Cataveiro

by E. J. Swift

  ‘No.’ Mig racks his brains – did she tell him? For insurance he adds, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘They came here,’ says the Alaskan. ‘It was during the coup of oh-six, before the government took back power in oh-eight. They came to this room, where you and I are sitting right now. They broke the door down, waving their guns about. They knew about my legs, so they brought a sling. A sling, I say! They expected to carry me out all rolled up like a cigar.’

  Mig knows what is expected of him. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I said to them: You know who I am. One of them spat at me. Another began breaking things. Small things at first, then my radios. “The northerner,” they said. “We’ve heard all about you. The time’s come to pay.” “Oh,” I said. “I have money. A lot of money. It’s in a trunk under this bed. It would make all of you rich, but you won’t take it.” I could see the greed in their eyes. Pirates, the lot of them. They would have robbed me and kidnapped me without a flicker of remorse. They’d try and make someone pay for me – who I can’t imagine – but they didn’t have the capacity to think ahead like that. And then, when that failed, they would probably kill me.’

  The Alaskan twists the dial on a radio and tilts her head, listening.

  ‘You are probably too young to know such a feeling. But I saw my final days played out before me. I saw what they had planned. I saw my own death.’

  He tries to imagine a life without Pilar in it. He can’t.

  She’ll make it through, he thinks. She’ll be the one to survive the redfleur.

  ‘So did you kill them?’

  It seems the only logical conclusion to the story.

  ‘No,’ says the Alaskan. ‘I said to them, “You know who I am. But do you know who my ancestors are?” They played along, like you do, Mig. “Why would we care?” “Because,” said I, “they survived the Blackout. Both of them.”’

  What she is.

  Now Mig is unable to look away. Maria told him, of course, and now he knows the Alaskan knows Maria told him, in fact that was probably why she told Maria in the first place. But he has never heard it from the Alaskan herself.

  He feels the cold of her black eyes, until every part of him, skin, blood, his internal organs, is chilled. Words run through his head.

  Freak, mutant, witch.

  Nirvana.

  ‘Of course they knew, as you know, Mig, what “survived” means.’ Now the Alaskan’s voice holds a note of vicious triumph. ‘They dropped the sling. Backed away. “Freak!” they shouted. All the usual, mindless insults. But they wouldn’t touch me. Or rob me. Not a nirvana. Not that.’

  She is breathing very quickly, her chest rising and falling, her nostrils flared.

  ‘They left very quickly after that. Because, as you know, we are not people.’

  Her fingers tremor, a quick spasm against the bedsheets. He cannot mistake the bitterness in her voice, but she has told him this for a reason.

  Do not underestimate me. Do not cross me.

  If he could feel anything, he would not dare to ask the next question. But Pilar is gone, and all he feels is dull inside.

  ‘Is that why you left the north?’

  The Alaskan’s gaze is suddenly cleared of expression. The shift is terrifying. He senses a searing rage concealed behind the soft cheeks and jowls, a rage that makes him shiver. He remembers the chemist. The poisons.

  ‘The north is no longer my concern. My concern is the plan which you were not listening to, and which you will listen to now. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, señora,’ he whispers.

  ‘There is a man coming. You have seen him before. He came for the telegram. His name is Alejandro Herrera. I wish for you to take him to the Antarctican’s residence.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who he is. What matters is that there are several people who are interested in what – or rather, who – we believe the Antarctican is hiding, and now is the time to exploit our knowledge. So firstly you will take this contact, Alejandro. You will check that Taeo Ybanez and his mysterious friend are in the building and you will fetch Alejandro. After that, others will come. Xiomara’s people will be primed to trail you. And a team of city enforcers will be following them. Your role is to check the coast is clear, take Alejandro upstairs, and then get out. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, señora. Take Alejandro and then get out. I understand.’

  She continues to hold his gaze.

  ‘Who’s capturing them?’

  ‘The enforcers, Mig. And then we will bail out the Antarctican, and then he will be in our debt, just like the others. And that will be a job well done.’

  ‘And what about the one from the sea city? What happens to him?’

