He could see the body of the protestor, slumped over the side of the rowboat. He clambered up onto the deck of a waterbus. Over the railings. He hit the deck rolling, vaulted over the other side, dropped onto the abandoned flat of a raft. He could see the skadi faces. He could almost see their eyes.
And then he saw another figure, someone making the exact manoeuvres that he was. Drake. She was headed for the same boat, and a skad had his rifle trained on her lanky figure.
Vikram almost lost his balance using the end of a canoe as a stepping stone. He took a flying leap onto a motor boat.
The skad’s rifle lifted.
Drake saw it. She faltered.
She was one boat ahead of him, on the buoy line between west and skadi. Vikram gathered all of his breath and jumped. He slammed into her. Her body flew sideways. He spun from the boat and plunged into the water.
Explosions boomed above. He opened his eyes underwater. Silvery bubble trails criss-crossed the water where the skadi were shooting freely. Drake’s face was a few metres away. Her arms arrowed as she dove towards him.
A man plunged into the water. His eyes were bared. A red flower bloomed in the water from a leak in his chest.
Stars, what are you doing, get out!
Vikram followed Drake’s lead, diving low, swimming underwater until his lungs were ready to burst.
They were under the boats. The dark was almost total, the occasional slice of light slashing weirdly down. His hands brushed hulls jagged with barnacles, slick with algae. They needed an exit. There was nothing. His lungs burned.
He felt a tug on his ankle. Drake, behind him. She jabbed her hand upwards. He saw the darker shadows of the hulls and understood. They were beneath two small boats, and there was a tiny gap where the sterns almost met. He contracted his body, wedged himself between the two slopes and pushed with his feet. Drake joined him. The space widened, marginally, then enough for her to slither up. He saw her boots exit the water. The boats knocked together once more.
His vision went fuzzy. The water was black.
A hand reached down and pulled his hair. He broke surface and gulped in huge draughts of oxygen. Water trickled from his nostrils. He grasped the sides of the two boats and hauled himself out. He managed to swing his legs free just as the boats collided once more. The crash resounded. His ears were ringing; above surface the noise was mayhem, gunfire, shouts, screams, crashes—
He saw one boat forced beneath another. A man was crushed to death.
He saw a skad fall backwards with a knife lodged in his throat. Other skadi were pulling masks over their faces, launching canisters into the air. Gas. There was no way of avoiding it.
Drake was beside him. They were lying side by side on one end of a small fishing craft. The other occupants took no notice of them. They were engaged in their own vendetta, pointing and yelling at the skadi. Vikram and Drake exchanged no looks, no words. We’re idiots, Vikram thought. We’re bloody idiots.
He had been turned inside out in a day.
Breathing in chemicals, the gas worked fast. One by one his limbs seized until he lay, immobile except for his eyes.
Drenched, nauseous with the gas, Vikram finally allowed himself to look up.
He had landed up at the other end of the western crowd. Beyond the netting, directly across the square, rose one of the City towers. It was silver and fleeced in greenery. Two floors above the surface was a balcony, and on the balcony, watching, were the elite of Osiris.
He could see the man who had sentenced Eirik to death. Vikram knew who he was. Everyone in the west knew who he was. The man’s name was Feodor Rechnov, Councillor. Head of the first founding family in everything but name. His face was many metres away, disguised and protected by the faint shimmer of a defensive sonar shield. But Vikram knew those features as well as he knew his own.
Two younger men stood next to Feodor: the sons. They were slighter replicas of their father, well-dressed and rigidly postured. The daughter stood between them. Her famous red hair was covered, but her face was as white as salt.
Vikram wondered how Feodor Rechnov would feel if it were one of his own three children floating face down in the tank. Knowing, as every person in Osiris knew, the mechanics of drowning. Knowing that the body would be bloated. That if you pushed down on the chest, white foam would leak from the mouth and nostrils. The face would have swollen just enough to distort a memory that had been, until that moment, familiar as the skin on your own hand.
He wondered what Feodor would feel, unzipping the corpse of his son or his daughter. If he would grieve. If the man was capable of grief.
Sounds swept overhead — a whistle, shrill; the whoosh of a boat throwing up spray. Each separate noise seemed to arc through the air, leaving its echo like a sparkler or a yard of ribbon, so that the sky was painted in sound. Vikram sensed, throbbing distantly, just waiting for the gas’s effect to fade, the scrapes and bruises that caked his body. It was the same sounds, the same aches, the same red fog from three years before.
Time was unravelling. Keli was here. Eirik was here. Everyone was talking at once, past and present and future, a collision of time. With a final effort, Vikram wrenched his eyes back to the balcony.
The Rechnovs were leaving.
For a few precious moments, his head was clear. All we were was a breeze against a cyclone, he thought. The ideals argued and laughed over, the late-night plans laid so optimistically — they had really believed in themselves. He only saw it now, when it was too late. Because without a political platform, without visibility and words, they had nothing. The New Horizon Movement had never stood a chance.
Watching Feodor Rechnov turn away, Vikram felt a current shift inside of himself. A realization, distant but imperative.
This was where it had to stop. On a strange, pale skied autumn day, the City had crossed a line. And Vikram had woken up. Really woken up. The glass shards jostled in his chest, minute needles of memory and of pain. He knew that he would carry them now forever. Eirik was the first but he would not be the last. Everything they had been through, everything they had done — the starving winters, the riots and the border protests, his best friend’s death and Eirik’s execution — all of that was worthless unless they could convince one man to listen.
Then he thought: this is the west. There is no we. So it’s up to me. If I want to change anything, I have to start again. I have to rewrite the rules.
The chemicals in the gas seeped steadily through his veins with every breath he drew. Beside him, Drake lay inert. Dizziness overtook Vikram at last. His eyes closed, and his mind moved quietly away.
3 ¦ ADELAIDE
She had never seen anyone die before. Death was meant to be sudden. The condemned man clawed at the glass. He slipped and tried to get up and fell back down and the water erupted in bubbles as his hands smacked the water.
His panic was infectious. It made the air thick, the sea restless with cloud-capped waves. Overhead, colonies of birds formed dark helices as they swirled, some diving low over the crowd of western boats. Adelaide’s lungs tightened. She knew it was false; she could still breathe. In a matter of minutes that man would never be able to breathe again, and anyway his suffering should not affect her — if she felt anything, it ought to be satisfaction at justice being done. She knew all of this, but she stepped back, prepared then and there to leave.
A shoulder blocked her passage. She was wedged between Dmitri and Feodor, two solid boulders. Her eldest brother’s expression was inscrutable, even bored. On her other side, Feodor wore his usual faint scowl, intended to suggest burdens of responsibility far beyond the public imagination.