Osiris

by E. J. Swift

  The teapot was flat and heavy with an s-shaped spout. It was accompanied by a small bowl of powdered ginger. Adelaide, very deliberately, took the pot and poured tea into one of two round-bottomed glasses. The liquid was pale amber. She blew ripples across the top of it before allowing a tentative few drops over the barrier of her lips.

  Vikram poured and gingered his own tea. The scorching temperature did not affect him; hot beverages had kept him alive on many nights. Despite himself, his anger was fading under the dual influence of warmth and relief. They hadn’t been caught. The aroma of fresh tea, the soft drifts of rising steam and the intermittent sounds of human habitation relaxed him. He was safe. Even Adelaide’s pettiness with the tea seemed trifling. It was good tea too, the sort that would find its way onto the black market in the west.

  “Me and Axel used to come here,” she said. “It was our local. Axel loves the Chinese because they keep their Mandarin, and he’s always been into Old World languages. Do people keep their languages in the west, Vikram?”

  “Some do. But it makes it harder to get by.” And why make it harder than it already is, he thought.

  “Axel used to speak bits of Mandarin with the servers and then we’d sit and make up stories about everyone else. You get some right crazies in here. You know, I can’t help wondering if he’s ever come back without me. Where would you hide, Vikram, if you wanted to escape?”

  “Depends what you mean by escape.”

  “Disappear, then.”

  “When people go missing in the west they turn up dead or not at all, which generally means they’re being eaten by fish. I guess that’s one way to disappear.”

  He spoke without thinking and expected an angry glower, but Adelaide was looking up at the misty windows. The rain still pounded on the exterior walls. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “No, he’s alive.”

  The question was too obvious not to be posed. Besides, Vikram was curious. He had made up his mind even before the break-in that Axel must be dead; seeing the penthouse had only confirmed his thoughts. One way or another, the boy had found his way to the sea.

  “Why do you think he’s alive?”

  “I don’t think. I know.”

  She was staring at him now with an air of expectancy, almost as though she wanted evidence of his disbelief. Something to pounce on. Her fixed gaze was like that of the cat on the lead. She had a cat’s detached nonchalance, he thought, a curious immunity to violence. She put her associates unquestioningly in the position of the mouse.

  “How can you know?” he said. Adelaide clicked her tongue.

  “Intuition. He’s my twin, so I know. We have a connection. It isn’t like a connection that you have with other people. You just—know.”

  Vikram thought of the photograph in her bedroom.

  “What’s he like, your brother?”

  Adelaide smiled. For the first time, it was a genuine smile.

  “He was clever,” she said. “Really smart. Maths, oceanology—he was great at those things. And he was smart when it came to people too, especially the family. I used to get angry with them, but Axel always calmed us down. He’d know before I did when I was about to flip. He was always there. The two of us, it needed two of us, really, against the rest of the tribe.”

  She ran a restless hand through her hair. The woollen hat was tossed aside on a cushion. She seemed embarrassed, almost cross about what she had said, and he suspected that she did not often talk about Axel. Strange that she should choose him—but it had been a strange night. “Anyway,” she said lightly. “He changed.”

  “What happened?”

  “He forgot things. Small things at first. He started mixing up names, and dates. Then it was bigger things. People. Places. Oceanology. It all seemed to happen very quickly. But it stemmed from the Incident.”

  He looked at her questioningly. “The Incident?”

  “Oh… It was my mother’s birthday party. A big, public, Rechnov event, on an extremely large boat.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you can imagine. We were sixteen. We always hated those events, but we tolerated them, I suppose. But this time, Axel was acting oddly. He was making no effort to be polite. He kept staring at people in a very fixated, very intense way, as if there was something wrong with them. I thought it was funny to start with, but he kept—staring. Then just walking off when someone was talking to him. And later—there was the speech.”

  She sighed. Not wanting to deter her, Vikram said nothing. Adelaide stirred her tea for a moment before continuing.

