“That’s entirely possible. But you’re missing one crucial element. Why would I want to help you?”
He shrugged, following instinct. “Because you’d be doing something you’ve never done before.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You’d be helping people.”
She looked unimpressed.
“And it would make you look good,” he added.
“I don’t have an issue with the way I look, do you?” she said sweetly, and if he did not meet that gaze he had to look at the rest of her, which was no doubt what she intended. There was only one way to play this game. He stared at her openly for a good ten seconds before replying. The posters did not lie: she was that beautiful.
“Not especially,” he said.
“Good.” There was a pause, and he wondered if he had read her right. Then she said, “Two minutes then.”
Vikram looked past her into the apartment. A lone red petal wilted on the floorboards of the mirrored hallway.
“Can I come in?”
“I’m fond of the doorstep.”
“Fine. But I don’t think you’re very hospitable.”
Adelaide’s eyes snapped with apparent delight at this game. “You’ve lost a good twenty seconds already.”
Inside his coat pockets, Vikram crossed his fingers.
“Listen,” he said. “This city has everything. It wouldn’t take much to give some aid to the people who need it. I know it doesn’t affect you now but one day it might. People are angry, over there, in the bit you forget about. But we do exist. There will be more riots and one day the violence will come here and then you’ll wish you did something about it before. But if you used your influence like Linus said you could—”
“Leave Linus out of it,” Adelaide interrupted. “More. Seconds. Lost.”
He looked at her for a moment, not as he had before, but as though he was searching her out. Testing her. He doubted anyone had ever looked at Adelaide Mystik this way before, and he was not sure how she might react. But she seemed to lean into his gaze. She did not break the silence.
“Have you ever seen anyone dead?” Vikram asked.
“Yes,” she said. “My grandmother.”
“Did you see her die?”
“She died in her sleep. I saw her afterwards.”
“It’s different when you watch them die.”
“Is it.”
“You should know,” he said. “You were at the execution.”
She stared back at him in a way that should have been frank, if she had been capable of frankness. He sensed catacombs beneath her expressions.
“You knew that man?” she asked. “Eirik 9968, you knew him?”
“Not personally.” Once again, a flutter of guilt accompanied the lie. It was impossible to tell whether she believed him.
“Then who died on you? Death seems important to you, so who was it?”
“I’ve known a lot of people who died.”
“It’s never about the many. Nobody’s that philanthropic.”
“Her name was Mikkeli,” he said blankly.
“Ah. A girl.” Adelaide twirled a strand of red hair between two fingers. “And is that why you want to help your people, for this dead girl?”
Her words were probing fingers, digging through his hair and his skull to root around inside. Vikram told himself it did not matter what he said now. Adelaide could have what answers she wanted as long as she helped him.
“Something like that.”
“Something like that,” she repeated. Her gaze idled up and down him. Vikram matched it.
“Yes.”
“And what exactly do you want to do for your westerners?”
“Food. Warmth. Jobs. Hope. Is that concise enough?”
“I’m not sure,” she mused. “I suspect it might turn out to be rather more complicated than that.”
“I could tell you more, but it might take longer than your two minute allocation.”
“You are insolent.” Adelaide toyed with the lace of her nightclothes. “What are you going to do for me in exchange for my voice?”
“What do you need?” He kept his face expressionless. A smile lit up her beautiful, flawless features.
“I’m sure I can find something. Let’s just call it an i.o.u. for now, shall we? Meet me at The Stingray on Friday. Fourteen o’clock. Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.
She reached out, past the doorway for the first time, ran her finger lightly along the edge of his jawline. Her face was close to his. She looked incredibly young; only the traces of lines in their making showed she had left her teens behind. Perhaps it was that that made her so unreadable, like a slate yet to be written.
“You know it won’t bring her back,” she said.
It wasn’t a compassionate line. He wondered why she had said it.
“I think I know that.”
“Goodnight then.”
“Goodnight.”
The door shut. There was no sound from the other side, or from upstairs. Vikram stayed for a minute, memorizing the patterns of the wood, and those of the girl behind it.
He waited another hour before the first Undersea train of the morning. He had bribed a man to smuggle him over the border by barge, a quarter of the credit from the two weeks work. The man had hidden him in a cupboard-sized compartment, and when they reached the checkpoint, Vikram had heard skadi guards banging up and down the length of the barge and his heart had leapfrogged. It irked him that Adelaide hadn’t asked how he had got to her, hadn’t cared, even if it was better she didn’t know.
The Undersea was dark and virtually deserted. Vikram had earmarked a hiding place in his carriage, but no one checked the train going back west. When he finally reached 614-West it was still dark and he was burning with a low exhilaration. He debated banging on Nils’s door. Nobody liked to be woken before dawn, though, and he hadn’t decided what to tell Nils when he did see him. Out of habit he tried the lift. Its OUT OF ORDER sign had been graffitied long ago. Vikram was tempted to add his own mark: an affirmation of the night’s work, but he had nothing to scratch or spray with.
He ran up the first couple of flights, then slowed, stopping every few floors to catch his breath. After thirty-six floors he felt leaden with tiredness. He fumbled with the key in the lock — still weak — and collapsed onto a stew of rugs and clothes. He pulled everything over him. He expected to sleep instantly, but his brain thwarted him, spinning into action. He replayed each moment of his conversation with Adelaide. Was she lying awake now, or was she sleeping? If she was sleeping, what was she dreaming? Did she have ground-dreams like everyone else?
Vikram’s dream was always the same: a stretch of golden sand. A beach. He walked along it, at first near the surf where it was damp, and then inland, past tufts of vegetation. The vegetation gave way to waving grasses. Where the grasses grew through the sand there were pebbles, smooth and white. In the dream he picked one up, one by one, and dropped them into a bucket that never filled.
Vikram lay awake a little longer. Sounds dulled by memory now crept back to taunt his hope of sleep. An itinerant banging from the floor above. The stamp of footsteps up and down stairs. Shouting. Always a dispute somewhere that could only be resolved when one throat grew too hoarse to continue or a raised fist brought an end. Beneath it, the ever present chatter of a city that had not known unconsciousness for a long time. Osiris articulated itself in waves of vocals, rising, falling, meandering through his subconscious like the disparate moods of the sea.
He was woken by persistent hammering. Dozy with dreams, he stumbled to the door. A flashlight temporarily blinded him, then dispelled the darkness of the room. Behind the torch he made out the faces of Nils and Drake. Drake’s wayward hair was squashed beneath two woollen hats and a hood. She was grinning.