Soq could see her, pacing. Alone in her room, a massive cloud of anxiety shoehorned into a tiny body. Never looking out the portholes. Staring into screens. Fifteen, twenty of them lay strewn across the tables, and Go was constantly getting new ones out of drawers and boxes, opening up some new software, calling up the footage from some additional drone. Impressive, how hands-on she was with all this. No flunkies to do it for her. If Dao weren’t dead, would he be doing it? But if so, that made it all the more impressive—so many kingpins would be utterly helpless without the people who normally did everything for them.
As far back as Soq could remember, Go had been there. An idol, someone whose successes and setbacks Soq followed the way other grid kids followed beam fighters. Soq’s own career trajectory, their dreams of savage revenge on this shit city, had been modeled on Go’s.
Go was fearsome; Go was magnificent. Wise, cunning, bloodthirsty, brilliant. That had never been in question. What Soq was wondering now was something completely different: was Go a halfway-decent human being?
Other questions, too. Ones that hadn’t stopped bothering Soq since they first started popping into and out of that rich kid’s memories. What was the point of rising to the top? Conquest had always seemed like its own goal, but what did one do when one got there?
For almost an hour, Soq was sure of it, Go had been trying her hardest not to look out the portholes. Because she knew she’d see Soq there.
And for almost an hour, Soq had been trying to knock on the door. Why hadn’t they? Fear rarely stopped them. Soq could remember the first time they’d strapped on slide boots, how fearlessly they’d clomped across the grid, how effortlessly they’d vaulted up and onto the incline. Stepping forward without a second’s pause. People broke limbs every day on the inclines; people died. But pain and death never frightened Soq. Soq had nothing; nothing could be taken; no attachments bound them to the earth.
And now? What stopped Soq? A newly discovered mother? A father? Some corny fantasy of pre-fall family life? Was Soq so weak that ceasing to be an orphan for a few days had turned them into one of those weak wide-eyed children from Arm One whom they’d spent their whole life despising?
Soq knocked. Hard.
“What?” Go said through a speaker. Soq could see her, framed by the porthole. Her back to the door.
“You need help,” Soq said.
“I don’t.”
Soq knocked again. And waited. Sixty, ninety seconds later, a soft thump from the latch. Soq turned the knob and entered.
“What do I need help with?” Go asked.
“Where to begin?” Soq said, slumping into an ancient filthy recliner. The closest thing Go had to a throne.
“Watch yourself,” Go said, her back still to Soq. “Don’t think you have some special license to be disrespectful with me.”
“Don’t I, though?”
Go whirled around, eyes wide. Soq flinched at the anger they saw there, but anger was what they had been looking for. Anger, violence, something. Some sign that Soq’s existence impacted Go in some way. Soq stood, stepped over to the table. Watched ten separate screens showing ten different live drone shots. Five of them aimed at the same person. An old, old white man in a big office. Paper thin. Pacing back and forth like some flimsy doppelganger for Go. “The guy from the video,” Soq said. “Whose grandson got killed.”
“Martin Podlove,” Go said.
“What syndicate?”
Go laughed. “No syndicate. Or the very biggest syndicate of all, depending on your political stance. He’s a shareholder.”
Soq whistled, squatted lower to get a better look at the screens. A shareholder. Like seeing a unicorn. Growing up with nothing in Qaanaaq, you wondered about everyone you met—was this chubby man a shareholder? What about that woman in rags over there? Of course, lots of them would dress expensively, but Soq had always been certain that most wore shitty clothes, blended in, looked for all the world like any other piece of Qaanaaq flotsam. Who did they have to impress, after all? They were already the masters of the universe.
“How do you have so many eyes on him?”
“Microdrones, mostly. Outside his office.”
“He never heard of curtains? Ionizing the windows?”
“He doesn’t care who sees him. He believes he’s invincible.”
Too weird. Too fucking weird. Too many roads leading back to this boy, the one who gave Soq the breaks. Life doesn’t work like this, they thought, in a city so big—so many bizarre and separate strands coming together. Forming a pattern, a mesh. A net. And Soq was caught in it. Being hauled up, out of the sea where they’d spent their whole life, where they felt safe, where they could breathe, into a harsh killing light.
Soq’s vision blurred. The image flood came again. The vacant apartment they’d met in.
But this time, Soq was ready. Soq would not be overwhelmed; Soq would not be drowned in the dry air like a fish. Soq had—whatever Masaaraq had given Soq. The nanites. The power. The control.
Empty rooms. So much space. A long line of beautiful boys. Hunger; so many hungry people.
Software.
Passwords.
Soq scooted the armchair closer to the table. “Tell me what you’re so upset about,” they said, almost startled to hear how authoritative their voice sounded, how confident of being obeyed, as if they knew what they were doing—and, stranger still, beneath that, the knowledge that they did.
“I can’t believe this is happening right now,” Go said, standing behind Soq to watch what they did with the screen. Her voice was not annoyed. Her voice was scared.
“This? The Cabinet mission?”