  The Alaskan shrugs. ‘His fate doesn’t concern us. I’ve been thinking, Mig. I know how you look at me. You look and you see a decrepit, bedridden old woman. An evil woman, even, if you believe in evil as a force. Perhaps you do. Maria believes in a jaguar in the sky so why wouldn’t you believe in evil? They broke my spine, you know. You didn’t know. Yes, they broke it. I was twenty-six. A group of rabid children heard the word nirvana and decided they would teach me a lesson for what I was. They weren’t so different to you. They’d been to school but it hadn’t made them less ignorant. I doubt they could have told me the history of the anthropocene.

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I have enjoyed this city. You can choose your story here. You can choose what you wish to be, and what you wish to believe. But when it comes to nirvanas, there is only one story. And Cataveiro is running out, Mig. Time is running out for your country. The future is Antarctica. It’s time for me to head south. You should think about it. I could use someone resourceful like you.’

  Mig stares at her. He has no idea what to say, or what she wants him to say.

  ‘Ah yes. You wanted to know about the Osirian. Well, once the sea city is discovered, it will be destroyed, one way or another. I have no further interest in who Taeo Ybanez is hiding. I could play with this man, yes, I could sell him to the Boreals. But the time and investment are too great, and I have plans to make. For all I care, they can kill him.’

  He waits. Nothing more is forthcoming. For once, the Alaskan appears to have exhausted herself.

  ‘Yes, señora,’ he says.

  ‘Now get the hell out.’

  He goes.

  37 ¦

  ALWAYS CARRY YOUR life with you.

  That was the advice Ramona offered the Antarctican, flippantly enough, little realizing it would soon be truer than she might care to think. Their conversation on the roof of the Facility seems like a long time ago, but when she counts the days, barely four weeks have passed. She has her life with her now. Her pack is wedged between her knees; within it are supplies of food and water, her toolkit, a knife, a torch. The medicine. She clutches the straps of the pack tightly. She is in total darkness, but she doesn’t want to waste the battery on the torch now. She’ll need it, once she’s on-board.

  She can hear the machinery of the docks, at once loud and muffled. She can hear directions being shouted.

  When the crane engages with the roof of the container, the reverberation goes right through its metal walls. She feels a primitive fear as the container is lifted from the dock floor and swung up into the air and across, the boxes of papaver tea shifting around her. The truck driver promised she would be unhurt by the brief ride.

  Everything has a price, including bribery. The truck driver was happy to take the night-vision goggles. No doubt they will serve him well.

  Perhaps he knew who she was. Perhaps when the container sets down on the ship there will be someone waiting on the other side, to open the door and shine a light in her face. Perhaps they will be Xiomara’s agents. Perhaps they will be the harbourmaster’s officers, ready to take her out and drop her in the desert, where this time there will be no return. Perhaps it will be the raiders themselves, pleased to have another victim, and she will be reunited with
her mother sooner than she expected.

  Or perhaps the driver saw her as just another southerner desperate to see the shining north. A woman whose life is so wretched she is prepared to endure incarceration and starvation to stow away in the hold of a Boreal ship; risk discovery, risk capture, risk her life. She is not the first and she will not be the last to go north this way. There always had to be an enabler.

  The container swings down and lands with a sickening thud. A flare of pain shoots through Ramona’s ribs. Once again she feels the urge to turn on a light.

  Not yet.

  She thinks of Félix, lying in the bed where she left him. The clench and release of his heart, a little slower, as he dreams the sinuous dreams of the poppy flower, lost in the labyrinth of sleep until he is woken, groggy and confused, at midday. A fellow crewmember shaking his shoulders: You’re late, we’re leaving!

  By then it will be too late. By then the Boreal fleet will be edging away from the docks, and Ramona will be switching on her torch and shining it on the cubic interior of the one-and-a-half metre container.

  Don’t hate me too much, Félix. You’d have done the same to save me.

  Ma, I’m here. I’m with you. I’m coming.

  38 ¦

  THE DOOR IS unlocked but there is no evidence of forced entry: the first sign that something is wrong. Vikram enters cautiously, avoiding the sections of the floor that make a noise. He smells it first. A faint but cloying scent that lingers in the apartment. Stale air and vomit. The smell is sweetish, like burnt honey.

