The recruiting officer gave Vikram’s and Nils’s papers a fleeting glance.
“Sign here.”
His eyes never left Vikram’s hands as he wrote his latest pseudonym, then passed the list to Nils to do the same. When they had both signed the man pulled the piece of paper back, smearing the ink.
Their new employer typed a few words, presumably their names, into the ancient Neptune chained to the desk. “What’s that, an h? You dogs illiterate or what?”
Both men looked steadfastly at the mouldering wall behind the desk. Strips of plaster were peeling away. The wall might have been a colour once, although what hue it was impossible to tell. Now it looked like a jigsaw of damp clouds. Vikram continued to stare at it, finding shapes, patterns, anything to distract him from the dismal tap-tap-tap into the Neptune. He wondered how many other westerners had passed through here before them, standing on the same worn floor, staring at the same square foot of wall.
The officer stamped two fifteen-day passes to the City and grudgingly handed them over.
“Eight o’clock start. Be early.” He waved them out of the door. “Next!”
“Parasite,” muttered Nils.
At eight o’clock, when Vikram began work, the mist swaddled the world in milky white. From the moment he abseiled from the magnetized scaffolding to the morning’s site, he could see only his own limbs and the indistinct figure of Nils, a few feet away. When the fog lingered longer than it should, Vikram was jolted by fear that he was lost or had been left behind. The city had vanished; there was only this smooth glassy surface, on which he must crawl forever, with nothing but the tap and scrape of his tools for company. Then his nerves tingled. He looked to left or right and felt, rather than saw, another man passing up or down the scraper.
There were twelve of them on the project, all westerners apart from the foreman. They were repairing storm damage in the southern quarter. The cold gnawed through Vikram’s two scarves and his muffler; the scaffolding felt flimsy and unsafe, but it was paid work and the pay was in instant credit. At the end of each day their chips were topped up, no questions asked. He could use the credit to buy City goods, or exchange them for the western peng notes which continued to prove lucrative for the ex-skad profiteers who had invented them. He thought what a joy it was to choose something and buy it without haggling. Maybe he’d get a bag of oranges.
Once, through the window-wall, he caught the curious eyes of a child on the other side. Her fingers were gripped firmly in an adult hand, a father, perhaps, bringing his daughter into the office for a day. When she turned the other way, Vikram saw a red bow in her hair and he thought of the invitation to the Rose Night, discarded in a corner of his room. Westerners with workpasses were allowed to spend their evenings in the City, but few of them did. The one time Vikram had gone to a City bar he’d been stared at all night.
On the third afternoon, six of them were on a break for lunch, wedged in a row on the scaffolding. The men drank hot soup and rubbed their hands to revive the circulation. Vikram and Nils checked each other’s reactions. Vikram held up his hand. Beneath the glove the webbed skin was already cracking; by the end of the week it would be raw.
“How many fingers?”
“Four. No, I’m joking. Three.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Nils.
The rest of the group exchanged few words to start with. Vikram had been on similar projects before, and he knew the location was dangerous not only physically but mentally. Everywhere he looked he was confronted with evidence of the divide. This side of town, skyscrapers were softened with sweeps of vertical garden. Window-walls gleamed. As the shuttle pods streaked through glowing tubes, it was impossible not to imagine where they were going, all those sated stomachs in the surrounding towers, glutting on electricity.
It was only a few days, but already his visit to the marble Chambers seemed like months ago.
The lunch break was almost over. The soup had gone, and someone passed around a flask of steaming coral tea laced with raqua. Vikram took a grateful sip. The drink flooded his throat and warmed the pit of his belly. He handed the flask along to Nils.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” said the man who had brought the tea. There was no direct response to this. It had been threatening to rain for the past three hours. Then another man said he had heard if you could find full-time work in the southern quarter, they would find you a room, or at least put you on the waiting list for one.
Nils snorted. “Sorry, but that’s bullshit. They’ll never give you a room, Stefan.”
“It’s worth a try,” Stefan answered defiantly.
“Anyway, what would it be, work like this? You wouldn’t last a year.”
“One year over here might be better than one year in the west. What with people getting restless and all.”
There were a few surreptitious glances inside, though the foreman could not hear them through the bufferglass. The man with the flask said, “Keep your noise down.”
“Maybe they’re right to worry,” Nils muttered.
“Why, have you heard anything?”
