“You give every new grid-grunt flunky the full tour yourself?” Soq asked.
“No,” Go said, but did not say anything else.
Back up top, she handed Soq an armband. Leather, black, embossed with an incongruous toile print. A pastoral French peasant scene. Go said, “When she was grooming me to take her place, my mentor once told me that ambition is essential to being an underling, but death to a crime lord. That we will flourish and thrive for precisely as long as we remain content with where we are, what we have. And when we try to reach further, seize more, that’s when we run into problems. That’s how wars start, how empires topple.”
Soq smiled, because it was easy to see where this was going. “But you’re not content with what you have.”
“No.”
“Your mentor sounds like a pretty smart lady.”
“She was pretty smart. But she thought small. And maybe she was wrong. Maybe that’s one of those pieces of received wisdom that everyone just accepts, even when it keeps them trapped in one place.”
“One way to find out,” Soq said, looking out at the city lights. The wind was picking up. Waves crashed against the side of the boat beneath them. This is what it feels like. To step outside your box. To shake your fist at the city and say, You will not break me. I’ll break you, if that’s what it comes to.
Go smiled. “I knew you’d see it that way. I want broader, more legitimate supremacy. I want to get off this boat.”
“What can I do for you?”
“The empty apartments. They’re the key to what I have planned. I need to establish a foothold. I want you to move into one. I’m asking all my warriors to do that, minus the ones I need for protection here on the barge, of course.”
“The empties are real?” Another one of those Qaanaaq stories that people loved to tell, right up there with the heat-resistant spiders that supposedly infested the geothermal pipes, and the threat of Russian invasion. Allegedly, it was common practice for shareholders to keep some of their holdings off the market. A sort of gentleperson’s agreement, to artificially inflate prices by increasing demand by keeping supply low. Soq didn’t doubt that the empties existed, but they were pretty sure their number was exaggerated, as was the extent of the conspiracy behind it. The more likely reason was the simple thoughtless wickedness of the rich, who had more money than they knew what to do with, who didn’t need the rental income and could keep an apartment empty for Grandma’s once-a-year visit or in memory of a loved one dead for decades. Either explanation was unacceptable. Shareholders were wise to keep themselves hidden, because surely Soq wasn’t the only one who would gladly stomp them to death if given the chance.
“They’re real. I’ve been collecting data on them for years. I know where many of them are. Not all.”
“Why do you need me there?”
“Don’t worry about that right now.”
Soq smiled. “You just told me ambition was essential for an underling.”
“No. I told you that’s what my mentor said. I also told you she thought small.”
Fill
The flat-bottom boat felt like a dungeon. Water dripped; red rust stains spread across cement walls.
“She must be here somewhere,” Barron said. They passed tents and shacks, lean-tos, yurts. The air felt tubercular, uncirculating.
“People live like this,” Fill said, and then regretted it. He’d spent all morning trolling through Grandfather’s software, surveying his holdings, everyone’s holdings, really, especially the ones marked Empties, and while it had bored him to tears at the time, it was presently making him sick with guilt, to think of so much space sitting empty for decades while these people lived packed together like splice shrimp in a jar.
“It’s warm, at least. A lot of these people are grid workers—vendors, food stall operators, sexual entrepreneurs—they spend all day in the shivering cold, so the warmth is a big part of the draw here. Of course, a few of them never leave at all.”
More than a few, to judge by the funk of feet in the air, of urine. Fill felt short of breath, angry at himself for coming down here. Why couldn’t they have made an appointment to meet her somewhere else? A brightly lit, above-sea-level spot? Surely this mythical maybe-Reader would have welcomed the opportunity for some fresh air and a cup of real coffee.
Barron, on the other hand, seemed to relish the dark, tight space. He looked almost disappointed when he stopped beside a ramshackle thing, a teepee made of sheets of hard plastic like some gritty closed flower, and said, “This is the place. But she’s out.”
“How do you know? These things don’t exactly have apartment numbers on them.”
“Patience, young Podlove.”
Five minutes passed like that. The longer he stood there, the more sounds Fill could make out in the space he’d mistaken for silent. Chatter, plucked instruments, squawking speakers, the clink of silverware. A nightmare confirmation of his worst imaginings of an urban underbelly. He wished he were less disgusted to be so close to the Poor Unfortunates he’d been idealizing as he listened to City Without a Map.
“Tell me a story,” Fill said. “I bet you’re full of them.”
“Very well, Your Majesty,” Barron said, and bowed. “I will tell you the story of how I came to Qaanaaq.”
“Sounds good.” Children scampered past, throwing deformed bottom-grade plastiprinted figurines at each other.
“I will tell you about the fall of New York. You’re a New York boy, aren’t you, Fill? Just a handful of generations back?”
“Two,” Fill said. “My grandfather.”
Barron rubbed his chin. “Like most cities, New York had managed to be both heaven and hell for a very long time. Filthy and beautiful, a playground for the rich and a shithole for the poor, sometimes leaning more toward one extreme and sometimes more toward the other. By the time I was in my twenties, most of the things that made it heavenly were gone. The transit system that was its pride and its lifeblood was largely unusable, ever since the storms that flooded the tunnels and forced the governor to agree to construction of the Trillion-Dollar Fail-Proof Flood Locks. And the Flood Locks themselves were widely believed to be bankrupting the city as a whole, but better to be bankrupt than dead went the common adage. Maybe your grandfather told you about that time, eh?”
