PART ONE

NOT DEAD YET

Osiris

They pulled her out of the water and took her away from the place where he died. She was half drowned, saltwater swilling in her lungs, howling and delirious. One of them gripped her beneath the ribcage and pushed upwards until she vomited all the liquid and could only retch, twitching in the stern of the boat like some strange sea creature they had dredged up from the deeps. All around them the derelict west was on fire. The ocean gleamed red with the reflection of flames and the pitted towers were outlined in stark relief against the night. Skadi boats weaved ribbons across the surface. One of the two could hear sirens and human screams, tormented sounds issuing from the water and from behind the fire, and the other watched the flames and sensed the burn of heat on skin.

They took her home, a run-down apartment where the electricity was touch-and-go and several but not all of the appliances worked. It was not the worst they had lived in but not the best either. Broken objects stood where they had last been used with a vaguely helpless air, as though there might one day be the means to fix them, and they hoped, while not entirely believing, that this might be the case. The rescued woman from the sea became a fixture like these other things.

They put blankets and pillows together and tried to get her to sleep, but she lay catatonic, her body racked with tremors, and no matter how many covers they pressed on top of her she remained cold. She stared upwards, appearing to see nothing. Nothing physical, anyway. When she did sleep it was never for long. She woke screaming and so she became afraid of sleep; they could see the fear spark beneath her lids even as they drooped, the terror of what sleep might bring. Ole Larsson, who was deaf, saw only the open mouth of the girl, muted, a hole stretching in her face. Mikaela Larsson heard the cries, and made soft, pacifying noises. They tried to quiet her, although there were others who screamed too in this tower. She was not out of place. She was not the only one with demons.

When she screamed too loudly they put a hand over her mouth and tried to calm her until she shook with dry sobs. They patted her shoulders, which were thin and bruised. They put salve on her skin. Both of her wrists were hurt; they chose not to think about why that might be. What might have caused those marks to be there.

They were not sure what to do with her. Through the first night they murmured. There, there. There, there. They stroked her forehead, her hair. It was long and russet and rough with saltwater. They remembered a bird they had once nursed back to health. They had found it tangled in a cluster of junk on the surface, plastic wires twined around its feet, flapping helplessly, without the tools or knowledge to free itself. It was like that. They guessed the girl was a resident of the unremembered quarters. If so, she had no family. They were not sure what had brought them out on the night when their city burned and the old haunted tower collapsed, releasing all of its ghosts into the open air like spores, where they must be drifting now, without sense or direction. A bad thing, to set those ghosts free – they felt it with a sense of unease. If asked, Mikaela Larsson, a kind-faced woman who believed in providence, would struggle to explain their motives. They were part of no movements. They had no political agenda. But they had found they could not stay inside. Something was happening. A need to aid propelled them. With their habitual, unspoken symbiosis, they fetched their boat and rowed the short distance from the tower where they lived to the unremembered quarters and there in the water they found the woman, half-drowned.

And now they had her and did not know what to do.

The woman was someone, but they did not recognize her. Even if she had told them her name, it would have meant little to them. Nothing the City had done had ever made much difference to their lives. On the other side of the border, laws were passed and acts declared. Ole and Mikaela took shifts at the plant and sat together in the evenings, one listening to scratchy music on the o’dio channels, and the other reading, salvaged books and papers, or they played cards or bones, or went to watch the gliders practise, stood arm in arm, with a flask of warm spiced raqua if money was better. They kept to themselves. The City was another country.

The morning after the tower collapsed they coaxed her into clean clothes, noting the abrasions on her body, and tried to make her eat. They gave her coral tea. When her hands shook and she spilled the steaming liquid, they wiped it up and pressed cold cloths to the scalds. There, there. They had a son, but he visited rarely. She was like the daughter that had never been. There, there. When she managed to eat a few mouthfuls they watched with pleasure. Good, Mikaela encouraged her. And another. Ole smiled and nodded. They spoke little. The woman did not speak at all, except in dreams. What she said in her dreams was incomprehensible. They did not try to understand; they only wanted her to be well again.

The woman did not know it yet, but being found by these two was her first piece of luck for some time. For now, she was in the fog. There were senses here, premonitions and paranoias, sudden horrors that sneaked up with moist hands at her back, but there was nothing that could be grasped. Here, everything slipped. Mostly it felt as though she had never come up for air. She was still underwater, suspended somewhere between life and death, turning over and over in a watery limbo without name.

* * * *

‘Ata,’ says Mikaela Larsson.

Ata. Ole mouths the syllables, testing them silently first.

Ata.

This is what the woman who used to be known as Adelaide Rechnov writes for them on a piece of paper, a week, or maybe a fortnight, after. She is no longer sure about time, about anything that once could be counted and now cannot.

The paper is spotted with grease from the work surface. The word sits upon it. Ata. A-ta. A part of her must be working, still functioning, because she chose the name. It sounds not unlike the old one, so she will not be caught out when someone calls an unfamiliar word. She will not be caught again. She cannot be caught.

Ole and Mikaela Larsson take turns to go to their shifts at the plant and to look after the woman, until they feel they can leave her alone. One day they come home and find a tail of matted hair lying in the sink. She has taken a pair of scissors to her head. She sits on the floor snipping away at what is left. They watch silently. Eventually Ole removes the tail of hair and washes it out in a bucket and sets it out to dry, separating the strands. The woman is angry when she sees it but Mikaela takes her arm and says they can use it. Hair is good for pillows, or some other insulation, they can sew it into her clothes, she says. It will keep her warm in the winter. Gently, she takes the scissors from the younger woman, prying them out of her hand. Let me. The woman falls abruptly still and obedient and Mikaela takes the ends of her hair, clipping at them neatly, leaving the fringe long when the woman insists.

The woman sweeps up the cuttings of hair and that evening she helps them clean the apartment, awkwardly, trailing them from one side of the room to the other, copying what they do. If they think her behaviour strange they do not say so. She is grieving, they have decided, but she will not – or cannot – say what she has lost.

Later she writes:

I need to change my hair.

They look at the note, confused. Mikaela thinks of those women on the boats whose hair is always sheer and black and she worries. You want a different colour? Is that it?

Ata nods. She hesitates. They watch her pick up the pen again.

She writes:

It isn’t safe.

They look at the three words for a long time. Without having to exchange a glance they realize that they have always known this. It isn’t safe. They do not know who she is but it is not safe for her.

They remember the damage to her wrists when she arrived. The bruising. The skin there is still new, pink and shiny. They find they cannot bear the idea of her being harmed.

Ole and Mikaela circle her in their arms and hold her in a hug. They can feel her trembling. Mikaela says, we will look after you. We will keep you safe. She leans into them, shaking, absorbing their kind, open-hearted warmth, wanting to believe that it is true. That it could even be possible.

* * * *

Mikaela procures the dye for her. Something plain and brown, innocuous. If she were in the City she could get lenses to change the colour of her eyes, but she is not in the City now, and has no intention of going back. In the trash banks of the tower she finds a pair of discarded glasses and the couple help her to change the glass in the frames to something that does not blur her vision. After a while she gets used to the rub of plastic against the bridge of her nose.

On the o’dio, she is reported as missing. There are patrols out there, searching the western waterways. Then she is pronounced dead. It is a relief, to be dead.

She makes herself useful to the Larssons. She can see the pleasure in their faces with each small achievement, preparing a meal, or taking her first steps outside the apartment. She lets Ole show her how to drive their boat, a small motor with blue and white stripes, pretending she has never driven before. It gives her a reason to keep going. For them, she will do this. For them, she will clean her teeth, do the shopping run and scrub the windows, polishing in round, persistent motions until the glass sparkles like sunlight on the waves of the ocean that rush by, below, below, below.

She does not allow herself to think about him. Not even his name. His name is a whirlpool waiting to open up and engulf her. It could appear at her feet at any moment, through any matter: on the interlocking decking around a tower, or the fibreglass floor of a waterbus. Where there was ground underfoot, suddenly there is an abyss.

But sometimes it happens by accident and the pain is so acute she wants to cry out. She pushes her fist against her mouth, biting into the skin of her knuckles. Mikaela wraps tape around her fingers and tells her not to touch them. She remembers being told not to bite her nails as a child. Who told her that? Her mother, probably, but to think of them is another trip-up, another entry to the whirlpool below; it is because of them that all this has happened, that a man has died, that many more than one man have died.

The last words they exchanged were not happy ones. She was angry. She felt betrayed. He told her the truth and in that moment she hated him for it.

Had she known there was no more time, it might have been different.

There were other things she would have said. There are things she would say now, but will never have the chance.

