Blackfish City(45)
They crawled out backward, for there was too little room to turn around. “A fascinating creature, is she not?” Barron said as they stood blinking their eyes in the relative brightness of the dim underbelly of the flat-bottom boat.
“How do you not want to learn more about what she meant?” Fill said, grabbing Barron’s sleeve. “She said she was cured! Of the breaks!”
“You said that,” Barron said. “I don’t know what she was trying to say, or whether the poor creature could tell the truth even if she wanted to. But you, in your damn hurry to—”
“I’ll talk to my grandfather,” Fill said, chastened, already turning on his heel, desperate to be gone from here, from Barron, from City Without a Map, from the abominable ways that caring about something opens you up to hurt. “I’ll let you know what he says.”
Barron was saying something, but he did not turn to hear what it was.
He decided he did not want to go home. For just one night, he wanted to slip away from his life. He went to his grandfather’s other apartment, the one he’d kept empty for all these years.
What had happened there? he wondered. What was so special about it? Who had died there; what torrid love affair or pivotal business deal had his grandfather conducted in it? Or did it mean nothing to the old man? An asset on a screen, one of Qaanaaq’s legendary empties? Walking in, it felt so different from the warm safe home his grandparents had built, the place his grandfather lived alone now. This one was stark, cold, austere—
And occupied.
“Hey,” said the boy playing with a shape-memory polymer at the kitchen table.
“What are you doing here?” Fill asked, but smiling, because the boy was beautiful. Butch haircut, broad spike-studded shoulders, a refugee face with the skeptical expression of a hardened Qaanaaqian. Fill stepped closer. Smelled him, like slide grease and star anise, and saw that maybe he was not a boy at all.
“Friend asked me to watch the place,” the kid said, and Fill sat at the table across from him. Them?
“But it’s not your friend’s place,” Fill said. Boy or girl, or some other majestic thing altogether, Fill shut his eyes against the flood of desire that washed over him. The danger of the situation was every bit as arousing as the person before him. He should have turned and left, called Safety, called his grandfather. He should have remembered that he had the breaks.
“No. My friend thought it was empty. Is it yours?”
“Not exactly,” Fill said.
Pornography writhed and danced in his peripheral vision. He opened his mouth, intending to say something seductive or submissive or something, but the pornography was growing more frantic, more bizarre, the pretty boys becoming monsters, the ground beneath him bubbling, and he stepped forward, still smiling, and fell to the floor.
Soq
I should have fucking left. Stepped daintily over his stupid body while he was unconscious and stomped my ass out of here.
But Soq hadn’t left when the rich kid fell to the floor in front of them. Soq had rushed over, checked his pulse, gotten him a glass of water, sat with him for the sixty endless seconds it took him to wake up. Cradled his head in their lap, been kind and nurturing while the kid emerged from the brief infancy of post-unconsciousness.
Mostly, Soq told themself, because they didn’t want this little prick waking up alone, remembering Soq’s face, calling Safety on them, saying he got jumped by a home invader.
But now here they were, an hour later, sitting on the floor like kids at a sleepover in an old movie, drinking soda and eating krill chips delivered by slide messengers, debating where to get noodles from.
“You have to eat noodles in the first fifteen minutes,” Soq told Fill. “It’s just basic food chemistry. The heat is still cooking them, and in fifteen minutes they’re mush. We should go out to a stall somewhere.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Fill said. “And I don’t want to go anywhere. Let’s get them delivered.”
“Idiot, you can’t get noodles delivered. Are you not paying attention to me?”
The kid had a sense of humor, and some serious self-doubt, so the two of them got along great. Fill was less than a year older than Soq, and infinitely more naive about absolutely everything but sex, in which subject they were more or less evenly versed.
“I can get noodles delivered,” he said. “Watch.”
Fill dialed, promised a massive amount of money if they could have the noodles in his hands within five minutes of the moment they left the wok. Clicked off, smiling in triumph.
“Of course they’ll tell you it’s five minutes,” Soq grumbled, but Soq was also excited by his confidence, by the options that unlimited money opened up, by the previously unimaginable prospect of decent noodles being delivered.
“I guess we’ll know when we take a bite,” Fill said. “Since you’re such a noodle-quality fussbudget.”
“Yeah,” Soq said. “I guess we will.”
Turned out they were both obsessed with traffic trawling, following currents of attention to find the latest bubbling-up art and news being shared among Qaanaaq’s million subgroups. They compared bots, shared the software they both used to uncover new trends, swapped archaeology dubs and ancient Sunken World footage and the photo archives or instant messenger logs of long-dead strangers. Fill had the best programs money could buy, slick, swift, terrifying tools that turned up stuff that made Soq’s jaw drop, but Soq had gnarly, unpredictable Frankensteined software concoctions they’d found at the Night Market and Fill seemed just as excited by those as Soq was by his.