Blackfish City(33)
Soq
Blackfish Woman was a ghost. Glimpsed from afar. Impossible to touch. Every day new sightings. In the water, on boats, on the grid. With the polar bear or astride her whale or alone, but never without her blade. Always moving. Since the slaughter on the Sports Platform she’d been impossible to pin down. If anyone knew where she slept, where she moved her rig to, money or fear or respect kept their mouths shut.
Soq made maps. Drew lines connecting the dots of the places she’d been seen. Looked for patterns. Found none.
Soq collected pictures. Soq asked questions. Noodle vendors and ice scrapers and boatmen and algae vat stirrers were all only too happy to talk Soq’s ear off with every little detail of their sightings. Nor was Soq the only one asking them to. All of Qaanaaq was talking about the orcamancer. Soq wondered how many of them were asking from simple curiosity and how many were like Soq, working for someone else, crime bosses or shareholders or the intelligence agencies of foreign nations, for whom the orcamancer represented an unsettling, inexplicable, existential threat.
There was one thing Soq knew, that none of them knew. That Go didn’t know. That Soq kept secret, without knowing why.
Killer Whale Woman was afraid of the polar bear. The polar bear would kill her if it had the chance.
What did that mean?
Impossible to research her without delving deep into who the nanobonded were, how their tech or magic worked. But what was real and what was lies, legend, misunderstanding? Many sources said they could each bond to only one animal. Others told stories of women bonded to whole flocks of birds, a man who headed a pack of wolves. At any rate, killer whale woman was clearly not bonded to the polar bear. So . . . why was she traveling with it?
All of this was extracurricular. Soq still made slide deliveries. Dao had not discussed a pay rate for Soq’s research when he handed over the assignment.
Nor did he mention one four days later, when he buzzed Soq.
“Progress report,” he barked. “What have you got?”
“A whole lot of not very much,” Soq said, stopping at the entrance to Arm Three. They kicked at the cylinders set into the ground, the thick forest of bollards that could be raised in times of trouble to divert demonstrations or thin out unruly crowds. Soq delivered a long list of scraps, so flimsy that they felt compelled to apologize for it.
“That’s fine,” Dao said. “That’s excellent, actually.”
“No, it’s not,” Soq said. “I’ve got nothing. Nothing Go couldn’t find out herself by doing some half-assed web searches.”
“What would it take, to get more?” Dao asked.
Soq laughed. “If money was no object I’d say send me to Nuuk. That’s the last grid city she went to before coming here. Killed a couple of families of boat people. Let one guy live. Allegedly. Number one lesson learned here is that nothing is ever certain when it comes to her.”
There was a long pause, like maybe Dao was writing something down.
“So . . . are you going to send me to Nuuk?”
Dao laughed. “No, Soq. She doesn’t want you traveling yet.”
Yet. Soq trembled at the promise in that word.
Two days later, though, Jeong pinged Soq an address. “Not a delivery,” he said. “Dao says it’s a meeting.”
“Huh,” Soq said.
“When did you get so important that you get to have meetings?” Jeong said. His chuckle was not without pride.
“When I became a spy,” Soq said. Their sense of power lasted all the way down Arm Seven, to the address Jeong pinged, past a blue-striped monkey fighting with an otter and a wild-haired woman asking passersby to help burn it all down, and onto a decent-sized old houseboat and in the door, and then burst like a bubble at the sight of a man strapped to a chair.
“You made it, good,” said Dao, playing with a shape-memory polymer perched on a windowsill. He tapped at his screen and it transformed from a bird to a ballerina, then he grabbed it and crushed it in his fist. “I brought you what you asked for.”
Bruises crisscrossed the man’s face. There was blood on his clothes. “What I . . . asked for?”
“The survivor. From Nuuk.”
“Shit, Dao,” Soq said. “What the fuck did you do to this guy? I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt—”
And Soq knew, hearing the words come out, how stupid they sounded. Dao at least did Soq the favor of not saying any of the things Soq knew he could have said. Did you think working for a crime boss would be bloodless, painless? Did you think your hands would never get dirty? What did you think we do here, exactly?
Dao did say: “He’s yours now. See what you can get from him just by being nice, and call me if you need some help or advice being . . . not so nice.”
“And then you’ll . . . ?”
“Shoot him in the head; take him home and give him a bubble bath; I don’t know, Soq. We’ll have that conversation when we have it.”
Dried fish guts caked the floor. Crab or lobster shells cracked underfoot. On an ancient wooden table, a methane burner and a wok and two green glass bottles. Did the boat belong to him, the poor beat-up man bound in front of Soq? Had Dao’s soldiers dragged it all the way from Nuuk? Or was it one of a thousand syndicate hiding places here in Qaanaaq, perfect for carrying out all kinds of illicit activity?