by E. J. Swift
He drops to his belly and starts to crawl. He can’t see a soul, ahead or behind. Something sears past his ear and hits the tree to his left. He crawls painfully into the undergrowth, expecting any second to feel the burn of a shot in his flesh.
A hand grips his shoulder and Vikram suppresses a shout.
The pinpoint light of a torch flicks on. He is face to face with El Tiburón, belly to the ground.
The pirate’s face, streaked with paint and merging with the bushes, is a startling sight. El Tiburón extends a hand and says, ‘Come.’
The torch flicks off. They are in darkness again. The drones whir overhead. A pillar of light passes behind him.
‘I can’t leave these people—’
‘You have to leave if you wish to make it off the island alive.’
‘No, I—’
‘You have one chance,’ says the pirate. ‘I will not offer it again.’
Another shot whistles overhead. Vikram ducks his head, swearing, but the pirate does not move.
‘To clarify, your options are these,’ says the pirate. ‘Stay and be killed, or come with me and live.’
Vikram lies helplessly, unable to force himself to move. What the fuck is he meant to do? Mig is out there. Mig, and everyone who put their trust in him. The Alaskan—
‘I can’t leave the boy—’
‘Make your choice. Quickly.’
‘I have to find him—’
‘Then I have to leave you.’
He senses the pirate beginning to move backwards. The Antarctican raid continues behind him, the yellow mist drifting outwards. The camp is lost. If he’s caught, it’s all for nothing.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Good.’
The pirate finds his hand. Vikram takes it and allows himself to be lifted to his feet. It is only with that brief contact that he realizes something is wrong. The size of the hand is smaller than he remembers – much smaller. In the next sweep of light he peers at the face and despite the paint and the briefness of the light he can make out a slenderness that does not fit with the man they met on the beach.
‘You’re not who I met—’
‘Nonetheless I am El Tiburón,’ says the woman – it is a woman, listening again, Vikram is sure. ‘Come with me, or take your chances with the Antarcticans.’
She turns her back and starts to move away at speed.
‘Wait—’
He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but behind him is a massacre and to go back is capture or death.
He follows the pirate through the forest, struggling to match her pace. They have covered a few hundred metres when the pirate turns, pushes him down and draws a gun. An Antarctican is a short distance behind them. She shoots the soldier in the face. She moves on. Vikram tries not to think about what is happening in the camp. What happened to Mig, whether he got out in time – if the boy ran away he might have escaped before the Antarcticans moved in – the fading screams and gunshots as members of the camp disperse through the forest, pursued by Antarcticans.
I should have given myself up—
This is your only chance to get back to Osiris—
As he stumbles after the pirate his mind turns numb. His lungs are burning with every breath.
A small boat awaits them on the water: no light, no motor, only the hint of a figure at the oars under the starlight. El Tiburón steps lightly into the boat and turns to offer her hand to Vikram. He takes it dazedly, feeling once again the slenderness of the fingers beneath the glove. The boat rocks with his weight. They are on the move at once, pulling smoothly away from the shore, out into the inky blackness of the archipelago, with only the sound of the oars dipping and lifting, and his own inhalations as he tries to settle his breathing.
Behind them, at the heart of the island, he can see a flock of distant lights circling above the trees.
Vikram senses rather than sees the ship: a source of darkness more eclipsing than that which surrounds them already. He feels the impact of their boat against the hull. Invisible signals are exchanged and he hears the faint mechanical whine of something extending down the side.
‘After you,’ says El Tiburón.
He climbs the ladder, rung by rung, with no idea of its height until he feels the weight of a hand under his elbow, guiding him onto the deck. Moments later El Tiburón jumps lightly over the rail. El Tiburón says something, too quietly for Vikram to hear, and then the pirate’s hand is on his shoulder once again, shepherding him expertly around invisible obstacles on deck and below, until he finds himself inside a cabin. Only then does El Tiburón allow a light.
