Blackfish City(88)

“Hey!” he shouted involuntarily. “Don’t!”

Masaaraq looked up for just a second. Just long enough for Go to strike her in the leg with the machete. Blood flew. Not a lot—the orcamancer’s thick leather wrappings had muted the blow—but it was still hard enough to make her tremble, lose her balance.

Something angry thrashed and rolled in the dark water underneath him. Kaev looked down through the grid. He made eye contact with Atkonartok, and what he saw there made his blood flush frigid.

He ran toward them. He didn’t know what he would do when he got there. Who he would help. He wanted to step between them, these two people he loved, stop them from fighting, but the bear had other ideas. He felt split, shattered, confused, and into that confusion stepped Liam.

The bear roared, and he roared with it. Masaaraq flinched at the mirrored sound.

“Kaev!” she shouted. “Stop!”

He couldn’t. The animal was in control.

The animal did not like Masaaraq very much.

Kaev felt the pain of the metal cage on its head, the chains she’d kept it in. Years and years of that. Traveling to every settlement and camp and grid city and grim salvage ship in the north. Intermittent glorious moments of being unleashed, when she was in peril or had tracked down some particularly bad people, only to be knocked back out with a tranquilizer dart at the end of it and awaken in chains again.

She didn’t want to hurt you, Kaev tried to say. She was trying to bring you to me. To help us both. We were incomplete. She completed us. Chaining you was the only way.

She is our mother.

He knew he was speaking into the wind. In a moment of calm he might have been able to make the bear understand. Now, there was no space in its mind for words. For emotions. There was only the kill. For both of them. Whatever human part of him cared to talk Liam out of hurting Masaaraq, it was swiftly swallowed up by the bear’s frenzy.

Masaaraq ran for the edge of the Arm. The bear followed. Ora screamed, ran in their direction, and Soq pulled out some kind of weapon that had been strapped to their back, but the orcamancer and the bear were too fast, too far away.

If she makes it to the water she can climb onto the orca and escape, Kaev thought, and wondered whether that was really him thinking it. He knew he didn’t want that to happen. She was so close, and he—he? Which he?—was gaining on her, just a few more leaping bounds and he’d be on her—he wanted her to trip, fall—

And then she fell.

He heard the gunshot a split second later. Go’s brass-knuckled flunky had pulled herself up, taken aim with a trembling arm, and fired. Masaaraq wouldn’t have left her alive by accident. She must have shown mercy. And now. Now she was down. Unconscious, not dead. The bear knew by her smell.

A second gunshot—from Soq, this time, visible from the corner of his eye, but it didn’t strike him, or his bear, so Kaev’s attention did not waver.

Go made a sound, a horrible sound. Kaev was barely there to hear it.

Liam reached Masaaraq’s unmoving form. Roared. Reared up on his hind legs. Kaev laughed at the bliss of it. The surge of happiness, the divine perfection of this moment, the kill, the thing he was made for. The bear raised its arms, and so did Kaev. He looked up, at his hands, and they were huge, thick with white fur, capped with long black blade-claws.

Pain split him in half. Broke his brain. He fell to his knees, and then to the ground, shrieking.

Before him, he saw a blur of black and white. And then red. So much red.

The orca had breached, leaped high into the air, and clamped its implacable jaws around the polar bear’s midsection. Liam roared, raking his claws against the killer whale’s sides, drawing blood in great gouts, digging deep—but not deep enough to break through Atkonartok’s thick layer of blubber, soft and yielding yet somehow the most effective armor in the animal kingdom. The orca opened its mouth, clamped down again. Shattered the polar bear’s spine. Dragged it into the sea.

Eyes shut, Kaev saw black water. The sea’s mouth swallowing him. Opening them, he saw white sky. White snow, falling. Vomit gargled in his throat with every short gasping breath. Why couldn’t he just die with the bear? He ached for unconsciousness. He lay on his back, praying for it, but it did not come.





Ankit


Ankit drove the getaway boat. Chim shivered on her shoulder.

Force of habit kept her slow at the start, afraid of a ticket from the traffic aquadrones, and then she sped up, because surely all of Safety’s toys would still be out of commission or otherwise engaged . . . and then she slowed down again, because where were they going? And what would they find when they got there?

The orca swam alongside the boat, vocalizing the same plaintive note again and again. Nudging the boat—lovingly, somehow; apologetically.

“She’s grieving,” Ora said. “That was her brother.”

“Then why did she kill him?” Soq snapped.

“She couldn’t help it. She was stuck, with Masaaraq unconscious. Locked into a frenzy, just like Kaev and Liam were. Even if she wasn’t, she probably couldn’t have acted any differently. Masaaraq’s life was at stake. The bear was a half second from killing her.”

“Atkonartok could have stopped him without killing him.”

“Maybe.”

Masaaraq said nothing. She sat as far back in the boat as it was possible to be, hugging her knees to her chest. Looking out to sea. Oblivious to the gunshot wound in her shoulder, her machete wound, her blood. Avoiding the city; avoiding Kaev, gasping and mumbling on the floor of the boat. Ignoring the severed hands that lay in her lap.