Revolving Door: Volume 2
The Vanishing Act - False Shuffle
Content warnings (contains spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of arrest and hypodermic needles.
Among the things mentioned in passing over dinner with Lea, one is that San Francisco taxis drive themselves. Before the reset, the last thing Felix does with his PalmNote is to book such a cab.
Their ride meets them at the Hexagon’s lobby, ghostly silent like all the other phantom engines that power this city. This morning, Adelaide wears a cerulean dress that flares around her knees. The day seems to deserve it, momentous in its own muted way.
They watch through dimmed windows in the backseat as lights flutter across them, pink and lime and blue, selling the latest plasticky fad in dieting products. Beside her, her travel companion is busy checking departure boards. The buildings start to thin out, till they are zipping through the pastel suburbs where she used to roam.
Half an hour later, the ride whizzes to a stop by a runway fence, where they alight while a robot voice thanks them.
Along the fence, they search for a gate. “This one,” whispers Adelaide, pointing at the recent tire tracks under a spotless gate. Hidden in a veil of light, they wait for ten minutes, till a KN Air Services truck trundles to the entryway, with its noisy gas engine. Once the gates have swung open for the visitor, they sprint in after, through the narrowing gap.
There is nothing inside but bare tarmac under a rolling gray sky, subdivided into roads by a thousand painted lines. The warehouses stand in files to their left, steel roller doors half raised. In front of one, the truck putters to a stop. The back hatch open, and the driver leaps out, watching in a fluorescent vest as an autonomous cart rolls from the warehouse door.
“There's our ticket,” Felix says. While the driver's gaze is trained away, the pair scramble in under the hatch, diving in among toolboxes and pipes.
Five minutes later, the truck rumbles back to life and rolls away, gears and spanners jangling, the stowaways curled in a corner and trying not to breathe. A rack of pipes rattles uncomfortably close to Adelaide’s head.
At the other end of a one-minute drive, the driver reopens the hatch to retrieve box after box of tools. It is when they disappear for a chat that Felix and Adelaide leap out of the container and across the tarmac, dashing crossing painted stripes in a refractive bubble of light. Out here, the ground is severe grey, the air stirred with fuel, and Adelaide feel exposed. If a plane were to land now…
“Gate 34,” Felix whispers with a glance at his tablet. “Let’s head for the terminal wall.” They sprint along the boundary of the glass facade. The air is frigid, but the fear is red hot, booming in her ears.
The jet bridge of Gate 34 hangs unwatched in the morning sun, its entrance on standby one story from the ground. Adelaide points at a flight of steel-frame steps ascending from the ground to a door in the metal tube. “We can wait till someone opens it,” she whispers.
“Ready when you are,” he answers, and they race for the stairs, still cloaked.
Things have lined up so far. Felix lugs their trolley bag upward, step by clattering step. No one is there to hear them. They wait for someone to come, their key to the chamber.
Then a hum shakes their feet, and they stumble apart. The machinery is waking beneath them. “Hold on,” whispers Felix. Adelaide snatches his arm. The bridge groans, and with a head spinning budge, the ramp begins to lift, the steps pantographing as it rises to the height of the aircraft to come.
Adelaide bites back a yelp as the bridge's ascent segues seamlessly into its sideways extension, like a turtle’s neck from its shell.
The whole assembly comes to a stop, and the bristling machinery slowly settles. Then, they hear a rattle of the steps. Beneath, a uniformed woman is climbing towards them. Adelaide dodges out of the way, breath held, while she unlocks the door to enter. Swooping their luggage off the floor, they sprint in after her, and then stumble to a walk, coming to rest among the bridge's glass windows while the employee departs for the departure lounge.
“We should wait here,” says Felix then, pointing out the counters barring the terminal end of the bridge. Adelaide nods mutely.
It is hard to miss the plane arriving. The buzz of the engine crescendos, over a minute, into a roar that makes her ears hum. She shrinks away from the noise, hands clamped over her ears, until she reaches the boundary of the ripple in the light, her companion disappearing like a mirage. The corridor is too bright. She darts back in, plugging her ears with her fingers.
Ahead, the bridge latches onto the aircraft like a larva to rock. Then the doors behind them open in a hiss. Leaping aside, they let the alighting passengers pass them first, then wait again. The traffic begins to come in the other direction. Felix waves for them to move. They slip in front of the walkers and their roller bags, invisible and a good distance ahead.
