Blackfish City(71)

“How do you have so many eyes on him?”

“Microdrones, mostly. Outside his office.”

“He never heard of curtains? Ionizing the windows?”

“He doesn’t care who sees him. He believes he’s invincible.”

Too weird. Too fucking weird. Too many roads leading back to this boy, the one who gave Soq the breaks. Life doesn’t work like this, they thought, in a city so big—so many bizarre and separate strands coming together. Forming a pattern, a mesh. A net. And Soq was caught in it. Being hauled up, out of the sea where they’d spent their whole life, where they felt safe, where they could breathe, into a harsh killing light.

Soq’s vision blurred. The image flood came again. The vacant apartment they’d met in.

But this time, Soq was ready. Soq would not be overwhelmed; Soq would not be drowned in the dry air like a fish. Soq had—whatever Masaaraq had given Soq. The nanites. The power. The control.

Empty rooms. So much space. A long line of beautiful boys. Hunger; so many hungry people.

Software.

Passwords.

Soq scooted the armchair closer to the table. “Tell me what you’re so upset about,” they said, almost startled to hear how authoritative their voice sounded, how confident of being obeyed, as if they knew what they were doing—and, stranger still, beneath that, the knowledge that they did.

“I can’t believe this is happening right now,” Go said, standing behind Soq to watch what they did with the screen. Her voice was not annoyed. Her voice was scared.

“This? The Cabinet mission?”

“I’m at war here. I don’t have time to go rescuing somebody’s missing mommy.”

“Why not fire a missile at that old man’s office and be done with it? I know you have the firepower.”

“Because he has the firepower, too. Or at least, he pays a security company well enough to cover all contingencies. Money and wealth and power are abstractions to people like this. They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do in a real fight—but they pay people to handle their problems. There are rules to war. Things you don’t do. I kill him, his people kill me.”

Something glimmered in the floodwaters. Something shiny in the rush of drab images. Soq made a choking sound and snatched up one of Go’s screens.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” Soq said. “Accessing something, I think. A program.”

“What program?”

“I’m not sure,” Soq said. “To be honest, I’m not entirely certain that it exists at all. Or how to use it if it does. Or what it will do if I can.”

“Great,” Go said, turning away, shuffling through the other screens.

“I saw it in a vision,” Soq said, and Go didn’t respond, because Go wasn’t listening.

“The Cabinet mission is no skin off your nose,” Soq said. “They make it, they make it. They don’t, they don’t.”

Go said nothing.

“You mad because Dao is dead?”

“Yes,” Go said nonchalantly.

“You’re angry at her. You hate her. Masaaraq.”

“Yes,” Go said.

Soq thought for a second. Surfed a long slow crashing wave of images, memories bound up inside the coding of the breaks. Soq looked for Go, and found her. A hundred different outlet stories; a million shitty photos. A legendary figure. Spoken of in whispers. Superhuman; unstoppable. Emotionless. That was the most important part of Go’s facade: the idea that she felt nothing.

“It’s him. You’re worried about him.”

“He can take care of himself. He has a fucking polar bear.”

“Polar bears are mortal. You have no idea what kind of firepower is in that place. What kind of weapons.”

Go stared at her hands. “It’s not just him,” she said, finally.

It took several seconds for Soq to realize they were holding their breath. When they did, they didn’t let it out.

Go laughed. “You can’t imagine, Soq,” and there was a softness to the name that Soq had never heard anyone say it with before. “I had everything planned, everything under control. I was on track. Nothing could hurt me. Nothing could hold me back. Now there’s him—now there’s you . . .”

Go trailed off.

Soq’s eyes shut. Overwhelming, to hear Go express this kind of warmth, this humanity—but frightening, too, because Soq could hear how it broke Go up inside, how angry she was with herself, the war she was fighting to master these emotions. “It’s okay,” Soq hazarded. “It’s okay to worry about something else besides the blood-spattered bottom line.”

They both avoided eye contact. They stared at the screens where Martin Podlove paced, where back-alley empires and fortunes were being bought and sold in subsurface trough meat bubbles, where spreadsheets and dossiers documented the profit and the loss. Sucking in breath, Soq stuck out a hand and grabbed Go’s.

The crime boss flinched back. “You don’t know me.” Her voice was stern, hardening fast. “You don’t know me at all.”

“Don’t I?” Soq said, and there it was, the anger Soq had been sitting on their whole life, the rage that had never found a focus before, the blind fury that spawned a thousand dreams of burning Qaanaaq up, breaking its legs and watching a million people freeze to death in the Arctic waters. The city was not a person, the city had done nothing but exist. Go, on the other hand, had done things. Made decisions. Maybe some of them came from a good place. But maybe not. And maybe it didn’t matter that somebody meant well, if the end result was misery. Soq stood. “Tell me I have it wrong. I know how you operate. How you got where you are. How you treat your workers. I know you’d gut me like a fish in a second without giving it a second thought, because who the fuck am I? Some kid you gave up ages ago, wrote off—kept tabs on, found a spot for, a job you’d give me, but only if I was good enough, only if I somehow passed your little personality test, turned out sufficiently savage and unscrupulous. And if I ended up as anything other than what I am, you’d have gone on ignoring me until the day you died.”