Even with this ridiculous hat and poncho, Mouth had enough visibility to catch the motion in her blind spot, and whoever it was ducked behind a garbage pile or a doorway whenever she turned. Mouth retraced her own steps, until she came to the spy’s hiding place, a narrow gap between two factory buildings.
Mouth’s tail was the quiet girl from the Illyrian Parlour, the one who’d brought spiced coffee while they’d unloaded some of their cat butter. Dark, pretty, big hazel eyes, small twitchy nose—she looked solidly Xiosphanti middle class. Full mouth, which never smiled or opened. She recoiled, but showed no fear, even though Mouth outweighed her by a lot.
Mouth smiled. “Did I forget to pay for my coffee?”
The girl just stared, not flinching or backing away. Mouth let go of her collar.
“Why were you following me?” Mouth said. “Who do you work for? What’s your game?”
No response. Mouth hadn’t heard her speak at the coffee place, either. Maybe she was mute? That would be a handy trait in a spy. Mouth tried a few more questions, but got nothing.
The two of them were stuck together in the pale shadow of the leatherwares plant. Dank, reddish smog pooling around them. Mouth didn’t want to hurt this girl, not without a much better reason. No point trying to capture her, because then you’d be stuck with her.
This whole situation felt weird, like Mouth had been stalking the girl instead of the other way round. At last Mouth gave up.
“Don’t follow me anymore. Or I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands.”
She turned and walked away, without looking to see if the girl had obeyed.
* * *
When Mouth got to George’s roofing plant, Alyssa was waiting out front. “Don’t go inside,” she said. “Just walk away right now, before anyone sees you.”
Mouth turned and walked in the opposite direction, and Alyssa walked alongside her.
“They’ve all gotten wind of some of your political activities,” she whispered. “Omar is pissed. He’s pretty close to putting together a deal to carry some Xiosphanti leather to Argelo. But they’re going to hit you with an ultimatum: you quit with the politics, or the Couriers leave you behind when we go.”
Alyssa’s hand was on the back of Mouth’s neck, which was the first clue that Mouth was bent double and heaving, with a stream of vomit pooling on the slate pavement below. Mouth had gotten into a crash position without even realizing—she just kept breathing harder, tasting more puke.
“I can’t,” Mouth said. “I can’t. Please, I can’t.”
“Oh fuck,” Alyssa said. “I’ve never … I thought nothing ever got to you. What the hell. This is a whole new side of you, and I don’t…”
“I’m sorry.” Mouth was face-to-knees panicking. “I’m sorry. I’ll get it together. I will, in a moment. I just, this is all too … I mean, they have the last surviving piece of my childhood, my heritage, in that stupid Palace. It’s the only thing that can save what’s left of me. I can’t just walk away from it. But I can’t be trapped here, either. This town. I just hate it. I hate it so much. I think this town thrives on hate.”
“Well.” This was the problem-solving, reasonable tone, which usually meant Alyssa was about to cut through some logistical issue on the road. “The thing you’re trying to get, the Invention, isn’t going anywhere. Right? I mean, they’ve had it for a while. They’ll still have it for ages more. We can grab it the next time we come back to this dump.”
“Can’t risk it.” Mouth straightened up. “Anything could happen. I could die. They could burn that ugly mausoleum down in one of their stupid political actions. They could decide to clean house and throw away a bunch of stuff. I have a duty. I can’t explain this right. I owe everything to the Citizens, the nomads who raised me. And this is all I can do. I just have to string those revolutionaries along a little longer.”
“Well,” Alyssa said. “If you want to leave town with us, you better move fast.”
“Please, just stall them,” Mouth said. “Tell them I got too drunk to walk. They’ll believe that.”
“As long as you never hear Omar’s ultimatum, you might not get in trouble for disobeying it.” Alyssa smiled. “That’s why I grabbed you before you could go in there.”
Everything still tasted awful. Alyssa looked down and gave Mouth a radiant smile, in spite of how gross she must look hunched over, with bile on her chin.
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” Mouth said.
She laughed. “Nah. It’s more like, I’d be a shitty friend if I gave you what you deserved.” Alyssa punched Mouth’s arm. “And you’ve gone all the way to the edge of the night for me, more times than I can count.” Mouth couldn’t actually think of a single time, but let it go.
“Well, thank you,” Mouth said. “I … I really care about you a lot, and I can’t imagine what I would do if I had to break in a new sleepmate.”
“Ugh. I’m the only one who can put up with your kicking. Anyway, get out of here. I need to get back before they start to wonder why I’m taking so long in the bathroom.”
Alyssa hugged Mouth, who clutched her tight for a moment. She was gone a moment later, and Mouth was left almost choking on puke and carbon dioxide again.
“Please,” Mouth whispered again, to the sunburnt air. “Please, please, don’t fuck me over this time. I know that a good traveler is supposed to leave everything in their dust. I know that impermanence and loss are just the distance markers on the road. I know that. Just please, this one time. I can’t get fucked this time, or I don’t know what will happen. Please.”
Then Mouth stood up straight and pulled herself into fighting shape. She was running out of time—and depending on other people was worse than tasting your own digestive fluids.