All sound falls away as they pass the cabin door. The scent of sanitisers cuts through the dry cold. They dodge flight attendants. Adelaide lets out a long breath as, still invisible, they wheel their bag up to the galley in the back, and wait.
Flights to Asia are never full these days, passenger volume whittled down by protectionism and pandemics both. The rows of cushy chairs begin to fill haphazardly, one empty seat to each filled. At the back of the left aisle, they watch the comings and goings until the cabin doors groan shut and the pressure shifts. Once the passengers are settled and they are sure of the consecutive vacancies, they pick out an empty row to sit in—and only then do they blink back into view.
The seatbelt clicks into place. Adelaide settles into her window seat, draws a deep breath, and exhales slowly. “I've never flown internationally,” she murmurs, turning to Felix as he returns from shoving their luggage into the baggage compartment. “What if someone notices we're not meant to be—”
“Hush, don't let anyone hear you,” he whispers as he takes his seat. “All those checks ought to have happened before the gate.” She makes a sound of agreement, then draws her lips into a line.
The plane pulls out of the terminal, and rolls into a graceful takeoff, not so much as a word among the passengers who are already lost in the flight entertainment. Attendants in red pass them heedlessly. At two o’clock, they are asked for their preferred meals, and by then, Adelaide has finally begun to relax, the buzzing anxiety settling into a gentle unease as the aircraft rattles on around them.
The cabin lights fade out through sunset pink when nighttime arrives. In fifteen hours, Adelaide manages five hours of sleep. Her hunger is only just staved off by the half-sized meals that they buy for thrice as much as they are worth.
Felix does not seem to think much of the mash nor the tea, and his inflight entertainment of choice is to read the retail magazines in quiet disinterest. Adelaide takes her tablet phone from her pocket and begins to write again.
We are flying without a ticket. I don’t know how we made it past security. I don’t know how Felix knew we could do it this way…
She writes of whatever she can think of: the uncertain future ahead, and the quiet dread of knowing she will never return. She sleeps in stops and starts, never quite noticing when she drifts away until she returns to consciousness.
By the time they descend over the waters and touch down at Hong Kong International Airport, Adelaide’s legs are wracked by gnawing aches. She awakens from slumber with her head on the tray table, imprints of the napkins from dinner pressed into her cheek. Before the cabin doors have unlatched, Felix slides their luggage bag out of the compartment above.
Everyone shambles off the plane in one daze or another, out into the gentler air, the uncanny brightness. While passengers funnel into the carpeted hallway, they linger and wait for the service door to open again.
For two hours they watch. The passengers of their flight leave, and then those of the next flight board in a tumult of voices and wheels. But the chance never comes. The passenger exit snicks shut, and the plane takes off. Through the windows, they have a view of the hills and runways beyond, two dizzying floors above the ground.
Adelaide and Felix glance at each other under the cloak of light. “Through border control, then?” he says. “I cannot hide us for much longer. It is much too tiring.”
For the first time, she notices the dark rings around his eyes, remembers not seeing him sleep a wink on the flight. A lump of guilt forms in her throat. “Yeah, let’s go.”
So they rejoin the passenger crowd on travellators, trickling towards the next hall. The border control gates form a gleaming wall, the new country on the other side. The automatic gantries flash violet, their scanners demanding faces. Peering from behind a pillar, they watch the gates open and close as documents are scanned.
Felix leans on the luggage bag. “We can’t have you scanning your face,” he murmurs, “nor I. I do not have a travel document.”
Adelaide’s eyes rest on the inactive gates. “It’s a silly suggestion,” she says, “but could we go invisible and climb over the ones that aren’t being watched?”
“Not one bit silly. We could do it, if we are quick and clean about it.”
“Quick and clean,” she repeats, and nods.
The pair tiptoe towards the closed gantries, ducking under the nylon barricades within their bubble of light. At the threshold, Adelaide freezes, and eyes her companion for his next move. With a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, he says, “When I cross, I will flash an orange light across the gantry. I will keep you cloaked—do not move while I am looking away.”
That is all the instruction Adelaide received, before Felix creeps towards the transparent barrier, and dissolves out of sight, along with their bag.
She stares in the gap between the gates, half veiled in the dark.
The plastic rattles. Her breath catches, but her heart hammers on.
An orange light flashes in the shape of a flower.
Swallowing a gasp, Adelaide inches up. She is much shorter than Felix—her shoulders are barely high enough for her to boost herself over, and it does not help that she has not put her arms to much strenuous use.
She looks up, and finds that he has slipped back into view. He holds one hand towards her and nods once, mouthing words she cannot read.
