Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “What’s the plan?” Soq asked.

  “There is no plan. I’m handing over this idiotic man and he’ll probably be tortured to death. End of story. Tomorrow we’ll get down to the business of making peace.”

  “And my software?”

  “Will have to wait. Right now Podlove and everybody like him is going to be keeping an extra-close eye on all their holdings. We kill the heat, wait till things calm down. See if it makes sense to deploy it then.”

  “Easy for you to say, when you’re not sleeping in a fucking box every night.”

  “Show me some respect in front of my soldiers, at least,” Go said, heading for the door.

  “What about the other thing?” Soq said, feeling angry, impudent, desperate. “You can’t postpone that. It’s now or never. We don’t know how things are going in the Cabinet. What kind of—”

  “I’m considering it. Get out of my way.”

  “You’re not,” Soq said. “You’ve already made up your mind. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. If you did, this wouldn’t even be a question.”

  Go’s eyes didn’t flinch away from Soq’s, but what did Soq see there, exactly? Whatever it was, it wavered. And wavering meant maybe.

  Go beckoned for the soldier to follow, and to bring the old man. And after she’d left, her voice still echoed in Soq’s ears.

  We’re on the same page.

  Soq was startled to see that this was true. And that this troubled Soq profoundly.

  Kaev

  They pressed closer together without talking or even thinking about it, instinctively making themselves a smaller target, giving them some room to maneuver around whatever obstacles or weaponry might emerge from the walls. Eighteen floors up, the architecture felt different. The hallway widened as they went, and then there was suddenly a fertile garden on either side of them.

  “Smoker’s lounge,” Kaev said, reading off Soq’s screen again. “Open-air spaces. Lie out in the sun, get some exercise. Very helpful for crazy people.”

  “Which is the grid side?” Masaaraq asked. “And which is the sea?”

  Kaev pointed each out.

  My mother is close, he thought. For the first time since childhood, I will see her.

  I am going to find her. I am going to free her.

  They entered the central cylinder; a chaos of screams and wailing. Patients everywhere, and Health workers. Everybody stuck.

  “The invasion protocol paused the evacuation protocol,” Kaev said. “Safety should be here by the billion in about three minutes, maybe four.”

  “Safety’s already here,” Masaaraq said.

  There was only one of her, a lone Safety operative, and apparently unarmed. Although her smile was a little too confident for that to be true. Something else, then. The patients made a space around them. Afraid of the polar bear, of the weapon Masaaraq carried, of the fact that they could see their breath steaming in the frigid air.

  The Safety worker raised her arm, rolled up her sleeve. Subdermals twitched and glowed along her arms. She was one with the room, with the system, with the Cabinet. Seamlessly melded with its innumerable defense measures.

  Kaev and Masaaraq backed away from the Safety worker. Kaev scanned the crowd, looking for a pocket of less deranged and disheveled-looking residents—who were easy to find, there at the wall, dressed in civilian clothes, one of them even holding a wineglass.

  The woman from Safety advanced. Kaev tightened his fists, watched to see how Masaaraq would come at this new threat, wondered if she’d know enough to understand how dangerous this opponent was. But Masaaraq wasn’t looking at her at all.

  “Ora,” she said.

  The woman stood ten feet away, draped in blankets, bald, beautiful, her skin bright and brown.

  “Kaev!” someone called—and he saw Ankit running toward them through the crowd. A crab-faced woman called her name, but was swept forward by the human current.

  “Tighten up!” Ankit called, and Kaev was in fight mode now, his higher brain deactivated, all animal, all instinct and swift brutal action, he saw what she saw—the woman from Safety tapping at her subdermals—and he knew what that meant, somehow, even though he’d never seen something like this before. He grabbed Masaaraq, pulled her with him.

  Ora alone seemed capable of independent action, and she alone seemed to pause, not from uncertainty or fear, but from the magnitude of the decision she had to make. The world she had to choose.

  “Come on!” he called.

  How can this even be a question for her? he thought, but the thought was gone in an instant.

