“There’s no way to replace someone who had so much life. But I guess you can still make her death worth something.” Mouth could smell all the spices and the rankness of boiled tomatoes in the kitchen upstairs. The scent brought back a powerful recall of this one herb that the Citizens used to pick out in the far plains way past the other side of Argelo, which Yolanda insisted was great for your digestion, but which tasted like salty dirt.
“You’re the only person I can talk to about her,” Bianca said. “Everybody at the Gymnasium just decided to pretend Sophie never even existed as soon as she was gone. And Derek and the other organizers of the Uprising don’t want to hear about my selfish motivations for joining the fight. Everybody’s supposed to be in this for the pure light of justice, and liberation from the endless cycle of toil.”
“There’s no right reason for wanting to make a difference.” Mouth kept seeing that picture of the Invention from the catalog in her head. She imagined picking it up and letting light into all its contours, and feeling as though maybe her life had a purpose after all.
“Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the Uprising. I think Xiosphant was a great place once, before the wars and the isolationism and the Circadian Restoration, but now it’s grown into something elitist and corrupt.” Bianca looked up at the pockmarked clay ceiling. “The only goal this city has is to maintain. We’re just supposed to keep the city the same for another four or five generations, and after that, everything breaks beyond our ability to repair.”
Mouth wanted to say, You shouldn’t get yourself killed in a pointless gesture. But she thought about the Invention, and instead she said, “I bet Sophie would be proud of what you’re doing.”
“I hope so.” Bianca smiled, and the backlit shadows turned it into a scowl. “I just can’t keep feeling like this. Ever since they took her, I’ve hated every breath. And I want to take all of this pain and give it to someone else. Let them see how they like it.”
Mouth sensed she was running out of time to find out how these revolutionaries were going to get inside the Palace. If she could just sneak inside under their cover, she’d only need a few hundred heartbeats to get upstairs, crack the vault, and grab the Invention.
Mouth almost said, You know, you’ll just end up killing the working stiffs if you attack the Palace. The guards, the cleaning staff, the drudges. You’ll never even touch the people in power. Instead, she poured Bianca more swamp vodka and said, “You need to stay angry, and remember why you’re fighting. Hold on to that fire, because you owe it to your friend. Trust me, you can’t leave these debts unpaid, or it’ll ruin you over time.”
As Mouth spoke, she was thinking of the fire that had consumed the Citizens’ remains, and the debt that she had carried ever since. Bianca was nodding, heavily, and Mouth made herself smile.
SOPHIE
The last few times I visited Rose at the summit of the Old Mother, I’ve been empty-handed, because it took me some time to figure out how to get copper. This time, I’m weighed down. To add to the chunks I bought in the temperate zone, I stripped some old wiring that I scrounged in an alley near the Illyrian Parlour, and found a few more bits in a scrapyard, plus one of our clients made me a present of a pendant that has some copper in it. The extra load adds to the strain on my already-stiff arms with every steep rise. I keep taking breaks, and thinking about Bianca’s heartsick expression.
When I reach the plateau, I sit and wait, staring outward, and I try to make sense of all this mess. No human being has ever shared their thoughts with me the way Rose has. I know more about what it feels like to watch hunters drag my friend into the searing twilight than I’ll ever know about most human experiences, and every time I think about that image I feel something lower than shame. Even with all the other anxieties that overturn my thoughts, the image of a crocodile being dragged away for an obscene feast, bound and bleeding, keeps coming back.
I hear a crunch, and a massive shape rises out of the dark. I nearly lose my balance on the slice of rock where I’m perching, even though I’ve been waiting for Rose. The wind ruffles her fur, and her front legs crinkle as she plants her wide, clawed feet. She shields herself from the meager daylight with her tentacles, and crouches near me, greeting me in the crocodile fashion. Her round mouth seems to smile.
“Hi,” I say, over the sorrowful wind. “It’s good to see you. I hope you’ve been safe out there. I hope all your friends are holding up. Things in Xiosphant have been … intense. Everyone is so freaked out they almost can’t think straight.”
