Tidelands: II-One (20)

Antonio.

By the time Percy is finished at the Arc, evening has begun to drop. Despite the weather shield, which only keeps out the worse of it, those outside the Arc take whatever they get, which today is a sudden freezing fog, obliterating the city in an amnesiac fugue. Having arranged for the body to be transferred on to the municipal morgue for further analysis, he books a water taxi to the hotel, sitting in companionless silence as the driverless boat manoeuvres him along the flooded byways and through the haunted maze of eroded, shrouded forms. What would once have been charming, romantic even, in a Venice or an Amsterdam, here has become eerie, desolate. He reaches over and trails his fingertips through the lapping waters, only to withdraw them sharply as the dark shape of something surely too large to be an eel slips beneath them, rocking the boat with its passage.