I’m left alone, catching my breath, next to the whitestone plaque commemorating our heroic dead.
* * *
I can’t stop cursing myself as I work my way back toward the darker end of town. Bianca was right there, she needed me, and I did what? I stayed hidden, because when I saw the Gymnasium and the students and everything, my execution turned brand new, as if it had just happened. They took me away from her, and they’re still taking me from her. It’s not my fault. I know it’s not my fault. The whole purpose of arresting me and hauling me away, with so much fanfare, was to put fear into people.
So why be surprised that the fear is in me?
Those gloved hands haven’t loosened their hold on me, even after all this time.
I have to stop and check myself, because I’m carrying valuable metal and I don’t want to be noticed in this neighborhood. I try to clear my mind and pretend I’m playing a game of shadowseek.
Every child in my neighborhood learns to play shadowseek at a young age, even middle-class kids like myself. To win, you have to know where the shadows are, and move from one to another without a break. The shadows never change shape or position, so a clever child can memorize them in advance. And if you’re really good, you can stay in the shadows by pure instinct.
But my mind is stuck in the moment when Bianca let her grief show and I almost went to her. I hardly even see my surroundings, because in my mind I’m still stepping out from behind a decaying metal slab, about to console her with an indelible tenderness. All the potential that was in that moment, I let it fill me up so that maybe next time I can …
That thought consumes me—so I don’t even notice the mob until it’s rushing toward me.
They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time.
But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness. We arrive in Founders’ Square, facing the Council Building and the Spire.
I stand, pressed in on all sides by people, and stare down at the paving stones, which have a pattern that looks like star charts when the light hits them. My parents used to bring me here to listen to the vice regent or even the prince, and instead of looking up at all the gaudy costumes, or the grandeur of the Palace and the Spire and everything around me, I just ran my fingers over this pavement, marveling at the flecks of mica and agate.
Trumpets sound, and the vice regent comes out on the plinth: a tall man with a slack chin and mean eyes, wearing a long gold tunic held together with a bright red sash. We hear his voice around the square, thanks to speakers but also the amazing acoustics that our ancestors engineered.
The vice regent talks about all the achievements of Xiosphant since our great-grandparents’ time, when the Fourth Age of Beauty began. We were falling into decadence, our society was collapsing, all our resources were dwindling. But then we severed contact with Argelo, we stopped tolerating disruptive elements, and we renewed our Xiosphanti values, thanks to the Circadian Restoration. Now we’re truer to our ideals than ever. And yet, we’ve made sacrifices—like all the people who just journeyed past the Northern Ranges to find more arable soil for the farmwheels, steering lorries across thousands of kilometers, with only their timepieces to tell them when to sleep.
The vice regent puts on his most comforting voice. “Thanks to these brave souls, and our hardworking farmers, I’m delighted to announce an increase of two percent in the supply of food dollars. Alas, at the same time we are still facing … certain resource constraints. And thus, the supply of both water tokens and med-creds is being reduced by ten percent each. I’m sure we’ll all make the best of this challenging situation, because we’re Xiosphanti, and we—”
Everyone roars. I don’t hear the end of that sentence, because the mob is rushing forward again, this time charging straight at the vice regent’s plinth, in front of the Council Building. A woman standing next to me has a moldy radish that she must have brought just for this moment, and she flings it at one of the riot cops in front of us. People chant slogans, but I only hear vowels. The vice regent tries to restore order, but the officers have clubs and shields raised.
I have no choice but to run toward a line of police, who wear the same murky faceplates as the figures in my worst memory. They’re raising weapons and clubs, and I feel myself blank out as the people in front of me crash into the wall of the Council Building. We speed up as we hit. I have to close my eyes for a moment. They’re going to clutch me, I’m trapped. When I look again, the people closest to the front are crushed between the mob and the police shields, and I hear them scream. The police bring their clubs down.
The calm part of my mind takes over, the same part that figured out how to communicate with Rose the first time. I pull back and look at this whole situation as if from far above. I stop staring at the mob and the armored cops, and search instead for a way to survive. I don’t let myself look at the helmets and guns, or think about how close they are.
The woman next to me snarls and hoists another vegetable. Then the whip-crack sound of a gun, and she’s gone. Just … vanished. I don’t even think to look down at first, and then I see her. A red mess has replaced most of her head, but the people around me trample her body.
I’m still not letting myself feel any of this. The crowd has broken. People shove each other in all directions. Someone pushes me and I nearly fall in the path of more trampling feet. But I recover, and then I spot the golden statue of Jonas, and I dodge the flailing limbs and angry faces to reach it. I pull myself up into the hollow underside of Jonas’s shimmering All-Environment Survival Suit and hide. I hear shouts, falling bodies, and more gunshots.
The noises peter out, but I don’t leave my hiding place. A few times, I’m about to make a move, when I hear the police making another sweep or, later on, the aggrieved cleanup crew trying to mop all the blood and dirt off the spangled paving stones. But at last they all decide to knock off and get some gin-and-milk, so I risk slipping away.
