Blackfish City(34)

“Untie him,” Soq said.

Dao bowed and did so. “I’ll be outside,” he said to the man. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The guy was young. Bearded, burly; his head wrapped in an American flag bandanna. It was faded and filthy.

“Tell me about the orcamancer,” Soq said.

His mouth opened like he had something smart to say, but then he thought better of it. “Who are you?”

“My name is Soq. I work for an entrepreneur here in Qaanaaq.”

“Uh-huh, entrepreneur. And your people brought me all the way here to talk about the person who killed my parents. Why is that?”

Soq was about to answer, but then realized—they didn’t know why Go was so interested. Dao said Go didn’t want any unknown variables introduced into the equation of her power play, but what if that was untrue, or half-true? What if Soq’s information gathering would be used to harm the orcamancer? Now wasn’t the moment to ponder that question too seriously. And in any event, one of the many life skills Soq had learned in foster care: the best way to get information out of someone is to tell them what they want to hear. “Maybe my employer sees her as a threat. Maybe she has a vendetta against her for something. Maybe she wants to destroy her, and your information could help us achieve that.”

He smiled. “I was at work. I clean lobster pots. I came home—my parents, they brought this boat with them from America—and they were . . . dead. My grandparents, too. And she was still there. Like she was waiting for me. Sitting right where you’re standing now.”

Soq looked around. So this was where it happened. They shut their eyes and tried to picture it.

“It stank in here, so bad. She was sitting on the floor, covered in blood, looking like she was praying, or meditating, or, I don’t know, taking a fucking nap.”

“The reports all said she hit you with the butt of her staff, and left.”

“That’s right.”

“She didn’t say anything to you first? She waited for you, knocked you out, and then left? Why wait for you at all?”

He looked up at Soq, his eyes steely. Bracing himself for pain.

“She didn’t say anything to you?”

He shook his head.

“Hey,” Soq said, pulling up a stray chair, scorched battered white plastic. Had it been there, then? “Come on. Help us out. We can help avenge them. Any little bit of information you might have, we could use it. Maybe she threatened to hurt you, if you told anyone—”

He spat out: “She didn’t. She wanted me to tell.”

“So tell me. You’re safe now. We’ll protect you.”

He laughed, and Soq knew he was right to laugh. “You can’t. My family, they weren’t soft. They had guns. Weapons. Lots of them. And they’d . . . done things. Vicious things. To survive. But she took them out easy. Without using her damn . . . fucking . . . animals. Whatever she wants, whatever she came here for, she’s going to get it. Fuck any entrepreneurs who stand in her way.”

“What did she tell you?”

He nodded. “She said my family deserved what she’d done to them, but I didn’t. Told me to make sure everybody knew it.”

“. . . And?”

His face, a practiced mask of masculine hardness, sagged. Reddened. Broke.

“She asked about my uncle,” he said, in gasps, like he was about to cry. “Asked where she could find him.”

“And you didn’t tell her. At first.”

“At first. But she . . .”

“She hurt you,” Soq said.

“She hurt me. She threatened . . .”

“To hurt you worse.”

“Yeah.”

“So you told her. Where to find your uncle.”

He was weeping now. “He was working an ice ship. I told her the name of it. That’s all.”

“And then you heard . . .”

“I heard he was killed. Week, two weeks later. He was all alone on the glacier, working an ice saw, and they said he must have fallen . . . Forty stories high, that glacier. Onto ice. Happens all the time, they said. And he’d been out there for a couple of days by the time they found him. Said those bite marks, those missing chunks, anything could have gotten to him after he fell.”

Soq stepped closer. Tapped his bandanna. “Your family—they’re from the States.”

“Proud Americans,” he said. “Always will be.”

“Even when there is no America?”

“It’s in our hearts.”

Soq imagined the hearts of his parents, and grandparents, skewered and plucked from their bodies through a shattered rib cage and stomped on.

“Religious?”

“Sure.”

Of course. They participated in the nanobonder slaughter. That’s why they were butchered. Soq swooned to think that the Killer Whale Woman was strong and wise enough to find and punish the guilty, even decades later.

“What did they do, I wonder? During the migration?”

He sniffed, a wet thick sound. “What they had to do.”

“Including killing people?”

“You soft fucking city people can’t even imagine. What it was like. Everybody trying to kill everybody. Blacks against whites, immigrants against citizens. If you didn’t have guns—lots of them—you were going to lose everything you loved.”