There was something awful, she thought, about the idea of prolonged wondering, of surveillance. She would almost rather have been caught in the act.
“You know if our father finds out he’ll be fired,” said Linus.
“I know.”
“You’re selfish.”
“I always have been.”
“There’s too much on the line.”
“For me, too.” She hardly knew what they were saying.
“For everyone. This is an unstable time politically.” Linus lowered his voice. “Adelaide, you must know that the City is on the verge of a resource crisis. Bufferglass and solar skin reserves are all but gone, now we’re having problems at the mining station. This is not a time when the family needs distractions. Now please — if you aren’t prepared to reconsider, let’s just go back to how things were. We’ll stick to our business and you stick to yours.”
Not trusting herself to speak, she stared directly ahead. Linus sighed.
“I have to go. I’ve got a meeting at nine o’clock in the morning and I need to be awake for it.”
“Of course. Thank you for coming.”
Many hours later, when the party was over and she was sitting alone in its debris, Adelaide would have to admire the finesse of Linus’s attack. He might have played his trump card too early. He had played it well nonetheless. But watching him leave, all she felt was sick, as if every last gasp of oxygen had been squeezed from her body.
12 ¦ VIKRAM
“So Vik does his spiel, tells her how we’re all living in shit, dying of cold and drowning down here, and Miz Adelaide Mystik goes, get this, she goes, thank you for coming. Thank you for coming! Can you believe it!” Nils laughed until it turned into a spluttering cough. He tapped the passing bar girl on the shoulder. “Get us another jug of that, will you?”
The boarded-up den was packed and beginning to get rowdy. Vikram, Nils and Drake hunched on either side of the makeshift table: a door propped over empty kegs. Drake had her feet up. She was wearing her prized boots, huge and chunky, their soles two inches thick and ridged like a series of fins. A naked electric bulb swung overhead, casting wild shadows, making the drunk feel drunker.
“Stuck up cow,” said Drake. She drew luxuriously on a skinny roll-up and sighed out an equally emaciated trail of smoke. “Surprised you didn’t punch her, Vik.”
“I was tempted,” Vikram said.
“Thank you for coming.” Nils put on a high pitched, whiny voice. “What a bitch.” He shook his head admiringly. Nils’s reaction was predictable. He was disappointed Vikram had seen so little of Adelaide, but she was exactly as Nils had imagined.
Drake elbowed a man who was trying to inhale the smoke from her cigarette. “So, did you get a good look at her apartment? I bet it’s massive, right?”
Vikram shook his head. “You can’t imagine.”
“Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine the whole thing.” There was a derisive, bitter tone to Drake’s voice. Vikram understood it completely, but he wished suddenly that it was not there.
“I talked to this one girl,” he said. “She seemed alright.”
“Alright?” Drake gave a snort of disbelief. “How alright?”
Vikram couldn’t say that Jannike hadn’t given him away without explaining that he’d been in Adelaide’s bedroom, so he just shrugged. Now he thought about it, perhaps she had given him away.
The bar girl came back with a cracked jug and dumped it in the middle of the bench. Some of the contents splashed over.
Nils jumped to his feet. “Hey, watch what you’re doing!”
Vikram reached up and put a hand on Nils’s arm until his friend sat down. The bar girl stalked off without a word.
“That Miz Mystik could take a leaf or two out of her book,” Drake commented.
“Maybe she already did,” Vikram tried, half-heartedly, to join in on the joke. He had given his friends the bare facts. He’d told them about the extravagance of the Red Rooms, his brief conversation with the guests, what Tyr had said at the end. He hadn’t told them about western rag. He could not explain the chagrin he had felt. For Nils, Vikram’s expulsion was a great escape, to be recounted and exaggerated in company. It was not an unflattering version, but every time Nils retold the story, it echoed falser in Vikram’s mind.
The wind banged against the boarded bufferglass. Above them, the light bulb flung back and forth.
“Whipping up a ghost-grabber,” Drake said, hooking one ankle over the other. She widened her eyes spookily. Vikram glanced at the window-wall. Watch out, the orphanage boat-keeper used to say, or the Tarctic will get you.
“Better not be,” Nils grumbled. “We’ll be stuck here all night.”
“Better get another jug.” Drake stuck her arm into the air and twisted her face into an expression of mild pain. “Oy, waiter! Are you there?” She and Nils convulsed.
A heavy-set man in a woollen hat paused by their table. His face was familiar but Vikram couldn’t place him.
“Drake. Thought I heard your voice.”
“Hey, man, good to see you. Working the Friday shift?”
“Maybe, maybe. You?”
“Same as always.”
The man nodded to Nils and Vikram and moved on before they had a chance to return the greeting.
“Who was that?” Vikram asked.
“Rikard. You remember Rikard? He was with us three years ago.”
“Think Keli knows him,” Nils added.
Rikard. The face sharpened into memory; their paths must have crossed. It was possible he had never even spoken to the man, but there had been so many people back then.
“I didn’t realize you were still in touch with that crowd,” he said.
“I’m not. He’s started crewing the boats occasionally, I ran into him a few weeks back.”
Vikram looked at the soles of Drake’s boots, the ridges packed with waterproof wax and fish scales. He was terrified that one day she would be caught on an illegal fish run and either killed or flung underwater, but it was pointless voicing that fear. Instead he asked, “What happened to your tooth?”
He thought she had lost one of the front ones, but when she grinned he saw that the tooth had turned entirely black.
“Some bastard tried to nick my boots while I was asleep.”
“I’ll buy you a gold one for midwinter,” Nils offered.
“You’re so generous, you. I’ll have a pair of ruby earrings while you’re at it. And maybe a bunch of, what was it, roses too — for my hair.” Drake screwed up a handful of wiry curls. “What d’you think?”
Vikram drained his mug.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny you two.”
When they left the den, much later, the wind had dropped and they had finished several jugs. Vikram stepped outside ahead of the others. The first bridge, thirty floors up, was a rumpled construction lashed together out of planks, boards, squares of fibreglass, broken bufferglass panes, metal sheets and whole and partial boats. Dirty water welled in the pit of a kayak, dripping erratically down.
Vikram climbed easily over the treacherous walkway. The bridge rocked beneath him, regularly, like a pendulum. He sensed movement in the sky above, the clouds scudding away on high winds. A glimmer of light drew his gaze south. He followed it, found clear sky and there, on the horizon, a phenomenon. Ribbons of gauze undulated in the stratosphere: green and yellow, flickering, shimmering. The lights always meant something. Sickness. Death. Was that where his failure to engage that lofty girl would end? He was afraid, but the strange evanescent beauty drew him in spite of his fear. He could have sat on the bridge for hours, with no company but the sea hissing somewhere below.