* * *
I reach the Parlour with just one bell left to shutters-up, and turn the brass doorknob three times left and four times right, as I was taught. Five people with severe windburn and ill-fitting Xiosphanti clothes are sitting in the entry lounge, with Cyrus sneering at this invasion of his cozy space, exposing his lower incisors. One of these strangers has a spiky haircut that covers only the middle of her scarred head, and another has metal sticking out of his face. I almost turn and leave again, because these people don’t look like clients. The images of the police shields and helmets, the gunshot and the headless woman are still seeping into my mind, and I can already tell they’re going to replay in my dreams.
But Hernan appears and waves one arm. “Sophie, come on in. These lovely people are the Resourceful Couriers, and they’re visiting from Argelo. They won’t be staying long. I’ve done business with them in the past, and this time they’ve brought some great delicacies, including genuine cat butter.”
I can’t help gawping. I’ve never even met any foreigners before. The Resourceful Couriers nod at me, and one tall man with a large black mustache and neat beard does a little bow. They’re all staring at me, and the need to get away from all these people is almost overwhelming. But I’m curious, too.
“I was worried about you,” Hernan says to me. “I thought you might have gotten caught up in the … unpleasantness at the Founders’ Square.” He measures his syllables, as if to remind me that, inside the Parlour, we do not rush.
“Some unpleasantness, yes.” The leader of the Resourceful Couriers, the man with the dark whiskers, laughs. “People here are not accustomed to see
ing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.” Omar’s accent sounds like nothing I’d ever heard, and his syntax keeps slipping from polite to familiar.
“In my experience,” says Hernan, “absolutely everyone can pretend to be a pacifist, just so long as there’s enough money to go all the way around.”
I want to keep listening, but without anyone paying too much attention to me. So I fetch a pot of lukewarm coffee and load up a tray with tiny cups.
The youngest Resourceful Courier is a woman named Yulya, close to my age, with long dark hair and skin that looks less windscarred than everyone else’s. Yulya believes her ancestors traveled in the Zagreb compartment, just like Hernan’s, and she stares at every little item and decoration. “I can’t believe you managed to build all of this. In Xiosphant, of all places,” she says, with worse grammar than Omar. “I wish my father could see this place.”
“I always heard that Zagreb didn’t put in its fair share when they were pooling resources to build the Mothership,” says the large man with the metal piercing his face. I think his name is Kendrick.
“That’s what they say, when they talk about it at all,” Hernan says.
I’ve heard Hernan’s version of the story a few times now. By the time the great city-states of Earth were building the Mothership to escape a ruined planet, Zagreb was in steep decline from its worldwide supremacy back at the start of the Brilliant Age. But you still couldn’t call yourself cosmopolitan if you hadn’t spent time there, so all the other cities made concessions to allow Zagreb to have a compartment on the ship. In return, the Zagreb contingent made sure to bring everything from musical instruments to cooking spices to beautiful handcrafted furniture to great works of literature—everything you’d need to re-create true civilization.
But after the radiation leaks, the explosive decompression, the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, and all the tiny wars, the Zagreb stock ended up ruined. They arrived with nothing. All anybody remembered about Zagreb was that they didn’t contribute as much as all the other city-states, but we let them come along out of charity.
Hernan grew up believing he came from a long line of beggars. He and all his extended family lived on the bright edge of town, where the shutters conducted heat and you felt like you were cooking alive in the dark, and he hated every one of his relatives. Until Hernan somehow discovered a long-forgotten book about the salons of Old Zagreb. That’s why he opened the Illyrian Parlour, although he had to pretend that it was just a beautiful coffeehouse, and downplay any Zagreb connection, or else they’d never have let him accept food dollars instead of just luxury coins.
Some of the other Resourceful Couriers pipe up with their own theories and stories about things that happened to their distant ancestors on the Mothership, during the journey, or after planetfall. This conversation has strayed into territory that would get all of us arrested, at a time when the city has already set about eating itself, and then I realize the smugglers are amused by my discomfort, to varying degrees. Which makes me more uncomfortable.
Thank goodness everyone realizes the shutters are about to close, and the conversation ends. The Resourceful Couriers leave the Parlour in a hurry, looking flustered, almost like proper Xiosphanti.
* * *
Four of us sleep in a tiny room, even smaller than I used to share with Bianca, with two rows of bunks. I’m sleeping above Jeremy, who thrashes when he dreams about whatever drove him away from his comfortable old existence. All Jeremy has told me about his past is that he was doing an extended course in geophysics, hoping to help solve the great riddle of our world: how the climate can be so stable, with fire and ice so close together, and whether it’ll stay that way. But there was some scandal, an improper romance, and he had to flee.
Opposite us are Kate and Walter, who’ve been here the longest and always start shoving, running, and pillow-fighting the moment we’re done playing at languid slowness.
Everyone else seems to be asleep, but I just lie there and hug myself. I remember the defiance on that woman’s face at the Square, right before she didn’t have a face anymore. All of my old fears feel even more rational than before, and the gloved fingers grip my armpits more tightly. My last thought before sleep is of Bianca’s ghost smile, slowly dispelling.
