“About the breaks.”
“Are you serious? You need to learn your lesson, lick your wounds, and move on. Fyodorovna isn’t planning to pursue this, is she? Make it a campaign plank?”
The view was breathtaking. The windscreen was being shifted, and as the sun caught the gleaming facets it looked like the sky was one massive kaleidoscope. Was that fear, in Breckenridge’s eyes?
“Maybe,” she said. “We’re still collating.”
“Big gamble,” he said. “Unlikely to pay off for her. Maybe if you weren’t an incumbent, you could rally people behind it, make absurd demands and promises, whip it up from a fringe issue to a major one, but with all her time in office and not a lick of concrete action, the few people who do care about it one way or another won’t—”
“Maybe she’s planning concrete action.”
“That would be unwise.”
“Why?”
He took off his glasses. Rubbed his eyes. “You know that even if I did have access to any information that might be helpful, we couldn’t share it.”
“I need to know,” she said. “We’re losing here. And you need us.”
“Let’s get noodles,” he said. “You hungry?”
She wasn’t, but she knew when someone wanted to talk off the record.
Her jaw pinged on their way out. She let the message come in: a colleague back at Fyodorovna’s office, concerned because That Crazy Lady Maria was apparently rallying an angry mob. Hardly a challenging feat; out-of-work Americans took little riling up. Employed Americans, too, for that matter.
“Back in ten,” Breckenridge said to the receptionist. Receptionists were a funny holdover, Ankit thought, not for the first time. Software could do everything they did. But they made people feel more comfortable. How much of the world around us is utterly superfluous, kept in place to preserve an illusion of order?
That’s when she realized how scared she was. She never got philosophical. There were always too many real things to think about.
On the street, darkness was inching in. The days were short now. Soon they’d be down to four dim hours, and they’d crank up the lights nonstop, and the whole city would smell of the composting sewage in the biogenerators that powered the methane-sodium lamps. They crossed the Arm, toward a shop expensively made up to look like a ragged Arm Eight street stall. Right down to the spray-painted tarps, except these were hanging inside, where they weren’t protecting anything from the wind.
Arm One noodles were the worst.
What did it mean, that Breckenridge had something to say but couldn’t say it in the office? Something was afoot with the breaks, and the shareholder he worked for knew what was going on. Might have helped make the decisions. Or maybe this was something else, some other scandal, some other terrible thing about to hit her, one more reason her boss’s career was over and therefore so was hers.
A slide messenger ululated past them.
“Hey, comrade,” said a man in a hooded sweatshirt, running up behind them. “I think you dropped this.”
Breckenridge patted his pockets, made a quizzical expression, reached out to the man’s extended hand.
The man grabbed him, pulled him in, took hold of his arm at the wrist and above the elbow, and twisted. Breckenridge yelped, turned his body with the arm. The hooded man kicked at his knee, gave him a shove, dumped him off the grid and into the sea. Ankit got a glimpse of gritted teeth, a neck wide with muscle. He turned to her, slowing, as if debating whether to soak her, too, and in that second she got in one good kick. Missed the mark slightly, hitting his inner hip, but hard enough to surprise him into pausing for just an instant, a fraction of an instant.
Long enough for her to catch a better glimpse of his face. Shadowed, battle-scarred, seen only once in the flesh, but familiar. From posters, from fight broadcasts.
Her brother.
“Kaev,” she said, but he was already sprinting away.
Sirens blared. Arm One had surface sensors to know when someone had been soaked. Breckenridge flailed in the choppy sea, glasses gone, looking ridiculous, like he’d never again make the mistake of leaving his office.
“What the hell,” Ankit said, but he couldn’t hear her, couldn’t have answered if he had, and anyway she wasn’t talking to him.
City Without a Map: Anatomy of an Incident
You are bound to your body.
Your body is shaped by its DNA, your parents’ decisions, historic hate and hunger, contested elections, the rise and fall of the stars in the sky. Maybe your body is in an awful place. Maybe, like me, you are there through no fault of your own.
