Ymir, page 22
He glances sideways. His older brother’s eyes are fixed on the insect. His face is expressionless. It’s always that way in the apartment, even when their ma is gone. It got stuck.
“Once you start killing something, you should finish,” Yorick says. “Here.” He flexes his pale sharp thumb, hovers it over the wounded wasp. “On the head. You just push down, and it’s dead.”
Thello’s stomach revolts, how it does with skimmer meat. He feels hot all over. “I didn’t take its wing off,” he says. “Just found it.”
His older brother blinks. “Oh. Kill it anyway, Thello. Or it’ll crawl in your ear when you’re sleeping.”
Thello grabs one ear by instinct, pins the cartilage against itself, sealing it shut. “No, it won’t.”
“Sure,” Yorick says. “That’s why you have those dreams, I bet. You already got a little wasp crawling around in there.”
Thello scowls. “No,” he says. “No. Stop lying.”
His older brother rocks on his haunches. “Wasps can’t grow new wings,” he says. “That’s true, no lie. And if it’s only got one wing, it can’t fly. Can’t find food.”
Thello feels a small flicker of hope. “Maybe a teledoc can grow it. They know how to grow parts.”
Yorick puffs air out of his mouth; Thello joins in with a blurt of automatic laughter even though he doesn’t know if he was joking.
“Just use your thumb,” his older brother says, solemn. “And push down hard. Please, Thello?”
Thello’s stomach churns. His ears are boiling hot. He doesn’t want wasps in them, but he doesn’t want to touch the buzzing thing, doesn’t want to push down hard. He drifts his hand overtop of the insect. His thumb is a bit smaller than Yorick’s. A bit darker.
It makes him wonder sometimes what their da’s hand looks like, but Yorick never seems to wonder about that, says their da is dead or far away and a company man, which is the worst kind of offworlder. His hand falters.
“It’s okay,” his older brother says. “I’ll do it.”
Thello watches Yorick kill the wasp, grind the ball of his thumb through its exoskeleton skull, a final buzzing frenzy and then quiet. His older brother has a flush on his pale face. He smears the guts on the concrete floor, a little curve like a smiley mouth.
Thello’s rush of gratitude is tempered with something else, something he feels often around his older brother and doesn’t know the word for, never found explained on the company tablet they hide under the cooker now—
CHAPTER 66
Yorick feels his thumb twitch in another world, the one where he is lying on the bartop with Linka’s arms spinning around him. In the smaller world he feels the grendel’s fragment expanding around him, pulling vast swathes of data from the hotel, dredging the electric sea.
Southern Urbanite Memory has noticed them, but Yorick can’t stop now. Not until he finds the stoop, the drone, the needlegun. He hurls himself into the singularity again.
CHAPTER -4 (V2)
More company ships are coming down, falling soft through a veil of gray snow. They look small from here, from their grandmother’s surface colony, but Thello knows they are immense towering hives. He knows they launched from other worlds, and that gives him a strange pulse of excitement, makes his blood electric. He’s seen those worlds, and not only on his tablet.
His night-friend, the one who cannot be a grendel, because you don’t talk to grendels, has shown him them in dreams: foggy Hod, cliff-ringed Baldr. Now, watching the ships, he puts his spiderwooled hand to his chest and feels his own accelerating heart.
Yorick sneaks up behind him and dumps slushy snow on his head. He yelps, shakes it off, chases his older brother back toward the sagging ice-houses. The idea of going in one of those ships, leaving Ymir, stays with him for a week, two weeks. He even tells Yorick about it.
But then it fades, because he falls in love—he is almost sure—with Basta, the sealie woman who lets them try her vapor pipe. He doesn’t tell Yorick about it, but Yorick catches him rubbing himself against the gelbed, eyes shut, thinking hard about her, and his older brother’s apartment mask cracks into confusion and contempt.
Thello realizes Yorick is ashamed of him. He cries all night, muffling it in his arm.
CHAPTER -3 (V2)
Thello feels a sly hand between his shoulder blades on his way down the stairs. He stumbles, smacks into the wall. When he regains his balance, when he turns around with a furious sob in his throat, he sees Yorick glaring back.
