The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  Maybe Mouth would get lucky and the whole city would fall into a chasm before they reached it.

  The city wall loomed in the distance: granite blocks, topped with tungsten spikes, which they’d raised after one of their stupid wars, generations ago. And soon the noises rang from inside that wall, and Mouth couldn’t tell factories and mining gear from shouts and musical instruments. Cities teemed with synesthesia. So many sounds and smells, a din of imagery, until your senses just gave up.

  Omar gave the signal when they were almost under the wall, at the designated spot. Nothing happened. The Resourceful Couriers tried to get the sled as close to the cover of the wall as they could as its axles protested, and they all huddled there in the pale half light. The damn wall vibrated. They had started out with eight people, including three new recruits, but Jackie had taken one look at the Sea of Murder and run back to the relative safety of Argelo. Then Franz had acted like a fool on the boat, and had toppled and drowned. Even Mouth wanted to raise a glass to poor Franz, and to all their absent friends and family.

  Everyone around Mouth started to panic they would be stranded at the foot of an ugly gray-brown wall forever. Omar did the signal again, and then again a moment later.

  A passage opened a dozen meters away, a dark tunnel going under the base of the wall, propped up with rotten vines. Justin, their contact, told them to hurry inside because it was late. As if they hadn’t been waiting out here for an age and a half.

  Justin had three people with him, and they all got hands on the sled, which kept getting caught on the tunnel’s grooves. Something about the way Justin’s helpers positioned themselves, once everyone was grunting and the sled motor started overheating, made Mouth suspicious. So she hung back. Halfway into the tunnel, Justin whipped out a gun, an ancient slow-repeater, and said he was taking the cargo. All of the Resourceful Couriers had their hands out—except for Mouth, who emerged from behind and raised Justin’s head into the support beam so hard it half collapsed the tunnel. After that, just a big knife fight in the dark.

  You don’t get to be a Resourceful Courier without having blades stashed in every contour of your body.

  The Resourceful Couriers eased the sled into a junkyard right before the tunnel collapsed behind them, on top of Justin and his crew. This was shit. They needed to find a new contact—because dried apricots, fancy fabrics, and swamp vodka don’t sell themselves, and who could understand the stupid money here. Plus when time came to leave town, they would need a new tunnel. All in all, a shit end to a shit journey. Nothing for it but to get ass-faced.

  * * *

  One thing Xiosphant did have plenty of was bars. Something about all that repression. They found a dive called the Low Road and traded a case of the swamp vodka for food, drink, and permission to crash in the back room after curfew. Soon everyone had gotten good and wasted.

  Mouth had developed a persona that camouflaged the social awkwardness and the trapped-inside-walls feeling: loud, boastful, full of jokes. Sometimes even Mouth was fooled, after enough booze.

  But Xiosphanti was a clumsy language to joke in—all those consonants, glottal stops, verb tenses, fancy pronouns. Mouth mangled every other sentence, even though people seemed entertained by the story about the bar brawl (adjacent to a hot oil cauldron) against a man twice Mouth’s size. At the same time, in the quiet part of Mouth’s brain, the memory kept replaying: Justin’s head giving way against the support beam, as Mouth’s muscles levered upward. Had Justin gotten a shot off? Sometimes Mouth thought yes, sometimes no. The only constant was the feeling of a man’s head losing solidity, the body tensing and then slackening, and a scent between urine and motor oil. The usual post-murder hangover nauseated Mouth, but meanwhile she was also full of furious loathing at the sort of person who would try to rob hardworking smugglers who had hauled garbage halfway around the world, crossing the goddamn Sea of Murder even. If Justin had appeared at the Low Road, somehow alive and unscathed, Mouth might have torn him apart. She couldn’t decide if the murder had left her queasy with guilt or just unsatisfied.

  Both, maybe.

  “Dude is dangling headfirst over the boiling hot oil, by his throat.” Mouth’s story had reached its crowd-pleasing climax all on its own. “And he looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, is that peanut oil? I’m allergic.’” Everybody howled with laughter and a couple people bought Mouth more gin-and-milk, along with some of the swamp vodka that the Resourceful Couriers had bartered in the first place.

