She smiled. “Just curious.”
“I don’t care for your curiosity. Where I come from there’s no place for it. Tell me where you need to get into.”
A thought occurred to her.
“You’re not an Osuwite, are you?”
He looked at her coldly.
Adelaide’s plate slid neatly in front of her. “The rainbow-fish, madam.” The fish, belying its name, was a warm rose colour. “And the swordfish.”
The waiter filled both their glasses with weqa and placed the bottle on a stand, withdrawing discreetly.
“It’s wild swordfish, by the way,” she said. “They catch their seafood fresh every morning. Probably confiscated from an illegal fishing boat.”
She prised a segment of rainbow-fish from the delicate spine.
“My grandfather told me that when Osiris was first built, these fish were all they ate. But they were vastly overfished. And now, they’re exceptionally rare… you have to stalk the shoals for hours. But you know how they catch them?” She waited, but Vikram did not offer a guess. His fork was poised over his plate. “Their tails glow in the dark,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
Adelaide’s reaction had been the same the first time she heard the story. Now she shared some of her grandfather’s indignation. She took a bite.
“Delicious. Enjoy your swordfish.”
“I will.”
He cut into the fillet with quick, precise movements. Adelaide lingered over her fish, watching him surreptitiously. His dark hair was overlong. The ascetic planes of his face seemed inadequate for those whirlpool eyes. Haunted eyes? She wondered. Or just wary?
“So where is it?” Vikram asked.
“Top floor of three-zero-one-east.”
“Sounds expensive. Who lives there?”
“Nobody, at the moment. My brother used to,” she clarified. She sampled the weqa. It tasted saltier than usual and she pulled a face. Vikram sighed. He sat back and met her eyes squarely.
“Your twin brother, right? The one there’s a huge investigation about?”
“Axel. Yes.”
“A crime scene.”
“He’s not dead.”
“But you get my point. I’m guessing it’s somewhere secure.”
“Otherwise I wouldn’t need to break in, would I?” Adelaide squeezed a lime quarter over her fish. “Would you like a karengo square? They do them well here.”
“I’ll pass.”
“On the karengo, or the break-in?”
“The seaweed. As to the break-in, I think you’re fucking crazy. You know it’s instant jail time if we’re caught? Are there cameras?”
She nodded. “And a security bar. I can bribe someone for a swipe card and to cut the cameras, but I need you for the locks.”
Vikram shrugged. “Your money.”
“My family’s money,” she agreed.
“Fine. I’ll do it. In exchange, you’re going to get us a second address with the Council and persuade them to start a winter aid programme.” He paused. “I’m assuming you’ll want your part done first.”
“Of course,” she said serenely.
“In that case, I want your word that you’ll keep helping me until I’ve achieved my own ends.”
Adelaide speared her few last flakes of fish.
“Let’s be honest with one another, Vikram. My motivations are selfish, and I don’t care about your people. You certainly can’t trust me. On the other hand, I’m probably the best chance you’ve got.”
He was silent, but his fingers tightened around the stem of the weqa glass.
“There’s a song in the west about prison,” he said eventually. “They’ll put you underwater where the sun will never rise. And the mud will take your tongue because you’ve told too many lies. That’s how it starts. And in the end, you lose your head.”
She looked at the untreated cut on his right temple and thought, what in hell’s tide am I getting myself into?
Vikram hadn’t finished.
“I could never explain what underwater’s like to someone like you,” he went on. “But I do promise you, if we get caught, I’ll drag you all the way with me. So do we have a deal?”
Adelaide met his eyes, those watchful eyes. Below the chink and chatter of the restaurant, the pianist spilled her rippling chords, notes like surf and jetsam. She thought of her grandfather’s piano, out of reach in the brocaded rooms of the Domain. Out of reach, like Axel. But the penthouse would hold the answers she so badly needed.
“I believe we do,” she said.
Vikram clinked his glass to hers. Neither of them blinked.
PART THREE
18 ¦ VIKRAM
The hallway outside the penthouse was silent. It was four minutes past three in the morning, and the lifts were still, poised on different levels of the skyscraper. Vikram crouched in front of the yellow-barred door, his eyes level with the second keyhole. He selected a slim metal pick from a set and inserted it into the lock. He liked to think of this as a skill rather than a profession, but there had been enough occasions where he’d helped Mikkeli on the break-ins of her later career.
Just busting a lock was enough to push the memories forward. The dripping green cell. The porthole. He felt too large for the door and its frame, as though he had grown and the corridor had shrunk. He closed his eyes, used his ears instead. Metal scraped on metal. Now he began to feel the personality of the lock, its strengths, its lines of weakness. Gently he manipulated the pick this way and that.
“Will you hurry up?” hissed a voice behind him. “We haven’t got all day.”
Vikram sucked in a breath and told himself, very sternly, not to respond. It had taken precisely forty-four seconds to break the first lock. That wasn’t quick enough for Adelaide, who had moaned and cursed and once, poked him with the plastic sheathed toe of her shoe. Anyone else pestering him like this would have received a black eye for their pains. Today, he had no choice but to be with Adelaide.
He had told her that if they got caught, he would take her down with him. Realistically, he knew there wasn’t a chance. If they got caught, Vikram was as easy a scapegoat as ever she could find. That was the only reason she had agreed to the deal.
He twisted the pick twelve degrees left.
“I mean, really, how long does it take?”
Her impatience was a physical scald on his back. He sensed her fidgeting behind him. He twisted around and scowled up at her. She was practically on top of him, arms folded across her chest and both eyebrows elevated. Her red hair was tucked under a woollen hat. He supposed this was her idea of a criminal outfit.
“It’s a science,” he said. He tapped the deactivated bar. “Your money might have got us the swipe card for this, but it won’t buy you a picklock. So shut up and give me some space.”
Adelaide’s eyes narrowed but she took half a step backward. Vikram returned his attention to the lock. Twenty seconds later he heard it — a whisper of a click. The door popped ajar. Vikram sat back on his heels. His satisfaction was tempered with a stab of fear; he’d done it now. Second offences sent you plummeting toward the seabed without a trial.
“Aren’t you the clever one?” Without waiting for him to move Adelaide ducked under the yellow bar and disappeared inside.
“You better hope that alarm doesn’t work,” he said.
Her voice floated back to him. “It’s disabled.”
“I hope you’re sure.”
“I told you. There was a code to change the code. Only me and Axel knew it.” Vikram heard the sound of a cupboard door opening all the same. Then Adelaide’s smug tones. “I was right.”
For about the fifth time that night, Vikram wanted to strangle her. He didn’t bother telling her that if she’d been wrong they would have known by now, just glanced back at the empty corridor behind him — the final curl of the stairway rail, the red carpet, dimly lit, and the security camera trained on Axel’s apartment. It was off. Adelaide’s bribe had given them fifty-nine minutes to get in and out. They had about fifty-four of those left. He’d assumed she’d got some minion to do the actual bribing, but she had reacted to this implication in amazement. I’m hardly going to trust anyone else, she said. It made sense. She had a cajoling voice; with the additional seduction of money it was no doubt irresistible.