“Maybe they’ll cancel it,” said the woman next to Vikram.
He looked at her properly for the first time. She was old, at least fifty, and wheezing in the cold air. She probably had tuberculosis. He remembered Mikkeli’s lilting voice- people don’t get sick in the City, Vik. He wanted to ask the woman her name, but could not trust himself to know even this tiny piece of personal information.
“It’s just an act,” he said-whether to convince himself or the woman he did not know.
The crowd murmured impatiently. Where was the condemned man?
Vikram had not seen Eirik since before the riots. Even if he had wanted to, prisoners were allowed no visitors. Underwater, the information that Vikram overheard came in drips and leaks. A whisper, across cells, that Eirik had confessed. Months later, in the breakfast line, rumours of the tribunal.
He hadn’t been sure about Eirik at first. It had always been the four of them: Vikram and Mikkeli, Nils and Drake. Mikkeli, as the oldest, was the leader. None of them had family; they had grown up on the boat and later they lived together in a single room. They squabbled and got into fights, they tried and sometimes succeeded in finding work and eventually, when their circumstances could no longer be viewed entirely as a joke, they had talked, talked seriously, and they had founded the New Horizon Movement. Their ideas were popular. Others joined. The talks grew to meetings of fifteen or twenty people, but they were always the core.
One night, Mikkeli brought Eirik back to talk to them. Vikram remembered Eirik walking into their favoured bar for the first time, tossing his coat onto the table, drawing up an empty keg.
They had been in the middle of a heated discussion. When Eirik sat down, they all stopped talking. The silence was expectant.
“Well,” Eirik said. And looked at them all. A canny, knowing look, but somehow gleeful, as though he was pleased with life and what it offered, and even how it found him. “Well.”
He remembered Mikkeli, sidling forward, a shyness about her. Vikram had never seen her like that before.
“This is Eirik,” she announced. “He wants to hear about Horizon.”
Vikram was suspicious. He could tell that Nils and Drake felt the same way, sensed them bristling beside him.
“Show him the letters, Vik,” said Mikkeli. She spoke to Eirik. “Every week we send a letter to the Council. Vik does the writing for us. He’s the smart one.”
Vikram was embarrassed.
“He doesn’t want to see those, Keli.”
“Oh go on.”
“That’s our business,” Nils interjected. “We don’t know who this guy is. No offence, Eirik.”
Eirik smiled. “None taken. How about we all get a drink instead?”
Later, Eirik took Vikram aside.
“I didn’t want to make you feel awkward, Vikram, but I’d be interested to see what Horizon sends to the Council. There’s too much talk of violence out there. It’s understandable but it won’t work. We need to use our heads.”
“He’s a spy,” said Nils, when Mikkeli and Eirik had left and Vikram relayed what had been said to the others.
“He’s almost forty.” Drake emptied the dregs of a tankard into her mouth.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Old, but no grey hair,” she said simply. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“Clearly Keli does,” said Nils sourly.
“I’m not sure he is a spy.” Vikram was thoughtful.
“Must be.”
“But he looks like us.”
Eirik had what they all had-the unmistakeable taint of the west. It wasn’t just the general shabbiness and the permanent smell of salt from water travel and poor diet. It was something in the eyes. Part wariness, part resignation; a continual expectation of the worst, as though by acknowledging, almost welcoming the worst of their situation, they could somehow ward off the reality. According to the only survey ever carried out in the west, by the Colnat Initiative, life expectancy in the west was an average of forty-three. The years before, filled with sickness and unemployment, would become increasingly harsh. They all carried this knowledge on their faces, and the only time Vikram actually noticed it was when he saw someone who did not look like that. Like the skadi.
Eirik came back. One by one he won them over. Part of the lure was undoubtedly that Eirik knew how to talk.
“You people are exactly who I’ve been looking for,” he said.
When Vikram showed him the transcripts of their letters, Eirik was visibly excited.
“These are great ideas! Joint fishing missions, that’ll appeal to the anti-Nucleites, they’re desperate to get further out of the city. And if you rephrased a few things-you don’t mind me making suggestions? Like here, you talk about reducing security at checkpoints-what you want to say is border reconciliation. It’s all about the jargon.”
Vikram wrote it down.
“How do you know this stuff? Who taught you?”
“You learn to pick things up. Odd jobs in the City-I always scan their newsfeed. Listen to them talking. Know your enemy, Vikram. It’s the oldest rule in the universe.”
Then he began asking questions. So now we know what we want-how are we going to get it? It was we, right from the start. That had made them feel good. And it was a valid question, to which none of them yet had an answer. This was what they sat around arguing about for nights on end. They had been happy enough doing that for a while, with Vikram composing the letters, and occasional suggestions that they might organise a protest. Mikkeli had come up with a series of slogans. But after Eirik showed up they started noticing other things-like the fact that one electric bulb did not produce adequate light even in the summer, and that no amount of well-written words could assuage the fact that none of them had had a decent meal in weeks.
“We need to engage with the early justice groups,” said Eirik. “Get right back to the start. The Western Repatriation Movement, they were good people-you know about them? They sent the first official refugee delegate to the Council, seven years after the Great Storms and the first immigrants arrived. The Council made promises, of course. The western quarter’s only temporary, they said. Give us eighteen months to restructure the city, we’ll find you somewhere decent to live. Eighteen months go by, the delegates return, they warn the Council that people are getting angry, and the Council places them under house arrest-idiotic move but they were probably scared shitless. That’s what led to the rise of the New Osiris Affiliation, and they led to the second wave of riots, and what happened at the Greenhouse, and finally, thirty-nine years ago, to the border. That border’s as old as I am. We’ve grown up together.”
He sat back and held their eyes, one by one, steadily.
“Everything,” he said. “Has a root.”
Eirik’s voice was thoughtful and inevitable like a tide. They could listen to him for hours. It seemed that Mikkeli’s adulation had proved well founded. They had followed her and she had needed someone to believe in as much as the rest of them. It was only Eirik himself who seemed to wander, fleet as foam, unhindered by such petty concerns as doubt.
As the weeks passed, Vikram noticed shifts in attitude. At first it was small things. There was less attention to the letters. Instead of helping him dictate, the others might talk about an incident at the border. A man who had been detained at the checkpoint for forty-eight hours without reason. A woman, beaten up, who had lost an eye. Phrases crept into conversation: if only I’d been there. Vikram found himself only too happy to join in.
The lack of response to the Council missives began to feel like a personal insult. Did they even read what was sent? Was there any point in writing at all?
He started revisiting old childhood haunts, by the border. The towers on the other side seemed brighter and more blinding than ever and his hands would itch with inactivity.
He clearly remembered turning to Nils one day and saying, “If something happened this winter-if people decided to riot-what would you do?”
Nils said without a flicker of hesitation, “I’d kill as many of those skadi bastards as I could.”
“Not Citizens though.”
“Course not Citizens. What d’you take me for?”
