Blackfish City(51)

The woman’s face—her mother’s face—her other mother’s face—was terrifying in its rawness. It hid nothing. It refused to hide. It was bare, alien, hostile to how humans behaved. More orca than person. Ankit’s cheeks reddened with emotions, and they were not all joy and love. She also felt fear. Fear of this woman, who cared nothing for social niceties or Qaanaaq or the safe life Ankit had fought tooth and nail to carve out for herself there.

“My name is Ankit. Was that my name, before?”

She shook her head.

“What was my name?”

“It’s not important now. Some other time, perhaps.” She got off the whale, climbed up onto the grid. Extended her arm stiffly, like a foreigner unaccustomed to the practice. “My name is Masaaraq.”

They shook hands. When Masaaraq let go, she stepped forward with alarming speed to swamp Ankit in a fierce bear hug.

They were exactly the same size.

“And my mother? What’s her name? All these years, I’ve never known. She’s a number, to them.”

Masaaraq looked around, as if suspicious of invisible eavesdroppers. Outsiders, especially from the underdeveloped parts of the Sunken World, believed all kinds of crazy things about Qaanaaq’s technological capacity, like that the fog could hear your every word and report it back to the evil robot overlords.

She whispered in Ankit’s ear: “Ora.”

“You’re here to get her out,” Ankit said. “Aren’t you?”

Masaaraq nodded.

“I want to help.”

She took Ankit’s hand and squeezed it. Not hard, but implacably, her strength overwhelming. This was a woman who had never stopped, who could not be stopped, no matter what happened to her or to anyone else.

Ankit had to take several deep breaths.

She’d told herself that she was triumphing over the fear. She wasn’t that kid anymore, the one whom fear froze solid, the one who was ruined by it. She’d posted that photo of Taksa—she’d gone to see her mother—again and again she’d stood at the edge of a tough decision and made the leap to the next one. Done the difficult thing.

But here she was again, up against her limit. A line she was afraid to cross. A leap that meant risking everything, leaving behind all she knew of comfort and ease, that might land her in jail or deregistered or worse. I want to help, she had said, and she did, but she couldn’t. To distract herself and Masaaraq from the bile rising in her throat, the panic she knew was visible in her face, she blurted out, “And do I get a killer whale?”

“Polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “That’s what you were marked for bonding to. But she died before you two had a chance to bond. When we were attacked. When your mother escaped with you two. We were nomads, spending the winter in an empty town. I was away, tracking the people who were trying to wipe us out. I failed. They got to you first. Everyone died—except you two. And her.”

“And you,” Ankit said.

“You should count your blessings,” the killer whale woman said. “The fact that your animal died before you two had been bonded is the only reason why you didn’t spend most of your life a gibbering idiot.”

“Like my brother,” Ankit said. “Right? Is that what’s wrong with him?”

“You know Kaev? He doesn’t know you.”

“Yeah. I know of him. I introduced myself, once. He . . . sort of . . .”

“Broke down. Yes. His mind was cracked. He was incomplete, his whole life. He is complete, now, and healing. You have been incomplete as well, you just haven’t known it. I will heal you, too.”

“I’m not incomplete,” Ankit said, feeling the grid give way beneath her. “I don’t need to be healed.”

“You do,” the orcamancer said. “You need to be bonded.”

“Or what?”

Masaaraq did not answer. She took a step back.

Ankit asked, “Do you . . . want to come over to my place? For a cup of tea?” She looked at the whale, briefly—ridiculously—imagined it in her elevator, daintily holding a teacup in one massive blade-fin, sitting at her kitchen table. “Can you . . . leave her?”

“I can. And I will drink tea with you. But not right now. I have an errand to run. With some friends.” From behind her back, she pulled a black box that was strapped to some kind of orca saddle. “Right now we must begin the bonding process.”

“No,” Ankit said, possibly not out loud.

“I have no polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “And it would need to be an adult, as you are an adult. I do not know how the bond will come out. Whether it will be painful, how well it will work. Our kind has never bonded someone so late, who had never been previously bonded. Do you have an animal in mind? Something you’ve always felt a particular attraction to? Connection with?”

“No,” Ankit said, louder now—gods, she didn’t even have a pet, she had never been interested in a romantic partner, the thought of commitment made her throat hurt, and now this strange woman who’d walked into her life five minutes ago—rode into her life on a killer whale five minutes ago—was proposing a kind of commitment more intimate and horrifying than anything she’d ever contemplated before.

One look in Masaaraq’s eyes, and she knew—this woman was not entirely human. Being bonded to an animal turned you into something else. Something that behaved completely differently, wanted different things.