by E. J. Swift
“-heard anything from Ilona?”
“Still waiting on Maak for a location.”
“She’ll be alright, Nils.”
“I know, but I could’ve-”
“You know why.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a…?”
“No. Waterbus.”
The last voice was Drake. She was sitting in the stern. Her boots were close to Adelaide’s head, close enough to see, in the disappearing light, the beaten quality of the leather under its waterproof waxing. A few wiry curls escaped the outline of her hood, nodding in the wind. Adelaide was concealed from the worst of the wind’s blast which bagged and billowed the others’ clothes.
The man with the beard was one of the two rowers. The other was a burly man whose hood was pulled forward over his face. Their arms worked in strong, regular motion. The fourth occupant, seated at the prow, wore no hood. His hair was shaved down to stubble and she wondered how he could stand the cold.
She noticed the bulge of guns in their clothes. They held them close, but not in the easy, caressing manner of the skadi. They held them as though they were scared to let the weapons go. That worried her more.
They passed beneath a bridge. Footsteps sprinted over with a hollow boom. A pair of dangling feet, a jeer and a missile splashing the water, not far from the boat. Then they were past. Peering back, Adelaide saw teeth ridged the underside of the bridge. Icicles. She could just make out other bridges higher up, like faint webbing in the dusk.
She tried to lift her head. The effort caused an explosion of pain behind her eyes, and drew the attention of the man with the shaved head. He observed her coldly, unblinkingly.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Shut up.”
Those two quiet syllables held a world of hatred.
“Will you just tell me where we’re going?”
“I said shut up. If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you. Do you understand? Don’t speak, nod.”
Mute, terrified, she dipped her head.
“Blindfold her.”
Drake’s hands reached down. Adelaide saw the other girl’s eyes intent on the task, before the material enfolded her vision. With the loss of sight, her internal compass clicked off. The boat’s uneven motion nauseated her. Open your ears, she reminded herself. They were her most useful tool now.
Night would be setting in. She remembered the girl Liis saying something about a curfew, but she did not want to think about Liis, Liis who had fallen, lost Liis. Adelaide did not know what had happened to her family. She knew nothing about the girl at all, except that she had been fighting for something she believed in, and now she was dead.
On the backs of her eyelids she watched them fall again, slowly this time. Apart from Goran, Adelaide had little experience with the Home Guard, but if all of them were like Goran, then she knew what had happened after. Goran was a man who enjoyed cruelty. He understood it as a science. Those falling bodies were not people to the Guard. They were target practice.
As the oars dipped and rose she had caught her captor’s names. Rikard, the burly man, Nils, the one Drake had led her too. And Pekko.
From her journey in the boat to where they rested now, she had gained an idea of the group’s dynamic. Pekko was in charge. She sensed his surveillance, a brooding pulse in the darkness. Instinctively, she understood that all of his resentment and rage towards the City was now conditioned into a sole desire: to spill her blood. She heard it in his voice, a rigidly controlled hunger when he spoke about her. She saw it in the way he took out his knife, and scraped it back and forth over a loose bit of metal.
She tried to speak to him.
“What do you want? My family can pay.”
She knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. Pekko looked at her speculatively, as though she was an insect, one that he would like to flatten and lick the blood that came out.
“You Rechnovs…” he said slowly. “All you do is take, and glory in the taking.” He stripped off his glove, held up his left hand, and she saw that the last two fingers had been crudely amputated. “You know how I lost these? No, it wasn’t in the riots. It was the cold, a long time before. Stars, I despise your family. I think I despise you even more. You know, in the west you’re a laughingstock. But you’re dangerous too, dangerous like the senile are dangerous, because they’re so stupid they can’t see what they’re doing. Money? What use is money to me? But I’ll watch them crawl, your Rechnov clan. I’ll watch their attempts to get you back.”
He drew the knots tight and smiled.
“I wonder how hard they’ll try?”
She had hoped that Vikram’s name might act as a kind of talisman for her safety, or even a potential exchange which would release them both. It had met with anger, resentment and suspicion. Pekko grew sullen at any reference to Vikram’s ties with Citizens. For him, her relationship with Vikram was akin to debasement for the west. Nils merely sneered.
Whilst they waited for Pekko to come back, Rikard opened his pack and distributed kelp squares. He came over and gave her one, then offered her the water flask. He went back to the others without a word. He had never spoken to her. The kelp was stale and hard but compact. She chewed steadily. Her tongue drained the salt from it and left her sucking thirstily.
She gazed out of the window-wall. Panes of bufferglass had broken away and were boarded up. What remained was filthy. Lightning flashed and she glimpsed the tower opposite. Confused, inexplicably afraid, she forgot her hunger and stopped, the kelp square half eaten in her hand. Her teeth chattered, but she did not notice. Another flash lit up outside. Thunder rumbled close by.
“It’s leaning,” she said. Nils shot her a glance. “The tower. It’s leaning.”
“Something’s eating the foundations,” he said shortly.
“Something?”
“Unhappy spirits. It burned once, that tower. An electrical fault, so they said. It was when the first refugees came. People were inside it. They burned too. Stands to reason their spirits haunt the place.” Nils glanced towards the window-wall. “Other people say it’s a monster.”
