Maybe it had been a trap. A lie. But if it was, all it did for them was save my skin. Because when I got back to where I’d left them, I was the last of my kind.
No bodies. No humans, no animals. Lots of red and black blighting the landscape. Blood, and the charred remains of buildings. I found our bathroom mirror in the rubble, with the word Taastrup on it. In Ora’s handwriting. I chose to believe that she got out alive, took the two kids with her. Left behind our son’s polar bear, whom I found hidden in the basement of the schoolhouse. He must have done it, I thought—the boy, he hid his bear to keep it safe, because she would never have allowed them to be separated, she’d have known better. I shivered, then, to think of that kid’s life without the bear he’d been bonded to. And I swore I’d find her, find them.
We wept for a full day, Atkonartok and I. For our murdered kin. I lay on my stomach, on the ice, looking into black water. She circled. Each of us amplified the other’s pain, echoed it back and forth, until I thought it would split us in two. Only hunger saved us. Hunger stirred her savagery, which roused my own, which stopped our wailing.
I brought her armfuls of bloody snow, hacked-off pieces, shreds of clothing. Atkonartok could tell them apart, our people and the people who hurt them. She could single out their unique pheromonic signature, singular as a fingerprint. She smelled their bodies, their sweat, their hair, their waste, their stories. From their smells she could see their shape, their weight, whether they were young or old or weak or strong.
Forty attackers, total. Forty monsters to hunt. She could see their outlines, so I could too. And so we moved on. Looking for our lost, the ones whose bodies we did not find, who we knew escaped—and looking for those forty outlines.
Taastrup, first. All the way, I watched the skies. Spent more time staring at the air than I did watching the sea or the land I traveled over. Looking for a black-chested buzzard eagle.
I knew it might take forever. I knew that by the end of it, it might be me who got rescued by her. I knew it might take so long that by the time I found her, she wouldn’t be her anymore, and I wouldn’t be me.
We found many of those monsters. In the cities of the land and the cities of the sea. Sooner or later, if they were there to be found, Atkonartok would catch their scent. I broke them apart or pushed them into the sea for her to tear to slow tiny pieces. Some we learned things from. The names and locations of their comrades. Others had nothing to offer, but their fate was the same.
Revenge was not my mission, but each new slaughter soothed the grief and rage I felt at being unable to find her. Find them. Murder gave me the strength to keep going.
My sisters, my mothers, the whole long line of generations: They come with me. With us. We carry them inside us. Our ancestors never leave us. Ora knew that, tried to explain it to me. She said our people understood death and loss and the legacies of our forebears. She said that we never lose the people we love, not even when we want to, and that’s what the Western world had lost sight of, a lesson they forgot but we relearned, which is why the nanites didn’t kill us, didn’t drive us mad, gave us this gift, this curse.
Once, I saw one of them. The kids with cameras; not a kid anymore, and no camera. Standing over a trash barrel fire in a Scottish resettlement camp. I think she recognized me, but her face stayed as empty as mine was. I felt sad, then, for her, and angry at myself. I took that moment, that short time, to mourn, to be sad, to be angry, to feel emotions for her that I never let myself feel for me and mine, because we’d been born to this but she hadn’t, and because people who only know suffering from stories are never prepared to find themselves inside one.
Kaev
Kaev woke up in darkness. He heard water sloshing against the other side of a metal wall. Something massive breathed beside him. Where was he? How had he gotten there? He felt no fear, no anxiety. Dimly, he knew that this was wrong. He should have been terrified. But the realization vanished, and he slipped back into sleep.
To wake, hours later, to light. A narrow room. A high ceiling. The most comfortable bed he’d ever been on.
Which was breathing. Which was no bed at all, but rather a polar bear. One heavy furred arm lying across Kaev’s legs. Ebony claws more than capable of tearing him in two.
Still, no fear. He knew, on a level deeper than the human, that this animal would do him no harm. That its happiness, sleeping peacefully, was his, and his was its. He lay there for a long time. Watching it sleep. Feeling his own thoughts come easy, a smooth unbroken flow.
