She kept pinging their radios, trying to reach them, getting nothing. She ignored her lurking terror, even when the drones found her two motionless bodies, photographed them in blurrycam, then less-blurrycam, then hovered and got stills, illuminated with LED-bright flashes that revealed the pink snow, the inert bodies. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She walked.
The men were frozen stiff, blood-melted snow now refrozen. Their faces were pale and bluish, the wounds in their throats washed incongruously clean by melted snow, giving the incisions the look of medical textbooks or pickled demonstration cadavers. Not comrades she’d loved and laughed with. She wouldn’t let herself cry.
Limpopo was nowhere to be seen. Snowmobile tracks pointed the way. They disappeared into the woods. The drones were clever enough that they were already on their trail. They’d sent status updates helpfully informing her that if she could get more computing power for an inference engine to make better guesses about likely trail-ways, they would be more efficient. As it was, they were cycling through various coverage algorithms, trying to make allowances for trees and terrain without spending too much time thinking.
Gretyl watched their progress on her visor and called Kersplebedeb, who came on the line after a delay; a soft buzz in her earpiece warned her the network link was unreliable and there would be buffering delays at both ends.
“Everything okay?”
“They killed”—she sucked air—“Etcetera and the other one, Johnny or whatever his name was. Throats cut, facedown in the snow. Bled out.” Again, breath catching in her chest. She flicked her gaze at the OVER button. Waited.
“Oh, Gretyl.”
“Limpopo is gone, into the woods. On a snowmobile. I think they dragged her on a travois or stretcher.” OVER. Pause.
“Fuck.”
“I want to go after her, but…” OVER. Long pause.
“Not a good idea. You’ll get killed, too. Have you got drones up?”
She tossed him their telemetry and feeds, waited. Saw him log in to a shared space. Waited.
“I think you should come home.”
“Home?” OVER.
“Dead Lake. There’s food, power, network access. People who love you. I’ll put the word out about Limpopo. We can send someone to get you. I saw a skidoo on the way in, and I’m betting the Dead Lakers keep it charged. They’re organized.”
She was so cold. Her back and neck ached. Her suit chafed the backs of her knees and the undersides of her arms raw.
“Send someone.” She sent him a location beacon.
“On the way. I’ll make loud noises about Limpopo. Lots of people love that woman.”
“I think they’re counting on that. I think they took her to demoralize us.” OVER.
“You’re more paranoid than I am.”
“I know more than you do.”
“Let me find you a snowmobile and a rescue party. There’s no booze here, but sending some hot cocoa, with marshmallows.”
“You’re a good man.”
“And an excellent post-human.” He was gone.
The pin-drop clarity of the outside soundscape returned. Wind, branches, pinging noises of frozen water crystals sliding over one another. The two bodies stared at her in the false light of her visor. She sat down in the snow and sank in. She was so tired. Shattered.
She missed Iceweasel. It ached inside her. A voice she hated, always louder when she was sad, reminded her she’d once taught at a university, had a house, a name, and an address. Once she’d been able to buy things when she needed them—even if she had to go into debt—could pretend there was a future. Now she had none of those things, least of all a future. She was living as though it was the first days of a better nation, but that nation was nowhere in sight. Instead, she had a no-man’s-land of drone strikes and slit throats.
Holy shit, she missed Iceweasel so much.
[xx]
When Iceweasel was a little girl called Natalie, she and Cordelia played in the ravine, under the watchful eye of the house drones, or, if there was some incomprehensible violence-weather in the city—an uptick of kidnappings—a private security person who’d fit them with ankle-cuffs she couldn’t loosen, no matter how many tools she tried. Cordelia never understood her impatience with these minor indignities, insisting they were for their safety. For Natalie, it was symbolic battle. If she’d ever gotten the cuff off, she’d have stuck it in her pocket. Ditching it in the Don River would bring the security goon down the hill. But it was designed to defeat a kidnapper with a hacksaw—anything that could brute-force it would take her foot with it.
She was in the ravine again, in winter, wearing a snug jacket, too-big boots with thick waffle-tread, and thermal tights that insulated so efficiently she was sweating by the time she and Nadie reached the end of the short tunnel. She paused in the tunnel mouth, poised between captivity and freedom, and called out softly, “Dis?”
“We’ll talk again,” Dis said. “I’ve already emailed my diff. I love you, Iceweasel.”
“I love you, too.”
She didn’t meet Nadie’s eyes. She’d just confessed to loving software. She hated herself for being embarrassed by it.
She’d seen pictures of Toronto winters in her father’s childhood, her grandparents’—snow forts, plows on the roads, salting trucks. But in all the time she’d spent in the city, there’d never been enough snow to make a decent snowball—not like the high-altitude snow she and Cordelia hurled at each other atop Whistler and Mont Blanc—just a gray frozen custard that froze to the sidewalks and streets in late January and lasted until April or sometimes May. On very cold days, it turned into treacherous ice, slippery to walk on and thin in places, your foot plunging through into lurking reservoirs of frozen water.
The floor of the ravine was that texture—frozen enough to almost burn if it touched your skin, unfrozen enough to be a gelatinous hazard that sucked at Iceweasel’s boots. She staggered through it in her borrowed clothes—some of Nadie’s ninja-wear, a bizarro-world version of walkaways’ printed cold weather clothes, also lacking in manufacturer’s markings, also wicking and dirt-shedding and soft inside and rip-stopping on the outside, but printed with dazzle-textures that hurt the mind to look at. Looking at her knees as her legs fought the mud and slope as they sloshed downhill made her dizzy.
Even Nadie—wearing dazzle-stuff, hard to look at for more than a few seconds—struggled with the terrain, dancing a few steps down the hill, getting caught, lumbering a few more, using sickly trees to catch herself. Even so, she soon got ahead of Iceweasel. Iceweasel reminded herself she’d been a prisoner for months and had hardly exercised. Also, she wasn’t a ninja mercenary badass.