by E. J. Swift
In the next room, the pianist picked his way through the second half of the programme. A Neon Age interlude drifted into the Broken Ice sonata. Adelaide’s throat tightened. Axel loved this piece. Axel used to play it, badly. Such was the intensity of her longing that she believed, for a second, that she saw her twin standing there—and then she blinked, and the ache of missing was as vast as it had been before.
Adelaide leaned out to get a better look at the performer. It was Ruben Tallak, the composer, who had tutored both her and her brother. Standing alone by the piano was her grandfather.
He had seen her. Slowly, Adelaide extracted herself from the alcove and made her way over, straightening her collar and tie. Her grandfather, though in many ways the most lenient of the family, was meticulous about presentation. Above the lapels of his velvet jacket, his face was an intricate network; a history contained in every line. He held a glass less than half full of an amber weqa. She knew it was because of his shaking hands. He was worried the liquid might spill.
“Alright, Adie,” he said gently.
“I want to go, Grandfather. Please, say I can leave.”
Leonid’s hand rested for a moment on her hair, as it often used to when she was a child. She felt it tremor. She wished that her grandfather could give her a hug. But they were in public, and besides, she had given up that right.
“I’m sorry, Adie. We need you to stay.”
“Leonid.” One of the Councillors approached her grandfather, solemn faced. Adelaide melted away. The Councillor’s pompous tones echoed after her. “Such a tragedy. Barely come of age…”
She stumbled upon other conversations, each flirting sombrely around the same topic, each fading away at her approach.
“Poor Viviana, have you seen her? So wan.”
“She should drink an infusion of red coral tea every night. It may not restore the spirits immediately, but it does energise the body…”
Low murmurs; a group around the canapé table.
“—can’t help noticing that this is the second incident involving a founding family. Has anyone even considered that it could be the same people who killed the Dumays? What if…?”
“My dear, that was almost twenty years ago—”
“Eighteen, to be precise—may they rest with the stars.”
“—and anyway, Kaat was convicted.”
“Actually, she was never officially convicted because she never confessed.”
“A sure sign of guilt… of course I am not saying he is dead, you understand, but one does fear the worst. And it might have been easy, you know, the way he was, to lure—”
Finding Adelaide’s eyes cold upon her, the speaker stopped abruptly.
“Adelaide, my dear—” someone else spoke.
Adelaide turned away. She saw Linus talking to one of the krill, and watched him for a moment, wondering what he was saying. The journalist was listening intently, nodding through Linus’s sentences. Then she reached out and put a hand on his arm. It might have been a gesture of sympathy, nothing more, but Adelaide saw him shrink. And something about Linus’s reluctance struck her as important, as if, having listened to a song a thousand times over, she had suddenly noticed a flat note in the vocal. She continued to survey him for some time before she realized it was not her brother she should be concerned with. The discordance lay elsewhere.
“I’m sorry about Axel.”
The voice from behind her was Tyr, who worked for her father. Generally they would exchange pleasantries, but today she did not turn to look at him. She couldn’t.
“Why? He’s not dead.”
Tyr paused. “I mean the not knowing.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that is something to be sorry about.”
Through the doors, she saw her father was engaged in discussion with a black-suited man she did not recognize.
“Who is that?” she asked Tyr.
“I believe it’s the new man in charge of the investigation.”
Her father was tall, but his companion stood half a head above him, a thin angular streak of a man. His head was inclined politely towards Feodor.
“For Axel?”
“Yes.”
She moved away before Tyr could tell her more, pushing through the mourners, or whatever they thought they were. Feodor saw her coming. She knew he was aware of her intent, half expected him to vanish the visitor away before she had a chance to speak to him. But when she reached them, Feodor made the obligatory introductions.
“This is my daughter, Adelaide. Adie, this is Sanjay Hanif, who took over the investigation when it went to Council.”
There was nothing in this pronouncement out of place, other than the abbreviation, which suggested an affection entirely absent from their relationship. Adelaide contrived an equally fake smile.
“Hello. We’ve not seen you before. I haven’t, anyway.”
“How could you have, Adelaide.” Feodor’s voice was light in its warning. Hanif appeared not to notice. He had dark sombre eyes, a listening face. He reminded her of someone but she could not think who.
“I was only recently assigned,” he said. “I read your statement.”
“I hope you enjoyed it.”
He looked at her curiously. “It was through you the family discovered Axel was missing, was it not?”
“Indirectly. It was the delivery girl, Yonna.”
“A girl you employed.”
“That’s right.”
Feodor interrupted before she could say any more. “It was very important to Adelaide that her brother was well looked after. She undertook a lot of organization on his behalf.”
“It is very important,” Adelaide clarified. “And it’s alright, Feodor, I’ve been through these questions before. I have no objection to going over them again if it helps to find Axel.”
An awkward silence followed. Sanjay Hanif glanced at his watch.
“I’m deeply sorry for what you are all going through,” he said. “Hopefully we will have new information soon. But I’m afraid I cannot stay any longer. Thank you for your time.” He pressed his inner wrist to Feodor’s, then Adelaide’s, in formal greeting. She waited as he stepped swiftly through the crowds, gauging the optimum moment for pursuit. Feodor took her arm.