When the shutters open, I wake groggy, and remember dreaming of helmets on a mountainside. Meanwhile, Walter, Kate, and Jeremy are whispering that our next clients will be the worst, now that everyone knows someone who got trampled or shot at. A feeling of dread seeps through all of the hand-gilded murals and reproductions of classic wooden furniture.
Hernan takes me aside as soon as I’ve dressed and tied my wavy hair back with a neat ribbon. “Sophie, I know you had a terrible experience. Do you feel up to working this shift? We can always give you some time off.”
Over in the far corner, Jeremy’s eyes widen, because if I take a surprise vacation, Jeremy will be left dealing with all these people on his own, and he’s still not ready.
I shrug. “I’ll be okay.”
Hernan stares, because he knows I’m lying.
“I’m close enough to okay,” I say. “I know how to get out of a situation if I start feeling less okay.”
“That will have to do, I suppose.” Hernan smiles, and then offers me a hug. I hesitate a moment, then lean into his stocky chest, close enough to see a loose silver thread on his brocaded jacket. “I wish I knew why you were sneaking off all the time, with my old padded jacket and those new boots that you spent all your clothing vouchers on. You never quite explained how you survived being forced up that mountain, and now I wonder … I just hope that whatever you’re doing, you keep yourself safe.”
I feel like saying, Nobody is ever safe, but instead I smile and say, “Of course.”
* * *
Long after I have forgotten what everything in the Illyrian Parlour looks like, the scents will stay with me. The musk that hangs in the air after I’ve slept in our tiny bunkroom with Jeremy, Walter, and Kate, the flowery, pungent scent of coffee brewing in the tiny cracked-tile kitchen behind the beautiful client room, the aroma of sandalwood and fresh-cut lavender, the comfort of soap. These scents have come to feel like home, and if I even notice a hint of sandalwood or dark coffee anywhere else, I feel a recognition that my mind only catches up with after a moment.
I find myself trying to memorize every detail, so I’ll remember this place whatever happens, and also because Hernan created a place where the world feels bigger, and yet also more intimate, than anywhere else in this city. I wish I could figure out how he pulled that off. My mother used to smile at me and say these funny things, which I now recognize as quotes from the books Hernan has made me memorize. A fen has more dignity than a mountain, because the fen settles according to its own weather. Or: Listen to yourself, hear your own footsteps, your breaths, your heartbeats, oh, how many rhythms you make as you come and go! you are an orchestra. I remember my mother saying that to me: “You are an orchestra.” And laughing, until I laughed too without getting the joke.
* * *
Jeremy and I work together, while Kate and Walter play music or hustle behind the scenes, and Jeremy’s grateful enough that I’m working that he covers for me when I have to shut my eyes and ride out a small memory-panic. Some part of my mind has combined the guns that forced me up a mountain with the ones that took a woman’s head apart, as if those were one incident. And meanwhile, the people who sit across from us flail around, grope for stillness, and make too much noise and commotion, in spite of all our work. Jacek, a pipe-worker who always seems ashamed of his fetid odor in this clean, fragrant space, keeps looking in all directions, biting all his fingers one by one, muttering, “They didn’t need to shoot anyone, they didn’t,” and twitching. Our next client, a tall athletic woman from the power plant, seems better, breathing slow and shallow, hands on knees, until I realize she’s in shock.
Nobody is okay. Nothing we do helps. I breathe slow
er and louder, confuse them with morsels of old stories, sprinkle petals in their coffee. Client after client. The shutters close, and open again, and it’s the same thing again. Even after two more shutter-cycles.
It’s okay, I want to say, I know how you feel. Like slow-dancing with a rockfall.
After another endless shift, I let myself slump, so exhausted my arms fall like rags. I turn to Jeremy and ask, “Have you ever had something happen to you that scared you so much you felt like you were going to keep reliving it forever?”
Jeremy pauses for a moment, his round face creasing. “Hernan always says that a perfect moment of beauty can last forever. But maybe some moments are so ugly that they never end, either. All you can do is be patient with yourself.”
mouth
Mouth spent way too much time obsessing about how to get inside Bianca’s head when the two of them weren’t sitting together in the oatmeal place, eating overseasoned mush and drinking bad liquor. Bianca’s main weakness seemed to be the dead girl, Sophie. Mention that name, and she just devolved into a weepy mess, but this always led to a conversation about loss and revenge rather than any actionable information about their Palace job.
“Every time the shutters roll down and the light comes into my room I lay there, and I just look up at the milky sky. I curse, and I stare at the shelf where Sophie used to sleep.” Bianca closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. “Hope doesn’t get me out of bed. Duty definitely does not get me out of bed. The only thing that does is making the bastards who took her from me pay.”
By this point, Bianca had talked about the dead girl half a dozen different times—but Sophie never once sounded like a real person. According to Bianca, Sophie had possessed no flaws, not even the slightest jealousy or negativity. “She always wanted to see the good in everyone.” Bianca held the bowl of oatmeal to her face and breathed in the sour vapor. “She managed to see through all the hypocrisy, using kindness instead of anger.”
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 8