Blackfish City(6)
Hao was tiring, he could tell. The kid was too new, too rough. Kaev switched into stamina mode, feigning defense while modeling how to conserve energy and catch your breath while you’re winded. Hao followed suit, probably without realizing what he was doing. A new trick he’d learned tonight. In moments like this, Kaev was proud of what he was. A rare and sophisticated skill, letting someone else win without the crowd knowing it. Hao’s kicks connected with his thighs and side and the onlookers surged to their feet and for a few short instants Kaev was the king of Qaanaaq.
The kid got it. Kaev saw him get it. The instant when it all became clear; when he saw what Kaev was doing, and his attitude changed from cocky contempt to humbled respect. His eyes went wide, went soft. He paused—and Kaev could have kicked him in the back of the knee and followed up with a punch to the side of the head, sent him sprawling into the sea below; he saw precisely how to do it, even lifted his leg to unleash the attack—but do that and he’d cost Go millions, probably get a hit put out on him, and for what? A record of 37–3 instead of 38–2? Kaev pulled his wrist back, anchored himself; the crowd lost its mind, he could win it, their golden boy could be finished—
Laughter trembled up through Kaev. Joy threatened to split his skin wide open. He was a bird, he was bliss, he was so much more than this battered body and broken brain. In the split-second pause that gave away his advantage, he wanted to howl from happiness.
Hao’s face looked sad as he leaped in close and slammed home an uppercut. Kaev had given him that, the humility of a genuine warrior. That was what made a true artist, the kind of fighter who would mean something to the cold wet salt-stinking people of Qaanaaq. Falling, Kaev focused on that. On Hao’s career—like the careers of dozens of bright young boys who’d fought Kaev before him. What they might go on to do.
Kaev caught a glimpse of a woman graffitied onto the underside of the platform he’d fallen from. Clever placement: the sort of spot where no one but a falling fighter would see it. Programmed into an amphibious tagger-drone that swam in from the sea below and flew up to paint her in that secret nook. She was beautiful. Older, bald, dressed in either a monastic shift or a hospital robe, one hand raised, her face projecting saintliness. Beside her, three letters—ORA. Initials? For what?
He saw the metal fretwork that held up the bleachers, the places where the walls of the arena plunged down below the surface, the walkway around the edge where the fight doctor waited to fish the loser out of the water. He heard the howls of the crowd. But none of that was real. The water was all that was real. It rose up to him now, overjoyed to be embracing him again. Water was as much his native element as air. He was amphibious. He was a polar bear. He felt his body break the surface, felt the electric jolt of cold, and then he was gone, vanished, his body abandoned, its spasms and inadequacies and unfulfillable needs and mental fumblings all erased in a wash of stark bare ecstasy.
Ankit
Being a good scaler was easy. Ankit had been good. She was strong and she had decent reflexes. She could vault over barricades, evade drone cams, scamper along railings barely wider than a tightrope.
The difference between a good scaler and a great one was fear. Ankit was afraid. Fear held her back. She’d never been able to truly let go. She’d never been able to fly. She wanted to—wanted so bad it made her stomach heavy and her limbs freeze, poised at the edge of the abyss, unable to move.
She felt it now: the wanting. Standing between two tall ramshackle buildings, staring up at the handholds and footrests taunting her. The wanting, and the fear.
A whiff of pine needle smoke hit her before his voice did. “Hey, kid,” he said from the dark space between two building struts.
“Hey,” Ankit said, vaguely gratified to still be called a kid by someone. This guy had been doing errands for her since she actually was one. She stepped forward, out of the stream of traffic, into the cold wet dark of Qaanaaq’s interstitial commerce. Clatter of Chinese chess tiles from the street behind her; ahead, in the deeper dark, two men grunting together.
“Missed you lately,” he said. He wore three hoodies; their shadow softened the lines in his face.
“New delivery,” she said, and handed him a screen. Small, cheap, used, its network connections all fried, but with a long battery and a solar-charger skin.
“What’s on it?” he asked, smiling, excited. The guy was old, old enough to have had a whole life somewhere else before he came to the city. His pine needle cigarettes were resettlement-camp mainstays, smoked proudly and defiantly by recent arrivals, but as a result they had a certain outlaw appeal and even privileged Lower Arm kids could be seen smoking them.
“Books,” she said. “Enough books to last a lifetime.”
“You know her restrictions say only approved tech. She gets caught with this—”
“That’s her call to make. If she doesn’t want to take the risk, she can refuse it. In which case, give it back to me, if you’re feeling generous, or just sell it. I’ll never know anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said, and took the screen from her. “You’re so trusting. All these years, I could just be stealing your money and pocketing your stuff. You have no way of knowing if any of it ever gets to her.”
“You keep saying that,” she said. They could not smell the methane stink of the nightlamps, out there. The darkness held her in its mouth; the sea wound around her like a cloak. Here was bliss, was freedom: a sliver of the thrill she’d felt when scaling. The pleasure she never felt in daylight, in the scripted comings and goings of her job. “I can’t tell if it’s your twisted way of making a confession, or some kind of criminal code of honor thing you want to stress.” And even this felt good, the not knowing, the wondering. The city’s rigid certainties were robotic, unforgiving.