Blackfish City(67)

Soq could not recall ever having seen a smile as beautiful as the one that broke across their father’s face. The bear, too, smiled, though Soq would not have believed that polar bears could do so. It charged forward, uninhibited by human restraint, prompting screams and gasps, but Ankit held her ground, and when it reached her it stopped, pushed its head against hers, settled back onto its hind legs.

People laughed. People clapped. Kaev followed his bear, gave his newfound sister a hug. Go looked somewhere between bored and angry.

“I’ve known about you for some time,” Ankit said. “Since I got my job at the Arm manager’s office. I went to find you once. Tried to introduce myself. You weren’t making any sense, and you got really emotional. You were . . . I don’t know, howling. I was frightened of you. I’m sorry.”

Kaev shook his head, looked devastated. “I am . . . I wasn’t . . .”

“I know.”

Soq had a family. And it kept on getting bigger. Would continue to do so, since they were about to bust someone out of an impregnable psychiatric center.

“I have a way into the Cabinet,” Ankit said to Kaev. “I’ll be bringing someone into Protective Custody. If we time it right, I’ll be on the inside to help when you launch your assault.”

Go sneered, and Ankit turned to her.

“And I came to tell you that I think we have a common enemy in Martin Podlove.” Ankit took out her screen, played that video everyone had been passing around. “And I know who he is, the guy who killed his grandson.”

“So what,” Go said. “Everybody does. He says his name, right on the recording.”

“But he’s in hiding,” Ankit said. “Has been, ever since this. And I know how to reach him.”

Soq hadn’t watched it. The past couple weeks, Soq had been too busy to stay in the traffic-trawling loop. They’d heard about it—some boy, burned alive by a methane flare. Soq watched now, with idle curiosity at first—and then sucked in a short shocked breath, seeing the boy before the flames consumed him.

Fill.

“I fucked him,” Soq said, but no one heard them.





Kaev


What’s the matter?”

Go didn’t respond, didn’t roll over. Shouts and dragging sounds from the deck, but the porthole beside the bed showed only a placid sea and sky slowly turning the deep black gray of Qaanaaq before dawn.

“I know you’re awake. You always woke up so early. Even back then. Are you crying?”

“No,” Go said, wiping her face.

Kaev sat up. Her sheets were expensive and he liked the way they felt. He would gladly have stayed there all day. He would gladly have stayed there forever.

“What if this is the last time?” Go said, and he knew how much it cost her to speak like this, to be vulnerable. “I lost you for so long—what if after all of that, one of us dies today?”

“You didn’t lose me,” Kaev said gently, without anger, without bitterness. “Not really. You had to do what you did because somebody forced you to. If anything, I was taken from you.”

“True,” Go said. “But I can’t let that happen again.”

“You’d still have Soq. I mean, unless they get killed, too. Which I guess is possible.”

Go laughed. “They hate me. Or they would, if they had any sense.”

“They don’t hate you.”

“Now you’re such an expert on human emotions all of a sudden?”

“Yeah,” Kaev said, sitting up. He liked being naked. He never had, before. “All of a sudden I am.”

“Thank god for that polar bear.”

“Amen.”

Go rolled over, and smiled at what she saw. “You’re magnificent.” She ran a hand along one hairy leg, up his stomach, to nestle in the forest of his chest.

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

Outside, the noises settled. The shouts stopped. Preparations were at an end; the operation was about to begin.

Kaev said, “Can I ask you a question?”

Go shrugged.

“Why now? All these years you’ve been content with where you are. You never made a power play before like the one you’ve been making, trying to go beyond being just a syndicate boss.”

“I was never content,” Go said. “I was always planning. Laying the groundwork for this.”

“So . . . why now?”

“A bunch of reasons. The time was right. There were new vulnerabilities. New . . . opportunities.”

“Go on . . .”

Go shut her eyes. “I’ll sound like an idiot.”

“You always do.”

“Shut up,” she said, softly. Had he ever seen her so vulnerable? “It’s the stupidest thing. It was City Without a Map that got me started on this. Have you ever listened to it?”

Kaev nodded.

“I can’t explain it. Something about the broadcasts spoke to me. And not just in the words that they said. But the way that they said it. It got me thinking. I’d been biding my time, waiting . . . for what? So many of us here, powerless and alone. Keeping our heads down, keeping to ourselves. But we aren’t separate. We are one thing, and there’s power in that.”