Blackfish City(25)
“Shoot her!” the mob’s leader wails, unnecessarily, from the sidelines, her voice thick with pain but light from loss of blood.
The orcamancer neatly disembowels another soul idiotic enough to charge her.
A man closes his eyes and then opens them. Takes a breath. He stands away from the fray, between her and the bear. His thighs ache. A week and a half has passed since he got off the iceboat. They should not still be hurting. He is getting too old to straddle the saws anymore, too weak to calve functional shards off the Greenland glacier. By this time next year, he’ll be unable to make a living at the only job he’s ever had in this crummy city. And then what? He is old enough to remember Philadelphia before the Revival, before the state of Pennsylvania fell to fundamentalists with a platform of confronting “centers of sin” who ordered the complete evacuation of every major city. He has seen everything taken from him, so many times, and he’s never been able to do a thing about it.
He shoots. The bullet strikes the orcamancer in the lower leg, knocks her back, causes her to stumble and fall to her knees.
People laugh. The circle, smaller now, closes in.
She taps two fingers against the corner of her jaw. Someone gasps. They had been so convinced that she eschewed all technology, this possibility never entered their minds.
Metal rings against metal. Again they hear the polar bear roar. Louder now. They turn to see that it is unfettered, the cages fallen away from its hands and mouth. It shrieks and charges.
This is where the official record breaks down. Everyone leaves at this point, and swiftly. Journalist and freelance gawker alike exit. So, for that matter, does the recently dehanded woman who moments ago had been a mob leader. What’s left of her mob attempts to depart but is unsuccessful.
There are no cameras to capture the carnage.
Soq
Soq saw the slaughter and did not flinch.
It was their fifth time visiting the orcamancer. Lots of bored Qaanaaqians came to see her, either at the Sports Platform or at the Arm Six sloopyard where her boat was docked. Most went once and found the real thing far less interesting than the mythic warrior they’d been imagining. Only the obsessed came back again and again, the people for whom hate or fear or love won out, the people for whom she meant something. Soq had looked from face to face on each visit and wondered: Why is this one here? Why this one? Do they want to destroy her? Do they want to beg her for the gift of her nanites, a teaspoonful of blood that could turn them into something as awesome as she is?
And why, Soq wondered, am I here?
Sometimes people asked the Killer Whale Woman things, and they were always ignored. Most often they stood as silent as Soq did.
Soq arrived in the middle of the bloodbath. They almost got trampled in the sudden swift exodus of people up the stairs. When Soq got to the bottom and climbed into the bleachers, they got there just in time to see the bear break a man’s neck. A woman turned to run, and the bear’s paw raked down her back, tearing it open, pulling her backward and onto the ground, and then it stooped to tear out her throat.
It took less than eight minutes for the polar bear to kill the last of the people who had come to hurt the orcamancer. It played for a short while with a severed limb and then turned to face its traveling companion.
And—was that fear Soq saw, in the orcamancer’s eyes? How could that be? Weren’t they bonded? How did this work? Which of the stories were true? Hadn’t they known each other all their lives, been raised as siblings; didn’t they feel each other’s pain? But perhaps in the chaos of so much bloodshed, the wild animal could not be controlled. It took a step closer to her.
For reasons Soq did not understand, they were not afraid of the polar bear. They knew they should have been. But they also knew that there was a very good chance that the bear was about to eat the orcamancer, unless someone distracted it, and no one else was around to do the distracting, and the bear was far away, so maybe Soq would have time to escape—
“Hey!” Soq called, standing up in the bleachers. Thinking too late to calculate the distance from there to the exit, gauge how fast the bear could run, whether they stood a chance of making it out, whether the heavy door could be bolted to keep the bear from charging through and eating Soq.
It stopped, turned its head to look in Soq’s direction. Sat back onto its hind legs. Cocked its head. The orcamancer gasped. The bear did not resist when the orcamancer put the cages back onto its head and hands.
The orcamancer took off her hat and bowed to Soq. Her hair fell in a heavy intricate coil behind her. She pressed the button for the elevator. Waited patiently. With her polar bear. Then she turned and said something. Soq’s jaw buzzed, translating from Inuktitut-English Pidgin:
“I am in your debt.”
The first words anyone had heard this woman say, and she had said them to Soq! Blood covered the animal, and the killer whale woman was shining with sweat, and Soq had never seen anything so beautiful. I should go down there, say hello, start up a conversation, become best friends. Help her escape. Something. But Soq could not move, could barely breathe. It took an incredible effort to call out, “You’re welcome!” in the last second before the elevator whisked them away.
Kaev
Kaev had been hoping for something like what he felt from a fight. The adrenaline rush, the thrill of danger, the joy of abandoning the ego and embracing the body, the animal. But he’d gotten no pleasure from his soaking. Only guilt, and shame, and now the extra special gift of having to worry about getting arrested.