Blackfish City(47)
Soq leaned into the wind, descending the slide and cleaving the vortex like a machete blade, Go’s: a weapon, a tool, a soldier, unencumbered by the emotional baggage that made everyone else so miserable.
At least they’d gotten a damn good traffic trawling app out of the experience.
Once the briefcase was safely in the hands of its twitchy, strung-out recipient, freshly wealthy Soq settled down for a ginger beer on a heated replica of a Bangkok floating market. Someplace Soq had passed a thousand times and never been able to afford. A maddening smell came from below them, where a chubby woman who couldn’t have been more than five years removed from the Chao Phraya River splatted noodles down into a skillet. Geothermal heat swirled around them, but every minute or so the wind shifted slightly and a cold gust sent a chill up Soq’s spine. Incense burned beneath the table. Purely ornamental, here, with no insects to scatter the way it would back in Thailand.
How did Soq know so much about Thailand? With a start, they sat up. Had they fallen asleep? Dreamed? Sense impressions swarmed their mind, vivid memories of things they’d never experienced. Out of nowhere, their head ached exquisitely.
The pad Thai was the best Soq had ever eaten, but at the same time it tasted like a pale echo of something else. Fresher spices, the flesh of richer fish. Bangkok, the capital of the world, the heart of the country that weathered the global storm of rising sea levels better than any other. Home of the mightiest military, the most fiercely defended borders. A source of constant fascination to Soq, as it was to many in Qaanaaq, the way London would have been to a colonial American—the colonized’s distant, foolish pride in its patron commonwealth. But now it felt like a place Soq had been.
I am a spy, Soq thought later, making their way down Arm Eight. High on good food, pockets not empty, Soq was approaching some ill-defined idea of “the good life” that they’d spent their whole life striving for. Confidential agent. Criminal mastermind. One of this city’s secret rulers. The black leather armband marked Soq as Go’s, as invincible.
Soq used Fill’s program to troll for recent orcamancer sightings. One was only a couple of hours old. Soq let the vortex take them in that direction.
No orca, unsurprisingly. Killer whales don’t stay still. They circle; they hunt. Soq did a sweep of the immediate area, and then widened the sweep. How much of this came from movies versus books versus life experience, they couldn’t say. All the tangled threads of Soq’s life had finally resolved into a pattern. A texture. They wandered through the under-building caverns, emptying their mind and letting their body go where it wanted. Soq had stumbled into a part of Arm Eight that they’d never seen before, the kind of place they’d have worked hard to avoid not so long ago. The smell of bottom-grade trough meat was thick and pungent in the air, and the few familiar glyphs graffitied onto the walls and pylons belonged to the city’s savagest gangs and societies.
But now Soq wasn’t afraid. Who would fuck with one of Go’s drones?
This guy, apparently. Some battered fighter dude who had been doing pull-ups in the chilly twilight from the low-hanging crossbeam of a building support platform, who dropped when he saw Soq. His hands made fists. “She sent you?” he said, reddening at the sight of Soq’s armband.
Something—roared. A shadow moved in the dark forest of building stilts—came forward, grew brighter. Roared again. A polar bear. The polar bear.
“She didn’t send me,” Soq said, throat dry. Knowing it wouldn’t matter. Whatever grudge this guy had against Go, he and his polar bear would not be talked down from this peak of rage. The bear ran forward, stood over Soq. Roared again. It smelled like rotten sea lion meat, and something else. Something mammalian, something close to human. It hadn’t been hostile with Soq before, but now it was with its human, and its human was furious. With Soq. The bear lowered its head, its mouth wide enough to fit around Soq’s face and then bite it right off.
Soq shut their eyes.
The bear’s nose pressed against Soq’s face. It sniffed, tracing a wet smear from side to side.
Soq decided that it was a trick, to get them to open their eyes, because the bear wanted to see the mortal terror in the moment that it ended Soq’s life. Soq would not be fooled. They did not open their eyes.
“What the hell?” the man said.
“I thought so,” said a voice—female, heavily accented, gravelly and wise. The orcamancer.
For once, Soq thought. For once I followed a sighting and actually found her.
“Thought what? Go sent this little asshole to kill me, and—”
“This little asshole is your child, Kaev.”
Soq still didn’t open their eyes.
City Without a Map: Archaeology
The beer is weak and has a salty taste to it. The ceiling is low. You’re hungry. Someone vomited at a table near yours, and no one is coming to clean it up. The only windows in the place have green-black ocean water on the other side of the glass. Your thoughts are melancholy—
—What will save us from this gray city, these long nights, this wind that cleaves memory from bone, the cold and wet that will never forsake us, these dappled shadows falling on aging faces? What will bring us joy? What will keep the fire burning in each of us?—
But then they take the stage, women with guitars and synthesizers and percussion instruments, and a man on bass, and they smile, and start. And you smile, shut your eyes, let the songs happen to you.