The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  mouth

  When the crocodile opened its jagged maw and Mouth went inside, she saw nothing but darkness, more absolute than night, without even gradations of shadow. Mouth fell with no gravity, no direction, no childhood or old age. Like delirium, but emptier. But then the dark opened, and Mouth found the reason behind it. The crocodiles had other ways of “seeing,” and Mouth let go enough to see without eyes.

  A great city, shaped like a rose or some fungal bloom, stretched under the ice and extended downward, heated by a geyser and powered by lava. Mouth glimpsed walnut-shaped bodies on walkways, in cubby holes and hammocks. And in deep buried chambers, where they studied the movements of the oceans under the ice, the swirl of the atmosphere. Mouth glimpsed celebrations, rescue missions. Ancient crocodiles built some huge structure—or grew a living creature—to stop a glacier. Around the steam jets at the city’s edge, the crocodiles danced.

  Ancient memories sluiced into Mouth’s brain, cutting across all of her own thoughts and pulling down every structure she’d built to sequester the worst parts of herself. Delirium would have been welcome, compared to this. Mouth struggled to pull away, but the claw held her fast. The crocodile thoughts crowded out her own memories, like she could forget being human all at once. Digging through ice with big forelegs, sifting through snow with tentacles. Mouth felt all her defenses shattering.

  Just before Mouth got enough leverage to shove the crocodile away, there was a glimpse of something else. She ran with a group of crocodiles, on a hazardous journey into a scalding vent, to place fleshy seeds, horned with sprouts, in the middle of a volcano. Time passed, and the seeds became wildflowers, spreading their thick petals in the lava, with knotted roots that went deep inside the mantle of January, crossing vast distances. The volcanoes went inactive, or erupted, but the mesh of roots held strong. Mouth felt all the hope, the careful treatment of these blooms, for generations … until the flowers were gone. The root system withered. After that, Mouth felt nothing but fear, and a sense of corruption and death.

  Somehow, amid all this, there was a message: Something beautiful died. Everyone will suffer.

  Then Mouth felt the night air again, the paralyzing cold, and fumbled to get her protective garments back in place. Noises came from all around her, too many to separate or understand at first.

  “What the fuck—” Reynold sounded undone. “What did I just see?”

  “Seeds, far under the ground.” Laura was retching. “Giant seeds. Hundreds of squirming shapes.”

  “I saw death,” Pedro said. “I saw nothing … but death. My god.”

  Mouth wanted to speak, help get the situation back together, but she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get back to being Mouth. Part of her was still trying to see without sight, to feel the frozen air with tentacles she didn’t have.

  “What did you do,” Reynold’s voice rose.

  “Walls of death coming down—”

  “What did you do to me?”

  “Seeds, goddamn ugly seeds, squirming.”

  “What did you do?”

  Mouth had come into this as nobody, and now these alien memories had surged into all her hollow spaces. Her stomach churned. Strange thoughts that weren’t thoughts, visions of life in permanent darkness, a rose-shaped ice city. Mouth was weeping and retching, but she realized the others were much worse. She needed to get a handle on herself.

  Reynold shouted, “Keep away—” Then, the bark of a harpoon gun firing.

  Mouth got her eyes back and pulled herself back together in time to see one crocodile on her back, a harpoon jutting from her side. The crocodile that had just opened its claw to Mouth was prone on the ice but unharmed, until someone (Pedro?) fell on it screaming. A blur of flailing arms and tentacles, and then Mouth heard nothing but alarms. One of them was the Critical Suit Breach klaxon, which meant someone was about to freeze to death. The others Mouth couldn’t recognize, except that all the alarms stopped about the same time the other nearby suits stopped registering living occupants.

  Mouth ran back toward Argelo. Stumbling and sliding, collecting bruises on both knees. Every footstep was a battle against the deep snowdrifts and thick ice, but terror kept goading her forward. The suit’s readouts were useless, except one: the tiny notch that showed where to find light and warmth again.

  When Mouth reached the first glimmers on the skyline, and pulled off the thick headgear, Argelo had vanished.

  She sank to her knees, holding on to the ground with both hands, and watched her helmet roll away. The city was just gone. Mouth had another moment of trying to use alien senses she didn’t have, as if Argelo were somehow hidden from human awareness. She kept hearing the final screams of the Glacier Fools, but also remembering the image of ruined blooms inside a volcano.

  Mouth stumbled in circles, staring at cracks in the dry soil and the thin line of bright orange off in the distance. She tried to listen to the road, but she couldn’t make sense of anything. At last she stumbled across some broken-down shacks on the outskirts of Argelo, and realized: she’d come out of the night too far south. As she walked toward density and saw people carrying food or building materials, the world came back to her. But she still felt half present.