  He finds Taeo lying on his back on the bed, a dark-haired woman leaning over him, one arm slightly raised, her face arrested. Vikram backs away, startled. Seconds pass before he realizes the woman is not moving. She will never move. She is frozen. The woman is Shri, Taeo’s partner, and she is a hologram.

  Vikram edges closer, trying to ignore the staring eyes of the shimmering three-dimensional projection. Taeo’s one open eye is glazed and prominent, a green bauble. His mouth is slack and a trail of vomit and saliva has congealed on his chin. The light falling through the window makes the damp interior of his mouth glisten, and catches the saliva, as well as the dull gleam of a spoon scorched to black at Taeo’s side. The radio is hissing static. Vikram leans over to switch it off. The silence is sudden and intense.

  In this room the smell is stronger. Vikram’s head swims. He feels sweat collecting on his forehead, sliding down his face and neck and getting into his eyes. He wipes it away roughly, knocking a fresh scab from his cheek.

  He takes Taeo’s pulse, but he already knows he is dead. His skin is cold and hard. Dead for at least a day, probably. It looks like he choked on his own vomit. Vikram tries to close the eye that is open but the flesh has already set. The bruises inflicted by Vikram are a permanent fixture now. He hadn’t realized he had done so much damage. He hadn’t meant to – he’d just been so angry …

  The room feels shaky and shifting, as though he is suddenly stood on the decking around an Osirian tower after so many days on land. On the table beside Taeo is a lighter and what is left of the drug, a tiny nub of something black and waxy. Taeo’s hand is wrapped around the holoma. Vikram has to walk through the frozen woman to get to it. He feels a tingling sensation all over his body as he is immersed in her image. He squeezes Taeo’s cold, stiff hand around the holoma, as he observed him do once before. After a few seconds, the woman vanishes, and the room seems even quieter.

  Vikram prises the holoma from Taeo’s hand. It weighs less than he thought it would.

  Visions of familiar faces appear and recede before him. Mikkeli. Eirik. Nils. Drake. Adelaide.

  Taeo.

  He leaves the room and closes the door. He cannot bear to be with the staring eye of the corpse a moment longer.

  Walking about the apartment, he has a sense of extreme unreality. Everything that has happened in the last few days feels like a hallucinatory experience, and his disorientation is intensified by the stuff pumped into his veins in that hellish basement. He changes his clothes, fumbling with zips, falling over himself when he pulls on his trousers. He raids the apartment for anything of use, stopping and clutching at the furniture when sudden rushes of nausea take him by surprise. He finds a few coins, but most of the money has gone. Taeo must have used it to buy the drugs that killed him. Vikram loads packets of food into a backpack. He fills two bottles with stale water from the sink. He hesitates and goes back into Taeo’s room. Avoiding looking at Taeo’s body, he roots through the Antarctican’s bags. He has had ample time to check Taeo’s belongings; the Osirian gun is what he is looking for. After all this time the power will have leaked out of it, but he puts the gun in the backpack too. Intimidation alone might save his life.

  Lastly he brings a blanket from the room where he slept for two weeks and covers Taeo’s body with it. He flushes the drugs and kicks the spoon under the bed.

  In the doorway he hesitates again. It feels as though he should say something, apologize, but the silence is too wide, too heavy, and he doesn’t have the right words, and if he did they would be sucked into it.

  He thinks about saying goodbye to the girl next door who helped him with his Spanish while Taeo was out visiting the Alaskan. No. Best leave no trace. He picks up his bag and steps out into the corridor.

  A boy is standing there. A skinny boy, with a look in his eyes of unbearable sorrow. A boy who is strangely familiar, although Vikram cannot think where he would have seen him before. The boy stares at Vikram, a similar, confused recognition spreading over his face.

  ‘You’re the other one,’ says the boy. ‘The one from the sea city.’

  Vikram realizes then. There is only one person who could know about his presence in the city. The Alaskan, and the Alaskan’s accomplices. She uses children, Taeo told him. Homeless children. He had seen a girl and a boy.

  ‘Mig,’ he says.

