The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  The deck plummets without warning, and we both cling to the railing.

  I breathe spray and blink salt out of my eyes, and Bianca is blurrier than ever. My longing feels so intense it’s more like raw panic. This could be our last moment alive, and I feel nauseous, and I don’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wanted to spare you, I didn’t want to hurt you.” I have to talk much too loud just to be heard over this wind. “I thought, I don’t know, I thought you deserved to be free, and live your life, and you would have so many other people who cared about you, and you would just forget about me eventually.”

  The ocean erupts with gray foam. I think I glimpse dark shapes far beneath the surface, but they’re gone before I can be sure.

  The wind surges, but over the boat’s terrible creaking I hear Bianca’s voice. “How could you think I would just move on and find new friends, after what they did to you? How could you even think that? When they took you, they tore a hole in my—”

  A wave strikes almost hard enough to flip the boat over and sprays both of us with freezing water. Drenched and gripping the railing with raised knuckles, Bianca still stares at me, tears mixing with the seawater on her face. Every inch of me is soaked, and I’m sure the next wave will snatch me into the depths.

  The wind subsides again, by some mercy. For a moment, I have a clear view of the shadowed icebergs on one side, the geysers on the other, and the moon and stars above.

  “You’re the most alive person I ever met,” I say, eyes burning, chest closing up. “I was sure you would find a way to keep going. I knew you were going to amaze everybody, with or without me.”

  Everything else on the ship holds steady for a moment, but Bianca still clutches the rail and sways with the echoes of turbulence. “Maybe if you’d trusted me, I wouldn’t have been so stupid. But I trusted the wrong person.” She glances at Mouth, who’s too far away to hear us. “And now a lot of good people are dead, and my heart is just this rotten pile. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me sooner? Why couldn’t you come back to me—”

  She breaks into sobs and lets go of the railing to hug herself as her shoulders rise and fall. The Resourceful Couriers are busy watching the ocean, so nobody sees me put my arm around Bianca. She stares at me, like she still can’t look at me without reliving my execution and everything that followed.

  Then Bianca puts her face on my neck and sobs so hard it feels like she’ll shake herself to pieces. My grip is strong enough to hold her up, and to encompass her crying jag.

  * * *

  “Storm!” Kendrick shouts. “Storm coming!”

  I hear the typhoon, without seeing. The roaring starts low and hoarse, then gets louder and shriller. The shrieking feels as though it’s inside my own head.

  The Resourceful Couriers rush to cover the sled and the precious cargo as much as possible with their last tarpaulins. Everyone secures themselves to the deck with ropes and chains, and Bianca and I imitate them. I try to wrap my bracelet with some loose twine, though I don’t know if it’s prone to water damage. Alyssa stays put, trying to keep the ship on course.

  Bianca has tied a thick rope around her waist, but the rope snaps and she careens down the wet planks, toward the rail. Her mouth is open, but I can’t hear her.

  Part of me gets lost in the memory of tumbling down the Old Mother, but then the part that stays hyperfocused in a crisis takes over. I grab her just in time, and hold on to her with all my strength. I still have a chain slung around my belt, lashed to one of the deck’s attachment points.

  “I am not letting you fall,” I say, though Bianca probably can’t hear. Her face is pale, her eyes wide and nostrils flared. “I am never letting go, ever again,” I say louder, in her ear, over the screaming wind.

  The boat shakes almost onto one side, and she almost slips away, but I tighten my hold.

  “I’m here,” I say. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’m going to keep holding on for as long as I have arms. You’re safe in my love.”

  I keep saying these things as the winds wrench the ship one way, and then the other. A million jets of water knock us flat on the deck and try to wash us off the ship altogether.

  “I will never again let you out of my sight,” I say as the front of the skiff draws upward, like a foot kicking a ball. “I’ll guard you while you sleep.” The hull makes a cracking sound and the motors sputter. “I’ve got you. You’re safe in my love.”