  The bear roared to frighten away bystanders. A space cleared for them as they backed toward the wall. Ankit arrived, grasped his hand.

  A wave of polyglass rose up from the floor. At the sight of this, Ora finally moved. She ran for them, but the polyglass wall was moving faster. She dove, finally, and her whole body did not clear the closing wall, and it struck her in the leg and she fell to the floor beside them.

  The new wall reached the old wall and melded seamlessly with it, boxing them in: Masaaraq, Kaev, Liam, Ankit, Ora. The woman from Safety smiled and came closer.

  The bear roared, launched himself against the glass wall of his prison like it was ice, except this would not break any more easily than the window in the door had. There was a door in the wall behind them, but it would not budge. Ora felt her leg, nodded. Nothing broken, nothing bleeding.

  Kaev reddened. His muscles tightened. He crouched, a fighter’s stance, waiting for the bell to ring to explode into violence. But of course he wouldn’t be fighting anyone. In an instant the ducts beneath the floor would rearrange, reconfigure, spray some fancy smoke to knock them all unconscious, and when they woke up they’d be imprisoned for absolutely ever. He could see Ankit taking deep breaths, preparing to have to hold one for as long as possible.

  Masaaraq, on the other hand, did not seem to be aware that she was trapped at all. She smiled. She reached out her hand.

  Slowly, painfully, like someone seeing through thick fog or a patient coming out of paralysis, Ora smiled back. And took her hand.

  Ankit

  Mom,” Ankit whispered, marveling.

  This woman was nothing like the creature she’d had in her head. That pitiful thing, she saw now, had been shaped in her memory by a child’s fear. This woman stood up straighter, her shoulders were broader, her smile indomitable. She wore the clean elegant uniform of Protective Custody. So she’d been transferred, at some point, from the general-population hell she’d been in the last time Ankit visited.

  The floor lights flashed from red to blue. The walls ceased their distress sequence. The woman from Safety tapped at her jaw, delivered the update to one supervisor after another. The threat was contained. The invasion software had yielded to the evacuation bots.

  Arrows appeared in the floor. Red again, but orderly this time, with a soothing flow of cool blues and greens in the walls, pixels and patterns calmly urging people in the appropriate direction.

  Kaev and his bear roared, screamed, kicked, fought. Masaaraq smiled beatifically.

  Why are we still conscious at all? Any of us? Why haven’t we been gassed? Perhaps the interrogation protocols were about to kick in, and they wanted them conscious . . . or maybe it was easier to transport conscious people than unconscious ones? Aside from the belly lurches as her monkey leaped and climbed her way around the building, Ankit noticed that she was eerily objective about the whole thing.

  Patients stood, pointed. Came closer with fear and awe on their faces. Health workers tried to encourage them to continue the evacuation, but most preferred to stand there. Shivering. Watching.

  “Hello,” Masaaraq said to Ora.

  “Well hello,” Ora said, smiling. “It’s good to see you. What took you so long?”

  There. That’s why Ankit wasn’t worried. Wasn’t scared. Her family had been reunited. Her mother was free. Sort of. Even if it was just for a moment—even if they were current
ly trapped, about to be incarcerated, deregistered, locked back up or banished to separate scrap salvage ships, even if they’d never see each other again after this—they were together now. For a moment.

  “Family hugs later,” Kaev barked, stern fighter instincts in action, and Ankit was grateful for them. “We’re about to get gassed. Anybody got any ideas on a way out of here?”

  With one hand, almost absentmindedly, without ever taking her eyes off Ora’s face, Masaaraq pulled a small circle from the inside of her sealskin jacket. She pressed two buttons, peeled off the backing on an adhesive strip, stuck it to the door in the wall, called for everyone to get as far away from it as possible.

  The explosion, when it came, was much worse than the surgical bulkhead disruption process that Go had promised. Instead of just magically making a wall open up, it sent a thudding shock wave and a wall of fire in their direction. Kaev pressed both hands to his ears and winced. Ankit had to fight to keep from throwing up. Liam shielded them from the worst of the blast, and he howled as a dissipating blossom of flame singed the fur of his back.