SOPHIE
I grapple with the last handholds before the ridge of the Old Mother, like a clumsy old bear. Once on top, I stumble and teeter toward the other side, then I sit and stare at the textureless dark, trying to imagine the city out there, all the great machines, the webs full of sick children. I think about that smuggler—Mouth—telling her friend, I just have to string these revolutionaries along a little more. This was after she told me not to follow her, but I just followed her anyway. In my mind, the cops are already on their way to arrest Bianca, and I don’t know what to do.
Nothing moves in front of me. No shapes grow, or change their position. I’m wasting my time looking for help here, when Bianca needs me. I slap my legs to get blood back into them, and try to stand.
Rose raises her head up over the cliff, tentacles and front legs straining. She finally gets her whole body up in front of me, and I see the soft, tawny hide around her front legs. I hand her the pitiful amount of copper and tin I’ve scrounged this time, and she studies it with the cilia on the end of one tentacle, then puts it away on her back.
“I’m sorry, I need your help again. I don’t know what to do. My friend is in trouble. I know your people have amazing technology. You showed it to me. But do you have any weapons? Weapons? Something to protect a person from getting hurt.”
Rose bows her head, big indentations on top narrowing, like she’s frowning or sad. She raises a tentacle to touch me, and I let her brush against my face and feel my pulse through my neck. She wants to understand, and not just because I brought her copper.
I push my face toward her tendrils. “I’m scared. Please understand that I’m scared. I’m still scared from the way I almost died, back when you saved me, and now I’m scared that something will happen to Bianca. She’s everything to me. Can you feel my fear? Can you at least understand the feeling, even if you get nothing else?”
Rose seems to nod, or maybe it’s just my imagination. She reaches into her own wool-covered carapace, searches, and pulls something out, holding it in a knot of her tentacles. The size and shape of a starfruit, the object has five spines, going off in different directions. I almost try to bite into it, but I look closer and realize it’s made of some metallic alloy, with
flecks of a crystal or mineral, like quartz. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen, but I can tell that somebody designed these diamond shapes and the complex way they intersect.
Still, this device is just as confusing to me as my clock was to Rose, and I hold it up to the twilight, squinting.
Rose lets me fumble for a moment, then finds another, identical metal-and-crystal starfruit. She twists one of the diamond-shaped segments around, so it’s at a strange angle to the others, and the one in my hand vibrates, giving off a faint rumbling sound.
“Wow. What did you—” I grapple with my own device for a few moments before I manage to turn one of the slices, and a similar growl comes out of Rose’s device. So it’s like an old-style phone, or the telex machines in Xiosphant. And maybe you can use one of these to find the other? Rose helps me to rearrange the diamond slices until the device forms a circle. I snap it around my right wrist: a spiky bangle.
I stare at this device, snug against the base of my thumb. These creatures must have invented it over a long time, as they found materials under the ice, dug up metal and rocks and studied what they did and how they worked, and put them together. It’s not like almost all our technology in Xiosphant, which people invented millions of kilometers away on Earth, dozens of generations ago, and we’re just trying to keep it all working.
Rose comes closer, slow and careful, and puts her claw around my face and neck again. I always have to make a conscious effort not to pull away as these tongues affix themselves to my skin, but it gets easier each time—
—A crocodile built a flying machine and soared over the flaming glaciers, shielded against the sun, but still cowering a little under its rays. Crocodiles stood on great soaring platforms, making a study of the atmosphere. The sky on fire, gouts of flame roaring into the ice. A team of crocodiles journeyed to the very end of the world, going inside a mountain with smoke pouring out of it. The sky turning and reversing, turning and reversing, clouds doing a strange dance. None of this stuff makes any sense to me, until I form those images into a story: the sky was on fire, when the world was young, and we risked everything to find a solution.
Then I sense the weight of the bracelet that just closed around my own wrist, only it hangs on the tentacle of an elder crocodile who travels across a shale landscape dotted with frost in a carriage that is half rock, half flesh. She may not make it back home before she dies, she feels weary in her clicking joints, and a sense of fallowness leaches into her core when she thinks of being away from her extended family. But the bracelet grunts in answer to her lonesomeness, and it connects her to all the explorers and scientists—the menders—who had flown above an icefield painted with flames—
—Rose pulls away, and I touch the bracelet, which now seems an emblem as well as a device.
“Thank you.” I put my arms around her, as gentle as I can. “I wish I could tell you … I don’t really have a family anymore, but I’m going to feel like you’re with me, wherever I go, as long as I wear this. No matter how far into the light I travel. And I need to stop calling your people crocodiles, because that’s just a dumb name that humans decided to call you.”
I look at Rose, and at last I don’t see her body only in terms of sheer power. I was taught to see her as a great destroyer, and in my fear I had wanted to keep seeing her that way—so I could identify with her, and feel powerful by association. Her front legs move like great pistons, but they’re also supple, made for exploring tricky spots. Her tentacles swirl and grip like serpents, but their cilia are exquisite, sensitive, delicate.
I remember a word that came to me, during the last thing she shared: “menders.”
