Vikram’s watch ticked off the seconds with silent, calculated precision. It was nearing half ten o’clock; the appointed time of Eirik’s death was eleven. Vikram had already been here for over an hour. The boats had gathered early.
His hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists, catching shreds of torn lining in the pockets of his coat. Something had changed when he woke today. A tight band squeezed his chest, constricting the airflow and his heart. He could not have said what it meant; for so long he had felt only a blankness tinged with fear.
He stood at the boat rail of a rusting waterbus anchored far back in the crowd. The Council had chosen to stage the execution near the north end of the border, where four soaring towers cornered an impromptu square. On the western side, the sea was carpeted with boats, every craft jammed with westerners who had congregated, whether to witness a spectacle or out of disbelief that it would be carried through, Vikram could not tell. Apart from a few officials and the skadi, there were no Citizens on the surface. They were all inside, locked away behind window-walls, or listening to a reporter describe the scene on their o’dios.
“Mind if we squeeze in here?”
The man was a head shorter than Vikram, his breath misting in the cold, steering a child of perhaps eight in front of him. Vikram moved along the rail.
“Sure.”
What could he say? He glanced at the kid, a boy, whose expression was open and curious. He wanted to ask the man if it was right the boy should witness such a thing, but to draw any attention was risky. There was always a chance that one of the skadi might recognise him. They did as they pleased, and in the event of any trouble, Vikram’s record would count against him. The thought of going back underwater was enough to bring sweat trickling down his back.
“They say he’s the NWO leader,” said the man. “Eirik 9968. They say he’s number one. What do you reckon?”
“I don’t know.”
He could have said a lot of things. He could have said that he had known Eirik like a brother, once. But between the rumours and the krill speculation and what Drake and Nils had told him, he no longer knew what or who to believe.
The kid pointed to the tank, sat on the deck of a barge a hundred metres away, beyond the front line of western boats. Behind it, the border rose out of the waves, its rippling mesh wet and dripping with seaweed.
“Is that it?” said the kid.
“That’s it.”
“Where’s the prisoner?”
“They’ll bring him out soon.”
Soon. In a matter of minutes, he had to watch Eirik die. Vikram thought he might cry, or shout out, or be sick. If he only knew if the man was guilty or not! He drew in a deep breath. When he exhaled the air came out loud, too loud, the woman on his other side turned her head to look. He had thought that his face was blank, but you never knew what really showed. Vikram had seen fear and horror spark in the most hardened of features: the emotion sudden and unexpected, like electric light in a dark window.
Keep yourself empty, he thought. A pebble at the bottom of the ocean. A bit of kelp. When it’s happened it’s over, done. Then you move on.
That was what the three of them had agreed, him and Nils and Drake. They would go to the execution, because they couldn’t stay away. But they would do nothing. There was nothing they could do.
Eirik’s sentence had finally been announced in early summer, eight months after Vikram was let out of jail. There had not been a public execution since the six Osuwa criminals were shot at the border twenty-eight years ago, for an alleged act of terrorism at the university. Even Vikram knew that Eirik had committed no acts of terrorism. The Citizens were going to execute him anyway.
Was the City actually scared of the west? How could they be, when there wasn’t a single coherent movement or activist group? The west was in chaos, crippled by food shortages and drug trafficking and the continual power failures. The shanty towns were terrorised by gangs who imposed illegal levees and warred continually amongst themselves. Once every few months there might be a straggly protest at the border, mute and seemingly purposeless, but it didn’t take a Councillor to work out that the west was in no position to threaten anyone.
Twenty minutes before eleven. The back of Vikram’s neck tingled with the bitter cold. He pulled up his scarf. In a couple of weeks, he’d need two to go outside.
It was an incongruously clear, pretty day, the sky palest blue and utterly empty. Under its expanse Vikram felt the unsettling jumble of freedom and an at times incapacitating terror of losing it again, which had dogged him ever since he got out. Around the towers, waves slapped the decking with light, almost playful gestures. The waterbus he stood upon with twenty other westerners rose on the swell.
A skadi boat glided down the edge of the crowd. They had a fleet of barges and speeders, and they had strung a line of buoys to fence in the western boats. The skadi were dressed bulkily in their habitual black. They were all armed with guns and tasers. One of them had a speakerphone.
“You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats. Any attempted action will meet with severe punishment.”
The execution boat, anchored between the western crowds and the City, was a squat, ugly craft, surrounded by clear water and painted entirely black except for the prow, where someone had daubed two white orbs and the teeth of a shark. The deck was flat. On it, the transparent cube reflected the towers on either side and the people and the empty waiting sky.
The wind blew spray into Vikram’s face and he licked the salt from his chapped lips. It stung, an unwelcome reminder that he was really here. He was alive, and awake.
The speakerphone crackled. “You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats…”
Vikram was nine years old when Mikkeli first brought him to the border. From his earliest memories, he had heard people talking about the infamous waterway. It was a subject which made voices change, and sometimes faces too. In Vikram’s young world, which consisted mostly of places he could not go or things he could not do, this barrier dividing the west from the City was a concept at once as solid and as transient as the sky.
