, too, it was their immaculate symmetry that she loved, two sides of the same, like Adelaide and Axel.
“Did you speak to the staff?”
“I have checked admissions records and spoken to all of the receptionist staff in the accident and emergency units. None of them recognises the image that you sent.”
“I suppose that’s good news.”
“I also checked the morgues. I should ask you, at this stage, Ms Rechnov-”
“Mystik.”
“As you wish. Ms Mystik. I should ask you exactly what your suspicions are regarding your brother’s disappearance?”
“At this stage, I should say that I’m not sure.”
A small girl in a polka dot frock ran past, followed by the mother at a more sedate pace. Lao waited for them to disappear down the pathway. He gave a little cough.
“Let me be blunt, Ms Mystik. A full-scale search operation has already been mounted. I understand that it cost a substantial proportion of the Council’s security budget. The sea has been searched. There have been raids on suspected gang members in the west. The public operation, in short, has been intensive. This leaves us with three possibilities. One, your brother is hiding. Two, he is hidden. Or three, he is dead and it has been engineered that his body will never be found. Do you suspect murder?”
“Murder is a dangerous accusation, Mr Lao.” Her voice, surprising her, came out as calm as his.
“A large part of my job is to find lies. My experience of working with high profile cases is that the perpetrators do not like to dirty their hands. If certain acts have been committed, someone-somewhere-will have seen something. They will have been paid, or intimidated, to keep quiet. You need to find out if your family are lying.”
“They are lying. At least, my father is lying. I asked him for the keys to Axel’s penthouse. He told me they have all been handed over to Hanif.”
“And you have proof that this is untrue?”
“I know my family, Mr Lao. We have more sets of keys than we own greenhouse shares. My father would never have relinquished access so easily, which means he is lying.”
Lao nodded. “Tell me about your brother. His state of mind.”
Adelaide stared at a flower with large, velvety petals, twined about the trunk of a lemon tree.
“I’m sure you’ve read more than you need to know.”
“I prefer to hear from the client directly. Please try to be as objective as possible.”
“Very well. My brother-Axel-he’s not himself. That is-he’s ill, but the doctors can’t agree on a diagnosis. Some days he’s perfectly lucid, they say. Other days…” She watched an insect crawl inside the flower head. “He can be paranoid. Delusional.”
“He is unpredictable?”
“Yes.”
“Is he violent?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Lao had finished polishing his glasses. He put them back on. “You don’t have to be defensive, Ms Mystik. I am not here to judge character. I just need the facts. If your brother is the type to become embroiled in an argument, for example, that might have a bearing on the case.”
Adelaide let out a shaky breath.
“He’s never intentionally violent,” she said. “Not to people. But he sees things. He thinks he sees horses. And-hears them.”
“He hears them talking?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to discuss the horses. She wished she hadn’t mentioned them.
Lao tapped his Surfboard. He was waiting.
“Sometimes his behaviour is compulsive,” she allowed.
“Such as?”
“He does things-like-I don’t know. Once he told me to come to his boat and he had this basket full of white cloths. He said we had to fix them to the towers. We went all through the quarter, tacking up these stupid white cloths. It started raining but he wouldn’t let us stop. He said it had to be done that day. He was adamant.”
She remembered the glitter in Axel’s eyes, the puzzled expressions of those they passed.
“He’s not well,” she repeated.
“What about habits? Routines?”
She shook her head.
“Superstitions? Does he visit Tellers?”
“Not any more. He’s always been dismissive of them.”
“What about his regular contacts?”
“Very few. In the last few months he’s hardly left the penthouse. There’s myself, the cleaner, and a girl that does his shopping. But he has been known to wander, you see. Sometimes he appears in my flat-he has my key. But he might have visited anyone.”
“And the last time you saw him?”
She thought of that quiet figure waiting in her apartment.
“Nothing remarkable.”
Behind their glasses Lao’s eyes flicked about, scanning the leafy pathways where the butterflies spun in the artificial light.
“Are there any other conflicts within the family? Tensions? Grudges?”
“There are conflicts in every family,” she said, although she did not know that this was true, having had little enough exposure to other families. Her own set, the Haze, was mostly composed of those who had spurned their families, like herself. Lao gave her a sharp glance, as though he knew this, though he couldn’t, of course. She collected her thoughts.
“Feodor-my father-and Linus-they’ve had their differences. But only over political agendas. They’re all in league when it comes to family status and loyalty. Myself and Axel are estranged from the rest-not that it makes a difference to Axel these days.”
“But your family continue to bankroll you.” The investigator’s tone was bland. She mirrored it.
“Yes. Under the condition that I attend public functions like the one last week. Call me frivolous, Mr Lao. I daresay I am. But I like my lifestyle and I know when to compromise.”
“Your mother? I’ve heard it said she’s an intelligent woman.”
“She is. And completely allied with my father.”
“And your oldest brother-Dmitri?”
“Similarly. His fiancee is proof enough of that.”
“What are the Rechnovs’ relationships with the other venerated families-the Dumays and the Ngozis?”