“My ancestors should have tried to call you what you called yourselves,” I say aloud. Rose cants her pincer a little, as though she’s listening in her own way. “You think of yourselves as menders, as builders, as explorers. There’s no one word for all those things in Xiosphanti, but the old language, Noölang, had one: Gelet. It’s like architect, and traveler, and five other things, all in one. So … I’m going to start calling your people the Gelet.”
Then I remember about Bianca, and turn to rush back to the city. “Thank you,” I say again. “I hope I do something to deserve this.” Rose is already halfway off the plateau, her massive frame clambering back down into the dark.
* * *
When I pull myself through the hole in the fence and get back inside the city, I hear the clatter of all the people trying to finish their business before shutters-up. Parents hustle their children, or try to do one last odd job to score infrastructure chits, med-creds, or water tokens. The repair crews apply their last bits of sealant to the cracked walkways. I haven’t carried a timepiece since I gave mine away to Rose, but I can tell you what the clock says just by the scents of cooking, cleaning, or brewing of hot drinks. The laundry steam, the long line at the bakery, fathers carrying their children home from school. You can’t fight Circadianism, because it’s soaked into our pores.
Jeremy finds me sitting on the steps leading to the Parlour’s lacquer door, staring at my new bracelet. My face must diagram all the suffering in my heart, the way I’m seeing Bianca’s death more vividly than my own feet under their tiny skirt, just as the crocodile visions—the Gelet visions—always seem realer than real. Being ashamed of fear doesn’t make me less afraid.
“I’ve tried to cut off my old life,” I whisper. “But I have a friend from school, and she’s trusting someone that she shouldn’t. She’s going to throw her life away. I’m scared to face her, and everyone at school will lose their minds if they see me.”
Jeremy sits next to me and breathes, deliberate and even, as if I’m a client and he wants to steal away my awareness that time is flowing. He doesn’t have that easy look on his face, though.
“You can’t hide from the people you care about. A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.” I have a feeling he’s quoting one of the books we were supposed to memorize, but I don’t care.
I say nothing back—just take the biggest breath I can of the ozone-scented air, touch Jeremy’s shoulder with one hand, and walk toward the light.
* * *
Everybody said if my mother had lived a bit longer she could have prepared me: for my body changing, for marriage, for life as an adult. She’d been waiting for the right time to explain to me what was expected, everyone said. But sometimes I wonder if my mother would have sat me down and told me to grab as much freedom as I could, as hard as I could, instead of getting stuck in a marriage to a man who called her the Brick, because of the way she slept in a rigid fetal position. Maybe my mom was working on a way to break free of my dad. I’ll never know.
My mother was with a group of managers, inspecting their farmwheel, and the crops burst into flames at the top of the superstructure. Someone had come up with a scheme to raise the farmwheel slightly, expose the food to more light, increase yields. This plan worked for a while, but they didn’t count on one thing: erosion. A few boulders fell off the Young Father, or the peak just grew shorter, and the crops caught a full sunbeam. My mother was one of the people closest to the disaster, and while everybody else screamed and laid blame, she climbed up and stopped the fire from spreading. But the rays of the sun roasted her skin and boiled her eyes, and even if she hadn’t fallen, she would have been dead anyway. Everyone called her a hero, but I always wondered if she had seen a way out of her dead-end life and had taken it, without even stopping to think about me.
* * *
The final warning sounds, and I hear the shutters close, but I keep playing shadowseek in these empty streets. I can’t loosen the chokehold inside me. The sky looks like a flat pan of dirty water, which brightens as I make my way. The closer I get to daylight, the higher my risk of arrest for curfew violation. I hear a few patrols, but I always manage to slip out of view before they get close.
The Gymnasium looks the same as ever. The War Monument swallows the same light in which all the whitestone buildings bask. But emptied
of students, teachers, and staff, these places look abandoned, as if after some catastrophe. I let the old familiar anxiety claim a few heartbeats, then I touch my new bracelet and remember I’m not alone. And I make my hypervigilance work for me, scanning in all directions. I’ve already seen the worst, and I’m still here.
I unpin my skirt and climb the wall of my old dorm—anybody could see me, awash in pallid light—and swing from sill to sill without making a noise, until I reach my old window. I lean on the shutters with all the strength I’ve developed climbing a mountain so many times, and they go down, with a rusty groan.
Looking into the dorm room where I used to sit and talk after curfew is the most powerful experience of Timefulness I’ve ever known, reminding me that time is real, the past is the past, and part of me really did die when they executed me. I always thought moments of Timefulness should be either practical or wistful—but here’s an acrid chunk of poison lodged in my throat.
Bianca rests on her little shelf, same as always. I almost expect to see myself sleeping there, on the opposite shelf, but it’s empty. Bianca looks so happy and peaceful I almost want to let her sleep. Then I see some shape hidden under the blankets beside her. Something rigid, bulky. A crutch? No, an ancient rifle. She’s cuddling a gun in her bed, as though the fight could begin any moment. Bianca keeps opening one eye, watching for something.
She notices too much light coming in the window and opens both eyes. She reaches for her gun, while I get the window open and stumble inside. By the time she has her gun out of the snarl of blankets, I’m on top of her, with a hand on her mouth.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 10