He checked the list supplied by the doctors.
“Do you remember Osuwa, Shadiyah?”
She gave him a quick, measured glance.
“Of course I do. I was twelve, I was on the waterbus. I heard the explosion first. Then boats started speeding past. By the time I got to Market Circle everyone knew what had happened.” She sighed. “And that it was only a matter of time before the reprisals. I’m not surprised Mr Argele raves about it, a lot of people went mad after those few weeks.”
“Worse than the last riots?”
Shadiyah leaned against the work surface, her hands wrapped awkwardly around the edge of the bench. “Different. Because it wasn’t just the skadi, and it wasn’t just violence. To give citizens guns, that was a terrible, awful vengeance. The corpses we saw hadn’t just been killed, they were barely people.” There was a brief silence. “I suppose you want to know if I agreed with Osuwa.”
The room seemed a little darker, a little narrower.
“Do you?”
“No, Vik, I don’t condone arbitrary killing. But I won’t deny that there was a part of me, whilst they were hunting us like rats, there was a very large part of me that said they deserved everything they got.”
She straightened, adjusting her headscarf with her usual deft touch.
“They is such an elusive term,” she said.
Vikram found the prescriptions and made a mental note of what they were running low on. After they had delivered the medication, Shadiyah made up two bedrolls in the laundry room whilst Vikram checked the dormitories. In each bunk he made out the hump of a sleeping body. Snores and rattling breath filled the rooms, but tonight everyone was still. Vikram heard Mr Argele mutter a few blurred words in his sleep. He was one of the shelter’s regulars.
They left the children alone to settle in their bedrolls. In the canteen, Vikram reconvened with the doctors. Marete was filling in the record book. He peered over her shoulder.
“You can’t record them as brother and sister.”
“Why not?”
“Population control laws,” said Shadiyah.
“Shit, yes of course.” Marete tore out the page and started again.
“Only one of them is legally entitled to aid,” Vikram reminded her. “We’ve got to be careful. They’ll slash our funding if they know we’re supporting multiple offspring.”
When he left the shelter, the sky was pitch dark with cloud. It felt late, but his watch told him it was only twenty-two thirty. The tarpaulin over the boat was covered in frost. It shimmered like a half-submerged iceberg. He hauled off the tarp and folded it, noticing a man observing him from the window of a tower across the water. The surveillance was unapologetic. He sensed other eyes too, hidden in the darkness of waterways and decking. He knew in that instant that he had become that incalculable thing: an airlift. Something to be watched.
As he turned the ignition key and the boat purred into life, he decided to do something he should have done a long time ago.
The decking around his old tower was thick with boats. He circled until he found a gap to park, secured the boat and because he did not intend to linger, stuffed the tarp into the storage space under the seat. The tower doors parted and a man staggered out, holding his arm and cursing. Two others followed.
“Want to say that again, mate? To my face?”
Vikram slipped past them into the unlit passageways of the building. The shouts and blows of the fight were cut off as the doors slid shut.
Inside, a rancid stench crawled up his nostrils. He tried the lift. There was a clanking sound. He thought at first that it had been fixed, but realized the sound came from another lift much further up. As he began the familiar, gruelling climb, he felt the hierarchy of his senses shifting. He had become too dependent on sight. The smell separated into parts: fish, wet kelp, cigarettes and manta, dirt, mould, old blood, placebo chemicals. Every couple of floors he passed a shadowy form going in the opposite direction, or the backlit tableaux of two people talking in an open doorway. Kids shrieked as they chased one another blind up and down the steps. Vikram moved instinctively, one hand brushing the walls. He could not tell if the bodies he stepped over were catatonic or dead.
Floor thirty-five was dark and quiet. He stepped up to his old door with the key, before he realized that it was ajar.
He pushed the door. It swung open, slowly and noisily. He saw bodies lumped in the gloom, heard the hiss of breath. A figure scrambled to its feet, pale steel in one hand. Cold sliced along his old scar.
“Get out.” The voice was female.
Vikram stood still.
“I said get out,” she repeated. She levelled the knife.
“I don’t mean any harm,” he said. “I used to live here. I left some things.”
He caught a glimpse of white eye, smelt the fear on her. She would not hesitate to sink that knife.
“I never saw you before,” she said. “And if you wake my kids I’ll see no-one else does, either.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. It’s your place now, that’s fine. There’s just one thing I wanted-my salt tin.”
There was a pause. He saw movement in the sleeping forms beyond her and he sensed her dual attention on them and him.
“Weren’t any salt tin when I got here.” The knife shook but she did not drop her wrist.
“It was a silver thing, about the size of a fist.”
“I said it weren’t here. Think I’d lie? Not likely to be angering the dead when I’ve got four mouths to feed, am I? You get out of here now.”
He backed away, hands raised. She pushed the door to. He knew she was waiting on the other side, listening for his departure.
The door did not close properly. He never had repaired the lock. The woman had broken in, or someone else had before her. She was entitled to the room.
Ten floors down there was a glow under Nils’s door. For several minutes Vikram stood in the corridor, uncertain and not sure of the reason for it. Finally he knocked. The door opened and Nils gave a roar of surprise.
“Vik! Wondered when you’d turn up. Come in, come in. Meet Ilona. Ilona, sweetheart, it’s Vikram, I told you about him, remember?”
Nils’s room was a pool of warmth. He had a heater burning, an unusual extravagance. Vikram realized it must be for the benefit of the girl. She was enveloped in one of Nils’s jumpers. A bleached wing of hair fell across her face.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hey,” he said.
Nils hauled him into the room and shut the door by leaning on it. Vikram realized his friend was on the way to being drunk.
“Have a drink, have a drink. We’re celebrating tonight, aren’t we Ilona?”
Ilona did not say anything more, and exactly what they were celebrating was left unclear. Vikram sat on the floor and took the proffered bottle. Greasy papers were balled up in the corner, but the smell of food couldn’t quite mask the stale ash and human reek beneath. He had never noticed those things before. He had a sudden desire to join Nils in his inebriation. He took a draught from the bottle.
“I just went up to the old place.”
Nils gestured to a corner.
“Your stuff’s there. Figured you might not be back for a while so I broke in before anyone else did.”
Vikram looked at the little bundle. His salt tin was there. He felt a flush of guilt.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t be stupid, you’d have done the same for me.”