Remembering. Piecing together how he’d ended up here. Wandering Arm Eight, his brain cracked, thoughts leaking out like always, and then—peace. A sensation so pleasant he’d stopped in his tracks, sat down, would have stayed there until he died.
And then killing a whole bunch of people.
“Hello,” said a woman, who entered the room bearing two bowls. She was sturdy, muscle-bound. Her face was raw and bright from a lifetime of sun and wind. Long hair fell in a wide cascade down her back, with two small braids framing her face and curling under her chin.
She set the larger bowl on the ground beside the polar bear. The smaller one she handed to Kaev. “Good morning.”
The bear came awake. The first thing it did was turn its head to look into Kaev’s eyes.
He gasped. He felt tears well up.
“Can polar bears smile?” he asked.
“This one just did.”
He laughed. The bear nodded its head vigorously, like maybe that’s how polar bears laugh.
Kaev reached out his hand to touch the bear’s face. It pushed its head into his hand.
“He looks old.”
“He is old. For a polar bear.”
“Am I like you?” he asked the orcamancer.
“You are,” she said, and smiled, a smile every bit as wide and deep as his own. Like she, too, had found something she’d spent her whole life looking for. Except unlike him she’d had the privilege of knowing exactly what it was she’d been looking for.
“How?”
“You tell me,” she said. “What do you know about your family history?”
“Not much. Raised as an orphan. Ward of the city.”
“What about your mother? What do you know about her?”
Kaev shrugged. She looked disappointed in this news, somehow. But this was not surprising. If he was like her, if he was one of the nanobonded, there must have been a connection—a mutual family member, perhaps, someone she had come all this way to look for. He was a missing link; he could lead her to the person she sought. Kaev paused to revel in the clarity of his conclusions, the effortless way one idea connected to another. My mother. She is here for my mother. She must be.
For the first time, things make sense.
“Last night, I saw something,” she said. “The bear’s behavior changed. I knew that it had sensed you. Finally. I’ve been waiting for that to happen. That’s why I was watching when those people came, and why I was able to unchain it in time to take care of them. Or rather, to help you take care of them.”
He ate. The bear ate. Sea lion meat, it tasted like. Even the farmed stuff was fantastically expensive, although he suspected she hadn’t purchased this so much as sent her orca out to bring one home. His was cooked and the bear’s was raw. But he could taste what the bear tasted, feel the texture and the brine of the blood. Both were delicious.
“Kaev,” she said, and squatted beside him, and hugged him so hard they both lost their balance, toppled over, laughed. “I am so, so, so happy to have found you.”
Kaev smiled, unsure what to say. But it wasn’t the normal pain of being bewildered by words in general, of even the smallest thing being too big for him to find the words for. It felt good, right, the bliss of emotions that need not be put into words. Had he ever truly had a conversation before? Had he ever been able to talk to another human being without watching every sentence crumble on its way out of his mouth? If so, he didn’t remember it. He rolled over, from his back to
his belly, arms spread wide to embrace his brother bear.
Ankit
Context is everything,” Barron said. Birds chirped in the background of wherever he was, or maybe they were people making bird noises. “To understand any social problem, you have to know what’s going on around it.”
He’d taken to sending Ankit audio files. His voice was avuncular, grandfatherly. He never answered when she asked him why he didn’t want to meet or have an actual conversation. She imagined it had to do with his sickness. Self-consciousness over maybe being unable to answer a question, or losing his train of thought too easily. She listened for ambient noise disruptions, indications that he’d edited bits out, but the city’s standard noise was chaotic and jerky enough to make it tough to tell.
Ankit said, “Play,” and began to climb.
Context: When the first breaks cases started popping up, Qaanaaq had been a powder keg. Overcrowding; collapses of unsafe slum structures. Demonstrations. Many of the city’s mass congregation mitigation measures had been introduced back then. Ankit remembered it, vaguely. A friend of her foster father’s sitting in their living room, his brown face blackened with dried blood. Caught in a peaceful demonstration that became a street brawl when the slum enforcers brought out zap sticks.