On that day Mikkeli had blagged two passes on a waterbus and sneaked Vikram up to a balcony sixty floors above surface. Once they were safely installed, she unwrapped a package of fried squid and kelp. She said that someone had given her the food, which was a lie. Vikram knew Mikkeli had stolen it because he had heard the fry-boat woman yelling at them earlier as they ran away over the raft rack.
They shared the squid rings, greasy and chewy on the inside but coated with thick, salty batter. Mikkeli gave Vikram most of the kelp squares. She pointed outwards.
“Look over there,” she said. “See them towers?”
“Yeah. They’re all silver.” That was his first impression of the City. Silver and glorious, like the morning sun on the waves.
“We can’t go there,” said Mikkeli. Her voice sounded strange. Vikram could not work out if she was cross or if she might actually cry. He thought about what Mikkeli had said and decided that there must be a reason for it.
“Why can’t we go there?”
“’Cause we’re westerners, that’s why. We’re not allowed.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it’s the rules. The Council’s rules.” Mikkeli spat over the balcony rail. Vikram leaned forward to see the gob of spit fly and Mikkeli grabbed his collar and pulled him back.
“Who’s the Council, Keli?”
“Stupid old gulls, Naala says. Stupid gulls who make stupid rules. You see, Vik, our mum’s and dad’s folks, they weren’t born here. They came from some place else.”
“I know that. I’m not an idiot.”
“No, you’re clever, that’s why I’m telling you this. “’Cause it’s important. And it’s not fair. Why do we get left in this dump and them Citizens got heating and ’lectricity that works all the time and you know what else they’ve got? They’ve got the o’vis.” The yearning in Mikkeli’s voice reminded Vikram of hours spent waiting outside the fry-boats, smelling the smell of hot squid, knowing that it would be long past twilight before leftovers. “Naala actually saw an o’vis once. She said it’s amazing. You can watch ancient filmreels the Neons made; the newsreel and animes and everything.”
“What’s the newsreel?”
“This announcer thing they got, tells you information and stuff, like if someone dies, everyone knows ’cause it’s on the feed…”
Mikkeli talked on. She told him weird and wonderful stories of a fabulous world where people went to parties and wore beautiful clothes and watched acrobats and then stuffed themselves with weqa and fish until they vomited.
People didn’t get sick in the City, she said. They didn’t get horrible coughs and die in the night.
The Citizens did peculiar things. They kept animals in their rooms-as pets. They wore coats with bird feathers inside. They had gliders.
If they wanted to come to west Osiris, which they didn’t, they were allowed to whenever they liked.
Vikram listened. He looked at the sleek, silver towers. The shuttle lines looked like jets of blue fire leaping from one gigantic cone to the next. Fire was one of Vikram’s favourite things in his limited world.
“Can’t we just go to look around?” he asked.
“No. Look down there-careful! Naala’d murder me… See that net coming out the water? Goes down as far as the sea mud. People say the Tellers tied it, right at the centre of the earth. But that’s all lies. The Council wanted to keep us out so the skadi put it there.”
“We can’t go ever? Not when we’re older?” Vikram wanted to be sure.
“Did you listen to what I said? Never ever. You try and cross that waterway down there without a tag that says you’re a Citizen, the skadi shoot you- zap! Just like that. They hate us, they call us dogs. Look, look, there’s a boat of ’em going past right there, that dirty black speeder. Naala told me it all. I wasn’t even meant to bring you with me, it’s that dangerous.”
Vikram saw a gull fly past the nearest tower on the other side. The light, reflected from a window, turned the bird for a second into living gold. Everything that was beautiful belonged to the Citizens.
“Then why did you?” he said angrily. “Why did you bring me?”
It seemed like the most unfair thing that Mikkeli had ever done. But Mikkeli was unimpressed at his outburst.
“Because Vik, one day someone’s got to do something about it, and it might as well be us. Right?”
He looked from the waterway, where the low-lying skadi boat was gliding past one of the silver cones, and back to Mikkeli. Last week, she had stolen a new garment: a yellow hood. Within its furry halo her face was deadly serious.
Vikram would have done anything for Mikkeli.
“Alright,” he said. “How?”
Nine minutes to eleven. Vikram shivered uncontrollably. He could not take his eyes off the boat. With its unkind mission, the vessel itself seemed to have acquired a mesmerising power. Each of its component parts was imbued with more than simple menace; the cracked graffiti eyes, the crew posed at stiff attention, gun barrels protruding from their shoulders, the waves lapping and the creak of the hull. There was something inherently wrong about the scene. The boat’s natural purpose had been reversed. It would no longer protect life; it carried a tomb, clear and silent.
The kid on Vikram’s right fidgeted, looked up at his father.
“Not long now,” said the man.
Vikram wondered if there was anyone in the crowd who had plans to break Eirik out. He felt the tension of the crowd, really felt it, the way he’d sensed unease three years ago, the day the riots began. Who else had Eirik known? Did he have allies? Colleagues? Were there members of the New Western Osiris Front in the crowd? Had they ever been anything more than a rumour, or had all of those dissidents quietly disappeared after the riots were crushed? Perhaps everyone present today was simply relieved that a scapegoat had been found and that it wasn’t them.
