The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  At last Ahmad comes over to Bianca and me. “You came a long way,” he says in perfect Xiosphanti. “Welcome to Argelo.”

  “Omar was a really good person,” Bianca tells him. “He saved us from an awful situation back in Xiosphant, and kept us safe on the road when we were too stupid to live.” She smiles at me, and I half smile back. I’m starting to forgive her for the things she said about the Gelet.

  “Thanks,” Ahmad says. I notice he’s not eating the stew. “I used to travel with my little brother, and keep an eye on him. Now I wish I hadn’t stopped.”

  Bianca nods and takes a swig of the stew. “He kept his sense of humor in conditions that would make most people scream. I didn’t even realize how much he meant to all of us until he was gone.”

  They talk about Omar a while longer, while the musicians pack up. I feel so exhausted and numb inside I can’t hold my head up, and I feel drunk on three spoonfuls of stew. But Ahmad’s grief reminds me just how recently Omar died, and how little time we’ve had to mourn.

  At last Ahmad says, “Alyssa is hoping you can stay with my wife and me. We don’t have a lot of space, but there’s a small extra room. The goods you managed to bring from Xiosphant will cover your costs for a while.”

  “Thank you,” Bianca says. “I always dreamed about coming to Argelo and experiencing real freedom, but now that we’re here … I don’t even know. How do we even live here?”

  Ahmad brushes this away. “We’ll worry about that when you’re rested. Come on, I’ll show you our luxury penthouse.”

  We shoulder our backpacks again, say goodbye to the Resourceful Couriers, and follow Ahmad’s swaying gait down a series of zigzag alleys coated with vomit. At one point, he says: “I remember the first time I came home to Argelo after traveling with Omar. Took me a while to get used to the noise and the chaos again.” Like he’s trying to relate to our disorientation, but also his grief is still so new that everything reminds him of Omar. We emerge into the sunny side of town, at a plain cement block.

  Upstairs, the apartment is just a single long room, with a dining table, a tiny kitchen area and washroom, clean white walls, and tapestries showing beautiful patterns of geometric shapes. Ahmad and his wife sleep in the back, with their son nearby, but Ahmad shows us to a tiny storage space with two bedrolls, for Bianca and me. It’s a little bigger than the sleep nook, at least. Bianca’s already falling onto one of the bedrolls, without bothering to wash or even undress, and I join her, my boots still on.

  For a moment, I feel wide-eyed with fear, bordering on delirium, because I still don’t know whether the shutters are up or down at home. Plus, too much light is coming into this space. Now that I’m back inside walls and surrounded by people again, some part of my brain expects some order to my sleeping and my waking.

  I’m pulling my body into a snake shape, turned away from Bianca, when she murmurs: “I heard what you said in the storm, on the boat.” Now I’m wide awake, and I have a sprinter’s heart.

  “I need you to know that I’ll never let anyone take you away from me again. I would burn everything to fine ash, both cities, the world, to keep you with me. You belong here, you’re fucking mine. Whatever comes next, we’re going to demolish it together.”

  I catch my breath, and then I lose it again. I lie next to her with my heart speeding, until exhaustion drags me under. The whole time I’m asleep, I’m hearing her words in my head, and when I wake I’m not sure that I didn’t just dream them.

  mouth

  The light in Argelo didn’t look like the light in Xiosphant, or anywhere else. Xiosphant had those two perfect mountains to block and reflect the sunshine, creating a pale glow across the whole town that tapered as you approached the night. Out on the road, the light was naked, and you learned not to turn your head too far in either direction, but there was a different quality to the shadow—full of texture and energy—thanks to those storms that came right up to you and sometimes tore you apart. In Argelo, though, everything felt more muted because most of the city was recessed into the ground, and so you sometimes felt as though the dark was coming up out of the Pit and spreading over everything. There was a poet once who said something like, Xiosphant is the city of dawn, but Argelo is the dusk city.