“We didn’t all play together as children at midsummer, if that’s what you mean. The families are politically aligned but there are no strong personal ties. The Dumays keep themselves to themselves since the assassinations. My grandfather was very close to the other elders, Celine Dumay and Emeke Ngozi, but since they died the links have been purely strategic. Forgive me, Mr Lao, but surely this is information you can acquire equally well elsewhere? I try to spend as little time as possible thinking about my family.”
“As I said, I prefer to speak to the source. And if we are to succeed, Ms Mystik, you may have to devote a little more time than you are accustomed to thinking about your relations.” Lao put his Surfboard away. “I suggest that we proceed as follows. As the hospitals have yielded no leads, I will commence with further enquiries into those who last saw your brother.”
“Sanjay Hanif has done the same.”
“Hanif will not be paying them. I don’t doubt his ability as a detective, Ms Mystik, but results are always better with a little financial encouragement.”
She gave a half smile. “That is why I employed you. You will, naturally, receive a bonus payment in the event of a successful conclusion.”
“And what do you class as a successful conclusion?”
“Finding my brother. Alive.”
“Then I hope I shall locate him speedily.” He rose. “I’ll be in touch.”
The bath rose out of the black tiles like an island, round and white. Adelaide dipped her fingers into the searing water, then plunged both feet in and stood, gasping. Tropical scents rose with the steam. Breathing in slowly, she lowered herself into the bath until she was submerged to her neck.
She loved her monochrome bathroom. Like her bedroom, it faced east. Her apartment was on the very edge of the city and in daylight, the view from the bathroom was the wilderness beyond Osiris; endless sea merging into endless sky. It was evening now. The window-wall was darkened and held only the room’s reflection.
After a few minutes she leaned over and flicked the jacuzzi setting. She shifted to rest directly over a stream. The bubbles rippled up around her thighs and between her legs. She let her head fall back, sinking into daydreams. The water sloshed gently. She might not need company, but everyone needed physicality. Denying that urge was as foolish as believing there was life outside Osiris: it demonstrated only a basic disregard for fact.
Her hand drifted down, lazily, absently, and her breath snagged. It was not really her touch, it was Tyr’s. Their liaison had spanned some five years, but the forbidden meetings, restricted by time and place, still had an airless excitement. Sometimes she felt as though he was stitched into the fabric of her body, her responses a preordained thing. But nothing more than sex would ever lie between them. They both took other lovers; that way they averted suspicion.
The last time it had been at the theatre. With only a red curtain and the distraction of the play to cover them, he had kissed her mouth, her neck, the border of her backless dress. Her fingers lingered on the same spots. She felt every place his tongue had touched tingling again, as though the hot, scented jacuzzi tide had the potency of renewal.
In public, they used the studied banter of two rivals. Tyr worked for her father, and Adelaide hated him, so it was not a hard script for either of them to enact. She enjoyed their coded battles. But she was wary too, of the power folded into the layered phrases, the potential each of them held as a wrecker of the other’s life. Tyr would be in attendance at the Rose Night, which Adelaide traditionally held on the second Thursday of February. Her mind straddled the various possibilities of a rendezvous. Which stage in the evening might she slip away. Where they could fuck.
She slid down into the bath, out of the bubble stream. With the loss of sensation she felt her mind pulling back. She closed her eyes and remembered the theatre; the audience hushed, the sumptuous velvet of the curtain, the frisson when they kissed. She wanted the moment back. It was too late; her mind was roving now, tomorrow morning already panning out. A series of tasks. She needed to order the rose stock. In the afternoon she had a tasting session with the owner of Narwhal, who was devising the cocktail recipes.
The invitations for Rose Night had just been sent out. She imagined the squeals of delight from those receiving them. Adelaide’s guest list was the most envied publication in fourth gen Osiris. To have your name on the list was a statement: it linked the owner with dynamism and charisma, with Adelaide. In the early days, the era of the Double-A Parties, the twins had done the list together. Now it was just Adelaide.
The bath was beginning to cool. Not quite ready to depart, she leaned over and unleashed a gush of water from the taps. The hot current engulfed her feet before it bled into the rest of the pool and the temperature evened out into a pleasant shawl. Adelaide scooped up a handful of foam and held it to her face, listening to the bubbles popping against her skin.
She mulled over the meeting with Lao. The things he’d said. The things he’d implied.
Could she trust the investigator? Lao had no reason to lie to her, unlike her father. She could not escape the issue of the keys. Why would Feodor deny her access? Regardless of the press attached to Axel’s disappearance, it was hardly beyond his capabilities to find some way of sneaking her into the penthouse. No, she decided. There was more to it than public appearances. There were things he wasn’t telling her.
Adelaide had long thought her father capable of anything. But thinking a thing was not necessarily the same as believing it. Her mind skidded down the turbulent paths of suspicion. She must force herself to examine all angles. Lao had said there were three possibilities: Axel was hidden, in hiding, or dead. It was hard to imagine who would benefit from Axel’s death-if he had been killed for political reasons, the assassins would have brandished his body in public. Axel had long been a source of embarrassment to the Rechnovs, but murder-she let out a shaky breath-she could not bring herself to believe that they would murder her twin. Incarceration was more the family style. Secrets and lies. They could have locked him up in some anonymous Rechnov apartment.
