Nils’s breathing came heavily through the quiet. Vikram heard mutterings between Nils and Ilona as they examined the damage. None of them yet dared to move from their stations, fearful of a skadi trick.
“What’s happening?” whispered Drake. “Why are they withdrawing?”
Vikram could only think of one reason. He looked at Drake and she looked back at him, scared.
“Why would they go?” she said, not bothering to keep her voice down now.
Nils and Ilona came out into the open.
“They’re not going to get any more of their people killed,” Nils said. His arm hung useless at his side, bloody and clumsily bandaged, but he appeared otherwise unhurt. “They don’t need to.”
“Where’s Pekko?” asked Drake.
Vikram was alerted by the sound of footsteps. Turning, he saw the other man was already running back up the stairs. He swore and pelted after him.
45 ¦ ADELAIDE
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.
46 ¦ VIKRAM
The explosion knocked the world from under him and the air from his lungs. He was thrown to the floor, choking. He smelled fresh fire and knew the hit had been close. Rubble rained from the ceiling. Part of it had caved in.
Shapes moved. He heard Pekko groan. He sensed movement, Adelaide, raising her head, lifting her body slowly from the ground. There was a familiar sound and Pekko grunted and he knew what she had done. He felt her eyes searching for him but she would see nothing in the dust. He had one insane impulse to crawl forward, take her face in his and kiss her, whisper a goodbye. There was no time.
“Adelaide, run!” he shouted hoarsely.
47 ¦ ADELAIDE
She found herself on the floor, coughing, a ringing in her ears. The air was thick with dust. She felt slick blood at her throat where Pekko’s knife had grazed. Her eyes burned. She could hardly see.
She wriggled forward. Her hand closed over metaclass="underline" the knife. Pekko grabbed her ankle. She kicked but he hung on. She jabbed the knife behind her, felt it sink, stick, could not see where. Pekko made a noise. The grip on her ankle loosened. Blood dripped on her hand.
“Adelaide, run!”
Vikram’s voice propelled her onward. She found her feet. The door was before her. She wrenched it open and ran.
48 ¦ VIKRAM
Scrabbling on the floor. Pekko, a knife sticking out of his shoulder, lurched to his feet. He raised his gun, but it never fired. Nils was too quick. He swung his own weapon and hit the other man squarely on the temple. Pekko collapsed once more and was still.
“I never liked him anyway,” said Nils, as though Pekko was the problem they now faced, but Vikram understood that the gesture was more than that. Nils no longer cared about what Pekko could do. Very soon it wouldn’t matter.
“Rikard’s dead.” Drake’s voice came through the gloom. As the dust settled, Vikram saw Pekko’s body, inert, and Rikard’s slumped by the window-wall. There was a two metre hole in the ceiling. The others were standing, bruised but alive. Their faces were dirty and scared.
“We can still run,” Ilona said. Nobody moved.
“They’ll kill anyone who comes out of this tower,” said Vikram. “Adelaide—”
“She’s got a chance,” Nils said. “If they recognize her.” Nils turned to Ilona. “Lona, we’ve only got a few minutes before they strike again. You go. Catch up with Adelaide, take your chances together.”
The girl shook her head. “Not without you.”
He remembered a conversation with Adelaide, lazing in her jacuzzi, surrounded by soft white bubbles. It seemed impossible that it could have happened mere months ago.
“You don’t have any family, do you?” she’d asked, with that abrupt intimacy she sometimes offered, or demanded.
“How would you know?”
“Because it’s written here.” She touched, with a wet fingertip, the violet skin beneath his eyes. He realized she’d said it because she felt the same way.
If he could save one person, it had to be her. There was no-one else he could stand in front of now. He could not help Nils, or Drake, and they could not help him. All of them knew it; sensed their fates, Mikkeli’s fate, in the way they tensed, reforming. Ever since that day they had been marked. Mikkeli had shown them all that was possible. A gesture, a story to pass on. He had told Adelaide that she controlled her own life, believed the same of himself — but here he was, caught in a crumbling tower in the smoke and the flames.