left or right and felt, rather than saw, another man passing up or down the scraper.
There were twelve of them on the project, all westerners apart from the foreman. They were repairing storm damage in the southern quarter. The cold gnawed through Vikram’s two scarves and his muffler; the scaffolding felt flimsy and unsafe, but it was paid work and the pay was in instant credit. At the end of each day their chips were topped up, no questions asked. He could use the credit to buy City goods, or exchange them for the western peng notes which continued to prove lucrative for the ex-skad profiteers who had invented them. He thought what a joy it was to choose something and buy it without haggling. Maybe he’d get a bag of oranges.
Once, through the window-wall, he caught the curious eyes of a child on the other side. Her fingers were gripped firmly in an adult hand, a father, perhaps, bringing his daughter into the office for a day. When she turned the other way, Vikram saw a red bow in her hair and he thought of the invitation to the Rose Night, discarded in a corner of his room. Westerners with workpasses were allowed to spend their evenings in the City, but few of them did. The one time Vikram had gone to a City bar he’d been stared at all night.
On the third afternoon, six of them were on a break for lunch, wedged in a row on the scaffolding. The men drank hot soup and rubbed their hands to revive the circulation. Vikram and Nils checked each other’s reactions. Vikram held up his hand. Beneath the glove the webbed skin was already cracking; by the end of the week it would be raw.
“How many fingers?”
“Four. No, I’m joking. Three.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Nils.
The rest of the group exchanged few words to start with. Vikram had been on similar projects before, and he knew the location was dangerous not only physically but mentally. Everywhere he looked he was confronted with evidence of the divide. This side of town, skyscrapers were softened with sweeps of vertical garden. Window-walls gleamed. As the shuttle pods streaked through glowing tubes, it was impossible not to imagine where they were going, all those sated stomachs in the surrounding towers, glutting on electricity.
It was only a few days, but already his visit to the marble Chambers seemed like months ago.
The lunch break was almost over. The soup had gone, and someone passed around a flask of steaming coral tea laced with raqua. Vikram took a grateful sip. The drink flooded his throat and warmed the pit of his belly. He handed the flask along to Nils.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” said the man who had brought the tea. There was no direct response to this. It had been threatening to rain for the past three hours. Then another man said he had heard if you could find full-time work in the southern quarter, they would find you a room, or at least put you on the waiting list for one.
Nils snorted. “Sorry, but that’s bullshit. They’ll never give you a room, Stefan.”
“It’s worth a try,” Stefan answered defiantly.
“Anyway, what would it be, work like this? You wouldn’t last a year.”
“One year over here might be better than one year in the west. What with people getting restless and all.”
There were a few surreptitious glances inside, though the foreman could not hear them through the bufferglass. The man with the flask said, “Keep your noise down.”
“Maybe they’re right to worry,” Nils muttered.
“Why, have you heard anything?”
“Tell you what I heard.” Someone else chipped in before Nils could respond. “I heard Juraj is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Murdered. Ripped apart, I heard.”
“You’d hear anything,” Nils retorted. “If Juraj was dead, everyone would know. The rest of his people would be out nailing feet to boats. You heard anything about this Vik?”
“News to me.”
The other man shrugged. “Might want to keep it quiet. Might not want the Rochs to know, not with the manta trade.”
“The Rochs aren’t interested in manta, they’re buying up guns,” said someone else. “Friend of mine had a pistol. Kept it secret for years-well you don’t advertise you’ve got something like that, do you. So a few weeks ago he’s out, has a few too many drinks, and next thing he knows he’s handed it over for a few peng and a thermal jacket. The buyer was a Roch.”
“Well I don’t know about the Rochs or Juraj,” said Nils. “Been a cold spell though. Getting colder.”
Vikram glanced at his friend, but nobody replied, because they all knew what Nils meant. The last riots had been foreshadowed by an unprecedented period of cold weather.
Of course, he thought, whispers like this were always abound. Talk was not a precursor to violence; talk was everywhere. Silence was the sign. Three years ago, it was the silence that had warned Vikram to leave his room carrying a knife. He remembered the sound of quiet. It had rung louder in his ears than thunder.
In the afternoon, Vikram and Nils were stationed on the scaffolding with Stefan and his partner Ilan. Vikram began to talk to Nils about the hearing. He wanted Nils’s opinion. They could only just hear one another over the shree of the wind and the conversation was laborious.
“Probably just asked you there to make them feel good about themselves,” shouted Nils.
“That’s what I figured,” Vikram yelled back. “They’ll report it and it’ll make them look like they’re actually doing something. I told you they took my photo?”
“You’re probably on their newsreel.”
“Stars only knows.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Don’t know. They’ll never let me inside that place again. Honestly, Nils, I’ve never seen anything like it. This huge, stone circle, like an acrobat’s ring, you know? And all of them sitting around-”
“Like circus clowns.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a fire-eating troop this weekend down at Market Circle. Drake reckons she knows one of the guys.”
In spite of the wind noise and the delay in hearing, Vikram felt as though the change in subject had been deliberate. But maybe it was just the wind.
“Drake reckons she knows everyone,” he shouted. His throat was growing hoarse.
“Probably does. You in?”
“Long as I don’t get sling-shot.”
“Yeah, those kids are little shits.”
A scream cut them off abruptly.
“What the hell-”
The cry came again. Vikram leaned over the edge of the scaffolding and saw Stefan dangling, twenty metres below, his mouth gaping in his face. He wasn’t wearing an abseiling harness, only a short line, and he couldn’t winch himself up.
Stefan’s feet scrabbled on the skyscraper wall. Impulse told Vikram to move, but it was impossible to move quickly along the icy structures without risking the same accident and Ilan was closer. Vikram and Nils started to climb anyway, gingerly moving down the scaffolding ladders.
Vikram saw Ilan reaching down to the other man. Their hands were over a metre apart. Ilan began to haul, hand over hand, grunting with the effort. Other men, realizing what had happened, were abseiling back up the tower towards Stefan. Ilan and Stefan’s fingers were almost within grasping distance. Their hands strained toward one another.
Something snapped. Stefan’s scream sounded for a second, horribly clear above the wind. Then he was gone.
Vikram and Nils, still two levels of scaffolding up, stared at each other in horror. All the colour was leached from Nils’s face.
“I cursed him,” whispered Nils.
Vikram felt a cold deeper than anything the wind could contrive take root inside of him. “Nils, don’t-”
“I said he wouldn’t last the year. I did it.”
