He made himself as presentable as he could, washing with cold water from a bucket and pulling on the best clothes he possessed. He used his knife and a sliver of mirror to shave. Brown eyes glanced back at him, a tiny scar above the right. Wariness was their resting expression. Couldn’t change that if he tried. His coat was a shapeless affair that would not impress anybody, but he was damned if he would sacrifice warmth for appearance. In any case, the coat came with Vikram, or Vikram had come with the coat. Somebody once told him it belonged to his father, and it might have done, but it might have belonged to some anonymous figure who had no connection to him at all.
He wound a scarf around his neck and rooted through his bag for gloves. He found only one. It seemed impossible to have lost the other amongst so few belongings, but time was tight and he had to leave without them. On the way out, he noticed again that the lock was weak.
It was a long trek downstairs. The lower lift had failed last month and so far nobody in the skyscraper had managed to lure out an engineer. The stairwells and corridors were busy. People sat smoking on the stairs and lounged in empty door frames, idly reiterating yesterday’s conversations. He smelled the distinctive aroma of manta. Eyes grazed Vikram as he passed. He kept his watch hidden beneath his sleeve. He could have flogged it for several hundred peng or a few City credits, but he loved the watch and he wouldn’t give it up until he was desperate.
Ten floors down, he banged on an even less secure door. There was no response. He banged again, and this time heard an answering curse and someone staggering across the room. The door opened and Nils peered out. His eyes were bleary. A week-long beard shadowed his jaw.
“Vik. What are you doing here? It’s morning.”
“I’m going to the Eye Tower,” Vikram said. “To speak to the Council. The order came through two days ago, remember?”
Nils looked surprised. “I thought you weren’t going to go… I mean, after…”
Neither of them said Eirik’s name.
“I changed my mind,” said Vikram shortly.
“Oh. Okay.”
“You coming?”
Nils yawned. “Think you might be better off on your own.” There was a crash from the floor above. Nils winced and roared, “Shut the fuck up!” He turned back to Vikram, forced a laugh. “Floor twenty-six. I’m moving to twenty-nine, I hear they’ve got a working shower. Anyway, good luck, I suppose. You nervous?”
“Not exactly. What can they do to me?”
“Wouldn’t like to guess. Send you underwater?”
“Tried that already.”
The light-hearted tone fell flat. Nils’s fingers curled around the doorframe.
“Well, let me know how it goes. I’ll catch you later.”
The door shut. Another crash came from upstairs, followed by a yell. Vikram jogged down the remaining twenty-five floors to ocean level. He thought about Nils’s reaction. He wasn’t sure that his friend was entirely happy with Vikram’s decision-he hadn’t said so, not outright, but there had been an ambivalence in his eyes that was unlike Nils.
Outside, the cold punched him like a Tarctic wind. He cinched the belt of his coat tighter; the buckle was broken and it kept slipping. The floating deck that encircled each tower shifted beneath his feet. A man was shouting that his boat had been blocked in, but nobody could find the owner of the vehicle responsible. Squinting in the bright light, Vikram made his way to the east side of the decking, where a vandalized signpost marked the waterbus stop.
The queue jostled around him. As the decking rose and fell on the swells, those waiting kept their balance as one. He found himself looking at other people more carefully than usual. They were all ages and all heights, because the majority of westerners were unemployed, surviving on handouts from the City and their wits. Under hats and hoods the odd Boreal face stood out amongst the southerners, but they were all dressed the same, bulked up with as many layers as they could beg, borrow or otherwise acquire. Could he tell the Council that people had to steal clothes in order to keep warm, or would they assume that everyone in the west was a thief?
A cry went up as the waterbus was sighted. The surge forward knocked him off balance. He suppressed the desire to shove back and used the momentum to inch his way past a mother clutching a child in each hand.
The ticket collector stood wide across the boarding gate. The waterbus pulled in with tantalizing slowness. Vikram saw a girl in a yellow scarf duck under a man’s arm and sidle around an old woman. His heart jumped with the thought that it was Mikkeli, before he remembered, again, that it was impossible. The ticket collector braced himself as he unlocked the barrier.
Vikram pushed a few peng into the ticket collector’s hand and fought his way into a place at the prow. On the landing stage, a squabble broke out among those left behind. As the waterbus angled around the circumference of 221-West, Vikram saw the man who had complained about being blocked in, crouched in his own boat, in the process of setting loose the offending vehicle. He was striking at the chain with a pickaxe.
The waterbus nosed into the main channel of the waterway. Vikram huddled over the rail watching the spit of spray. The western quarter of the city had never been finished, and when he glanced up he saw clumsily made, open bridges connecting building to building. Many of the graffitied towers were ringed by boats, homes to the very poor. On the outskirts, boats lined up like dominoes. Nobody could say for sure what was concealed within the rotting hulls. People went to the shanty-boat towns for drugs or women. They didn’t always come back.
He had to find a way to describe all of those problems. For months, he’d been composing a speech in his head. Now the carefully arranged lines were void. Events had overtaken him. He had to focus on the things that could be changed. He had to ignore what they had done to Eirik.
It was Drake who had told him to start writing again. Gotta have a purpose, Vik. Gotta have something to do. The subject of most of Vikram’s letters, and his primary focus today, was to ask for a winter aid programme. The most important thing he could secure would be repairs and insulation in the worst of the buildings. In winter, cold killed as many people as starvation. The last riots had been sparked by the City holding back food reserves. He would ask for kitchen boats too. And for restoration work to begin in the unremembered quarters.
How would the Council react? Would they deny the situation, pretend it was less severe? He was ready to argue.
He tried to recall Eirik’s advice, so readily available at the time, now distant through time and suppression. Eirik would have known exactly what to say.
At Market Circle, the hub of the western quarter, the ocean was almost invisible under its cover of boat traders and traffic. Vikram ducked as a gull skimmed low overhead. It came to rest atop a fry-boat selling hot squid, where many of the birds gathered, shuffling. Their cries pierced the clamour of human voices-selling, haggling, shrieking-that pursued the waterbus as it barged a way through the congestion.
People carried on. They had no choice.
On the other side of Market Circle, the waterbus began to lose passengers. It chugged past greenhouse towers and a recycling depot. Down a waterway clustered with rusting houseboats was Desalination Plant W-03, around which the decking bobbed quietly, as though nothing had ever happened. Still Vikram imagined he heard the splash, and he kept his eyes forward. They were approaching the border.
By the time the waterbus was in weapon range, only five people remained on board. Nervously, Vikram felt in his pocket for his day pass and the letter detailing his appointment with the Council. His ID had stood up to previous scrutiny, but he could never feel quite safe.
A narrow gap in the border mesh, barely wide enough to squeeze a waterbus through, allowed a clear glimpse of the glittering City. The checkpoint jetty ran out from the base of 774-West. Skadi boots rapped the decking. The skadi cradled their rifles with the loose, easy attachment one might assign to a fifth limb. They laughed and joked amongst themselves, but when their attention went westward, their expressions lapsed into something between inscrutability and a strange taut hunger. Vikram glanced quickly around and saw that the other passengers were trying to look as blank and dull as possible.
“Papers.”
There were two inspecting officers. The first vaulted the waterbus rail and strode across the deck. His coat, heavy and black, swung deliberately free, revealing both a hand pistol and patches of storm-flecked camouflage. He checked the driver’s licence first. The rifle muzzle fell lazily at his side. Vikram was intensely aware of it. When his