At night she dreams of all the dead in conference and sees herself as reported on the o’dio among them, slowly decomposing beneath the surface. The dye comes off her hair, and then the skin comes off her face, and she rots. A strange relief in seeing the pieces of herself come adrift, the molecules of blood and tissue flying apart in a slow-motion explosion. What is left is a stillness of water, gently reddened, translucent. An after, as if there were never a before.

* * * *

One night they sit together at the table, eating a stew she has prepared from a recipe of Ole’s, chewing slowly. The occasional nod: it’s good. If she needs to communicate something, she gestures, or writes it. At first she tried to talk, and found her throat was blocked, but now she no longer tries. Mikaela reassures her: these things take time. It will come back. She has never been in a place where there was no need for words. When she thinks of her old life – that other person, in the other city – it occurs to her that there were always words, and never silence. There were promises and lies, but there was rarely the truth.

Spoons scrape against bowls. She notices details like this, the small functional sounds, a swallow or a cough. They eat all of the stew. Mikaela switches on the o’dio. The apartment is full of the smell of cooking, briny and fresh. The woman looks at the empty dish and she is surprised by the peace that settles over her in that moment. She offers a smile to her rescuers and receives two smiles in return. Their lips curve in the same way. She is not sure if it was always like this or if they have become more like one another over time, their gestures merging into one entity, as happens sometimes with those who share lives.

She writes one word on the piece of paper and pushes it towards them. A question. Mikaela Larsson looks at her.

‘Because you need us, Ata.’

* * * *

Weeks pass and they are beginning to depend on her too. Returning from the market with the day’s fresh kelp, she feels lighter than usual. She’s got a large bag of it, and she’s pleased, because she has learned to haggle without words. There are plenty of ways to communicate without speech: the slight contraction of the eyebrows, in surprise at the price, the shrug that denotes indifference. Take my money, don’t take it, I don’t care. She worried at first that her silence might mark her out, but the truth of it is, everyone has their peculiarities on this side of the border.

When she reaches the door to the apartment she hears voices. Not the o’dio but real voices in real time. Mikaela, and another, male, youngish, and with an insistent whine. She stops at once and listens.

The man says, ‘I think you should come.’

‘Well…’

‘No, I think you should.’

‘We’ll see. We’ll see.’

‘I helped organise it. Don’t you want to know more? Aren’t you interested?’

‘Of course I am, you know I am. Go on. You tell me.’

‘It’s a demonstration. Something big, exciting. There’ll be a lot of people there.’

‘You know we don’t go in for that sort of thing.’

‘It’s important. You should be there. It’s about integration. You can’t not be there.’

Mikaela makes a non-committal noise and the man repeats himself. ‘You can’t not be there.’

‘Really, I don’t think—’

‘You don’t think? You’re right, you don’t think.’ The man’s voice grows louder. ‘You don’t think about anything other than yourselves. Call yourselves westerners? You know what, you deserve to stay here when the border opens.’

She feels a rush of anger towards this person, whoever he is. How dare he speak to Mikaela in that way?

‘We don’t call ourselves anything,’ says Mikaela. She does not rise to the other’s anger and her voice remains gentle. ‘We just want to get on with our lives. Be careful, Oskar. You know we worry about you with those people.’

Then she hears the sound of something being hit. The table, she thinks. The table she polished this morning. She imagines the strange man’s palm smacking it, his sweat now smearing the clean surface, polluting it, and her anger grows.

She hears him say, ‘This is a joke.’

Footsteps, hurried, across the apartment. She backs away, alarmed, but it is too late. The door slams open. The young man is in the doorway, his coat buttoned to the throat implying he never intended to stay for long. He stares at her, his face flushed with anger.

‘Who the hell are you?’

She backs away, panicked. She can’t think. She can’t think! She hears Mikaela coming to the door, wants to say no, don’t acknowledge me, don’t say a word, but her throat is stoppered.

‘Ata?’ says Mikaela Larsson.

The man is still staring at her.

‘Ata?’ he repeats.

Danger, she thinks. Danger. Run. Get out. Get out now.

But she can’t move. She’s transfixed in his glare. The handle of the bag is slippery in her sweating palm. She can feel the damp weight of the kelp.

‘This is Ata,’ says Mikaela. ‘She’s been staying with us.’

No. No—

‘Since when?’

‘Since the night the tower collapsed.’

Please stop – you don’t realize—

‘The tower—’

‘We found her, Oskar. In the water. She was in trauma. Don’t raise your voice, it upsets her—’

She sees the change in the young man’s face. The hint of recognition, the confusion as he struggles to place her.

‘Ata,’ says the man again, a disbelieving note in his voice. ‘Take those glasses off a minute?’

He reaches out a hand. She doesn’t know what his intent is but the movement is enough, it’s the impetus her body needs. She turns and runs. Behind her she hears his shout, Hey! and Mikaela Larsson calling after her, but she’s already in the stairwell. Her chest is tight. It’s hard to breathe. She races down the stairs, blundering into people, ricocheting against the walls, unaware of any pain as she connects with concrete. She can hear the man, Oskar’s, voice.

‘Hey, Ata! Where are you going?’

He’s following. Did he recognize her? Could he?

There’s a bridge ten floors down. She ducks into a corridor and heads for it. He won’t know which way she’s gone. He’ll have to guess.

She steps out of the tower onto the narrow catwalk that constitutes a bridge this side of the border, clutching at the rusting handrails for balance. The tail of a winter wind hits her face, whipping through the inadequate western clothing and chilling her at once. The sea churns coldly in the waterway below. Ahead of her on the bridge is a young child. She watches where the child steps and places her feet in the exact same spaces. They are agile as birds, the kids here, and it is this that will give her away, any hint of hesitation, the suggestion that she has not spent her entire life balancing on rickety bridges constructed from salvage that might at any moment give way beneath her feet.

Fifty metres to the next tower. She crosses the bridge. She does not look back. She ducks into the tower. The lift is a trap; she takes the stairs to the surface. A waterbus is pulling in and she elbows her way onto it, using the few peng left over from the kelp to pay for her ticket. She goes below, and sits, head down, heart racing. Black spots dance in front of her eyes. The motor starts up, sending shudders through the boat.

Yes, leave. Leave now. Please. Please.

The boat pulls away. She doesn’t know where it is going and doesn’t care. The place that was safe is no longer safe.

She should never have gone outside. She thought the disguise was enough, but it only takes one person who follows the newsreels, and it’s over.

* * * *

The waterbus reaches a terminus somewhere near the south-western edge of the city. Here there are wide interstices of daylight between the conical towers and through them the sea stretches away into the distance, its grip unbroken except for the occasional fishing or military boat.

Adelaide disembarks with the rest of the passengers. It is only then she realizes the waterbus has remained busy to the end of the route. She looks up at their destination. The terminus appears like any other tower in the west, its drab grey slopes pocked with indents from unidentified sources, graffitied landscapes layered over grime, with no obvious signs to indicate what or who might be found inside.

On the decking westerners mill about, some pushing into the queue for the returning waterbuses, others smoking thinly rolled cigarettes, watching the buses, idly exchanging conversation. She finds it hard to guess the ages of westerners, who often look older than their years, but there is a full spectrum here, from young children clinging to the legs of their minders to old faces furrowed with lines and tempered by the harsh climate. Something jumps into her mind, something Vikram said once, about the average life expectancy this side of the city, and she has to close off the thought quickly, to prevent the whirlpool. She enters the tower with a stream of other passengers.

Inside is a heaving marketplace; a tower full of winding corridors opening abruptly into dimly lit hallways, where walls and ceilings have been knocked through, and partitions lean at dubious angles. She is swept into the flow of prospectors. Vendors grin up at her from the tightly jammed, competing stalls. Their grins seem identical, mass-produced – the grins of toothed fish. At every pace merchandise is dangled under her nose. Salt boxes and other amulets she does not recognize, pieces of mirror, jars of undefined substances, recalibrated scarabs and tobacco pouches with barely concealed slips of milaine inserted inside. She jerks back as something wet and wriggling is thrust in front of her face. It’s an octopus, still alive, on a platter. To her right, from the same stall, she sees a bucket full of creatures clambering over one another, their claws gaining the lip of the bucket but never quite managing to escape. The reek is abominable, the smell of rotting seafood and bodies in too-close proximity, a whiff of manta fumes drifting through, everything overlaid with a mask of cheap incense which fills the halls with bluish, hazy smoke.

A woman in white Teller garb and cheap plastic clogs totters down an aisle, grabbing at the clothes of the market-goers and imparting nuggets of wisdom into their ears. Adelaide swerves away as the Teller approaches, but she is not quick enough: the Teller has caught her eye and veers purposefully, inevitably, towards her. She will make herself more visible if she tries to evade the woman. The Teller grabs her shoulder and brings her mouth close to Adelaide’s ear. She can smell the alcohol on the Teller’s breath.