“So hit me,” his older brother says. “When people push you, you hit them. They want you to do it. It’s no different from the jig.”
Tuq is lurking behind him, smiling her blue-stained smile. She’s beautiful and awful at the same time. Once she ran her hand over his bare arm, so soft, almost reverent. Then she told him half-bloods only live half as long, because they’re not bred for Ymir.
He knows it’s a lie, something recycled from her ma or da, and he knows if he tells Yorick, Yorick will cut Tuq away, never even speak of her. But he wants Tuq to keep coming over, because she might run her fingers down his arm again, and because she makes Yorick laugh, sometimes, in a way he wishes he could make his brother laugh—
CHAPTER -2 (V2)
Thello can barely lift his legs. He and Yorick have been sparring for over an hour, and now he’s sweat-drenched, exhausted. The shoes feel like blizzard anchors.
“One more,” his older brother keeps saying. “One more, one more.”
Thello knows Yorick is leaving angles open on purpose, making invitations. He wants to be hit, hard, and every time Thello pulls the strike in, pulls it short, he gets more agitated. But Thello can still hear the reverb of a cracking femur, from a jig almost a month ago, and he can’t risk hearing it again. He tells himself he is being cautious of his brother’s counter.
Finally they stop. Thello throws himself down on the ground, hands on his head, breathing hard. His older brother drops to a crouch.
“Why don’t you get angry anymore?” Yorick asks, almost suspicious.
“You’re not meant to be angry when you jig,” Thello says. “You’re meant to be thinking.”
“I don’t mean the jig,” his brother says, even though once he said everything means the jig. “Why don’t you get angry at our ma? Angry at the cold-bloods?”
Thello knows something happened with Tuq and Mara and the rest. He knows his older brother has cut them away. The other day he saw him using a company tablet, freshly printed, gleaming black. Thello is not sure why he blanked the screen so quickly.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “Got tired of it.” He pauses. “Not everyone’s like our ma. Or like Tuq and Mara and them.”
“Who?”
Thello feels a flush of happiness to enumerate them, all the small burning stars he’s found when his brother is at the autohauler lot or lying tranqed and boneless on the apartment floor. “The old men on bottom level,” he says. “The ones who make the funeral masks. Bisi and their cousin. Ola, Linka, Graffen. Doro from the ice, that red with the bad leg.”
The names bounce off his brother’s mask. Thello realizes they are not people Yorick would want to know, and since he does still get angry it sets off a crackling flare in his chest.
His brother doesn’t notice. He is staring off into nowhere. “I’m going to Shipfall tomorrow,” he says. “They said I can’t bring you, not yet. Will you be alright with ma?”
Thello’s world lurches. “What? What do you mean?”
“You remember the grendel game?” his brother asks. He puffs a half laugh through his nostrils. “I’m going to do that, but real. Be a fucking company man for a while. Then you and me are getting off Ymir and never coming back.”
Thello doesn’t understand. A small part of him remembers the night-friend, the thing that spoke to him sometimes when he was small, but there are no grendels on Ymir.
“You and me, Thello,” he says. “Ma will be dead by then.” He pauses. “Don’t let her push you around. She’s skinny now. Scrawny.”
Thello realizes he does not know his brother, maybe never did, and his anger and confusion are tinged with something else. Something that has been skimming under the surface of their frozen lake for years and years now.
“And those people,” his brother says. “Your little list.”
Thello fights back the stinging pressure behind his eyes. “What about them,” he says, but already knowing, not asking.
“Don’t trust them,” his brother says. His voice is flat as a droid’s.
Thello wants to hit him, wants to hug him too tightly to breathe, wants everything at once. But he knows it’s better this way. It’s better that Yorick leaves the Cut, where he looks so hurt, so hunted, before he does something that could—
CHAPTER 67
In another world, Yorick is weeping. His ribs heave, and because he is horizontal on the bartop he chokes on his own phlegm. He weeps because he never protected Thello at all, only damaged him, and if Thello ever loved him it was the way they loved their ma, half of it dread and angst.