Biting back a cry, she makes the running leap.
Her right leg slips right in the wedge-shaped gap between the gates, and her left doesn't quite clear it. The pinch of the plastic makes her yelp—and then everything is moving too fast. Eyes dart in their direction, and Felix snatches her about the waist while she fights to loop her left leg across.
She has barely seen Felix as terrified as he is right now, hoisting her halfway over his shoulder while she finally clears the barrier.
And then she makes eye contact with a security officer. And it takes a second of looking, of widening eyes and mouths, for her to realise:
The officer can see her.
Gasping for air, she lands on the other side. The officer cries out and breaks into a run, and Felix mutters something under his breath—before the air ripples around them again.
“Haste!” he snaps, snatching her arm to drag her away.
The officer stumbles to a stop, pointing and shouting at the spot where she last saw them. They wind their way around gaps in passenger clusters. The officers are not chasing. Fighting her own panic down, Adelaide snatches the luggage handle, and they take off past the baggage belts.
“I am so sorry.” This is the first thing Felix says, as they clear the customs doors and stumble out into the arrival hall. “I let my guard down.”
“No, I'm sorry.” They are walking at double pace. “You’re tired, because of me. And I couldn't get across the gate when it counted.”
“Oh, Addie, that wasn't your fault.” He stops short of reiterating his stance, and instead points out the station on the edge of the airport, where the ceiling dips beyond a row of windows. “That’s where we want to be.”
Hong Kong’s airport train flies across the green outskirts of the city on elevated rails. Boarding the first train to pull into the airport station, the two settle into a pair of adjacent seats. They watch through the glass as the bay glimmers into view beyond the fences, and then the cranes of the port.
Like so many subways the world over, the MTR network has moved its ticketing to an app. Felix downloads it and purchases a city ticket. When Adelaide follows suit, she makes it as far as a payment screen, eyes darting to him by reflex. She is only just aware of another twinge of guilt when he wordlessly takes her phone and begins to enter his payment details.
The rest of the journey is a welcome lull, if a short one, owing to the speed of the train. The seats are full of travellers and locals both, as is their transfer station south of the strait. As they skirt through underpasses wider than halls, Adelaide stares around her, taking in the screens and the bilingual ads that glow off them.
The local subway is packed to the doors, elbows bumping and feet colliding with every swing of the train. They lean with their luggage between them, Adelaide hugging a pole. Wide-eyed, she studies their fellow commuters as the light flickers over their faces, noting the number of them using tablet phones barely any different from her own. Someone makes a phone call in what she supposes to be Cantonese, but there is enough English around that she doesn't think language will be a problem.
The brakes screech. The train decelerates steeply into the next station. While Adelaide clings fast to the pole, Felix, hanging onto a ceiling handle, swings and collides with her back.
She jolts upright. The surprise of his touch fills her head with heat. That's not right, she thinks at once.
“Sorry,” he mutters before righting himself again, but now she is too nervous to talk, and so she doesn't.
It is not until they have finally exited the MTR station onto milling city streets in the afternoon heat that they finally speak again. “When do we want to try lowering your disguise?” asks Felix.
“How about now?” Adelaide murmurs as he consults the map on his tablet. “I’m sorry I made you hide us for so long. I didn’t know it was so exhausting.”
“You needn’t apologise for my choices,” he says, gaze lifting from his screen. “It is the least anyone could do for you.”
“But it's all at your own expense. I just…why are you doing so much?”
Seeing her crestfallen look softens his expression. “Addie, why wouldn't I? You cannot be David Seeley’s test subject for the rest of your life. You deserve to live, and others deserve your friendship. And if I am making your days better, then, why, that makes all of this worth the while.”
“Worth risking your own life?”
He shrugs with a sidelong smile. “What can I say…I have a lot of time, and no fear of the consequences.”
Adelaide’s eyes unfocus. Bathed in the hazy sun, he waves for her to follow. It is more than the sun, making her vision spin. They continue to wander, dodging pedestrians and their shadows.
There are hotels and hostels aplenty in this corner of Kowloon, and it takes Felix all of ten minutes’ looking to find one that suits their needs. He speaks little as he decides, though he asks Adelaide for her preferences, from time to time—whether she minds separate rooms, which she does not, and whether she would like to be closer to restaurants or markets, for which she has no preference.
He leads them up crowded streets, past spotless mall lobbies and grimy apartment blocks, somehow spared of the future’s ruthless scouring. Then he stops before the lobby of a roadside lift, and steps inside. The concrete echoes their steps. The lift smells of old cigarettes.