  She wished she could believe the crocodiles were monsters, and that was why their touch had poisoned her mind. She was pretty sure it was the opposite: she was too void of goodness to share their thoughts. The memory of the dead flowers in the volcano confirmed this to be true.

  * * *

  Sophie sat, hunched over, on the steps of Mouth’s apartment building. She was covered with dirt and frost burns, and looked like she’d finally lost one thing too many. She straightened when Mouth approached, but didn’t stand. Mouth braced herself, because if Sophie hated her before, just imagine now. They were both still wearing their suits, without helmets.

  “I didn’t know where else to go.” Sophie’s voice was too quiet, after the howling of the night. “I figured if anybody else came home alive, it would be you.” She looked down at the cracked stair. “This was my fault. I made another mistake. I thought I could help you and the others through it, and that this would be the beginning of something.”

  They sat without talking for a while. Like their brains were so overstuffed with horror they had no space left to put words together.

  Mouth felt faint. All this light hurt, after going without, and the alien sensations blared in her mind. “You had never even tried sharing this thing with anyone. There was literally no way you could know what would happen until you tried. We were the ones who let fear control us.” She had to close her eyes and bend over. “I need to get indoors. You should come up with me. We’ll give you crisps, and some meatloaf that this weird old guy gave me. Nothing like the gourmet dishes you’ve been eating lately, but still good.”

  When Mouth squinted her eyes open, Sophie was staring, like she couldn’t decide if this was another trap.

  “Remember how I said Alyssa would like to see you?” Mouth said. “She keeps asking after you. She misses you.” Sophie hesitated a moment longer, then bobbed her head.

  Upstairs, Alyssa took one look at the two of them, and barked a string of Argelan curses. She didn’t need her cane much anymore, but she leaned on it as she gathered coffee and dark water and greasy fried things. Sophie fell into the big rattan chair, where Martindale had sat. Mouth slouched opposite.

  Sophie’s face had always shown her feelings, thanks to her wide hazel eyes and the way her cheeks dimpled whenever she smiled. But now she had just shut down. She wasn’t even scowling, like when she’d followed Mouth around back in Xiosphant. She just stared ahead, with her mouth slightly open.

  Some time passed, maybe a lot of time, before Mouth could get words out again.

  “I’m out there in total nothing, feeling the shadows creep over me, and then this creature is showing me a million things at once. Felt like I was falling into that canyon at the end of the world. My mind keeps vomiting up crocodile memories.”
Mouth let the steam from the coffee burn her sore eyes. “I don’t know how you handle it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just let it overwhelm me. The first time it happened, I was desperate to leave my own body.”

  Mouth didn’t know what to say to make this any better. Mouth had been hoping for some kind of Answer, the kind of truth she couldn’t get from Barney, or from the Invention. But it was worse for Sophie—she’d strung way too many hopes onto this one thing, and they’d all broken at once.

  This was just too much death at once, without a clean way to mourn.

  Alyssa was still piecing together what had happened, and her stream of Argelan curses and sayings still hadn’t slowed down.

  Sophie looked up at her. “What did you say? That last thing. What was that?”

  “Oh,” Alyssa said. “I was saying, it’s like Mouth is your jinx.”

  “Wow, thanks,” Mouth said. “I already feel bad enough.”

  This distracted Sophie, so she stopped torturing herself for a moment. “I’ve been trying to understand that phrase ever since I got here. I thought maybe it meant a troubled friendship, or a love that can’t ever become real.”

  Sophie pronounced “jinx” all wrong, like “an-kur-ban-tir.”

  Alyssa laughed, scaring Sophie and Mouth, who were both still in shock. “No, not exactly.” She explained slowly, in Xiosphanti: “This word just means bad luck. I’m oversimplifying. But your jinx is the person who always shows up and ruins everything for you, just by being there. You can’t get rid of them, whatever you do. Like your fate is intertwined with theirs, and you can’t escape until you figure out why you’re connected. Or if you can learn to live with your jinx, then sometimes the two of you can cooperate to wreck things for everyone else.”

  “It’s more sentimental Argelan shit.” Mouth barely had enough energy to be insulted. “And that’s not really what it means. It can be a good thing, if you make peace with it.”

  “That’s what I just said,” Alyssa said. “Everybody has their own explanation. But mine is the right one. Your jinx could be someone you hate, or a friend, or even a stranger. But you can’t ignore them, whoever they are.”

  Even though Alyssa had just accused Mouth of being an indelible curse on Sophie’s life, all this chatter somehow restored a feeling of normality. Like, they were alive and life had continuity, and they were at home, with oily food and bad drinks. You don’t come back from the night and start dancing and cracking jokes—let alone a trip where you touched an unthinkable consciousness, and everyone else died. Mouth kept almost shaking and gasping, but she tried to control her tremors, because Sophie needed comfort more.