In the smaller world, the grendel’s fragment has become a maelstrom, swelling and writhing as it devours the hotel. Southern Urbanite Memory hurls company countermeasures, oil-black sentinels. It tries to debride, cutting away chunks of its own code. The grendel’s fragment is implacable, ravenous.
Yorick can’t tell if it’s understanding or only devouring, if it’s going to burn the hotel down around their heads while he is lying prone in Linka’s bar. But he can’t leave yet. He has to find what he came for—the drone, the stoop, the needlegun—and watch it for the sickening confirmation. Watch as Thello shreds his mask apart at last.
He has always been the grotesque in this ballad. He hunts for his last day on Ymir.
CHAPTER -1 (V2)
Thello is waiting on the stoop for Yorick, and he is afraid. Not of the company drone drifting nearby. He’s accustomed to it now, the way it stalks him every time he sets foot outside the apartment. Not of their ma’s shade, even though she had no proper funeral, no wake. He knows she can’t be any worse dead than she was alive.
Thello is afraid of the company man, walking toward him now in an easy loping gait, shoulders back, unburdened. His older brother’s face, usually so stiff and solemn, has the split beginning of a grin. It makes Thello think of the recordings people show each other in darkened bars, company soldiers giggling as they load prisoners, spray down corpses.
He wonders if his brother was laughing when he cooked the Cradle. The thought makes his pulse pound in his throat. He tries to make his face a mask, how Yorick always did, when he asks the question: Where were you?
His brother bats it away. His eyes are guiltless. Thello asks the question again, even though he already knows the answer in his gut. He needs to hear his brother admit it. If things will ever be right again, or near to it, he has to admit it. He has to tell him he was drugged and deceived, that the past year has been a nightmare he’s only now waking from.
But Thello keeps thinking of the wasp crushed under his brother’s unworried thumb.
“You just saw who was winning,” he realizes aloud. “Saw you could get some sort of revenge.”
His brother breaks and his voice splinters for the first time Thello can remember. He babbles about the company algorithm, about the poisonous armistice they announced a day ago. He babbles about some night Thello hardly remembers, from when they were small, sneaking into a fountain and pretending it was a torpor pool.
The desperation reminds him of their ma, drunk and apologizing. It makes him even more furious. When his brother pulls a company weapon out of his coat, he is too numb to even be afraid.
“Go on,” he says. “Fucking shoot me, then. Before I tell everyone it was you who boiled Laska’s Cradle.”
Yorick rocks back on his feet. Thello realizes he thought that secret was still a secret. Thought his avatar had done well enough to cover for him, thought his little brother was still that trusting, still the little boy chasing after him at night.
“Tell me where you were, then,” Thello begs, latching to a sliver of mad hope that somehow he is wrong, and it was someone else who murdered seventy-eight hibernating people and snatched all the light from Doro’s eyes, Doro who is Laska Clan until the armistice disbands the ones who were not dissolved in their own torpor pool.
His brother is somewhere else, not hearing. He raises the gun, and for a moment Thello thinks he is going to die on this stoop. The company drone has closed its cam, how they do when company soldiers misbehave in the Cut, when beatings go too far.
But his brother is holding the gun to his own head. “They’ll never love me,” he mumbles.
Thello feels a jagged fear chine through everything else, splitting his anger and grief. “Don’t, Yorick.” His voice trembles. “Don’t fucking do this.”
His brother is not there. His eyes are emptied out.
A tendon moves in his pale wrist, and Thello lunges to stop him, to pry the weapon away. The needlegun goes off like a wasp nest exploding.
CHAPTER 68
Yorick is still screaming Thello’s scream when he gets yanked from the hotel net. Back in Linka’s bar, every piece of smartglass on the walls is seething with static. The lights jitter off and on. The host droid’s distorted voice blares from all ports.
“Apologies, Mister Bellica, I’m afraid I didn’t hear you. Apologies, I’m afraid. Satisfaction visit bad one of our bad one of our bad one of our bad bad bad bad.”
