“I was the grounded one. She was always a little bit removed, like none of our problems really hurt her. When we were hungry, when we were scared, when we were on the run, she never complained. Sometimes it was infuriating, like she wasn’t taking things seriously, like she was naive or childish or unprepared for the world we lived in. After we had kids, I saw what a sound survival strategy it was. I was always afraid. Always anxious. Always angry. You kids picked up on that and echoed it. Ora kept you happy, kept your heads in the clouds.”
“What was she bonded to?”
“A bird. A black-chested buzzard eagle. A most unpleasant thing, really, but back then we didn’t mirror our animals’ mind-sets so easily. We had the entire community to keep us stable, our nanites closely related enough that we were all low-grade empaths, smoothing out the edges of each other’s bad moods.”
“Whereas now—”
“Now, me and Atkonartok are all we have. It’s so different. I can’t describe it. I am what she is, she is what I am. I am an animal. We are an animal. It’s so frightening, and at the same time so exhilarating.”
Masaaraq took the tube out of Ankit’s hand, unstoppered it, poured the contents out over the strips of seal. The pebble now sported a smooth blue sheen where it had been jagged and gray. My nanites, Ankit thought. Masaaraq picked it up with bone chopsticks, densely patterned with tiny intricate shapes. “Now for your new sister.”
Ankit took the blanket off the cage. The blue-striped monkey blinked, looked around, yawned to show sharp eyeteeth. Ankit had only needed to wait a half hour from the time she opened her window and put six strings of seal jerky out for her, and when she’d come, and Ankit had put the food into a cage, she’d gone willingly into it. Hadn’t screamed or seemed the least bit distressed when Ankit shut the door behind her. Had apparently gone right to sleep when Ankit covered the cage with a blanket. Did not look particularly frightened now to see these two humans eyeing her.
“She’s had a rough life, I bet,” Ankit said, “or maybe a super-easy one.” She wondered how much of the animal’s trauma would become her own. Maybe trauma was different for animals. Maybe the absence of sentience kept the past from causing them so much pain. She had so many questions but was afraid to ask them—for even here, in her dirty little apartment, lit only by candles, the air of the sacred was so strong that she could not bear to disturb it with petty words.
Masaaraq placed the nanite pebble into a small china bowl, then poured a few drops of clear liquid from a flask over it.
“This will start to deactivate the polymerization agent.”
She took another syringe. When she grabbed the monkey’s arm, the animal smiled, a wide toothy smile of fear, and she screamed when Masaaraq stabbed her but did not pull away. Grid rumor said that synth drug labs tested their products on Qaanaaq monkeys, and Ankit had always chalked that up to mythmongering on the part of gossipy drug runners, or Narcotics, who wanted you to doubt the hygiene of unlicensed narcotics. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Masaaraq held up the tube of monkey blood. “You would not have had a choice, in normally functioning nanobonder society,” she said, dropping the pebble into the monkey’s blood. “An animal Other would have been allotted to you based on community need and availability. Every animal serves a purpose, brings a different kind of skill or resource. It was somebody’s responsibility to be bonded to a bunch of chickens, if you can imagine that.”
Masaaraq laughed. The sound was earthy, warming. Ankit got the impression it had been a long time since she’d made that sound.
“Old Rose. She was never quite right. Inappropriate, and mean.”
She picked up the nanite pebble gingerly. Ankit could see it, all but crushed between the two chopsticks. Masaaraq dropped it into the tube of monkey blood. “It’ll dissolve fast, now that the polymerizing agent is almost completely deactivated.”
“How did you get so lucky? I have to imagine an orca is a pretty sought-after . . . Other.”
“I had an unfair advantage. I was a stubborn child, totally uninterested in weaving, so I didn’t learn until I was nine years old . . . and by the time I did, I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to get stuck bonded to something stupid like milk goats. So I kept it secret, pretended like I still didn’t know how to weave, and I waited until an old woman in our village who was bonded to an orca passed away. And then, Wow, look, everyone, now I know how to weave.”