It’s a low, reddish glow that projects deep shadows around the room, and under it, the planes of the pirate’s face look like something from an ancient depiction of purgatory. Her attire is identical to the man they met, down to the pistols at her hips. The pirate goes to the sideboard, pours a single glass of liquor from a decanter, and offers it to Vikram. There is something in this small gesture of luxury – the chime of the decanter, crystal – that seems striking to him, but in his stupefied state he couldn’t explain why or how. He is only grateful for the liquor, whatever it is, which burns down his throat and makes his eyes water even more. The pirate does not drink. She is fiddling with a console, trying to find a radio signal.
‘Who was that – on the beach – if you’re El Tiburón—’
‘That was Gus.’
‘Gus?’
El Tiburón does not reply. The static from the console wheezes into words. The signal sounds faint and distorted, as though the voices are coming from a long way away. Vikram takes another gulp of liquor. He has an overwhelming desire to be drunk. As drunk as possible, drunk until he is sick.
The pirate taps the console, apparently satisfied, and straightens.
‘This happened today,’ she says.
Vikram looks at her without comprehending. It is only now that the words clarify – it is not the lilting Spanish he has become accustomed to hearing, but Boreal English, strange and, to his ear, formal and stilted. What he is hearing is a broadcast.
From Osiris.
The city of Osiris. The subsidiary state city of Osiris.
Vikram stares at El Tiburón, and his world upends for the second time that night. The pirate’s face bears no discernible expression, except perhaps a mild curiosity as to how he is taking the news.
‘I thought you should know,’ she says. ‘Your city has been claimed by the Boreals. They entered Osiris last night.’
PART FIVE
SILVERFISH
OSIRIS
A SHARK HAS entered the city. The Boreals let it in. They don’t know about the ring-net, you see, they just arrived, opened the city up like a ribcage, and the shark slipped through, soft as a knife in the dark. It’s a giant, as long as a raft rack from nose to tail. Pale-bellied, dark-backed. Teeth on it like a set of shivs, teeth that can tear you piece by piece and limb from limb.
The shark is hungry, yes, but not for meat. This is not a shark like other sharks. It’s not interested in eating us. Then what is it after, you ask? Perhaps your question should be, who does it want?
This shark has morals, you see – no wait, listen, cut me some slack here. You think this is just a tale but there’s more to it than that. The shark has ideas about who should live and who should die. This is something old, older than we are by far. It’s been in the ocean for millennia, its belly resting on the seabed, tail a-twitch, sleeping. Dreaming whatever it is that sharks dream – of shadows and hunts and blood. It rouses when times are bad. The Blackout. The Great Storm, it was seen then. Who by? Plenty of people. Ask anyone.
And now it’s back, and it is very much awake.
You don’t have to believe me.
But I’ll tell you how it goes. The shark’s sense of smell is so sharp, so incredibly precise, that it knows its target from half an ocean away. It can distinguish the exact aroma of one human being from another. There’s something about us, like ph
eromones, or maybe the shark just knows something else, that puts this shark in a murderous rage.
Having identified its prey, it moves. Slicing through the water, metres below the surface, torsional and direct, silently and at speed. It is in range. With a swipe of the tail, it rises. It has your scent. It’s coming for you.
In your last moments you see the nose, rising from the water, the vast breadth of the jaws, opening, a yawning pink aperture fenced with teeth. The shark in this moment is nothing but a mouth. You have an uncanny sense about it, a feeling that everything is inevitable, because the shark had marked you, perhaps from the moment you were born. The shark always had you in its scent.
The shark strikes.
It never misses. It takes its prey down deep, and it begins to demolish.
A fisherman is the first to see the ships, and claims that notoriety later, although there are many who will claim it, later. His name is Erlyn Tako. Late in the afternoon under a white sky, his nets trawl behind him as his boat moves sluggishly through the sea. When he winches in the nets, a large squid squirms against the ropes, wet and translucent. The catch is bad today and Erlyn does sums in his head: how much will this trader give him, or that one, are there any good fish to pull out, fat ones with scales bright and clean to push under the wind-burned noses of buyers, make the catch look more valuable than it is. He is further from the ring-net than he usually goes; he swears these days the fish are fewer, and the city grows no smaller, though when he looks back today it seems small, a collective of tapering shapes that merge into one single shadow.