“Fucking thing,” Linka grates. “Can’t get to the—” Her arms spasm. “Fuck!”
Everything goes still at once. Dead smartglass, no lights. The host droid’s voice cuts out and leaves only the faintest echo in the black.
Yorick drops his head back against the bartop. He’s still caught behind Thello’s eyes, watching himself put the needlegun to his temple over and over. He’s coated in sweat, adrenals spiked by the feedback. His heart is a hummingbird.
By the time it fades, by the time he’s reassembled himself in the dark, Linka has a tiny blade poised a micrometer from his eyeball.
“What was that?” she demands. “How’d it do that? You said this was the grendel’s fucking storage node.”
Yorick takes a raspy breath. He tries to speak without moving the muscles of his face, in case it brings him toward the blade. “I thought it was.”
“You think a lot of dumbsick things.” Linka’s other arms are whirling, unhooking the electrode cables. “It crashed the whole hotel. Nearly crashed my construct.”
“Linka?” The hoarse voice drifts through the empty bar. “You okay, Linka?”
Yorick doesn’t dare turn his head, but he listens to Nocti’s soft steps. He can feel the musician’s spindly limbs displacing air. He can smell the unwashed body glove.
“You have to get out of sight,” Linka says, terse. “I lost my cams, but the guards outside, they must be on their way in.”
“Locked out,” Nocti says. “Whole hotel’s sealed up.”
“Only until it reboots,” Linka says. “Shit. Shit.” The blade quivers over Yorick’s eye. “My blind spot might be gone when it does. You both have to get to the loading bay. Slip out the back as soon as the hotel unseals.”
“What about Oxo?” Nocti asks, and Yorick realizes he is not part of the both. “Yorick, I mean. Hello, Yorick.”
“Hello, Nocti,” Yorick says, remembering how Nocti watched him from the corner table, showed him to the wake. Realizing who supplied neuroleptics to Thello and the clanners down in the cave. “The hotel’s been thieving you. Taking melodies.”
“We’re all thieving each other,” Nocti says, then, to Linka a second time: “What about Yorick?”
“I don’t know,” Linka says. “I don’t fucking know.”
Yorick imagines the arms rolling him over, a jab and twist of the blade in the right spot, his body folded up fetal to fit in a brewing vat. There would be some sort of irony to that. But for the first time tonight, he has no desire to stop existing.
“I’m coming with you,” he says. “I’m going to get us into the camp. Get Thello and the grendel and the rest out. Then I’m going to get us into the ansible.”
Fen’s laugh comes out of the dark, soft and contemptuous and edged with pain. She can move quietly when she wants to after all. “You’re going to die,” she says. “I’ll do it, Linka. Hands to throat, no blood. Put the sticker away.”
The blade hovers a moment longer, then retreats. Yorick sits up. Nocti and Fen are at the bar, like they’re waiting for drinks. The musician looks unwell. The circles under his eyes are deeper than ever and his black body glove has a yellowish stain on the chest. His spidery white fingers flick against his leg, trying to touch the instrument inside.
Fen looks small. Yorick was not expecting that, not expecting to see her fury all sluiced away. Her broad shoulders are slumped. Her snowstorm eyes are quelled. She might not even enjoy suffocating him. She’ll do it out of duty, though, to Thello and her fellow clanners, to the seventy-eight she learned about as a child.
“It wasn’t Thello,” he says. “It was me. I shot myself in the face.”
No flicker. It doesn’t matter to Fen, even though it matters everything to him. She knew all along who the monster was. Yorick makes to slide off the bar, but Linka stops him. Her arms coil around his midsection and hold him in place.
“Let me undo this,” Yorick begs.
Fen swings up onto the bar, no hint of stiffness from the wounds he left with his graft-knife and the grendel excoriated with its serrations. She gives the severed limb a baleful look, maybe remembering that, then tosses it away and pushes him horizontal.
Yorick is sleepsick again, feeling the cold slick premonition he felt that first morning in the mine: he will kill Fen or Fen will kill him.