  The storm falls away, and we can hear and see again. The sea and sky shimmer—blues and greens and reds that leave afterimages even when I close my eyes—because we’ve drifted too close to the day. The wall of steam soars ahead of us: taller than mountains, wider than cities. I can’t look at the white churn without squinting, and my face feels burnt. Alyssa isn’t sure she can steer, with all this damage to the undercarriage, but she fights with the controls until we turn away from the cauldron. The engine sputters. I’m startled to be alive. I was sure that “love” would be the final word I ever spoke.

  I don’t know if Bianca heard anything I said, and I’m scared to look at her face. I hear her disentangle herself from the railing while I keep my eyes on the simmering ocean and the dark clouds congregating over the waves in the distance. Bianca moves closer, and then her hand reaches out and touches mine. I turn to face her.

  The pure white light of day, filtered through steam, bathes Bianca’s face. Her eyes are all pupil, opaque with tears, and her hair looks electric. She smiles at me, still weeping softly, and takes several gusts of warm sea air in through her mouth. Her hand remains on top of mine as we veer back into the middle of the ocean and the air turns damp and chilly once more.

  mouth

  The pirates sounded their horn just as the skiff got back on course, tearing through the air like a bison’s attack cry. Fucking pirates. They approached in three tiny fishing boats, with barbed hooks made of rusted iron attached to the gunk-smeared prows. Seven or eight scrawny people to a boat, some of them holding rifles or harpoon guns. Their floating jack-knives could outmaneuver the skiff even without storm damage, and they moved in a pincer formation that they must have practiced.

  “We’re gonna be surrounded,” Reynold said. “Are you guys seeing this?”

  “We see it,” Kendrick grunted.

  “Those attachments on the front are sharp enough to rip a giant chunk out of our hull,” Alyssa said. “If they get us with one of those, we’ve got a long swim ahead.”

  Mouth raised her own rifle and tried taking a shot at the main ship, the one in the center, but her aim was for shit with these unruly waves. She couldn’t stop remembering how Alyssa had accused her of caring more about ghosts than the people around her. There had to be some way Mouth could prove that she had everyone’s back, just like always.

  These pirates were just stupid fishing people who’d overfished their shore, so they’d turned to other ways of surviving. The Couriers’ skiff must have been the first vessel to cross their path in ages, and Mouth pictured them rushing to bolt these corroded abominations onto their sturdiest trawlers.

  “So what do we do? Maybe if we surrender they’ll just take a cut of our cargo and let us go,” Reynold said.

  Alyssa shook her head. “They’ll take everything. Ships don’t come along often enough to make it worth just collecting a tariff.” She looked at the three boats, bobbing in and out of view, and seemed to reach a decision. “Everybody hold your junk, and if you need to scream, do it in your own head.”

  Alyssa gave a little smile, like someone hatching a prank, and wrenched the controls so the skiff swerved toward the ice. The ship listed so far it seemed about to flip over, and the railing seemed about to buckle under Mouth’s weight. Then they flattened out again and sailed into near darkness, with just a tiny glow to orient them.

  * * *

  A dense mist rose from the freezing water and turned everyone into an outline, like a reflection in a plate-glass window. You couldn’t see the ice crag
s in the skiff’s feeble lights until they were dead ahead. Alyssa kept jerking the rudder to and fro, and the boat quaked.

  The sound of a thousand men grinding their teeth came from beneath. “We’re going to need a new hull,” said Yulya.

  “The hull will make it,” Kendrick said. “Remember how carefully Omar maintained that undercarriage? We can handle this.”

  “If we can just keep it level, we can slip past them,” Alyssa muttered.

  The claws of ice kept scraping against the skiff’s hull, and someone on deck was moaning. These two sounds, together, became much more unnerving than either on its own. Mouth caught sight of Sophie clutching at something on her wrist, like a talisman.

  A shape loomed in front of the skiff, and Mouth shouted before she even recognized one of the tricked-out fishing vessels. Besides the lance bolted onto the front, the other major modification they’d made to the ship was a skull, painted in phosphorescent green, on its hull, with unevenly shaped eye sockets. Seven people stood on the other ship’s deck, two of them holding range weapons, and they looked just as startled to have found their prey here.