Most of the time he doesn’t think about the peculiarities of it: this housing of souls wedged between the flat lines of sea and sky, nothing to be found as far as anyone has travelled, just the water, and the city, and the boats. There are some who think too much, and you see what happens to them. You see them gazing out, and you see the way indifference steals away curiosity piece by piece. Erlyn is wary of such a fate. So today, out in his boat, when he glances back at the city he thinks nothing of it, only notices the height of the waves and the velocity of the wind against his face, things you have to notice, things that can save your life.
The ships appear with no warning. They emerge out of nothing, from beneath the waves, colossal things, larger than any ship he has ever seen, the long backs pushing against the membrane of the ocean surface before breaking through in a cascade of foam. Rising steadily upwards, they tower over his tiny boat.
Erlyn stares, his initial shock blossoming into incredulity as the fleet assembles. He remembers stories of ghosts and monsters. He remembers the expedition boat that left the city of Osiris over three months ago. Is this the result? What did it find, that boat? Ghosts or monsters?
The news wings through the city, from the westerners’ fry-boats to the marble vaults of the Council Chambers, where austere men and women argue in purple surcoats. Residents begin to gather outside, standing on raft racks and leaning over balconies and the rails of the waterbuses, looking, searching for what is rumoured to be seen.
Seagulls settle on the roof of a fry-boat in a squawking chorus. A homeless kid whose eyes are too large in a malnourished face gapes at the vendor as she hands over a parcel of kelp squares, extra squid rings thrown in because she feels sorry for this one – sorry for them all, but sometimes she can’t not act on it. The kid says: they’ve come to save us. She says, what’s that then, and the kid is standing there holding the parcel, staring at her with those big anime eyes. The boats, he says. The boats are here to save us.
A diver in the aquarium tower swims close to the glass where her partner presses both hands, fingers splayed, against the tensile barrier. The diver waits, reads the other’s lips and forgets for a moment to breathe. In the adjacent tower, a psychiatrist named Radir frowns and turns up the o’dio. The investigator Sanjay Hanif cocks his head, crouched over the corpse of a young man with two gun wounds in his upper torso, and looks impatiently at his sergeant and says: Yes? What now? A skad swings her rifle like a stick, the gun falling in a satisfactory arc, and she laughs. You think we’re going to fall for that? What planet are you living on? An old man known as Mr Argyll grips the matted hair of his beard and yells Osuwa! Osuwa! Turn the lights out!
The city’s leaders confer in hastily gathered committees, while military vessels rush from the waterways of the city towards the ring-net, manned by disbelieving skadi forces. A lone bird follows the wake of a speedboat, tracing its path overhead. The submarines await them silently.
On the fifty-first floor of a western tower not too far from the border, a group of activists sit in heated discussion. The o’dio crackles. Dien raises a hand, frowning, and the conversation ceases abruptly. They wait. The silence is leaden.
Then a voice begins to speak.
It is not an Osirian transmission. It is not a voice any of them have ever heard before.
‘The Boreal States of the north reclaim the subsidiary state city of Osiris believed lost in the year of twenty-three sixty-seven. From hereon, this city is under our governance.’
The reaction in the room is one of strange delirium. Hands run through hair, glances exchanged, a smell of sweat, a hostaging of breath. Moments pass before tentative voices begin to rise.
‘We’re not alone—’
‘I always said—’
‘What do they mean, governance?’
Adelaide Rechnov, the woman known as the Silverfish, stares at the o’dio, immobile. In the seconds that follow the broadcast, time seems to slow, and within its hand she watches all the things she has hoped for rise and crash back around her, debris from an act of her own conjuring.