“You can’t go after him.” The genial tone of this pronouncement did not deceive Adelaide. She had grown up in a public environment; she knew the duality a voice could hold.
“Why not? I have to talk to him.”
Her skin was drained of colour where he gripped it, and there was a nerve twitching just above his left eye that she knew of old. She saw it for the first time the day Axel let out a cage of geckos at one of their parents’ anniversary parties. The twins were six years old. The stunt had earned them both a beating. Open it. You open it! I dared you first. Old friends, these memories. She almost smiled, but a twinge of pain shot through her arm as Feodor’s fingers squeezed harder. She wriggled, trying to free herself without drawing attention to her captive status.
“You promised not to make a scene. Osiris’s eyes are upon the family today. You promised.” Her father was struggling to keep himself in check. His reaction seemed entirely disproportionate to what she wanted. She wondered if he too was remembering the geckos.
“I didn’t know Hanif was going to be here then. Let go of my arm.”
He maintained his grip. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Let me go!”
They stood locked in mounting fury. Words raced through her head: all the things she could and would say to Feodor, after. What right did he have!—how dare he stop her—what did publicity matter, what did the Rechnov name matter? He didn’t care about Axel, never had, none of them had—
The crowds were closing in on Sanjay Hanif. In a moment the doors would do the same. It might be the one opportunity she had to catch him outside of Rechnov supervision, she couldn’t follow beyond the gathering, there were too many krill. She twisted her arm once more, biting her lip to
suppress an exclamation. Her eyes grew hot. She despised herself for the tears gathering there, though they were not the product of pain but of frustration. Why could her father not understand that she had to know? She blinked furiously.
Now Hanif was nodding to security. His black-coated figure was sliding away, subsumed by the closing doors. Gone.
“Why was he here?” She wrenched her arm free. Feodor nodded to a passing Councillor. “What was he doing here?” she repeated, louder this time.
“He probably thought it was as good a time as any to introduce himself.”
“What about the rest of us? Why couldn’t I talk to him? Axel’s my twin for stars’ sake!”
“Because this is a public event.” Feodor had subsided into a low hiss. “And we are meant to be presenting an appearance of unity. If you can’t behave yourself for us, then at least do it for your brother. Now pull yourself together.”
She threw him one look of derision and walked away. The gathering did not permit her to walk far, but the gesture felt right. She wanted the numbness back. She craved its anaesthetic. How stupid she was to even attend this pathetic event. Their father was wrong, Axel would not want her to behave. Axel would scorn everything about his service of hope: the pomp, the speech, the piano. She imagined him appearing like a magician from under the instrument’s lid, hopping onto the stool, striking a jaunty note whilst the guests stared, flabbergasted. “Did you miss me, A?” he’d say.
At least, the old Axel would have done.
That sense of the off-key clanged again. Even her own role today was unforgivable.
By the refreshments table, two of the Ngozi girls had given up discussing Axel and had moved on to the next prominent item of society’s speculation: the execution of the westerner Eirik 9968.
“Are you attending?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Aunt Mbeke says we all should and I suppose she’s right. It might be a bit unpleasant though.”
“I shouldn’t worry. We’ll be miles away from the westies.”
“I suppose. And I’m quite intrigued to see, you know, what he looks like.”
“You should have said. Dad could have got us into the trial. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it either.”
Eirik 9968 was the last thing that Adelaide wanted to hear about. There was something eagerly nasty in the girls’ fascination with the execution that told her they had been talking about her twin in exactly the same way.
Ignoring them both, she took an open bottle of weqa from the table and went to the next room where earlier she had noticed a balcony door. She slipped out. It wasn’t a large balcony, only a few metres wide, a cuboid sanctuary seventy-eight floors above sea-level. She sank to the ground, knees drawn to her chest and her back to the closed door, shivering violently. The regulation strip of soil in front of the railings supported trembling plants. Autumn had arrived. It was freezing.
The veil itched her skin. She tore the hat off, feeling the pins in her hair come loose, and flicked the hat over the balcony rail. The sunshine made her blink.
Osiris lay before her, a shimmering metropolis sunk shin deep into the ocean. Before dawn, mist obscured the entire city, enveloping the thousands of pyramid skyscrapers in its damp, arcane touch. It was noon now, and the fog had mostly dissipated. Deceptive sunshine polished the tapering structures of glass and metal, turning the bridges and shuttle lines that webbed them into silver threads. The solar skins of the towers greedily reaped this bounty of heat and light.
Adelaide took a gulp of weqa. The wine had a sharp, tangy taste. She read the bottle label: seaweed farmed from the northern kelp forests. In Osiris, every possession or belonging or simple luxury was representative of an achievement. Adelaide ate avocados that germinated under artificial light. She smoked cigarillos rolled from tobacco nurtured in the greenhouses of Skyscraper-334-North. Nestling in the heights of the eastern quarter, the Rechnovs lived off the produce of Osiris ingenuity, first sown over one hundred and forty years ago with the establishment of the Osiris Board in remote Alaska.
