Tamaruq (22 page)

Deliberately now, Mig gets up and goes to join the sailor.

‘Is it true, what the pirate said? That she’s a…’ the sailor hesitates. ‘A nirvana?’

‘She told me herself,’ says Mig. ‘You should stay away from her.’

‘Vikram trusts her.’

‘Vikram doesn’t know her. I do.’

The Alaskan remains by the radios, her head tipped back to absorb every available ray of the sunlight. A smile on her sagging face.

‘You think she’d betray us?’ asks the sailor.

‘Those monsters you were talking about? The blood-suckers?’

‘What about them?’

‘That’s her,’ says Mig. ‘That’s what she is.’

Shri Nayar. Vikram recognizes her straight away, although she looks different from the woman in the holoma, lesser somehow, drained and exhausted. She is barely able to sit upright. The Antarctican exile hovers protectively nearby.

‘I’m Vikram Bai,’ he says. ‘I know you’re looking for me.’

Her eyes raise slowly to meet his. She has the gaze of a woman who is broken. He sees the depth of despair there and recognizes her loss for his own. Too quickly he remembers Taeo’s corpse, with the bruises he had inflicted upon the other man still visible on the rigid flesh. He remembers the hologram of Shri, how Taeo’s last thought had been for his partner back home.

‘You can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘You’re a danger to us. I’ve come to ask you to leave.’

Shri does not answer.

‘You need to leave – today,’ he says. ‘You’re putting my camp in danger. You may not realize it, but you are.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘They’ve abandoned us. There’s no one out there.’

Her gaze slides away.

‘There’s no one,’ she says.

Stars help him but she reminds him of Adelaide, Adelaide as he found her in the unremembered quarters, barely alive, those last few hours they spent together. He knows what it is to lose someone you love. With difficulty, Vikram resists the comparison. He reminds himself of the blood tracker they used in Osiris. What if the Antarcticans are using something similar?

‘Shri. Please understand. I can’t help you. I can’t bring Taeo back to you. You need to go home.’

‘What happened to him?’ she whispers. ‘What happened to my man?’

‘He missed you,’ says Vikram.

She starts to cry.

‘Please, take me with you,’ she implores. ‘Please.’

Vikram debates. Everything that is logical tells him it’s madness to let this woman near the camp. But in thirty-six hours, they’ll be meeting the pirate. He’ll be off the archipelago, the camp will disperse. What is more dangerous, to take Shri with him or to leave her here? Sometimes, he thinks, you just have to go with what your gut tells you.

‘I need to check you’re not carrying anything,’ he says.

She nods. The women in the party take Shri aside and strip-search her while Vikram and the men search Ivra. He submits resignedly. The women shout back – ‘She’s clean!’

Reassured, they give the two Antarcticans fresh clothes. Everything they are wearing or carrying is confiscated. Vikram instructs one of the sailors in the team to take the bundle out to sea and dump it.

Thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours, and he’ll be on his way. Vikram wishes it were tonight. They can’t afford to wait.

The camp is chaotic with preparations. A select delegation will be travelling with Vikram to Osiris; the others are free to stay or move on, but most have elected to maintain their small community, although Vikram has advised them to relocate. The atmosphere is excited, almost delirious with a sense of imminent discovery. Osiris will have the answers they seek. The agreement with El Tiburón has only reinforced Vikram’s status and the Alaskan’s role in securing it seems to have outweighed the revelation of her secret identity. Mig has seen her, laughing and joking with the inhabitants of the camp, with all the insouciance of a woman without a past, a woman who has never owned a book of those in debt to her, or arranged the release of mass murderers from prison.

Only Mig does not share in the enthusiasm. He can’t.

As if it weren’t bad enough having the Alaskan on site there’s now the Tarkie woman as well, who arrived with a Tarkie spy in tow, a man who upon seeing the camp looked like he might burst into tears, a man so obviously broken Mig can only think of him as a liability, and he told Vikram so – told him explicitly that Mig wouldn’t have him in any crew of his, wouldn’t task him to pickpocket a five-year-old. But Vikram barely listened. He was too distracted by the woman. They entered the camp together, something protective in the way Vikram showed Shri around, shielding her from questions.