Street protests were an oddity in Qaanaaq. Present—common, sometimes—but performative. Nostalgic. Like horse-drawn carriages in twenty-first-century cities. Immigrants from elsewhere believed in them, but Qaanaaq’s native-born political activists treated them like parties, chances to take photos. With such minimal explicit human decision making, there were no targets to pressure, no places where a strategic crisis could force a policy change. You could call on an Arm manager to issue a statement, but everyone knew how little that could achieve. The real decisions were made by machines, a hundred thousand computer programs, and you could scream at a data server farm until you were blue in the face without getting anywhere. Even if a mob burned one down, there were dozens of backups, many of them floating in bubbles orbiting the geocone.
“Run!” someone called to her.
She’d never been to an indoor scaling course before. Like most serious scalers, she’d scoffed at the concept. Once you’ve been out there, hurtling through the frigid sky, the safe legal version seemed insulting. Nor could she say, exactly, why she’d decided to visit one now. But run she did, when the coach commanded it, leaping over foam obstacles and then flinging herself against a replica of a rotating cellular antenna and swinging around on it.
Yes, she thought. That is why I came here. The body has a way of thinking that is very different from the mind’s. Maybe moving the old muscles will help me figure this all out.
Context: Barron’s friend’s molecular assembly machine could not produce Quet-38-36.0. Some deeply buried safeguard stopped it.
Context: That had never happened to him before. He’d called friends, asked them to try, gotten the same result.
Context: For some reason, Quet-38-36.0 could not be produced in Qaanaaq.
“Jump!” the coach called, a split second too late. This coach was no scaler. Or if she was, she’d been so subpar she’d been forced to flee to the safety of a padded indoor course.
Context: Martin Podlove was scared of her. But he was scared of other things more.
He had refused her requests for a meeting or a call. The three times she’d gone to his office, intending to wait in the Salt Cave until he walked out and corner him then, she’d found out that he’d left hours earlier by a different exit. She’d drafted messages and deleted them unsent. She had to be in his presence. Had to corner him. Had to see him squirm, read his face for tells. And if she merely sent a written message, who could say whether he’d smugly send an enforcer to soak or slaughter her?
What she knew: Podlove had ordered her mother’s incarceration. He’d slotted her Code 76. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t know what she could do about it. And she didn’t know why his employees were being attacked all of a sudden—she’d seen the clips of her brother beating the shit out of a slum enforcer a day after she’d seen him soak a Podlove bureaucrat, and she knew it couldn’t be a coincidence—but she knew it was making her job harder. Podlove was battening down for a siege, and would be even more inaccessible than he normally was.
She was in midair, when her jaw bug chimed. Rolling hard landings had never been her strong suit, and the distraction made this one even worse.
“Hello,” she said several harsh seconds later, sitting on the floor and cradling her ankle.
“Ankit,” said the caller, his voice so old, New York–accented, and she thought at first it must have been Barron—but this man drew out the second syllable of her name too long, and his tone was too hard, too cold.
“Who is this?”
“Dak Plerrb, calling on behalf of Mr. Podlove.”
“Ah,” she said, forcing herself to breathe slowly. “This is a surprise. Is he on the line?”
Plerrb laughed. “No, no. But he did want you to know that he’s noticed. How determined you are, to talk to him. Visiting, writing.”
“I wanted—”
“And researching! Spending so much time looking into him. The Qaanaaq web, the global web, all sorts of places.”
Outrage flared up, but she fought it down. Of course shareholder flunkies could get reports from the security programs that monitored data behavior. They could probably control them, too. He wanted her shocked, angry, thrown off.
“He wanted me to call and let you know how serious he is when he says that this is not the time to be fucking with him.”
Breathe, Ankit. One breath, two. Don’t rush this. When she spoke, her voice was ice. Was wind. “Do me a favor and ask him why he had my mother locked up in the Cabinet.”
But there was no answer. Her screen said the call was terminated. Had he heard her question? Would he ask Podlove?