Ankit laughed. They laughed together.
“But still—it wasn’t a sure thing. Three other kids had come of weaving age that year, and we would all bond at the same ceremony. The shaman would make the choice, and I couldn’t leave it up to chance. So I went to the cove where the orcas and their human Others lived—most nanobonder communities only had three or four, whereas they might have thirty wolf dogs and a couple dozen horses—and jumped into the water. There were orca babies, unbonded, and they came out to play with me, like I thought they would, except they came out to play at killing me. Would have, if a human and its adult orca hadn’t intervened. But the shaman decided that it meant I had some deep spiritual connection with the orca, so she marked me for bonding to one.”
Ankit scanned her face for a sign of that impetuous, clever child. The one who’d risk dying without stopping to weigh the pros and cons. It was still there, she decided. Buried deep. But there. Masaaraq gave the monkey blood tube a brief vigorous shake. Then she sucked the blood back up into the syringe and injected most of it back into the monkey. The last few drops she squeezed out onto the plate of seal flesh strips.
“Eat,” she said, and held out the plate to Ankit and the monkey.
“Is this hygienic?”
“No,” Masaaraq said. “But it is probably the least risky part of this entire process.”
Ankit ate a strip, salty from their blood. The monkey took one in each hand and shoved both into her mouth.
“You’ll both need to sleep now,” Masaaraq said, opening two bottles of the little over-the-counter post-opioid drink that was the closest Ankit had been able to come to the red tar opium that the ritual’s “recipe” had called for. Ankit drank hers directly from the bottle; Masaaraq poured the other one into the little bowl and the monkey lapped it up.
“Why a monkey?” Masaaraq asked. “You could have had any animal. Those boats full of functionally extinct predators—I could have gotten you a tiger, or a wild boar, or a sea snake . . .”
“Monkeys are survivors,” Ankit said, feeling tentacles of trance take hold of her already. “They’re small and resourceful. And fearless.”
She slept. Hours passed. Her dreams were glorious, vibrant, alive. More real than memories. She scaled—everything.
“I know how to do it,” Ankit said, coming awake for one brief flash between dreams. “I figured it out the other day.”
Masaaraq was there, holding her hand, watching over her and her monkey. She asked, “How to do what?”
“How to get her out.”
Soq
Soq kept lists. Document after document, stored on their screen. Soq recorded everything they saw. The info that came into their head. The data; the images.
Each new wave of imagery and sound and memories that were not theirs came with a new kind of pain, starting in some new place inside their brain. But Soq was determined to be stronger than the breaks.
Soq cataloged. Created structure. Tried to order the things into categories; to find the patterns; to make them when there weren’t any. And when they weren’t trying to impose structure on the chaos of new things surging through their mind, they played with the polar bear, who seemed perfectly happy to be named Liam. There was barely room for the two of them in the little cabin Go had given Soq, which was full of old screens and smelled like wet wood.
“Hey!” they said to Masaaraq when she came back from gods knew where, having been away for what seemed like days, looking exhausted but with an uncharacteristically blissful expression on her face. “Where’ve you been?”
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“Met up with an old, old friend.”
“The same one who made you so upset the other day?”
Masaaraq glared at Soq, like she was surprised they were paying attention. Soq decided that the rules of human conversation were largely meaningless to Masaaraq. “I’ve been thinking,” they said. “I thought it was special machines. In the blood. I thought that was the secret to how you bond with animals.”
“Nanites,” she said. “It is.”
Schematics lay in front of Soq, on the small bit of bare floor space. Special architectural-quality screens, thin and rollable, loaded with the plans for the Cabinet. Go had gotten them when Soq asked. Though she’d laughed when she asked why they needed them and Soq said, To bust somebody out of there.
“But I don’t have those. Do I? How would I? Maybe if my mother were one of you, it could have passed on to me while I was in her womb, but that’s not the case. It’s not like it would have been in my father’s sperm.” Soq rubbed Liam’s belly. “So how come he isn’t eating me right now?”
