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.
PART TWO
8 ¦ VIKRAM
The recruiting officer gave Vikram’s and Nils’s papers a fleeting glance.
“Sign here.”
His eyes never left Vikram’s hands as he wrote his latest pseudonym, then passed the list to Nils to do the same. When they had both signed the man pulled the piece of paper back, smearing the ink.
Their new employer typed a few words, presumably their names, into the ancient Neptune chained to the desk. “What’s that, an h? You dogs illiterate or what?”
Both men looked steadfastly at the mouldering wall behind the desk. Strips of plaster were peeling away. The wall might have been a colour once, although what hue it was impossible to tell. Now it looked like a jigsaw of damp clouds. Vikram continued to stare at it, finding shapes, patterns, anything to distract him from the dismal tap-tap-tap into the Neptune. He wondered how many other westerners had passed through here before them, standing on the same worn floor, staring at the same square foot of wall.
The officer stamped two fifteen-day passes to the City and grudgingly handed them over.
“Eight o’clock start. Be early.” He waved them out of the door. “Next!”
“Parasite,” muttered Nils.
At eight o’clock, when Vikram began work, the mist swaddled the world in milky white. From the moment he abseiled from the magnetized scaffolding to the morning’s site, he could see only his own limbs and the indistinct figure of Nils, a few feet away. When the fog lingered longer than it should, Vikram was jolted by fear that he was lost or had been left behind. The city had vanished; there was only this smooth glassy surface, on which he must crawl forever, with nothing but the tap and scrape of his tools for company. Then his nerves tingled. He looked to left or right and felt, rather than saw, another man passing up or down the scraper.
There were twelve of them on the project, all westerners apart from the foreman. They were repairing storm damage in the southern quarter. The cold gnawed through Vikram’s two scarves and his muffler; the scaffolding felt flimsy and unsafe, but it was paid work and the pay was in instant credit. At the end of each day their chips were topped up, no questions asked. He could use the credit to buy City goods, or exchange them for the western peng notes which continued to prove lucrative for the ex-skad profiteers who had invented them. He thought what a joy it was to choose something and buy it without haggling. Maybe he’d get a bag of oranges.