Blackfish City(50)
“Thanks, brother,” Soq whispered.
He had everything, that poor sad fuck Soq had fucked, and he was so empty inside that Soq had to fight back the urge to hunt him down and give him a hug.
Ankit
Ankit spent three hours shivering across the grid from the entrance to the Yi He Tuan Arena. Watching every face that went in and every face that came out. Looking for her brother. The screens flickered: Hao Wufan’s upcoming fight canceled. A damn shame, she thought. The Next Big Thing already a thing of the past, since those all-boy-sex-party photos surfaced, and the audio of his lunatic ramblings, drugged out of his mind or possibly suffering from early-stage breaks.
The dossier from her contact at Health hadn’t had much to offer, but she’d learned a little more about her brother. That he was sick, some unspecified form of brain damage. She had a file now. Something to hand him. He could take his time, process the information. And she wouldn’t be frightened if he howled or hooted or got upset. She knew what she was dealing with.
First she’d have to find him. She was pretty sure fighters didn’t hang around arenas when they weren’t scheduled to fight, but it was the closest thing to a lead she had. Maybe he’d come by to meet with a manager or promoter, pick up a payment, practice on the beams, train at a secret gym or battle society somewhere inside.
It had seemed like a solid enough plan when she had arrived. But now she was freezing and hungry and her feet were sore.
She called up a photo of him on her screen. She could see it, she thought: some sibling similarity around the eyes, a similar scoop to the sides of the face. And maybe they’d had the same nose once, before his had been broken a bunch of times.
She leaned against the wall beside a red pipe. An old vagrant trick, soaking up the heat it radiated. But after another hour, all the warmth in the world wasn’t enough to distract from the ache in her feet and the conviction that this was a fruitless way to go about finding him. She turned and headed for the Hub.
A girl cawed above her. Imitating crows: an old scaler taunt to frighten pedestrians. Ankit cawed back, prompting startled laughter.
We miserable grown-ups weren’t always groundbound, she thought, and then felt happy that she still spoke scaler-speak. Sort of.
Another revelation from that costly dossier, one she’d been avoiding examining. Sharp, prickly, cutting up her hands each time she tried to get a hold of it: before coming to Qaanaaq, her mother had spent time in Taastrup. The same place the early cases of the breaks kept pinging back to. Did that mean something? Could her mother have contracted a sort of proto-breaks, decades before the first cases started cropping up? Had her brother? Could she have been the subject of some experiment, or a survivor of some accident?
Patient 57/301. No name; no match in any genetic identification bank. Imprisoned in the Cabinet for thirty years. Top-level classified status; authorization that could only come from one of the sponsor nations—China, which meant it could be anyone with a ton of money; Thai officials typically couldn’t be bought off like that.
No diagnosis to appeal, no doctor to hunt down and punish. Waist-deep in bloody fantasies of how she’d hurt the person who did this, she noticed something. Someone staring at her.
A woman, with beautiful wind-scoured light brown skin, just a few meters away. She sat—sat?—in the sea. And then she rose, and Ankit saw she wasn’t sitting in the water at all, she was riding, riding something as black and deadly and magnificent as the sea itself. The orca turned its head and stared at her, stared into her, and so did the woman, and Ankit felt gutted, stabbed through, harpooned—
“She remembers you,” she said, the famous Blackfish Woman.
She was real. And she was here. And she was talking to Ankit.
Ankit said, after a very long time, “What,” and her voice was much smaller than she ever remembered it being.
“She has a very good memory. Thirty years later, she remembers someone’s smell.”
Ankit stepped closer, squatted down. Her breath would not budge. It stuck in her lungs like lead. She shut her eyes, tried to remember. Cast her mind back as far as she could. She recalled strange rooms, cramped spaces, fear, someone’s hand across her mouth to stop her from shrieking. Footsteps overheard. Harsh male laughter. Nightmare glimpses, nothing new, things she’d carried with her and ascribed to filthy group homes and overcrowded nursery boats, things that fit right in with the long line of better-remembered ugliness that Qaanaaq’s foster care system had given her. And when she began to see wide vistas of white snow, smell smoke, hear distant animal bellowing—gunshots—the wails and the cries of the dying—how could she know whether that was memory or imagination, the nanobonder genocide so widely written about, reimagined in movies, subject of epic poems and endless analysis?
She opened her eyes again, stared into the face of this impossible creature. Breathed out. “You’re her mate. My mother’s partner.”
The orcamancer nodded. “I’m your mother, too.”
“Of course,” Ankit said, awkward, uncertain about what was the proper protocol here. An embrace? A bow, a handshake, tears, wailing and the rending of garments?
“We’ve been going up and down every Arm of this city for days. Weeks, maybe. Human time markers don’t stick in my mind. Our minds. Sniffing at the air. Looking for your scent. This city, and a hundred others before it.”