  Mouth and Alyssa spent most of their share of the Couriers’ haul, plus some savings, on a tiny apartment overlooking the bright end of the Knife, Argelo’s biggest nightclub district. With a balcony, so they could watch all of the party kids throwing up on each other. They filled the apartment with artisanal rattan furniture, and decorated with dried flowers and hilariously ugly paintings of children riding around on cats, using the cats’ neck spikes to steer. (In real life, if a child tried that, their parents would have one less mouth to feed.)

  Mouth couldn’t lean too far over the balcony or she’d have an instant recall of hanging over sharp ice, pleading for her life. She was starting to remember how painstakingly she had built a cairn inside herself, a stable structure that kept her upright and fighting, protected her from any emotional assaults, spared her from being afraid of dying. But these things always crumble when you need them most.

  Alyssa spoke up from the big rattan chair. “So. You remember that conversation we had in Xiosphant? About retiring from smuggling? Time we made it official.”

  Alyssa got up and poured out some of this fancy wine, made from blackberries that grew on bushes out in the bright hills past the steppes, which only fruited once in a while, when the hot wind came off the day just right. She handed Mouth a glass, and she looked into its scrim. The smell was better than the taste: like air from a cloistered orchard, where nothing bad could happen.

  “Even if I wasn’t broken after that last trip,” Alyssa said, “there’s the fact that the Couriers are basically you and me. Kendrick doesn’t want to travel ever again, if he even recovers. Yulya said one round trip was enough for her. We don’t even know if Reynold will ever wake up. We’d need to recruit a whole new crew, and neither of us is an Omar. And my guess? Nobody travels anymore. It’s just gotten too dangerous.”

  Mouth felt like the wine had gone down the wrong pipe. But she put on a smile. “So. What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do.” Alyssa laughed. “I’m not going to waste my remaining money on partying and gambling and buying fancy bottles of booze—even though this wine tastes lovely—the way that Argelo always wants you to do. This town is designed to separate losers from their money, and all the prices keep going up. So I’m going to live cheaply after this. Maybe invest in something. Start a business, you know, open a shop.”

  “You’re going to be a shopkeeper.” Mouth couldn’t help laughing. “You? Standing in the middle of a salesroom, trying to get people to buy shirts? I can imagine you robbing a store, but not owning one.”

  “Wow, thanks.” Alyssa cast her eyes at the ceiling for a moment. “Really appreciate the vote of confidence. So glad you think I’m doomed to failure.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I just … You might as well shave your head and become one of those bald music teachers.”

  Alyssa sat for a moment, and her face turned dark. “Seeing Ahmad made me think. He seemed happy, apart from the thing where his brother died because he wouldn’t quit smuggling.” She paused to choke down some wine. “And you know what? Ahmad used to look much older than you or me. We were kids, next to him. Not anymore. If anything, he looks younger than we do.”

  Mouth bit both her lips, but still wanted to say something she would regret, some remark that might break the only worthy thing she had left. She took a breath. “Maybe you just need to take some time off. That situation with the pirates was … intense. We just need to take some time and regroup, and then we can put another crew together. I don’t think I can do it without you.”

  “You probably couldn’t do it even with me,” Alyssa said. “Anyway, you just want help getting back to Xiosphant, so you can have another shot at stealing that poetry book.”<
br />
  Mouth flinched. “I don’t think I get another shot at that. After what happened, the security will be way tighter. That whole town is going to be a prison.”

  Even since they came to Argelo, Mouth and Alyssa had kept sleeping next to each other, in this tiny cubbyhole. The apartment had a nice sleeping area, but they still used the nook, for the same reason they slept in a knot: they were used to it. Eventually, though, you could get used to something different, if you weren’t careful.

  “Listen,” Mouth said, reaching out one hand to the big rattan chair where Alyssa sat cross-legged. “You’re the closest thing to a friend that I have, who’s still alive.”

  “How close, though?” Alyssa looked at the street below their balcony, where some drunks were beating each other senseless. “How close to actual friendship are we?”

  “I’m good at reckoning distances, by looking at the shades of light on the ground and the length of the shadows,” Mouth said. “I’m not so good at figuring out near or far from abstract ideas.”

