The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  Bianca stops, because she notices an expression on my face that she’s never seen before, not even when she said the Gelet were my pets. The entire wall of superheated vapor on the Sea of Murder, with all of its dazzling spray and choking steam, is bursting inside me.

  “What’s wrong? Are you angry at me? What did I—”

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I spit. She starts to ask, and I cut her off. “Don’t turn my personal … my real-life suffering into a cute story to entertain those people.”

  Bianca starts to explain, to justify herself, and I give her a look that makes her stop talking.

  “Just. Don’t,” I spit. “Never again. I don’t even understand why you care so much what some stupid rich people think about us. You can tell them whatever you want about your part, but you don’t get to turn my execution into party banter.” My own breathing sounds like a giant rusted machine. “What I went through after they took me away, it still hurts. I have to work so hard. You have no idea. Even I sometimes forget just how hard I keep working, to stay at peace with it.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.” Bianca pauses. She swings her puffy arms, almost hitting the gray-brick wall. “But you know, it … happened to me, too. I watched them take you away, and I blamed myself. Because I mean, it was all my fault. I stole three stupid food dollars. I’ve imagined myself putting that money back before anyone noticed it was gone, a million times.”

  I never thought of how guilty Bianca must have felt. I only made it through everything in one piece by telling myself a story of how I had saved Bianca, and she would be fine. But of course she must have felt like garbage.

  “I get that,” I say aloud. “I know it wasn’t easy for you, either. But … it’s not the same thing. You don’t know. There’s no way you could know. You weren’t there. You can’t understand what I went through after they took me.”

  “But there were some good parts to what happened to you too, like you got to work for Hernan. And I was the one who had to live with—” Bianca must be able to see the scream building inside me, because she catches herself. “You’re right. Okay. I can’t even imagine what you went through, and I still don’t understand this connection that you have to those creatures.” She puts her arms around me, covering my face with her billowing shoulders. “I keep thinking how brave you must be, to have survived everything, and then still save all of us on the ice.”

  I look into a neon puddle. “I don’t know if I survived or not. I feel like part of me never came back from the Old Mother. Like I’m here, but I’m also still there, too.”

  “Like the memory won’t let you go. Like the past becomes an optical illusion.” Bianca takes a deep breath, not letting go of my neck. “I think all you can do is not blame yourself for how you feel, and be aware of things that bring the memory back. Take care of yourself. Okay? And I promise, I won’t talk about your real-life trauma in front of other people. That topic is off-limits from now on.”

  She lets me go, and I take a long look at her, in her crimson satin, turned strange colors by the reflected sign from a nightclub close by. I nod, slowly, and clasp her hand with mine, as if to say that we are bound together by more than just the past.

  * * *

  When we get back to Ahmad and Katrina’s place, I’m swaying on my feet, but Bianca is still on a high. She can’t own the biggest party in town, and then just sleep. I keep trying to imagine if the shutters are up or down back home. I almost wish I hadn’t given Rose my father’s timepiece. The confusion, the lack of shape to my sleep, is almost as bad as the sleeplessness, and I feel like I have lightsickness, even indoors.

  “We can sleep later!” Bianca pulls my arm toward the door. “This is Argelo, remember? We’ll sleep when we damn well feel like it.”

  Ali is dozing in the corner. Ahmad and Katrina trudge to their own bed and draw a curtain, but Bianca keeps jumping up and down. “Let’s go out to the Knife. We’ve had our coming-out party, and now we need to be seen in all the best crowds. Come on. Let’s go dancing!”

  I just stare, because she must be joking.

  “I get it,” she says at last. “You can’t shake off the Xiosphanti mind-set. You’re still internalizing all the nonsense they taught you at home, and there’s a wheel inside your head that won’t ever stop turning. But don’t try to hold me down.”