“Not really. Just that it was miserable, and he was lucky to escape at all.”
“We all were. I lived in a place called Brooklyn. By that point, the situation was very dire. In New York City then, as in Qaanaaq now—as in most cities, always, I imagine—the landlords called the shots. It didn’t matter who was mayor, who was in the city council, what party a politician was from, real estate interests owned them all. They gave the most money to campaigns for public office, and electeds did whatever they asked. But by the time the Flood Locks were almost finished, Big Real Estate was in trouble. No one wanted to invest in the New York City housing market anymore. Banks pulled out. Foreign investors evaporated. The safest investment in capitalism was suddenly not so safe.”
Bored, Fill thought back to what his grandfather had told him, wondered where he fit into this story. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. More like it all seemed so remote, something that had nothing to do with him. Qaanaaq was what he wanted: a story he was part of, something he belonged to.
“We tried to fight back. We came together. We put our bodies on the line. We took the fight to them.”
Barron’s voice was rising, his face reddening.
“And we won! We got the mayor to block the budget the landlords were lobbying for, which would have paid them full market rate on all the newly worthless property they owned. We got the city council to vote against it. But that’s the thing. You can win against people. You can’t win against money. Money is a monster, a shape-shifting hydra whose heads you can never cut off. Money can only behave one way.”
Fill felt chills dance along his neck. The old man’s anger was unsettling.
“We watched from ou
r roofs, the day they blew the Flood Locks,” Barron said, standing up straighter. Suddenly he seemed a different, younger man. “We saw the explosions, the water pouring in. I’d imagined the Red Sea, Charlton Heston, a wall of water wiping us out. Really it wasn’t that much. Looked more like a bathtub overflowing. Only enough to render two-thirds of the city uninhabitable. By nightfall, the governor had declared a state of emergency. The feds spent a week working out an aid appropriation package that bought the landlords’ buildings off them—at full market value. Exactly as the landlords had planned. By the end of the week, the bloodshed had begun in earnest. Food couldn’t come in. Water supplies all contaminated. People desperate to get out, forced to abandon everything and take only what fit in one suitcase. I watched this one family—”
“What do you want?”
A woman stood beside the conical shack. Fill hadn’t even noticed her approaching.
“Are you Choek?” Barron asked.
She nodded.
“Robert sent us. Said he spoke to you—about the recording you did?”
“Come inside,” she said, scuttling backward into the teepee.
“Oh hell no,” said Fill.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Barron said, squatting and waddling in after her with remarkable agility for a man of his years. Fill counted to ten and then held his breath and followed.
Barron and Fill sat on the floor; the woman sat on a tatami. Her shack was barely big enough for the three of them. Fill could not have stood if he’d tried. Shelves hung from the ceiling, dangling all around him, heightening his claustrophobia. Her expression seemed empty, void of interest or even fear. Fill babbled, “Tell us about City Without a Map. Who told you to read that text?” He knew he should proceed with more tact, but he also knew that he was overwhelmed, frightened, stranded in a strange place he might not ever find his way back from.
“What did it mean to you?” Barron said, more gently.
“No one told me to read it,” she said. Her hands rested anxiously in her lap. “I read it because I wanted to.”
“But who wrote it?” Fill asked. “Did you write it?”
Choek looked at him, seeing him as if for the first time. “I can’t tell you any more than that,” she said. “I promised.”
“You promised who?” Fill whispered. This woman had touched her, talked to her—or him—but probably her?—the Author.
“I can’t,” she said. “You need to go.”
Fill looked to Barron, whose face seemed torn by rival impulses. To flee, to apologize, to beg . . . Finally he bowed his head and said, “We really appreciate your agreeing to speak with us.”
Just like that. It was over.
“Money,” Fill said. “How much would it cost for you to tell us?”
Choek looked at them for a long time, her eyes wracked with pain, before shaking her head.
Barron said, “Thank you for your—”
Fill blurted out a figure. A big one. A dangerously big one, the kind that he’d have to really beg his grandfather for. And might not get.
But big enough that her eyes went wide. With wonder, and then with anger, and then with sadness. Because there was no way to turn that much money down. No matter whom she had to betray. Single Author, rogue collective, evil robot overlord.
“Did you make this?” Barron said, placatory, pointing to a sculpture cobbled together from ancient circuit board. “What does it mean?”
“Don’t know. Just started seeing them. Dreams. Someone else’s. They’re about the Sunken World, I think. How all those people got buried alive in their own things. Or couldn’t let go of them when the waters started rising, when the flames came, and died clutching them.”
“Magnificent,” Barron said. “And you just started making the things you saw?”
“No,” Choek said. “For so long it was just visions, glimpses, images I could see but not understand. A compulsion to make something I had no idea how to make. I didn’t start sculpting them until I was in the Cabinet.”