He gauged the thickness of the glass construction, wondering if a single shot would break it. He remembered, distantly, the feel of a gun in his hand, that sense of absolute power and invulnerability. It had proved false, like everything else.
The skadi would have prepared thoroughly. They always did.
Only another few minutes. There was no sign of Eirik.
“Maybe they’ll cancel it,” said the woman next to Vikram.
He looked at her properly for the first time. She was old, at least fifty, and wheezing in the cold air. She probably had tuberculosis. He remembered Mikkeli’s lilting voice- people don’t get sick in the City, Vik. He wanted to ask the woman her name, but could not trust himself to know even this tiny piece of personal information.
“It’s just an act,” he said-whether to convince himself or the woman he did not know.
The crowd murmured impatiently. Where was the condemned man?
Vikram had not seen Eirik since before the riots. Even if he had wanted to, prisoners were allowed no visitors. Underwater, the information that Vikram overheard came in drips and leaks. A whisper, across cells, that Eirik had confessed. Months later, in the breakfast line, rumours of the tribunal.
He hadn’t been sure about Eirik at first. It had always been the four of them: Vikram and Mikkeli, Nils and Drake. Mikkeli, as the oldest, was the leader. None of them had family; they had grown up on the boat and later they lived together in a single room. They squabbled and got into fights, they tried and sometimes succeeded in finding work and eventually, when their circumstances could no longer be viewed entirely as a joke, they had talked, talked seriously, and they had founded the New Horizon Movement. Their ideas were popular. Others joined. The talks grew to meetings of fifteen or twenty people, but they were always the core.
One night, Mikkeli brought Eirik back to talk to them. Vikram remembered Eirik walking into their favoured bar for the first time, tossing his coat onto the table, drawing up an empty keg.
They had been in the middle of a heated discussion. When Eirik sat down, they all stopped talking. The silence was expectant.
“Well,” Eirik said. And looked at them all. A canny, knowing look, but somehow gleeful, as though he was pleased with life and what it offered, and even how it found him. “Well.”
He remembered Mikkeli, sidling forward, a shyness about her. Vikram had never seen her like that before.
“This is Eirik,” she announced. “He wants to hear about Horizon.”
Vikram was suspicious. He could tell that Nils and Drake felt the same way, sensed them bristling beside him.
“Show him the letters, Vik,” said Mikkeli. She spoke to Eirik. “Every week we send a letter to the Council. Vik does the writing for us. He’s the smart one.”
Vikram was embarrassed.
“He doesn’t want to see those, Keli.”
“Oh go on.”
“That’s our business,” Nils interjected. “We don’t know who this guy is. No offence, Eirik.”
Eirik smiled. “None taken. How about we all get a drink instead?”
Later, Eirik took Vikram aside.
“I didn’t want to make you feel awkward, Vikram, but I’d be interested to see what Horizon sends to the Council. There’s too much talk of violence out there. It’s understandable but it won’t work. We need to use our heads.”
“He’s a spy,” said Nils, when Mikkeli and Eirik had left and Vikram relayed what had been said to the others.
“He’s almost forty.” Drake emptied the dregs of a tankard into her mouth.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Old, but no grey hair,” she said simply. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“Clearly Keli does,” said Nils sourly.
“I’m not sure he is a spy.” Vikram was thoughtful.
“Must be.”
“But he looks like us.”
Eirik had what they all had-the unmistakeable taint of the west. It wasn’t just the general shabbiness and the permanent smell of salt from water travel and poor diet. It was something in the eyes. Part wariness, part resignation; a continual expectation of the worst, as though by acknowledging, almost welcoming the worst of their situation, they could somehow ward off the reality. According to the only survey ever carried out in the west, by the Colnat Initiative, life expectancy in the west was an average of forty-three. The years before, filled with sickness and unemployment, would become increasingly harsh. They all carried this knowledge on their faces, and the only time Vikram actually noticed it was when he saw someone who did not look like that. Like the skadi.
Eirik came back. One by one he won them over. Part of the lure was undoubtedly that Eirik knew how to talk.
“You people are exactly who I’ve been looking for,” he said.
When Vikram showed him the transcripts of their letters, Eirik was visibly excited.
“These are great ideas! Joint fishing missions, that’ll appeal to the anti-Nucleites, they’re desperate to get further out of the city. And if you rephrased a few things-you don’t mind me making suggestions? Like here, you talk about reducing security at checkpoints-what you want to say is border reconciliation. It’s all about the jargon.”
Vikram wrote it down.
“How do you know this stuff? Who taught you?”
“You learn to pick things up. Odd jobs in the City-I always scan their newsfeed. Listen to them talking. Know your enemy, Vikram. It’s the oldest rule in the universe.”