  “Feodor was about to make one of his pompous speeches. He was standing at the head of the boat, my mother at his side, the picture of respectability. He never got the chance to speak. Axel leapt up in front of all these people, pushed our parents aside—it was almost comical, in a way—‘Ladies and gentlemen’, he began. Very proper. He winked at me, and I laughed. I remember, I did laugh. But then he started talking about all of these other things, things that made no sense, things even I had to admit sounded crazy… it was awful. When he finished, he bowed, three times. You can imagine the silence. Finally, he took this running leap, and he jumped off the boat.”

  “He jumped off the boat?”

  “Into the sea, yes. It was so cold. We could hear him, whooping, splashing the water. They had to send someone in to pull him out. He was drenched—that beautiful suit, completely wrecked—shivering all over—and he was still laughing. He came and hugged me. It was like hugging an ice sculpture. ‘Oh A,’ he said. ‘Look at their hopeless, broken faces. Did you ever see such a desolate sight?’ I took him home. He was hospitalised with pneumonia the next day.” She frowned. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “So why are you?”

  “I don’t know.” She took a sip of tea, and set the cup back without a clink. “What about your girl? Mikkeli, wasn’t it? What was she like?”

  He felt indebted to answer. “She wasn’t my girl,” he said. “Not like that. We grew up together. She looked out for me. She was smart, too.” He smiled wryly. “Not like your brother. She was a thief.”

  Adelaide smiled back. “I like that.”

  “Anyway, she died.” Vikram almost said too, but caught himself in time. He stretched out his legs under the low table and realized that both of them still had the plastic sheaths on their feet. He removed his and discreetly stuffed them into his boots.

  The girl with the origami was taking her booty from table to table, depositing a napkin bird on each polished surface. When she reached them, Adelaide spoke sharply.

  “We don’t want that.”

  The girl ignored her and placed a bird on a saucer. She moved dreamily onto the next table. Vikram picked up the offering. Its folds were clean and crisp. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t like birds.”

  “You don’t like—” He glanced at her and grinned with the realization. “Oh. You’re scared of them.”

  Adelaide scowled blackly.

  “It’s alright, you’re not the only one I’ve met with a phobia.” He tucked the origami into his pocket. “I won’t tell.”

  The girl, having finished her rounds, paid for her tea and left.

  “Where do you think Axel is?” Vikram asked bluntly.

  “He may have gone somewhere. Somewhere he feels safe, until I can find him. That could be anywhere, with Axel.” Adelaide hesitated. She checked around them and lowered her voice. “But I have to consider the possibility that he’s been taken somewhere. By someone who wants him out the way.”

  Stars, he thought, the girl’s deluded.

  “Then I hope it’s the first option,” he said.

  Vikram’s certainty was equally strong. The way he saw it, Axel’s death could have been accidental or deliberate. If it was deliberate, presumably the Rechnovs had decided the boy was too much of an embarrassment, and had him removed. They were an important family with a big reputation at stake. Vikram had no doubt that they were capable of it. Or, Axel had chosen
to die, in which case it was better for all the Rechnovs if his body was never found.

  Osiris was not a kind city, but to choose to opt out was the strictest of taboos. In the severest cold spells, Vikram had spent the nights with friends, talking through the long dark hours, pinching one another at the first sign of drowsiness, because if sleep came there was no guarantee of ever waking up again. Every sunrise was a miracle. On days like those, you didn’t think about why, or what for. You just clung.

  Perhaps that was why Adelaide was so adamant that her brother was alive. To avoid the shame if he had taken his own life.

  “You saw something in the penthouse.” Adelaide changed the subject. “Not about Axel. It was the balloon room. When you saw that, you thought of something.”

  He was surprised that she had noticed.

  “It’s not important,” he said. “You’d think it was silly.”

  Denial was a sure way to catch Adelaide’s interest. She poured herself another glass of tea and then topped up his, absently or on purpose, he wasn’t sure which.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “There’s a story about a balloon flight.” Vikram shrugged, trying to impress upon her its insignificance, although the tale resonated with him. “When I saw that room, I was reminded of the story. That’s all.”