  The boy nods, cautiously.

  ‘You don’t have scales.’

  ‘No.’

  The boy looks past Vikram into the room.

  ‘Taeo is dead. He—’ Vikram does not know the Spanish word for overdosed ‘—he died. He is in there.’

  The boy is staring at him openly now, at his face, and the scars on his cheeks.

  ‘I saw you,’ he says. ‘I saw you, where she was singing. The soldiers took you.’

  ‘They believed I was sick.’

  ‘Where did they take you?’ says Mig, urgently. ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s a way from here. The other side of the city.’

  Mig glances down the stairwell. ‘They’re down there. They’re waiting for me to say it’s clear.’

  ‘Who’s down there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Soldiers. Government people. Xiomara’s people. Maybe all of them. I don’t know who she told. She’s a witch. She’s a nirvana. She wants the Tarkie.’

  ‘The Alaskan?’

  The boy nods. He darts another nervous look back.

  ‘Mig. Is there another way out?’

  The boy hesitates. Vikram watches him weighing up his options. He can see the boy’s impulses grappling in his face: his fear of the Alaskan, of the place where Vikram was taken, a great loss, a need to act.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘There’s another way.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘You have to take me to the place. To Pilar.’

  ‘Pilar?’

  The boy swallows. ‘She’s the one who sings.’

  The girl on the stage. The girl who sings. Vikram looks at Mig and he understands.

  ‘I’ll take you there, and you’ll get me out of the city. Deal?’

  The boy reaches for Vikram’s hand. He leads him to the end of the corridor, tugging, making Vikram move faster. Vikram fights the dizziness clouding his head. Mig opens a door onto a fire escape.

  ‘The roof,’ says the boy. ‘Now.’

  The morning sun glints off solar panels and fractures Vikram’s vision, but it doesn’t slow down Mig. Following the boy over the
roofs, he has the incongruous sense of tracking a younger version of himself. Mig moves swiftly and certainly, as at home up here winding in and out of the bathtubs and twitching radio antennae as Vikram ever was on the raft racks of Osiris. The kid knows his city. In momentary pauses, Vikram glimpses the streets below and sees that Cataveiro has been segmented. Areas of contamination are cordoned off by army barricades. White hazard tents pop up on street corners and red sheets draped from windows mark the redfleur zones. He asks Mig, has this happened before? Yes, says the boy, and it will come back again. The redfleur always comes back. Vikram knows the words should frighten him, but instead he finds them oddly comforting; the knowledge that redfleur has come and gone; that this is not an end but the end of one time that only marks the beginning of another.

  He watches the ground ahead of him, and he runs.

  05/ 12/ 2417

  INTEL MEMO URGENT

  FM SPECIAL UNIT ATRAK / GRAHAM STATION 6

  TO DEP CIVIL SECURITY HQ / HOME SECURITY CHIEF MAXIL QYN

  INFO CIVIL SECURITY REPUBLIC OF ANTARCTICA PRIORITY HIGH

  SUBJECT: MONITORING OF THE SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN CITY OSIRIS (INTERNATIONAL STATUS: DESTROYED)

  REF: OS17532

  Classified by: KARIS IO, CMR SPECIAL UNIT ATRAK (FM 04/05/2414)

  On 05/12/2417 at the hour 22.09, a long-range radio signal was detected originating from the City of Osiris. The signal is transmitting a distress call addressed to all land nations within range.

  Cmr Karis Io requests an emergency briefing with the home security chief.

  EPILOGUE

  In the city of Cataveiro there was a man who survived the redfleur. He was a man from nowhere. He was a man without a name, although some say that he had scales like a fish, and could swim for hours underwater without coming up for air. The redfleur had him, and the redfleur let him go. Who can say, listeners, why some are spared? The man lived. He walked out of the city, awake and breathing, amazed to find himself alive. Afraid? Yes, perhaps he was afraid, at least a little. Giving death the slip has that effect, and this was not the first incidence of the man escaping a horrible fate. For a time after the epidemic he was seen in places – south of the city, and around the archipelago. Places where there was water. Here and there he would appear where he had not been seen before. And then, just like that, he was gone.