  At last Bianca agrees to climb into the storage area, and we peel out of our complicated outfits. We lay there, with Bianca squished against my chest just like in the Couriers’ sleep nook. I dream of riot cops and ice, same as always, but Bianca wakes me, thrashing and yelling, “I have to warn them, they need to know,” over and over. This is what she said to me in Xiosphant, right before the end.

  When I wake again, she’s already gone, and I’m still weary. But I feel the weight of the bracelet on my wrist more than ever, and my arm keeps landing in the direction of evening. I’m sick of being trapped in my own skin, and I crave that experience of going outside myself, when I let go of my memories and sink into someone else’s. I can almost feel the softness of the tendrils, and smell the faint residue they leave behind. Those rare occasions when I remember a happy dream, it’s always about venturing inside the midnight city. So I get up and put on the warmest clothes I can find.

  * * *

  When I slip past the last ramshackle buildings before full night, I still see nothing but faint snowdrifts, and the frost still tries to drain the life out of me. The extra layers of clothing feel useless, and I can’t see which way is daylight. This is the farthest I’ve ever been into the night on my own, and I’m already too cold to move.

  As I walk, I’m remembering the party, and how I finally got to be a part of something that Bianca always did on her own back in Xiosphant. And she burned me, but then afterward she opened up to me at last. I hope this is the beginning of the two of us sharing everything.

  Just when I’m about to turn and go in the opposite direction of the bracelet’s pull, I spy an indistinct glimmer in my torchlight. A Gelet tilts her body until I see her pincer flex, right in front of me. I try to speak, even though the air chills my mouth. “I came out here as soon as I could. It’s been complicated. I’m sorry I didn’t bring anything for you this time. Next time, I promise.”

  I hear something move, somewhere behind me, but then it stops.

  The big claw closes around my mouth and nose, like usual, and—

  —I’m in the Gelet city: the giant vaults and galleries, struts of ice and iron and stone, machinery deep beneath our continental shelf. I see clearer than ever that the Gelet city is alive, with a heart of fire from inside our mountains, and a mind made up of the shared memories of every Gelet who’s ever lived there.

  But this time, I’m not one of the Gelet, crawling inside their own city. I’m there as a human. As myself. I see Gelet leading me down the walkways, and everyone comes out to greet me. This isn’t a memory, it’s a vision of something that they hope will happen. Like when Rose asked me for copper, except more detailed, as if they’ve thought about this a lot. The Gelet are celebrating my arrival, as though I’m a friend who’s been away a long time, and I’m rejoicing too, at being someplace safe—

  “You want—” I stammer as this Gelet pulls away. That vision of myself in the midnight city lingers, as real as my own senses. “You want … me to come live with you. You’re inviting me. But I mean, I wish, so much, but … Bianca. She’s my friend. You met her, or a few of you did, and she needs me—”

  The frozen air shatters. The Gelet falls backward, and my searchlight reveals a dark line sticking out of her side. I hear men shouting in Argelan, like they have glass in their throats.

  I reach out and touch a harpoon, from one of those harpoon guns, and then the Gelet shakes, and the harpoon flies off her. I feel hot ink spatter my hand. Not ink. Blood. “No, no. Please. No, please no. I’m so sorry.”

  The voices get closer, men and women, shouting. I hear them call to me.

  “Run!” I hiss. She flees into t
he darkness. A jolt of light from some huge lamp blinds me.

  The humans beckon me, and I understand most of their chatter. They saw this Gelet holding my throat in her claw, and they thought she was strangling me. As I get closer, three men and one woman step onto the brittle frost, their faces ghostly in their floodlight. The biggest of them holds a harpoon gun that also shines a beam of light from its stock. He aims at the Gelet, who’s too injured to leap to safety.

  I throw myself at the man with the harpoon, shouting, “Do not kill” in Argelan. (A moment later, I realize I got the word order wrong, so I was shouting, “Would not have killed.”) I knock the man on his back, and his second harpoon shot goes wild. As he falls, he lashes out and knocks the woman to the ground while the other two men shout. The big man and I roll on the frozen ground, until I bite his hand and smash my forehead into his.