  The Low Road emptied out as the chimes signaled the Span of Reflection, the last bell before curfew. Mouth sat next to Alyssa, staring at the street full of suckers trying to outrun a clock. Alyssa was Mouth’s road buddy, meaning they spent every moment together, slept together, watched each other’s backs, and each knew what the other was thinking. By rights, they ought to be sick of each other.

  “Are you excited to be back in Xiosphant?” Alyssa laughed at Mouth’s grimace. “I bet you’re overjoyed to be speaking a language that’s so full of qualifiers you can hardly get to the point,” she said in flawless Xiosphanti, the polite form. Her sentence specified what time it was, the tense implied (present conditional), and the genders and social statuses of both herself and Mouth. None of it sat right with Mouth, who never liked to be categorized.

  Mouth snorted. “I don’t care. I won’t stay here long enough to let it bother me.”

  “You’re an optimist,” Alyssa said in Argelan. “Remember how you caved in our tunnel with a man’s skull? And we lost our main contact? Might be a while before we get another gig. And to be honest…”

  She didn’t finish that sentence. She almost didn’t have to. Here, under a roof for the first time in forever, she had all sorts of shadows and creases on her face that hadn’t been there before. Alyssa had curly dark hair, a strong jawline, and big firm hands that had clutched Mouth comfortingly whenever they had shared a sleeping nook. Alyssa had always seemed inexhaustibly young and capable of surprise—except now, she looked older.

  “You want to quit.” Mouth shouldn’t have cared. The lineup of the Resourceful Couriers had always changed, since forever, except for Mouth and Omar. You couldn’t get attached.

  “Not so much that I want to quit, more that I don’t know if I can go on.”

  Mouth laughed. “If you were going to quit, you’d have been better off staying in Argelo. Your hometown. At least they know how to have fun there.”

  “Argelo was a little too much fun last time. Actually, I like Xiosphant. It’s quiet. They make nice cakes, thanks to all the flour from those farmwheels.”

  “I really hope you change your mind.” Mouth drained her jar of swamp vodka. After hauling cases of the stuff across nine kinds of hell, it didn’t taste nearly good enough. “I would hate to lose you. I don’t want to have to share a sleep nook with Reynold.”

  Reynold, sitting a couple meters away, overheard and rolled his eyes. He was a big ugly dude with tattooed arms, a broken nose, and weirdly tiny hands. Nobody ever wanted to share a sleep nook with him, because he snored and farted at the same time.

  “That’s not why this is upsetting you,” Alyssa said.

  Mouth didn’t feel upset, but Alyssa was usually right about these things. “Why, then?”

  “You’re scared that if I’m too old to keep doing this, then maybe you are too.”

  “It’s different for me,” Mouth said. “I’m going to keep doing this until I die.”

  “Why? Because you were raised by nomads?” Alyssa laughed. “You do get that nomads aren’t smugglers, right? Smuggling is for young people with decent reflexes. Do you think you’ll be able to break a man’s head with one hand after a few more of these trips?”

  “Nomads have to break heads too sometimes.”

  Mouth wanted out of this conversation.

  “Are you ready to be the only old person in a crew of young smugglers?” Alyssa asked.

  “I’m ready to drink until I pass out. Beyond that, I hadn’t made any plans.�
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  “Drink faster. Time’s running out.”

  And sure enough, just as Alyssa spoke, there was that grinding, squalling sound that Mouth remembered from previous visits to Xiosphant: the shutters cranking up all over town, blocking out the half light. The Low Road went from pleasantly dim to can’t-see-your-own-feet.

  Mouth hated darkness. The idea that you would want to sleep under conditions where anything could ambush you, that just closing your eyes wasn’t risk enough, seemed barbaric. Atavistic. All the other Resourceful Couriers fumbled for a corner of the back room to sleep, alone, with their road buddy, or just in some random pile. But Mouth sat, staring. She’d never really been in the dark until she’d first visited Xiosphant as a child and the shutters had closed on her. Discovering a new phobia was like the opposite of falling in love.