  “Come on,” Kaev said, and they followed him down the empty hallway.

  The crowd noise rose behind them as the woman from Safety lowered the wall to follow them.

  Ankit ran, reveling in the ecstasy of having a crew again, a posse, a team, the way she had all those years ago when she’d leaped from building to building and death was always right behind them, right ahead of them, but it didn’t matter because they would face it together. She was inside and she was outside, she was human and she was animal, she obeyed gravity and she defied it.

  “Slow down,” Masaaraq said. “We can’t exert ourselves too much. If it comes down to a real fight, we’ll need to have some stamina to spare.”

  Which, of course, was when another polyglass wall slammed shut in front of them. And another, past that, and then another—a long series of them, and more certainly waiting in the wings, as many as would be needed to exhaust their supply of explosives.

  From behind them they heard the stomp of the Safety worker’s boots.

  She’ll be careful, because of Ora, Ankit thought. She won’t risk hurting her. Protective Custody cases would be the priority in the chaos of an evacuation. Ensuring they didn’t get snatched by whatever enemies had obliged them to enter custody in the first place. Or murdered, as was more likely for the high-value clients whose custody was a more genial form of incarceration, like the lamas and child monarchs and inconvenient heirs whose claims to power could jeopardize distant regimes.

  “Where are we?” Masaaraq asked Kaev.

  “Eighteenth floor, outer corridor,” he said, reading from a screen.

  “Radio Go’s ship,” she said to Ankit. “Tell her where we are. Tell her to prepare the extraction ladders.”

  “I can’t,” Ankit said. “They bricked my implant when we came in. I can’t reach them.”

  “Ours are blocked,” Kaev said. “Privacy shielding engaged.”

  “They’re down there, though,” Masaaraq said. “Right?”

  “Right. Down . . . somewhere.”

  “Cover me,” the orcamancer said, following the curving corridor until she was out of the line of sight of Safety. “Hold her off. Don’t let her see what we’re doing.”

  Kaev and Liam stepped slowly toward Safety, looking as menacing as they could. Which was pretty menacing. Masaaraq pulled out another explosive sphere, attached it to the outer wall, and then pulled out another. And then another. Five in all, a clumsy circle of them on the wall that was all that stood between them and an eighteen-story drop to the sea below.

  “What about your whale?” Ankit asked. “Can you tell her, and have her communicate it to the people on the ship?”

  “At this distance, it would take too long for me to pass on our location. I’d need to meditate on it for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. We don’t have that kind of time. And even if I could do it, nobody on that ship speaks orca. There’s no guarantee they’d understand what Atkonartok was trying to tell them.”

  “What about that screen Kaev has?”

  “Not networked,” Masaaraq said. “Soq loaded it with blueprints, predictive software bots.” She barked, “Stay together!” and then activated the explosives.

  As one, they moved away from the blast site. They had to get to a safe distance from it, but they couldn’t let Safety know where they stood in relation to the explosion, or she’d wall them in somewhere they couldn’t get back to it.

  “Drop!” Masaaraq said, and they did. Again the sick-making thud, again the roar of fire. Then the orcamancer was pulling them back to the red-hot wound in the side of the building, where cold bitter wind was already rushing in. And Ankit knew why, knew it from the sick yawn of space, so she was stammering, “No no no,” before Masaaraq said:

  “You’re going to have to scale it.”

  “No,” Ankit said. The sky was night black outside. Green light sketched the city’s outline below. It was one thing to feel what her monkey felt while her own body was safe in a hallway. To venture out in this dense human frame—“I can’t.”

  “You have to. Or we all die.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can. You are more than human now.”

  “Even if I could,” Ankit said, stammering for any imaginable excuse—and she could feel her, the monkey, climbing, feel how the wind tugged and pushed at the little torso—“it’d take me so long to get down there. And for them to send up the ladder. She’s not going to just stand there waiting.”