‘Osiris is a lost city,’ mutters the Teller. Adelaide jolts back as if struck, but the Teller clings on, nails digging into her shoulder.

‘She has lost the world and the world has lost her.’

In close proximity, she can see the hems of the Teller’s robe are stained with dirt. The skin of her face is peppered with spots and shiny with grease. Everything about the woman is repulsive to her, and yet she cannot move, pinned as much by the rasping voice as by the need to remain invisible.

‘Not dead,’ says the Teller. ‘Not dead yet.’ She laughs drunkenly. With a gesture that is almost tender, she strokes a finger down Adelaide’s cheek. ‘I can spy a heretic. I can smell them! When did you last perform the salt?’ The Teller hiccups, and covers her mouth with a giggle. Her fingers tighten. ‘Not lately, not lately. They’re not dead yet, the ghosts. They’ll deny it, but it’s true, you know.’

The Teller darts quick, paranoid glances around them. She lowers her voice.

‘Something is coming. The ghosts have roused it.’

Adelaide stares. She wants to ask, what? What is coming? But the words won’t come and the Teller now bears a guilty expression, as though she has already said too much. She reels away, reaching out to clutch at her next victim, repeating her mantra.

‘Not dead, no, not dead yet. The ghosts are not dead yet.’

The white-garbed figure recedes into the crowd. For a moment Adelaide remains where she is, very still, until the motion of the crowd pushes her too deeper inside.

The sheer volume of people makes the tower unbearably hot, causing her glasses to steam up continually. This is good, she tells herself. People are good, the more the better. In the crowd you can disappear. Everyone here is on the hunt. Their eyes are alert and animated, exaggeratedly so; they seem to her like people on the o’vis, in those old Neon reels she used to watch, alone in her City apartment, dulled by voqua, as though life was difficult, problematic, then. Voqua. She hasn’t drunk alcohol since she crossed the border. Not since her father’s bodyguard – no. Don’t think about that. The thought of alcohol glitters. Perhaps it would make her feel something. Perhaps it would give her a purpose, even if the purpose were oblivion. All around her, people are moving. Not dead yet. Their concerns are now her concerns; like them, her focus must be to survive, but she will always be an intruder, not wanted here, and reliant on camouflage to avoid detection.

She walks the height of the tower, floor by floor, barely noticing the ache in her feet. She counts the remaining peng in her pocket. There is enough to get herself something to eat. Her stomach churns at the thought of food. She needs to wait, to spin the money out. What is she going to do now? She can’t go back to the Larssons. She has no credit, no belongings but the clothes she is wearing. She’s alone.

She keeps wandering until the stalls begin to shut down. Evening brings a different crowd, one intent on liquor and gaming. She watches as objects are exchanged, City things, petty there but of value here, and realizes that what she is witnessing is the black market. In one hall there is a pit where huge rats are taken out of cages and set against one another. She can hear the scrabble of their claws and the shrill squeaking and she can see flecks of blood where their teeth sink into haunches and bellies. She stares, transfixed by the vicious struggle of the creatures. Bets are called, money changes hands. There are arguments. Heated words. A rat whimpers in a pool of blood.

She hasn’t been there long when a fight breaks out. She is too slow to spot what is coming, or to move; the first thing she knows is the weight of a woman crashing into her. She falls and lands awkwardly. All at once the hall is full of noise and limbs lashing out. She rolls out of the way just in time to avoid a boot in her ribs. The grey blur of a rat scurrying away. Through the commotion she senses eyes upon her.

Dizzy, overwhelmed, she goes outside and manages to sidle onto the waterbus without paying for a ticket. It’s getting late and she doesn’t know where to go. She stays up on deck and the western towers slip by in the dusk, barely lit, gargantuan and prophetic against the deepening sky. It’s cold, bitter, end-of-winter cold. The conductor calls the stops: Ess-two-seven-four-west, ess-two-seven-five-west. His voice is hoarse and thick with phlegm. Ess-two-seven-six-west. Ess-two-seven-seven-west.

She sees the light from a fry-boat hatch parked at a tower decking, and it is only then that she remembers the kelp. She still has the kelp. All day the bag has been in her hand and somehow she has clung on to it, even during that fight. She scrambles to get off at the stop with the fry-boat, and approaches the vendor, resolute. The vendor is chatting with a customer. She waits for the man to notice her. When she has his attention, she taps her throat, which has become her sign for muteness, and holds the bag of kelp to the hatch. They haggle. The man says it is stale. She shakes her head and squeezes the bag.

She gets half the price she paid for it this morning, but it is peng in her pocket, and the vendor also gives her a bag of leftover weed squares and a few hot squid rings. The transaction brings a glow of pleasure to her cheeks. She holds on to it, telling herself over and over that this is a victory: her first in this hostile new world. She sits on the decking trying not to eat too quickly, feeling faint with the sudden influx of protein. But soon enough the dusk is swallowed into the night. The fry-boat packs up and drives off to another tower, and with its departure her elation fades.

She gazes up at the dilapidated tower. Washing hangs down from the windows, strung from lines, the clothing shapeless in the dark. Its owners are out or they have forgotten it or they are not coming back. She goes inside. There is no security on western towers. Further up, people are sitting in the stairwells, smoking manta, their eyes glazed and sated. She chooses a level with a bridge out so she can run if she has to and curls up, chilled and exhausted, in the stairwell. Now she can feel the deep ache in her feet and calves.

Slumped against the wall, she chases sleep half-heartedly, and through the night she senses other people coming and going. Drunks stagger back from the bridge, uncertain of their footing. There are other homeless, shuffling up and down the stairwells. She wakes from bad dreams, crying, her lips mouthing I’m-sorry I’m-so-sorry but no sound, still no sound. She wakes again to find hands on her body.

She lurches upright. Fingers slip from her pockets and the thief darts from her side, but she is too late. The peng she earned from the sale of the kelp is gone.

The thought comes and will not retreat. He is dead. He is dead because of her. Vikram is dead. Not dead yet. No, but he is. She wants to hit that stupid, drunk Teller, sink her teeth into the woman like a rat from the pit. The whirlpool advances. The floor opens up and she falls into the whirlpool, through all the floors of the tower above the surface and below it, where the ocean sucks you down, down, and the core of the earth opens up to swallow you whole. She stays like this, cheek to the filthy floor, listening to the low, atonal humming of the manta addicts, the restless footsteps up and down the tower, the crank of the lift. Flickering lights emit a static, intermittent burr. After a time it all becomes part of a single disconnected symphony, and her thoughts revolve in kind.

Dead.

Not dead yet.

Dead.

Not dead yet.

Vikram’s dead.

* * * *

She keeps on the move. Sleeping in different towers, never quite in step with the daylight world. More than once she is woken by the pounding boots of skadi soldiers, and the other homeless get to their feet and they shift as one, a loose, amorphous mass, like a shoal ejected from their coral. One day a boy gives her a cigarette, and they smoke together companionably, in silence. Another day her hat is stolen while she rests. She becomes aware that there are striations even within this side of the city. There are towers where the homeless are permitted to sleep. There are other towers where the residents will kick you if you so much as park your buttocks on a step, and each day the residents go doggedly to their jobs at the plants or to queue for a western work party. There is talk of the shanties, clusters of boats roped together like a crust of scum over the sea, out near the unremembered quarters, on the very edge of the city. It’s a place even the homeless don’t want to go.

The days are spent walking, through the towers, over uneven raft racks and swaying, precarious bridges, where the sea glints invitingly below. Everywhere she goes its voice is with her, soft and sibilant. She remembers the horses of Axel’s hallucinations, and finds they have a plausibility now that they did not have before. Once or twice she thinks she glimpses them: a white flank, or the turn of a long head, its eye black and portentous.

At twilight she gathers with other homeless at the fry-boats to beg for scraps. At first the corrosive ache in her stomach is at the front of everything, and then it becomes a dullness, always present, but a mundane part of existence. Some days she is too tired to go anywhere and stays where she slept, breathing in the fumes of the manta addicts.

Her movements become furtive. Calculated. Scraps are not enough so she watches the food of others. Her first attempt at stealing is a disaster. As her fingers close around the food she hears a shout. Faces turn towards her. She drops the food and sprints away over the raft rack, loses her balance and falls into the water. Her heart jerks. The cold is terrifying. She loses her glasses, sees them float for a precious second and thrashes about, trying to grab them. Too late. She drags herself spluttering onto the raft rack. A hand comes down upon her throat.

‘Try stealing from me or mine again and I’ll fucking cut you.’

