The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  “I got the signal,” Alyssa said to the man nearest the door, a wall of muscle with long dark hair, a neat beard and mustache, and a tailored black one-piece. “We’re supposed to move the stuff into position.”

  “The pickup location you told us?” the guy said.

  Alyssa nodded.

  “Great,” said another large man with no beard, sitting closer to the bar area on a five-legged stool. Nobody bothered to introduce themselves to Mouth. “Do it just like we talked about. When you get their route, follow it as long as you can, and then make a detour on the dogfish lane. End up at the maiden’s fountain, and we’ll collect your cargo. Meantime, we’ll deal with the social climbers.”

  Alyssa nodded again, then turned to go.

  This time, Mouth didn’t even wait until they had gotten a block away. “You’ve seriously lost your shit.”

  “Too late to discuss now. You going to back my play or what?”

  Mouth didn’t answer.

  “This is Argelo,” Alyssa said. “This is how you move up here. I grew up in this town, you didn’t.”

  Alyssa had started out in the boiling-hot Snake District, with her mother and uncles, and became the leader of her own gang of kids. Petty theft and arson for hire, mostly, but a few other hustles. Alyssa had thought they would stick together forever, but all the other members of the Chancers had decided to graduate to the big leagues. By then, Alyssa’s family had all died of skin cancer, and that was when she’d decided to try smuggling.

  “Look at it this way,” Alyssa added. “You’ll be doing your part to keep the fabric of society intact. And those are good people to have a relationship with.”

  “As you know, social cohesion and making friends are my two primary concerns,” Mouth said.

  At the cracked wooden building, Carlos handed them a banyan-wood crate that was smaller than the gun crates, but still a good square meter, and almost too heavy for the two of them to carry alone. “We don’t need to know what’s in here, I guess,” Mouth said. “But we do need to know if anything will happen if we drop it or bring it too close to an open flame.”

  “Let’s just say the contents are delicate,” Carlos said. “I would handle with extreme care.” He handed Alyssa a map, which had as many words as lines, then wished them luck.

  “See you soon,” Alyssa said. Then they were off.

  “Please tell me we at least have a way to make this box less conspicuous,” Mouth said. It was already making inroads into her shoulder. “I don’t much care, but we did tell them we were professionals.”

  “Way ahead of you.” Alyssa steered the box down a steep slope and an outdoor staircase to a tiny cul-de-sac below street level. There, Alyssa pulled some potted plants aside and revealed blue delivery smocks and sticky labels from the grocery store nearby. Mouth followed her lead and helped her put stickers all over the box. A moment later, they were two grocers carrying a box of potatoes and carrots.

  “Okay, I have to admit, you did good.”

  “Damn right,” Alyssa said.

  Now all they had to do was make this heavy, “delicate” box look like root vegetables. Mouth tried to square it against her chest, but Alyssa still had to hoist her end over her shoulder to keep it level, and they were both gasping after a few of these up-and-down streets.

  “Makes me hungry for some fried carrots,” Mouth said.

  “Shut up,” Alyssa grunted.

  Gunshots seemed to come from every direction, thanks to the bunk acoustics. Mouth was pretty sure they were getting closer to the fighting. She flinched, but even before Alyssa said anything, they both knew they just had to keep walking.

  “Hang on,” Alyssa said. “I gotta check the map.”

  “Really?”

  They laid the cube down, straining not to drop it, and Alyssa pulled out the map that Carlos had given her. “Oh, man. I think we already took a wrong turn.”

  A naked man fell out of a window in front of them, blood already spurting from a wound in his shoulder before he even hit the pavement. “Fuck,” he said, and died.

  Mouth did not want to know what would happen if a bullet hit the crate. She was reliving the memory of hanging over the ice, babbling supplication. She tried to stay businesslike, rough-hewn. “I guess we ought to move.”

  Alyssa nodded, and they got the crate in motion again.

  “Potatoes,” Mouth said. “Get your fresh potatoes.”

  “Shut up.”

