Free Osiris by E. J. Swift

shortly.
    “Oh. Okay.”
    “You coming?”
    Nils yawned. “Think you might be better off on your own.” There was a crash from the floor above. Nils winced and roared, “Shut the fuck up!” He turned back to Vikram, forced a laugh. “Floor twenty-six. I’m moving to twenty-nine, I hear they’ve got a working shower. Anyway, good luck, I suppose. You nervous?”
    “Not exactly. What can they do to me?”
    “Wouldn’t like to guess. Send you underwater?”
    “Tried that already.”
    The light-hearted tone fell flat. Nils’s fingers curled around the doorframe.
    “Well, let me know how it goes. I’ll catch you later.”
    The door shut. Another crash came from upstairs, followed by a yell. Vikram jogged down the remaining twenty-five floors to ocean level. He thought about Nils’s reaction. He wasn’t sure that his friend was entirely happy with Vikram’s decision—he hadn’t said so, not outright, but there had been an ambivalence in his eyes that was unlike Nils.
    Outside, the cold punched him like a Tarctic wind. He cinched the belt of his coat tighter; the buckle was broken and it kept slipping. The floating deck that encircled each tower shifted beneath his feet. A man was shouting that his boat had been blocked in, but nobody could find the owner of the vehicle responsible. Squinting in the bright light, Vikram made his way to the east side of the decking, where a vandalized signpost marked the waterbus stop.
    The queue jostled around him. As the decking rose and fell on the swells, those waiting kept their balance as one. He found himself looking at other people more carefully than usual. They were all ages and all heights, because the majority of westerners were unemployed, surviving on handouts from the City and their wits. Under hats and hoods the odd Boreal face stood out amongst the southerners, but they were all dressed the same, bulked up with as many layers as they could beg, borrow or otherwise acquire. Could he tell the Council that people had to steal clothes in order to keep warm, or would they assume that everyone in the west was a thief?
    A cry went up as the waterbus was sighted. The surge forward knocked him off balance. He suppressed the desire to shove back and used the momentum to inch his way past a mother clutching a child in each hand.
    The ticket collector stood wide across the boarding gate. The waterbus pulled in with tantalizing slowness. Vikram saw a girl in a yellow scarf duck under a man’s arm and sidle around an old woman. His heart jumped with the thought that it was Mikkeli, before he remembered, again, that it was impossible. The ticket collector braced himself as he unlocked the barrier.
    Vikram pushed a few peng into the ticket collector’s hand and fought his way into a place at the prow. On the landing stage, a squabble broke out among those left behind. As the waterbus angled around the circumference of 221-West, Vikram saw the man who had complained about being blocked in, crouched in his own boat, in the process of setting loose the offending vehicle. He was striking at the chain with a pickaxe.
    The waterbus nosed into the main channel of the waterway. Vikram huddled over the rail watching the spit of spray. The western quarter of the city had never been finished, and when he glanced up he saw clumsily made, open bridges connecting building to building. Many of the graffitied towers were ringed by boats, homes to the very poor. On the outskirts, boats lined up like dominoes. Nobody could say for sure what was concealed within the rotting hulls. People went to the shanty-boat towns for drugs or women. They didn’t always come back.
    He had to find a way to describe all of those problems. For months, he’d been composing a speech in his head. Now the carefully arranged lines were void. Events had overtaken him. He had to focus on the things that could be changed. He had to ignore what they had done to Eirik.
    It was Drake who had told him to start writing