Osiris Read Online Free PDF Page A

blank, but you never knew what really showed. Vikram had seen fear and horror spark in the most hardened of features: the emotion sudden and unexpected, like electric light in a dark window.
    Keep yourself empty, he thought. A pebble at the bottom of the ocean. A bit of kelp. When it’s happened it’s over, done. Then you move on.
    That was what the three of them had agreed, him and Nils and Drake. They would go to the execution, because they couldn’t stay away. But they would do nothing. There was nothing they could do.
    Eirik’s sentence had finally been announced in early summer, eight months after Vikram was let out of jail. There had not been a public execution since the six Osuwa criminals were shot at the border twenty-eight years ago, for an alleged act of terrorism at the university. Even Vikram knew that Eirik had committed no acts of terrorism. The Citizens were going to execute him anyway.
    Was the City actually scared of the west? How could they be, when there wasn’t a single coherent movement or activist group? The west was in chaos, crippled by food shortages and drug trafficking and the continual power failures. The shanty towns were terrorised by gangs who imposed illegal levees and warred continually amongst themselves. Once every few months there might be a straggly protest at the border, mute and seemingly purposeless, but it didn’t take a Councillor to work out that the west was in no position to threaten anyone.
    Twenty minutes before eleven. The back of Vikram’s neck tingled with the bitter cold. He pulled up his scarf. In a couple of weeks, he’d need two to go outside.
    It was an incongruously clear, pretty day, the sky palest blue and utterly empty. Under its expanse Vikram felt the unsettling jumble of freedom and an at times incapacitating terror of losing it again, which had dogged him ever since he got out. Around the towers, waves slapped the decking with light, almost playful gestures. The waterbus he stood upon with twenty other westerners rose on the swell.
    A skadi boat glided down the edge of the crowd. They had a fleet of barges and speeders, and they had strung a line of buoys to fence in the western boats. The skadi were dressed bulkily in their habitual black. They were all armed with guns and tasers. One of them had a speakerphone.
    “You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats. Any attempted action will meet with severe punishment.”
    The execution boat, anchored between the western crowds and the City, was a squat, ugly craft, surrounded by clear water and painted entirely black except for the prow, where someone had daubed two white orbs and the teeth of a shark. The deck was flat. On it, the transparent cube reflected the towers on either side and the people and the empty waiting sky.
    The wind blew spray into Vikram’s face and he licked the salt from his chapped lips. It stung, an unwelcome reminder that he was really here. He was alive, and awake.
    The speakerphone crackled. “You will stay behind the barrier. You will not move your boats…”

    Vikram was nine years old when Mikkeli first brought him to the border. From his earliest memories, he had heard people talking about the infamous waterway. It was a subject which made voices change, and sometimes faces too. In Vikram’s young world, which consisted mostly of places he could not go or things he could not do, this barrier dividing the west from the City was a concept at once as solid and as transient as the sky.
    On that day Mikkeli had blagged two passes on a waterbus and sneaked Vikram up to a balcony sixty floors above surface. Once they were safely installed, she unwrapped a package of fried squid and kelp. She said that someone had given her the food, which was a lie. Vikram knew Mikkeli had stolen it because he had heard the fry-boat woman yelling at them earlier as they ran away over the raft rack.
    They shared the squid rings, greasy and chewy on the inside but coated with