  The way forward was blocked by the large bearded man they’d met at the Perfectionist building. “You made it,” he said, and Mouth realized that ugly blob behind him must be the maiden’s fountain. “Nai is going to hear about your service, and you’re going to be—”

  A hole had opened in the man’s forehead. He pitched forward, onto the pavement.

  Standing behind him, gun raised, was Maria, wearing a floral dress that was probably nice before it got coated with the blood of four or five different people, going by the spray patterns. “Fucking smugglers,” she said.

  “You don’t want to shoot us while we’re holding up this crate,” Alyssa said.

  “We all do things we don’t want to do,” Maria said, and shot Alyssa.

  * * *

  People in Argelo had no real way of reckoning the passage of time, but they had plenty of ways to talk about regret. A million phrases to describe what might have happened, what you should have done. Several major sentence constructions in Argelan had to do with information that had been knowable in the past: knowledge that a person had taken to her grave, observations that could have been collected, texts that were no longer readable. The Argelans had developed dwelling on lost opportunities into an art form, but they couldn’t say with any precision when any of those doors had closed.

  Alyssa hadn’t woken up, and the longer that continued, the worse her prognosis. The bullet had missed everything major, but she’d lost blood and suffered head trauma from her fall. Mouth kept replaying the scene, trying to figure out what could have gone different. As Maria had shot Alyssa, Mouth had thrown the crate, which turned out to contain batteries. Now the Perfectionists had gotten Alyssa a bed in a back room at one of their health facilities, with tubes gnawing at her.

  Now that Mouth had helped clean up what was left of the Superbosses, the number-two guy in the Perfectionists, Sasha, held out a token with the four-winged horse.

  “Keep this where people can see it,” Sasha said. “Nobody will ever hassle you. You’ll get the best stuff. If you ever have kids, they can go to one of our schools. Finest schools in the city.”

  Sasha was that clean-shaven bruiser who’d been sitting in the back when Alyssa had stopped by to tell the Perfectionists she’d gotten the signal. Up close, he had a receding hairline that you could still see, even with his head shaved, and lines on his face that charted how quickly his smile could turn vicious.

  Mouth took the token and tried to look overjoyed, because she could already tell that Sasha had been surrounded by sycophants for too long.

  Here’s what Mouth learned about Sasha from eavesdropping: he collected paving stones from different towns here on January, plus a few that supposedly came from Earth. He loved to play that type of music where you also play a game at the same time, and everybody let him win. He only ate humanely raised meat, and he made a big deal out of the fact that he’d never killed anyone with his own hands.

  “You look like you had some ancestors in the Ulaanbaatar compartment,” Sasha said.

  “People tell me that,” Mouth said. “Never even knew who my biological parents were.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing. Most of us in the Perfectionists can trace our roots back to old Ulaanbaatar. The greatest civilization that ever was, back on Earth. They built this one tower that held twice as many people as Argelo, with its own built-in farms. I’ve seen pictures. Ulaanbaatar was where they made the outer hull of the Mothership.”

  Mouth rotated her hands. “I always thought it was a sad story. They were lifelo
ng travelers. Horse-herders. They lived in tents, found whatever they needed. Then they put down roots and became city people.”

  “You could see what they had built from space.” Sasha was not used to being contradicted. “They built to last, something people in this town could learn from.”

  “Of course,” Mouth said. Alyssa was the one who knew how to handle people like this. “They were amazing. You’re right.”

  Mouth wouldn’t leave Alyssa’s bedside, except for bathroom breaks. No matter how much Mouth tried to keep Alyssa clean, or beg others for help, she kept marinating in her own piss and sweat. Alyssa’s eyes, which usually laughed or scowled or glared or rolled in reaction to the stupidity around her, stayed closed and motionless. Mouth couldn’t stand to see Alyssa like this, but also would not look away.

  Mouth wept into her own free sleeve. Gave a silent prayer to the Elementals.

  She had started having little bursts of dreamsleep where crocodiles were standing next to Alyssa’s bed, or the walls crumpled, when Alyssa opened her eyes. “What the fuck” were Alyssa’s first words out of her coma. “Did you just dump me in a ditch? Am I in a ditch now? What ditch am I in?”