One day, you will break free of your body. Every one of us will. Until that Great Liberation comes, we must be content with the little liberations. The shiver up the spine—the telltale tingle of a beautiful song. Great sex; a good story.
So. Another story. This one encompassing twenty minutes, distilled and condensed from diverse sources. Journalist reports; video cameras; eyewitness accounts as delivered to Safety and other agencies.
Scene: The Sports Platform. Lowest level. Evening. Darkness has just come to Qaanaaq.
At 17:55, forty men and women board the Platform. They are an angry, unruly bunch. They carry improvised weapons; lengths of pipe, mostly, retired from the city’s geothermal ventilation system. Some wield the rusting skeletons of American guns, family heirlooms desperately clung to, sometimes the only thing an ancestor carried when they escaped from the hellhole collapse of Chicago or Buffalo or Dallas.
By 18:04 they have reached the lowest level.
The woman who leads them has been transformed. Whatever wretched old crone she is, in whatever miserable crevice of Arm Seven or Eight she resides, she has left all that behind. Right now, she is magnificent. A monster.
“You guys can get the hell out of here right now,” a thug hollers at the half dozen journalists lazing on the bleachers. “Unless you want some of this, too.”
“Let them stay,” the woman says, and from her accent they know she is the original article, straight New York, by way of the Dominican Republic, been here a week or twenty years, it doesn’t matter, she’s had so little actual conversation with her neighbors that the city can put no fingerprint on her voice. “They should see this. The world should see this.”
Still. Most of them leave.
“But they could call Safety!” someone says, making ready to pursue them.
“They could call Safety without moving an inch,” she says. “But by the time Safety gets here, our work will be done.”
Their target has not moved since their arrival. For why else could they be here, if not for the Killer Whale Woman? She stands there, watching them, and the journalists will report that she is smiling.
Imagine her beautiful. Imagine her stout and muscular inside her leathers and furs. Imagine someone so strong that if you knew she was on your side, you would never be afraid again. And if she was coming for you, you would know all you needed to do was wait.
“Surround her,” the woman says. “Don’t let her get to the bear.”
Several members of the mob notice it for the first time. Chained to the wall, getting to its feet, bristling with rage at the smell of so much anger. And now the smell of so much fear. A couple of people yelp. One runs.
“Your kind is not welcome here. You are an abomination. A profanation of the human being as God made it, in His image. He made us distinct from the animals for a reason. Your bond with that savage beast in chains over there is sin, and that sin is why your people were wiped out.”
At the word abomination, their target moves for the first time. She raises the weapon that has been resting at her side and takes hold of it with both hands. It is taller than she is, walrus-ivory handle and a slightly curved shaft that might be ironwood or might be the rib of the most massive of whales. At its end, a blade like a lopsided crescent moon, fatter at the bottom than the top, its edge broken up into hooks and barbs.
Some of the journa
lists capture photos of it. Some of them are filming the whole thing.
“Why have you come here?”
Someone hurls a pipe. Hard. Her motion is effortless, so slight that some people don’t even see it, the most minimal shift of the weapon to deflect the projectile without striking it head-on in a way that might damage her blade. The effect on the mob is obvious, immediate. Mouths open. Feet shuffle. For the first time, the courage of a violent crowd begins to crack. They are not invincible. Their target is not helpless.
It has the opposite effect on their leader. Or perhaps it is their fear that makes her braver. Her chest swells. She steps closer, into range of the weapon.
“You are not welcome here,” she hisses.
“She can’t understand you,” someone yells. “You know they’re afraid of technology. She doesn’t have an implant.”
At this, Killer Whale Woman laughs.
This, too, startles the mob, so much so that hardly anyone notices that she has struck out with her weapon. Only their leader’s scream, several milliseconds later, alerts them that something is wrong. Her right hand is lying on the floor, being baptized in a cascade of arterial blood. The smell of it makes the polar bear roar.