  Kaev and Liam stepped back to keep from being walled off away from them, joining the pitiful crew pressed up close to the opening. Shivering. They would die if she didn’t move. Kaev turned to her and she saw the fear in his face, saw how he smiled to hide it. To be brave for her.

  “Go,” Ora said, her hand warm on Ankit’s face. “I can handle her.”

  Everyone stared at her. She smiled, nodded. “Go.”

  Ankit touched the damaged wall, which was cooling fast.

  Ora stepped toward the woman from Safety, whose hands were busily tapping at her subdermals. “Your father,” Ora called.

  Safety’s hand stilled.

  “He never stopped trying to find you.”

  Safety’s mouth opened. No words came out.

  “It cost him everything, getting you and your mother out of Port-au-Prince. He spent years saving up money to come after you, even when he heard that your balsero armada got broken up by people pirates. Every Sunday he got on the circuit, spent all his money calling the reporting services. Listened to the reciting of the names. He got out. Got as far as Gibraltar. Spent a long time there. Waiting.”

  Ankit shut her eyes. Breathed. Reached out for the monkey—for Chim—who was somewhere nearby; she’d released her outside the building when she’d arrived with Fyodorovna, to scale the facade and wait for her, as Masaaraq had instructed.

  She realized: Masaaraq had anticipated this exact scenario.

  The monkey answered her. She opened her eyes without opening them, seeing what Chim saw, the sheer walls and fretted glasswork. She stepped through the opening. She turned around to begin her descent, but paused for a moment. To take in the scene, these people she loved, this family, these humans she was bonded to in bizarre magnificent ways, in case she never saw any of them again—in case, in fact, she never saw anything again.

  One word leaked out of Safety; a croak, a single syllable that contained a thousand questions. “You . . . ?”

  “When I saw you, I remembered,” Ora said gently. “What he remembered. I can show you. Everything he saw. What he went through. Where he ended up.”

  A moment ago Safety had seemed to be eight feet tall, armored and invincible, but now she sounded small, simultaneously very old and very young. “Is it the breaks?”

  “It is.”

  Ankit knew she needed to go. She clung to the ragged edge for a few seconds more, listening, desperate to delay her descent.r />
  “My friend had it,” Safety said, and she was crying now. “She said some of the things . . . it was like remembering someone else’s memories. But she couldn’t . . .”

  “Control it,” Ora said. “The breaks isn’t a disease. It’s just incomplete. Once the missing piece is in place, it’s a gift. An incredible ability. I can share it with you. Answer all your questions about your father. About the circumstances behind your family leaving. I see it, too. I see everything.”

  Ankit slipped out.

  A narrow ledge, barely wide enough to stand on. Wind tugged at her—but the wind was not an enemy, every scaler knew that. Wind, gravity, walls, rooftops, fences—these were facts. Things to accept and embrace. Tools. Things to use.

  She moved west, with the wind.

  Come, she called, and Chim answered.

  Sophisticated scalers shunned climbing. What they wanted was adventure, excitement, the swift running leaping progression from building to building. To go straight up or down was hard work, and ignominious.

  Hard, but possible. And, in fact, her strong suit. Because what she lacked in courage she made up for in determination and diligence and discipline.

  She descended now. Slowly, gripping tight, wishing she had her gecko-skin gloves, her ropes and anchors, but hadn’t her friends scorned all that equipment? Hadn’t they maintained that scaling always came down to the human body and the human mind, up against the elements?

  When she reached a landing, she turned to scan the sea below. They were near the grid, and she could see only a narrow slice of ocean. No sign of Go’s ship. She continued the descent.

  Her heart hammered. She sang to herself, but suddenly couldn’t remember more than one verse to any song at all.

  Focus. Focus.

  Down two more stories, she reached a garden smoker’s lounge. It should have been tropical, but the geothermal heat was still out. Glasses of water stood on every table, all frozen solid. She hurled one over the edge. Watched it explode against the grid.

  Which was stupid. Because now she kept imagining herself exploding against the grid.