The man pushes her back under the water and holds her there until she thinks her lungs will burst. Just as her vision starts to go black, he lifts her out, and up, to her feet. She sees his face, scarred, and his neck, bare, encircled with a tattoo of interlinking chains. Then he launches her from the raft rack. She crashes back, goes under, fights for the surface. The man is striding away. As she struggles back to the rack, she can hear the jeers of onlookers. She grabs the rack, gasping for breath, her heart still racing. A kid ducks close to her and mutters, what the hell you thinking trying to steal from a Roch, are you insane, and she thinks: I can’t afford this. I have to learn faster.

The second time she is more careful. She watches the western kids. How they do it. The way they watch. She learns to recognize the moment they identify a target. Then the slow nonchalance of the approach and the dash away, quick as sin. She copies their movements. She has always been a good mimic. The first success is a dull thrill. Squid rings. Only a quarter-full bag but she doesn’t care, it’s food, it’s hers. She took it. She stuffs the rings into her mouth, an explosion of fat and salt, aware if she doesn’t dispose of the evidence fast enough someone else will take her prize. She turns the paper inside out and licks out every scrap of grease.

Here and there she catches glimpses of herself. In water, in smeared glass, thin slivers, an eye, a limb, a half of her mouth. Her face, at once familiar and unfamiliar, has become her greatest hindrance. She maintains a mask of grease and grime. When her hair starts to grow out, she steals another hat.

Inevitably she finds herself drawn to the border. She watches from the rails of waterbuses and the precarious ledges of bridges. From raft racks and deckings and public balconies where children stare and point at the spectacle below. The angle is different but the view is the same. The conical towers in their emerald and silver casings. Birds drifting in slow spirals above and about their peaks. Sometimes lone pairs, sometimes a flock in sudden inexplicable ascent, shrieking and clouding the sky with their beating wings. She used to be afraid of them. She is not afraid any more, not of birds. Along the length of the border waterway, the netting lifts from the waves as though suspended from invisible hands.

There was a girl over there. A girl who threw parties and sketched gardens and her words were like a charm, even when they were about nothing of importance, which was most of the time. That girl ceased to be real in the moment the City abandoned her, the moment the Rechnovs, her family, gave the order to fire upon the tower, knowing she was trapped inside.

Adelaide, run.

What he told her. She is running now, though there are times when she believes it would be easier to let go. Slip through the gap in a bridge. Lie on a raft rack in the night and ask the stars to freeze her with their great cold hearts.

People look at her in a way she has never experienced before. She is painfully aware of the softness of her own body, of never having learned to defend herself, of being frightened. One night a fight breaks out in the corridor where she is sleeping. She sees a westerner break a bottle against the step and stab the jagged end into the face of another.

Glass shards are strewn across the floor, spotted with blood. The fight blunders away down the hallway, accompanied by crashes and screams and someone shrieking. What have you done, look at his eye, holy fuck look at it! She surveys the glass. The glimpses of red. She lets her eyes travel over it until she sees what she is looking for. An edge piece, a long, narrow triangle shaped like a blade. When no one is looking she darts forwards and takes it. Slips the glass into the pocket of her coat. Walks quickly away.

Later, she uses a wall to grind the edges smooth at one end and wraps around scraps of cloth to make a grip. She brings the sharp end of the glass to her face, trying to find the courage to make a cut, rendering her face unrecognizable forever. The point of the glass presses into her cheek. Her hand shakes. She tries to make herself drag the glass down but she can’t do it. When she lowers her hand her cheeks are wet with tears.

At night she keeps her fingers locked around the glass and doesn’t let go until morning.

* * * *

She hears the announcement late one night, lying with her ear close to the gap under someone’s door so she can listen to the intermittent sound of the o’dio. There will be an expedition boat. The boat is to depart the city, leaving on the first tenable day in the spring, to seek out land.

She hears, with a shock, a voice she recognizes.

Her brother, Linus.

‘As you know, this is the first expedition in almost fifty years. Naturally we’re excited about what we may discover, but it’s equally important to be reasonable about our expectations. The fact is, no one knows what’s out there.’

The words flow from him the way life has always flowed for him: effortlessly. The way a Rechnov’s life is meant to flow.

‘But what do you think, Councillor? Do you really think there could be life on land? After all this time?’

Linus’s voice is replete with confidence. ‘I think we should expect the unexpected.’

After the interview with Linus the o’dio channel switches to Isis 100, and a few minutes after that the person on the other side of the door turns it off completely. She can hear a strong wind getting up outside the tower. Suddenly she can’t stay where she is, she has to move, go somewhere, it doesn’t matter where. She crosses a low-level bridge to the next tower, holding her hat to her head, because the wind is already whip-fierce. In the next tower there is a late-night bar which has the o’dio turned up loud. She waits and watches until one of its patrons leaves a beverage half-finished, and then she slips inside and takes the seat with the drink and holds it in both hands. You can’t hear the wind in here. That’s good.

The bar is warm. She sips at the drink. It’s warm too. A slow fuzziness wraps around her head. Chatter is idle. Whispers, low and interrogative. Something is coming. She thinks about Linus’s expedition and tries to imagine land and wonders if it is possible that people might be there and what they might be like. The bar quietens. Unasked, the bartender brings her another drink and takes away the empty glass. She remembers Second Grandmother’s stories about square houses and flat gardens. Second Grandmother was a westerner. She wonders if Second Grandmother ever sat here, in this place, if she is retracing a course backwards, and if so where it ends. And then she realizes the bar has gone very quiet and she can hear the wind again, and she looks up and the only people left are herself and three men, two of them embroiled in deep conversation, the third sat apart, staring at her intently.

The bartender has disappeared.

She gets up and pulls on her coat. The man stands also, his movements leisurely, but his eyes never leaving her face.

As she leaves the bar she hears his footsteps cross the room behind her. Outside, the tower corridor is deserted. Her heart starts to beat faster.

‘Hey, sweetheart.’

He makes a chirping noise in his throat, the way you might call a pet, or a bird.

‘Hey, pretty girl.’

She ignores him. Keeps walking, down the corridor, towards the stairwell. She hears his footsteps hastening and speeds up until she’s jogging. He’s following her, increasing his pace as she does. Why is it so empty? Where is everyone?

She reaches an impasse. Bridge to her left, stairwell to her right. She can hear the wind shrieking. A Tarctic wind from the south, packed with spite. She can’t go out there: she’ll be ripped from the bridge like a piece of tissue. The man is only paces behind. She runs towards the stairwell, her heart pounding, her hands clammy with fear, and as she starts to descend the steps she hears quick, heavy footsteps and feels a shove between her shoulder blades and she trips and falls.

She scrambles to her feet to find her way blocked.

‘Where you going, sweetheart? Don’t you want to say hello?’

The man is taller than her. Broader. She can smell alcohol on his breath, sweet and pungent, but he stands quite steadily, his eyes narrowed, travelling from her face to her chest and downwards.

‘You are a pretty little fish,’ he says. ‘I was watching you in there.’

She tries to speak. Get out of my way. The words stick; she can’t get them out. She tries to move around him. He blocks her.

‘Hey, hey! Where do you think you’re going?’

She looks desperately past him. No one.

‘No point in screaming,’ he says softly. ‘There’s always someone screaming.’

He reaches out and grips her shoulder, pinning her. His hand drifts down her arm and runs over her buttocks and he smiles.

She eases her hand into her pocket. Her fingers clench around the grip of the glass shard.

Once again she tries to speak. Her lips work helplessly.

‘G-get—’

‘G-g—’ he imitates her. ‘You trying to tell me something, sweetheart?’

His hand squeezes.

‘F… f-fuck you!’

She jabs the glass into his belly. Direct, instinctive, like a thrust in fencing. Blood spurts over her hand. He gasps and lets her go at once, clutching at the wound. His face twists horribly. She wrenches the glass out and turns and sprints down the stairwell without a second glance. The glass is wet in her palm. The wind is shrieking. But she can’t hear footsteps.

Sick and shaken by the incident, it is only later that she realizes. The words are in there. When she needs them, they are there.

* * * *

On the day of the boat’s departure she goes to watch, because everybody goes, and because she wants to see it leave. And it is an event. There is a curious parity between the two crowds as the boat makes its way down the rows upon rows of well-wishers, a moment when an outsider, perhaps, could hardly tell which way was east and which west.

After the boat has disappeared, an uncertain atmosphere descends. Now we wait. Now we wait, not knowing. We wait. For how long? A month? Forever? A trail of thrown flowers and messages, those that did not reach the boat, float in the water corridor, the white patches of paper and colourful petals an incongruous debris between the crowds on either side. A large boat of Citizens begins to blare out music and soon its decks are bouncing with revellers. A group of westerners, apparently in jest, imitate the moves, and suddenly most of the crowd is moving, infected by the celebratory beat, but the movement is not quite in kilter, and a streak of restlessness, of unconfirmed mockery, weaves like an undercurrent through the westerners.