I’m ashamed of my tiny amount of copper, which Rose clutches in one tentacle before tucking it under her woolly carapace. We used to have tons of the stuff, because the Mothership had steered a lot of ore-rich asteroids down to us. People used copper to decorate everything, but all the treasure meteors are exhausted and our mines are empty. Scientists believe that a lot of the most valuable metals on this planet are concentrated on the day side, where we can’t mine or even investigate.
So to make up for this sad bundle, I reach into my satchel and pull out the timepiece my father gave me when I was a child, to help me pay attention. I had this tiny clock in my jeans pocket when they banished me to this place, and the fine metalwork survived somehow. You can still make out the care that somebody put into every angel, every flower, and the way the fine gears turn.
“This is important to my people,” I say. “This is how we know what to do, or what everyone else is doing right now. If you could read this, and you knew enough about me, you could use this to know where I am, all the time.” I try to show Rose how to wind it, and which dial points to day or night, the different times and settings. She seems to pay attention, or at least to understand I’m making a fuss about this object. When I place the timepiece into her tentacle, she tries to give it back. I press it into her grasp and let go.
“A present. For you.”
Rose accepts the clock, placing it next to the copper. Then she beckons with her open pincer, and I only hesitate for a moment. I push my face and neck into the fulcrum, where slick warm fingers brush my face—
—We live in a great city, far from here, under the crust of the night. Cliffs of ice, deep fissures, towering structures of stone and metal, and wheels turning far beneath us, fueled by underground rivers, and furnaces hotter than the touch of the sun. At the heart of our city, tiny creatures who look like us hang in a mesh of warm, dark threads, helpless and spindly. They cry out, their tentacles and pincers still too tiny to communicate properly, but we can feel their distress, and our blood runs thin. They stay inside that web because their slender bodies haven’t finished developing, and when an adult places some bright roots among the threads holding them, the babies absorb this nourishment right away. The roots shrivel as the web swells with nourishment. But these infants still cry out. Their pincers open and close, and the message is clear: I’m cold. It hurts. I’m scared. No matter what we do, these children aren’t growing the way they’re supposed to. Their soft unshelled bodies hang, weaker and weaker, as they struggle to take in any nutrition.
We don’t understand the cause of the sickness for a long time. But then we discover: a poison rain, falling on the ice sheets far above, gives off scents that make us almost lose consciousness if we even approach. Some caustic liquid that was trapped long ago, somewhere in the hottest part of the day, has been released into a cloud, because the sky has gone out of balance. Even the slightest touch burns the cilia off your tentacles, and it turns the air too noxious too breathe. This poison seeps down into the soil, until it reaches the protective threads around our children, tainting them. We feel sorrow, trapped in our deepest cores like a memory too painful to share, when we travel back down into the depths of the city and see their toothless mouths open and close, their unshaped tentacles reaching out for nothing. This sickness taints a whole generation of our children, and there will be nobody to give our most cherished memories to before we die—
—When Rose releases me, I reel, a
nd topple in the direction of the night before I recover. My face is wet, even apart from the residue from her tendrils. I fall on my back, looking up at the dark clouds.
I babble something. “Those babies. I’m sorry. I wish … I don’t know what I can do. How can I help? What is there? I’m so sorry. I would do anything—”
Rose just lowers her head again, like she’s encouraging me to climb up on her back and ride. We stand there, on the line between one world and the other. I hear thunder a long way off, on the other side of endless ice fields, but never see any lightning. I wonder how long that toxic rainfall has been blighting the crocodiles’ nurseries, and what caused it. There was a sliver of an idea buried in Rose’s shared memory: the atmosphere was in balance for a long time, the day and night in perfect arrangement, but now the sky itself has gone wrong.
I’m too cold to stay up here any longer, even with Hernan’s warm padded jacket, and I hear the chimes sound the Span of Reflection. I touch the end of one tentacle, gently, then pick my way back down the mountainside.