“I’m at war here. I don’t have time to go rescuing somebody’s missing mommy.”
“Why not fire a missile at that old man’s office and be done with it? I know you have the firepower.”
“Because he has the firepower, too. Or at least, he pays a security company well enough to cover all contingencies. Money and wealth and power are abstractions to people like this. They wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do in a real fight—but they pay people to handle their problems. There are rules to war. Things you don’t do. I kill him, his people kill me.”
Something glimmered in the floodwaters. Something shiny in the rush of drab images. Soq made a choking sound and snatched up one of Go’s screens.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Soq said. “Accessing something, I think. A program.”
“What program?”
“I’m not sure,” Soq said. “To be honest, I’m not entirely certain that it exists at all. Or how to use it if it does. Or what it will do if I can.”
“Great,” Go said, turning away, shuffling through the other screens.
“I saw it in a vision,” Soq said, and Go didn’t respond, because Go wasn’t listening.
“The Cabinet mission is no skin off your nose,” Soq said. “They make it, they make it. They don’t, they don’t.”
Go said nothing.
“You mad because Dao is dead?”
“Yes,” Go said nonchalantly.
“You’re angry at her. You hate her. Masaaraq.”
“Yes,” Go said.
Soq thought for a second. Surfed a long slow crashing wave of images, memories bound up inside the coding of the breaks. Soq looked for Go, and found her. A hundred different outlet stories; a million shitty photos. A legendary figure. Spoken of in whispers. Superhuman; unstoppable. Emotionless. That was the most important part of Go’s facade: the idea that she felt nothing.
“It’s him. You’re worried about him.”
“He can take care of himself. He has a fucking polar bear.”
“Polar bears are mortal. You have no idea what kind of firepower is in that place. What kind of weapons.”
Go stared at her hands. “It’s not just him,” she said, finally.
It took several seconds for Soq to realize they were holding their breath. When they did, they didn’t let it out.
Go laughed. “You can’t imagine, Soq,” and there was a softness to the name that Soq had never heard anyone say it with before. “I had everything planned, everything under control. I was on track. Nothing could hurt me. Nothing could hold me back. Now there’s him—now there’s you . . .”
Go trailed off.
Soq’s eyes shut. Overwhelming, to hear Go express this kind of warmth, this humanity—but frightening, too, because Soq could hear how it broke Go up inside, how angry she was with herself, the war she was fighting to master these emotions. “It’s okay,” Soq hazarded. “It’s okay to worry about something else besides the blood-spattered bottom line.”
They both avoided eye contact. They stared at the screens where Martin Podlove paced, where back-alley empires and fortunes were being bought and sold in subsurface trough meat bubbles, where spreadsheets and dossiers documented the profit and the loss. Sucking in breath, Soq stuck out a hand and grabbed Go’s.
The crime boss flinched back. “You don’t know me.” Her voice was stern, hardening fast. “You don’t know me at all.”
“Don’t I?” Soq said, and there it was, the anger Soq had been sitting on their whole life, the rage that had never found a focus before, the blind fury that spawned a thousand dreams of burning Qaanaaq up, breaking its legs and watching a million people freeze to death in the Arctic waters. The city was not a person, the city had done nothing but exist. Go, on the other hand, had done things. Made decisions. Maybe some of them came from a good place. But maybe not. And maybe it didn’t matter that somebody meant well, if the end result was misery. Soq stood. “Tell me I have it wrong. I know how you operate. How you got where you are. How you treat your workers. I know you’d gut me like a fish in a second without giving it a second thought, because who the fuck am I? Some kid you gave up ages ago, wrote off—kept tabs on, found a spot for, a job you’d give me, but only if I was good enough, only if I somehow passed your little personality test, turned out sufficiently savage and unscrupulous. And if I ended up as anything other than what I am, you’d have gone on ignoring me until the day you died.”
“That’s not true,” Go said, and her voice was harsh, but the harshness was shallow and choppy. “I had more to do with how you turned out than you think. I’ve been far more present in your life than you could guess. Nudging you; sculpting you. I’ve been taking care of you all this time. And Kaev, too, whether you believe it or not. Think it was easy, keeping him from killing himself, accidentally or on purpose, for a decade or two? I always had someone close to him, a friend of his who was in my pocket or a grid grunt assigned to keep an eye on him, to get him out of any situations that could have been dangerous. And there were dozens. Just like I made sure you got that slide messenger job. And paid off Registration four or five times a year, so they wouldn’t dig too deep at your agency.”
“I believe that,” Soq said, reining in the anger, because too much was happening, too much was at stake, time was too short—and Soq could see that this, too, could have come from Go. “But I’m not talking to you like this because I think you’d hesitate to kill me because I’m your kid.”
One of Go’s exquisite eyebrows rose.
A shout from above. The ship was in position at the base of the Cabinet.
Soq tapped a final sequence on their screen and handed it to Go. “I’m talking to you like this because I have something I know you would be very, very eager to get your hands on. And I have some conditions before I consider giving it to you.”