Most outsiders saw only misery, when they came to Qaanaaq’s Upper Arms. They took predictable photos: the tangled nests of pipes and cables, filthy sari fabric draped over doorways and hanging from building struts, vendors selling the sad fruit of clandestine greenhouses. Immigrant women gathered to sing the songs of drowned homelands.
Ankit watched the couple in the skiff, taking pictures of a little boy. His face and arms were filthy with soot; cheap stringy gristle covered his hands. He sat at the edge of the metal grid, legs dangling over the ocean three feet below, stirring a bubbling trough that floated in the sea. Bootleg meat; one of the least harmful illegal ways to make money out on the Upper Arms. He frowned, and their cameras clicked faster.
She hated them. She hated their blindness, their thick furs, their wrongness. Her jaw bug pinged their speech—upper-class post-Budapest, from one of the mountain villages the wealthy had been able to build for themselves as their city sank—but she tapped away the option to translate. She didn’t need to hear what they were saying. They knew nothing about what they saw. Their photos would capture only what confirmed their preconceptions.
These people were not sad. This place was not miserable. Tourists from the Sunken World looked at the people of Qaanaaq and saw only what they’d lost, never what they had. The freedom they had here, the joy they found. Gambling on beam fights, drinking and dancing and singing. Their families, their children, who came home from school each day with astonishing new knowledge, who would find remarkable careers in industries as yet unimagined.
We are the future, Ankit thought, staring the hearty dairy-fed tourists down, daring them to make eye contact, which they would not, and you are the past.
She inspected the outside of 7-313. House built crudely upon house; shipping container apartments stacked eight high. A flimsy exterior stairway. At least these would have windows carved into the front and back, a way to let light in and watch the ocean—as well as keep an eye on who was coming and going along the Arm itself. And she saw something else: the scribbled hieroglyphics of scalers. Where the best footholds were, what containers were rigged to ensnare roof sprinters.
It had been years since she last scaled anything. She couldn’t do so now. She carried too much with her. Physically, and emotionally. To be a scaler you had to be unburdened.
The tourists took no photos of her. They looked at her and could not see where she came from, what she had been, only what she was. Safe, comfortable. No shred of desperation or rage, hence uninteresting. The little boy had run off; they turned their attention to the singing circle of women.
Ankit stopped to listen, halfway up the front stairs. Their voices were raw and imprecise, but the song they sang was so full of joy and laughter that she shivered.
“Hello,” said the man who answered the fourth-floor unit door. Tamil; she knew maybe five words of it. Fyodorovna thought that Ankit’s cultural comfort level would make these people feel less frightened of her—she’d been raised by a Tamil foster family—but that was stupid. Like most things Fyodorovna thought.
“My name is Ankit Bahawalanzai,” she said. “You filed a constituent notice with the Arm manager’s office?”
He bowed, stepped aside to let her in. A weathered, worn man. Young, but aging fast. What had he been through, back home? And what had it cost him to get his family out of there? The Tamil diaspora covered so much ground, and the Water Wars had played out so differently across South Asia. She took the seat he offered, on the floor where two children played. He went to the window, called outside. Brought her a cup of tea. She placed her screen on the floor and opened the translation software, which set itself to Swedish/Tamil.
“You said your landlord—”
“Please,” he said, the slightest bit of fear in his eyes. “Wait? My wife.”
“Of course.”
And a moment later she swept in, flushed from happiness and the cold: one of the women from the singing circle. Beautiful, ample, her posture so perfect that Ankit trembled for anyone who ever made her mad.
“Hello,” Ankit said, and repeated her opening spiel. “I work for Arm Manager Fyodorovna. You filed a constituent notice with our office?”
Every day a hundred complaints came in. Neighbors illegally splicing the geothermal pipes; strange sounds coming through the plastic walls. Requests for help navigating the maze of Registration. Landlords refusing to make repairs. Landlords making death threats. Landlords landlords landlords.
Software handled most of them. Drafted automated responses, since the vast majority were things beyond the scope of Fyodorovna’s limited power (No, we can’t help you normalize your status if you came here unregistered; no, we can’t get you a Hardship housing voucher), or flagged them for human follow-up. A flunky would make a call or send a strongly worded message.
But the Bashirs had earned themselves a personal visit from Fyodorovna’s chief of staff. Their building was densely populated, with a lot of American and South Asian refugees, and those were high-priority constituencies, and it was an election year. Word would spread, of her visit, of Fyodorovna’s attentiveness.
She wasn’t there to help. She was PR.
“Our landlord raised the rent,” Mrs. Bashir said, and waited for the screen to translate. Even the poorest of arrivals, the ones who couldn’t afford jaw implants or screens of their own, had a high degree of experience with technology. They’d have dealt with a lot of screens by now, throughout the process of gaining access to Qaanaaq. And anyway, her voice was sophisticated, elegant. She might have been anything, before her world caught fire. “We’ve only been here three months. I thought they couldn’t do that.”
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.