Blackfish City(82)

Ankit shut her mouth and then opened it again. What would she say? What if she hated the idea? Who was this woman? What did she love, fear, hate, crave? Kaev felt his whole future hung on the next sentence that was said.

“I—”

Ora interrupted: “We’re not going anywhere.”

No one said a word.

“My work here is unfinished,” she said.

“Your work?” Masaaraq said, letting go of Ora’s hands. “What work?”

Ora smiled and showed Masaaraq her forearm. Kaev caught a glimpse of a crescent-shaped scar or wound, endlessly repeated.

Masaaraq’s eyes went wide. She stood, stepped back. When she spoke, it was in a whisper. “You’ve been bonding people.” She clamped her hands over her mouth.

“Don’t you dare judge me,” Ora said. “And don’t tell me you’ve become so weak you need long-dead superstitions for a crutch.”

Masaaraq could not answer.

“You bonded me,” Soq said to Masaaraq. “And you’d just met me.”

“And me,” Ankit whispered.

“That’s different,” Masaaraq said, and the terrifying fearless orcamancer was gone from her voice. “You’re family. Both of you. We’re family.”

“How do you think I survived?” Ora said, and her voice was a viper’s now, a hiss of warning, of pain, of anger. “How do you think I lived so long? How do you think I lasted the decades it took you to come and find me?”

Masaaraq flinched. “I never—”

Ora stood. “Exactly. You never. You never had to live with what I lived with. You never had your animal die of old age, of grief, kept from touching you by sixty feet of polyglass. You never had to sense it, flying in endless circles, searching for you, never getting any closer. Bonding to people was the only way to keep from going insane. From getting my brains scrambled back to the mental capacity of a child.”

Kaev stood up, went to her. Bear-hugged her. Thinking, I would do anything to keep from feeling that again.

“I’m sorry,” Masaaraq said. “I’m sorry. Of course I have no right to judge you.”

“I met a lot of sick people in there,” Ora said. “Suffering from a lot of illnesses. Many of them completely baffling to the medical software. And I found a funny thing. When I bonded with people with the breaks? They weren’t sick anymore. They still had it, but they weren’t suffering from it.”

Masaaraq gave Soq a swift look and then a nod.

“What is it?” Ankit asked. “The breaks. How does it work? Scientists know it’s delivered by a viral vector, but we don’t know if it actually is a virus. Might be that, or a bacterium or nanites or rogue gut fauna or some combination of those, or something else altogether.”

“Whatever it is, when you get infected with it—it carries information. Memories. This disease defies everything we thought we understood about how memory works. Somewhere in its genome, the sickness encodes massive amounts of data from the person who infected you, and the one who infected them, and so on, all the way back up the chain. A normal human mind has no idea how to process this kind of information, and it will slowly start to break down. But the nanites that let us bond with animals also let us process their emotions, their imaginations. So when someone with the breaks gets bonded to one of us, the nanites help them survive, handle those memories, control them as well as you would control any others.”

“That’s your work,” Masaaraq said. “You want to save these people.”

“I am going to save these people,” Ora said.

“It’s not safe,” Masaaraq said. “The city won’t rest until you’re back in custody.”

“Let them try.”

“We’re up against some very well-resourced enemies. We almost got taken out, in the Cabinet. We’d have been recaptured if it hadn’t been for—”

“For the fact that I could give that woman something she needed. Something I got from helping people. The people I helped will help us. I can see the big picture. I’ve been drawing a map for a city without one. Reciting it to myself every night. I know how we all fit together, how this will play out.”

Masaaraq looked at her with curiosity, possibly fear. The way you would if you suddenly started wondering whether the person you love might have become something more or less than human.

“You’re the Author,” Soq said. “City Without a Map. You seed it, somehow. Right? In them? You . . . compose it, pass it on to them when you pass them the nanites.”

Ora said, “Yes.”

“Small boat,” Kaev said, looking worried, as Go’s transport reached the ship. “Won’t hold very many soldiers.”

“She’s only taking a couple of us.”

“To confront a guy who wants her dead?”

Soq nodded. Kaev’s brow furrowed, and he stood up. “We have to go, too,” he said, but no one heard him.

“Speaking of Martin Podlove,” Ankit said, turning to Ora. “Do you know who he is?”

Ora paused, shut her eyes. Began to recite facts. Rumors. Things she’d called up, effortlessly, from the mountain of memories she’d inherited from every breaks survivor she’d bonded with.

“No,” Ankit said, and they heard shouting from the other side of the boat, chains dragging and bells tolling as Go’s ship prepared to depart. “Do you know why he put you in the Cabinet?”