Or he could be hiding. Axel was-she had to be honest with herself-not in a clear state mind.
If only she could get into the penthouse. There were no friends or confidantes to whom Axel might have entrusted a spare set of keys. Even in the old days, his relationships were superficial. He had never seemed to need people, except for Adelaide. Before.
She slid further under the bathwater, until her hair swilled around her shoulders and only her face remained above. It felt cold and exposed. She remembered Axel, hiding in a similar fashion under the bedclothes, because he was afraid of the storms. Adelaide was afraid of birds. She’d mocked her twin, they’d mocked one another, until their grandfather came to Axel’s rescue. Tell us a story, she’d begged. Tell us about the storms. And through the wind and the rain outside they listened to the slow resonant timbre of his voice as he told them about the year of the Great Storm, and how the refugees came to Osiris to escape the doomed, poisoned lands, from Patagonia, from Afrika, from India and Zeeland, even from the far flung Boreal States in the north, and how disease flew through the city like a dragon so they had to stay in the west, in quarantine. What then, she asked, what then? And he said, after the Great Storm came the Great Silence. We lost contact with the world. The people who left the City never came back. They were lost.
All of them? Asked Axel.
All of them.
When Adelaide got out of the bath it was dark. The water swilled away in languid spirals. She thought of the tank being drained the day Eirik 9968 was executed and she closed the door on the bathroom so as not to hear the noise.
She walked barefoot around the window-walls of her apartment, switching on lights, remembering something funny Second Grandmother said once about her old land-house having square rooms. How boring, said Adelaide. How functional, said Second Grandmother.
Adelaide was seized with a sudden longing to hear Second Grandmother speaking. She called on her o’musaique and selected an excerpt at random from the transcripts. The machine glowed pale violet and Second Grandmother’s light, softly accented voice filled the room.
We knew, that day, that the end of the world had come. We read it in the sands and in one another’s eyes. The Neon Age (as they used to call it on the beam, when I was girl) was truly over.
Adelaide sat on the edge of her futon. Her skin was still damp under her kimono and between her toes. On the glass-topped table before her was a ceramic bowl with her keys in it, and a silver pot. Adelaide drew the pot towards her, frowning as she noticed signs of tarnish on the lid. She used a corner of her kimono to polish the metal.
And that’s when we got on the boats. I had nothing with me. No belongings and no people. My family were dead. I was leaving behind fire and ash. As we crowded onto the boat, the beach was ablaze. I remember the sky-yellow, like malarial eyes. There were deaths. There were so many deaths. Some bodies had been desecrated, others were still fresh and ripe with blood. Not just through sickness, there were killings too, of course. I had spent much of the last two years in hiding. Even now I will not speak of those things.
I was terrified of the ocean. I knew that the sea sunk many more boats than the precious few it allowed to pass. I might be hurled from the boat and drown. I would be alone, in the vastest plain on Earth-the saltwater. But my terror of land and all it contained was even greater-so I fled, as we all did, with death in the surf beside us.
I did not imagine what I would find.
There was a slight cough, and Second Grandmother said, Autumn seventy-two, end of transcript fourteen.
A shadow made Adelaide glance up; a night bird sweeping past the window-wall. She tensed, hunched over, until it had passed. Even then she could feel its presence, as though those sharp avian eyes were fixed upon her, watching.
She thought of Second Grandmother, speaking carefully into a microphone. She thought of Axel standing at the glass, his back to her, watching space. He always had questions, her twin, so many questions, could never accept that some things just were. His later visitations might have spooked anyone else, but Adelaide had grown used to the intrusion. She came to expect it. The person that came into her apartment and stared out of windows was not really her brother. They shared the same constellation of freckles, and they had the same calibre voice, but there the resemblance ended.
It was only since he disappeared that she had felt the tug again. Before, there was the gap. What had been and what now was. As though while he was physically present, she could ignore the strange thing that had happened to him. But now he was gone, the old connection had ignited once more. Its flame was tiny. She had to shield it in both hands. Blowing gently upon it, watching the baby fires curl and evolve into dragon shapes, that suspicion, as fragile and nebulous as a bubble, hardened into certainty. Axel was alive. He might have been taken, hidden, locked away-but she was certain her twin was alive.
She just had to find him.
A distant whirr of machinery caused her to glance up at the ceiling. The three floors above her apartment were home to a private scientific facility that housed an array of sensors and telescopes trained on the stars. Sometimes she heard noises in the night. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of someone passing in the lift, coming down from, or travelling up to the final floors.
The noise stopped. The apartment was silent once more. Adelaide gave the silver pot a final wipe. From it she took a pinch of salt, and threw it at the window to ward off the dead. Each night, out by the ring-net, the ghosts gathered in their millions, keeping silent vigil over the city.
But not you Axel, she thought. Not you.