self-preservation. That there was nothing he could do for Eirik now. He could only give Eirik the dignity of a witness. Someone to remember, to throw salt in Eirik’s name.
The skadi bent and straightened as they worked the pumps, first in time, then in an almost comical seesaw motion. One paused to wipe his brow before he bent to the task again.
“Get on with it!” a westerner shouted.
“Why don’t they just shoot him?” muttered a girl on Vikram’s boat.
The water swilled, a foot high.
The woman beside Vikram gasped and let out a long sigh as she fainted, her weight a sudden heaviness against his own too-light frame. The man lifted the kid off his shoulders to help Vikram support the woman and the kid climbed up onto the boat rail to see better and stared and stared.
The girl who had spoken before knelt to give the woman water. The woman’s eyelids were violet. Her lashes fluttered as she regained consciousness.
“Is she alright?” Vikram’s voice came out ragged. He cleared his throat. The noise sounded as loud as a slap.
“I’ll look after her,” whispered the girl. Her eyes met Vikram’s and for a moment held, whilst a slight frown creased her forehead. He froze, suddenly terrified that she had recognised him. Did he look like an insurgent? Could she ever have seen him with Eirik? He turned stiffly away.
“Dad, look, the water’s up to his neck,” said the kid. “He’s going to die now.”
“They’re killing him.” Vikram couldn’t stop himself. It was important that he said this, that this definition, at least, stayed with the kid, even if his father gave Vikram a peculiar glance and placed his hands protectively on the boy’s shoulders.
Eirik tried to stand but slipped and crashed back. He tried again. His legs could not support the weight of his torso.
“Well you know… if the NWO really had come back… maybe it’s better this way…”
“You think..?”
“The skadi would have crucified us… if you were old enough to remember what happened after Osuwa, you’d know…”
“Please, don’t talk about Osuwa.”
The snippets of conversation drifted from all sides like small feathers. Vikram could no longer tell where they came from.
The water lapped at Eirik’s chin. He got clumsily onto his knees. The movement must be an exertion. Perhaps he was in dreadful pain. The black overalls hid his body; whatever previous tortures had been inflicted upon him were invisible. Vikram imagined the prison guards entering Eirik’s cell, taunting him, with words at first, the jeers giving way to cigarette burns, blows, worse. He winced.
Time was winding down. The two skadi at the pumps seemed to move in slow motion. What kind of man could kill another in this way? Vikram looked around at the crowd. Every one of them was complicit. He was complicit himself, because to do nothing was to aid in the working of the pumps.
Eirik floundered on his knees. His gloved hands slipped at the sides of the tanks. He fumbled to remove the gloves and they came adrift. Vikram saw Eirik’s bare hands slide against the glass, feeling to his left and right, reaching up to the top of the tank, finding this too blocked.
Vikram folded over the rail, his head buried against his clenched hands. He did not care now who saw. He wanted to cry. But his eyes remained obstinately dry, and even if the tears had come he knew that they would be for himself, for his own stupidity and his failure to believe in a friend, as much as for Eirik who in many ways was already dead. The impulse shamed him. He lifted his head; he would make himself watch the end. It was the last thing he could offer Eirik.
He heard the skadi at the pumps grunting with exertion. The water level rose and rose. It reached Eirik’s shoulders. Eirik was trying to undo the hood. His bound hands flapped ineffectually around his head. He didn’t seem able to bend his fingers.
The crowd, sensing a conclusion, were growing voluble. From all sides a chorus lifted, the voices louder now and more aggressive. Shouts and insults, wailing, overlapping. The skadi fired a barrage of warning shots into the water. A girl, perhaps the same girl, started screaming. This time no one stopped her. Vikram’s boat rocked; the crowd was pushing at the barrier, jeering at the skadi. The man beside Vikram pulled his kid roughly from the rail and told him to keep his head down. Skadi boats sped down the crowd barrier, whipping around, racing back again. Spray hid the execution boat momentarily. The boat in front moved sideways, blocking Vikram. He had to crane to see what was happening.
The tank was almost full, and Eirik was fully conscious. His body convulsed like a bird hooked in a net. His feet thrashed the water white. He was floating on his back, head half submerged below the last few inches of air.
That’s enough, he thought numbly. Just stop now. There’s still time, the lesson’s learned. He could live “Oh, but there’s never enough time, Vik, that’s why you have to take it-”
Mikkeli was speaking. No, Mikkeli was dead. Her body limp and sodden on the decking. Frost already forming on her eyelashes.
“You have to take it from someone else!”
Mikkeli’s ghost laughed, that big, slightly dirty laugh. She cocked her head at Eirik and winked, once. Ice splintered in Vikram’s ribs.
“That’s right,” said Eirik. “She’s right. If you steal anything, steal time.”
In the tank, the last inch of air disappeared.
Vikram imagined Eirik’s mouth forced open as his lungs battled for oxygen. Water pouring in. Water like acid, water to burn away words. He had seen this in his dreams, his own body and those of friends, turning over and over. This was just a dream. It must be a dream.
Eirik’s limbs jerked in spasms. His hands and feet pounded the ceiling of the tank. He was asphyxiating.
The crowd fell silent. Vikram heard dry whimpers, or was it laughter? The girl behind him, crouched by her mother. The kid had gone quiet.
A gull wheeled overhead. Its screech trailed across the bleached out sky. Eirik threshed, knocking the glass of the tank with dull thuds.
Vikram could only observe. The waves moved, and the sun shone on the water, but time had finally stopped.
The body stilled.
What floated in a tank of seawater was no longer Eirik. Eirik’s spirit had been torn loose. He was out there with the ghosts now, a half thing condemned to the waves.
The body, face down, rotated half a circle, drifted slowly back again. It bobbed against the tank ceiling. The arms hung loosely down, Eirik’s bare hands indistinct shapes in the subsiding water. There was nothing but silence in the two crowds. The silence pressed on the space between Vikram’s shoulder blades. He hunched over the rail like an old man.
On the barge, a medic stepped forward. Two skadi slid open the ceiling of the tank with a grating noise. Some of the water splashed over and they stepped quickly back, as though it were poisonous.
The medic reached into the tank and lifted Eirik’s arms. He had to tip over the body first, and the movement dislodged more water. The medic rolled up Eirik’s sleeve. Vikram saw him examine a red band around the elbow. He nodded, looked at his watch, and said something to the officer wearing the sunglasses.
The loudspeakers crackled.
“The convict Eirik 9968 is pronounced dead, at oh-eleven hundred hours and thirteen minutes.”
Vikram stared at the body. He felt the steel band that had gripped his chest all day dissolve at last, and with it, the past three years. He was back on the decking, holding Mikkeli’s body. The pain was as sharp and as real as it had been on that day, but this time he knew that it would not disappear. It expanded in his ribs like a lungful of broken glass.
The City had won. They had won at the moment they arrested Eirik. They had won when Mikkeli burst into Vikram’s room, yelling, “Vik, get out, they’ve taken Eirik and we’re next!” He had found it so easy to believe in Eirik’s guilt. Underwater, that belief had manifested as rot, slowly eroding the will to survive-and for what? So that he could watch the New Horizon Movement die with a clear conscience?