  “To me, friend is an either/or: you’re a friend, or you’re not. You’re always saying that you’re a real traveler, you were born on the road, not like the rest of the Couriers. You always made sure we all knew you were better than the rest of us, and I always let it slide. But now? Now you have to decide if you have room to care about anyone besides your dead nomads.”

  Mouth felt like getting up and storming out, maybe smashing the rattan couch on the way. But then this might be her last ever conversation with Alyssa. The two of them would become strangers, and Mouth would be even more lost.

  “I thought you understood. About the pain of losing your whole extended family. When we first knew each other, you used to talk to me about the Jews, and how they were nomads, and your ancestors were almost wiped out more than once. You were the one person who was supposed to understand.” She still wanted to break things, but also to cover her stupid weak face.

  “That’s just it.” Alyssa’s tone softened, and she reached out for Mouth’s hands. “You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. Or even the only one who belongs to a culture that was all but destroyed. There are still some descendants of the people who survived the Hydroponic Garden Massacre walking around. I get it, you lost your whole world when you were a child, and I can’t even imagine the awfulness. But that doesn’t give you a lifetime pass. You know?”

  The Citizens had many ideas about death, but mostly, if you died on the road, then the rest of the group would carry you with them. Metaphorically, not physically. Even the group was doomed to extinction; only the road was eternal, and the only real death would be if you lost the road.

  But none of this was Alyssa’s fault, and in fact she’d saved Mouth’s ass too many times. So Mouth dug up a kind voice from somewhere, clasped her hands, and said, “I get it. I can recognize reality, I swear I can. I just have a hard time with change, which is probably weird for someone who grew up on the move. But I get it. I won’t pressure you to keep smuggling. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Alyssa poured some more wine. “And maybe you’re right, and we’re not cut out to be shopkeepers. Maybe there’s something else we can do to make money, since we’re going to be here for the rest of our lives.”

  Mouth tried to suppress a shudder.

  * * *

  Mouth kept asking Alyssa where they were going, and she just laughed. At last she said, “Our new job.” She started singing one of the Couriers’ old songs, about the dog and the ostrich and the man who lived underground. This just ratcheted the tension in Mouth’s gut, which had aspirations of becoming a full-blown ulcer. Alyssa veered uptown, so close to the day that Mouth felt the first stirring of lightsickness.

  Just as Alyssa got to the part of the song where the dog tugged at one neck of the ostrich and the man pulled the other, she stopped and banged on the stone door of a wooden building that was so blanched it had cracks. They were in a tight alley where four streets collided and you’d need to be a wizard to find the continuation of the street you’d come in on.

  “Here we are,” she said. Mouth followed her inside a high-ceilinged one-story warehouse stacked with crates that Mouth knew at a glance would contain guns.

  “This is going to be way better than opening a shop,” Alyssa said.

  Mouth made sure to wear a neutral expression.

  “You must be Mouth,” said a tall man with swept-back hair, tiny eyes, and a pointed beard. Behind him, a short woman wore her raven hair in two thick braids. They both looked like they identified with the Merida section of the Mothership.

  “My name is Carlos,” the man said, “and this is Maria.” Handshakes all around. “Alyssa tells me you’re a good person to have in a bad situation.”

  Mouth gave a head tilt, which could mean “yes” or “depends,” or “I don’t know you, and don’t feel like volunteering any information.”

  “We’re about to be in a world of bad,” Maria said, looking at Alyssa. “The Nine Families haven’t been managing their shit, and it’s time for some smaller, leaner operations to move up.”

  “It’s all up for grabs,” Carlos said. “The sea is fished out, meteor quarries coming up empty, textile factories at half capacity. Toxic rainstorms have been trashing our crops, and the aquifers are getting polluted or drained. Shortages mean one thing: opportunity.”

  Mouth could think of one other thing that shortages could mean, but just gave a tiny bob of the head. Alyssa, meanwhile, was saying, “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So we’re going to hit the Perfectionists while they’re weak,” Maria said. “We understand you two have some experience at getting things where they need to go.”