  The road didn’t age you. Settling down somewhere, gaining attachments and expectations, assimilating—those things aged you. This was a childish way of looking at things, but Mouth couldn’t help it.

  The nomads who raised Mouth had included elderly people as well as children, but they’d worked out all sorts of customs to make sure vulnerable members of the community were taken care of. And of course, the Citizens hadn’t been trying to carry fragile, semiperishable goods from one city to another at a decent speed.

  Mouth barely slept, even in spite of exhaustion and tipsiness. When the shutters rolled down at long last, and the blue-gray light poured into the room, Mouth felt ugly. The bar owner, a cheery old man with short gray curls named Ray, brought around plates of hot pastries that made Mouth feel less like smashing another head or ten.

  Alyssa was right: they really did know cakes in Xiosphant. But their coffee still tasted like shit.

  Now the streets were filling up instead of emptying, the Resourceful Couriers all went out to explore. The streets of Xiosphant were narrower than in Argelo, but straighter and laid out in a semi-grid—and better paved, because they’d had more access to fancy technology from the Mothership when they’d laid out this town. One building they walked past had a big stone awning that had to have been fabbed, with little creatures flying around it. Then there was a narrow townhouse, with gold leaf all around the fancy piping that had crumbled to bits but still had some grandeur.

  The Couriers made a big effort to clean up and look like they belonged here, because even being a foreigner in Xiosphant was basically against the law. Mouth wore a big ribbony cap that covered up her mohawk and scars, and one of those ponchos that the local women were wearing, but she drew the line at putting a lacy fringe around her ankles. Everyone else blended in, more or less. But in this town, you could tell the pipe-workers, the factory grunts, the shop kids, and the bureaucrats apart just by looking at their clothing and the stains on their hands. Everyone seemed to sneak glances at Mouth whenever she risked walking on one of the busier streets full of food vendors and schoolchildren. A few little kids pointed at Mouth’s mismatched poncho and trousers, and the lack of an ankle-skirt, and made noises.

  Everything that happened now, Mouth turned into another opportunity to feel old, after everything Alyssa had said.

  They had left Kendrick guarding their stuff, back in the junkyard, and it was all still there when they got back. But time was not a friend here. The police had a million eyes, and everyone in Xiosphant was too curious about your business. With Justin gone, they needed to find someone else to move the merchandise and help them get a new cargo to bring back to Argelo.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Kendrick said, his high forehead crinkling in a way that made his many piercings jangle. “We won’t find another fence, not in a hurry. The black market in Xiosphant is pretty tiny, and disorganized, compared to Argelo. But I know a guy named George who might be able to help. He’s the bank for this big roofing company, which means he handles every kind of currency, not just infrastructure chits. And he does a certain amount of bartering to make sure the roofers have access to dental care and toys for their kids. I heard last time we were in town that he also does some moonlighting.”

  “Let’s go see George the Bank.” Omar whooped.

  They hid the rest of the swamp vodka in the back room of the Low Road, then spent ages disguising the sled with their other goods as a delivery vehicle for one of Xiosphant’s leather warehouses, using mostly stuff they found in this junkyard. Those chimes were rattling again: time running out. “We’ll just have to stick to the back alleys,” Kendrick said. “I know a route.” Kendrick was the guy who knew the way to the spiciest food or the weirdest liquor, wherever you traveled.

  “I still don’t get how someone can be a bank,” muttered Yulya. She’d never even been outside Argelo until she talked Omar into letting her tag along, and everyone had expected her to freak out and run home, like Jackie. Instead, she’d taken to the wild road, carrying her share without complaint. She even kept her spirits up on the Sea of Murder. Yulya said she’d always wanted to be a traveling performer, a profession that hadn’t existed since … well, since Mouth was little.

