Blackfish City(26)
He’d cried, after the first one. A bureaucrat, a flabby flimsy thing who felt truly safe only when behind a desk. He’d probably never been close to violence in his entire life. Kaev tried to tell himself that maybe the man was pure malevolence, merrily authorizing mass suffering—rent raises, embargo orders, strategic pharmaceutical restrictions—but he couldn’t diminish how wretched it felt, the look on the guy’s face when he thought he was about to be murdered.
The second one, he wouldn’t feel bad about.
“He goes by Abijah,” Go had told him. “But then he always tells everyone that it’s a nom de guerre. And gets disappointed when no one cares enough to ask any follow-up questions.”
Kaev recognized him. A slum enforcer. The muscle that came to kick you out of your home if you ignored an eviction notice, or roust you from your nook when the sub-subletter you were paying decided he wanted to clean house. Nasty thugs. Arsonists, torturers, evidence planters—effective enforcers had to be jacks of all the sordid, ugly trades that went into maintaining good tenant-landlord relations in a city where the landlords called all the shots. Many were failed beam fighters, and all of them were obsessed with the sport. He’d seen Abijah at the Yi He Tuan training center, watching from the bleachers while he practiced. Making awkward conversation. Flexing his muscles, complaining of soreness from a rough day, like there could be any comparing his job and Kaev’s.
“This one needs to be quiet,” Go said. “The first one had to make a very clear statement, but this one needs to be . . . more uncertain. It should unsettle the target—your victim’s employer—but create just enough doubt that the target doesn’t feel confident unleashing a violent response.”
“And. Who.” Deep breath, Kaev. You can do this. It’s just human speech. Everybody does it. “Who’s. The. The. The target?”
She’d stroked his face, and laughed, and dismissed him.
Kaev watched Abijah walk down Arm Eight. Tight clothes, like many insecure people who wanted to show off their muscles wore. Big boots that gave him an extra inch of height. Go’s target had to be a shareholder. What other common ground could there be between the bureaucrat and the slum thug? Kaev could see the fear in people’s eyes when they saw the enforcer pass. How their faces tightened. So he was well known out on Eight. He’d fucked up a lot of people. Kaev felt his lip curling, a snarl he could not keep in check.
“Look!” someone called, and pointed to the sea.
A giant onyx blade, seeming to be as big as a person, slid through the surface of the water. The orca, Kaev thought, and felt the hairs of his neck prickle. It kept rising, and there she was, straddling its back: the orcamancer.
She is real.
She was so close. So big. He wondered what her black clothes were made of. He shut his eyes and felt a strange flare, like remembered warmth.
“She comes through here every other day, seems like,” someone said.
“Wonder she doesn’t get hypothermia, out there in the ocean.”
“You got to be human to get hypothermia.”
The Arm Eight rabble continued the debate, but Abijah was oblivious, did not see her. Did not slow down. Kaev watched until it was clear the orcamancer would not be resurfacing this side of the Arm, then hurried to catch up with his quarry.
Abijah entered the gully between two cafés on tall stilts, unzipping already. His actions exaggerated. He wanted everyone to know he was going to go piss or fuck something.
Here you go, Kaev. An easy one. Duck down and sneak between the stilts so no one sees you entering the gully, sneak up behind him, knock him the fuck out. Push him into the sea.
Kaev did not duck down. The orcamancer would not have attacked like that. She never hid. Whatever she’d come to do, she wasn’t trying to be secret about it.
“Hey,” he said when Abijah stepped back onto the grid.
“Hey!” Abijah said, recognizing him, unable to place him.
“Kaev,” he said, loudly, so the crowd between the two cafés could hear. He extended his left hand. “We met at the arena gym, remember?”
“Yeah!” his quarry said, smiling, and paused for an instant, thrown off by the unexpected hand, before extending his left to take Kaev’s.
When he had it, Kaev pulled. Hard. He swung his body around, letting his right shoulder lead, swinging his elbow into his opponent.
A killing blow. The kind of move you never use in a beam fight, because it’s unsportsmanlike. A thing you keep up your sleeve for those hopefully-never occasions when it’s you or the other fighter. Kaev pulled back at the last instant, striking the man’s right clavicle instead of his windpipe. He heard it snap. Felt the man drop.
Pain incapacitated Abijah. He screamed. He bellowed. He sobbed. He tried to ask, Why? Thugs never learned what fighters learned—how to battle through pain—because they only ever hurt people who couldn’t fight back.
Kaev looked up. A couple hundred pairs of eyes were on him. They clapped. They cheered. They held up screens to capture the moment.
Kaev smiled. Already he was running the scenarios, anticipating the ugliness that was in store for him, the revenge Go would take for his disobeying her, the punishment Safety would impose when they caught him. But there was another arena skill he had up his sleeve: how to put all his fears for the future into a box and briefly forget about them.