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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