The hostel’s counter staff quickly catch on that Felix does not speak Cantonese. While they do business in English, Adelaide peers over the solar-powered cat waving its paw on the counter, and her reflection in the receptionist's metal placard. It is her ordinary old face, pale and rosy, new red blonde hair.
He hands her the key codes to both doors on a torn pocketbook page, and takes them up to the sixth floor. Their rooms are squirreled away in the very depths of the hall. Hers is closer; behind the red door is a bed, a bathroom and an armchair, lit warmly by the recessed lights.
She drops what little luggage she has and takes stock of the room. A humid musk permeates the air, trapped by windowless walls. Between the bed and the counter is a linoleum floor. The air conditioning is controlled with a remote. Sitting down on the bed makes her eyelids droop at once.
She perks up as her phone buzzes. “Freddie, read the latest message?”
“Message from Felix: ‘Visit me in 6-11 at your soonest convenience.’”
“Just a second…” Dragging herself off the bed, Adelaide slips out, closes the door behind her, and knocks on her companion's.
By now, Felix has rolled their luggage bag into the gap between the bed and the wall. He sits on the edge of the mattress.
“How’s your room?” he asks.
“Not much different from this one…but I feel like I could fall asleep anywhere right now.”
“You and I both.”
“Why'd you call me over?”
At this, Felix picks up his phone. “Would now be a good time to outline my plans? I promise I'll be brief.”
She nods. “Go ahead.”
“Well, as you already know, I am here to locate the final piece of the wormhole portal, a supercapacitor. The National Engineering Research Centre of Hong Kong developed the capacitor in question, although the specifics of its location are unclear. I have an inkling as to where it is, but locating it may take some espionage on the premises.”
“Will you be able to figure it out?”
He nods. “I have booked a visit to the Centre in two days’ time, and I will speak to the project’s head researcher,” he replies. “I ought to be able to find and retrieve the capacitor on the same day.”
“How big is it?”
He motions out a cylinder about the diameter of a steering wheel. “Small enough to carry in hand.”
“So while you're doing this, what will I be doing?”
“Whatever you choose, my dear,” he replies. “You have access to my finances through your phone.”
Her eyes widen. “Are you sure?”
He beams. “Why don't you pick out a place to dine?”
They have dinner in a secretive neon-lit teahouse whose menu changes to claypot rice in the evening. Back at the hostel, they turn in all too eagerly, parting ways at the doors with an agreement to do nothing taxing the next day. Both sleep through the evening and wake at noon; by the time they step out onto the streets, the walls are bright in the sun.
That day feels special, like the eye of the storm. Adelaide doesn’t yet know what will become of her after this, or of Felix, but she will have to decide for herself, soon.
Today, she is wearing a green sundress, to match the humid heat. Felix has ceded navigation fully to her. In the absence of a local familiarity, Adelaide simply goes where her attention takes her. On the sun-baked streets, they stroll past hawkers and dine together in noodle restaurants. They both struggle with the chopsticks and let their attentions steep in the flavours. They share milk tea as they stroll back, passing the plastic cup back and forth between themselves.
Once the sky washes vermilion, Adelaide makes a course for the markets. Drifting among the glowing faces of shoppers under strings of LEDs, she finally walks maskless among the shifting shadows. They pass poultry roasting on spits, and fruit piled so high behind glass that the shopkeepers are half hidden. They munch on meat skewers and spring rolls with two paper bags of fruit between them. Strangers shoulder past, couples hand in hand, families flocking one stall after another with egg waffles in paper bags.
In that moment, Adelaide feels light. The earth, the buildings, the streets, they do not recoil from her. She could keep walking like this, or at least she wishes she could, with the colours filling her eyes. But Felix has a task that he cannot defer. And then, after that…
She turns to ask him some question or other—like if I bought us some fruit, what kind would you like?—but finds him already watching her, curiously.
“What do you think of this place?” he says then. They have slowed to a stop beside an electronics hawker. She cannot tell if he is conjuring illusions, or if it is just her post-flight drowsiness, but he looks different, brilliant as carnival lights.
Again, she is drowned by a sticky, honeyish joy. Again comes the impulse to disown it, to wash it off.
But this evening, she lets herself steep in it for just a minute. She beams and stares to her heart's content. “I love it,” she answers. The colours glisten in her companion's eyes. “I haven't felt this free in eleven years.”