‘It means they’ve come to claim the city.’
On the first day, the Boreals surround the city. Their submarines gleam with a sleek, effortless health. They enter the ring-net, ploughing through the Osirian waters, pushing aside the rusting hulks of ships in the abandoned harbour as easily as plastic.
Adelaide and Dien remain glued to the o’dio, piecing together events from the panicked reports of journalists across the city. The Osirian defence is brief, disorganized and swiftly crushed. Strikes attempted against the submarines barely dent their superstructure. After the initial retaliation, a submarine dives and disappears. Another seems to vanish where it rested. The Boreals target a City tower and give its residents fifteen minutes to evacuate. The last boat of civilians has only just departed when they issue their counter-attack. The screams on the o’dio sound distant and unreal. Then the reporter’s voice comes through, taut and panicked – there’s people in there still, there’s people trapped—
They hear the screams echo on. Adelaide remembers the burning tower in the west, the flames at her back, her terror as she jumped. She doesn’t know what Dien is thinking. She looks at her hands and finds they are shaking. She has done this. Shortly after that, the Council declares a state of emergency and the Boreals move into the city.
Their first act is to requisition Osirian weapons and replace their operators. Skadi boats are commissioned into Boreal service. Then the Boreals seize the Osirian o’dio stations and the Reef falls suddenly, shockingly silent.
The Boreals issue a summons to representatives from the City and the west. The new arrangements for the city will be discussed in the Council Chambers, at ten hundred the following day. The western summons is handed to a skad who hands it to a fishing vendor who hands it to a raft rack engineer until eventually it reaches the woman with many names, the woman known as the Silverfish.
Adelaide Rechnov reads the summons without comment. She looks at Dien, who has not said a word all day.
‘Do you want to read it?’
Dien doesn’t reply.
An unnatural hush descends upon the city. People remain inside, gathering in the stairwells, adults whispering, children alert for clues that will demystify this new, unexplained state. It begins to rain, a soft persistent drizzle. The rain streams over the solar skin of the towers and the bufferglass window-walls and
the armoured sides of the Boreal submarines, soaking into the newly mounted Boreal flags.
Sometime between the hours of two and three in the morning, an explosion rips open the night. Orange flame bursts skywards, blazing brightly for several minutes before receding. Smoke drifts upwards and dissipates in the rain. The explosion occurs on the far eastern side of the city, where Adelaide Mystik once hosted her annual Rose Soirée at the Red Rooms. In the laboratory above the apartment, a row of exquisitely crafted telescopes is blown into shards.
Adelaide enters the vaulted dome of the Council Chambers unaccompanied. Today there are no glamorous accessories, no statement white suit or tinted spectacles to antagonize or distract her spectators. Her footsteps fall sombrely with each step, the sound seeming to sink rather than echo, and she can feel the creak in the waterproofing of her western boots.
The Chambers are almost deserted. Without the Council present, the skeleton is exposed, the wood and marble that were shipped from land nations and the ceiling frescos which are so painstakingly maintained, the rows of empty chairs bearing the impressions of those who are usually seated here. She has the sense of standing in a place that has not heard a human voice in years.
Except there are people: a single row of occupants, men and women, none of whom she recognizes. The Boreals regard her with curiosity rather than interest. Their attire is foreign, though some are dressed in what she takes to be military uniform, with insignia at their breasts or collars. Their faces are smooth and plump and strange to her. Even as she surveys them, a part of her can only marvel that they exist at all.
The mouth of one of the Boreals, a woman, curls in a sneer. Adelaide can imagine how she must appear to them. Unkempt. Bedraggled from the rain. Not much of a leader.
There is one other Osirian in the room.
Her father, Feodor Rechnov.
The contrast between them could not be more marked. Feodor, perhaps under advisement from his colleagues, has dressed austerely, even conservatively, but he has retained the purple surcoat of the Osirian Council. Everything about him speaks of affluence, from the protein-rich skin of his face and hands to the immaculate creases of his trousers.