“You’re right,” Masaaraq said. “You don’t. Have them. Not yet.”
“Not yet? You can give them to me?”
She laughed wearily. “Nothing to it. They’re very smart, very hardy little buggers. Otherwise none of this would work at all. If I introduced some of my blood into your bloodstream, even just a drop, they’d start to replicate inside you. They’re a lot like viruses—they assemble by hijacking cells, reconfiguring them to do what they want. And they’re programmed to recognize once they reach a certain density in the body, and stop reproducing. Otherwise they’d start to metastasize uncontrollably. Your body would swell up unevenly, your organs would be crushed, bones would break or extend, you’d die. And they’d keep on reproducing after that.”
“Amazing. Who created something like that?”
“Some very bad people. They were trying to create something much uglier. They failed.”
“If it’s so easy to pass on, why are you the last one? Why not give it out to lots of people? Get them on your side? Build an army, slaughter the bastards who came for your . . . tribe?”
“I’m not the last one,” Masaaraq said, eyes on the schematics, fingers walking the halls of the Cabinet. “And giving it to outsiders is a very grave sin.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re not worthy. Because they’d use it for evil. And because if they were worthy, if they wouldn’t use it for evil, sharing our curse with them would mean condemning them to death. They’d be slaughtered just like we were.”
“Well. You saw what happened to the last people who tried to come for you. Times have changed. Maybe you don’t need to be afraid anymore.”
Masaaraq considered this possibility, but only for a second.
“Anyway, you said not yet,” Soq said. “Does that mean you’re going to give them to me?”
“You’re one of us. It’s different. I am obligated to give them to you.”
“But you just met me.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Masaaraq said, and for the first time Soq had an inkling of the vast and terrifying tangle of expectations and obligations and pain and bliss that lay hidden in the word family. “He smells that you’re one of us,” she said. “That’s why he isn’t eating you right now. He smells your father. Your DNA, your pheromones, are half his. The bond is not nearly as strong—he could still hurt you, in certain circumstances, whereas he’d starve to death before laying a paw on Kaev—but there’s something there.”
“For real, why are you in such a good mood?” Soq asked. “Because of your old friend?”
Masaaraq nodded. “Because of her, we have a plan. Finally. The beginnings of one, anyway. These pipes”—Masaaraq pointed to a spot on the schematics—“they’re for the geothermal heat?”
“Red, yup,” Soq said, and rolled up their sleeve to show the sprawl of red-ink pipes tattooed on their arm, knotted and coiled, fading in and out in spots to resemble veins. A common enough motif for grid kids, but Soq was proud of theirs. A talented artist had done it, someone much in demand, whom Jeong had talked into inking Soq at a significant discount.
“They look thick. Thick enough for someone to crawl through?”
“Only if that person didn’t mind being boiled alive instantaneously.”
Masaaraq paused. “But the heat could be turned off?”
“Even if it was, these pipes are superinsulated. It’d be hours before they’d cool enough for someone to survive in there.”
Soq gasped at a new flood of data through their head. Apartments. Listings of hundreds of apartments. Accompanied by sharp pain below the ears. They cried out, pressed their palms to the sides of their head. They tried to scribble down the details, but could capture only one in ten at most.
When Soq looked up, Masaaraq was staring at them.
“I’m fine,” Soq said.
Masaaraq kept staring.
“Really!”
“And what would the authorities do,” Masaaraq wondered aloud, “if the heat went out? In a big building like this? Full of people with health challenges?”
“I don’t know,” Soq said, fighting to return to the here and now. “Whatever the protocol software told them to do, probably. People are awful cowardly about making actual decisions.”
“These walls are thin. Most Qaanaaq construction is. Because heat is always so abundant and inexpensive, thanks to the geothermal vent, they don’t need to build for retaining warmth, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So it would get very cold very fast.”
