Blackfish City(87)

“Ah,” Podlove said, nodding his head as if someone had told him he’d left the oven on. “I think I understand now.”

Go’s hand rested on the scabbard of her machete. Soq calculated: Her only hope is to make an explicit peace with Podlove. Otherwise, one way or another, she’ll be destroyed. If he dies, the city’s response will be merciless. Qaanaaq let the crime syndicates flourish, setting very few rules on what they could and couldn’t do, but she’s broken pretty much all of them. Go lives only if he does. And even then it’s a long shot.

His survival seemed unlikely, Soq supposed, but then again anything was possible. Some demonic magic had kept him alive this long in a world full of people he’d pissed off. There might be some of that left.

“You think you understand?” Ora said. The bear flinched, a jerk of rage barely stifled.

“We put a lot of people in the Cabinet,” he said. “We had to. Either that, or kill them. Would you rather we did that? It was nothing personal. Our employees made a lot of enemies, and made friends with a lot of unpopular people. Understand, during the Multifurcation, a lot of people came to us with problems. Twenty different cities had minority populations practically rioting over police murders of unarmed civilians. Political parties about to lose key states. All in need of some . . .”

“Bloodshed and blaming and scapegoating,” Barron said from under the sack.

“We didn’t write the playbook,” Podlove said. “Dīvide et īmpera. Divide and conquer has been the foundation of human societal power dynamics for as long as there have been human societies.”

“There have been knives that long, too,” Kaev said. “Doesn’t mean a man who stabs someone to death isn’t guilty.”

“How many people?” Masaaraq said.

“In the Cabinet? At least fifteen. In other grid cities . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

“Was every one of them the sole survivor of a large or small genocide?” Ora asked. “You probably don’t know. You probably didn’t want to.”

Podlove said nothing. He stood there, his face fooling no one with its approximation of repentance. “I didn’t do anything on my own. There were a dozen of us, fellow executives. I wasn’t even the highest in the hierarchy. I know you want me to be some savage bloodthirsty monster who single-handedly caused all your suffering. But believe me, I’m not. I just happen to be the last one left alive.”

“Do you know what I could do right now?” Masaaraq said, aiming her bloody blade at him. “I could stab you in the stomach with this, use that notch at the end to grab hold of your intestine, yank it out, choke you with it—or make you eat it, or toss it to my orca, who would pull you into the water by it and take her sweet time killing you.”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t stop you. And I wouldn’t blame you.”

An explosion in the distance. Sirens starting, stopping, starting, stopping.

The stalemate lasted a long time. Each side glaring at the other. Except for Podlove, who looked only at his feet. At the metal grid he stood on, the city he’d helped build, the safe place his bloody money had bought for him. The sea beneath it. The water that would still be there long after the last human sank beneath its waves.

He was so old. His skin was so thin. So wrinkled. Wrinkles upon wrinkles, a crisscrossing net of them. He hadn’t physically harmed anybody. His hands were bloodless. He’d merely gotten other people to hurt people, and then profited off it. Wasn’t that worse, though? Didn’t it magnify his crime, to have bloodied the hands of others? What kind of suffering had it caused them, the people who slaughtered innocents on his behalf? What trauma, what rage, what nightmares had it left them with? What bad karma?

Even if they chained him to a chair in the basement and spent the rest of his life torturing him until he passed out from the pain, then waking him up to do it again, over and over, there was no way to balance the scales of hurt. Nothing they could take from him that would approach even a fraction of the loss he’d caused others to feel. He was innocent in his own eyes, his crimes excused by necessity, and nothing they could do to him could make him see his own guilt.

Soq was still looking at him when it happened.

Masaaraq shouted something, twisted her body to intercept, but was standing too far away to stop Go from beheading Barron.

“Run,” Go said to Podlove, bloody machete extended, launching herself at Masaaraq.

After that, everything seemed to happen in the space of a single short breath.





Kaev


You need to stay focused, Masaaraq had told him back in the Cabinet, and now he knew why.

He smells blood, he sees all this frenzied motion, it’d be very easy for him to go into a total killer rampage.

Kaev felt it. The bear’s rage sang in him. It wasn’t harsh or savage. It was beautiful. It was music. It wasn’t the ugly human thing Kaev had felt before a fight, a spattered mess of wretched emotions like hate and fear and greed. It was clean and clear and simple.

Keep your attention on the people he needs to be focused on.

But who that was he did not know. The woman he loved was fighting with one of his mothers. The one who had brought him Liam, fixed his brain, made him whole again.

Masaaraq struck Go with the butt of her staff, knocking her back.