Mig doesn’t like it. He doesn’t trust the Alaskan and he doesn’t trust the murdering bastard of a pirate with his too-soft voice and he doesn’t trust this woman, Shri Nayar. Mig is beginning to wonder if he’s backed the wrong man, if that sense of
special
that first drew him to the Osirian is going to turn out to be nothing more than Vikram’s downfall. Back when it was just the two of them, Vikram would have listened.

The Alaskan’s words gnaw at him. Mig isn’t anyone’s shrimp.

And soon enough, she’ll find that out for herself.

Vikram lies on the cabin bedroll running every last detail through his head. Everything is in place for their departure. El Tiburón is to collect them at dawn. He can think of nothing he has missed.

He is desperate to get going. The camp has been a strange place, not unhappy, but a place where he has struggled with himself, where he still struggles to reconcile a destiny over which he feels no control. There are moments when he has felt himself enjoying the sense of authority, and if it weren’t for the odd combination of Mig and the Alaskan to keep him grounded, he might have found himself a little too comfortable. A false king in a false empire.

Despite everything Mig has told him of the Alaskan’s misdeeds, he feels an affinity for the old woman. He is still in two minds about what to do with Mig. It feels wrong to take the boy with him, on a journey whose only certainty is danger and where there is no guarantee of survival, even if they make it back to Osiris – but it feels wrong to leave him behind. Or is he just being selfish? Knowing he wants to keep the boy with him, when the responsible thing would be to make Mig stay in Patagonia, in safety. But is it fair to deny him the choice?

He is never going to sleep. There is too much anticipation in the air. All of the hopes and worries of his renegade camp seem to crowd the atmosphere, leaching out the oxygen. His chest feels as tight as if he is standing at the top of an Osirian tower.

Resigned, Vikram gets up and pulls on his boots, shutting the cabin door gently behind him. He walks through the camp, passing the tents at the edge of the clearing with their sleeping occupants, and moving into the trees. The forest canopy filters out the starlight, and it is almost completely dark, but Vikram doesn’t need light. The Alaskan’s cabin, with its untrustworthy occupant, is still and silent.

He has no way of knowing whether she has told him the truth. He only knows what he has seen: the acquiescence of the pirate. They are not people he would choose to ally himself with, but he lost the luxury of choice a long time ago.

He goes beyond the camp, slowly treading its perimeter. He feels a wave of gratitude towards the forest, which has been kind, granting them refuge, keeping them safe at a time when they had nothing. The forest has allowed him to regroup. To build something. Some of the camp may stay, but not forever, and once they have departed it will return to what it was, silver-barked, murmuring trees and the undisturbed floor of the forest, soft with mulch, gently composting. There will be no trace of the nights that have passed here, the impassioned discussions, the plans, the uncomplicated fervour of those who found him, who found in this place a mission to distract from their own grief. All that will be gone.

Vikram stops to exchange a few words with the sentries, who seem unsurprised to see him. Their mood is quiet but confident. He wonders what they will do when tomorrow is over, and when he – if he – is on the seas, bound for Osiris. A part of him wants to ask but he holds back, acknowledging the transient nature of their meeting, the way lives cross and have importance to one another and then move on, with nothing known of before or after, and no likelihood of meeting again. He leaves the sentries to their posts.

He has an irrepressible urge to see the sky as he would see it from the sea, uncluttered by the topography of land. He clambers up into a tree not far from the clearing. The sensation of lifting himself into this growing thing remains one of his greatest pleasures: one of the rare and treasured moments which feels like it belongs solely to him. He climbs as high as his weight permits.

The southern constellations are bright and clear. The upper part of the tree lofts in a gust of wind and for a moment it is possible to imagine himself back in Osiris, lying on a raft rack or a western bridge with the sea moving somewhere beneath him, the constant, ever-shifting motion of the waves. A memory comes to him: his friends Nils and Drake, both drunk, supporting one another as they staggered over a bridge, the southern lights radiating above them, Drake pointing up to the sky.

Aurora australis.