Felix smiles back, head tilting to a side. “I am delighted, then. Better that you liked it than that you didn't…”
They have talked over the future many times already, and Adelaide has nothing new to say about it. “I just wish you would be here too,” she answers. “But I know why you can't stay.”
His eyes widen. “Well, then let us take our time.”
They stroll down Nathan Road, sparkling and blinking all around them. Shops full of confections, phones, and fish blur by. Adelaide stops by a glowing hawker stall and buys without haggling—a plastic cat keychain with a golden tassel, a glittery turquoise hair clip in the shape of a butterfly.
She tucks her hair behind her ear and clips the butterfly on. “How do I look?” she asks, turning to Felix.
“Like you could steal some hearts,” he replies.
“Figuratively?”
He laughs. “Maybe literally, too.”
They wander back to the hotel with all their cakes and meat skewers finished, the paper bags long discarded in a recycling bin—save for one last bag of apples.
“I'll be out quite early tomorrow,” Felix says, as Adelaide unlocks her door. “If something should go wrong, if I find myself making a quick exit from Hong Kong…this could well be our last time seeing each other.”
“Oh.” Whatever words she was about to say, they scatter like ash. “Please…stay safe. Okay?”
“You too. Promise you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He pauses, some unreadable current of emotion fleeting across his face. None of it makes it into his words. “Take care, my dear. With luck, I shall see you tomorrow.”
Adelaide stands frozen on the threshold of her room for almost a minute after Felix leaves. If this could be their last time talking, then she wants something else, something more than such a threadbare goodbye.
But she soon finds that she can no longer fight the pull of sleep, so she lets the door close, and turns off the light, curling up in her bed.
There is no window in this room. By the time Adelaide awakens, it is well into the afternoon, and she is alone.
Please help yourself to my finances. I shall have little more use of them if this venture proves successful.
F. M.
So reads a note slipped under the door. She takes a minute to walk next door and check her travel companion’s room for any sign of him. She sits on the bed for an hour and watches the entrance with a blossoming ache in her heart, but he does not appear.
Returning to her own room at last, she picks up the paper bag of apples from last night. As she picks out the rosiest fruit and begins to eat, she toys with her phone’s lockscreen controls.
What is she meant to do with this unexpected ache, somewhere between rapture and grief? Will it stay after he goes? How much of this is the relief of being free—and how much is the joy of having someone she can believe in?
For several minutes, she hears no sound but the rattle of her thoughts.
Then, three sharp raps on the door.
“Hello? Adelaide?”
The wood muffles the voice. It is not Felix. It is an American voice. A voice she doesn’t know.
Dread rakes over her. Her thoughts glitch out.
They knock again. And this time, they say:
“Adelaide Moore. Enough of these antics. I have a warrant for your arrest. Open the door, before I open it myself.”
The world flashes—light and shadow, like strobing like lights through subway windows.
The engine of reality thunders forth.
The doorknob rattles. A key in the lock.
Adelaide’s hearing has gone foggy, but she is lucid enough to pull her phone from her pocket. She swipes her lockscreen and taps the microphone button.
She drops it under the counter and knocks the bag of apples over it. The lock clicks open, the door swinging away. She sees the hallway outside, two agents in jackets—one of whom soars in, pouncing upon her.
She only starts screaming then.
Their face flashes past—they shove her, pinning her against the counter. Methodic, efficient, their gloved hands bruise her back against the wood.
“Go away! Go away, go away!” she sobs, as if she could blink and scatter this nightmare, to find the room empty again.
“Cuffs!” The voices pierce the film of her dreaming. “Come quietly and this will all be over quickly—”
With one sputtering burst of bravado, Adelaide twists her arm and grips a bare wrist, thinking of the berries, of ageing, of necrosis—until the agent roars out in pain and, with the flat of their other forearm, slams her screaming against the wall. Her nose collides with the wallpaper, not one inch of skin making contact with hers as they clamp her hands down with gloved fingers.
“Don’t you dare try that again,” snarls the agent, then their voice takes on a softer quality. “We can make this painless. Just come along quietly, now. You have a nice, warm room waiting for you back at home.”
“How did you find me?” she cries. She feels the handcuffs—cold, fateful, like the ones from eleven years ago—snap around her wrists. A perfect fit.
“Did you think your little vanishing act at the airport wouldn't be caught on camera? You should know by now—it is impossible to disappear in this world,” they answer.
A needle in her arm. She can feel her strength giving out to theirs, her awareness of the world sputtering, as they glove her hands and drag her to the door.