Blackfish City(4)

Ankit smiled sadly and launched into her standard spiel about how Qaanaaq imposed almost no limits on what a landlord could or couldn’t do. But that, rest assured, Fyodorovna’s number one priority is holding irresponsible landlords accountable, and the Arm manager will make the call to the landlord herself, to ask, and that if Mrs. Bashir or any of her neighbors have any other problems, they should please message our office immediately . . .

Then she broke off, to ask, “What’s this?” of a child drawing on a piece of plastislate. Taksa, according to the file. Six-year-old female. Sloppily coloring in a black oval.

“It’s an orca,” she said.

“You’ve heard the stories, then,” Ankit said, and smiled. “About the lady? With the killer whale?”

Taksa nodded, eyes and smile wide. The woman was the stuff of legend already. Ample photos of her arrival, but no sign of her since. How do you vanish in a city so crowded, especially when you travel with a polar bear and a killer whale?

“What do you think she came for?”

Taksa shrugged.

“Everyone has a theory.”

“She came to kill people!” said Taksa’s older brother, Jagajeet.

“Shh,” his mother said. “She’s an immigrant just like us. She only wants a place to be safe.” But she smiled like she had more dramatic theories of her own.

The children squabbled lovingly. Ankit felt a rush of longing, of envy, at their obvious bond, but swiftly pushed it away. Thinking about her brother brought her too close to thinking about her mother.

Taksa put her crayon down and shut her eyes. Opened them, looked around as though surprised by what she saw. And then she said something that made her parents gasp. The screen paused as the translation software struggled to parse the unexpected language. Finally Russian flashed on the screen, and its voice, usually so comforting, translated Who are you people? into Tamil and then Swedish.

Three seconds passed before anyone could say a thing. Taksa blinked, shook her head, began to cry.

“What the hell was that?” Ankit asked, after the mother led the girl into the bathroom.

The father hung his head. Taksa’s brother solemnly took over the drawing she’d abandoned.

“Has this happened before?”

The man nodded.

Ankit’s heart tightened. “Is it the breaks?”

“We think so,” he said.

“Why didn’t you call a doctor? Get someone to—”

“Don’t be stupid,” the man said, his bitterness only now crippling his self-control. “You know why not. You know what they do to those kids. What happens to those families.”

“Aren’t the breaks . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence, hated even having started it.

“Sexually transmitted,” the father said. “They are. But that’s not the only way. The resettlement camp, you can’t imagine the conditions. The food. The bathrooms. Less than a foot between the beds. One night the woman beside my daughter started vomiting, spraying it everywhere, and . . .”

He trailed off, and Ankit was grateful. Her heart was thumping far too loudly. This was the sixth case she’d seen in the past month. “We’ll get her the help she needs.”

“You know there’s nothing,” he said. “We read the outlets, same as you. Think we aren’t checking every day, for news? Waiting for your precious robot minds to make a decision? For three years now, when there is an announcement at all, it is always the same: Softwares from multiple agencies, including Health, Safety, and Registration, are still gathering information, conducting tests, in order to draft new protocols for the handling and treatment of registrants suffering from this and other newly identified illnesses. Meanwhile, people die in the streets.”

“You and your family will be fine. We wouldn’t—”

“You’re young,” the father said, his face hard. “You mean well, I am sure. You just don’t understand anything about this city.”

I’ve lived here my whole life and you’ve only been here six months, she stopped herself from saying.

Because I feel bad for him, she thought. But really it was because she wasn’t entirely certain he was wrong.

The bathroom door opened, and out came Taksa. Smiling, tears dried, mortal illness invisible. She ran over to her brother, seized the plastislate. They laughed as they fought over it.

“May I?” Ankit asked, raising her screen in the universal sign of someone who wanted to take a picture. The mother gave a puzzled nod.

She could have taken dozens. The kids were beautiful. Their happiness made her head spin. She took only one: the little girl’s face a laughing blur, her brother’s hands firmly and lovingly resting on her shoulders.





Kaev


Nothing was certain but the beam he stood on.

The gong sounded and Kaev opened his eyes. The lights came up slowly. A pretty standard beam configuration for this fight: Rows of stable columns and intermittent hanging logs. Poles big enough for someone to plant one foot upon. Three platforms, each large enough for two people to grapple on. He pressed his soles into the bare wood and breathed. A spotlight opened on his opponent, a small Chinese kid he’d been hearing about for weeks. Young but rising fast. The unseen crowd screamed, roared, stamped, blasted sound from squeeze speakers. Ten thousand Qaanaaq souls, their eyes on him. Or at least, his opponent. A hundred thousand more watching at home, in bars, standing in street corner clumps and listening on cheap radios. He could see them. He could see them all.