  “You’re not in a ditch.” Mouth sobbed with relief. “You’re in a bed. You’re safe. You’re here, with me. I fixed it. You’re being taken care of.” Then Mouth screamed for the doctors so loud Alyssa tried to raise an atrophied hand to cover one ear.

  Some time later, a doctor showed up, shone a light in Alyssa’s eye, and examined her. Concussion, she said. No lasting damage. Should make a full recovery, but take it slow at first. Lots of fluids, painkillers, and gentle physical therapy.

  “Thank you.” Mouth’s eyes were so wet the light refracted into those cheap rainbows you see on soap bubbles.

  “How long have you been sitting here watching me?” Alyssa asked, and Mouth had no answer. “You should get some sleep. You look like shit.”

  “You look shittier,” Mouth said. “You look like if shit took a shit.”

  “You look like if shit made a shitty monument to the god of shit.”

  “You look like if shit built a whole shit city, but then it went to shit.”

  They went on like this for a while, and then Mouth fell asleep in mid-sentence. This time Alyssa watched Mouth sleep, or at least her gaze was the first thing Mouth saw on waking.

  SOPHIE

  My bracelet keeps giving tiny nudges in the direction of the night, which feels just like a person grabbing my wrist and pulling me toward them. I want to jump out of my banyan-wood chair in the front room of Ahmad’s apartment and run headlong toward the dark so I can talk to one of the Gelet that rescued us from the Sea of Murder. We didn’t even get a chance to speak after they saved us, and I can only guess at what they were thinking. These were the first Gelet I’d ever met other than Rose, but I know nothing about them. And I keep thinking that this might be a turning point, when I actually asked for the Gelet to help, and now I belong to them even more than I did before.

  Bianca can’t stop talking about everything we’re going to do now that we’re in the City That Never Sleeps. “I want to go to the Knife,” she keeps saying. “I want to find all the best parties, and meet absolutely everybody. We have one chance to make a huge splash.” Bianca sounds giddy—all of Argelo is a present she’s dying to unbox—but then I catch her staring into the corner, her hands coiled into fists.

  Whenever I see Bianca falling into this silent rage, her face compressed and her hand clutching at some invisible weapon, I try to distract her by talking about all the fun we’re going to have. “We can dress up in colorful clothes, like the ladies here. We can explore together, just the two of us, as a team,” I say. She smiles and nods, and her posture slackens.

  But first we need to speak the language. I’ve been studying Argelan for ages, but I still can’t make any of the sounds, and I hate the bludgeoning syntax: the order in which you say the words makes them subject or object, past or present, and so on. No tenses, qualifiers, or distinctions. And then, in the empty space where they’ve removed all the useful parts of speech, Argelan substitutes a million different terms for relationships: lovers, parent/child, teacher/student, friends, some combination of those. Many of these relationship terms don’t translate to Xiosphanti—not to mention the strange thing that Yulya tried to teach me about on the road, the phrase that sounds like “Anchor-Banter.” You could be father/daughter, creditor/debtor, murderer/victim, but “Anchor-Banter” will replace or transcend any of those. Whatever that means.

  Even the body language is different here: people toss their heads off to one side, meaning “yes,” and sort of roll their heads for “no,” and I can’t tell these gestures apart.

  Ahmad wants us to memorize the crests of the Nine Families of Argelo so we can avoid messing with anyone who bears one of them. “You tangle with anyone wearing one of these emblems,” Ahmad says, pointing, “you’re basically dead.” Are the Nine Families the government? Bianca asks, and Ahmad just laughs.

  Time passes, and we sleep sometimes, both of us breathing like swimmers. Sometimes I get up and wander to the washroom across the hall, then realize the rest of the household is sleeping, and I feel a surge of guilt, like I’m awake at the wrong time. Or I catch sight of a window without any shutters, and feel a jolt of worry, as if there are Curfew Patrols on the street, and they’ll see the uncovered panes and rush inside to grab us.

  At some point, Ahmad starts organizing a proper funeral for Omar, and he invites Bianca and me. But I can tell he’s being polite, and it’s more of a family gathering, so we stay home.