Adelaide stared where the slanted tower had been. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Good,” Nils said blankly. “Because that’s where we’re going next.”
She could not suppress a shiver. Something about the tower chilled her. She had an unshakeable sense of premonition.
Pekko returned. He flashed his torch in her face and then onto her hands, as he always did when he had been gone for more than a minute. There was someone with him; a stooped figure in shapeless rags, who could have been male or female. The voice, when it spoke, was a hoarse rasp.
“No more bridges. Only seventieth.”
“What’s the seventieth?” Nils asked.
The figure shuffled back reluctantly. Pekko caught its arm.
“You agreed to show us.”
“Not good to go there, cursed place, why you cross?”
“We have to get across. Where’s the bridge?”
“Don’t show. I tell. You listen, go if you must.”
Adelaide lifted her eyes to this weird specimen, trying to see its face. She sensed her gaze reciprocated.
Nils went over.
The two men and the stranger conversed in low voices. Pekko muttered something under his breath. Nils responded sharply. Pekko nodded. They both glanced at Adelaide.
“What?” she said.
“We’re going up,” Nils said curtly.
The would-have-been guide disappeared as abruptly as he had come.
The five of them climbed to the seventieth floor and reached a door that careened on one hinge. Pekko flashed about a torch. The room was empty, completely empty, even without litter. There was a two metre gash where part of the window-wall had been ripped away. Icy sleet blew inside. It was freezing.
“Stars,” muttered Nils. He was wheezing.
“Great bridge,” Adelaide ventured. She had to get Nils on s
ide.
“Oh, you’ll like the bridge,” said Pekko, a nasty grin curling his lips. He reached overhead and tugged on a length of rope which was attached to a metal ring in the wall.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the bridge,” Pekko said.
Adelaide stared, uncomprehending. She looked at the metal ring, the thick tarred knots, the rope which ran close to the ceiling and out.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
The others looked equally unhappy. Drake and Nils exchanged glances. Rikard pulled on the rope, testing its strength.
“Pekko, you’d better go first,” said Nils at last. “We don’t want her running off on the other side.”
Pekko nodded. From his rucksack he took a tangle of rope and began fashioning it into some kind of harness. Adelaide watched his hands at work under the torchlight with a sick fascination. She glanced through the gaping wall. Now the leaning tower was invisible. Thunder rumbled again.
“I’m not going over a rope,” she said. “We’re seventy floors above sea level, are you all crazy? Did you hear what that-that man said downstairs, he said this place is cursed. I’m not going there and I’m definitely not going on that bit of string. It looks ready to snap.”
“Leave it,” muttered Nils.
“None of you want to use it either, this is fucking insane!”
She stared at Drake but Drake looked away.
“Would you gag her, please,” said Pekko, continuing to work with the ropes. “She’s doing my head in.”
“With pleasure,” Nils retorted. “Don’t struggle,” he said, as the material pulled once again at the corners of her mouth. “Or I’ll use tape instead, and that’s more unpleasant to get off.”
Her nose sucked in air frantically. Pekko had slipped on his harness; a rudimentary construction which tightened under his arms and around his chest. He reached up and hooked it onto the rope. His face betrayed no fear; only the single-minded, merciless determination that was as much a part of him as his shaven skull. Nils checked all of the knots. He reached up and gave the rope a tug.
“You’re good.”
Pekko stepped up to the gap. He stood on the ledge, sleet lashing his face. Adelaide felt her heart treble. Pekko leapt and vanished.
She gave a moan of horror. Pekko had drowned, and Nils was about to send her after him.
Nils peered across the chasm. He gave a shout, and flashed a torch twice. An answering light blinked. Pekko had made it across. A minute later the harness came spinning back across the rope. Nils reeled it in.
“You’re next.”
She tried to make a bolt for it but they anticipated the move. She didn’t even make it to the door. Nils pulled the harness over her head. She fought him, struggling with every weapon she had left. Her forehead contacted with his collar bone. She heard him grunt. Then Drake put a knee into the small of her back and she went down. She felt the harness tightening around her chest.
“Come on,” said Nils. “Just get it over with.”
She didn’t move so he wrenched her to her feet. The harness fastened to the slimy rope. She tried to speak but even if the gag hadn’t been there, only gibberish would have come out. Her body was dysfunctional with fear. Nils dragged her towards the window-wall. Her shoes scraped on the buckling floor. Thunder and lightning split the sky and illuminated the leaning tower. She was a foot away from the edge-her toes were at the brink-over it-blackness above and below Nils untied her hands.
“I’d hold on if I were you,” said Drake from behind.
She gripped the rope. It was the only thing between her and death.
I don’t want to drown. Oh stars, I don’t want to drown. Give me any end other than that…
Hail fell in a gulf of oblivion.
Another rumble, another sheet of lightning flared. Nils’s shove sent her spinning out. She closed her eyes against the onslaught of sleet and wind. Thunder growled and her scream was muffled by the gag and the elements. She saw the lightning that followed on the backs of her eyelids. She thought she’d been hit.
