The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  mouth

  Mouth’s final memory of Omar would always be laughter.

  She had been lucky to sit in the passenger seat, on watch, where she could enjoy a long conversation with three participants: Mouth, Omar, and the landscape. They had been reminiscing about a time the sled broke down in the marshes, and Omar had chuckled, remembering how upset they’d all been. And they’d pointed out things to each other, like the furrows in the stabgrass near the day that could be from some creature, or an air-pressure drop that could mean a storm. Plus all the native Earth plants that’d spread since their last trip—like the soybeans, engineered to flourish in local soil, which had mutated into something inedible. Mouth had been thinking that Omar, out of all the Resourceful Couriers, could have been at home among the Citizens. This warm feeling had pushed away some of Mouth’s remaining sickness from the failed Palace heist, like she still had friends and still belonged here.

  And then the bison had cut Omar clean in half.

  Now Mouth stumbled out of the passenger seat and fell on the clay ground, trying to get away from Omar’s unseeing gaze. She went numb, her vision unfocused, her ears hissing. No sense left but smell.

  “Fuck no,” Kendrick was saying. “He was like a brother, he … This isn’t right.”

  “He kept me from losing my shit out here, so many times,” Alyssa said.

  “Omar … Omar was the heart of this group,” Yulya said. “He never once made me feel like the newest. Even after Jackie and Franz.”

  “We need to keep moving,” Kendrick said. “If Omar was alive, he’d say we can’t stop here, where we’re easy targets for more bison attacks.”

  Alyssa sighed. “We’ll give him a burial at sea. Mouth, you’ve driven this sled before, right?”

  Mouth gave a toss of the head in the Argelan style, meaning yes. “But I don’t want to be in charge.”

  Kendrick snorted. “Given that you almost got thrown out for breaking our most important rule, that seems wise.”

  Mouth helped Alyssa and Kendrick to lift Omar’s torso, gently, out of the front seat, and wrapped him in some of the cloths secured at the top of their cargo. Every time Mouth glimpsed Omar’s face, she went hypothermic.

  There was no time to clean Omar’s guts off the driver’s seat before Mouth sat and got them moving again. Alyssa slid into the passenger seat, cursing in Argelan. The day and the night loomed on either side, like old enemies that could wait forever for their chance to finish you off.

  They stayed silent apart from the crunch of their boots and the chugging of the sled, until Reynold spat on the ground. “We’re so screwed without Omar. He was the only one who knew how to make this journey in one piece. Can we even find the boat without him? Does anybody else know how to reach our contact in Argelo?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Alyssa said in a lifeless monotone.

  “He’s got a point,” Kendrick said. “What’s the point of hauling all this junk now? The one guy who kept the Resourceful Couriers going is dead.”

  “Oh yeah, we’re done,” Yulya groaned. “We’re so done.”

  “We’re still moving because we’re too dumb to realize we’re already dead,” Reynold said.

  They all kept encouraging each other to panic, until everyone was shouting and crying at once.

  “Whoa!” Bianca yelled from behind the sled. She rushed forward and tried to shoot her rifle into the air, but she’d left the safety on. “Whoa whoa whoa! Everybody shut up.”

  They all went quiet, and turned to look at Bianca.

  “I thought you dicks were supposed to be the greatest smugglers,” Bianca said. “You keep bragging about how you walked through the jaws of death so many times you became their personal dentists. I know it sucks, you lost your number-one guy, but he seemed pretty anal retentive. He must have left contingency plans, right? I bet this asshole knows what you’re supposed to do.”

  Bianca was pointing at Mouth, who still felt frozen. Mouth shrugged. “Maybe I know some stuff.”

  “See? This lying shitstain may have used me, and betrayed everyone, and gotten my friends killed over a damn poetry book, but she still has her uses.”

  Mouth couldn’t look at Bianca, and not just because she had to watch the road.

  “I didn’t get anybody killed. The cops were already on high alert when I went out to meet you. Someone else must have turned informant, or gotten themselves caught after curfew.”