Then he began asking questions. So now we know what we want-how are we going to get it? It was we, right from the start. That had made them feel good. And it was a valid question, to which none of them yet had an answer. This was what they sat around arguing about for nights on end. They had been happy enough doing that for a while, with Vikram composing the letters, and occasional suggestions that they might organise a protest. Mikkeli had come up with a series of slogans. But after Eirik showed up they started noticing other things-like the fact that one electric bulb did not produce adequate light even in the summer, and that no amount of well-written words could assuage the fact that none of them had had a decent meal in weeks.
“We need to engage with the early justice groups,” said Eirik. “Get right back to the start. The Western Repatriation Movement, they were good people-you know about them? They sent the first official refugee delegate to the Council, seven years after the Great Storms and the first immigrants arrived. The Council made promises, of course. The western quarter’s only temporary, they said. Give us eighteen months to restructure the city, we’ll find you somewhere decent to live. Eighteen months go by, the delegates return, they warn the Council that people are getting angry, and the Council places them under house arrest-idiotic move but they were probably scared shitless. That’s what led to the rise of the New Osiris Affiliation, and they led to the second wave of riots, and what happened at the Greenhouse, and finally, thirty-nine years ago, to the border. That border’s as old as I am. We’ve grown up together.”
He sat back and held their eyes, one by one, steadily.
“Everything,” he said. “Has a root.”
Eirik’s voice was thoughtful and inevitable like a tide. They could listen to him for hours. It seemed that Mikkeli’s adulation had proved well founded. They had followed her and she had needed someone to believe in as much as the rest of them. It was only Eirik himself who seemed to wander, fleet as foam, unhindered by such petty concerns as doubt.
As the weeks passed, Vikram noticed shifts in attitude. At first it was small things. There was less attention to the letters. Instead of helping him dictate, the others might talk about an incident at the border. A man who had been detained at the checkpoint for forty-eight hours without reason. A woman, beaten up, who had lost an eye. Phrases crept into conversation: if only I’d been there. Vikram found himself only too happy to join in.
The lack of response to the Council missives began to feel like a personal insult. Did they even read what was sent? Was there any point in writing at all?
He started revisiting old childhood haunts, by the border. The towers on the other side seemed brighter and more blinding than ever and his hands would itch with inactivity.
He clearly remembered turning to Nils one day and saying, “If something happened this winter-if people decided to riot-what would you do?”
Nils said without a flicker of hesitation, “I’d kill as many of those skadi bastards as I could.”
“Not Citizens though.”
“Course not Citizens. What d’you take me for?”
And then came the morning of strange quiet, the day the riots began. The day that everything fell apart and the skadi came for Eirik. The City published findings that they said proved Eirik was NWO. He’d gone from group to group, they said, winning trust, gaining followers. Recruiting. They gave him a number.
For Eirik, after three years in a seabed cell, death might be a relief. He wondered if Mikkeli’s ghost had lingered with the other man whilst he was underwater, the way she had with Vikram, presenting him with her lifeless body over and over again, the tattered yellow hood that fell back from her face drenched to ochre. Did Eirik even know she was dead?
The second hand edged past eleven o’clock. Something was happening. Birds, alert to the change in mood, began to swirl overhead. A curious gull dove low over the boats. Of course the birds would come today.
The hatch on the execution boat had opened. A skadi officer emerged. He came to stand at the rail, hands clasped behind him. Wide sunglasses wrapped around his head caught the sun as he turned this way and that.
The officer barked an order. Eirik was led out from below deck. He must have been kept there all along, in darkness. Vikram strained his eyes, desperate for a glimpse of Eirik’s face, but it was concealed behind a dark hood, part of a prisoner’s suit.
A frisson went through the crowd.
“That’s him… that’s Eirik 9968…”
Eirik seemed to move as one in a dream. His hands were manacled in front of him. The man leading him gave tiny jerks upon the chains, and Vikram could hear their clank beneath the ever present rush of the ocean and the whispers of the audience.
The executioner checked the tank. He rapped the glass on each side and on the roof. Two skadi on either side of Eirik held his arms. They turned him towards the western crowd, but his head flopped on his chest, and his face remained in shadow.
He’s drugged, Vikram realized. He felt anger stirring at their cowardice, mixed with a horrible relief that Eirik would barely be conscious.
The air keened as a dozen loudspeakers were switched on. The wheezing woman next to Vikram covered her ears. The man to his right squeezed his boy’s shoulders. Vikram wanted to wrench the kid away and cover up his eyes. In the next breath he thought no, he should see this. He should know what the Citizens do to us.
A voice began to speak. The tone was clipped and robotic.
“The man known as Eirik 9968 has been sentenced for his actions against the city state of Osiris. He is found guilty of the following crimes: denouncing the Osiris Council, organising collective violence against the City, inciting aggressive action in westerners, acts of personal terrorism, assault and mass murder. In particular he is convicted for his role in reviving the illegal New Western Osiris Front, the organisation responsible for the atrocities committed at Oswua University in the year twenty-three eighty-eight, and for leading and instigating the July riots three years ago. He is judged responsible for both the deaths of Citizens and the necessary reprisals against the west.”