“Tell you what I heard.” Someone else chipped in before Nils could respond. “I heard Juraj is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Murdered. Ripped apart, I heard.”
“You’d hear anything,” Nils retorted. “If Juraj was dead, everyone would know. The rest of his people would be out nailing feet to boats. You heard anything about this Vik?”
“News to me.”
The other man shrugged. “Might want to keep it quiet. Might not want the Rochs to know, not with the manta trade.”
“The Rochs aren’t interested in manta, they’re buying up guns,” said someone else. “Friend of mine had a pistol. Kept it secret for years-well you don’t advertise you’ve got something like that, do you. So a few weeks ago he’s out, has a few too many drinks, and next thing he knows he’s handed it over for a few peng and a thermal jacket. The buyer was a Roch.”
“Well I don’t know about the Rochs or Juraj,” said Nils. “Been a cold spell though. Getting colder.”
Vikram glanced at his friend, but nobody replied, because they all knew what Nils meant. The last riots had been foreshadowed by an unprecedented period of cold weather.
Of course, he thought, whispers like this were always abound. Talk was not a precursor to violence; talk was everywhere. Silence was the sign. Three years ago, it was the silence that had warned Vikram to leave his room carrying a knife. He remembered the sound of quiet. It had rung louder in his ears than thunder.
In the afternoon, Vikram and Nils were stationed on the scaffolding with Stefan and his partner Ilan. Vikram began to talk to Nils about the hearing. He wanted Nils’s opinion. They could only just hear one another over the shree of the wind and the conversation was laborious.
“Probably just asked you there to make them feel good about themselves,” shouted Nils.
“That’s what I figured,” Vikram yelled back. “They’ll report it and it’ll make them look like they’re actually doing something. I told you they took my photo?”
“You’re probably on their newsreel.”
“Stars only knows.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Don’t know. They’ll never let me inside that place again. Honestly, Nils, I’ve never seen anything like it. This huge, stone circle, like an acrobat’s ring, you know? And all of them sitting around-”
“Like circus clowns.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a fire-eating troop this weekend down at Market Circle. Drake reckons she knows one of the guys.”
In spite of the wind noise and the delay in hearing, Vikram felt as though the change in subject had been deliberate. But maybe it was just the wind.
“Drake reckons she knows everyone,” he shouted. His throat was growing hoarse.
“Probably does. You in?”
“Long as I don’t get sling-shot.”
“Yeah, those kids are little shits.”
A scream cut them off abruptly.
“What the hell-”
The cry came again. Vikram leaned over the edge of the scaffolding and saw Stefan dangling, twenty metres below, his mouth gaping in his face. He wasn’t wearing an abseiling harness, only a short line, and he couldn’t winch himself up.
Stefan’s feet scrabbled on the skyscraper wall. Impulse told Vikram to move, but it was impossible to move quickly along the icy structures without risking the same accident and Ilan was closer. Vikram and Nils started to climb anyway, gingerly moving down the scaffolding ladders.
Vikram saw Ilan reaching down to the other man. Their hands were over a metre apart. Ilan began to haul, hand over hand, grunting with the effort. Other men, realizing what had happened, were abseiling back up the tower towards Stefan. Ilan and Stefan’s fingers were almost within grasping distance. Their hands strained toward one another.
Something snapped. Stefan’s scream sounded for a second, horribly clear above the wind. Then he was gone.
Vikram and Nils, still two levels of scaffolding up, stared at each other in horror. All the colour was leached from Nils’s face.
“I cursed him,” whispered Nils.
Vikram felt a cold deeper than anything the wind could contrive take root inside of him. “Nils, don’t-”
“I said he wouldn’t last the year. I did it.”
After that, one of the men kicked up a fuss and said they weren’t being paid enough to risk their necks. The foreman said Stefan hadn’t secured his harness properly and the man who had complained was sacked. Nobody else said a word. They couldn’t afford to. The next day at break, there was a distance between Nils and Vikram and the rest of the workers. No more coral tea was passed around, only darting looks of fear. Vikram told himself Nils’s words were simply that: words, but guilt had recomposed his friend’s features and Vikram was contaminated by it. They never mentioned Stefan again.