  Alyssa veered to try to avoid the pirate ship as the man standing closest to the prow raised a rifle. Mouth already had her own rifle out and hit the man before he could get off a shot. He toppled into the ice water. One of the surviving pirates on the boat fired another rifle, but missed.

  The pirate boat still raced right toward the Resourceful Couriers, with its metal thorn aimed at the weakest part of the skiff’s hull.

  “We’re super screwed this time,” Yulya said.

  “This was such a bad idea,” Reynold hissed.

  The cockeyed skull came close enough that you could count its teeth. Then it stopped and flipped sideways, like the skull’s owner had decided to take a rest. They must have hit one of those icebergs dead on. The skull’s smile looked whimsical, philosophical, accepting an unjust fate with a chuckle.

  “We got them,” Alyssa whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Shit. We’re in the water! We’re sinking. It’s too cold to swim. I can’t feel my—somebody help. Please, somebody. Please help.”

  Everybody looked at Kendrick, who shrugged.

  “Even if I wanted to help those bastards,” said Alyssa, “I don’t think we can.”

  The screams of drowning pirates fell away, leaving nothing but the crunch of ice against the hull, and Kendrick’s low curses as the skiff became less and less seaworthy.

  “I can’t believe this is going to work,” said Reynold. “Just a little farther, and we can come around behind them and make for the Argelan shore. No fuss.”

  Mouth didn’t see the second pirate boat until it was too late, and her warning shout came right before she felt something break irreparably under her feet.

  Shouts and cheers came from the other ship, and its crew rushed forward, guns and long knives already raised.

  * * *

  Mouth kept thinking about her conversation with Alyssa, in the middle of fighting hand-to-hand with eight half-starved pirates. You care more about ghosts than the people around you. Maybe Mouth did feel bad for leading Bianca on, or the way her scheme had gotten the other Couriers stuck in the middle of a citywide freakout. Or maybe that guilt was just a poultice over the much deeper wound of failing to rescue the Invention, and knowing the Citizens would be forgotten when Mouth died (soon, most likely).

  The pirates had abandoned their rusty guns because they had the Resourceful Couriers surrounded and that spelled a nontrivial chance of friendly fire. Mouth managed to get off three shots at actual targets, and even injured one young woman with flowing auburn hair and a strong brow who cursed and knocked the gun out of Mouth’s hands with her unhurt arm. Mouth headbutted the gorgeous pirate and felt her nose crack, then elbowed her in the neck. The freezing sea air clogged in your throat like woodsmoke, turning every breath into a misery.

  “My name is Jenny, and I’m in charge here. This is our ocean, and you fuckers are trespassing,” shouted a tall woman with a huge mane of black hair and some mix of Zagreb and Ulaanbaatar features. “We’re taking your cargo either way, but we’ll spare anyone who surrenders right now. This is a one-time offer.” Nobody even responded.

  Mouth usually did most of her best thinking in the midst of battle, when everything was simple for once. But this time, her thoughts were a mess, and this foggy deathtrap wasn’t making anything better.

  The fight sprawled from the Resourceful Couriers’ skiff to the pirate ship that had rammed them. Freezing water pooled around their feet, sloshing as Mouth kicked a stocky man with more beard than face and the kind of bad skin that comes from serious vitamin deficiencies. Mouth’s foot connected with the man’s stomach and sent him sprawling on the wet deck, and then Mouth trampled him on the way to punch a large hair-knotted man with both fists.

  “You’re all dead,” Captain Jenny kept shouting, even as her voice grew hoarse from screaming into the sea wind. “You’re going to feed the squids. You fucking smug city people, I’m going to kill you all.” She had a big corkscrew-shaped blade with a handguard, and Kendrick howled as she stabbed him in the leg.

  Everything stank of rotten fish and human entrails.