  “Not the right time to sort this out,” Alyssa said. “But Bianca’s right. We don’t just quit because we lost our leader. We’re smarter than that. We’ve survived so much already.”

  “The Resourceful Couriers always complete the job,” Reynold said.

  “So? Let’s complete the job,” Bianca said.

  Everybody got back into position, flanking the sled, and put on an imitation of their usual swagger. They marched in silence, casting more watchful gazes into the night.

  * * *

  Mouth kept having bouts of lightsickness: stabbing pain behind her face that gave birth to white haloes, whenever she spent too long outdoors, with all this sun and shadow. She tried to concentrate on driving straight, but everything hurt. And then she realized Alyssa was looking at her instead of scanning for more bison, or axle-snapping craters, or those burrowing mud-crabs.

  “What is it?” Mouth asked when the first glimmers of marsh appeared. Thank the Elementals, her head was clearing somewhat. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Just thinking,” Alyssa said. “I didn’t realize Bianca was one of those revolutionaries that you were using to get at your poetry book. And now all her friends are dead. And yet she saved all of us from self-destructing just now.”

  “I feel bad for her too,” Mouth said. “I wish I could have helped. But loyalty isn’t some sugary confection that you hand out to everyone. And Bianca’s the one who chose to get dragged into politics.”

  The marshes lapped at their wheels, and the people walking sloshed with every step. Here come the horseflies.

  “Wasn’t your thing political too? Getting this book that belonged to your dead tribe?”

  “That was cultural survival.” Mouth swerved to avoid a sinkhole. “It’s different. Politics changes all the time, and it doesn’t matter who’s in charge now versus a generation ago or a generation from now. But culture ought to last forever, if we protect it like we’re supposed to.”

  “I guess I just value actual breathing people, who are alive now, more than the writings of people who are already dead.”

  “You were the one who wanted to help me steal the Invention—anyway, it’s over. I failed. I’ll never get another shot. And I couldn’t have saved Bianca’s friends. They were doomed before I met them.”

  “Maybe the part that worries me is where you care about ghosts more than the people who are right in front of you,” said Alyssa, who sat close enough for the scent of sweat and hair oil to reach Mouth. “You know, with Omar gone, we depend on each other to survive more than ever.”

  “I’m here,” Mouth grunted. “I’m not carrying any ghosts. And now that we’re out of that city, I feel more alive than in ages. Walls and other people’s rules fuck me up.”

  Mouth needed half her concentration to drive the sled, and the other half to avoid falling into despair. She kept thinking that if she only had the Invention, she could have said the right words over Omar’s corpse, a proper goodbye to one of the few decent people she’d ever known. The Invention would’ve helped her to cope, to understand what she had lost when she was a child, and all the loss since then. But instead, the loss of the Citizens felt like an old wound gone septic.

  But Mouth tried to put on a good face for Alyssa, who’d risked her neck waiting for her at the Low Road after the others had gone. They’d been sleepmates for five and a half round trips now, and there was something about your sleep patterns syncing with another person’s that felt like intimacy. Mouth wasn’t sure how to say any of this out loud.

&nbs
p; * * *

  “Do you remember any of it?” Alyssa said a while later. By now, the marshes were a stained-glass mirror spread before them.

  “Any of what?” Mouth was grappling with the control for the mudguards.

  “Any of that poetry. The poems you were so desperate to get your hands on.”

  “I guess. More just the rhythm than any actual words. Snatches.”

  Mouth tried to reconstruct one of the verses in her head, and her heart beat so fast she thought she might die. She had a sudden memory of Yolanda leading all of them in one of the songs of gratitude, and had to gasp out loud. That ball of barbed wire was back inside her chest.

  “Could you recite some of the poetry now? For me?”

  Mouth looked around. None of the other Couriers could hear. Sophie and Bianca were all the way behind the sled, having some fancy student drama.

  The marshes swallowed their wheels. The mudguards barely helped. Everyone on foot sank up to their knees. The air smelled like rotten fish and sewage, the marshwater glinted with daylight, and the horseflies swarmed, ready to carry off a piece of you in their mandibles.