Eirik made no reaction to this speech. His posture was bowed and defeated. It was doubtful whether he had even heard the accusations. Confronted with that small, lone figure between two cities, all Vikram could think of was Eirik sat cross-legged in Nils’s room, leaning forward, gesticulating as he spoke, his face intense and serious, half illuminated by the flickering light. Look, it’s not enough to know the history-we’ve got to know how these people think. Why won’t they take us seriously-why won’t they answer Vik’s letters? Because we don’t use their language and we don’t understand their systems. We don’t know who they really are.
The memory was so strong it made him giddy. Vikram could hear Eirik’s voice perfectly; he could see that room, smell the empty wrappers of squid and kelp. His head swam.
Instinct told him the truth. In that moment he knew, with absolute and shocking conviction, that everything that had been said about Eirik was a lie. Because Eirik, who did know the language, had been a threat. He might actually have made people listen. And the City couldn’t let anything threaten the divide, so the City were going to remove him.
Maybe Eirik had helped to feed the riots. Did it matter? It was not a terrorist who had thrown the first fire torch. It was an ordinary westerner like Vikram, who had been up against the border and everything it represented too many times, and in a single moment of frustration had cracked. Anyone could have started the riots.
The officer on the boat drew himself up, concluding his speech.
“For this long and atrocious history of criminal activity, the Osiris Council has condemned Eirik 9968 to death by drowning.”
The kid leaned forward over the boat rail, eyes wide and eager.
Vikram felt a rising panic. It couldn’t happen. Eirik was innocent. Vikram knew he was innocent. Where were Nils and Drake? If he could find them-he had to explain. It was as though he had emerged from hibernation. How could he ever have imagined that Eirik could be involved with the NWO? The idea was insane. What had he been thinking?
There was still time for a miracle. The speaker would reverse his statement. He would declare that the execution had been a warning to the west, and Eirik would be freed. They couldn’t-they couldn’t kill him.
He willed Eirik to look his way. A moment of contact-he needed Eirik to know he was here “Pardon.”
The call came from the other side of the crowd. Quiet at first. Then another voice joined in.
“Pardon.”
The call rose, each voice creating a new bubble of sound. Vikram added his own plea, but his throat was tight and his voice hoarse and barely audible.
“Pardon. Pardon.”
The executioner stepped forward and zipped up the hooded suit, concealing Eirik’s face completely.
No One of the guards opened a door in the tank. They pushed Eirik inside. He fell against the side of the tank and slumped to the floor. The skad banged the door shut. Vikram felt the reverberations shudder all the way down his spine. You didn’t believe him, they said. You didn’t believe him, believe him, believe him…
Wild ideas raced through his head. If he could get to the tank underwater-hold his breath long enough to swim Chatter skittered through the crowd, small sounds of distress, quickly choked, others muttering in anticipation. The people around him were faceless and alien. The man on his right had lifted the kid to sit on his shoulders and someone behind was complaining that their view was blocked. Vikram could not see Nils or Drake anywhere. He was on his own.
Two skadi went to their stations at the pumps. The executioner checked his watch, gave a curt nod. A stifling quiet fell over the crowd.
It was so still that Vikram could hear water guzzling through the bilges. The first load splashed into the tank.
He heard disjointed words behind him.
“I can’t watch-”
“Don’t look. Come here, just don’t look-”
“Dad, the water’s going in-I can see it-”
Behind the glass the water trickled, greenish in colour. It foamed and swirled with the pressure. Strands of floating kelp were sucked inside. A small fish was flung out of the pipe. Eirik lay prone against the tank wall, his hands still manacled.
Stars Help him!
The water gathered around Eirik’s legs. At last he seemed to stir. The shock of the icy water must have jerked him from his state of comatose. He moved his head. He drew his knees to his chest. Every movement he made was infinitely slow.
“It’s going to take ten minutes,” said someone on the next boat.
“Ten? Fifteen at least.”
“No, not fifteen. Not as long as that.”
“I’ll bet you on it.”
A girl began to scream, a long and eerie sound, rising and falling. A skad lifted his rifle and fired a warning shot into the air. The scream stopped abruptly. The crowd rippled with alarm. He saw several people duck, some hunching protectively over their neighbours, but no one shouted; no one dared to protest. It would have to be Vikram. If he spoke up, he could incite the crowd-they must be angry enough to act-surely they must want to stop this-surely they didn’t believe, as Vikram had His body had turned to lead. Some part of his mind knew that this was self-preservation. That there was nothing he could do for Eirik now. He could only give Eirik the dignity of a witness. Someone to remember, to throw salt in Eirik’s name.
The skadi bent and straightened as they worked the pumps, first in time, then in an almost comical seesaw motion. One paused to wipe his brow before he bent to the task again.
“Get on with it!” a westerner shouted.
“Why don’t they just shoot him?” muttered a girl on Vikram’s boat.
The water swilled, a foot high.
The woman beside Vikram gasped and let out a long sigh as she fainted, her weight a sudden heaviness against his own too-light frame. The man lifted the kid off his shoulders to help Vikram support the woman and the kid climbed up onto the boat rail to see better and stared and stared.