“Correct,” Soq said, breathing in and out as slowly as possible. “And I’d be willing to bet that if the heat went out in a place like the Cabinet, it wouldn’t be long before the protocol AI told them to start evacuating patients.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Masaaraq said.
“There’d be a lot of chaos.”
Masaaraq nodded, and then turned to Soq suddenly. She stood. She unhooked her bone-bladed staff from her back and aimed it at Soq. “Come here.”
For a second, Soq froze. Then they stood up, stepped forward.
“Give me your arm,” Masaaraq said, cutting a curved line into the back of her own forearm, midway between elbow and wrist.
Smiling, unafraid, Soq did.
Ankit
Protesters, outside her office. This happened from time to time. Ankit smiled at them as she entered.
You fools, she thought. Don’t you see how little this matters? How little power Fyodorovna really has?
But you could never say that. Because they wouldn’t believe it, would think she was just ducking responsibility, and because if they did believe it, the whole facade of Qaanaaq’s flimsy democracy would come tumbling down.
Her whole body felt wrong. Arms too short, legs too long, head too heavy. Pains and aches leaped from spot to spot. She carried the monkey with her, asleep in its cage. Dream figures flexed in her peripheral vision. Waves of lethargy came and went. Ankit stood there, watching the protesters from the far side of the glass. Signs and chants in English. She recognized Maria, the woman who’d wanted Fyodorovna to do something about the orcamancer. She carried a sign that said SAVE OUR SISTERS. She didn’t look to Ankit like a fundamentalist nut job anymore. She looked like someone who had suffered greatly, who wanted to stop that suffering for someone else. Also, she had only one hand now.
“It’s alive,” Fyodorovna said, unsmiling, when she turned around and saw Ankit standing there. She was outside her office—never a good sign. Talking by the alghe machine with the scheduler. Which meant she was really stressed out. “We hoped you were dead. Then you’d have an excuse.”
“What happened?”
“Come.”
Ankit followed her into her office and sat. Fyodorovna’s face was stern, rigid, taut. She explained, but Ankit knew it all already. The trite rote statement of concern Fyodorovna had asked for, sending thoughts and prayers to the mourners, demanding
Safety step in and stop the violence—Ankit had never released it. So in the eyes of her grid rat constituents, Fyodorovna was insensitive to their suffering, deaf to their grief. And they were not happy about it.
A bottle struck the office’s front window. Both bottle and window were polyglass, and neither so much as cracked, but it had the desired effect.
“Call Safety,” Fyodorovna said.
“On it.”
“They set fire to a rug shop boat,” the scheduler said. He was a fey and timid thing and seemed excited by the impending violence.
“Outlets are predicting riots,” Fyodorovna said. “And look at them! They look ready to riot.”
“There’s no riots,” Ankit said, then put a lot of emphasis on: “Yet.”
“They’re pre-rioting.”
“That’s not a thing.”
Fyodorovna sniffled. Ankit could sense it, her irrational fear, could follow it down the mental pathways where it was leading her. Precisely the mental pathways Ankit had hoped she’d follow.
Chanting, now, from outside. It gave Ankit a giddy feeling: This is my doing. I can make things happen. She asked Fyodorovna: “What do you want to do about it?”
“Call Safety.”
“I did. They’re on their way.”
Fyodorovna’s knuckles were white around her mug. Better if she suggests it, Ankit thought. If I propose it myself, she’ll fight the suggestion.
“Do you feel safe here? Or anywhere on the Arm?” Ankit asked.
“Of course I feel safe here.”
“Would you feel safer someplace else?”
Her boss exhaled and sat. “Yes.” The word seemed to lighten her load. It had slipped out, and now the decision was made for her. “I think maybe we should look into Protective Custody.”
“You’re sure?”
Fyodorovna nodded, and her eyes were wide and helpless and frightened in a way they’d never been before. Ankit felt bad for having pushed this poor fragile creature into such a terrified corner. But more than that, she felt elated, in a way she hadn’t since those moments when she’d take a shot of pine-and-apple rotgut before heading out on a night of scaling.
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