You come into Gorodskie Ekho on the lower road, because the upper road belongs to the Eurasian Oligarchy and they decide each morning who is allowed to use it. The lower road runs along the inside of the sea wall. The wall is concrete, and older than its own repairs, which are also concrete in a paler grade, so the whole structure reads like a wound that several different people closed without consulting each other. You can see the rectangle where the city authority scrubbed the paint. You can see, just above it, where someone painted it back.
The line everyone knows is there. Before the water rose, we had names for countries. It has been scrubbed fourteen times. A man selling relay cable near the barrier gave me the number the way other people give you the time. Fourteen. He was not proud of it and he was not tired of it. He read it off like a gauge, then went back to coiling cable.
The city smells like a decision that got made fast and then had to be lived in. Wet concrete, machine oil, the iodine note of water being cleaned somewhere close. Gorodskie Ekho is built out of cable and concrete and almost nothing soft. Sound does not fade here, it travels. A voice three corridors away reaches you with its edges intact. The musicians who came up in this city play without amplification because the walls do the work for them, and because the grid is not a thing you can plan a show around.
What holds the city up is not the wall. The wall holds the water. The city is held up by three pumping stations and a flood system the locals call the Current, and the Current is held up by a maintenance schedule that everyone has memorized. When a station goes down for service, the other two run at capacity and the city has a margin of about six hours. People here can tell you the margin without stopping to think. It is the first number children learn that means anything.
During a maintenance window the Oligarchy reduces the monitoring on the flood barrier and increases the monitoring on the people. Somewhere this is written down as efficiency. The reasoning is that a barrier under service is a barrier nobody can sabotage, so the cameras are free to watch the crowd instead of the water. I asked a CROM technician whether that math had ever been wrong. She said the barrier had never failed during a window. Then she said it again in a way that told me she had counted the windows.
The economy is cable. Everyone here either moves signal or moves around the people who do. The cable operators have their own dialect of the relay protocol, words that mean nothing forty kilometers away, and they wear the work on them: spliced lanyards, technician badges from companies that may not check, the grey patches that say a person is carrying something for someone. Running clean is a fashion and a survival posture at the same time. The market sells signal hygiene off a table next to the bread, and nobody on that road finds it strange.
At night the city does the thing it is good at. In a flooded undercroft near the second pumping station, a group plays the architecture, the sound coming back off concrete and standing water until the room holds more music than the band is making. No power grid involved, which their rider lists as a preference and which is in practice a necessity. People dance in their coats. Nobody takes the coat off. You learn quickly that taking your coat off in Gorodskie Ekho is a statement about how sure you are of the next six hours.
The people who live closest to the wall are the people the rest of the city has agreed not to look at directly. They hold the worst water tier and the best view of the barrier. When the margin goes thin, theirs is the district that learns first, because the alert that reaches the inner corridors reaches them as water around the ankles. I met a woman who had been relocated three times inside the same city. Each address was farther down the slope. She kept the paperwork. The paperwork still called the moves temporary, in good official type, recently printed.
I left on the lower road, the way I came, past the stretch of wall where the paint was still fresh. Someone had already begun the fifteenth. They were not hurrying. The city authority would come, and the rectangle would go grey, and then the line would be back, because the people who paint it are not trying to win. They are keeping a count. The wall is the only ledger in Gorodskie Ekho the Oligarchy does not control, and it says the same thing every time, in a hand that gets steadier with the practice.