  “We were part of the Resourceful Couriers, as I mentioned.” Alyssa punched Mouth’s arm.

  “That’s excellent. Really excellent. We don’t need you to take anything to Xiosphant, or Moorestown, let alone Untaz or Wurtaz,” Carlos said. “God knows, just getting from one end of town to the other can be vicious.”

  Mouth finally spoke: “How big are the items we’ll be transporting?”

  “Not super big,” Maria said. “Don’t worry, you’re not carrying these.” She gestured at the crates of guns. That had, in fact, been Mouth’s worry.

  The rest of the conversation was just logistics: signal, pickup, delivery, and, most important, payment. Nobody in Argelo could ever agree on what time it was, so Carlos and Maria’s crew, the Superbosses, used tiny wireless devices that could receive up to a dozen preprogrammed signals. Complex electronics were getting harder and harder to come by as everything ran out, but someone had figured out a way to manufacture a ton of these gadgets.

  After the meeting, Mouth waited until they’d walked several streets away, then said: “You fucking kidding me? That’s our new job?”

  “It’s a good opportunity.”

  “After everything we’ve been through, we’re going to be working for gun-running bottom-feeder gangsters.”

  “You owe me,” Alyssa said. “I stuck my neck out for you so far I could barely see my own body.” They got lost while arguing. Here at the edge of morning, all the ugly streets looked the same, and they all swallowed their own tails. Even the shadows were no help.

  “Listen,” Mouth said as they retraced their steps. “This isn’t like smuggling out there, on the road. It’s not open spaces, where storms and local fauna are your biggest worry, except on the water. Here, it’s enclosed, it’s all firefights in tight spaces. This city is one big killzone.”

  “That’s what everyone loves about you,” Alyssa said. “Your sunny personality.”

  “Don’t call me that. The sun has killed too many friends of mine.”

  They ended up at a bar at the top of Archer’s Hill. From up here, the Knife seemed always to be in midswing, about to stab the Pit’s black heart. You could still see where they’d torn up a ton of the old alleys to make a grand thoroughfare back during one of the People’s Congress eras, and then more recently the Nine Families had torn do
wn an entire neighborhood to build a few of their mansions, leaving a nest of streets that led nowhere.

  “You know that I will do this if you ask me to,” Mouth said after the third overpriced swamp vodka. “Even if I didn’t owe you, you’re family. But it’s a bad idea.”

  “We have to do something,” Alyssa said. “You’re starting to scare me. You get weird when you have too much time on your hands, and you’re not built for honest work.” She paused and drank enough to destroy the lining of her throat. In between coughs, she blinked tipsily at Mouth. “You really think of me as family?”

  Mouth leaned across the table, almost knocking over the half-empty bottle, and caught Alyssa in a hug so encompassing, it was like one of those streets that folded in on itself. As she relaxed into the hug, Mouth whispered, “You’re my only family.”

  * * *

  Mouth refused to sleep while they were watching for the Superbosses’ signal, and then when at last the tiny black gadget spat out a single glyph, Alyssa all of a sudden needed to make a pit stop on their way to the pickup.

  And now Mouth wished she’d slept when she had the chance, because she kept hallucinating out of the corner of one eye. Someone was selling roast pheasant on the street corner, with smoke permeating the scaly flesh and the webs between all of its legs. Alyssa bought one for each of them, and the hot juices felt like a corpse reviver.

  The “pit stop” took them far from the pickup location, which was that same building on the edge of daylight. Mouth got more and more confused, following Alyssa into the guts of Argelo, and then farther into a row of muslin and silk warehouses. Alyssa knocked on a blank stone wall and said, “It’s me,” and the whole wall swung aside.

  Inside the stone building, a bunch of men and women perched on expensive mahogany furniture, holding new-looking single-shot rifles with slide-loading action. Mouth recognized the flying-horse insignia of the Perfectionists, one of the nine ruling “families” here in Argelo.