Blackfish City(68)

Kaev stopped himself from laughing. “You sure we’re talking about the same City Without a Map? The one I’ve been listening to never said shit about crime syndicates declaring gang war on shareholders.”

“It’s called subtext, Kaev. Did you learn that word when you got a polar bear and became a fucking genius?”

“Sure,” he said.

They lay there, unspeaking, for a long time.

“This is idiotic,” Go said after a while, sitting up, and Kaev could almost hear it, feel it crackle in the air, the armor she put on, the psychic bulwark, the magic shield that protected her from harm. The walling off of every emotion, every human thing. “Why are we doing this? It’s not our fight.”

“It’s my mother,” he whispered, surprised at how hard that word was to say, how good it felt.

“It’s a woman you’ve never met. Who’s been locked up in the Cabinet for so long that she’s probably mentally damaged beyond hope of repair.”

“Even if she were an empty shell—even if she weren’t my mother—I’d do it for Masaaraq. She saved my life. She rescued me from . . . I don’t know. Walking death? A lifetime of constant pain? This is the love of her life we’re talking about. Someone she’s spent thirty years hunting for. What kind of person would I be, if I took a gift like that and refused to help her?”

“The kind of person who has a chance. With me. With a real life.”

“We still have that,” he said, and got out of bed. The room was cold. She’d always kept her quarters cold. Uncomfortable. To discourage torpor, to spur her on to constant motion. But he enjoyed the bare concrete floor against his feet, the air that prickled his skin. He took his time getting dressed, regretting each new garment that came between them.

“I love you,” he said, pants in hand.

She put a hand on each muscular thigh. She pulled him closer.

“I have to go!” he said, laughing, and hopped away.

“Fine,” she said, laughing too, but the laugh faded fast from her voice, and by the time she said, “Have it your own way,” she was every inch the brutal granite wall who had been his heartless boss for so long.

Masaaraq was waiting for him, standing there with the bear, staring at the door to Go’s cabin. Angry, at first, to be kept waiting for so long, but then the anger faded and she looked like she might cry. From happiness, Kaev knew, because he was such an expert on human emotions all of a sudden, because he could see how close it was, whatever majestic blissful feeling of family unity the orcamancer had spent so long stalking. He could see how much she loved him, how familiar he was to her, even if she hadn’t seen him since he was so small she could hold him in her arms.

“Hey, Liam,” he said, throwing his arms around the bear’s neck.

“It’s an idiotic name,” she said.

“It’s growing on me.”

Together they walked to the railing, climbed onto the lift. It brought them down to a little boat, the same tri-power vessel she’d come to Qaanaaq in, and then it went back up for Liam, who was too big and heavy to ride it with them.

“Atkonartok,” she said, and a few seconds later the killer whale surfaced.

“Good god,” Kaev whispered, realizing why some of the post-nomad settlements on North America’s west coast worshiped them as gods. “It’s incredible. Can I touch it?”

Masaaraq nodded. He reached out his hand, slowly, more frightened than he thought he’d have been. Wet rubber, he’d been thinking, or hard plastic, but the orca felt like nothing he’d ever felt before. Some higher, better form of flesh. Surprisingly warm. Masaaraq unmoored the boat and they began to row.

“Yesterday I went for a walk,” he said. “Along the Arm. Looking for noodles. The farther I got from Liam, the more I got this feeling. In my stomach, in my head. An ache, but physical and psychological at the same time. Like being heartbroken and having food poisoning all at once.”

She nodded. “It’d get worse as time went on. You’d have a week or so before you started to experience cognitive difficulties.”

“How long before I was—like I used to be?”

“A month, if Liam was still alive. Maybe six weeks.”

“And if he wasn’t?”

“A lot less.”

They rowed in silence the rest of the way. They had an hour before full dawn.

“Go’s bots say two hours,” Kaev said. “From the time the heat cuts out to when the protocols are likely to order an evacuation.”

Masaaraq nodded. She stood up, stripped off her thick sealskin coat. Underneath she wore clothing made of lighter, furless skins. She pulled her hair together, piled it atop her head in an intricate structure somewhere between a coil and a nest. And then she leaped into the sea.

“You’re not going to ride her down,” Kaev said when she surfaced with the whale beside her.

“Too deep,” she said. “But what we need her to do, it’ll be difficult. Identifying the right geothermal vent, the right pipe branching off it, and how to break it. I’ll need to be heavily involved, and that’ll be easier if I’m in the water. Seeing what she sees. Not hearing through our human ears.”

The aquadrones were designed to protect the cone from human and machine attacks, as well as debris from below or wreckage from above. Animals were different. They moved like none of those things. Programmers would not have taken malicious animals bent on destruction into account, so they wouldn’t have scripted the drones to engage marine life. Masaaraq had tested Atkonartok on some of the outlying drones, and confirmed that she wouldn’t trigger an attack.