The packet is the size of a playing card and it weighs almost nothing. Foil on one side, a cartoon snake on the other, coiled and grinning like it knows something you don't. HYDRA-CLEAN. Two tablets inside. You drop them in a liter of gray water, wait the twenty minutes the packet never actually specifies, and most of the time you do not get sick.
Most of the time. Hold onto that.
I spent two weeks tracing one carton. It starts in a shipping container parked three rows deep in a salvage yard below the salt line, where a woman named Otieno runs a packing line the manifest calls a textile concern. She has been doing it since the first dry year. Her right thumbnail is stained a permanent rust color from the press. She fills, she folds, she seals. She told me the line does eleven thousand packets on a good shift, and she told me the number the way you would tell someone the time.
I asked if she uses them. She looked at me the way you would look at someone who asked whether you ate the packaging.
"I boil," she said. "I have a stove. Downstream doesn't have a stove."
That is the whole piece, if you want it short. The honest version stops there.
The sixty percent is not printed anywhere, because nobody printed it. It is the number that travels the way real numbers travel up here, which is by funeral. A medic in the borough clinics keeps a private tally, since no faction will. Six cups in ten come out drinkable. The other four are a coin you already flipped before you knew you were betting. Sometimes the tablet does nothing. Sometimes it half-kills the bloom and wakes up something with a longer name, and you have traded a stomach you understood for a fever you don't.
There are at least four snakes now. Otieno's original press runs a snake with five coils. The yards to the east run six, or four, or a snake that is frankly more of a worm. The kiosk traders read coil count the way old sommeliers read a label, and they charge you for the reading. A five-coil packet goes for nearly double a worm. Both of them work sixty percent of the time. The premium is not for the water. It is for the feeling of having chosen.
At a checkpoint on the Bermondsey line I watched a kid, maybe twelve, sell singles out of a split carton, one tablet at a time, to people who could not make the price of the pair. He had a system. Five-coils in his left sock, worms loose in a tin, and he sorted his customers by their boots before they finished the sentence. Good boots got offered the real ones. Bad boots got the tin.
I asked him why.
"Good boots come back," he said. "Bad boots you only see once."
He wasn't cruel. It was inventory. He had worked out, younger than anyone should have to, exactly what each customer was worth to next week, and he had priced the snake to match.
I bought a pair of five-coils off him before I left. I carry a filter and a card that means I will most likely never break the seal. I bought them anyway, because walking past felt obscene, and that feeling, that specific useless ache, is the entire market. HYDRA-CLEAN does not sell water. It sells the part of you that cannot stand to do nothing while you are thirsty.
Sixty percent of the time, that is enough.