  “Go on.”

  She wasn’t looking at him but he sensed the beam of her attention, bouncing off the windows and lancing him in the chest, where another voice was stirring. He felt Mikkeli sit up, shake her spiky mess of hair out of its hood.

  “There’s a legend,” he said. “When the rain began in the year of the Great Storms, a balloon set out on a journey to Osiris. There were two passengers. One of them was a girl—an important girl. Some people say she was a ruler or a princess. Others say she was some kind of star.”

  A smile flitted over Adelaide’s face.

  “Like me.” She raised her coral tea to her lips and sipped without looking at the glass. He had earned her concentration.

  “Well,” he said. “More like me, actually. They’d be refugees, wouldn’t they? Anyway, she has different names. She’s also blind. The other passenger is a man. Her guide.”

  He heard Mikkeli’s voice in the quiet parlour. Come on, Vikram, you can do better than this! Where’s the drama? He couldn’t do her exuberant speech, her exaggerations, but they were both speaking as he continued, because Keli had loved this story and narrated it many times, whispering to Vikram from the bunk above his on nights when the orphanage boat rocked on frightening waves, and Naala’s off-key, drunken singing was drowned by the wind.

  “The girl relies totally on the guide. He flies the balloon. He has promised to take her to a safe place—to Osiris, he says.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Nobody knows. Some say south where the ice is, others say deep in the deserts, far up north. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, the man isn’t who he says he is. He’s an assassin.”

  Adelaide made an ooh shape with her mouth. Vikram paused, making a show of sprinkling a finger-and-thumb full of ginger into his tea. The tiny grains floated for a second, then sank.

  “Well? Does he kill her?” Adelaide demanded.

  “He poisons her. And then he discovers that she isn’t who she says she is either. She’s a double. An illusion of the real target.”

  “So who wins?”

  “Nobody wins. He poisons himself in remorse. The legend says there is a cure in Osiris, but they haven’t got here yet. The balloon is still flying. That’s why it’s called the last balloon flight.”

  Adelaide licked her index finger and dipped it into the ginger. She sucked thoughtfully.

  “They’d be dead,” she said. “Or old. Ancient, by now.” She fell quiet.

  “It’s a story, Adelaide.”

  “I know,” she said quickly.

  “People talk about it mostly when they’re thinking about getting out. You could say it’s like an alarm bell.”

  “Maybe Axel heard it.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a western thing.”

  “He might have thought he could take that flight.”

  He did not reply to that because her words rang uncannily close to Mikkeli’s. His best friend, leaning forward over the oars of a rowboat as they scuttled from tower to tower, lit only by the moon. Just imagine, Vikram, that it was true. Would you take that flight? Keli would have. She’d have jumped on board without a glance back, just to get that close to the clouds. And then they’d hop out the boat and bust a lock.

  “I said your tea’s gone cold,” said Adelaide.

  She was staring at him. He wasn’t sure why he had told her the story. It felt like a betrayal. As if he had given away a piece of the west, its fragile, ethereal psyche. He wanted to take the story back, to tell Adelaide that she wasn’t worthy of their superstitions. Her side of the city had safety; they did not need hope.

  Vikram looked at the windows. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The rain’s stopped anyway.”

  19 ¦ ADELAIDE

  Adelaide reached across and groped on the bedside table. Her fingers closed around the plastic body of the stolen horse. It was no more than a few centimetres long, a child’s toy, crudely made. She moved it up and down, emulating the motion of waves, the way she imagined a real one might run. Shadows of her hands and the horse rippled over the walls and ceiling. It was dark outside; the light within the colour of a bruise.

  She turned the model over to look into one of its black eyes. Dr Radir, last in a long line of Axel’s psychiatrists, had been the first person to mention horses. According to Radir’s assessment, the hallucinations had begun months, even years before. He said Axel had theories about the horses; elaborate hypotheses about storm omens and contact from outside Osiris.