After a time the skadi begin to urge westerners to move on, and Adelaide realizes that what seemed like a united occasion was only the appearance of one; now that the boat has gone, things will carry on, as they were. This is just another gesture from the City. The founding families, including the Rechnovs, are already surrounded by bodyguards in anticipation of potential assassins. When she looks again, they are gone.

Anger grips her. Nothing changes.

But now she has an instinct for the inevitable violence to follow, and shortly after the Rechnovs leave she extracts herself from the scene.

She remembers Linus speaking on the o’dio and wonders what he made of this occasion. If he orchestrated it. What he meant by it. He always did believe in life outside Osiris, and she had always mocked him for it, but now she feels a flower of hope unfurling within her chest. That he might be right. That there might be something, anything, out there.

Perhaps it is this thought that makes her take a route she has not travelled in weeks. On the waterbus she looks at her hands, marvelling at the layers of dirt, crammed between cracks in her fingernails, embedded in the grain of her palms. It doesn’t seem right, to go and see them like this, but she is suddenly so tired, so very tired. The thought of their kindness glows like a lantern over black water.

She just wants a sighting. Ole and Mikaela don’t need to see her. She just wants to make sure they are there.

She finds a spot on a tower decking across the waterway from where they live. Scanning the boats parked opposite, she sees that the Larssons’ boat, the one Ole taught her to drive with its faded blue stripes, is missing. One or both of them will be on their way home. They were probably in the crowd with her, watching the expedition boat.

She waits. Her stomach is twisting about on itself. She barely notices it these days but she does now, here where she was cared for. She is in the shadow of the tower but she can see the sun on the waves, and refracting against the dirty bufferglass, and for a moment it is possible to imagine that she is somewhere else entirely. She feels herself sinking into the decking. She’s so hungry. So tired.

A hand grabs her shoulder. Lips come close to her ear and she feels the warmth of breath as the aggressor murmurs.

‘Ata, isn’t it? There’s someone who wants to see you.’

Another hand under her elbow, pulling her to her feet. She stares at the man, testing her body for a reaction, asking. In her pocket is the shard of glass. But as she stands the face of her captor fades in and out of focus. She dredges her memory. She has seen him before. Yes, she remembers now. The son. Oskar.

She looks towards the tower, searching for the boat, suddenly desperate for a sight of those cheerful blue stripes. Oskar says, ‘Don’t worry about them. You’re coming with me.’

* * * *

On the journey there, blindfolded, she wonders how they will do it. If it will be slow or if they will just shoot her. Maybe they’ll drown her, like the City did the activist Eirik 9968. She thinks of his body in the glass tank, the hood over his face. Does it matter how it’s done? Soon enough, it will be over. Is that so bad? The guilt will vanish, along with everything else. She won’t wake every day knowing Vikram’s ghost has been wandering the corridors of her dreams. She won’t wake at all.

After half an hour of driving she feels the boat stop, the motor cutting out. They push her out and she feels the decking, uneven beneath her feet. The air temperature rises as they enter a tower and then a lift which bears them upwards. The son, Oskar, leads her into a room and seats her in a hard plastic chair. She waits, expecting at any moment the coldness of a gun against her temple. This must be it. Then she feels hands at the back of her head. Untying the blindfold. She opens her eyes, blinking.

She expected a dripping, burned-out room like the derelict spaces of the unremembered quarters where she was held captive before. But she is in somebody’s apartment. Plainly furnished, a kitchen area in front of her, a column of window-wall to her right. Sat in a chair facing her is a thin woman with sharp, intelligent eyes. She is wearing a headscarf and a thick smearing of cherry lipstick. The woman is leaning forwards, studying her intently.

After a minute the woman says, ‘Yes, it’s her. You can go.’

She hears retreating footsteps and the door closes. She is left in the room with the woman. They appear to be alone.

The woman addresses her.

‘It is you, isn’t it? You are Adelaide Rechnov?’

There’s something in the way she utters those last four words that is difficult to decipher. Perhaps disbelief that this pathetic creature could be connected to the City’s most eminent founding family. Or amusement that society’s darling, a woman believed dead, a woman worth millions, is seated here before her in the heart of the west.

Adelaide doesn’t attempt to deny it. They know.

‘Cup of tea?’ asks the woman.

She nods tentatively.

The woman rises, crosses the room, fills a pan with water and puts it on to boil. For a minute the only sound in the room comes from the bubbling water. She pours a mug of tea and brings it to Adelaide. It’s very hot against her palms. An exhausted part of her registers that were she to throw the steaming liquid into the other woman’s face, there might be a chance of escape.

‘What happened to you?’ asks the woman.

She looks at the floor.

‘What happened? You were in the tower, with the rebels?’

The floor is cleanish, with cheap linoleum, peeling away in places.

‘I’m going to have to keep asking until you give me a response.’

Adelaide taps her throat, and shakes her head.

‘Easily solved. I’ll get you something to write with.’

She dumps paper and a pencil in Adelaide’s lap. Balancing the tea, she forms the words slowly.

Who are you?

The woman laughs. It is such a surprising sound that Adelaide starts and spills the tea. She lowers the mug to the floor and focuses on the woman’s hands, which are strong and capable-looking.

‘My name’s Dien,’ says the woman. ‘I’m what’s left of the resistance movement. The others are dead. Everyone in Soren’s cell. And the folks who had you. Pekko. Rikard. Drake. Nils. Your friend,’ the woman allows herself a certain degree of innuendo, ‘Vikram. They all died in the tower. They burned there. But you already knew that, didn’t you?’

Adelaide looks down. The hand that is squeezing the pencil is trembling. She doesn’t need to hear his name. She wishes they would get on with it. Why bother tormenting her, unless it’s for revenge?

‘Somehow you survived,’ says Dien. A note of wonder in her voice. ‘Somehow, that doesn’t altogether surprise me. Though when Oskar told me his suspicions I didn’t believe it. It’s only now, seeing your face…’

Once again she rises and crosses the short distance to Adelaide. Cupping a hand under Adelaide’s chin, she lifts her head gently.

‘Incredible,’ she says. ‘You know, I never in a thousand years thought I’d meet one of you. A Rechnov. But here you are. The Architect’s granddaughter, sat in my apartment, drinking my tea.’

Adelaide jerks away. She writes quickly.

Get to the point and tell me what you want.

‘That’s a good question,’ says Dien. ‘Much as it pains me to say it, I’m afraid we need you, Adelaide. That face of yours has a value. We need it. We need your name. There’s work to be done, and you’re going to help us do it. So we’re not going to let you die just yet, though I’ve got to say it looks like you’ve been doing your best to do the deed yourself.’

Adelaide shakes her head. She writes.

I can’t help you.

‘It’s not a choice,’ says Dien. The tone of someone who isn’t used to being argued with. ‘Stars know you’re the last person in the world I’d choose to help me, but I know your worth, better than Pekko ever did. He was an arsehole – yeah, just because he was one of ours doesn’t mean we didn’t know it. But you – the City will listen to you.’

She has a sudden sense of where this is leading. That nub of anger returns, bright and fierce. She is done with the City. Done with it.

‘Fuck – y-you.’

Her words, barely a croak, but with force behind them, catch both women off guard.

Their eyes meet.

‘So you can speak,’ says Dien.

She doesn’t see the blow coming. One moment she’s staring up at Dien, the next she’s on the floor, her jaw a fierce star of pain, blood welling in her mouth. Dien stands over her, clenching and unclenching her knuckles.

Adelaide puts a hand to her throat. She can feel the words, trapped deep down inside her throat. Slowly, haltingly, she calls them up. Blood dribbles from her lips.

‘I w— I won’t go b-back there. I won’t – t-talk to them. I won’t have anything – to do – with them.’

Dien gazes at her for a long time, and now her eyes are hard.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘We’ll see about that.’

* * * *

Dien goes away. Dien returns. She begins a tactical campaign. She starts by speaking softly, sitting on the table with her legs hanging loose and casual in their warmers, speaking about Vikram. With every repetition of his name, Adelaide feels the whirlpool widening. He was important to the west, says Dien. He had ambitions. He started something, something even Eirik was unable to start. He got under the City’s skin, that’s the truth of it. He was getting people on side, even Citizens. And she knows Adelaide helped with that, even if it was for the wrong reasons, she helped. She knows Adelaide cared about Vikram. She knows they were fucking. After all, everyone saw the newsreel. Maybe Adelaide even thought she was in love. It has a certain romance, doesn’t it, the Architect’s granddaughter and the poor revolutionary. But now he’s gone, and the last things that were said about him made him out to be some kind of criminal mastermind, and worse. Devious, they said. Conniving, treacherous. An eel in the water. Dien lifts her gaze sadly. What kind of legacy does Vikram have now, she asks? Was his death for nothing? Surely Adelaide does not want him to have died for nothing?