How do you know?
he had said, or something like that, not realizing, having no inkling of just how much they did not know. Of a world they had imagined only in ground-dreams. If Vikram succeeds in returning to Osiris, his mission will not be confined to redfleur: he intends to find out what they did not know. To discover who has told them these lies. He will fish the culprits out, one by one, at sea or on land. This he promises himself. This he will do, for Nils and Drake. For Adelaide, the woman he loved. For Adelaide, who never knew the truth about the city that killed her.

Lost in thought, it is only because of his vantage point in the tree that Vikram notices movement in the camp. The flap of a tent peels open and the Antarctican woman crawls out, moving with slow and clearly deliberate stealth. She doesn’t zip the door to the tent closed, and Vikram realizes she must have left it open all night, precisely so as not to alert anyone with the distinctive sound. As he watches, the woman straightens, hugs her coat around her body, and sets off into the cover of the trees.

Vikram drops silently to the ground and follows her.

Mig waits until Vikram has left the cabin and then he goes inside and finds the Osirian’s pack and retrieves the gun. He holds it in both hands, getting used to the weight and heft of it, the strange rounded contours, the coldness of the steel that slowly warms within his hands. With the weapon finally in his grasp he feels a flood of relief and triumph, even as he notices his fingers are trembling. But that’s all right. It’s all right to be scared. He always told his crew that. It means you’re ready. Once the barrel of this thing is up against the Alaskan’s head, he won’t be trembling any more. He rests one finger lightly on the trigger.

Now is the moment.

The Alaskan sleeps in the other cabin. Mig knows she was unarmed when she entered the camp because all of her belongings were searched, and they confiscated the pistol she used to keep under her pillow in Cataveiro. But he wouldn’t put it past her to have secreted a knife, or some other implement, into her possession since she has been living in the camp. Nor does he doubt that the Alaskan has other things, things Vikram’s people wouldn’t have spotted, wouldn’t have known to look for, things which are fatal. Mig will remain at arm’s length, and ensure the Alaskan keeps her hands within his sight. If all else fails, he has the rope in his pocket. He hopes he won’t have to use this. The gun will be quicker.

As he approaches the cabin he rehearses his opening line. She may scream for help, so he won’t have much time. But it doesn’t matter if they all come running. It only takes a second to shoot someone. The freak is lucky. She’ll die fast. It wouldn’t have been like that for Pilar. His parrot girl had a slow, agonizing death. She was alone. There was no one there to hold her hand.

Pilar’s dead because of you.

He’ll begin with that.

You killed her.

In the forest gloom Vikram can barely make out the outline of Shri Nayar, but despite her efforts to keep quiet, she’s making more noise than he. They can’t have country like this in Antarctica, or at least, she’s never had to move through it in silence, in the dark. Shri is fumbling with something in her hands, something too small to see. Vikram moves closer. He sees a minute speck of light between her cupped hands. Realization floods him.

He sprints forwards. She looks up, startled, but reacts too late. Vikram knocks her hands apart, grabbing her around the waist with one arm, and clamping his other hand over her mouth. Shri struggles in his grip, kicking out and biting at his hand. Whatever she was holding has fallen to the floor, and the light has gone out. Vikram drags her awkwardly back through the trees, swearing under his breath. He can feel her shaking with suppressed shouts.

A sentry comes running as he enters the clearing, quickly followed by another. Vikram relinquishes Shri into their care.

‘Get her inside the cabin, and keep her quiet! And find the other one, Ivra – he may be involved.’

Shri Nayar continues to struggle as the sentries haul her across the camp. The disturbance has woken more than one person. Vikram follows the sentries inside before anyone can ask him questions and closes the door.

‘What the hell were you doing out there?’

The woman is breathing heavily. She looks at him with fierce, accusing eyes. One of the sentries is binding her to the chair.

‘I wasn’t doing anything.’

‘You snuck out of the camp. I saw you. What were you doing?’

‘As if I’d tell you,’ she sneers.

Vikram draws up a chair and sits facing her.

‘Don’t make me ask again.’

‘Are you going to interrogate me? Torture me? What would your precious followers make of that?’

‘If you’ve threatened this camp, there isn’t a soul here who’ll lift a finger to save you. Now you’re going to tell me – what were you doing out there in the forest?’