Blackfish City(37)

Animals exist in the moment. They don’t worry about whether they will bleed to death, whether they will die. The wounds were minor. Their enemies fell swiftly, terribly.





Fill


Round doors. Frosted windows that let in light but nothing else. Leather straps, stinking of the fear-sweat of strangers.

The breaks caused dreams to creep into waking life, made him wonder whether anything he was seeing was really there, whether anything he remembered was really his—but they also changed his dreams. Stretched them out, tightened their walls. A short nap might leave him with hours and hours’ worth of remembered dreams. And Fill could no longer wake up from a nightmare, no matter how hard he tried.

Injections. Isolation. A dark shape flapping past the window.

This one was the worst. An instant before, he had been dozing on a bench in a greenhouse park boat, and then—blink of the eyes—he was here. Confined, chained, bound like Prometheus. Strapped to a bed, knowing in his gut that no one was coming to rescue him. Praying for it anyway.

The Cabinet—it had to be. Days and days of it. Months. Years.

Who was he? These memories belonged to someone. They had to. He ran his fingers over his face, tried to piece together what he looked like, but his mind was numb with pain and loneliness. He could remember himself. His name. His research: the Disappeared; shareholder privilege; no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.

Most people see only one Qaanaaq. They live their lives inside of it. The Arm where they reside, the nook where they work, the friends and family who make up their world. A private Qaanaaq, uniquely theirs, shaped by history and mental health and their socioeconomic positioning. Some people manage to move to a second Qaanaaq, when fortunes shift in one direction or another. Perhaps it will be a better Qaanaaq; usually it is an uglier one.

You and I are fortunate. We can see so many. We can move from city to city, Qaanaaq to Qaanaaq, see what our neighbors see, step into their stories. Randomly at first, too fast to control, but soon you will learn to summon them like memories.

Something else was happening to him. Something more exhilarating than frightening. He was hearing City Without a Map differently now. He no longer felt so much like an outsider. Sometimes he even thought the broadcasts were meant for him.

Maybe they were wrong, all of them, imagining it to be a guide for new arrivals. Maybe the broadcasts weren’t meant for immigrants at all. What if they were meant for people with the breaks, whether they were newcomers or not?

Somewhere before dawn, his jaw buzzed.

“What do you know about the Reader Hunters?” Barron asked, his voice excited, attenuated.

“Waste of time,” Fill said, deciding not to get indignant over being called so fucking early. “City Without a Map aficionados who make it their business to hunt down the people who narrate the episodes, in the hopes that talking to them will help them track down the origins of the broadcast.”

“You don’t think that’s intriguing?”

“I think it’s unlikely to yield anything helpful. And even if you could track one down, I have to imagine that the Author instructed them to never reveal their origins. Or that there are double blinds in place, and they’ve never even had any interaction with the Author.”

“Perhaps,” Barron said. “But wouldn’t you like to try? If you could track down a Reader?”

“Of course.”

“Well. I have one.”

“You . . . found a Reader?”

Barron made an affirmative noise. Fill said nothing. His mouth felt dry. He drank coffee. It did not help. Why was his heart so loud? “You . . . yourself?”

“A friend of mine, from one of the forums I’m part of. A total coincidence, really. A casual listener, he had just heard a broadcast, and then went to a fruit vendor, and when the woman opened her mouth, he knew.”

“If that’s true, and he published her location and identity, she’d already be besieged by City devotees. By the time we got to her . . .”

“That’s just it. He didn’t publish it. He told me directly.”

This felt too good to be true, but Fill was feeling melodramatic, self-pitying, heedless of consequence. He got the alleged Reader’s address and agreed to meet Barron there.

The dream again. Plunged back into it, like the floor opened up and dropped him into the frigid sea. Shifting, speeding up, coming to a stop. Whoever they were, this person whose memories he was locked into, things had changed, for her, ten years after arriving there. Her isolation ended. She was let into the light. Change in staff; change in policy; an obscure order from inscrutable software. Access to common areas, supervised at first, and then not. Conversations. Friends. A slate, even—unnetworkable, but loaded with approved texts, and a stylus for drawing. Fill watched thousands of sketches shuffle past. Birds, over and over.

Eagle, flying. Eagle standing over its nest. Eagle falling.

Grief: crippling, murderous. Pain like nothing he’d ever felt before. Pain—and guilt.

This was real. People lived like this. In his city, the one that belonged to him, the one that had fed and pampered him, given him everything he ever desired, the city his grandfather had helped build.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was, and he screamed it, and that was when he woke up.





Masaaraq