Blackfish City(60)
There were no good ways to say any of the things she needed to say.
The boat was big, old, decrepit looking. Indistinguishable from a hundred other docked ships whose seaworthy days were long behind them. She’d passed it so often and never wondered what happened on board. Heavily guarded now, much more so than it would have been a week ago. More evidence that Amonrattanakosin was at war.
“I want to speak to Go,” she said to one of the soldiers at the foot of the gangway. The woman gave her a quizzical look and then tapped her jaw.
A stupid approach. She should have done more research, come up with some reason to be there. Crime bosses didn’t just sit around fanning themselves, waiting to meet with every salesperson and grid rat trying to rescue her mother from imprisonment who came along.
Voices, above her on the boat. Soldiers conferring.
A man came down the gangway. Slim, elegant, dressed in gray coveralls. These had been the uniforms of the (mostly Chinese) laborers who constructed Qaanaaq, worn now with fierce pride by their descendants. The vertically moored tension-leg platform had been a massive and dangerous endeavor; hundreds had died or been sent home damaged. Gray coveralls said, No matter how poor and humble I may be, this city belongs to me.
“My name is Dao,” he said. “Walk with me?”
“We can’t talk here?”
“Walk with me,” Dao said again, and started walking away from the boat.
“Surely you ran scans of me. Saw I’m not carrying any weapons.”
“We scanned you. We saw you’re not carrying any of the weapons we know how to scan for. That doesn’t mean you’re not carrying something we don’t know how to scan for.”
She hurried to catch up. “Or you think I might be part of an ambush. Snipers, crawlers clinging to the underside of the grid . . .”
“We take no chances, in a time like this,” Dao said.
They walked in silence, halfway to the end of the Arm. They passed flatboats where boys rolled fish balls between their palms, boats where kids whittled knife-cut noodles from a frozen square of rice dough. “Tell me what you came to tell Go.”
They had reached an empty stretch of houseboats. The wind was loud and the grid was bare. At her silence, Dao rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. You imagine that what you have to tell her is so important it cannot be trusted to anyone else. Something her inferiors might not understand or might miscommunicate to her. Something that we might keep from her. You know how precious her time is, but you truly believe that she will want to take a moment to hear this. Correct? This is true of absolutely everyone who comes to see her. And absolutely everything goes through me. State secrets, forbidden formulas—trust me, I know her business better than she does, the scope of her empire, the day-to-day details of every operation, and I can assess what she needs to hear and what needs to be done about it far better than she. And certainly better than you.”
“Fine,” Ankit said, stopping, turning around and walking back the way they’d come.
He did not follow. At first. When he finally did, she could tell he was angry.
“Stop,” he said softly, and she did not. He said it again, far harsher.
“I don’t take orders from you. I’m not some subflunky. If you want to hear what I have to say—”
“You misunderstand,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her back. Hard. “I don’t care a bit about what you have to say. What I care about is a stranger showing up unannounced in a time of war and trying to goad me into circumventing the normal process so she can get into the presence of my boss.”
“Let go of me!” she yelled, knowing that yelling would do no good, that no one could hear her in that lonely stretch.
“I will not.”
She struggled, broke free from his hand. The other shot out, aimed with knife-blade focus for the bridge of her nose. She slammed her forearm into his, deflecting the blow but causing pain so sharp she yelped aloud. And still he came, the other fist now, and she ducked, dropped down, scrambled back. He pivoted his hips, a twist-kick of terrifying force, something that would have knocked her out had it hit her full-on, but she was moving faster than he’d expected and his foot caught her in the lower leg, threw him off balance, caused the slightest stumble—
Enough for her to stand, sprint for the nearest warehouse boat. Her leg ached from the kick, the kind of ache that promised dire pain the following day, bringing to mind so many scaler injuries of the past. But the pain was like a key, unlocking muscle memory she’d gone years without remembering, shaking her loose from her head and pouring her into the body, her limbs, her center of gravity, the glorious physics of rising and falling.
He was behind her. He wasn’t breathing heavily. He would keep in fighting shape, train constantly, whereas she was lucky to hit the stay-kayak twice a month.
She made for the black pipe. Grabbed its middle gasket, hoisted herself up to the next one. Her upper-body strength was a shadow of what it had once been, and she couldn’t do the vault-and-swing she once would have done—but scaling wasn’t about gymnastics, it wasn’t about strength, it was about the lightning-fast intelligence of figuring out how to get where you needed to get with what you had. The calculus of the landscape and the body.
So, no vault-swing. Instead, a shimmy, straight up.
He was even with her, on the red pipe. Of course—the red pipe wouldn’t be hot. The warehouse was sealed off. No one was accessing the geothermal main. He was faster than she was, he was on the roof already. She let go, scrambling back down, faster than she’d intended, scraping the skin from her fingertips when she tried to grab hold of the middle gasket again.