Another cup of coral tea. Other people – Dien’s people – escort her to the bathroom. They bring her back. They sit her in the chair. Feed her, force her to swallow when she tries to refuse. We don’t want you passing out on us, now. She wants to scream.

Dien’s efforts become more overtly hostile. Adelaide owes Vikram, she says. She owes the west. If not for everything her family have done, and Dien could offer a pretty comprehensive list, Adelaide only has to ask, then how about for the man she betrayed. Make this right, she says. Help us. Help your dead westie boyfriend.

Dien talks on. The mobility of her face becomes intensely familiar: the stretch of her lips, thickly coated in that cheap cherry lipstick, the way her jaw sets at a slight disjuncture when she clenches her teeth. There’s a small mole at the edge of her eyebrow, a larger one at her temple. Every action she makes is decisive and set, she moves as if there were no other possibilities of movement; Dien has conquered all of them. She circles the room. She comes closer, pausing at Adelaide’s back, leaning in, the smell of her last meal ripe between them as her words drift into Adelaide’s ear. Constructed. Persuasive.

Hours pass. The light in the room changes. Dien talks. Adelaide sleeps, or thinks she does. She feels numb with exhaustion. She wakes to find Dien sitting, surveying her, not a trace of weariness in the other woman’s face. Dien’s eyes shining in the dark. She has no idea how long she has been there. They begin again. Dien talking. Adelaide silent. A dead man and a whirlpool between them.

Daylight. A man enters the apartment with a case. He sets down the case and opens it and from an array of metal tools he selects a scalpel and a tin of salt. The westerners rope Adelaide to the chair and remove her boots and socks and someone takes hold of her ankles, their thumbs digging in, pulling back her toes and presenting the soles of her feet to the man. She clamps her teeth, a fresh flood of pain welling in her bruised jaw. The man takes up his scalpel. His thumb runs over the soft skin in the arch of her foot, his grip tightening when she flinches.

Adelaide looks at Dien. Dien looks at her. She doesn’t want to show fear but all of her limbs are shaking uncontrollably at the thought of what is to follow.

‘No,’ says Dien. ‘This won’t work. Let’s try something else.’

The next time she wakes the room is empty and the door is open. She looks about her, blinking, confused. Is she really awake? She becomes aware of a hot, itching sensation in her groin and realizes to her humiliation she’s wet herself. Through the door she sees two figures. A man and a woman, his hand on her elbow in an intimate, supportive gesture. Familiar. So familiar.

The Larssons.

Shame envelops her, that she should appear to them in this state. She tries to stand but she is still bound to the chair.

The Larssons see her.

‘Ata!’

Their faces change. They look confused. What is she doing here? Then other figures come into view. Dien. The man carrying the case. The case. Dien is holding something. She uncurls her hand, letting Adelaide see. A salt box.

Adelaide starts to scream.

‘No! Dien, no!’

She can hear Mikaela pleading.

‘What are you doing to her? Please, let us see her!’

Dien does not reply. She is staring meditatively at Ole and Mikaela.

‘Leave them alone!’ Adelaide screams. Ole tries to enter the room, to reach her, but the man with the case bars the way.

‘Please—’

Mikaela’s face, fraught with distress.

‘Ole, Mikaela, get away from them! Get away!’

‘Ata!’

‘Mikaela!’

‘Ata!’

Dien passes the salt box to the man with the case, then enters the apartment and closes the door, blocking Adelaide’s view of the Larssons. Panic floods her. She looks frantically to Dien.

‘You wouldn’t—’

‘I would.’

‘But their son, that boy – he’s one of yours – you can’t do this!’

Dien shakes her head regretfully. ‘I know.’

‘No.’ She is shaking. ‘No, I don’t believe you.’

When Dien speaks her voice is soft, almost caressing.

‘Don’t underestimate me, Adelaide Rechnov. And let’s be clear – I want you to be clear. We’re talking about me hurting these people. Your rescuers. Ole and Mikaela, that’s their names, right? Which I will do. Do I want to hurt them? No. I don’t, of course I don’t. I don’t enjoy torture. But will I, in order to make you do what we need? Yes. I will. Unequivocally. Because we’re at war here, and in war, people make sacrifices.’

Her gaze locks with Adelaide’s.

‘Don’t make these people be one of them. They helped you, I hear. You might say they’re the reason you’re alive. I’ll leave you to think on it.’

She rises. Walks towards the door.

‘Wait!’

Dien pauses. As she turns Adelaide sees the glint of triumph in her eyes, and she understands that this is the end result of a calculation Dien made a long time ago, one whose outcome she has been riding out ever since.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please, don’t hurt them.’

* * * *

Dien’s crew can’t work out how to act around her. They are more uncertain of themselves than Adelaide, who has been treated worse than this, and now that the terms have been made clear she at least knows where she stands. The arrangement is essentially house arrest: they keep her locked in Dien’s apartment, but she is free to move around it, as long as someone is there, to make sure she doesn’t take a knife from the drawer. Try to stab one of them – or herself.

She doesn’t recognize the towers across the waterway. She can usually orientate herself by the graffiti. This must be one of those parts of town where they kick out the homeless and the people have regular work and an assumed air of gentility, where aspirations of crossing the border are not uncommon.

Different people come and go from the apartment. There are only two rooms, the living and sleeping area, and a small bathroom where the taps work if the water meter has been paid. When the westerners mention their plans it is always in hushed voices. After a few episodes like this Adelaide starts to laugh.

‘Something amuse you, Rechnov?’ asks Dien.

‘No, nothing.’

But she can’t suppress a smile, and Dien is watching.

‘Only, if I’m going to be your figurehead, don’t you think it would be useful to know what you’re trying to do?’

‘I don’t think we’re at quite that level of trust yet, Rechnov. Shut up or we’ll lock you in the bathroom.’

Despite everything Dien has done, she has to admit to moments of liking for the other woman. One of the others glances in Adelaide’s direction and mutters, ‘The water.’

‘You don’t think I’m serious, do you? Stars above. Anyway, she isn’t going to kill herself. Are you, Rechnov?’

‘I’m weighing up my options,’ says Adelaide.

Her levity seems to surprise, but not displease, Dien, who every now and then will give her a curious, straight-on look, as though Adelaide is a previously undiscovered species whose behaviour must be constantly monitored and re-evaluated, and Dien is not fazed by this process being transparent. It reminds Adelaide of the way her twin Axel used to examine things, back in the days when Axel’s speech was almost entirely composed of questions, tumbling over one another in his eagerness to ask all that he wanted to know.

Something has shifted in her memories of him. The poison has drained away; it is easier, now, to remember Axel at his best, and not in the absent, befuddled state which defined the last years of his life. Axel, she suspects, would have appreciated the ludicrousness of her current situation, and he would not have hesitated to have pointed it out to her captors. But Axel didn’t always use his head, either.

She remembers Mikaela’s face. She can’t trust Dien.

* * * *

‘This is the speech.’

Dien pushes a piece of paper under Adelaide’s nose. This is the latest iteration of their plan, the plan Adelaide is not to know, but can guess at.

Adelaide puts a finger on the paper and slides it back across the table. Dien looks at it for a moment, expressionless, then stands, picks up the paper, walks around the table and puts it in front of Adelaide.

‘This is the speech,’ she says again.

‘There is no point in me doing this. Nothing I can say—’

‘I’d slam your stupid head into the table,’ says Dien, ‘but there’s no point in beating you up. It won’t have any impact if you look like the victim here. But if you don’t help us, so help me I will damage your precious friends. That is a promise.’

Mikaela’s screams. Ole’s frightened, bewildered expression. Her gaze drops to the paper in front of her and against her volition, she begins to scan through the text. After a few lines she frowns and picks up the paper.

‘Who wrote this?’

‘It doesn’t matter who wrote it, you’re going to read it, and you’re going to read it like you fucking believe it.’

‘It matters because it’s shit. No one says things like this.’

Dien places both hands on the table, her head thrust forwards, the muscles in her neck taut with tension. Under her headscarf Adelaide can see strands of dark brown hair. She has never seen Dien’s hair before. Her own is starting to grow out, but they won’t allow her to dye it again.

A vein pulses in Dien’s forehead as she clenches her jaw.

‘Then write a better one, Rechnov,’ she says at last.

