I’m impressed,” Podlove said, with a slight wobble to his voice, as the new arrivals closed in on him. He’s terrified, Soq saw. Desperate. “I expected your people would try to blunder in here. But I didn’t think you were capable of somehow crashing my lobby’s defenses.”
“Both are surprises,” Go said, furious, confused, frightened. To Ora and Kaev and Masaaraq and the polar bear she said, “I told you to stay on the ship.”
Podlove’s lips were tight. “Right. You didn’t get my grandson killed. You didn’t tell them to come here. Terrible things keep happening to me, with you standing right next to them, but it’s never your fault.”
Soq looked back and forth between Go and Podlove. Comparing. Wondering: Which is more fit to rule? Which is more villainous? They were both frightened. Both sweating. Barron, at least, was relaxed, or that’s how it seemed. Tough to tell with a sack over his head. His posture and general vibe of chill indicated a lack of fear.
On a sloop across from the Salt Cave, someone had spray painted BLACKFISH CITY.
“We didn’t crash your defenses,” Soq said, earning a death glare from Go. “You did. You ran that barbarian software against itself, and that’s what’s fucking you up. And most of the city, I’d imagine.”
“How did you get it from him, I wonder?” Podlove said. “My poor dead grandson. Did you torture it out of him? No. He’d probably have given it to you willingly. You’re just his type. Feral and filthy and frea—”
Soq laughed. “Don’t be childish.” That had the desired effect. Pointing out when octogenarians are behaving like children is usually a good way to shut them up.
The soft putty of Go’s face was hardening. Soq watched her slowly come to accept that the situation was out of her control. While the sensation was clearly agony for Go, for Soq it felt . . . expansive. Full of potential. Terrifying, but also thick with magnificent possible outcomes. Soq knew how the miserable poor of Mexico City or Pretoria might have felt watching the rebel armies march through the streets, or Lisbon or Copenhagen when the waters came flooding in. For once, the status quo is fragile. Things could change.
“And our new arrivals?” Podlove said, turning to the very tiny angry mob. “Surely you didn’t come all this way just to stand there glaring at me.”
Ora stepped forward. “Do you know who I am?”
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, ma’am.”
She said her full name. His expression did not change. No recognition, no deceit flickered in his eyes. He really doesn’t know, Soq thought.
A groan from underneath them. The building at war with itself. A digital autoimmune disease. “We should take this conversation outside,” Soq said softly, noting that this time Go did not seem angry that they were speaking out of turn. “His weaponry could come back online at any time. We’d be dead in a millisecond.”
“Come,” Masaaraq said, arm twisting out to aim the blade at Podlove.
“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”
He thinks his old age will protect him, Soq thought, so maybe he is not as smart as I thought he was.
Masaaraq gave a half shrug, and both his flunkies fell to the floor, clawing at their opened throats. Soq calculated that it must have taken two swings, based on how far apart they were standing, but they had not seen even a single one.
Three swings. A single tiny red line formed across Podlove’s forehead. Lone drops of blood beaded up, dripped down.
“You don’t call the shots here,” Go said to Podlove, smiling, but the smile looked flimsy.
“Neither do you,” Masaaraq said, and swung again, slower, because she wanted Go to see what she was doing. The brass-knuckled soldier fell to the floor, gasping, refusing to scream.
Masaaraq’s face showed nothing, but Soq knew what was going through her mind. From the moment that they’d bonded, Soq had so many of Masaaraq’s memories, her fears and her nightmares, the pain she carried, the horrors she’d been forced to endure. Everyone had imagined that Ora would be the broken one, after so many years in the Cabinet, but Soq saw that Masaaraq was the one whose damage threatened to shatter them. And Soq loved Masaaraq so much in that moment, their beautiful formidable mutilated grandmother, that their heart hurt.
If you know someone, know them completely and utterly, does that automatically mean you love them?
“It’s a lovely day,” Podlove said, stepping over the writhing brass-knuckled soldier. Soq saw: politeness, good manners, these were his only real skills. The affectations of wealth were a suit of armor you could wear when the world threatened to wash you away. “Why don’t we take this conversation outside?”
