Blackfish City(79)
She moved west, with the wind.
Come, she called, and Chim answered.
Sophisticated scalers shunned climbing. What they wanted was adventure, excitement, the swift running leaping progression from building to building. To go straight up or down was hard work, and ignominious.
Hard, but possible. And, in fact, her strong suit. Because what she lacked in courage she made up for in determination and diligence and discipline.
She descended now. Slowly, gripping tight, wishing she had her gecko-skin gloves, her ropes and anchors, but hadn’t her friends scorned all that equipment? Hadn’t they maintained that scaling always came down to the human body and the human mind, up against the elements?
When she reached a landing, she turned to scan the sea below. They were near the grid, and she could see only a narrow slice of ocean. No sign of Go’s ship. She continued the descent.
Her heart hammered. She sang to herself, but suddenly couldn’t remember more than one verse to any song at all.
Focus. Focus.
Down two more stories, she reached a garden smoker’s lounge. It should have been tropical, but the geothermal heat was still out. Glasses of water stood on every table, all frozen solid. She hurled one over the edge. Watched it explode against the grid.
Which was stupid. Because now she kept imagining herself exploding against the grid.
She climbed up onto the railing. Not so much farther to go, but here the orderly progression of walls and windows and ledges that had taken her this far broke down. Now she’d need to really scale. Run, leap, execute flawless rolling falls.
Now the fear took her.
Turned her feet to ice, froze them to the railing. Filled her bones with lead.
She shut her eyes. I am not afraid, she thought, but that wasn’t true, and then she thought, I am stronger than my fear, and that was maybe true. She breathed.
A scream from beside her. Chim, squatting on the railing.
“Hey, girl,” Ankit said.
Chim screamed genially. And then jumped.
Ankit jumped too.
And grabbed hold of a horizontal bar, the same one Chim had landed on. She let the momentum swing her forward, and at the apex of her swing she bucked her body to extend the arc, landing with a wobble on the joint where three struts met. Chim leaped to join her on it.
They swung, they tumbled. They were one. Whatever happened, she was not alone.
A wall blocked her way, and Ankit sped up. Leaped. Took one step and then a second up the wall and grabbed hold of a bar, squat-hopped onto another one. In the space between two stairwells she zig-zagged down, back and forth from one landing to the next, dropping four stories in the space of seconds. She caught herself throwing in superfluous moves—thief vault, Kong vault, cat pass, rotary jump—for the sheer exultant pleasure of it.
At the end, two stories from the sea, Ankit leaped to the final level without even thinking about it, and for the first time in her life executed a flawless rolling fall. Then she had to wait, laughing, breathing heavy, for the monkey to scamper down through less spectacular means.
She didn’t feel relieved when they reached the struts and ran the wide circumference of the Cabinet’s lowest level, and finally saw Go’s boat, where Soq was standing on the prow looking for them, and gave them directions for where to aim the ladder to extract everyone else, and climbed aboard to be draped in blankets and offered a steaming mug of something hot and alcoholic.
What Ankit felt was sadness, to be groundbound again.
City Without a Map: Press Montage
From the Brooklyn Expat [in English]:
Sometimes Qaanaaq can seem like Saturn, ceaselessly devouring its own young—and dooming itself in the process. Blink, and something you love has vanished. Your favorite noodle stall; the karaoke skiff where you went for your first date; the Mongolian cinema where you discovered the work of Erdenechimeg or Batbayar. The high cost of real estate, and the sponsoring nation council’s steadfast refusal to adopt the commercial rent controls supported by an overwhelming majority of registrants, add up to a city where nothing good can stay.
And yet—some things simply seem . . . permanent. Unchangeable. Essential to the structural integrity of the city’s psyche. As crucial as the grid itself. Some things we’ve been seeing for so long that their absence is simply inconceivable.
This morning, residents woke up to two previously inconceivable new changes.
The first was the absence of the rusted old freighter that had been docked on Arm Five for almost thirty years, according to some neighbors. Generally believed to be the flagship vessel and headquarters of the Amonrattanakosin crime syndicate, it had shipped out at some point in the night.
The second? A hole. In the Cabinet. A smoking flaming wound in the side of that building so widely considered impregnable.
And according to many witnesses, these two inconceivable disruptions are connected . . .
From Keskisuomalainen [in Finnish]:
The drama unfolding in the Cabinet reached its climax shortly after three in the morning. This outlet was one of a handful that was present from the start, from the moment the geothermal heat to the city’s largest psychiatric center went out, and we stayed on-site for the duration, sharing every official communique as Health released it, capturing evacuee responses that contradicted Health’s facile tale of a simple heat disruption, even releasing images leaked anonymously to us by a Health employee that appear to show a team of violent invaders assaulting Safety officers inside the facility—accompanied, we hasten to add, by a polar bear. And we were present forty-five minutes ago, when a loud boom echoed through the Hub and a ball of fire appeared in the outer wall of the Cabinet.