* * *
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about toxic rain falling on a city thousands of kilometers away, across an endless field of ice and storms. I can’t banish that image, but I also can’t make my mind encompass it.
So I find myself drifting back to my other obsession.
I need to make sure Bianca’s okay, after I’ve seen so many other people flying out of their skins. I’m not even sure how many times the shutters have gone up since the riot, but at last I dredge up the courage to go check on her again.
When I walk near the Gymnasium, I feel myself freeze up again. But this time I’m expecting it, and so I take Jeremy’s advice: I’m patient with myself. I stay in a safe alcove, protected by shadows, until the worst passes. Then I find another hiding place and watch Bianca, chatting with the other students, striding away from campus. I see her stroll past Matthew and a couple other old members of the Progressive Students, and they barely acknowledge each other. Good. The police are probably still watching that whole group, including her, and right now they’re ready to shoot anyone who makes them the slightest bit nervous.
I almost try again to talk to Bianca, but there are always too many people around. Instead, I just walk a safe distance behind her as she strides downtown. Bianca doesn’t look at the Plaza, the Market, or the row of clothing stores along the Grand Boulevard. She just keeps her head down, and doesn’t even change her posture when she passes through the cold front. Colored smoke fills the sky, and the bakery switches from wake-up pastries to after-work treats. Watching Bianca from a safe distance, I feel so homesick, in the middle of my chest and the prow of my back.
Bianca wanders into the grayest part of town, close to the Warrens, and knocks on a plain metal door in an abandoned paint factory. I find a tiny window, on the other side of the building, that has a view into the dingy room where she emerges and starts hefting an ancient rifle in both hands. Around her, people study plans and maps of the Founders’ Square.
Seeing Bianca next to this pile of guns, I feel the cold go through me. She’s going to do something stupid. Spots fill my eyes, almost like an attack of lightsickness, as I think about the helmets, the guns, the casual murder. The thick gloves seizing Bianca this time, or hoisting her dead body.
I have to close my eyes and picture myself out in the ice floes, kilometers from the nearest drop of illumination, clawing the tundra in total darkness.
When I make myself look into the basement again, I notice someone who seems out of place, even among rebels and misfits. They turn their head, and I recognize one of the foreigners who came to the Parlour. The Resourceful Couriers, they called themselves. This is the tall, angry one, with the strip of hair cutting across the hash of pale scars on her head. She’s hoisting a large gun in both arms, like a baton in some obscure game.
mouth
The air felt sickly, like the chemicals from the old paint factory had seeped through the groaning cement ceiling and the meter-thick insulation down to this maintenance pod. They’d taken all of Mouth’s weapons, except the two that were hidden in places nobody ever searched. Bianca escorted her past a couple of smudge-faced pipe-workers and three artfully scruffy Coliseum students, until they reached a small pale man with a wispy beard.
“Derek, this is Mouth. She’s the foreigner I was telling you about.”
“Bianca says good things about you.” Derek gestured at a well-annotated map of the Palace, the Spire, Founders’ Square, and the surrounding areas. “We’re ready to move soon. When they shot unarmed protestors, they showed their real faces and exposed the contradictions at the heart of this broken system. If we strike now, the people will be on our side.”
Derek worked at a shoe-tacking place, and his callused fingers were always moving things around and making marks on paper. Everyone in Xiosphant seemed to have fidgety hands.
Besides Derek, the other key people included a physics student named Jeff (tall, with big hands and a great mane of black braids), a rangy, red-faced pipe-worker named Vicki (who made sculptures from detritus she found in the abandoned mine tunnels), and a big crusher named Brock, whose shaved pink scalp had lost too many fights with ringworm. Plus three skinny white-haired men who worked together in the same linen factory, whom everybody called the Gumdrops, on account of the bright-colored stains on their faces and hands.
