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.
