Ankit spent three hours shivering across the grid from the entrance to the Yi He Tuan Arena. Watching every face that went in and every face that came out. Looking for her brother. The screens flickered: Hao Wufan’s upcoming fight canceled. A damn shame, she thought. The Next Big Thing already a thing of the past, since those all-boy-sex-party photos surfaced, and the audio of his lunatic ramblings, drugged out of his mind or possibly suffering from early-stage breaks.
The dossier from her contact at Health hadn’t had much to offer, but she’d learned a little more about her brother. That he was sick, some unspecified form of brain damage. She had a file now. Something to hand him. He could take his time, process the information. And she wouldn’t be frightened if he howled or hooted or got upset. She knew what she was dealing with.
First she’d have to find him. She was pretty sure fighters didn’t hang around arenas when they weren’t scheduled to fight, but it was the closest thing to a lead she had. Maybe he’d come by to meet with a manager or promoter, pick up a payment, practice on the beams, train at a secret gym or battle society somewhere inside.
It had seemed like a solid enough plan when she had arrived. But now she was freezing and hungry and her feet were sore.
She called up a photo of him on her screen. She could see it, she thought: some sibling similarity around the eyes, a similar scoop to the sides of the face. And maybe they’d had the same nose once, before his had been broken a bunch of times.
She leaned against the wall beside a red pipe. An old vagrant trick, soaking up the heat it radiated. But after another hour, all the warmth in the world wasn’t enough to distract from the ache in her feet and the conviction that this was a fruitless way to go about finding him. She turned and headed for the Hub.
A girl cawed above her. Imitating crows: an old scaler taunt to frighten pedestrians. Ankit cawed back, prompting startled laughter.
We miserable grown-ups weren’t always groundbound, she thought, and then felt happy that she still spoke scaler-speak. Sort of.
Another revelation from that costly dossier, one she’d been avoiding examining. Sharp, prickly, cutting up her hands each time she tried to get a hold of it: before coming to Qaanaaq, her mother had spent time in Taastrup. The same place the early cases of the breaks kept pinging back to. Did that mean something? Could her mother have contracted a sort of proto-breaks, decades before the first cases started cropping up? Had her brother? Could she have been the subject of some experiment, or a survivor of some accident?
Patient 57/301. No name; no match in any genetic identification bank. Imprisoned in the Cabinet for thirty years. Top-level classified status; authorization that could only come from one of the sponsor nations—China, which meant it could be anyone with a ton of money; Thai officials typically couldn’t be bought off like that.
No diagnosis to appeal, no doctor to hunt down and punish. Waist-deep in bloody fantasies of how she’d hurt the person who did this, she noticed something. Someone staring at her.
A woman, with beautiful wind-scoured light brown skin, just a few meters away. She sat—sat?—in the sea. And then she rose, and Ankit saw she wasn’t sitting in the water at all, she was riding, riding something as black and deadly and magnificent as the sea itself. The orca turned its head and stared at her, stared into her, and so did the woman, and Ankit felt gutted, stabbed through, harpooned—
“She remembers you,” she said, the famous Blackfish Woman.
She was real. And she was here. And she was talking to Ankit.
Ankit said, after a very long time, “What,” and her voice was much smaller than she ever remembered it being.
“She has a very good memory. Thirty years later, she remembers someone’s smell.”
Ankit stepped closer, squatted down. Her breath would not budge. It stuck in her lungs like lead. She shut her eyes, tried to remember. Cast her mind back as far as she could. She recalled strange rooms, cramped spaces, fear, someone’s hand across her mouth to stop her from shrieking. Footsteps overheard. Harsh male laughter. Nightmare glimpses, nothing new, things she’d carried with her and ascribed to filthy group homes and overcrowded nursery boats, things that fit right in with the long line of better-remembered ugliness that Qaanaaq’s foster care system had given her. And when she began to see wide vistas of white snow, smell smoke, hear distant animal bellowing—gunshots—the wails and the cries of the dying—how could she know whether that was memory or imagination, the nanobonder genocide so widely written about, reimagined in movies, subject of epic poems and endless analysis?
She opened her eyes again, stared into the face of this impossible creature. Breathed out. “You’re her mate. My mother’s partner.”
The orcamancer nodded. “I’m your mother, too.”
“Of course,” Ankit said, awkward, uncertain about what was the proper protocol here. An embrace? A bow, a handshake, tears, wailing and the rending of garments?
“We’ve been going up and down every Arm of this city for days. Weeks, maybe. Human time markers don’t stick in my mind. Our minds. Sniffing at the air. Looking for your scent. This city, and a hundred others before it.”