“I’ve seen you at a few of our meetings, sitting way at the back.” Derek squinted. “You always stood out, even with your head covered up.”
“I wanted to see if I could help.” Mouth smiled. “Somebody needs to do something about this town.” Then she quoted from Grantham: “‘The worst way to deal with failing technology is to transform human beings into machines.’”
“So, you’ve been paying attention.” Derek grinned, revealing crooked teeth that he hadn’t had enough med-creds to fix. And he seemed to reach a snap decision. “Here’s what we could use your help with. We have seven incendiary devices we put together, and they’re located in a safe place nearby. Somebody needs to transport them to the Founders’ Square after the next shutters-up, arriving before the Span of Industry.”
“That’s when the blue-and-red cloud appears, right?” Mouth said.
“Right. If you can help us get them to the far end of the street market off the Founders’ Square, you’ll be met by our team there. The explosives will create a lot of noise and smoke, but they won’t hurt anyone. The perfect distraction for me to lead a small team inside the Palace service tunnels by removing this solar power transformer box, which provides access to the maintenance crawlway. We’ll take the High Magistrate hostage when his guards move him from the Receiving Room to a secure location once they hear the blast.”
“Okay,” Mouth said. She only half listened to Derek, because she was trying to memorize the maps and plans in front of her. Now that she knew how they planned to get in, she could just go right now, make a run at that vault—but she’d probably have a better chance during the chaos after those incendiaries went off.
Whoever designed the Palace had gone for a circular design, in homage to Jonas’s original principles of Circadianism, but the rooms were still rectangular, which created some weird bottlenecks. A handful of access hallways bisected those “spokes,” but most of the rooms only opened onto the central hub. The service corridors ran around the outside of the circle, with stairs leading down to the basement level, where the kitchens and maintenance areas were, or up to the second floor, where that vault lay at the end of a side corridor. Mouth imagined herself holding the Invention. Reattaching a long-lost part of herself. She had been half awake for too long.
“This Palace is made of chokepoints,” Mouth said aloud. “You get into a firefight with Palace guards, they’ll get you from both sides.”
“We’ll worry about that,” Derek said. “You just help Bianca get the explosives into position.” Then he turned to Bianca. “You’re responsible for this smuggler, since you brought
her in. Keep her with you the whole time.”
“Will do,” Bianca said, with a sober expression.
“Okay,” Derek said. “Both of you show up here right after the next shutters-up. This place will be our rally point.” He walked away to talk to the Gumdrops, who were inspecting some rifles.
“I can’t believe it’s going to happen,” Bianca whispered as she led Mouth back to the entrance. “Just one more shutter-cycle, and we’re doing this. What if we succeed? What if we really capture the High Magistrate, and force them to negotiate? I can’t even imagine what it would look like for Xiosphant to treat everyone like an actual human being.”
Brittle ice coated every nerve lacing through Mouth’s body, but her blood was hot. She looked at Bianca and saw the same confusion of symptoms. “You’re doing the right thing,” Mouth said. She repeated this, like a blessing. “You’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the right thing.”
“I’m so glad I met you.” Bianca put her hand on Mouth’s forearm, right when she was in the middle of strapping all her weapons back into place.
“I’m glad we met too.” Mouth smiled. “You’re going to set this old town on fire. After this, everyone will remember Sophie’s name.” Then Mouth heard those fucking bells, once again, and realized she was late to meet up with the Resourceful Couriers.
* * *
On her way back into the glare, Mouth stuck to the trashy alleys, and tried to convince herself that she had some kind of shot. Derek’s plan had enough weak spots to ensure that every single member of the Uprising died, including poor Bianca—but all Mouth needed to do was give Bianca the slip after they delivered the bombs, and make her way to that loose solar power transformer in time to follow Derek’s crew inside. Then it was just twenty meters from the maintenance hatch to the service staircase leading to the second floor, with the vault, while the Palace guards were distracted. Mouth tried to form a clear mental image of how this would go down, and then she realized someone was following her.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 9