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?”
And then came the morning of strange quiet, the day the riots began. The day that everything fell apart and the skadi came for Eirik. The City published findings that they said proved Eirik was NWO. He’d gone from group to group, they said, winning trust, gaining followers. Recruiting. They gave him a number.
For Eirik, after three years in a seabed cell, death might be a relief. He wondered if Mikkeli’s ghost had lingered with the other man whilst he was underwater, the way she had with Vikram, presenting him with her lifeless body over and over again, the tattered yellow hood that fell back from her face drenched to ochre. Did Eirik even know she was dead?
The second hand edged past eleven o’clock. Something was happening. Birds, alert to the change in mood, began to swirl overhead. A curious gull dove low over the boats. Of course the birds would come today.
The hatch on the execution boat had opened. A skadi officer emerged. He came to stand at the rail, hands clasped behind him. Wide sunglasses wrapped around his head caught the sun as he turned this way and that.
The officer barked an order. Eirik was led out from below deck. He must have been kept there all along, in darkness. Vikram strained his eyes, desperate for a glimpse of Eirik’s face, but it was concealed behind a dark hood, part of a prisoner’s suit.
A frisson went through the crowd.
“That’s him… that’s Eirik 9968…”
Eirik seemed to move as one in a dream. His hands were manacled in front of him. The man leading him gave tiny jerks upon the chains, and Vikram could hear their clank beneath the ever present rush of the ocean and the whispers of the audience.
The executioner checked the tank. He rapped the glass on each side and on the roof. Two skadi on either side of Eirik held his arms. They turned him towards the western crowd, but his head flopped on his chest, and his face remained in shadow.
He’s drugged, Vikram realized. He felt anger stirring at their cowardice, mixed with a horrible relief that Eirik would barely be conscious.
The air keened as a dozen loudspeakers were switched on. The wheezing woman next to Vikram covered her ears. The man to his right squeezed his boy’s shoulders. Vikram wanted to wrench the kid away and cover up his eyes. In the next breath he thought no, he should see this. He should know what the Citizens do to us.
A voice began to speak. The tone was clipped and robotic.
“The man known as Eirik 9968 has been sentenced for his actions against the city state of Osiris. He is found guilty of the following crimes: denouncing the Osiris Council, organising collective violence against the City, inciting aggressive action in westerners, acts of personal terrorism, assault and mass murder. In particular he is convicted for his role in reviving the illegal New Western Osiris Front, the organisation responsible for the atrocities committed at Oswua University in the year twenty-three eighty-eight, and for leading and instigating the July riots three years ago. He is judged responsible for both the deaths of Citizens and the necessary reprisals against the west.”
Eirik made no reaction to this speech. His posture was bowed and defeated. It was doubtful whether he had even heard the accusations. Confronted with that small, lone figure between two cities, all Vikram could think of was Eirik sat cross-legged in Nils’s room, leaning forward, gesticulating as he spoke, his face intense and serious, half illuminated by the flickering light. Look, it’s not enough to know the history — we’ve got to know how these people think. Why won’t they take us seriously — why won’t they answer Vik’s letters? Because we don’t use their language and we don’t understand their systems. We don’t know who they really are.
The memory was so strong it made him giddy. Vikram could hear Eirik’s voice perfectly; he could see that room, smell the empty wrappers of squid and kelp. His head swam.
Instinct told him the truth. In that moment he knew, with absolute and shocking conviction, that everything that had been said about Eirik was a lie. Because Eirik, who did know the language, had been a threat. He might actually have made people listen. And the City couldn’t let anything threaten the divide, so the City were going to remove him.
Maybe Eirik had helped to feed the riots. Did it matter? It was not a terrorist who had thrown the first fire torch. It was an ordinary westerner like Vikram, who had been up against the border and everything it represented too many times, and in a single moment of frustration had cracked. Anyone could have started the riots.