  “Yeah. Right here. Why not.” This felt like a test, of whether Mouth trusted Alyssa, or whether these poems had been worth so much scheming.

  Mouth could only stall for so long.

  The Citizens’ poetry was written in the old language, Noölang. The one Mouth remembered best was about an old peach tree growing by some fluke, out in the wild meadows between the towns of Untaz and Wurtaz. Every time the travelers passed, they had fresh peaches, big and purple as life, with juicy strands inside them. Until a small town sprang up around the tree. The townspeople tried to plant an orchard and harvest the fruit according to their own schedules, and make peach bread to sell to other towns.

  The next time the travelers passed, the soil was dead, there was no fruit, and the town was gone.

  Mouth thought of Yolanda, the Priors, everybody, and felt like throwing up.

  “Come on,” Alyssa said. “Speak up. I want to hear. Please.”

  Mouth recited, louder and with more oratory, like when they used to do one of their “theater troupe” things, long ago:

  Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread

  But never say you own the tree

  The hot wind flows from the day

  Tempered by a hedge, across the cooling waters

  A crag guards the peach tree from ice storms

  Cradled by chaos

  Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread

  Give praise to the meeting of day and night

  Through hedge and rocks, and the generosity of fruit

  You cannot organize luck, or make the perfect wind

  Or bridge night and day with your foolishness

  You will never again taste such beauty

  Cradled by chaos

  Alyssa was nodding. “That was beautiful. You have a lovely voice when you’re not threatening to kill everyone in sight.”

  “I should kill people sooner and skip the threats, then. My voice would be fresher.”

  Alyssa laughed at that.

  “The Citizens.” Mouth hesitated. “They were supposed to give me a name. I was … I was at the age. We had a whole rite of passage. You got your real name around the time your body changed, along with the story of who you were. ‘Mouth’ is just a temporary name, for a person who hasn’t earned one yet.”

  “I always wondered why you were called that.” Alyssa shook her head, swatting away horseflies. “So what happened? They all died before they could name you?”

  “No.” Mouth wove the steering wheel back and forth. “They kept delaying, until I was almost too old. They said, over and over, that I wasn’t ready. Some test, I don’t know what, I never passed. And then, yeah, eventually they all died.”

  Mouth had never talked to anyone about any of this. And talking about it now made her feel much worse—guilty for talking to an outsider, but also heartsick. Nothing Mouth could say might do justice to the reality of the Citizens, or just how completely Mouth had failed them, both then and now. She was out here, on the road, with one horizon blazing and the other drowning everything in its emptiness, and she felt as though the Elementals were watching her. Counting her failures.

  A horsefly took a chunk out of Mouth’s hand. They came in swarms, tearing your skin, until you bled all over. Little bastards. Nearby, Reynold waved a bat around, making a splattering noise whenever it connected with two or three at a swing.

  “Ugh.” Mouth drove faster through the last of the swamp, so horseflies exploded against the sled’s front window, coating it with their glutinous bodies.

  They reached the rocky strip, covered with pebbles, that separated the marshlands from the Sea of Murder. Mouth climbed out of the sled and searched for the hidden skiff. There ought to be a bunch of landmarks, like this one inlet and a thumb-shaped rock, but brand-new thistles (another invasive species) waved their candy-colored heads everywhere and camouflaged the shoreline. You could memorize landscapes all you wanted, but everything was like that peach tree: here one time, gone the next.

  Bianca stared out at the Sea of Murder. “It’s just so gorgeous,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures but … this is breathtaking.”

  Mouth followed her eyeline, and had to gasp after all. You spent all your time on the Sea of Murder trying not to end up one of the corpses who drift down to the bottom to be eaten by the giant squids that lurked inside the hulks of old warships. But the water smelled crisp and salty, especially nice after the swamp gas. Moonlight spangled the waves—and that was the other thing. You could see the moon. Stars, too. Something about convection, or the air currents, peeled away the clouds that kept an off-white haze overhead everywhere else. The sky turned a dark creamy blue, and you could make out a handful of craters in the shape of a footprint on the moon. Bianca was probably seeing stars with her own eyes for the first time.

