She wore simple clothes, the skins and furs preferred by the people who had fled to the north when the cities of the south began to burn or sink. The polar bear was in chains, a metal cage over its head and two smaller ones boxing in its forepaws. The skiff was your standard tri-power rig, with a sail and oars and a gas engine, and for the last few miles of her journey to the floating city it was the engine that she used. The truth of her arrival was almost certainly less dramatic. They are what we brought when we came here they are what cannot be taken away from us. She had come to do something horrific in Qaanaaq, and she could not wait to start.

Her fingers twitched along the walrus-ivory handle of her blade. She wore battle armor built from thick scavenged plastic.Īt her feet, in heaps, were the kind of weird weapons and machines that refugee-camp ingenuity had been producing strange tools fashioned from the wreckage of Manhattan or Mumbai.

In these stories, which grew astonishingly elaborate in the days and weeks after her arrival, the polar bear paced beside her on the flat bloody deck of the boat. People would say she came to Qaanaaq in a skiff towed by a killer whale harnessed to the front like a horse.

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller