Rose thanks me, and with one tentacle she holds up her own present for me. It’s a ball of dark green spikes with bright blue tips, connected to a long yellow-white stalk. The spikes are each as long as my ring finger, and they quiver in the wind. The frosty stem burns the skin off my fingers. I take a piece of cloth from my pocket, so I can hold it.
I stare for ages before I realize: it’s a flower. Some kind of hardy plant that grows out there in the night and exists without sunlight, maybe even without liquid water. It can’t use photosynthesis, so how does it live? The spikes catch the twilight and seem to glisten, the greens and blues seeming more vivid and delicate the longer I stare. There’s no way this flower will survive the trip back to Xiosphant, so I just commit it to memory while Rose rests next to me.
“I’m actually feeling kind of happy,” I say to Rose without taking my eye off the rippling blue-green petals. “I don’t know if I ought to be. I can’t stand to wonder what Bianca’s doing right now. But meanwhile, I have a new family, and we’re helping people. I’m doing work that I enjoy, and I can see the results. My life feels wrong, but good. Maybe that’s the best I can do.”
Rose just tilts her head toward me, like she wants to understand. The flower is already wilting. The cloth I’m pinching around the stem is soggy. The spikes droop, but as they do, they reveal an underseam of brilliant orange.
“I wish I could have talked to my mother about her paintings,” I say. “I never even knew she painted.”
Rose is holding her pincer open, ready for me to go inside again. I try not to drop the flower as I lean toward her. I’ve found that it’s easier to do this from a kneeling position, when Rose is hunkered down, than standing up. I’m still thinking about Bianca, and my mother, and the impermanence of the flower in my hand, when my face and neck make contact with the slimy tendrils, and—
—I’m out in the ice. This is the part where usually Rose shows me some aspect of the crocodiles’ society, like how they built that huge city by mining deep caverns and tempering metal in the heat of a volcano, and by growing other structures organically. Sometimes she shows me some engineering feat that would make the professors at the Gymnasium sick with envy, but then it’s tinged with a sadness, a worry, that I don’t understand.
This time, though, I don’t see other crocodiles, deep furnaces, or soaring girders. I see a young human, dying in the snow.
(This is the second time I’ve seen how I look to someone else lately, and this time I almost don’t recognize myself. To Rose’s senses, I’m a pile of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals and making vibrations in the chill air. A jittering, stumbling human, smaller than most, with upper limbs closed in on themselves. The most unusual thing about me, to Rose, is that there’s only one of me.)
I hesitate, because the smart thing in this situation would be to leave this creature to die. But something makes me stop and examine closer. We have plenty of experience with human fight-or-flight behavior, including the usual stances and the chemicals that humans give off. And this one tastes different on the wind: like some mixture of defiance and tenderness.
So instead, I approach the shivering, mewling human and embrace her. For a moment, she seems about to lash out and try to attack my tendrils, and maybe I’ll be a dead fool. But no, she moves into my embrace, and I give her one short memory, with a simple message: We have our own city. We can work together—
—I think that’s it, Rose has shown me everything she’s going to, but the memory shifts, and—
—I’m standing with a group of other crocodiles, and we’re watching one of our friends bleeding from a spear that juts out from under her carapace. She’s surrounded by humans who carry explosives and weapons that could tear through us. My stomachs grind and every heart in my body beats against its cavity with the need to help my friend, but the other crocodiles cross their tentacles in my path. It’s too late for her. I break down, venting a noxious cloud of misery and grief, as the humans lash my friend with cords. They drag her, still flailing, up the mountain toward the punishing glare—
—Rose lets me go. I’m already on my knees, but I sink further, and double over, sick to my stomach. My face is moist from the secretions on Rose’s tendrils, which create an afterimage when I breathe deeply. I’m hyperventilating, which makes Rose’s memories flicker in and out of my head.
“Why don’t you just hate us?” I stammer. “Why don’t you want to kill us?”
Rose just pulls away slowly, and pulls herself up on her hind legs.
“I know you could. I’ve seen enough of your geoengineering by now. You could bring rocks and ice down on our city, and we’d never even know what happened.” I take a deep breath and rise up on one knee, swaying. “I’m … I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend.”
I’ve never eaten crocodile meat. Few people have, it’s a huge delicacy. But I’ve seen the hunting parties leaving town before, young people full of loud songs and swagger, and I watched Frank take one apart with knives and spikes. Something rotten settles in my guts and I have to hug my knees. “That was evil. And I wish there was something more I could do.”
The ice flower is a dark smudge on the ground.
Rose can sense my distress, like before, and maybe she understands I’m expressing remorse. She comes back again, and opens her pincer one more time. I rise up and bring my face in, and I get a single impression of a block of glossy orange metal. Copper. I feel its cool weight on my hand. She pulls away again.
“Okay,” I say, still unsteady on my feet, still heartsick. “I’ll get you some copper.”
Rose turns and clambers over the edge, back toward the night, her front legs picking at the rocks so she doesn’t overbalance. A moment later, she’s gone, and I turn back to stare at the complacent city, washed in its usual gradient. The farmwheels and tar rooftops shine like new.
I think about how in the world I can score some copper, and then it hits me: I’ll need to go back to the temperate zone, the home of all my fear and regret. For a moment, I’m sure I’ll die—that if I go anywhere near the Gymnasium, people will see me, they’ll shout, the cops will arrive, and this time—
Then I breathe and remind myself, You’re in control. You’re stronger than those monsters. I pick myself up and hurry back to town before they ring the last curfew bell, running down the slope so fast I nearly kick myself as I skid and spill onto the ground.
mouth
Mouth and Bianca took a walk on the edge of the slaughterhouse district, where livestock raised outside Xiosphant came in to be butchered, on lorries or in long trains of wide-eyed cows and fidgeting goats. These buildings clustered near the city wall, on the side facing the Northern Ranges, and they made a crisp profile of clay-brick gables and steeples against the wall’s edge. Mouth had only eaten meat occasionally in Xiosphant, but she did appreciate the leather.
Since they were out in the open, walking along a wide slate-paved road with the indentations of countless lorry wheels, they spoke in whispers, and only discussed politics obliquely. Still, Mouth welcomed a meeting someplace besides the oatmeal restaurant.
“When they took Sophie, I lost all my dumb illusions about how the world works,” Bianca said. “I had all these lofty theories about culture, and internalized mechanisms of control, but I hadn’t ever faced up to how much the world runs on crude, mindless violence until it was right in front of me.”
“Violence doesn’t settle everything,” Mouth grunted. “Sometimes violence just postpones a conversation that’s bound to happen sooner or later. But that can be useful in itself, to some people.”
Bianca had barely slapped anyone in her life, and Mouth was the first person she’d ever met who’d killed people as part of her job. At times, Bianca seemed to crave reassurance: that she could do this, that fighting and maybe killing would come naturally, that it would pay off. Other times, she almost seemed to wish Mouth would say, You’re not cut out for this, leave this to the professionals. To justify Bianca’s qualms,
or make a space for her anxiety about whether her grief over Sophie would give her enough strength.
Sometimes at the oatmeal place, Bianca would quiz Mouth about her skills. How many people had she killed? Could she fight in close quarters? What weapons did she have particular experience with? Those questions always came with an appraising stare, like Mouth was a piece of merchandise that might be overpriced.
Now, in the wide driveway near the rows of abattoirs, Mouth tried to remember what the Citizens had said about self-defense when they’d trained every child to hold a weapon. Bianca seemed lost in thought.
At last Mouth said, “Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violent. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”
“That almost sounds like a quote from Mayhew.” Bianca laughed, then covered her mouth because they were out in the open, where any number of government spies could be lurking behind these walls, along with the muffled drone of cutting machines.
* * *
The longer Mouth stayed in Xiosphant, the further off-center everything drove her. They had foods that you could only eat right after the shutters opened, and other foods you ate right before they closed. People would raise a glass before the blue-and-red smoke filled the sky, because they expected it. When Bianca talked about the workers’ rebellion that happened during her great-grandparents’ time, she couldn’t help saying it took place during the Third Age of Plenty.
And right now, Mouth was hustling to George’s roofing plant, because the klaxons said the city was getting ready to pull up all the shutters. You could smell the starchy aroma of everyone’s pre-sleep meal, and the soapy fumes of last-chance laundry. The sky remained pale, and calm, thanks to those mountains cutting off the worst of the weather systems, but people rushed as if they were about to get hailed on. A look of good-natured anxiety on everyone’s face. You could almost hear them mutter, “Oh dear, this is very bad, well, it’s okay, but it’s very bad, must get indoors, if only I had a little more time, oh dear.”
Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just as long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.
George was in a good mood, because he’d been able to unload some of the textiles they’d brought from Argelo, and had done some wizardry to get them a “basket of currencies” in return.
“Is that like money?” Reynold snorted.
Mouth had to help the other Couriers to carry the crates of silk and muslin across town. They couldn’t use the sled because it drew too much attention, and they had to move these crates before the shutters closed. George came along, since he knew all the teeny alleyways that cut between the big boulevards and the crisscrossing avenues. The main obstacle in these shortcuts: heaps of garbage that smelled like the poisonous swamps out past Argelo, where they made vodka out of the sap of this one carnivorous plant. (Swamp vodka tasted better if you didn’t know where it came from.)
Six of them carried crates on their shoulders, nearly tripping over rubbish every few steps, and Mouth heard Alyssa cursing as she stepped in puddles. Their route took them closer and closer to the night.
The final bell sounded, meaning they were too damn late.
“Here it is.” George pointed at a stone staircase, at the end of a narrow alley.
By the time they hoisted the crates up the uneven stairs into the garment factory, the shutters were going up all over town, with a sound like Xiosphant was grinding its teeth.
“We’ll have to stay here until the shutters drop again,” Omar said before they even had a chance to look around the garment factory. Looms, rows and rows of sewing machines with rusty pedals, vats of dyes and ammonia. The place smelled even worse than the alleys, or the sub-basements where Mouth had snuck into political meetings. No place to lie down, and only those benches to sit on. The factory manager apologized in a few grunts as he handed over the “basket of currencies” in a bag made of cheap canvas, then locked himself in his office with the single cot.
“I can tell I’m not going to be able to sleep here,” Mouth said.
“Better get some shut-eye if you can. It’s also illegal to sleep when the shutters are open,” Alyssa said, settling onto one of those benches in front of a sewing machine.
“That’s not true.” Yulya gaped, speaking in broken Xiosphanti. “Is it true?”
“Actually,” said George, “the penalties are almost as bad for sleeping during shutters-down as for being out and about during shutters-up. You’re supposed to be contributing to society when everyone’s awake, so we’re all united. They’ve put people to death for being repeat offenders: sleeping at the wrong time more than once.”
“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” Mouth said, without even thinking.
George leapt to his feet and looked around, like they were all about to be arrested. “Where did you hear that?”
Everyone stared at Mouth. Alyssa raised one eyebrow. Omar’s eyes narrowed. The Resourceful Couriers had an informal rule against getting involved in local politics, for obvious reasons, and Mouth had sort of forgotten.
“I dunno.” Mouth tilted her head. “I was drinking somewhere and there were these students. I thought it was a funny thing to say.”
“It’s a dangerous ideology,” George said, “aimed at cutting my throat. Cutting all our throats. Wrecking our whole society. People don’t realize how much we’re all just hanging on by our fingernails. This planet really doesn’t want us here.”
“I don’t know.” Alyssa decided to rescue Mouth from an awkward moment. “Maybe people in this town could stand to loosen up just a tad, you know? I’ve been in synagogues in Argelo that were more laid-back.”
“I know you people have been to other places, where they deal with this hostile environment differently,” George said. “But we have almost a million people in Xiosphant, and everyone has food and shelter, pretty much.” He turned back to Mouth. “That phrase you quoted was part of a whole manifesto about living in harmony with nature, which on this planet is antithetical to human life.”
Mouth was starting to understand what that guy had meant when he said people were the most trapped by the walls they helped to build. But she just nodded at George and pretended to fall asleep.
Once the shutters came down again, Mouth would pretend to be awake.
SOPHIE
The memorial to the Second Argelan War looks even uglier up close: the seams in the lumpy black underside, the ochre streaks where it’s rusting away.
The sculptor tried to create the impression of waves and froth below the little section of boat, but they were working with an ungainly metal that couldn’t hold any fine details. I always heard that parts of this sculpture were made of melted-down artillery, but either way the result came out crude, like something your somnambulist hands might shape in the throes of a bad dream. Above the slice of deck, a faceless man in a heavy uniform stands holding a weapon on one shoulder, ready to fire some projectile.
I hunch behind the statue until I hear her voice, then I peer between the soldier’s legs. Bianca walks across the Gymnasium’s plaza with a satchel across her almost-translucent chemise, and her laugh sounds as dazzling as ever. She smiles and waves to the other students who trot past her on their way to class, and then she stops and talks to Cally, an earnest red-haired girl, about homework. I can almost guess which class they’re heading to, and what jibes Bianca is making about the professor.
The crumbling edges of the statue scrape my arms and repel my attempts to lean against them. The soldier scans for enemy boats in the distance. I sink below his leaden feet and look at a tiny rip in my ankle-skirt.
I tell myself this is what I wanted for Bianca. I wanted her to let me go, to get on with her life and be happy. I knew she was bound to forget me. If anything, I should be relieved. But I feel as if I’m made of the same dead weight as this top-heavy soldier, who seems more and more doomed to pitch over. I see nothing but rust and metal fati
gue, but Bianca’s voice still comes, from far off.
Copper nuggets weigh down my jacket pockets. I took all the infrastructure chits I’d ever earned at the Illyrian Parlour and went around town to all the markets and scrapyards, buying a little at a time. I couldn’t buy too much in one place, or someone would ask questions.
I’m about to sneak back to the nearest alley, a dozen meters away. But I turn back for one last look. Something to preserve in my mind for later. This time, I see a different Bianca.
She stands alone in the plaza, and her posture has transformed, now that she thinks nobody sees her. She stoops forward, her mouth wraps into a scowl, and her eyes have dark lines. Her right hand makes a half fist. All of the other students have gone, because class is starting, but Bianca stares at the paving stones. At last she forces herself to go to class, walking short measures that make her loose skirt ripple.
My heart wakes at the thought of running over to Bianca. I want to pull her into a hug and cradle her head with one hand, tell her that I’m here. I’m alive. I came back for her. I stare at the tight lines around Bianca’s mouth as she walks to class, and I feel so much longing and compassion and joy and sadness and rage I can’t help stepping around the statue, right in broad view.
But as soon as I’m out in the open, the memory-panic hits. I imagine the cops seeing me, in the middle of campus, and surrounding me. Their black faceplates blotting everything, their hands on my arms and legs. I won’t escape this time. All my former classmates will swarm outside to watch.
I feel my body go taut, and my lungs empty. I’m never going to escape that moment, no matter what I do. I almost white out from oxygen starvation. My armpits feel fresh-bruised, but the rest of my body has no sensation. I manage to stagger back behind the cover of the statue, praying nobody saw me, and then I sink into its shadow. By the time I get blood back in my head, Bianca has gone inside one of the classroom buildings.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 7