Blackfish City(8)

Probably Path was lying. Probably the whole sudden-moment-of-human-concern thing was a business strategy, beloved by fences everywhere, favored by criminals whose specific niches required a never-ending leap of faith on their clients’ part. Ankit really wouldn’t ever know.

At fifteen, she’d resolved to never visit her mother again. Her presence made her mother agitated, which might land her in several days of psychophysical therapies that Ankit suspected would not have been out of place in a nineteenth-century mental institution. That was why she never wrote to her, never called. The Cabinet hadn’t come by its reputation by accident; there was a reason some of Qaanaaq’s toughest criminals flinched at the memory of it.

But Ankit was happy, in spite of everything. Helping her mother out, even when she wasn’t sure if the help ever reached her, made her feel good. Less helpless, less alone. The night was cold and dark and she would not have had it any other way.

She slowed alongside a knot of stalls where women sold rotgut out of flasks. Raucous, ageless women. Ankit had bought shots off them when she was sixteen, one at the beginning of a night of scaling and a second at the end of it. She bought one now, from her favorite, whose stuff tasted like apples and pine sap. The woman’s smile said, I have watched you, I have seen you at your worst.

“What’s so crazy about it?” the vendor said to another. “All those animal workers, the ones who work with, what do they call them—‘functionally extinct predators.’ They make them get those shots so the things don’t kill them. Like that boat out on Arm One where they got tigers and alligators still, for rich people to rent. Not such a big leap from that to something that would let you meld minds with a killer whale.”

Ankit paused to savor her shot, and their conversation. Cold wind seared her skin, but inside she was a goblet of fire.

“My husband’s friend worked for one of the juntas,” another vendor said. “They all had their own secret unit they tried out all kinds of drugs on. He saw some shit, in Chile. Rumor was the Yucatán squad had a doctor, on contract from one of the North American pharma states, could inject you with something that let them hook your mind up to theirs, know everything you know. How else do you think they took down the narco government?”

“Narco government fell because of the rioting,” said the third vendor, scowling skeptically. “Second Mexican Revolution. No magic beans or science fiction required.”

“For all the good it did them.”

They would go on all night like this. And Ankit could have stayed, buying more liquor or simply standing in the wind at the edge of the circle of the nightlamp light.

This was always here, waiting for her. Qaanaaq night. Her drug of choice. But she was a creature of the day now, and if she relapsed into her addiction she’d lose everything she had.

“See you next time,” the woman said when she handed back her shot glass.

Her building’s lobby was warm and bright, with that particular brand of heat the geothermal ventilation system provided—wet and slightly salty, or maybe that was her imagination. She slowed her step to appreciate the heat after being so cold, and then her jaw chimed. A surprisingly swift response; Fyodorovna could barely be bothered to do any work while she was in the office, let alone when she was out of it. Her voice filled Ankit’s ear:

The breaks is toxic. There’s a reason politicians won’t go near it. People think it’s just criminals and perverts. Whether or not that’s true is irrelevant.

Ankit typed: It’s not true. And somebody needs to do something about it.

Fyodorovna responded: People are, I’m sure. Software is. Predictive is working on a plan of response. Scientists working on a cure. Something. Let the people whose job it is to worry about that worry about it.

Ankit knew her boss well enough to know that the conversation was over.

Upstairs, in her room, she pressed her forehead against the glass, looked out into the night, felt warm, felt bad about it. Turned her head to look in the direction she was always trying not to look.

It was still there, of course. It always would be. A sliver of building rising above the others in the distance: the Cabinet. The tallest building on Arm Six. Qaanaaq’s psych ward. She’d scaled it, once. The only time she’d ever gotten caught. The only time she’d scaled something for a reason, to get inside, to get something out. To get someone out.

The last time she went scaling. The time that her fear held her back. Froze her solid. The black sea, so far below, the wind screaming into her, the building slick with frozen mist. They’d caught her there, rooted in place, and there’d been nothing she could do about it, and here she was now, rooted in place, still helpless. Still afraid. Still obeying the rules. It was Fyodorovna she feared now, not Safety, even though she knew they were both ridiculous, but the end result was the same. She was groundbound. She never took that leap, the one that made the difference.

And so: She did something stupid. Something she knew was stupid. Something she did anyway.

She took the photo of Taksa, which was blurry enough to not be identifiable as any particular person, but rather conveyed a very generalized idea of Happy Little Girl, and cropped out any background elements that might give away whose home it was, and autoqueued it to post the next day to Fyodorovna’s channel, with one line of text—If the breaks affects one of us, it affects all of us.