The girl who had spoken before knelt to give the woman water. The woman’s eyelids were violet. Her lashes fluttered as she regained consciousness.
“Is she alright?” Vikram’s voice came out ragged. He cleared his throat. The noise sounded as loud as a slap.
“I’ll look after her,” whispered the girl. Her eyes met Vikram’s and for a moment held, whilst a slight frown creased her forehead. He froze, suddenly terrified that she had recognised him. Did he look like an insurgent? Could she ever have seen him with Eirik? He turned stiffly away.
“Dad, look, the water’s up to his neck,” said the kid. “He’s going to die now.”
“They’re killing him.” Vikram couldn’t stop himself. It was important that he said this, that this definition, at least, stayed with the kid, even if his father gave Vikram a peculiar glance and placed his hands protectively on the boy’s shoulders.
Eirik tried to stand but slipped and crashed back. He tried again. His legs could not support the weight of his torso.
“Well you know… if the NWO really had come back… maybe it’s better this way…”
“You think..?”
“The skadi would have crucified us… if you were old enough to remember what happened after Osuwa, you’d know…”
“Please, don’t talk about Osuwa.”
The snippets of conversation drifted from all sides like small feathers. Vikram could no longer tell where they came from.
The water lapped at Eirik’s chin. He got clumsily onto his knees. The movement must be an exertion. Perhaps he was in dreadful pain. The black overalls hid his body; whatever previous tortures had been inflicted upon him were invisible. Vikram imagined the prison guards entering Eirik’s cell, taunting him, with words at first, the jeers giving way to cigarette burns, blows, worse. He winced.
Time was winding down. The two skadi at the pumps seemed to move in slow motion. What kind of man could kill another in this way? Vikram looked around at the crowd. Every one of them was complicit. He was complicit himself, because to do nothing was to aid in the working of the pumps.
Eirik floundered on his knees. His gloved hands slipped at the sides of the tanks. He fumbled to remove the gloves and they came adrift. Vikram saw Eirik’s bare hands slide against the glass, feeling to his left and right, reaching up to the top of the tank, finding this too blocked.
Vikram folded over the rail, his head buried against his clenched hands. He did not care now who saw. He wanted to cry. But his eyes remained obstinately dry, and even if the tears had come he knew that they would be for himself, for his own stupidity and his failure to believe in a friend, as much as for Eirik who in many ways was already dead. The impulse shamed him. He lifted his head; he would make himself watch the end. It was the last thing he could offer Eirik.
He heard the skadi at the pumps grunting with exertion. The water level rose and rose. It reached Eirik’s shoulders. Eirik was trying to undo the hood. His bound hands flapped ineffectually around his head. He didn’t seem able to bend his fingers.
The crowd, sensing a conclusion, were growing voluble. From all sides a chorus lifted, the voices louder now and more aggressive. Shouts and insults, wailing, overlapping. The skadi fired a barrage of warning shots into the water. A girl, perhaps the same girl, started screaming. This time no one stopped her. Vikram’s boat rocked; the crowd was pushing at the barrier, jeering at the skadi. The man beside Vikram pulled his kid roughly from the rail and told him to keep his head down. Skadi boats sped down the crowd barrier, whipping around, racing back again. Spray hid the execution boat momentarily. The boat in front moved sideways, blocking Vikram. He had to crane to see what was happening.
The tank was almost full, and Eirik was fully conscious. His body convulsed like a bird hooked in a net. His feet thrashed the water white. He was floating on his back, head half submerged below the last few inches of air.
That’s enough, he thought numbly. Just stop now. There’s still time, the lesson’s learned. He could live “Oh, but there’s never enough time, Vik, that’s why you have to take it-”
Mikkeli was speaking. No, Mikkeli was dead. Her body limp and sodden on the decking. Frost already forming on her eyelashes.
“You have to take it from someone else!”
Mikkeli’s ghost laughed, that big, slightly dirty laugh. She cocked her head at Eirik and winked, once. Ice splintered in Vikram’s ribs.
“That’s right,” said Eirik. “She’s right. If you steal anything, steal time.”
In the tank, the last inch of air disappeared.
Vikram imagined Eirik’s mouth forced open as his lungs battled for oxygen. Water pouring in. Water like acid, water to burn away words. He had seen this in his dreams, his own body and those of friends, turning over and over. This was just a dream. It must be a dream.
Eirik’s limbs jerked in spasms. His hands and feet pounded the ceiling of the tank. He was asphyxiating.
The crowd fell silent. Vikram heard dry whimpers, or was it laughter? The girl behind him, crouched by her mother. The kid had gone quiet.
A gull wheeled overhead. Its screech trailed across the bleached out sky. Eirik threshed, knocking the glass of the tank with dull thuds.
Vikram could only observe. The waves moved, and the sun shone on the water, but time had finally stopped.
The body stilled.
What floated in a tank of seawater was no longer Eirik. Eirik’s spirit had been torn loose. He was out there with the ghosts now, a half thing condemned to the waves.