  I pull myself free and run back to the city, hoping with every panting lurch forward that I didn’t just get a friend killed.

  mouth

  Budkhi was a small town, about four hundred kilometers south of Argelo, the opposite direction from Xiosphant. A giant bog produced this one kind of moss there that tasted kind of decent if you grilled it, plus the bog-fish were good to eat if you removed their poison sacs first. A lot of people died when they first settled there, but that was true of every place.

  The Citizens had passed through Budkhi every once in a while, but most of their visits had ended with them being chased out with axes and slings. What did the people in this swamp-gas village need from a group of odd strangers? The Citizens tried trading, bringing supplies from Argelo or one of the bigger towns to exchange for food and woven swamp-grass, but the Budkhians had a taboo on using anything they hadn’t made themselves. So maybe the Citizens could be a theater troupe instead? Or just offer additional labor, for anything that needed some extra hands? Or they could be teachers? Doctors? Priests? Each time the Citizens arrived, they tried to present themselves as something new and different, and then the Budkhians only doubted them more. Yolanda kept saying, “Every community has a need that it cannot meet in itself. The more they say they do not need us, the harder we must try to become what they need most.”

  But the truth was, the Citizens needed the Budkhians much more than the other way around, because this was the only town within a hundred kilometers in either direction, and the food sources in and around that bog were not easy for visiting strangers to harvest. The last time the Citizens tried to visit, the townspeople saw them coming and lit bonfires on the road, with a large shirtless man spinning a lit torch in each hand, as a warning to come no closer.

  Still, Budkhi was always the last stop on the way to a big volcano, which was one of the Citizens’ sacred places. So the Citizens skirted around town as best they could, coming perilously close to darkness, and pulled some just-about-edible frog eggs out of the bog on their way out.

  Mouth was starting to realize it was odd for a religious order to be so willing to play any role you wanted, in any given situation. Mouth hadn’t spent that much time around other faiths—Alyssa had talked about her Jewish upbringing, and there were a few mosques, two churches, and assorted other houses of worship here in Argelo. But as far as Mouth knew, most people who devoted their lives to a creed wanted everyone to know about it. You only put on different identities for different people if you didn’t care about spreading the good reputation of your teachings.

  So Mouth had been trying to break the old habits, and to be the same person with everyone. This was more difficult than you might think, because it turned out, everybody wanted you to be someone else, depending on their needs. A soldier, a friend, an enemy, a reminder of the past. Treating other people with honor was harder than Mouth had ever expected.

  * * *

  Speaking of, Barney was a whole other person when he was waiting on a table of students—clowning, doing little dance moves, snapping his dirty rag. Mouth watched Barney work, wondering if this really could be a living sage, until Barney noticed and came over. “Mouth, good to see you.” Barney smiled so hard his eyebrows changed shape, but his posture also straightened, and he looked older. “Didn’t know you were coming. What you in the mood for? I have a nut roast that’s pretty similar to the stuff I used to cook on the road.”

  Mouth got some straw tea from the table against the far wall, choking just a little on the rank aftertaste. She ate the nut loaf—which did bring back powerful sense memories—and drank two more cups of the bitter tea. The starchy aroma made all the old memories of the Citizens feel more present, and Mouth had caught Barney in a good mood.

  He watched her eat with a half-open smile, peppering her with odd reminiscences. “Remember that old blanket Yolanda always wrapped around herself, that was so frayed it looked like scrubgrass? And ugh, those canvas shoes that Cynthia made for everyone, with the spongy soles that started so comfortable and always melted after the first hundred kilometers. Remember those?” Mouth kept nodding while she ate.

