Blackfish City(23)

The view was breathtaking. The windscreen was being shifted, and as the sun caught the gleaming facets it looked like the sky was one massive kaleidoscope. Was that fear, in Breckenridge’s eyes?

“Maybe,” she said. “We’re still collating.”

“Big gamble,” he said. “Unlikely to pay off for her. Maybe if you weren’t an incumbent, you could rally people behind it, make absurd demands and promises, whip it up from a fringe issue to a major one, but with all her time in office and not a lick of concrete action, the few people who do care about it one way or another won’t—”

“Maybe she’s planning concrete action.”

“That would be unwise.”

“Why?”

He took off his glasses. Rubbed his eyes. “You know that even if I did have access to any information that might be helpful, we couldn’t share it.”

“I need to know,” she said. “We’re losing here. And you need us.”

“Let’s get noodles,” he said. “You hungry?”

She wasn’t, but she knew when someone wanted to talk off the record.

Her jaw pinged on their way out. She let the message come in: a colleague back at Fyodorovna’s office, concerned because That Crazy Lady Maria was apparently rallying an angry mob. Hardly a challenging feat; out-of-work Americans took little riling up. Employed Americans, too, for that matter.

“Back in ten,” Breckenridge said to the receptionist. Receptionists were a funny holdover, Ankit thought, not for the first time. Software could do everything they did. But they made people feel more comfortable. How much of the world around us is utterly superfluous, kept in place to preserve an illusion of order?

That’s when she realized how scared she was. She never got philosophical. There were always too many real things to think about.

On the street, darkness was inching in. The days were short now. Soon they’d be down to four dim hours, and they’d crank up the lights nonstop, and the whole city would smell of the composting sewage in the biogenerators that powered the methane-sodium lamps. They crossed the Arm, toward a shop expensively made up to look like a ragged Arm Eight street stall. Right down to the spray-painted tarps, except these were hanging inside, where they weren’t protecting anything from the wind.

Arm One noodles were the worst.

What did it mean, that Breckenridge had something to say but couldn’t say it in the office? Something was afoot with the breaks, and the shareholder he worked for knew what was going on. Might have helped make the decisions. Or maybe this was something else, some other scandal, some other terrible thing about to hit her, one more reason her boss’s career was over and therefore so was hers.

A slide messenger ululated past them.

“Hey, comrade,” said a man in a hooded sweatshirt, running up behind them. “I think you dropped this.”

Breckenridge patted his pockets, made a quizzical expression, reached out to the man’s extended hand.

The man grabbed him, pulled him in, took hold of his arm at the wrist and above the elbow, and twisted. Breckenridge yelped, turned his body with the arm. The hooded man kicked at his knee, gave him a shove, dumped him off the grid and into the sea. Ankit got a glimpse of gritted teeth, a neck wide with muscle. He turned to her, slowing, as if debating whether to soak her, too, and in that second she got in one good kick. Missed the mark slightly, hitting his inner hip, but hard enough to surprise him into pausing for just an instant, a fraction of an instant.

Long enough for her to catch a better glimpse of his face. Shadowed, battle-scarred, seen only once in the flesh, but familiar. From posters, from fight broadcasts.

Her brother.

“Kaev,” she said, but he was already sprinting away.

Sirens blared. Arm One had surface sensors to know when someone had been soaked. Breckenridge flailed in the choppy sea, glasses gone, looking ridiculous, like he’d never again make the mistake of leaving his office.

“What the hell,” Ankit said, but he couldn’t hear her, couldn’t have answered if he had, and anyway she wasn’t talking to him.





City Without a Map: Anatomy of an Incident


You are bound to your body.

Your body is shaped by its DNA, your parents’ decisions, historic hate and hunger, contested elections, the rise and fall of the stars in the sky. Maybe your body is in an awful place. Maybe, like me, you are there through no fault of your own.

One day, you will break free of your body. Every one of us will. Until that Great Liberation comes, we must be content with the little liberations. The shiver up the spine—the telltale tingle of a beautiful song. Great sex; a good story.

So. Another story. This one encompassing twenty minutes, distilled and condensed from diverse sources. Journalist reports; video cameras; eyewitness accounts as delivered to Safety and other agencies.

Scene: The Sports Platform. Lowest level. Evening. Darkness has just come to Qaanaaq.

At 17:55, forty men and women board the Platform. They are an angry, unruly bunch. They carry improvised weapons; lengths of pipe, mostly, retired from the city’s geothermal ventilation system. Some wield the rusting skeletons of American guns, family heirlooms desperately clung to, sometimes the only thing an ancestor carried when they escaped from the hellhole collapse of Chicago or Buffalo or Dallas.

By 18:04 they have reached the lowest level.