Blackfish City(7)
Path bowed. Monkeys chattered from a warm nook beside the thermal pipes; the escaped endangered pets of the pampered rich, scavenging a living in Qaanaaq the way pigeons did in Sunken World cities. “Such are the twisted pathways of human trust. Any message for her?”
“The usual,” Ankit said. “Tell her that I love her, I miss her, I’ll get her out of there.”
He put his hand on her arm. He smelled like a forest. “My inside woman is a good person. She’ll pass your message on. Your birth mom is surviving, and that’s all anyone can hope to do in the Cabinet.”
“Thank you, Path,” she said, and stepped back, out of the shadow, into the street, where the vortex struck her hard, and she walked against it, farther out onto Arm Five. A woman rolled on the grid, babbling to herself about demons and oppression, her body shaking with end-stage breaks.
Ankit’s jaw chimed. She tapped it and heard the voice of her contact at Families. She’d messaged him that morning, trying to find out what might happen next with little Taksa, the girl with the breaks, and how she might be able to help.
Sorry to tell you, Ankit—Bashir family already deregistered. Awaiting transfer to the dereg ship. One good thing, transfer times have gotten crazy lately. Average wait six months. Ten thousand people flagged with the breaks, still in their homes. Waiting. Eventually they’ll be processed and put on the continental shuttle. Allotted space at one of the coastal camps.
Beside her, three seagulls struggled against the wind, then yielded to it. She reminded herself to breathe.
Taksa’s father had been right. You know what happens to those families. She’d heard. She hadn’t wanted to believe.
One shred of hope: that six-month transfer wait. That must mean something. Nothing ever took so long. Maybe it was an AI malfunction, or a new protocol was about to be rolled out that couldn’t be announced until some obscure other protocol finished its task. Decommissioned glacial calving ships being refitted for refugee transport, maybe, or the Swedes completing work on another West African camp. Qaanaaq was governed by a hundred thousand computer programs, which mostly got along well enough, but sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable mandates sparked a squabble that brought an agency’s operations to a standstill until a human or—more likely—another AI intervened. She’d have to look into it further.
Another tiny hope for Taksa, even slimmer than the first: asking her boss for help.
Idea for your campaign speech next week, Ankit wrote. I’ve been seeing more and more cases of the breaks in my constituent visits. Families. Kids. No one is talking about it. Certainly not your opponent. People are scared. If you show leadership on this issue it has the potential to increase your lead by 3.6%.
That last bit was made up. Put a decimal point on the end of a lie and her boss would swallow it every time. Whispering pleas to the universe—and wishing she could stop worrying about this family—Ankit headed home.
The problem was, Taksa’s father was just so similar to the man who raised her. The same profound humility, sturdy and essential as his spine. They’d been profoundly decent people, which wasn’t a given when it came to Qaanaaq. Or, really, anywhere. Few families would have helped a ten-year-old who demanded to know who her birth mother was—filed the appropriate paperwork, guided her through the bureaucracy labyrinth as best they could.
Both were dead now. Reflexogenic circulatory collapse, like so many of their generation—the decades-later legacy of corporate chemical spills and gas leaks. Pain in her chest made her stop walking, remembering. How well her father cooked, her mother’s paintings. How they gave her the grandfather’s name they were never able to have a son to carry. She resolved to buy some rice balls and make an offering before their photos—and then remembered that she made that resolution often, and followed through rarely.
She didn’t deserve the place where she lived. Few scalers ever landed a spot that nice, a job as good as hers, and it was a comfort, sometimes, to reflect on how lucky she was, and how hard she’d worked to get there, when you thought about how many Qaanaaq orphans were dying slowly in the cold green light of the methane-sodium streetlights that very moment of new diseases no one understood and no one wanted to talk about, and how easily she could have been one of them—and Ankit had to work hard to see it that way, instead of the other way, the one where she was turning her back on her people, where she should be doing more, where she and everyone else who got a raw deal from this shitty city should get together and demand what was rightfully theirs, like those weird seditious anonymous City Without a Map broadcasts always seemed to be hinting at.
Sudden shock: her brother, grimacing out at her from a fading bootleg flicker flyer. Advertising an upcoming fight, already in the past. Listing gambling sites and odds.
She’d gone to see him once, after she’d gotten her job and could access her file from Families, learn that she had a brother she’d never known existed—though nothing more than his name. When she found him he’d been strung out on something, probably synth caff, after a fight, and she’d known at once that something was wrong with him, mentally—the breaks, she’d thought at first, but no, this was something different—and she’d spent too long without a family and she couldn’t stop herself, and before she’d gotten through her carefully prepared introductory speech he had started gibbering and wailing. His friends had apologetically dragged him off, with a practiced ease that made her think these breakdowns were common occurrences. Since then she’d followed his career, at a distance. Become something of a beam fights fan. Betting on him every time, even though he always lost. He’d lost in this fight, to that new guy Hao who all the boys at her office were crushed out on.