Blackfish City(15)
“I think . . .” Fill said, but didn’t know how to say it, certainly not in the language he rarely spoke outside of his home. I think I am remembering things that happened to other people. “Have you ever . . .”
The bearded man from before had come into the coffee shop, was sitting on a bench. Not buying anything, of course. The kind of person Fill was most attracted to could never have afforded anything in a place like this.
“You’ve an admirer,” Barron said. “I daresay you have many admirers.” He seemed quite transfixed by the new arrival, and occasionally turned from him to Fill and smiled deeply, no doubt at an imagined pornographic tussle between the two young men.
“Some people think that the visions you get from the breaks come from the person who infected you. Or the person who infected them . . . or someone somewhere along the chain. Is that possible, or am I crazy?”
“Yes,” Barron said, stirring his coffee unnecessarily, seeming to have moved on from that topic of conversation altogether.
“Yes . . . it’s possible?”
“Oh, look!” Barron said, barely listening. “It seems that I have frightened your admirer away. I have that effect on young men these days. Punishment for my own youthful cruelty, I believe. We always get what’s coming to us, darling. What is your last name, by the way?”
Fill breathed out, promised himself patience. “Podlove.”
Barron’s eyes widened, and his jaw dropped, but who could say whether that was an involuntary old-man response, or whether the doomed ancient creature wouldn’t have been equally shocked by a last name like Wang or Smith, or the fact that tomorrow was Thursday. “Podlove,” he repeated, eyes narrowing. “An interesting name. Was it ever anything else?”
“Something egregiously Slavic, I’m afraid. Grandfather castrated it before he got here. Chopped off a pair of low-hanging syllables. Is it possible that the breaks—”
“At any rate,” Barron said swiftly, “you must have things to do. Pursue that swarthy fellow, perhaps. I hope you won’t fault me if I sit here a little longer? The legs, you know. They betray one so bitchily as the years go by.”
“Of course,” Fill said, standing, feeling weirdly like he was being dismissed, when it was his money that had bought them the coffee that earned this ridiculous specimen the right to occupy that space in the first place.
Ankit
The monkey stared at Ankit through the glass. A Kaapori capuchin, one of the smaller, tougher tribes of feral monkeys that had fled captivity in the gilded cages of Qaanaaq’s wealthiest. This one had a broad blue stripe down its back, tapering to a point between its eyes, where the owner had chemically seeded the skin’s melanin layer. Ankit had made the mistake of feeding it once, and it must have smelled her weakness, her kindness, because it kept coming back to her window. And because she was weak, because she was kind, she kept feeding it.
Her screen would not stop chiming. Dawn; she’d been up all night; she’d long ago stopped responding to the incoming messages from subordinates, donors, friends, and foes. None from her boss herself, of course, but once Fyodorovna waddled into the office Ankit would be hearing from her.
The monkey stepped in through the open window and sat. She gave it three seaweed squares, which it dropped indignantly into the sea below, and a string of seal jerky, which it rolled into a ball and stuffed into its mouth.
Fyodorovna’s campaign was in free fall. Her opponent had seized on the Taksa photo Ankit had posted, generated a script, talking points, sent them out to faith leaders and tenant association presidents and anyone else on Arm Seven who had half an audience, so now her feed was full of assholes squawking about how Fyodorovna cares more about criminals and perverts than our hardworking families; Seven needs an Arm manager who will work for us, not for the twisted individuals whose bad choices brought the wrath of God down upon them. For an entire hour she’d watched the bot poll scores plummet, and then she’d put her screen under a pillow.
Ankit had anticipated that this might happen. The possibility had flickered in the back of her brain, briefly, before she posted the photo. She’d considered it unlikely—and in that moment, in her anger, at Fyodorovna, at the breaks, at the fear that had always held her back, at the whole shitty city and the rich and powerful people whose ignorance shaped the lives of so many people and whose asses she was compelled to unceasingly kiss, she had posted the photo anyway.
Minutes after the office opened, Ankit’s screen chimed. A subordinate, one she was fond of, who never bothered her with bullshit. She accepted the call and there he was, looking stricken.
“Don’t ask, Theerasul,” she said. “I’m sick.”
“You’re not,” he said. “But I don’t give a shit about that. You have a visitor. She says she has an appointment with you?”
“She’s lying,” Ankit said.
“Of course I know that. But it’s one of the ones you handle better than any of us. I always end up pissing them off or making them—”
“Put her on.”
A crabapple face filled her screen: Maria. Ankit winced.
“God bless you,” the creepy woman said.
“God bless you.”
Maria had a storefront church halfway down the Arm. How she held on to it was a mystery to all. She rarely held services, and when she did they were not attended. By anyone. Ankit had two guesses as to why the deranged old fundie had an unused space as her own private kingdom when it could have been making somebody tens of thousands a month in rent. Either the place was a forgotten holding of one of the former American megachurches, which had bought up property at the height of their power and wealth and then promptly dissolved, its rent paid in full for the next fifty years and Maria sent to be the pastor of a flock that would never come, gone mad awaiting further instructions and resources . . . or she was a maintenance squatter, paid by a shareholder to occupy a space they intended to keep empty. Those were usually thugs or illicit businesses, people who could pay and still be ejected with no notice—but if you wanted to keep a space vacant long-term without attracting Safety’s attention, you couldn’t do much better than a pit bull religious fanatic.