Blackfish City(78)

Kaev and Liam stepped slowly toward Safety, looking as menacing as they could. Which was pretty menacing. Masaaraq pulled out another explosive sphere, attached it to the outer wall, and then pulled out another. And then another. Five in all, a clumsy circle of them on the wall that was all that stood between them and an eighteen-story drop to the sea below.

“What about your whale?” Ankit asked. “Can you tell her, and have her communicate it to the people on the ship?”

“At this distance, it would take too long for me to pass on our location. I’d need to meditate on it for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. We don’t have that kind of time. And even if I could do it, nobody on that ship speaks orca. There’s no guarantee they’d understand what Atkonartok was trying to tell them.”

“What about that screen Kaev has?”

“Not networked,” Masaaraq said. “Soq loaded it with blueprints, predictive software bots.” She barked, “Stay together!” and then activated the explosives.

As one, they moved away from the blast site. They had to get to a safe distance from it, but they couldn’t let Safety know where they stood in relation to the explosion, or she’d wall them in somewhere they couldn’t get back to it.

“Drop!” Masaaraq said, and they did. Again the sick-making thud, again the roar of fire. Then the orcamancer was pulling them back to the red-hot wound in the side of the building, where cold bitter wind was already rushing in. And Ankit knew why, knew it from the sick yawn of space, so she was stammering, “No no no,” before Masaaraq said:

“You’re going to have to scale it.”

“No,” Ankit said. The sky was night black outside. Green light sketched the city’s outline below. It was one thing to feel what her monkey felt while her own body was safe in a hallway. To venture out in this dense human frame—“I can’t.”

“You have to. Or we all die.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can. You are more than human now.”

“Even if I could,” Ankit said, stammering for any imaginable excuse—and she could feel her, the monkey, climbing, feel how the wind tugged and pushed at the little torso—“it’d take me so long to get down there. And for them to send up the ladder. She’s not going to just stand there waiting.”

Kaev and Liam stepped back to keep from being walled off away from them, joining the pitiful crew pressed up close to the opening. Shivering. They would die if she didn’t move. Kaev turned to her and she saw the fear in his face, saw how he smiled to hide it. To be brave for her.

“Go,” Ora said, her hand warm on Ankit’s face. “I can handle her.”

Everyone stared at her. She smiled, nodded. “Go.”

Ankit touched the damaged wall, which was cooling fast.

Ora stepped toward the woman from Safety, whose hands were busily tapping at her subdermals. “Your father,” Ora called.

Safety’s hand stilled.

“He never stopped trying to find you.”

Safety’s mouth opened. No words came out.

“It cost him everything, getting you and your mother out of Port-au-Prince. He spent years saving up money to come after you, even when he heard that your balsero armada got broken up by people pirates. Every Sunday he got on the circuit, spent all his money calling the reporting services. Listened to the reciting of the names. He got out. Got as far as Gibraltar. Spent a long time there. Waiting.”

Ankit shut her eyes. Breathed. Reached out for the monkey—for Chim—who was somewhere nearby; she’d released her outside the building when she’d arrived with Fyodorovna, to scale the facade and wait for her, as Masaaraq had instructed.

She realized: Masaaraq had anticipated this exact scenario.

The monkey answered her. She opened her eyes without opening them, seeing what Chim saw, the sheer walls and fretted glasswork. She stepped through the opening. She turned around to begin her descent, but paused for a moment. To take in the scene, these people she loved, this family, these humans she was bonded to in bizarre magnificent ways, in case she never saw any of them again—in case, in fact, she never saw anything again.

One word leaked out of Safety; a croak, a single syllable that contained a thousand questions. “You . . . ?”

“When I saw you, I remembered,” Ora said gently. “What he remembered. I can show you. Everything he saw. What he went through. Where he ended up.”

A moment ago Safety had seemed to be eight feet tall, armored and invincible, but now she sounded small, simultaneously very old and very young. “Is it the breaks?”

“It is.”

Ankit knew she needed to go. She clung to the ragged edge for a few seconds more, listening, desperate to delay her descent.

“My friend had it,” Safety said, and she was crying now. “She said some of the things . . . it was like remembering someone else’s memories. But she couldn’t . . .”

“Control it,” Ora said. “The breaks isn’t a disease. It’s just incomplete. Once the missing piece is in place, it’s a gift. An incredible ability. I can share it with you. Answer all your questions about your father. About the circumstances behind your family leaving. I see it, too. I see everything.”

Ankit slipped out.

A narrow ledge, barely wide enough to stand on. Wind tugged at her—but the wind was not an enemy, every scaler knew that. Wind, gravity, walls, rooftops, fences—these were facts. Things to accept and embrace. Tools. Things to use.