It had been drilled into her since birth: Osiris’s history, the Rechnov history. She had never felt further from it.
In the distance she saw a man abseiling down one of the gardens. His yellow jacket wove steadily through the green canvas. He was probably repairing storm damage. Adelaide lit a cigarillo. The nicotine rush caught her by surprise, and for a second she had the peculiar sensation that the city was melting, its majestic horizon stretching and reforming into new, unexpected shapes. She reached for the sculpted bars of the balcony railings and pushed her face between a spiral and a serpentine curve. The metal chilled her skin.
The building opposite was a tightrope walk away. Several floors down, a shuttle line fed into its belly like an intravenous tube, and snaked out the other side to continue its journey through the eastern district.
Adelaide pulled herself up and folded her arms along the balcony rail, resting her chin upon them. Ahead and behind, to left and right, the pyramids marched away in ordered lines. The sea rushed between them. From this height the waterways looked harmless, like washes of blue tinted paint. But in the sometime erratic progress of the boating traffic, there was a hint of the sea’s underlying menace.
She thought, as she did at least ten times a day, about the last time that she had seen her brother.
It was midweek. Adelaide had been to a fencing class in the studio fifteen floors down from her apartment. Her muscles were stiffening after the workout and sweat still clung to her body. She was running late to meet Jannike for lunch. She didn’t hurry, though. Inside, she was never seen to rush. Outside she rushed everywhere, on speedboats, on jet skis and on waterbikes. Adelaide had cultivated this image over the years.
On that particular day, the lift swished up through the core of the skyscraper and she got out on the ninety-ninth floor. When she entered her apartment, a figure was standing by the glass wall, facing out. None of the lights were on and darkness lined the flat like velvet. But she knew it was Axel because of his stillness.
She flicked the wall switch.
“You found your key then?”
That was definitely her opening line. Not said in an accusing way. By that stage, resignation had become the dominant frame of mind with her twin.
He said something odd. Have you heard about the balloon? Or maybe it was, did you read about the balloon flight? It might even have been, what do you know about the balloon?
Nothing worth paying attention to, anyway. Axel talked in riddles; he no longer made sense. Adelaide was late and the need to take a shower was pressing on her with her own damp odour.
“No,” she said. “Are you alright? Do you need anything?” If he did he didn’t tell her. He repeated the same question about the balloon. He did not turn. Fraying strands of denim, inches long, trailed on the floor behind his bare feet. His gaze was fixed beyond the glass, but there was no view. Osiris was held hostage by fog.
The tips of his hair, the same bright red as hers, attracted motes of light like a crown. She had a strange sense that he was smiling.
“I’m going to change,” she said. “I have to meet someone. You know where everything is, A.”
In the bathroom she peeled off her jogging pants and Urchin tank top and threw them carelessly on the floor. She stepped into the shower before the water had time to heat, gasping at the dousing. After, she wrapped herself in her kimono and went through to her bedroom. Carefully applying a sweep of scarlet lipstick, she almost forgot about Axel.
When she came back he was gone. He had left the front door ajar. She pounded it shut, purely for her own satisfaction, because she was sure he was nowhere near by and even if he was, the noise would have meant nothing to him. She went for lunch in the Hummingbird Café in S-771-E. Jannike was late too and had a tale about a faulty shuttle pod or some other transport problem. They ordered weqa. She remembered choosing the bottle because her staple choice was out of stock, and it was the first time she had read the win
e list in several months of patronage. It was likely she had eaten bird.
That was the last time she saw Axel. A month had passed in the way that the months always passed, and sometimes she thought about him more and sometimes less, and then he was gone. It occurred to her, shivering in the glacial air, that it was impossible to say exactly when he had vanished.
She realized now who Sanjay Hanif had reminded her of: it was Dr Radir, the most recent of her twin’s consultants. Radir had failed to diagnose Axel with a condition. He said he had never treated anyone like Axel.
Adelaide let the cigarillo fall. She knew the reason she was out here. It was that nameless thing people did when they felt bereft of decision: waiting, seeing. There was something about Osiris that demanded this act of looking out, perhaps because there was nothing beyond the city to find. It was the behaviour of a fool. She had unearthed a fracture and did not know what to do with it.
One other resource remained open to her.
She took her scarab out of her purse and slipped in a jewelled earpiece. Then she entered the code that she had memorised two days ago. The o’comm at the other end buzzed twice before it was answered.
The voice that responded was curt but unremarkable.
“Yes?”
“My name is Adelaide Mystik. We spoke earlier this week.”
“Yes. You’ve decided?”
“I’d like to go ahead.”
“Very well.”
“You understand that this remains outside of my family’s jurisdiction?”
“I guarantee discretion.”
“Use this number only if you have to contact me. If I don’t respond, don’t speak. The funds will be with you within the hour. Start with the hospitals. I’ll relay Axel’s photograph to your scarab.”
“There are plenty of photographs of Axel Rechnov.”
“Not recent ones,” she said.
