Blackfish City(31)

To maybe possibly somehow get her out.





Kaev


So. Now you’re on the run. Was it worth it?

Safety would certainly have ID’d him from the clips of his assault on Abijah. The crowd calling his name. By now they could be camped out across the street from his shipping container, waiting to arrest him. Not to mention Go, who would be furious, possibly furious enough to scoop him up before Safety got him and spend a day or a week carving him up before handing over whatever was left for arrest.

Yes. Yes, it was worth it.

And then there was Go’s target, the powerful man or woman who employed his two victims. Whoever they were, they’d have minders, watchers, microdrones maybe, and they would have figured out who he was as well, and were even now working out an abduction plan, were engaging the services of an old crusty interrogator from one of the fallen superpower states to torture out the name of who had hired him.

At this, at least, Kaev smiled. He’d give them Go in a heartbeat.

But it wouldn’t help; they wouldn’t trust a name easily given; they’d still have to torture him to verify the truth of what he said.

But that wouldn’t matter. Pain he could handle. He’d had plenty. They’d still be after Go at the end of it, and maybe they’d get her.

Kaev walked. Up and down Arm Six, and then Arm Seven. Head full of screaming; the roaring of savage beasts; the orgasmic cry of the crowd when the fight was at its peak, when he’d given them something beautiful, something to help them break free of the moment, their lives, their city, the weight of their slowly dying bodies . . . And what had he gotten for his troubles? Add up all the joy and pleasure he’d brought to the people of this city, and what had he received in exchange for it? Barely enough money to eke out a subsistence living. He wasn’t angry, not at them. They didn’t owe him anything. They paid their money; they had their own troubles. It was the city he was mad at. The city that he loved. He wanted to punch something, punch everything, pin it down and snap its neck, this squirming tentacled mass of thoughts and whispers and memories and contradictory beliefs that screamed and gibbered inside his head.

Back down Arm Seven; through the Hub; onto Arm Eight. A slide messenger sped past, ululating all the way. He could hear himself yip and caw, could not make himself stop.

Someone was singing in a high window. People were making love all around him, in the darkness of bedrooms and alleyways and coffin hotels. People were dying. They crowded him, pressed on his skull with a more-than-physical pressure. He wanted to scream, but he was good at not screaming. He spent most of his time not screaming even though he wanted to.

He walked.

And then: he stopped.

Because the pressure ceased. The screaming and the singing evaporated. The fog lifted. Peace flooded him, a peace like nothing he’d ever known. A quiet. Shivers climbed his spine, building in intensity as they went.

He looked around. Saw no one. For such an overcrowded place, Arm Eight had a weird way of feeling completely empty sometimes. Boats rose and fell with the waves on his right, and on his left were a series of squat strutted buildings on a floating platform.

He took a few steps farther out onto the Arm and felt the peace subside just the slightest bit. Felt the squirming thing in his head start to gurgle again.

Kaev returned to where he’d been. Took a breath; basked in the silence. Then took several steps back, toward the Hub. Again the gurgling rose inside him.

So. Just one spot. Okay. Kaev didn’t wonder why or try to investigate what, exactly, was having this effect on him. Poke around too much at something good and you tend to find something bad. Depleted uranium, probably, the weaponized stuff scraped from the wreckage of Chernobyl or Hanul, causing blissful sensations as it killed off brain cells by the thousands. If so, better to let it kill him swiftly and pleasantly. So he sat down on the freezing metal of the curb, beside the clamps where the building platform was docked, and hugged his knees to his chest to conserve heat, and shut his eyes, and let hot tears of happiness warm his face.





Ankit


Ankit began with the easy stuff. The human stuff. She called her contact at Health, second assistant to the director. A sweet boy, one of a couple dozen agency flunkies she forced herself to be friends with, sending regifted tickets or day passes that had been given to Fyodorovna, even meeting up for drinks or karaoke or isolation tanking when her calendar reminded her it had been a while.

“One of my constituents’ mother-in-law got in trouble,” she said. “Sad story, really. Locked up. The Cabinet. I felt so bad for her . . . and she’s been a loyal donor . . .”

Joshi promised to look into it.

Next, she called her woman at Safety. Spun the same sob story. If there had been a violent incident behind her mother ending up in the Cabinet, Safety might have a record of it.

“We don’t use Health’s numbering system,” she told Ankit. “So that patient number won’t be helpful to us.”

“Really?” Ankit said, surprised. “Agencies don’t coordinate that kind of thing? Seems inefficient.”

“When things are inefficient, there’s usually a reason for it. Things are only supposed to run so well in Qaanaaq. Efficiency is expensive. Helping people get what they’re entitled to, solving problems quickly, that sort of thing is costly.”

“Fascinating,” Ankit said, unfascinated, and angry at her for the civics lesson. “But if there was a Safety case that ended in the subject being confined to the Cabinet, you may have her patient number in the file, yeah?”