The body, face down, rotated half a circle, drifted slowly back again. It bobbed against the tank ceiling. The arms hung loosely down, Eirik’s bare hands indistinct shapes in the subsiding water. There was nothing but silence in the two crowds. The silence pressed on the space between Vikram’s shoulder blades. He hunched over the rail like an old man.
On the barge, a medic stepped forward. Two skadi slid open the ceiling of the tank with a grating noise. Some of the water splashed over and they stepped quickly back, as though it were poisonous.
The medic reached into the tank and lifted Eirik’s arms. He had to tip over the body first, and the movement dislodged more water. The medic rolled up Eirik’s sleeve. Vikram saw him examine a red band around the elbow. He nodded, looked at his watch, and said something to the officer wearing the sunglasses.
The loudspeakers crackled.
“The convict Eirik 9968 is pronounced dead, at oh-eleven hundred hours and thirteen minutes.”
Vikram stared at the body. He felt the steel band that had gripped his chest all day dissolve at last, and with it, the past three years. He was back on the decking, holding Mikkeli’s body. The pain was as sharp and as real as it had been on that day, but this time he knew that it would not disappear. It expanded in his ribs like a lungful of broken glass.
The City had won. They had won at the moment they arrested Eirik. They had won when Mikkeli burst into Vikram’s room, yelling, “Vik, get out, they’ve taken Eirik and we’re next!” He had found it so easy to believe in Eirik’s guilt. Underwater, that belief had manifested as rot, slowly eroding the will to survive-and for what? So that he could watch the New Horizon Movement die with a clear conscience?
Did he know himself at all?
The skadi had not replaced the lid of the tank. Their procedure from this point seemed unclear; they were standing about uncertainly. A seagull landed on the rim of the tank and a skad butted it away with his rifle. The medic had gone below deck.
The show was over. Vikram needed to get out. There were too many people. One by one, the other passengers came into focus, like ghosts emerging from the mist. The waterbus was hemmed in on every side.
“What will they do with the body?” the kid was asking.
Vikram crouched to see if the woman who had fainted was recovering. Some of her colour had returned. Recognising him, she gave a weak smile.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need more water?”
“Thank you-I’m sorry, it was the crowds and so-so horrible-it’s over now?”
“It’s over.”
He wondered what were her reasons for coming today.
There was a scuffle at the front of the crowd. A man had pulled his row boat a little way out, past the barrier of buoys. He was pointing at the tank and yelling. Vikram could make out one word, over and over again. Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!
Seagulls screeched overhead. Their cries merged with the man’sMurderers! Murderers!
Another boat nudged forward. Others were urging the protestor to get back. Now the skadi had seen what was happening. Three of their own boats began powering towards the barrier.
A noise like scraping metal sheets came out of the loudspeakers, before the sound settled into speech.
“All westerners get behind the barrier. Get behind the barrier now.”
“Get back, you idiot,” Vikram muttered.
The skadi arrowed in. A shark-faced prow rammed the rowboat. The protestor clutched the rocking sides of the boat and managed to stay afloat.
“Murderers!” he yelled.
“Get back!” Vikram wasn’t the only one who called out. The shouts converged from every side. It was impossible to know who was saying what, whether they were yelling at the protestor to save himself or at the skadi to retreat.
Still defiant, the protestor raised his arm.
“Mur-”
Vikram saw a parallel movement as the barrel of a rifle took aim at the man’s head.
There was a single shot.
A red fog filled Vikram’s head.
He never knew who made the first move. Maybe it was him after all. Maybe it was Nils or Drake, or someone else in the crowd. He locked his gaze on the speeder where the skad was now lowering his rifle. Vikram had only one intention. He was going to get to that boat. And when he got to it The red fog had him. He took no time to consider the ramifications of his actions. His movements seemed ahead of him as he leapt agilely over the rail of the waterbus, landing in the stern of a smaller rower. It rocked with the impact.
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
“What the fuck-”
Vikram was already gone. Scrambling from boat to boat, he bounded across the unstable carpet. Some tried to stop him. Others joined the push forward. The weight of the crowd was all around him, no longer dormant but a physical, surging force. Gaps of sea widened before his feet. He saw the waves surge as he jumped from boat to boat.
Boats crashed into one another. He was close. There were only three rows between him and the skadi speeder.
He could see the body of the protestor, slumped over the side of the rowboat. He clambered up onto the deck of a waterbus. Over the railings. He hit the deck rolling, vaulted over the other side, dropped onto the abandoned flat of a raft. He could see the skadi faces. He could almost see their eyes.
And then he saw another figure, someone making the exact manoeuvres that he was. Drake. She was headed for the same boat, and a skad had his rifle trained on her lanky figure.
Vikram almost lost his balance using the end of a canoe as a stepping stone. He took a flying leap onto a motor boat.
The skad’s rifle lifted.
Drake saw it. She faltered.
She was one boat ahead of him, on the buoy line between west and skadi. Vikram gathered all of his breath and jumped. He slammed into her. Her body flew sideways. He spun from the boat and plunged into the water.