The following evening, keen to drink and to forget, they shared a bottle of raqua and talked deep into the night. They discussed Drake’s new job on the ice-boat, the girl Nils had decided to stop seeing, possible work gigs, the unpredictable mood of the west. They mused over the things they wanted. Nils’s ambition was to own a bathroom. It was going to be lime green with bronze taps and a walk-in shower. And a spa, Nils said, relishing this prospect as he held in a lungful of cigarette smoke. And a mosaic ceiling, he added, exhaling. With a tiger in it.
“I just want somewhere with heating that works,” said Vikram. He was leaning against one wall of Nils’s room, which like his was little more than a nest of things to keep warm with. Boots kicked off, blankets at his back, his three pairs of socks were steadily thawing. “Think of walking out of the cold into a blaze of warmth. Imagine if you could have a fire.”
“You’d never leave,” said Nils. “How many rooms would you have?”
“Three would be good.”
Nils nodded. “Room for a bed, room for a bath, somewhere to eat. Nice.”
Already, Vikram could see Nils creating such an apartment, furnishing it with objects and colours. Vikram wished he had his friend’s certainty, the power to envisage the exact thing that he desired. But when he tried to imagine his own version, all he saw was the shadowy forms of unused furniture: a bed never slept in, cupboards with empty shelves. He changed the subject.
“Do you remember the time Keli went over the border with a fake pass?”
Nils roared with laughter, his blue eyes almost disappearing into their crinkles.
“Said she’d been in a shuttle line.”
A deck of playing cards littered the space between them. Vikram gathered them together. “I don’t believe her, do you?”
“Not a chance.”
“Bet she tried to talk her way through, though.”
“Well, that’s Keli for you. Never gives up beating a dead fish.”
They always talked about her like this, as if she was still alive. It was respectful. Vikram passed the pack of cards from hand to hand. Something occurred to him.
“What do they do with their dead in the City?”
“I think they have special bags. Pump them full of air so they float, and send them out to sea and then they burn.”
“I heard there’s a tower where they burn them. It’s called a crematorium.”
Nils looked dubious. “How can they join the ghosts if they burn under a roof?”
“Maybe they don’t become ghosts. Maybe it’s just people from our side.”
They both fell silent. Vikram thought of Stefan, and wondered if he had been given the burial rites, or if he had been sent to a crematorium, or if they’d found his body at all. He glanced at his friend and saw the shadow of guilt there, and felt guilty himself for leading Nils into this macabre contemplation. He tried to think of a way to change the subject. But it was too late. The larger shadow was already in the room. Eirik. Eirik’s body. What the skadi had done with it. What they hadn’t done with it.
When Nils spoke, his voice was quiet. “I saw you and Drake. We agreed we wouldn’t act.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“But when I saw you, I thought maybe you were right. We had to do something.”
“No, we didn’t. It was stupid.”
“It was too late for me then. I was too far back.”
“Good, or you’d be dead like me and Drake nearly were.”
“Then the gas got me.”
Vikram thought once more of the invitation. Perhaps if he went to the party, Adelaide Mystik would agree to help, and neither he nor Nils would have to rely on weak harnesses, and the skadi would stop using gas, and Nils could get his lime green bathroom.
The raqua must really be taking effect.
Hammering on the partition next door jerked them both awake. No one replied. More hammering. There was a brief quiet, then the sound of repeated blows as a door was kicked in. A woman screamed.
Vikram and Nils were on their feet, both tensed, each of them with a hand to their knives. Nils put his finger to his lips. Through the thin walls they heard a man shouting and the woman pleading.
“Who lives there?” Vikram’s question was soundless.
“Still Ari,” Nils mouthed back. “She’s got that kid. Her man walked out weeks ago. He was bad news.”
They heard the child crying, Ari trying to comfort it, then yelling at the intruder. The yells ceased abruptly.
They ran out into the corridor. Other people were gathered there, shapeless figures in the gloom. Eyes peered from behind doors pushed ajar. The door next to Nils’s had been kicked closed. Vikram glanced at his friend. From inside he recognised the bangs and crashes of systematic destruction. He stepped towards the door.
“Don’t-” said someone.
“What?”
“It’s one of Juraj’s men. We don’t want trouble round here.”
“I don’t care who it is,” said Nils. “That’s my fucking neighbour.”
Vikram shouldered the door. It collapsed immediately, swinging open on one hinge. Inside, the intruder had Ari by the hair. The child cringed against the boarded window-wall.
The intruder barely glanced at Vikram.
“Get out.”
“Leave her alone.”
