Blackfish City(85)

“These motherfuckers,” he said, sounding scared, sounding excited. Behind him, she could hear the clangs and hollers of Go’s boat. “All these people living like rats, while they have all this space just going to waste.”

“It’s not waste. It’s a business decision.”

“Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said.

“Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.”

Jeong chuckled. “You know I sleep at the messenger depot? In a capsule in my office. Sometimes I’ll go a week without stepping outside the building. Probably been a month since I left my Arm. Now I’m surrounded by all these people . . .”

The understanding-politician part of Ankit’s brain took over, emitted a gentle laugh. “Qaanaaq does that to you. I feel agoraphobic sometimes, too. You doing okay over there?”

“This ship is fucking crazy.”

“Fucking crazy is how it probably is on a regular day. Now you’re in full-on gangster war mode, with a hold full of psychiatric refugees.”

He laughed. Sounding grateful. “Something’s happening to the data,” he said. “It’s coming and going.”

“Defenses. We anticipated this. We’re making multiple encrypted backups, including several on partitioned drives that disconnect from the network as soon as a chunk is complete. If the attack bots compromise something, switch to another.”

“This is the easy part,” Jeong said, sounding stronger, more solid. “I’ll take a psychopathic corporate espionage AI over crying babies any day. We’ll have enough to start giving people addresses and passcodes in about three minutes. Enough to house all the Cabinet escapees, and a good chunk of les miserables from Arm Eight . . .”

“Excellent.”

“We’re getting pings from all over, people volunteering slots for these people. Some crazy church lady with one hand says she has space in her storefront for fifty people to sleep.”

Ankit stood, looked across the Arm to where Masaaraq and Kaev and Liam and Ora faced down Go and Podlove and an anxious-looking Soq. A stalemate. Angry words. She ached to be there with them. With her family—her two mothers, one a mournful butcher and the other a serene poet, but both identical in the staggering merciless weight of what their love could accomplish; her sweet and sad brother; his proud angry child—even if they were all about to die.

Especially if they were all about to die.

“All right everybody, line up,” Jeong was saying back on the ship, and she stifled a tiny laugh at the thought of this poor frightened man doing crowd control.

A splash from the water beside her. Ankit turned her head—and flinched, even though she’d been fully expecting to see the orca there. Maybe it was possible to get used to something so huge, so formidable, as dark as the sea and as hungry, but she didn’t see it happening anytime soon.

“Hey, girl,” she said.

Atkonartok’s immense head did a slow majestic dip. A nod, Ankit realized. Eerie, the intelligence it gave off. Not the intelligence of something as smart as humans, but rather the intelligence of something smarter, something making an effort to understand and be understood by these stinky smaller-brained beasts. Like right now, for example. The whale seemed to know, just from looking at her, how the whole complex plan was going.

How much does she see? Remember? Feel? About the people who slaughtered her tribe, her pod? About the friends she lost? About what it meant to be alone, and lost?

Like she had been all her life. Like Kaev had been, and Soq. And Masaaraq and Ora, who at least had known what it meant to not be alone, to love, to be loved, before they were plunged back into the well of loneliness. All these people going through life alone, suddenly plucked out of isolation and finding themselves part of a family . . . only now to be inches away from losing everything.

“Good!” Jeong said as the chaos of background noise in her ear quieted down. “There will be plenty for everyone. We’ll start with you.”

Children clapped. Jeong laughed. Ankit did too.

More laughter, from the real world now, two parking slips down. “The clocks!” said a plump matron with an Addis Ababa accent. “The parking clocks all went down!”

Ankit saw that it was true. Her own slip’s timer, which had reached eight minutes the last time she looked, was now flashing zero at a leisurely pace.

“Free parking!” someone else shouted.

Fuck, Ankit thought. If there was anything more unthinkable than a geothermal disruption, it was the parking clocks going down. What the fuck have we done to this city?

A shout from outside the Salt Cave caught her attention. She looked up just in time to see Go draw the machete from the scabbard at her belt, the scabbard everyone always assumed was empty, and behead Ankit’s friend Barron with one effortless swing.





City Without a Map: Savage Bloodthirsty Monsters


We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortune on, whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals, instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart.

Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped.

But villains are oversimplifications.