  She’d started visiting the diner regularly, whenever she wasn’t running errands for the Perfectionists, or helping with Alyssa’s rehab. Sometimes so many students were sitting on every available surface and on top of each other you couldn’t get in. Other times, the diner was closed, with a sign saying that the place would reopen when the university raised its study flag. Argelo was full of things like that: your favorite candy store would open whenever the crosstown train was running, and the crosstown train ran whenever the hydraulic systems were primed, and the hydraulics depended on the water levels in the reservoir, which fluctuated in a more or less predictable fashion. If you knew all these things by heart, you’d be able to get to the candy shop at the right time to buy those peppermints you liked.

  But even when Mouth could get into the diner, Barney was often too busy to talk. And if Mouth managed to arrive when the diner was both open and empty, Barney would be intent on cleaning dishes rather than answering Mouth’s questions. “You already know everything,” Barney had said over and over. “Seriously, you got it. You made a life for yourself, didn’t you? You know what you know, and there’s no need to know any more. The Citizens are long gone. Although sometimes I wake up and it feels like I’m in the middle of the camp, and everyone is packing up around me, and it takes me a couple eyeblinks to remember where I am.”

  Once in a while, Mouth would catch Barney in a thoughtful mood, and he would muse about everything they had all been through, and all the things the Citizens had tried to do. “We kept to ourselves, you know, but we did try to help people integrate their lives, whenever we could. We would come into these smaller towns as a group of carpenters or plumbers, but after we’d done the work, sometimes people would ask us questions. And we’d try to share some thoughts about how to pay attention, and stop getting distracted by trivial crap. Hang on, I need to check the oven. Where was I? Oh. So we talked, and listened as well. People in those frontier towns see the craziest things.”

  “Before Alyssa found you, I thought I had blown my last chance to understand any of it,” Mouth told Barney when the nut roast was gone. “I found a copy of the Invention in a vault in Xiosphant. The only copy, I guess. I just wanted to say the right verses for the dead. A lot of people died, pointlessly, and I didn’t even get the book.”

  “Mostly I remember that book being a lot of doggerel,” Barney said. “Their way of keeping everybody from complaining during those long hikes. I mean, don’t get me wrong. If I read it again, maybe it’d speak to me. I do remember there were a few moving passages here and there.”

  You might as well have kicked Mouth in both sides of the head at once.

  “Really?” Mouth said. “The Invention? I mean, it was our most sacred book, I thought. It was the story of us. I was ready to kill for it.”

  “It’s been a while, and I was pretty burned out by the time I left,” Barney said. “You were at an impressionable age when you lost them, so maybe it was the opposite.”

  “But you’re a sage.
Or at least that’s what you claimed. You said you achieved the goal,” Mouth said.

  “Don’t take my word for it. I wouldn’t, in your situation. You have no way of knowing if I’m telling the truth, or what that even means.”

  Mouth tried to remember a single line of the Invention, a single beautiful passage or moving sentiment. Everything came as a jumble, and now that Barney had called it doggerel, that’s what the words sounded like in her head.

  SOPHIE

  I lie half awake in the storeroom, remembering the sensation of standing inside a fortress of ice and stone, of feeling welcomed by a whole community, and then how it ended. The Gelet’s blood, dark and thick, was still on my hand when I got back to Ahmad and Katrina’s place. I can still smell it now. The bracelet hasn’t stopped urging me to come back to the night, but I don’t know how to make it there. Shouts and discordant music blare from someplace nearby.

  Bianca opens the slatted door and stands over me. She looks as if she hasn’t slept since the Founding of January: there are puffy blotches under her eyes, which seem red and unable to focus. Her arms keep making tiny gestures, too fast to make sense of. I hope she’s come here to sleep next to me, but instead she nudges my shoulder, harder than she probably means to, and says, “Sophie. Do you trust me?”

  I almost say yes right away, but something makes me stop and look up at her.

  “I need to know,” she says. “Because I have a plan, but it won’t work unless you trust me with your life. I did it, I found a way for us to go home. We can go back and fix everything we left behind in Xiosphant. We can take down the corrupt machine that decided you were disposable. If Mouth taught me one thing, it’s always cut them when they’re not looking. But I need to know. Right now. Do you trust me?”