“She owes Juraj. This isn’t your business.”
“The man who used to live here owes Juraj.” Nils spoke from behind Vikram. “He cleared out six weeks ago. She doesn’t have what you want.”
“Makes no difference to Juraj,” said the man. The knuckles were white where he gripped the woman’s hair. His face was obscured by greasy tangles. Vikram couldn’t read the man’s eyes but he saw the outline of a knife at his belt.
“I heard Juraj was dead,” he said evenly. The man stiffened.
“I guess you heard wrong.”
Vikram’s hand went to his own hip.
“Look, there’s no need for this to get ugly.”
The man did turn now, assessing Vikram, seeing Nils poised behind him. He gave the woman a last shove against the wall and walked out, kicking the broken door viciously behind him.
Vikram looked around. The room was in chaos. The child watched him with mute, swollen eyes from behind a thick dark fringe. Tear trails had made streaks in a dirty face.
Nils was helping Ari to her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her neck where her head had hit the wall.
“You’re hurt,” said Nils.
Ari pressed her fingers gingerly to the back of her head, and then her face. A bruise was coming up on her temple. “I’ve had worse,” she said.
Vikram set a table upright. “We’ll give you a hand with this.”
“I’m alright. Really.” As they lingered, unsure, she added, “I just want to sort this out. Please, leave me be.”
On the way out Nils pulled the door back into its frame. There were low mutterings from the spectators.
“Think you should stay at mine for a few days?” Vikram asked.
“What’s the point? If anyone bothers coming back, it’ll take them all of two seconds to find out where you live.”
“Alright. Keep an eye out though.” Back in Nils’s partition, the cards were still on the floor in a neat brick. Through the wall they could hear Ari rearranging the room, dragging things into place.
“What do you want to play?” Nils asked eventually.
“Start you with a hand of piranha.”
Nils scooted over the pack. “Juraj and the rest are getting out of hand. Soon they’ll be trying to impose tariffs on every quarter in the west.”
“If he is alive. More likely than not it’s his underlings cashing in before the news is out.”
“Makes no difference if he’s dead or not. There’ll be someone else in his place within the week.”
“Won’t stop with the gangs though. We’ll all get caught up in it.” He paused. “What was her boyfriend running?”
“Soft stuff, soap and sugar, at least publicly. But judging by the argument before she kicked him out, that was a cover. Sounded like he was dealing in weapons.”
“Through the skadi?”
“How else? The bastards aren’t incorruptible.”
Vikram shuffled, distributed, reshuffled. As game followed game, the inanimate faces of the cards took on strange personalities. The Jack of Spades fell into Vikram’s hand three times until he began to see its presence as an omen. Signs and portents were everywhere in this city. Some people said the sea itself was a judgement. That the city was cursed for its sins, past and present. And it was easy, when the lower levels were flooded for the fourth time in a month and children drowned in their own beds-it was easy, he thought, to wring your hands and blame the heavens, because nobody else was there to listen to your woes.
“Your deal,” said Nils.
“Yeah. Sorry.” He shuffled with a snap and cut the deck.
Now there was shouting from upstairs. Human clamour sounded loud to Vikram now; it used to be nothing to his ears. Naala’s boat, where he’d grown up, was both a refuge and a morgue. The first winter he could remember, three kids had gone to sleep and in the night they’d died. The others had woken to find them, curled up like shells, a greyish tinge to their hardened skins. After that he was afraid to go to sleep.
He remembered the first night he had spent in a building, feeling sick with stagnancy and wide awake. Through the night he heard the breathing of the other three more distinctly than ever before. Nils’s smokers’ rasp. Mik’s gurgles. Drake’s long clear inhalations.
Mikkeli never said what stunt she had pulled to get the room, but Vikram suspected it had to do with the packages she sometimes delivered for a man named Maak. She collected the packages from the shanty towns. She took them to locations whose owners never had names, only yellowed eyes and mouths that liked to argue over previously negotiated bargains. Mikkeli didn’t like Vikram coming along. He understood why the first time he saw a man pull a knife on her.
He had a feeling, looking back now, that Mikkeli’s packages had probably contained weapons too.
It was shortly after that Vikram began his stints on the illegal fishing boats. Decisions and answers came easily then. He realized, as time went on, that things had degrees. Degrees of hurt and degrees of shame.
