Blackfish City(39)
For the pharma corps, that was us. Us, and a handful of other communities of people who’d gotten terrible afflictions or terrifying gifts, or, more often, one that was actually the other. Deregulation had been ugly. People were tested on without their knowledge, or lied to about what was being tested and why.
We shouldn’t have existed. We were proof that somebody had been up to something terrible. And that somebody skillfully inflamed the passions of a bunch of fundamentalist gun nuts, talked about us as abominations, breaches of God’s law that mankind should have dominion over the animals, and of course those poor stupid fucks were only too happy to believe it, too eager to blame a bunch of people who were different and just wanted to be left alone. Ages ago, it had been the Immigrants, or the Blacks, always someone to push around, what this country was built on, I’ve taken everything from you and now I’m going to tell you it’s your neighbor’s fault because he looks different from you.
Kids at school, Ora working, and me out on the hunt, that’s when I felt the fear. That’s when I knew how helpless we were. I felt it all through me and I wanted to stay home, never let them go, stand in the doorway waiting with my weapon for the bad men and women who would dare try to hurt the ones I loved, even if I knew there were too many of them, that they had weapons we should have been terrified of, that I’d die swiftly.
A couple of traders, heading north, told us they’d seen the Plague ships. Dozens of pelts hanging from the sides. The skinned animal companions of our dead comrades.
“Could be a trap,” some hunters said, so most of them stayed behind. I was the only one left with an orca, the one with the best chance of scoring intel and escaping, or inflicting real damage if it came to a battle. They sent me and I didn’t say a word, not even when I held Ora and the babies to me and knew we might never see each other again. But that’s what we were, what we lived with, what those kids with cameras could never capture. That’s what we’d never let them see, because they had no right to it. No one did. Not them and not the people who would watch their work, the Whole World they were going to Tell, who would see us, and feel sad for us, and then go on merrily pretending the world wasn’t burning down around them.
We went south along the coast. The waters got worse the farther we went, thick with toxic sludge, the food scarcer. We never found any sign of the Plague ships. We turned around, went back. Went home. The last place home had been.
Maybe it had been a trap. A lie. But if it was, all it did for them was save my skin. Because when I got back to where I’d left them, I was the last of my kind.
No bodies. No humans, no animals. Lots of red and black blighting the landscape. Blood, and the charred remains of buildings. I found our bathroom mirror in the rubble, with the word Taastrup on it. In Ora’s handwriting. I chose to believe that she got out alive, took the two kids with her. Left behind our son’s polar bear, whom I found hidden in the basement of the schoolhouse. He must have done it, I thought—the boy, he hid his bear to keep it safe, because she would never have allowed them to be separated, she’d have known better. I shivered, then, to think of that kid’s life without the bear he’d been bonded to. And I swore I’d find her, find them.
We wept for a full day, Atkonartok and I. For our murdered kin. I lay on my stomach, on the ice, looking into black water. She circled. Each of us amplified the other’s pain, echoed it back and forth, until I thought it would split us in two. Only hunger saved us. Hunger stirred her savagery, which roused my own, which stopped our wailing.
I brought her armfuls of bloody snow, hacked-off pieces, shreds of clothing. Atkonartok could tell them apart, our people and the people who hurt them. She could single out their unique pheromonic signature, singular as a fingerprint. She smelled their bodies, their sweat, their hair, their waste, their stories. From their smells she could see their shape, their weight, whether they were young or old or weak or strong.
Forty attackers, total. Forty monsters to hunt. She could see their outlines, so I could too. And so we moved on. Looking for our lost, the ones whose bodies we did not find, who we knew escaped—and looking for those forty outlines.
Taastrup, first. All the way, I watched the skies. Spent more time staring at the air than I did watching the sea or the land I traveled over. Looking for a black-chested buzzard eagle.
I knew it might take forever. I knew that by the end of it, it might be me who got rescued by her. I knew it might take so long that by the time I found her, she wouldn’t be her anymore, and I wouldn’t be me.
We found many of those monsters. In the cities of the land and the cities of the sea. Sooner or later, if they were there to be found, Atkonartok would catch their scent. I broke them apart or pushed them into the sea for her to tear to slow tiny pieces. Some we learned things from. The names and locations of their comrades. Others had nothing to offer, but their fate was the same.
Revenge was not my mission, but each new slaughter soothed the grief and rage I felt at being unable to find her. Find them. Murder gave me the strength to keep going.
My sisters, my mothers, the whole long line of generations: They come with me. With us. We carry them inside us. Our ancestors never leave us. Ora knew that, tried to explain it to me. She said our people understood death and loss and the legacies of our forebears. She said that we never lose the people we love, not even when we want to, and that’s what the Western world had lost sight of, a lesson they forgot but we relearned, which is why the nanites didn’t kill us, didn’t drive us mad, gave us this gift, this curse.