Arms were around her. She collapsed into the ungiving mass. She could not understand that her feet were on a solid structure; she couldn’t support herself.
“Get up,” said Pekko.
She opened her eyes. She was on the other side. Pekko, taking no risks, was retying her wrists before he untied the harness. He flashed the torch back across the brink. She saw tiny dots, Nils responding. Pekko sent the harness back.
Adelaide cringed away from the gap and from Pekko. The wall here had disintegrated even more than in the other tower.
“I wouldn’t run anywhere,” Pekko said. “The whole tower is structurally unsound. Listen. You can hear it eroding.”
His voice echoed in the empty room. There were no lights. The floor was uneven underfoot, littered with unnameable, crunching debris. When she listened, she heard a deep, unearthly moaning. There’s something eating the foundations.
Nils landed walking. He must have done this before, she thought numbly. Nils stripped off the harness and passed it to Pekko, who sent it back for the others.
Nils switched on a torch. It lit the planes of his face weirdly.
“Welcome to the unremembered quarters.”
40 VIKRAM
The snow came down from the sky in dizzy swirls and collected in the well of the boat. It stuck to the hood and the shoulders of Vikram’s coat. He hunched over, shivering. At the prow a red lantern produced a dim glow. Every few minutes Vikram leaned forward and brushed the flakes away from its casing. The lantern was his signal.
The westerners, Surface Level or whoever they were, were late. He could not think of them as enemies, but neither could he think of them as friends. He had no idea who he was about to meet.
He should have a plan. He should have a decision, at least. But he had nothing. The invisible circle on the back of his neck seemed to pulse gently. He knew it was only his own circulation. He was the only person who could feel that mark. No-one else could translate its soft message: traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor.
If that was the decision.
Something bumped against his boat. He glanced down and made out a broken square from a raft rack, covered with two inches of snow. He reached over the side to push it away.
Two hands grabbed his shoulders, toppling him backwards. He lashed out. His elbow contacted-something-someone. A cry was stifled. The return blow, hard and fast, caught him in the ribs. He wheezed. A hand clamped over his mouth, halving his air. He struggled and wrenched the wrist away-a surprisingly thin wrist-but his assailant already had an arm against his throat and was dragging him backwards. Vikram reached around and punched behind him. The blow returned a muffled grunt. They were at the edge of the boat. Vikram tilted backwards and he realized his assailant was using Vikram’s own body weight as an anchor.
They tumbled overboard together, hitting the water with a compact splash. Vikram went under. The cold immersed him. His lungs seared with salt. He broke surface, gasping. Snowflakes poured onto his face. Arms wrapped once more around his chest and a voice whispered in his ear, “Quiet now. We’re getting you out.”
The cold was paralysing. He could not find the energy to speak, let alone fight. The assailant’s legs kicked under him with strong movements. He was towed steadily away from the boat.
One moment he was looking at the boat, the next a billowing sphere of flames. A fiery cloud blossomed-it seemed to hang, for a few, infinite seconds-and then a shower of sparks rained over the surface. Hot ash sprayed Vikram’s face. He did not think to wipe it away. He barely noticed his assailant hauling him into another vehicle. He was staring, mute, at the spot where his boat had been. The backs of his eyes prickled, and he felt a rush of sadness.
“Lie low,” whispered the voice again. “You were being followed. They will come to see what has happened.”
It was just a boat. He knew that. Vikram turned his head away from the destruction and saw his opponent�
�s face in the last of the firelight.
“Ilona?”
Incredulity wiped out anything else. The girl, Nils’s girl, was crouched low inside the boat. It was a tiny boat, and Ilona was inches from Vikram. She spoke urgently.
“Tell me Vikram, this is very important. They will be using you to find us. There was probably a tracker on board your boat. Is there one on you?”
“Ilona, what the hell are you-”
“Are they tracking you, Vikram?”
“Yes. Yes of course they are. Back of the neck. You can only feel it if you know it’s there. It’s like a disc…”
He pulled down his scarves and felt the cold thrill against the patch of bare skin. Ilona took something out of a pocket. He felt her gloved fingers push against his neck before the air numbed his skin to all sensation.
“What are you doing?”
“Dampening it. Done.” She pulled the scarves back up. “Keep low.”
“Where are we going?”
“The unremembered quarters.”
“Why are we going there?”
“That’s where Adelaide is. Don’t worry. Nils is there.”
“Nils? What’s he got to do-”
“No more questions, Vikram.”
Ilona began to row. His journey continued in silence. The shock was impacting on him now, physical and mental. Fate was playing havoc with his soul tonight. He felt sick.
Every few towers, Ilona eased into an offshoot waterway and stopped.
“Look.” She pointed. Vikram saw the dull shadow of a patrol boat crawling past. Searchlights arced from their prows.
“If a searchlight comes over, get in the water,” Ilona muttered. “These days they shoot dead bodies for fun.”
The night had come alive at last. The blizzard was pierced by intermittent gunfire. Muffled by the snowfall, it was difficult to pinpoint from where the sounds came. Vikram was full of questions, but all of Ilona’s concentration was on the boat. The air felt choked with halted conflict.