Overhead, the windscreen was shifting back and forth with slow, graceful, aimless motions. Snow fell. People stood, pointed, made calls, took pictures with their screens or oculars. Made space for them. Made lots of space. Only the complete and momentary collapse of Qaanaaq’s digital infrastructure was keeping them at liberty right now—on a normal day, a massive Safety response would be in the works. A convergence. The once-every-five-years-or-so deployment of those big scary ships with the holds full of gnarly weaponry.
“You put her in the Cabinet,” Masaaraq said.
“Ah,” Podlove said, nodding his head as if someone had told him he’d left the oven on. “I think I understand now.”
Go’s hand rested on the scabbard of her machete. Soq calculated: Her only hope is to make an explicit peace with Podlove. Otherwise, one way or another, she’ll be destroyed. If he dies, the city’s response will be merciless. Qaanaaq let the crime syndicates flourish, setting very few rules on what they could and couldn’t do, but she’s broken pretty much all of them. Go lives only if he does. And even then it’s a long shot.
His survival seemed unlikely, Soq supposed, but then again anything was possible. Some demonic magic had kept him alive this long in a world full of people he’d pissed off. There might be some of that left.
“You think you understand?” Ora said. The bear flinched, a jerk of rage barely stifled.
“We put a lot of people in the Cabinet,” he said. “We had to. Either that, or kill them. Would you rather we did that? It was nothing personal. Our employees made a lot of enemies, and made friends with a lot of unpopular people. Understand, during the Multifurcation, a lot of people came to us with problems. Twenty different cities had minority populations practically rioting over police murders of unarmed civilians. Political parties about to lose key states. All in need of some . . .”
“Bloodshed and blaming and scapegoating,” Barron said from under the sack.
“We didn’t write the playbook,” Podlove said. “Dīvide et īmpera. Divide and conquer has been the foundation of human societal power dynamics for as long as there have been human societies.”
“There have been knives that long, too,” Kaev said. “Doesn’t mean a man who stabs someone to death isn’t guilty.”
“How many people?” Masaaraq said.
“In the Cabinet? At least fifteen. In other grid cities . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
“Was every one of them the sole survivor of a large or small genocide?” Ora asked. “You probably don’t know. You probably didn’t want to.”
Podlove said nothing. He stood there, his face fooling no one with its approximation of repentance. “I didn’t do anything on my own. There were a dozen of us, fellow executives. I wasn’t even the highest in the hierarchy. I know you want me to be some savage bloodthirsty monster who single-handedly caused all your suffering. But believe me, I’m not. I just happen to be the last one left alive.”
“Do you know what I could do right now?” Masaaraq said, aiming her bloody blade at him. “I could stab you in the stomach with this, use that notch at the end to grab hold of your intestine, yank it out, choke you with it—or make you eat it, or toss it to my orca, who would pull you into the water by it and take her sweet time killing you.”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t stop you. And I wouldn’t blame you.”
An explosion in the distance. Sirens starting, stopping, starting, stopping.
The stalemate lasted a long time. Each side glaring at the other. Except for Podlove, who looked only at his feet. At the metal grid he stood on, the city he’d helped build, the safe place his bloody money had bought for him. The sea beneath it. The water that would still be there long after the last human sank beneath its waves.
He was so old. His skin was so thin. So wrinkled. Wrinkles upon wrinkles, a crisscrossing net of them. He hadn’t physically harmed anybody. His hands were bloodless. He’d merely gotten other people to hurt people, and then profited off it. Wasn’t that worse, though? Didn’t it magnify his crime, to have bloodied the hands of others? What kind of suffering had it caused them, the people who slaughtered innocents on his behalf? What trauma, what rage, what nightmares had it left them with? What bad karma?
Even if they chained him to a chair in the basement and spent the rest of his life torturing him until he passed out from the pain, then waking him up to do it again, over and over, there was no way to balance the scales of hurt. Nothing they could take from him that would approach even a fraction of the loss he’d caused others to feel. He was innocent in his own eyes, his crimes excused by necessity, and nothing they could do to him could make him see his own guilt.
Soq was still looking at him when it happened.
Masaaraq shouted something, twisted her body to intercept, but was standing too far away to stop Go from beheading Barron.
“Run,” Go said to Podlove, bloody machete extended, launching herself at Masaaraq.
After that, everything seemed to happen in the space of a single short breath.