The woman’s face—her mother’s face—her other mother’s face—was terrifying in its rawness. It hid nothing. It refused to hide. It was bare, alien, hostile to how humans behaved. More orca than person. Ankit’s cheeks reddened with emotions, and they were not all joy and love. She also felt fear. Fear of this woman, who cared nothing for social niceties or Qaanaaq or the safe life Ankit had fought tooth and nail to carve out for herself there.
“My name is Ankit. Was that my name, before?”
She shook her head.
“What was my name?”
“It’s not important now. Some other time, perhaps.” She got off the whale, climbed up onto the grid. Extended her arm stiffly, like a foreigner unaccustomed to the practice. “My name is Masaaraq.”
They shook hands. When Masaaraq let go, she stepped forward with alarming speed to swamp Ankit in a fierce bear hug.
They were exactly the same size.
“And my mother? What’s her name? All these years, I’ve never known. She’s a number, to them.”
Masaaraq looked around, as if suspicious of invisible eavesdroppers. Outsiders, especially from the underdeveloped parts of the Sunken World, believed all kinds of crazy things about Qaanaaq’s technological capacity, like that the fog could hear your every word and report it back to the evil robot overlords.
She whispered in Ankit’s ear: “Ora.”
“You’re here to get her out,” Ankit said. “Aren’t you?”
Masaaraq nodded.
“I want to help.”
She took Ankit’s hand and squeezed it. Not hard, but implacably, her strength overwhelming. This was a woman who had never stopped, who could not be stopped, no matter what happened to her or to anyone else.
Ankit had to take several deep breaths.
She’d told herself that she was triumphing over the fear. She wasn’t that kid anymore, the one whom fear froze solid, the one who was ruined by it. She’d posted that photo of Taksa—she’d gone to see her mother—again and again she’d stood at the edge of a tough decision and made the leap to the next one. Done the difficult thing.
But here she was again, up against her limit. A line she was afraid to cross. A leap that meant risking everything, leaving behind all she knew of comfort and ease, that might land her in jail or deregistered or worse. I want to help, she had said, and she did, but she couldn’t. To distract herself and Masaaraq from the bile rising in her throat, the panic she knew was visible in her face, she blurted out, “And do I get a killer whale?”
“Polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “That’s what you were marked for bonding to. But she died before you two had a chance to bond. When we were attacked. When your mother escaped with you two. We were nomads, spending the winter in an empty town. I was away, tracking the people who were trying to wipe us out. I failed. They got to you first. Everyone died—except you two. And her.”
“And you,” Ankit said.
“You should count your blessings,” the killer whale woman said. “The fact that your animal died before you two had been bonded is the only reason why you didn’t spend most of your life a gibbering idiot.”
“Like my brother,” Ankit said. “Right? Is that what’s wrong with him?”
“You know Kaev? He doesn’t know you.”
“Yeah. I know of him. I introduced myself, once. He . . . sort of . . .”
“Broke down. Yes. His mind was cracked. He was incomplete, his whole life. He is complete, now, and healing. You have been incomplete as well, you just haven’t known it. I will heal you, too.”
“I’m not incomplete,” Ankit said, feeling the grid give way beneath her. “I don’t need to be healed.”
“You do,” the orcamancer said. “You need to be bonded.”
“Or what?”
Masaaraq did not answer. She took a step back.
Ankit asked, “Do you . . . want to come over to my place? For a cup of tea?” She looked at the whale, briefly—ridiculously—imagined it in her elevator, daintily holding a teacup in one massive blade-fin, sitting at her kitchen table. “Can you . . . leave her?”
“I can. And I will drink tea with you. But not right now. I have an errand to run. With some friends.” From behind her back, she pulled a black box that was strapped to some kind of orca saddle. “Right now we must begin the bonding process.”
“No,” Ankit said, possibly not out loud.
“I have no polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “And it would need to be an adult, as you are an adult. I do not know how the bond will come out. Whether it will be painful, how well it will work. Our kind has never bonded someone so late, who had never been previously bonded. Do you have an animal in mind? Something you’ve always felt a particular attraction to? Connection with?”
“No,” Ankit said, louder now—gods, she didn’t even have a pet, she had never been interested in a romantic partner, the thought of commitment made her throat hurt, and now this strange woman who’d walked into her life five minutes ago—rode into her life on a killer whale five minutes ago—was proposing a kind of commitment more intimate and horrifying than anything she’d ever contemplated before.
One look in Masaaraq’s eyes, and she knew—this woman was not entirely human. Being bonded to an animal turned you into something else. Something that behaved completely differently, wanted different things.
“You have some time to think about it,” Masaaraq said, removing a series of strange tools from the box. Syringe, bottles, droppers, other things Ankit had no words for. “For now I’ll just take a sample of your nanites so we can start the culture process.”
“No,” Ankit gasp-yelled, and turned to run—and then turned back, and told Masaaraq precisely how to find her, where she lived and where she worked, and stammered some profuse apologies, and turned, and ran.