“Get her!” someone shouts, and the crowd closes in on her. Their dehanded leader staggers away to the far edge of the platform.
Pipes and chains swing. Pause the video, zoom in, slow it down, you can see the ballet unfold. Two men rush forward first, side by side, so close a single swing decapitates both of them. A woman attacker crouches low, coming in from the side, and catches a high kick that knocks her backward. The swing that lopped off two heads reaches its graceful end, and already the orcamancer is pulling it back, shifting her hands to the center of the shaft, ramming it back, expertly striking the rib cage of the man trying to run up on her from behind. Bones break. Their sharp edges stab into organs.
People stand in the doorway—athletes from other levels of the Platform, and the standard stream of curious Qaanaaqians who come every day to visit their mythical visitor. Fifteen screens are focused on the action, capturing every instant of it.
The polar bear stomps its forepaws against the ground. The whole hall echoes with the metal ring of it.
“Gaaah!” someone shouts, or at least that’s how their desperate, inarticulate cry will be rendered in the Post–New York Post. Before it is finished she has thrust her weapon forward and its blade has pierced his throat, one barb catching on his spine, and she swings it to the right to shake him free, bringing his body into the path of one of his comrades, who trips over it and tumbles to the floor and has one arm severed by the now unencumbered weapon.
A gunshot. The screech-whistle of a ricochet, and then another, more distant, as the bullet vanishes into the gloom of the Platform’s lowest level. And then a curse, for, as so often happens with the aging firearms of Americans, the igniting gunpowder has caused the barrel to explode in the hands of its user.
But the sound of it causes the orcamancer to pause. Her smile stops. She looks from face to face, hand to hand.
“Shoot her!” the mob’s leader wails, unnecessarily, from the sidelines, her voice thick with pain but light from loss of blood.
The orcamancer neatly disembowels another soul idiotic enough to charge her.
A man closes his eyes and then opens them. Takes a breath. He stands away from the fray, between her and the bear. His thighs ache. A week and a half has passed since he got off the iceboat. They should not still be hurting. He is getting too old to straddle the saws anymore, too weak to calve functional shards off the Greenland glacier. By this time next year, he’ll be unable to make a living at the only job he’s ever had in this crummy city. And then what? He is old enough to remember Philadelphia before the Revival, before the state of Pennsylvania fell to fundamentalists with a platform of confronting “centers of sin” who ordered the complete evacuation of every major city. He has seen everything taken from him, so many times, and he’s never been able to do a thing about it.
He shoots. The bullet strikes the orcamancer in the lower leg, knocks her back, causes her to stumble and fall to her knees.
People laugh. The circle, smaller now, closes in.
She taps two fingers against the corner of her jaw. Someone gasps. They had been so convinced that she eschewed all technology, this possibility never entered their minds.
Metal rings against metal. Again they hear the polar bear roar. Louder now. They turn to see that it is unfettered, the cages fallen away from its hands and mouth. It shrieks and charges.
This is where the official record breaks down. Everyone leaves at this point, and swiftly. Journalist and freelance gawker alike exit. So, for that matter, does the recently dehanded woman who moments ago had been a mob leader. What’s left of her mob attempts to depart but is unsuccessful.
There are no cameras to capture the carnage.
Soq
Soq saw the slaughter and did not flinch.
It was their fifth time visiting the orcamancer. Lots of bored Qaanaaqians came to see her, either at the Sports Platform or at the Arm Six sloopyard where her boat was docked. Most went once and found the real thing far less interesting than the mythic warrior they’d been imagining. Only the obsessed came back again and again, the people for whom hate or fear or love won out, the people for whom she meant something. Soq had looked from face to face on each visit and wondered: Why is this one here? Why this one? Do they want to destroy her? Do they want to beg her for the gift of her nanites, a teaspoonful of blood that could turn them into something as awesome as she is?
And why, Soq wondered, am I here?