The Jack of Spades was in his hand. It was his turn. He had no idea how long he had been lost in contemplation, but Nils said nothing and Vikram suspected his friend was similarly absent tonight. You make your own luck, he thought. He played the Jack. It was a reckless move. He lost the game.
The bottle of raqua was almost dry, and they gathered up the cards for the night. Then, because it was late and he was a little drunk, Vikram asked, “You ever think about getting out of here, Nils?”
“Out of where? Six-fourteen? “Course I do.”
“I meant out of Osiris.”
It was a question each of them had posed to the other, a number of times, over the years. The sea got inside your head. Its currents pulled you, this way and that way. That was why you had to keep people around you, at least one-to act as ballast when the tide got too strong. Nils glanced at him. His forehead creased.
“Now that is crazy talk. You want to start fishing again? Not all those boats come back. Dangerous business, fishing.”
“Maybe they don’t go far enough.”
“They’re looking for fish, Vik. Anyone who went looking for land got eaten by sharks or drowned. Nothing out there to find.”
“They might’ve ended up on land, for all we know. What if it’s out there, what if it’s there to find… just waiting for us. Waiting for us to be brave enough.”
“And what if it is? What do you think you’d find? Rocks? Sand? You can’t eat sand. Can’t eat wind, either.”
“But you’d know. You’d know.”
He had a vision of wind blowing across an empty plateau. Not a creature in sight, just desiccated rock stretching on and on. Why was it so alluring?
“Wouldn’t you like to see the land your folks came from?” he asked.
“Vik. I know what it looks like. Everyone knows that whatever land is left, it’s toxic. Fire. Corpses. Plague and insects, man. Hell on Earth.”
Vikram nodded. He knew, but sometimes he couldn’t believe it.
Nils reached across and gave his arm a friendly shake.
“You’re drunk.”
Vikram couldn’t deny it. His limbs felt like cotton wool. Neither he nor Nils could afford to build up a tolerance to alcohol. Vikram reached into his pocket and pulled out the invitation.
“What’s that?” Nils asked. Vikram passed him the card. The Rose Night was two days away, he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.
Nils looked at the card. He grinned.
“Where did you get this?”
“Linus Rechnov.”
“That guy you followed?”
“He’s Adelaide Mystik’s brother, isn’t he. Well, estranged brother. The other one’s most likely dead, if you believe what the krill say.”
“The twin was a nutter. Family probably did away with him. Why would Adelaide Mystik’s brother give you an invitation to some random party?”
“He said I needed a patron.”
Spoken out loud, it sounded even sillier than it had in Vikram’s head. Nils looked suitably dubious.
“It was you that followed him, right? So you caught him unawares. He probably thought you were out to assassinate him. He didn’t know what to do, so he’s palmed you off on his sister.”
Vikram shook his head. “No. It wasn’t like that. He’s-” He sought for a way to describe Linus Rechnov, but suitable words eluded him. “He’s too smart,” he concluded lamely.
“Smart? He’s a Citizen. Defective at birth.”
“Fine. So what if I go? And what if it’s a trick? Or a weird joke, I don’t know. At the time I thought he sounded genuine, but now…”
“No, you’re right. Citizens have reasons for everything. Still.” Nils turned the card over in his hands. He scratched the watermark with one nail. “It’s one hell of an opportunity.”
“To get myself chucked in jail?”
“More to spy,” said Nils. “Maybe this Linus guy, whether he realizes it or not, has a point. If we can’t beat them with guns and letters don’t get through, try something else. Try infiltration.”
“I’m not sure that’s what he meant either,” said Vikram.
“What does it matter? Go along, have a laugh. Eirik would love it.” Nils fell silent for a moment, but quickly recovered. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get to meet the mad bad Adelaide herself. Well worth a spell in jail.”
Vikram raised his eyebrows. Nils shrugged.
“Worth a day in jail?”
“Clearly you’ve never been underwater,” Vikram said dryly. Nils said nothing in response. He could not. The cell, with its green light and clogged porthole, was one memory they did not share. Time in a cell had made Vikram calm, dangerously calm. He had beaten down his anger so successfully that it had become an alien thing to him, unknown, and now unpredictable.
As the last few weeks had demonstrated. Perhaps, he thought, it was a warning. That for every hurdle put before him, there would always be a greater one behind it. At that moment, he knew that he’d always intended to go to Adelaide Mystik’s party.