The door shut. There was no sound from the other side, or from upstairs. Vikram stayed for a minute, memorizing the patterns of the wood, and those of the girl behind it.
He waited another hour before the first Undersea train of the morning. He had bribed a man to smuggle him over the border by barge, a quarter of the credit from the two weeks work. The man had hidden him in a cupboard- sized compartment, and when they reached the checkpoint, Vikram had heard skadi guards banging up and down the length of the barge and his heart had leapfrogged. It irked him that Adelaide hadn’t asked how he had got to her, hadn’t cared, even if it was better she didn’t know.
The Undersea was dark and virtually deserted. Vikram had earmarked a hiding place in his carriage, but no one checked the train going back west. When he finally reached 614-West it was still dark and he was burning with a low exhilaration. He debated banging on Nils’s door. Nobody liked to be woken before dawn, though, and he hadn’t decided what to tell Nils when he did see him. Out of habit he tried the lift. Its OUT OF ORDER sign had been graffitied long ago. Vikram was tempted to add his own mark: an affirmation of the night’s work, but he had nothing to scratch or spray with.
He ran up the first couple of flights, then slowed, stopping every few floors to catch his breath. After thirty-six floors he felt leaden with tiredness. He fumbled with the key in the lock-still weak-and collapsed onto a stew of rugs and clothes. He pulled everything over him. He expected to sleep instantly, but his brain thwarted him, spinning into action. He replayed each moment of his conversation with Adelaide. Was she lying awake now, or was she sleeping? If she was sleeping, what was she dreaming? Did she have ground-dreams like everyone else?
Vikram’s dream was always the same: a stretch of golden sand. A beach. He walked along it, at first near the surf where it was damp, and then inland, past tufts of vegetation. The vegetation gave way to waving grasses. Where the grasses grew through the sand there were pebbles, smooth and white. In the dream he picked one up, one by one, and dropped them into a bucket that never filled.
Vikram lay awake a little longer. Sounds dulled by memory now crept back to taunt his hope of sleep. An itinerant banging from the floor above. The stamp of footsteps up and down stairs. Shouting. Always a dispute somewhere that could only be resolved when one throat grew too hoarse to continue or a raised fist brought an end. Beneath it, the ever present chatter of a city that had not known unconsciousness for a long time. Osiris articulated itself in waves of vocals, rising, falling, meandering through his subconscious like the disparate moods of the sea.
He was woken by persistent hammering. Dozy with dreams, he stumbled to the door. A flashlight temporarily blinded him, then dispelled the darkness of the room. Behind the torch he made out the faces of Nils and Drake. Drake’s wayward hair was squashed beneath two woollen hats and a hood. She was grinning.
“How d’you fancy collecting an iceberg?”
Vikram stared at them both.
“What time is it?”
“Dunno. ’bout nineteen o’clock?”
“Shit.” He’d slept right through the day. He rubbed his eyes, replaying Drake’s previous words. “Iceberg? You mean?”
“I mean there’s a space on the boat if you want…”
She wiggled the flashlight helpfully. Vikram located the water bucket. It was still a quarter full. He splashed his face, pulled his own coat out of the bedding and slung it over his shoulders. “I’m in.”
Twenty minutes later, they were aboard a motor boat in pursuit of three industrial barges. Above them, the Moon moved in and out of its cloud cover. The sea was calm and dark. Vikram stayed by the rail with Nils, keeping out of the way of the crew. There were six of them including Drake, but no one else he recognized.
“Can you hear it?” Nils whispered.
Vikram listened. Beyond the engine motor, he heard a metallic susurration, like the sound of pooling chains. Ahead of them, high above sea level, a line of green lights stretched to left and right. He nudged Nils and pointed. It had been years since either man had passed the ring-net, but Vikram knew that Nils was thinking the same thing as him, that those were no lights: they were the glowing eyes of the dead.
The net was invisible in the darkness, but the windows of one of its watchtowers shone. The fleet of barges approached. Heavy clanking told Vikram that a curtain of the ring-net was lifting. The barges slid past the watchtower, slipping under the gap in the net. The smaller western boat followed in the swell. As they passed beneath, Nils’s and Drake’s faces were bathed in the green glow from the capping beacons. Vikram held up his hands. His gloves were tipped with the same green. The chains clinked in a tug of wind. Then they were through, the other side of the boundary.
Osiris waters lay behind them.
Vikram felt suddenly hollow. Who knew what had really happened to all those boats that left the city and disappeared? If only they had left a trail, a length of string that could be followed, hand over hand, by those that might wish to go after. Vikram leaned forward, straining his eyes. The Moon had gone behind a cloud.
The boats drove out for twenty minutes before they began to slow. Everyone on board fell silent. There was no noise except the sea, the humming motor, and a dull creaking.
Ahead, the sea turned entirely white.
“Is that…?” Vikram murmured.
“Yeah,” said Drake. “That’s it.”
The phosphorous island stretched away beyond the barges’ searchlights. The boats continued cautiously and came to rest at a point where the ice cut away smoothly, a sloping three metre cliff rising from the waves. Searchlights trained upon it. The air filled with the whirr of gears and engines.
Two platforms extended horizontally from the first of the boats. They were crowded with men and machinery. When the platforms reached the ice field, the workers clambered onto it, unloading their equipment with practised efficiency. Against the ice they looked like busy black insects.
Vikram watched in fascination as the process he had heard explained but never seen began. The crew dragged giant lasers into position. Through the night they would cut the ice sheet into many separate pieces, then tow them inside the ring-net. The freshwater bergs would relieve the load of the desal plants, which guzzled energy.
The lasers began their work, with a noise like metal plates scraping together. A shout went up on Drake’s boat.
“That’s it! That’s our bit!”
Everyone on board ran to the rail. The boat keeled. The deck juddered underfoot as two small harpoons, trailing cables, fired across the water and embedded in the ice.
“Who’s first?” yelled the skipper.
Drake gave Vikram and Nils a harness and a head-torch each. “Go on,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Don’t let go unless you fancy a dunking.”
They exchanged grins. Vikram fastened the strap of the head-torch and switched it on. A pale beam illuminated the rail and the cables. Another member of the crew showed him how to hook his harness onto the cable. Vikram climbed over the rail and pitched forward.
A shove sent him swinging across the gulf. Air rushed at his face; he was flying. The head-torch picked out the wave trenches and the foam-flecked caps. His boots dipped the water. He brought his knees to his chest. The ice loomed. He stuck his feet out in front and landed with a crunch.
Nils’s boots thudded down a second later. Vikram reached over and grabbed his friend’s hand. Holding onto the cables, they clambered up the remainder of the slope, and stopped.
It was as though they had stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The ice was pitted and cracked, sheer blank slates giving way to hillocks and gaping craters. Fifty metres away, the laser beams were working their way across the sheet, a flicker of lightning marking their progress. The noise was phenomenal.
Vikram stamped on the ice. It was rock hard. Beneath the groan of the severing pack, he heard water lapping against its edges. Land must sound like this.
Others had joined them. Drake took a running leap and skidded eight metres before landing on her arse. Vikram whooped. They moved, at first cautiously, then throwing themselves around the ice. Their head-torches made peculiar shadows of the uneven surface and their own figures. They twisted to make even weirder, eldritch shapes. The ice glinted pale blue. The Moon came out from behind a cloud and turned it greenish yellow. It smelled raw and new, of the untouched and the untouchable. It had never held human imprints before.