  Ahmad’s wife, Katrina, is a short round woman with spiky brown hair and pale skin who laughs constantly, and seems happy to have more people in the house even though she speaks almost no Xiosphanti. She gives us bowls of some kind of spicy fish and root vegetables, plus mugs of bitter tea. Their son Ali, who looks a bit younger than I was when I went to the Gymnasium, comes and goes without talking to us.

  Bianca keeps asking questions: How do you know when to go to work here? How does Ahmad know when to pray, or go to a mosque? How do women keep track of their cycles? Ahmad’s answer to all the questions is the same: You make your own arrangements.

  We get outdoors whenever we can, with Ahmad or Katrina, but I still don’t understand enough to distinguish between regular crowd behavior and a mob coming to tear me to shreds. People come too close and speak too fast, and I stiffen, and start seeing every angle at once, looking for a way out. Everything feels wrong, and I go from hungry to nauseous without any warning, and these streets all look the same and lead in circles.

  I start helping Ahmad in the kitchen, learning how to slice carrots against the grain, and peel the thick shells off swamp crabs. I’ve almost gotten used to a diet with more dairy, fish, root vegetables, soybeans, and seaweed. Argelo has no farmwheels, but they have orchards and swamps, plus types of cloth that we don’t have in Xiosphant: muslin, silk, denim, and some polymers.

  By now, Bianca and I are both wearing secondhand Argelan work clothes: loose pants, long-sleeved denim smocks, thick canvas belts. I pull my sleeve down to cover my spiky bracelet. I’m learning how to walk like an Argelan girl, swinging my arms and shuffling my feet, but my body carries all these memories from the Old Mother and the Sea of Murder, and they catch me off-balance. I wonder what it would be like to try to dress like my ancestors. Like, if I wore a Calgary jersey, like my father’s people, or a sari, CoolSuit, or embroidered silk jacket with long tapered sleeves, like my mother’s. I’ve been thinking about my mother more often lately, trying to imagine what she would think of all these strange sights and sounds, all this clutter.

  Sometimes I see Bianca by my side and feel so grateful my heart almost breaks, as though I still can’t trust this much luck. But another part of me can’t stop worrying at the distance between us. I wonder if Argelan has a word for when you get what you’ve always wanted, but it’s still not right.

  Soon I’m dreami
ng in Argelan (mostly about the same thing as always: glass-faced men forcing me to climb a freezing mountain). Bianca and I start speaking to each other in Argelan, which turns our conversations stilted but weirdly direct, because we just spit out nouns and verbs, like “I eat food.” When I try to slip back into Xiosphanti, to try to draw Bianca into talking about what happened back in Xiosphant, and the things she said to me when we first went to sleep here, she just keeps responding in Argelan. “Let’s keep practicing. I want to make the most of our time here.”

  Whenever we go outside, I feel the bracelet pull harder in the direction of the night. I’m wasting time here, when I ought to be following this summons. But if I wander too far on these streets, I’ll never even find my way back to Ahmad’s apartment.

  * * *

  I’m sitting in the front of Ahmad’s restaurant, reading the same page in one of Ali’s old schoolbooks for the ninth time, and I look up to see Mouth towering over me. “Hi, Sophie,” she says in an easy drawl. “Want to take a walk? I’ll buy you some lemonade. The good stuff. I just want to talk about, you know, our friends in the night.”

  I stare into the wide planes of her face. “You can’t tell anybody about what I did, or the fact that I can understand them. It’s complicated.” Almost the first words I’ve ever spoken to her.

  “I won’t tell anyone, I swear. I just want to talk to you about it. Please.” I shrug and stand up. I need to talk to someone about the Gelet, and I can’t talk to Bianca without hearing more of her nonsense. Plus I could use a break from studying this ridiculous language.

  Mouth decides to take me to one of the fancy drink stands in the Pit, which is a giant subterranean complex that the Mothership dug for Argelo before we lost contact with it. On the way down there, she tells me that Alyssa got herself shot, but she’s fine. “She only needs one more gunshot wound, and then she gets a free stuffed marmot.” While Mouth cracks jokes about Alyssa’s injury, her neck creases and her lip trembles.