  “One guy I knew,” said Mouth, “swore he saw the Mothership fly overhead when we were out on the ocean.”

  “That’s incredible,” Bianca said. “He could actually see it? I always thought if I saw it, I would make a wish or something. Did he make a wish?”

  “I don’t know,” Mouth said. “He was dead a moment later. Because he was looking up at the sky in the middle of the Sea of Murder, instead of paying attention.”

  Bianca laughed, which made Mouth like her again.

  Mouth searched for ages before she found their boat, and then they had to clean a swan’s nest out of the intakes while Mouth steered the sled gingerly onto the deck. But at last they chuffed across the Sea of Murder. Alyssa steered them along treacherous currents, between two deadly extremes.

  Mouth helped Yulya, Kendrick, and Reynold to hoist Omar’s remains and heave them overboard, making a pitifully tiny splash in the cold water. “We’ll drink to his memory in Argelo,” said Kendrick, who was sort of in charge now. “For now, we all stay watchful.”

  They were closer to the night than the day, so they could just make out the ice shelf where the sea froze. But if you squinted at the horizon to your right, you could see where the water hit daylight and boiled, creating a wall of steam so high you couldn’t see the top.

  SOPHIE

  I can’t stop throwing up. This boat is just a crumbling wooden platform built on top of a rusted metal frame, with an ancient polymer sac on its underside, which battery-operated pumps inflate, making a stuttering gasp that sounds more and more feeble. We secured the sled on the deck via a dozen attachment points, and there’s a silty blue platform for the “crew” to stand on, including a panel with the knobs that Alyssa uses to operate the rudder. The deck tilts in one direction and then the other, until I’m sure a giant squid has us in its grip. Seawater sprays up and burns all the places where the horseflies tore me open, and I can’t keep my damn stomach inside. I lean over the unfirm guardrail and spray into the water, with only Yulya’s grip keeping me from tumbling over the side.
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br />   I’m going to die, long before we can cross this ocean. I’ve never been so sick in my life, and the laughter of the Resourceful Couriers doesn’t make things any better.

  “Ice! Watch out! Ice!” Reynold shouts. Total darkness, almost dead ahead, swallows up the water and the sky. Frozen chunks drift past, bobbing with a rhythm that makes me sick once more.

  “I’m trying! I’m trying!” Alyssa wrenches at the controls. “Watching Omar steer this boat is one thing, but steering it myself is—ugh—something else. Grab ahold.”

  Just as Alyssa says that, we lurch so hard I fall on top of Yulya, and Bianca slides across the deck so fast she almost falls overboard before I grab her. A scraping sound, loud enough to feel in your teeth, fills the boat as we rub against a blade of ice. Some of the hull plating snags on the ice for a moment, then we’re free. I touch my bracelet and think of Rose.

  “Keep it steady,” someone shouts.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” Alyssa growls.

  No more ice, and the sky lightens enough to see ahead. The other horizon glows once again, sending flashes along the water that hurt my eyes. Jets of bright vapor rise up from where the ocean is always boiling.

  Bianca and I both try to scan the horizon for danger, but everything looks equally terrifying. My stomach has subsided and I have a moment of awe at the impetuousness of this ocean, which tosses waves in our path and tries to shake us off. I can’t help thinking of the Sea of Murder as a beautiful giant beast that needs nobody and obeys nothing.

  Bianca still isn’t talking to me, and I’m trying not to look at her. But she must have seen the starvation in my eyes, because she comes and stands beside me against the rail as the sea goes calm for once.

  “I don’t know how you expect me to deal with you being alive,” she mutters. The pale mist turns her spectral. “After I threw away everything to avenge your death. You’ve been living at some gracious coffeehouse, and meanwhile I’ve just been falling apart, piece by piece.”