  “It’s the screwy economy here in Xiosphant,” Kendrick told her. “They have like ten different kinds of money, for different things. Food dollars, med-creds, infrastructure chits, energy rations, and so on. So the roofing company gets paid in infrastructure chits, but George the Bank also has to make sure the employees receive all other kinds of money, by making side-deals with medical providers, food companies, and the power plant. And so on.”

  “That’s … literally insane,” said Yulya, still speaking Argelan, in a low voice.

  “It’s their way of avoiding scarcity and hoarding.” Mouth shrugged.

  “It’s how they keep everybody in line,” said Alyssa. “Everybody’s so busy trying to get enough of all the different kinds of money, nobody has time to stop and think.”

  Just then, red-and-blue smoke filled the sky, which signified the midpoint between shutters-down and shutters-up.

  The roofing company was all the way over on the bright side of town. Still indirect sunlight, still just creeping over a big-ass mountain, but there sure was a lot of it. Mouth could see all the little hairs on the back of her hand, and everything had colors. The air smelled different this close to the day: sulfurous, tangy, kind of salty. Sweat collected inside Mouth’s collar.

  “I guess being stuck in this part of town would make you think about the importance of a good solid roof.” Alyssa snorted.

  They came to a huge slab of limestone, so tall you couldn’t tell if it even had a good roof, with a sign over the corrugated shutter that read ROOF MASTERS. A few guys in coveralls were carrying boxes into the building, and Omar asked them where the Couriers could find George. Half of them ended up staying with the sled while Mouth, Omar, Alyssa, and Kendrick went through a maze of warehouse shelves and pasteboard walls, at the center of which a young man squatted on a big rubber ball, inside a wire cage.

  “You really just came all the way from Argelo?” George blinked at them. He had an autofocusing lens in one eye and a scarf tied around both arms, in the same style that Mouth had seen on some of the financial professionals swarming through the streets. But he wore his dark hair in six fancy braids. On the wall behind him hung one of those overcomplicated calendars that looked like a million lines crisscrossing inside a big circle. “I never even met anyone who’s been to Argelo. We used to have open trade with them, you know. I know some elderly people who still remember this one kind of cat butter that used to be imported from Argelo, and—”

  “Mason’s Salty Cat Butter,” said Omar. “We’ve got five kilograms of the stuff, in special preservation packs.”

  “Well,” George said. “That might be worth rather a lot of food dollars, or whatever you’re interested in. I also know some folks over at the mines who can get you bauxite, tin, copper, and a few other things. The mines are not what they once were, but they still produce some surprises.” He used the polite form of Xiosphanti, for addressing strangers, and identified himself as a manager and the
Couriers as visiting laborers.

  Mouth tuned out the negotiations and poked around the room. This space was as big as the front room of the Low Road, but seemed much smaller because filing cabinets ringed the whole back area. The good kind, made out of refractory crystal with a fine aluminum rotary index. George had collected information about not just his own trades but also tons of other stuff that people had swapped, bought, or sold here in Xiosphant. This one dentist near the cold front had amassed quite the collection of old uniform insignia from the Mothership. (Still sailing overhead, in her lonely, slow-decaying orbit.) George had lists of rare and collectible items sold at various auctions around the city, too.

  For a place that prided itself on having exactly the right kind of money for everyone’s needs, Xiosphant sure had a lot of deals under the table. For a moment, Mouth imagined settling down here along with Alyssa and some of the others. You could get rich and soft here. Or you could get dead—just ask Justin.

  Mouth kept spinning the wheel, letting different engravings on the crystal pop up on the viewer, out of boredom, as George asked all the usual questions about Argelo and its famous parties. Like, did people really just never stop dancing, ever? Would they let someone just walk around half naked, on the street? Was it even true that they let men go with men there? They let anyone do anything in Argelo, was the answer to every one of his questions.

  And then an item on one of George’s auction lists caught Mouth’s eye. Mouth nearly choked, vision gone white, like the road after a hailstorm. She must have misread—but no. There it was. She even found a picture when she pulled up the entry. And the name, written in fancy cursive Xiosphanti script. “The Invention.”