She places a blank sheet of paper and a pencil in front of Adelaide, and leaves the apartment. Adelaide hears the key turn in the lock behind her.

Sounds of habitation from the adjacent apartments blur and fade away as she stares at the blank page. The room is still.

Once again she reads through the speech that Dien has provided. She doesn’t know if it was Dien who wrote it, but it is bad. Incoherent and inconsistent. Adelaide has food in her stomach and the taste of coral tea in her mouth, and it’s good coral tea. For the first time in days her head is clear; she should be able to write what they want in her sleep.

What do they want?

And who is they? Who is she meant to be speaking for?

She had thought she understood the west. Its character is imprinted on her mind in a series of inexorable impressions: her journey to the unremembered quarters, bound and blindfolded in the well of a boat, crossing from tower to tower on a fraying rope metres above sea level, a skad beating the face of a westerner into pulp, a girl who showed her kindness falling to her death from a collapsing bridge.

But even these few weeks since have revealed to her a more complex, segmented society than she, and maybe even Vikram, would have liked to acknowledge. What can she possibly say that will convince a crowd of westerners?

After an hour, Dien returns. She looks at the blank paper. At Adelaide.

‘Time’s ticking,’ she says. Her mouth curls in a grimace that might be a twisted smile, Adelaide isn’t sure. She looks at Dien, thinking how the old Adelaide would have judged this woman. The slight irregularity of her features. The cheap cosmetics. She would never have seen what lies beneath that exterior, the courage or the cruelty; it would have been beneath her to offer Dien a second glance.

She picks up the pen, and writes a line.

‘That’s right,’ says Dien.

The door slams again.

Adelaide stares at the words on the page.

I used to live over there.

I used to live over there, with those people.

There was a man I knew, a westerner. His name was Vikram.

* * * *

Dien reads through the speech in silence. When she comes to the end she sits back in her chair and folds her arms, eyes narrowed in the familiar, shrewd expression. Assessing. Reassessing.

‘It almost reads like you mean it.’

Adelaide says nothing.

‘Good. This is what we need. The meet’s tomorrow evening. It’ll be busy. You’d better practise.’

‘I want to see Mikaela and Ole.’

‘The meet,’ says Dien. ‘And then we’ll see.’

She is clearly restless, but Adelaide senses her mood is closer to anticipation than irritation. She takes her chance.

‘What did you do, before you did this?’

‘And what do you call this?’

‘Revolution.’ Adelaide looks at her. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Good a word as any, I suppose.’

‘So, before the revolution, what did you do?’ Seeing the refusal in Dien’s face, she adds, ‘I’m just curious.’

Dien takes her time answering, evidently considering the wisdom of engaging in more intimate conversation with a Rechnov, even one undisputedly under her control.

‘I was a nurse. Still am, when they’re desperate.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Does that surprise you? Course it does. I threatened to torture your friends. That’s not the actions of a nurse. You might think. But I’ll tell you something, Rechnov. Nursing teaches you a lot. Like suffering, it teaches you about that. It teaches you about pain, and the thresholds of pain, and when to alleviate it, and when to apply it, and how people behave when they feel it. When you’re a nurse you treat whoever comes your way and you don’t question what they did to get themselves in that state and whether they deserve to live or die. You just… plug the holes.’

For a moment Adelaide sees, very vividly, a shard of glass stuck in a man’s stomach.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll have been to the western hospital,’ says Dien. ‘It’s not a pleasant place, that’s for sure. It’s not a fair place, either. And you might be the most hard-arsed soul in the world, but until you’ve held a woman’s head with half her face shredded while she drowns in her own blood screaming for her mother and the ghosts, you haven’t seen shit.’

‘Was that what persuaded you? To join the resistance?’

‘A lot of things persuaded me,’ says Dien evenly.

‘Do you hate me, Dien?’

Dien looks to the window-wall, distracted by a passing gull. The bird beats its way upwards, lofting out of view, leaving behind the grey assault of the city. ‘I haven’t made up my mind.’

* * * *

From the moment the speech is agreed, the apartment is abuzz with adrenaline as Dien’s crew prepare for the meet. Adelaide, always at the edge of someone’s eye, now feels almost invisible as they bustle about, tense and distracted. Adelaide herself presents a fresh problem to be solved: Dien is concerned that someone might stab her on the spot.

‘Before she has a chance to open her bloody mouth.’

‘Is that likely?’ Adelaide asks. She tries for a joking tone but no one will meet her eye. Dien takes her aside.

‘People are angry,’ she says roughly. ‘They want to be persuaded. We’ve had western fighters before but they’re all dead, every one of them is dead. We need someone who is immune to the system, and you, Rechnov – you have immunity.’

When the evening finally arrives it feels no more real or unreal than any of the strange events that have preceded it. They drive to the place in Dien’s boat. She listens to the voice of the sea, trying to make out a message in its whisperings, wondering if fate has an eye to her today. The meet is in a drinking house. Before they go in, Dien tells her that this was where Vikram and his friends Nils and Drake used to meet. Adelaide has no way of knowing whether it is true, or another piece of emotional ammunition to make her perform, but when they go inside she sees their photographs on the wall, pinned up with others, a collage of faces, southerners and Boreal, young and old. Among them is a man whose face is familiar from the newsfeeds, a man she watched drown: Eirik 9968. Beneath the collage is a tin of salt, the metal scratched and tarnished. Dien and the others go to the wall and perform the salt ritual, and Adelaide does the same, the grains falling somewhere behind her, over her shoulder – she can’t hear them land above the general rowdiness of the place.

It is a shock to see Vikram’s face. In the photograph he looks quietly confident, in a way she struggles to remember now but knows must have been true. The image must have been taken during his time in the City.

The place has a raw, unfinished quality with the upturned kegs and crates set out as seats, the naked bulbs swinging overhead. There are a lot of people here. Dien’s people are standing very close to her, all of them carrying concealed knives or handguns, and Dien’s flippant remarks about someone stabbing her take on an uncomfortable layer of truth and she realizes she is deeply, fiercely scared in a way she hasn’t felt for weeks.

‘Ready?’ says Dien.

‘Don’t have a choice, do I?’

‘No.’

Dien jumps onto a keg to speak. Her introduction is quick and energetic. She has a natural way with a crowd.

Having caught the room’s attention, Dien gets down to business.

‘All right. I said I had a surprise for you. And here it is. Or rather, here she is.’

Adelaide senses the people surrounding her tense in anticipation. Fear stiffens her spine.

This is it.

She has a fleeting memory, of standing on a podium amid the old-world grandeur of the Council Chambers, beckoning Vikram to join her.

‘I present to you our new speaker for western rights – Adelaide Rechnov!’

Dien bends down and with a theatrical, if slightly clumsy gesture, whips the hat from Adelaide’s head.

There are a few moments of silence during which Adelaide feels the weight of scrutiny, her face under the lens of a magnifying glass, like never before. Then the room erupts. Dien’s people gather closely around her, forming a barrier between Adelaide and the crowd, crushing her. Voices are raised in uproar. Through the barrier of familiar bodies she feels the impact of strangers, lunging to get at her.

If they reach me, I’ll be crushed before anyone can even pull a knife.

She hears a glass shatter. She hears Dien shouting above the melee, telling everyone to calm down. Hands grasp at her, pulling her up onto the table. Whichever way it goes she will be exposed. Now she’s standing next to Dien, an easy target. Dien has taken up a defensive stance, using her body to shield Adelaide from assault. A splash of liquid catches Adelaide square in the face and splatters over both of them. She can taste the tartness of alcohol on her lips, shocking in its sudden intensity. Dien is shouting and gesticulating with both arms.

‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up and listen to what she has to say!’

She shouts into Adelaide’s ear.

‘Go on. Go on! You’ll just have to start.’

A glass flies overhead, narrowly missing both of their heads.

‘This is insane!’

Dien shrugs and ducks.

‘Do or die, Rechnov.’

Adelaide pulls out the piece of paper on which she had painstakingly written out her speech. She glances at it once, then screws the paper up into a ball. She gathers her breath.

‘I used to live over there, with those people.’

‘Louder,’ hisses Dien.

‘I used to live over there,’ she shouts. The room reacts with jeers, but others shush them. She says it a third time, quieter this time, forcing the volume of the room to lower, until an abrupt, ambivalent hush settles. The westerners watch her mistrustfully, accusingly.

‘I used to live over there. There was a man I knew, a westerner. His name was Vikram. For a while, he lived where I lived. But he was never at home there. You know what they call people who cross over – what we call them. Airlifts. And Vikram – he could never find a balance. He was torn between two places.’

She gathers the courage to let her gaze settle on individuals, forcing herself to meet their eyes. Some look away but others hold her gaze. These westerners. These westerners, who she does not know.