  Rat-a-ta-tat. Rat-a-ta-tat. The music of drums: Axel’s fingers. Sounds like hooves, A. Adelaide sat up. She saw him in the room, standing by the dark pane of the mirror, a shadow in a pool of shadows. He didn’t move. He never moved. He was looking for the balloon.

  Where are you, A?

  The balloon was gliding through cumulus clouds. Adelaide was back on the balcony, high above the sea, staring over the edge. The sea below fell into a giant crater. At the bottom, so far away she was no more than a speck, Mikkeli was a chromium mermaid. Her tail swished and clicked in the mud. Adelaide looked for Tyr, but he wasn’t there, only Vikram was. She reached for Vikram’s hand. His eyes were murky whirlpools. She wanted to tell him that Mikkeli was there, down in the crater, but her tongue would not work. She had never felt so cold before, and she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

  Her eyes flew open. She must have been dreaming. Her skin was tight with goosebumps; the horse was imprisoned in her linked hands.

  “Where have you gone?” she whispered. “Damn it, Axel, where have you gone?”

  On the other side of her apartment, Vikram was sleeping on the futon under the mezzanine. She imagined his breathing as a tiny hum that ran through the woven rugs, under the doors and along a crack in the floorboards to her ear. What would Feodor say if he knew she had a westerner under her roof? Reduced to terriers, Adelaide? That’s scraping the seabed, even for you.

  She hadn’t locked the door. She didn’t like locked doors, and she wasn’t worried by Vikram’s presence. Vikram assumed she thought all westerners were scum, but he didn’t know her. If he did, he would know she never thought about the west at all.

  Best, though, to let Vikram think he had won this round. Sometimes impulse led down strange avenues; she had learned to accommodate herself to life’s twists and forks. She heard movement. Perhaps Vikram was still awake, or the scientists were at work upstairs. Then she realized that it was not an interior noise but the rush of rain against the window.

  She curled deeper under the duvet, listening. Some people, like Linus, said the rain was changing. They said it sounded more consistent than it used to. When people were desperate they found omens in the blue, pull
ing boats from the horizon and now balloons out of the sky. Vikram understood this; he had told her the story of the balloon.

  Adelaide had lost count of nights passed with only the rain for solace. She knew every version of rain: ice-bound rains and fresh bold showers, rattling hailstorms, delicate snowfalls. It gave her a feeling not of fear but of safety and enclosure. Axel had never understood this snugness, and perhaps in truth she only felt it now, since he was gone, and the rain had become her companion.

  She thought of the Roof, frying saufish, drinking Kelpiqua, meeting Jan. She and Axel, drenched and shaking on a towertop after a storm. When they were still living at the Domain, the twins used to go there every night, until Goran caught them. They’d been happy there.

  The rain was passing. Linus and the anti-Nucleites were wrong; it came and went according to its own whimsy.

  The little horse lay in her upturned palm. She imagined Axel locked inside in his balloon room, sewing bolts and bolts of material. He would have spent hours studying the paths of the winds, devising instruments for navigation; some part of him must remember his love of science. Axel had been preparing for a journey, but to where?

  20 ¦ VIKRAM

  He lay on Adelaide’s futon, a rug pulled over his body—not because he needed it for warmth in her apartment, but to feel the soft luxurious weight of the material. The lights were dimmed, the glass walls darkened, but he could not sleep. He was hot, conscious of a thin sheen of sweat. There was a decanter of water on a table beside him. He poured himself a glass and choked when he discovered it wasn’t water at all, but voqua.

  He thought of the coldest he had ever been, trapped in the unremembered quarters on the very edge of the west, certain he was going to die. The towers had fallen into such disrepair that they were more of a sea barrier than a living space. No electricity. Broken bufferglass. Ghosts. One of the towers leaned sideways; monolithic, charred. It had burned once and people had burned in it. It was said that something nameless lurked in its depths, gorging on the foundations.