  Mouth had seen too much death and not enough life, and maybe that was as bad as not letting in both the night and the day. Her knee connected with the face of the knot-headed pirate, who was already bent double, and he went overboard into the icy surf. Those young radicals, Derek and the rest, had been doomed from the start. But Mouth found herself getting stuck on the part where she’d encouraged Bianca to leap into the abyss in spite of all her doubts. Or maybe Mouth only felt remorse because her efforts hadn’t done a thing to preserve the Citizens’ memory.

  Kendrick was losing a lot of blood from his leg wound, and Mouth was standing over him, holding Jenny by the throat. The pirate’s corkscrew sword was coated with blood.

  What was the point of feeling guilty, when people just kept hurting each other all the time?

  Mouth tightened her forearm against Jenny’s neck. “Time to close down the show. We’re all going to drown here.”

  “My people live on this ocean. We eat and sleep and fuck these winds and these currents.” Jenny laughed. “I never expected to die any other way.”

  She managed to pivot and bite Mouth’s ear, so hard you could both smell and taste the blood. Mouth managed to get a foot on her instep and wreck her balance. Jenny fell mid-swing of the corkscrew blade and toppled over the side of the boat into the cold water.

  But Mouth had leaned too far, with too many limbs off-balance, and so went overboard too.

  Mouth grabbed at the slippery edge of the boat, suspended over blades of ice that moved faster than her eye could track. Her fingers clutched the rotten wood, and only managed to collect wet splinters. Terror chilled Mouth’s insides, and the tastes of bile and sea foam blurred together. All the regret churning around her head had left her too raw. She couldn’t help screaming.

  She almost got a purchase on the lip of the Couriers’ skiff, but the metal crumbled. She clutched instead at the barb jutting off the pirate boat, her feet kicking just above the sharp ice teeth. When the last of the Citizens died, their lore would die too, like all those songs they had forced her to memorize. Mouth probably should have tried to write some of it down, but couldn’t manage that old-fashioned script. Everything the Citizens ever taught, everything they ever learned in all the generations, wiped out forever.

  Nobody could hear her, and tears pooled in her scars.

  A hand reached down, then stopped. Bianca leaned over. “I should just let you get cut to fucking pieces by the ice,” she said. “I should just watch you die.”

  “Please, please help me up. Please, I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”

  Mouth would have expected, without question, to meet this situation with dignity. The Resourceful Couriers always faced death with a “well, fuck” attitude, like they’d expected to die, and
now was as good a time as any. Mouth had almost died before, with a heart of stone. But this time, fear owned her—or more like, fear was building a house inside her, one with too many windows. Mouth wanted to try to get her dignity back, but she couldn’t stop whinnying.

  “I can’t believe I trusted you. All your talk about loss and fighting back,” Bianca spat. “I thought you were for real. You were just laughing at me for actually daring to believe in something.”

  Mouth’s fingers froze and lost their strength, and she kicked against the side of the boat in vain. Bianca’s raw hatred looked like an amplification of the face she’d worn in the shadows of the oatmeal restaurant all those times Mouth had been working on her. Mouth heard herself back in Xiosphant, telling Bianca to stay angry, and her vertigo and chills grew worse, as though she were falling an infinite distance to a bed of frozen knives.

  “I wasn’t laughing,” Mouth babbled. Her fingers slipped. “I never laughed at you. I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s my fault. Everything’s my fault. I’m a shitty person. I don’t deserve to live, but I can’t die like this. Please.”

  “You’re horrifying,” Bianca said. “I can’t even stand to touch you.” But she reached down and grabbed Mouth’s wrist with both hands. She leaned so far she was in danger of falling herself.

  Sophie appeared alongside her friend, and then her strong hands had Mouth’s other arm. Mouth spilled onto the deck of the damaged pirate boat, coughing up a ruckus. The deck was flooding, four or five centimeters deep already.

  Mouth pulled herself together, still looking at Bianca. “I would have done anything for my people, the same as you would for yours. I don’t know why you thought I was going to risk my life for your cause. You can’t control anyone unless you know what they want.”