She stood. Shifted weight from leg to leg. Her ankle wasn’t sprained. She climbed back up the mock building stilts. Grabbed a horizontal bar; swung her body to the next one. And the next.
The old muscles kicked in. Facts fell together. All at once, Ankit saw: The shareholders want the breaks to be an epidemic. They’re pulling the strings to make the problem worse. To prevent solutions. That’s why the molecular printers can’t produce Quet-38-36.0. Why there’s a six-month wait for quarantine transfers.
Context: The breaks were a welcome distraction from the city’s fundamental flaws—the supremacy of property, the fact that landlords ran everything.
Ankit laughed out loud and leaped to the next stilt.
The place was a reasonable facsimile. She could see why people paid for it. But it only made her hungrier for the real thing. The bite of metal. The dark void below. The cold wind, most of all. A scaler friend of hers, quoting some old proverb: If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.
Soq
The boat was old, late or maybe even mid-twentieth century, tall and rusted, with a steep steel gangplank. Soq was out of breath by the time they reached the top. They turned to take in the view. Like most Qaanaaq urchins, Soq had marveled at the Amonrattanakosin flagship, lingered on the wharf where it was anchored, imagined the torture chambers and disruptor manufacturing facilities that must be belowdecks, the meeting rooms where criminals from every rung of the ladder met to plan out operations, the storerooms full of grain and cans for surviving sieges by the forces of Safety or enemy crime bosses or the military of one or more of the charter nations.
It seemed smaller now. Soq reached out to rub two fingers against the hull, watched rust flakes fall. When Dao had buzzed Soq that morning, told Soq to report to the ship, it had turned the whole day into a dream.
“Utterly unseaworthy,” Go said.
Soq nodded. “Why don’t you . . . I don’t know, paint it? Indonesia still makes that hydrophobic stuff . . .”
“This is just a starting place.” Go stepped off the gangplank. “Hello, Soq.”
“Hi.”
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They shook hands. It felt weird. Soq had dreamed of meeting Go. And now: there they were. The real thing was so much smaller than the mythic creature in Soq’s head.
The city was hard to see, below them in the ebbing twilight. And the boat moved differently, its rocking more noticeable than the city’s eternal rise and fall, which was mitigated by complex mechanics . . . Soq so rarely stepped off the grid. They paused to savor the almost-seasickness.
“People live here?” Soq asked.
“People do,” Go said. “But you don’t. Not yet, anyway. Your home for the foreseeable future is actually part of your first assignment.”
Three women squatted on the deck, slowly deconstructing a large plastic cube. Pulling away smaller plastic cubes of varying sizes, one at a time, and slotting them into canvas bins based on their color.
“What’s in those?” Soq asked. “Or is that the kind of thing you need to be here a lot longer before you can find out?”
Go laughed. “We’re not just drug runners here. Most of our work is totally legal. This shipping pallet contains spices, just arrived from the subcontinent. By letting so-called crime bosses control even the most mundane and legitimate aspects of Qaanaaq’s commerce, the city can keep expenses down. Particularly labor costs.”
“So I take it these women don’t have a union?”
“They do not. Although you are welcome to ask them how happy they are with their work and their pay.”
Soq watched one of them until she made eye contact. She smiled, nodded. A recent arrival from somewhere post-post-Soviet. Of course they were happy. Go was probably light-years ahead of every other option this woman had for making a living in the nightmare landscape she came from, or the city where there were thousands of smarter, more desperate women just like her.
The tour took a surprisingly long time. The boat had more levels than Soq had been imagining, each one with its own complex labyrinth of passageways and warrens and boxes and drawers. Go had her fingers in so many different things. A whole department dedicated to intelligence, files and photos and film on probably half the city, one person whose only job was mastering archaic media, flash drives and paper files and floppy disks and microfiche and crystal gel, cataloging what they kept and retrieving information from them when needed. Elsewhere, a lithe legless woman was lord and commander of a vast pharmaceutical storage system, swinging from rope to rope through a forest of cabinets.
Blackfish City Page 13
