Blackfish City(77)

Masaaraq, on the other hand, did not seem to be aware that she was trapped at all. She smiled. She reached out her hand.

Slowly, painfully, like someone seeing through thick fog or a patient coming out of paralysis, Ora smiled back. And took her hand.





Ankit


Mom,” Ankit whispered, marveling.

This woman was nothing like the creature she’d had in her head. That pitiful thing, she saw now, had been shaped in her memory by a child’s fear. This woman stood up straighter, her shoulders were broader, her smile indomitable. She wore the clean elegant uniform of Protective Custody. So she’d been transferred, at some point, from the general-population hell she’d been in the last time Ankit visited.

The floor lights flashed from red to blue. The walls ceased their distress sequence. The woman from Safety tapped at her jaw, delivered the update to one supervisor after another. The threat was contained. The invasion software had yielded to the evacuation bots.

Arrows appeared in the floor. Red again, but orderly this time, with a soothing flow of cool blues and greens in the walls, pixels and patterns calmly urging people in the appropriate direction.

Kaev and his bear roared, screamed, kicked, fought. Masaaraq smiled beatifically.

Why are we still conscious at all? Any of us? Why haven’t we been gassed? Perhaps the interrogation protocols were about to kick in, and they wanted them conscious . . . or maybe it was easier to transport conscious people than unconscious ones? Aside from the belly lurches as her monkey leaped and climbed her way around the building, Ankit noticed that she was eerily objective about the whole thing.

Patients stood, pointed. Came closer with fear and awe on their faces. Health workers tried to encourage them to continue the evacuation, but most preferred to stand there. Shivering. Watching.

“Hello,” Masaaraq said to Ora.

“Well hello,” Ora said, smiling. “It’s good to see you. What took you so long?”

There. That’s why Ankit wasn’t worried. Wasn’t scared. Her family had been reunited. Her mother was free. Sort of. Even if it was just for a moment—even if they were currently trapped, about to be incarcerated, deregistered, locked back up or banished to separate scrap salvage ships, even if they’d never see each other again after this—they were together now. For a moment.

“Family hugs later,” Kaev barked, stern fighter instincts in action, and Ankit was grateful for them. “We’re about to get gassed. Anybody got any ideas on a way out of here?”

With one hand, almost absentmindedly, without ever taking her eyes off Ora’s face, Masaaraq pulled a small circle from the inside of her sealskin jacket. She pressed two buttons, peeled off the backing on an adhesive strip, stuck it to the door in the wall, called for everyone to get as far away from it as possible.

The explosion, when it came, was much worse than the surgical bulkhead disruption process that Go had promised. Instead of just magically making a wall open up, it sent a thudding shock wave and a wall of fire in their direction. Kaev pressed both hands to his ears and winced. Ankit had to fight to keep from throwing up. Liam shielded them from the worst of the blast, and he howled as a dissipating blossom of flame singed the fur of his back.

“Come on,” Kaev said, and they followed him down the empty hallway.

The crowd noise rose behind them as the woman from Safety lowered the wall to follow them.

Ankit ran, reveling in the ecstasy of having a crew again, a posse, a team, the way she had all those years ago when she’d leaped from building to building and death was always right behind them, right ahead of them, but it didn’t matter because they would face it together. She was inside and she was outside, she was human and she was animal, she obeyed gravity and she defied it.

“Slow down,” Masaaraq said. “We can’t exert ourselves too much. If it comes down to a real fight, we’ll need to have some stamina to spare.”

Which, of course, was when another polyglass wall slammed shut in front of them. And another, past that, and then another—a long series of them, and more certainly waiting in the wings, as many as would be needed to exhaust their supply of explosives.

From behind them they heard the stomp of the Safety worker’s boots.

She’ll be careful, because of Ora, Ankit thought. She won’t risk hurting her. Protective Custody cases would be the priority in the chaos of an evacuation. Ensuring they didn’t get snatched by whatever enemies had obliged them to enter custody in the first place. Or murdered, as was more likely for the high-value clients whose custody was a more genial form of incarceration, like the lamas and child monarchs and inconvenient heirs whose claims to power could jeopardize distant regimes.

“Where are we?” Masaaraq asked Kaev.

“Eighteenth floor, outer corridor,” he said, reading from a screen.

“Radio Go’s ship,” she said to Ankit. “Tell her where we are. Tell her to prepare the extraction ladders.”

“I can’t,” Ankit said. “They bricked my implant when we came in. I can’t reach them.”

“Ours are blocked,” Kaev said. “Privacy shielding engaged.”

“They’re down there, though,” Masaaraq said. “Right?”

“Right. Down . . . somewhere.”

“Cover me,” the orcamancer said, following the curving corridor until she was out of the line of sight of Safety. “Hold her off. Don’t let her see what we’re doing.”