‘I understand now how he felt. I don’t belong there any more. I can’t go back. You’re wondering what I’m doing here when the o’dio says I’m dead. Well, I could tell you how but the only thing that matters is that I was rescued, by two of you. Two westerners, who were kind to me. Who didn’t know, or care, who I was. They only wanted to help. Only, I’ve realized I don’t belong here either. I don’t belong anywhere.’

The room has fallen silent, enough to hear the sound of the wind whining through the shutters, the distant blare of a waterbus horn.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ she says quietly. ‘My brother – my twin – he went mad. That’s the truth. I didn’t want to believe it but it’s what happened, he went mad, and he killed himself. I know, I know, I shouldn’t speak of it. We never speak about that. But it happened. He believed in horses. He heard them speaking to him. Sometimes I see them and I think I might be going mad too, and then I think, no. It’s just this place. This city. What it does to us.’

She wavers. Dien is at her side, nodding encouragingly. She remembers Vikram, his voice falling onto the ears of the Council, his confidence in the face of impossibility. Both their confidence, that they could make something happen. She cannot help glancing at the photograph on the wall.

‘I’m here today without any expectations. I can’t condone the things my family did. The things I did, without knowing. Or maybe I knew but I didn’t care enough to stop. It doesn’t really matter which, I did them. And to be honest with you, I’m here because I was blackmailed into being here.

‘But now that I am here, I realize I can do something. This city isn’t a fair place – but it could be. It could become what it was meant to be, a long time ago. I can help. I can’t give you much but I can give you my voice, if you’ll have it. I’ll fight for you. I’ll give you whatever I have left, because I owe it, to that man.’ She points at the photograph. ‘I owe it to Vikram Bai, who I loved, and never told. And I owe it to all of you.’

She gazes around.

‘That’s all I’ve got. There’s nothing else.’

In the ensuing silence, Adelaide senses the mood in the room teetering, tipped to go either way with the least bit of provocation. Has she done enough?

A woman with grey hair says, ‘Why have you brought her here, Dien?’

Dien answers the question directly.

‘Because we can use her.’ She glances at Adelaide. ‘And because, despite everything, I think she means what she says.’

The room divides into clusters of mutterings. Adelaide hears, quite distinctly, a voice saying, ‘We should just kill her now and be done with it.’ And someone else: ‘What about the prophecies? What if it’s her?’

Her life hangs now on her ability to act a part, or to tell the truth, or some convergence of the two.

She waits. Dien waits.

A man at the bar says, ‘You haven’t said you’re sorry.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. Of course I’m sorry. There’s a lot of things I regret, that I’d take back now if I could. But you can’t live a life like that. Or you’re no better off than a ghost.’ Even as she speaks, the truth of what she is saying sharpens its focus. This is how she has been living, and from here she too has a choice: a path is being offered to her. She looks at the grey-haired woman who first spoke. ‘Well, you have a choice as well. You can use me, or not.’

The room is pregnant with anticipation. Adelaide can hear the breath moving in and out of her lungs. In these moments, she still has her life. How could she have been so careless with it?

The grey-haired woman says, ‘I’m with them.’

Adelaide has made enough speeches in her life to know, in that moment, that she has won. It’s a bittersweet victory, the kind that is squeezed from ashes and tears, but it is a victory. A binding one. Dien meets her eyes. There is no hugging, no screams of exhilaration. Just a nod of acknowledgement from the other woman, which Adelaide translates as: You did all right.

One of Dien’s crew comes up and murmurs, just loud enough for Adelaide to hear.

‘That little eel Ren snuck out five minutes ago.’

Adelaide notes the shift in Dien’s expression.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means we’ve got about five minutes to get out of here.’

Dien jumps up onto her keg.

‘All right, people. There’s going to be a skadi raid in about five, that’s five minutes! So get the hell out of here unless you want to wake up feeling even worse tomorrow than you’re going to already!’

No one needs to be told twice. What was boisterous chaos is now a systematic evacuation as punters stream from the bar. As Dien puts a hand on Adelaide’s shoulder and steers her towards the exit, she sees hands tearing down the photographs from the wall, all of the west’s dissidents, faces gathered up and shoved unceremoniously into a folder. This was just an arena, a pop-up show. Outside, people are splitting, heading either upstairs or down.

‘We’ve got the boat,’ says Dien, directing them downwards.

‘Is there time – you said five minutes—’

‘There’s time. Anyway, you should always go the way they don’t expect.’

They cram into the lift with a dozen others and drop down through the tower in a series of juddering fits and starts. The raft racks are crammed with people unmooring their boats. Dien leaps into theirs and starts the motor. Adelaide scrambles in after her and Dien powers the boat away at once. Looking back, Adelaide can see other boats moving out, their wakes creating a star-like formation around the base of the tower, licks of white extending over the surface, before their makers duck away into darker corners of the west. For a few moments, the tower appears as dark and desolate as any other western building at night. The air still, the water lapping. Her breath in the arctic night. Then they hear the whine of approaching boats.

Skadi boats.

‘Right on time,’ says Dien with satisfaction.

Dien is relaxed at the wheel; they are well away now, the tower receding fast behind them. By the time the skadi reach the bar, all they will find is a deserted room with a few empty kegs, and the dregs of beer in tankards.

‘So, Rechnov,’ Dien shouts above the engine. ‘You ready to do it all again?’

‘Who’s Ren?’

‘A snitch. Don’t worry. We keep an eye on those people.’

‘Will it be like this every time?’

‘Worse, probably. Once they get wind something’s up.’ Dien glances back. ‘But you can handle it, right?’

Adelaide nods. The evening is sinking in on her now. As Dien steers expertly through the darkness, she hears again the jeers of the crowd, her voice against theirs. The outcome tonight was as fine as the edge of a blade, and the sense of danger, absent in the adrenaline of the moment, now crawls back to nuzzle at her throat.

When they reach Dien’s tower she gets out of the boat first, then waits for the others to catch up. As Dien approaches the tower entrance she calls out.

‘Hey, Dien?’

The woman turns. Adelaide takes a step towards her.

‘You don’t fucking threaten my friends.’

She swings hard and fast. At this range it’s impossible to miss; her fist connects with Dien’s nose with a satisfying crack. Dien staggers back, hand to her face, eyes wide with shock. When she takes her hand away, blood is dribbling from her nostrils.

Someone grabs Adelaide’s arms.

‘You little—’

‘No!’ snaps Dien. ‘This is between us.’

Adelaide feels her arms released. Her knuckles sting with the impact of the blow, but it’s a good pain, a welcome pain. Dien’s people move back, giving them space. Dien wipes her face and shakes droplets of blood from her hand. All of her focus is on Adelaide.

They move warily around one another. At the entrance to the tower and on the far side of the decking, Adelaide is aware of other, shadowy figures, watching the scene unfold.

Dien rushes her, left arm swinging. Adelaide lifts her arms to protect her head and Dien undercuts with her right fist. The blow hammers her stomach. It’s Adelaide’s turn to reel off balance, winded and gasping. She takes a few unsteady steps backwards before catching herself. Dien moves in, aiming a second punch. She ducks it, darts out of reach. At last she’s found a use for all those fencing classes, her feet moving nimbly over the decking as she recalls long-forgotten sequences.

‘Come on then,’ taunts Dien. ‘Rechnov.’

The use of her name is enough. They come together in a fury. Adelaide relishes the moment of impact. There’s no finesse, only passion as she implements every resource she has – fists, feet, teeth, nails – on whatever parts of Dien’s body are exposed. Dien’s headscarf comes off as she yanks at her hair, hearing it tear, bringing tears to the woman’s eyes. Next thing there’s a knee in the small of her back and she feels herself retch in response.

By the time they hit the floor, grappling and scrabbling like two rats in a pit, Adelaide knows she’s going to lose but she doesn’t care; it’s about pride now. All she wants is to inflict as much damage as she’s capable of. She lashes out indiscriminately and hears a yell of protest, knowing she connected with something tender. Then a blow to the temple sends her vision spinning. She collapses against the decking. Oxygen comes in sharp, jagged breaths. Everything hurts.

‘Are you done?’ pants Dien.

Adelaide squints upwards. She is grimly pleased to see Dien’s right eye is swelling viciously. She hopes she’s broken the woman’s nose.

Experimentally, she tries to move. Pain flares through her body.

‘I’m done.’

Dien digs into her pocket.

‘Take this. You’re going to need it.’

She throws something down. It’s a scarab. An old recalibrated model, undoubtedly stolen. Adelaide looks from the scarab to Dien, hair askew, face a bloody mess, and understands that this is an expression of trust.

From here, she knows, there is no going back.