Sometimes people asked the Killer Whale Woman things, and they were always ignored. Most often they stood as silent as Soq did.
Soq arrived in the middle of the bloodbath. They almost got trampled in the sudden swift exodus of people up the stairs. When Soq got to the bottom and climbed into the bleachers, they got there just in time to see the bear break a man’s neck. A woman turned to run, and the bear’s paw raked down her back, tearing it open, pulling her backward and onto the ground, and then it stooped to tear out her throat.
It took less than eight minutes for the polar bear to kill the last of the people who had come to hurt the orcamancer. It played for a short while with a severed limb and then turned to face its traveling companion.
And—was that fear Soq saw, in the orcamancer’s eyes? How could that be? Weren’t they bonded? How did this work? Which of the stories were true? Hadn’t they known each other all their lives, been raised as siblings; didn’t they feel each other’s pain? But perhaps in the chaos of so much bloodshed, the wild animal could not be controlled. It took a step closer to her.
For reasons Soq did not understand, they were not afraid of the polar bear. They knew they should have been. But they also knew that there was a very good chance that the bear was about to eat the orcamancer, unless someone distracted it, and no one else was around to do the distracting, and the bear was far away, so maybe Soq would have time to escape—
“Hey!” Soq called, standing up in the bleachers. Thinking too late to calculate the distance from there to the exit, gauge how fast the bear could run, whether they stood a chance of making it out, whether the heavy door could be bolted to keep the bear from charging through and eating Soq.
It stopped, turned its head to look in Soq’s direction. Sat back onto its hind legs. Cocked its head. The orcamancer gasped. The bear did not resist when the orcamancer put the cages back onto its head and hands.
The orcamancer took off her hat and bowed to Soq. Her hair fell in a heavy intricate coil behind her. She pressed the button for the elevator. Waited patiently. With her polar bear. Then she turned and said something. Soq’s jaw buzzed, translating from Inuktitut-English Pidgin:
“I am in your debt.”
The first words anyone had heard this woman say, and she had said them to Soq! Blood covered the animal, and the killer whale woman was shining with
sweat, and Soq had never seen anything so beautiful. I should go down there, say hello, start up a conversation, become best friends. Help her escape. Something. But Soq could not move, could barely breathe. It took an incredible effort to call out, “You’re welcome!” in the last second before the elevator whisked them away.
Kaev
Kaev had been hoping for something like what he felt from a fight. The adrenaline rush, the thrill of danger, the joy of abandoning the ego and embracing the body, the animal. But he’d gotten no pleasure from his soaking. Only guilt, and shame, and now the extra special gift of having to worry about getting arrested.
He’d cried, after the first one. A bureaucrat, a flabby flimsy thing who felt truly safe only when behind a desk. He’d probably never been close to violence in his entire life. Kaev tried to tell himself that maybe the man was pure malevolence, merrily authorizing mass suffering—rent raises, embargo orders, strategic pharmaceutical restrictions—but he couldn’t diminish how wretched it felt, the look on the guy’s face when he thought he was about to be murdered.
The second one, he wouldn’t feel bad about.
“He goes by Abijah,” Go had told him. “But then he always tells everyone that it’s a nom de guerre. And gets disappointed when no one cares enough to ask any follow-up questions.”
Kaev recognized him. A slum enforcer. The muscle that came to kick you out of your home if you ignored an eviction notice, or roust you from your nook when the sub-subletter you were paying decided he wanted to clean house. Nasty thugs. Arsonists, torturers, evidence planters—effective enforcers had to be jacks of all the sordid, ugly trades that went into maintaining good tenant-landlord relations in a city where the landlords called all the shots. Many were failed beam fighters, and all of them were obsessed with the sport. He’d seen Abijah at the Yi He Tuan training center, watching from the bleachers while he practiced. Making awkward conversation. Flexing his muscles, complaining of soreness from a rough day, like there could be any comparing his job and Kaev’s.
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