“Wait,” Fill said. “You said someone else’s dreams. So you have the breaks?”
“Had,” she said, and smiled.
“You . . . had? You’re cured now?”
“In the Cabinet,” she said. “But I’ve said too much. Go. Come back with the money and maybe I’ll talk more. Maybe.”
They crawled out backward, for there was too little room to turn around. “A fascinating creature, is she not?” Barron said as they stood blinking their eyes in the relative brightness of the dim underbelly of the flat-bottom boat.
“How do you not want to learn more about what she meant?” Fill said, grabbing Barron’s sleeve. “She said she was cured! Of the breaks!”
“You said that,” Barron said. “I don’t know what she was trying to say, or whether the poor creature could tell the truth even if she wanted to. But you, in your damn hurry to—”
“I’ll talk to my grandfather,” Fill said, chastened, already turning on his heel, desperate to be gone from here, from Barron, from City Without a Map, from the abominable ways that caring about something opens you up to hurt. “I’ll let you know what he says.”
Barron was saying something, but he did not turn to hear what it was.
He decided he did not want to go home. For just one night, he wanted to slip away from his life. He went to his grandfather’s other apartment, the one he’d kept empty for all these years.
What had happened there? he wondered. What was so special about it? Who had died there; what torrid love affair or pivotal business deal had his grandfather conducted in it? Or did it mean nothing to the old man? An asset on a screen, one of Qaanaaq’s legendary empties? Walking in, it felt so different from the warm safe home his grandparents had built, the place his grandfather lived alone now. This one was stark, cold, austere—
And occupied.
“Hey,” said the boy playing with a shape-memory polymer at the kitchen table.
“What are you doing here?” Fill asked, but smiling, because the boy was beautiful. Butch haircut, broad spike-studded shoulders, a refugee face with the skeptical expression of a hardened Qaanaaqian. Fill stepped closer. Smelled him, like slide grease and star anise, and saw that maybe he was not a boy at all.
“Friend asked me to watch the place,” the kid said, and Fill sat at the table across from him. Them?
“But it’s not your friend’s place,” Fill said. Boy or girl, or some other majestic thing altogether, Fill shut his eyes against the flood of desire that washed over him. The danger of the situation was every bit as arousing as the person before him. He should have turned and left, called Safety, called his grandfather. He should have remembered that he had the breaks.
“No. My friend thought it was empty. Is it yours?”
“Not exactly,” Fill said.
Pornography writhed and danced in his peripheral vision. He opened his mouth, intending to say something seductive or submissive or something, but the pornography was growing more frantic, more bizarre, the pretty boys becoming monsters, the ground beneath him bubbling, and he stepped forward, still smiling, and fell to the floor.
Soq
I should have fucking left. Stepped daintily over his stupid body while he was unconscious and stomped my ass out of here.
But Soq hadn’t left when the rich kid fell to the floor in front of them. Soq had rushed over, checked his pulse, gotten him a glass of water, sat with him for the sixty endless seconds it took him to wake up. Cradled his head in their lap, been kind and nurturing while the kid emerged from the brief infancy of post-unconsciousness.
Mostly, Soq told themself, because they didn’t want this little prick waking up alone, remembering Soq’s face, calling Safety on them, saying he got jumped by a home invader.
But now here they were, an hour later, sitting on the floor like kids at a sleepover in an old movie, drinking soda and eating krill chips delivered by slide messengers, debating where to get noodles from.
“You hav
e to eat noodles in the first fifteen minutes,” Soq told Fill. “It’s just basic food chemistry. The heat is still cooking them, and in fifteen minutes they’re mush. We should go out to a stall somewhere.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Fill said. “And I don’t want to go anywhere. Let’s get them delivered.”
“Idiot, you can’t get noodles delivered. Are you not paying attention to me?”
The kid had a sense of humor, and some serious self-doubt, so the two of them got along great. Fill was less than a year older than Soq, and infinitely more naive about absolutely everything but sex, in which subject they were more or less evenly versed.
“I can get noodles delivered,” he said. “Watch.”
Fill dialed, promised a massive amount of money if they could have the noodles in his hands within five minutes of the moment they left the wok. Clicked off, smiling in triumph.
“Of course they’ll tell you it’s five minutes,” Soq grumbled, but Soq was also excited by his confidence, by the options that unlimited money opened up, by the previously unimaginable prospect of decent noodles being delivered.
“I guess we’ll know when we take a bite,” Fill said. “Since you’re such a noodle-quality fussbudget.”
“Yeah,” Soq said. “I guess we will.”
Turned out they were both obsessed with traffic trawling, following currents of attention to find the latest bubbling-up art and news being shared among Qaanaaq’s million subgroups. They compared bots, shared the software they both used to uncover new trends, swapped archaeology dubs and ancient Sunken World footage and the photo archives or instant messenger logs of long-dead strangers. Fill had the best programs money could buy, slick, swift, terrifying tools that turned up stuff that made Soq’s jaw drop, but Soq had gnarly, unpredictable Frankensteined software concoctions they’d found at the Night Market and Fill seemed just as excited by those as Soq was by his.
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