Explosions boomed above. He opened his eyes underwater. Silvery bubble trails criss-crossed the water where the skadi were shooting freely. Drake’s face was a few metres away. Her arms arrowed as she dove towards him.
A man plunged into the water. His eyes were bared. A red flower bloomed in the water from a leak in his chest.
Stars, what are you doing, get out!
Vikram followed Drake’s lead, diving low, swimming underwater until his lungs were ready to burst.
They were under the boats. The dark was almost total, the occasional slice of light slashing weirdly down. His hands brushed hulls jagged with barnacles, slick with algae. They needed an exit. There was nothing. His lungs burned.
He felt a tug on his ankle. Drake, behind him. She jabbed her hand upwards. He saw the darker shadows of the hulls and understood. They were beneath two small boats, and there was a tiny gap where the sterns almost met. He contracted his body, wedged himself between the two slopes and pushed with his feet. Drake joined him. The space widened, marginally, then enough for her to slither up. He saw her boots exit the water. The boats knocked together once more.
His vision went fuzzy. The water was black.
A hand reached down and pulled his hair. He broke surface and gulped in huge draughts of oxygen. Water trickled from his nostrils. He grasped the sides of the two boats and hauled himself out. He managed to swing his legs free just as the boats collided once more. The crash resounded. His ears were ringing; above surface the noise was mayhem, gunfire, shouts, screams, crashes He saw one boat forced beneath another. A man was crushed to death.
He saw a skad fall backwards with a knife lodged in his throat. Other skadi were pulling masks over their faces, launching canisters into the air. Gas. There was no way of avoiding it.
Drake was beside him. They were lying side by side on one end of a small fishing craft. The other occupants took no notice of them. They were engaged in their own vendetta, pointing and yelling at the skadi. Vikram and Drake exchanged no looks, no words. We’re idiots, Vikram thought. We’re bloody idiots.
He had been turned inside out in a day.
Breathing in chemicals, the gas worked fast. One by one his limbs seized until he lay, immobile except for his eyes.
Drenched, nauseous with the gas, Vikram finally allowed himself to look up.
He had landed up at the other end of the western crowd. Beyond the netting, directly across the square, rose one of the City towers. It was silver and fleeced in greenery. Two floors above the surface was a balcony, and on the balcony, watching, were the elite of Osiris.
He could see the man who had sentenced Eirik to death. Vikram knew who he was. Everyone in the west knew who he was. The man’s name was Feodor Rechnov, Councillor. Head of the first founding family in everything but name. His face was many metres away, disguised and protected by the faint shimmer of a defensive sonar shield. But Vikram knew those features as well as he knew his own.
Two younger men stood next to Feodor: the sons. They were slighter replicas of their father, well-dressed and rigidly postured. The daughter stood between them. Her famous red hair was covered, but her face was as white as salt.
Vikram wondered how Feodor Rechnov would feel if it were one of his own three children floating face down in the tank. Knowing, as every person in Osiris knew, the mechanics of drowning. Knowing that the body would be bloated. That if you pushed down on the chest, white foam would leak from the mouth and nostrils. The face would have swollen just enough to distort a memory that had been, until that moment, familiar as the skin on your own hand.
He wondered what Feodor would feel, unzipping the corpse of his son or his daughter. If he would grieve. If the man was capable of grief.
Sounds swept overhead-a whistle, shrill; the whoosh of a boat throwing up spray. Each separate noise seemed to arc through the air, leaving its echo like a sparkler or a yard of ribbon, so that the sky was painted in sound. Vikram sensed, throbbing distantly, just waiting for the gas’s effect to fade, the scrapes and bruises that caked his body. It was the same sounds, the same aches, the same red fog from three years before.
Time was unravelling. Keli was here. Eirik was here. Everyone was talking at once, past and present and future, a collision of time. With a final effort, Vikram wrenched his eyes back to the balcony.
The Rechnovs were leaving.
For a few precious moments, his head was clear. All we were was a breeze against a cyclone, he thought. The ideals argued and laughed over, the late-night plans laid so optimistically-they had really believed in themselves. He only saw it now, when it was too late. Because without a political platform, without visibility and words, they had nothing. The New Horizon Movement had never stood a chance.
Watching Feodor Rechnov turn away, Vikram felt a current shift inside of himself. A realization, distant but imperative.
This was where it had to stop. On a strange, pale skied autumn day, the City had crossed a line. And Vikram had woken up. Really woken up. The glass shards jostled in his chest, minute needles of memory and of pain. He knew that he would carry them now forever. Eirik was the first but he would not be the last. Everything they had been through, everything they had done-the starving winters, the riots and the border protests, his best friend’s death and Eirik’s execution-all of that was worthless unless they could convince one man to listen.
Then he thought: this is the west. There is no we. So it’s up to me. If I want to change anything, I have to start again. I have to rewrite the rules.
The chemicals in the gas seeped steadily through his veins with every breath he drew. Beside him, Drake lay inert. Dizziness overtook Vikram at last. His eyes closed, and his mind moved quietly away.