  Sophie kept quiet, except that a few times she blurted out that she had no place to go. She couldn’t even stand to be with herself. She couldn’t face Ahmad, or Bianca. And she was worried about having to make nice with Dash, who was sort of Bianca’s boyfriend now.

  “You’re staying here,” Alyssa said, not like an invitation, but an order. “We never even use that bed, because we’re so used to sleeping in a confined space. If Mouth bothers you, I’ll kick her out.”

  Mouth felt weird having Sophie crash in their tiny apartment. She was sure Sophie would never forgive her for almost getting Bianca killed back in Xiosphant, and, probably, Mouth didn’t deserve forgiveness. Sophie also seemed to hesitate about staying under their roof after, well, everything. But then Alyssa told her, “Trust me. If Mouth is your jinx, you ought to get used to her garbage. Or if she isn’t, then no harm done. Right?”

  Alyssa wouldn’t hear any more argument, and started wrapping the bed for Sophie, Argelan style.

  When Alyssa was out of earshot, Sophie leaned over and said to Mouth: “This idea that you’re my ‘jinx.’ I guess Alyssa is really eager to find a reason why nothing is your fault.”

  Mouth cringed. “I’m sure you’re right. At the same time, though, she also truly does believe in this stuff.”

  “Alyssa still trusts you. You’d better not ever betray her.” Sophie’s tone was somewhere between a threat and friendly advice.

  That feeling Mouth had gotten when that crocodile first touched her, of toppling into formless shadow, came back for a moment, along with the old familiar pain in that tight spot right behind her brow.

  But Mouth just said, “I won’t.” She couldn’t help thinking about the worst part of the crocodile’s memories. “I have to ask you something. When the crocodiles—I mean the Gelet—spoke to you before … I know it’s not speaking, not really, but when they put things in your head … Did they show you something about flowers inside a volcano?”

  Sophie thought for a moment. “Flowers, no. They did show me how they used lava, deep underground, for power. And they had some huge projects where they created living organisms, deep underground, to try and control the climate. But it went wrong. A lot of their children died from toxic rainfall.”

  They sat for a long time. Alyssa was in the raised washroom, filling a basin with hot water for Sophie. And for Mouth, who felt less and less like a person who deserved kindness.

  * * *

  “I think I’m having a spiritual crisis,” Mouth told Barney, who was basting a large sheep carcass with a two-handed brush and something that looked like tree sap.

  “Well, damn,” Barney said. “You’ve been trying to have a spiritual crisis ever since you came to town. I’m glad you finally succeeded.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mouth said.

  Mouth had stopped asking Barney about the Citizens, because she couldn’t think of any new questions or summon the energy to keep asking the old ones. Mouth just wanted to watch Barney at work, to try to see the saint in him. Maybe the way he seemed to remember all his regulars, and asked them solicitous questions. Or the way he hovered nearby while two young mothers sat, half awake, next to three babbling, kicking toddlers. Barney stood, innocuous as furniture, in case these women needed anything or the children broke something. Mouth watched Barney tend to his three small tables and felt a longing so powerful it choked off some of the flow of blood to her head.

  “I know you think I ought to have something to tell you,” Barney said, in midstroke of his brush. “That I owe you something, because I walked away before the end.”

  Mouth didn’t react, except to unknot her hands a bit. She didn’t know what she wanted anymore.

  “I don’t know why they didn’t give you a name.” Barney turned the sheep on its axis. “I think maybe you just weren’t impulsive enough for them. They wanted people who would act without stopping to think, to follow their hearts instead of their heads. Sometimes on the road you have to react quickly. But they also didn’t want you to think when you ought to be feeling. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

  “I remember them saying that,” Mouth said. “I’ve tried to stop overthinking things ever since.”

  Barney left the sheep dangling from the ceiling in his small kitchen area and came to sit down next to Mouth. He kneaded his dishtowel into the shape of a thorn and placed it on the table between them.

  “Part of me was relieved when you told me how the Citizens ended.” Barney winced. “All of their teachings were about standing between these two extremes, and then coming out stronger and with more clarity. When the Citizens never came back to Argelo, and I realized something must have happened, I thought maybe they’d finally given in to the delirium. And I was glad they all just died instead. I know that sounds awful.”

  Mouth nodded. “They didn’t betray the teachings.” Then she decided to ask the most important thing. “The crocodiles. They showed me a … an experience. A vision. I don’t know. They had some kind of flower that they were growing in the lava vents, that opened in the heart of the mountain. And I have this vague memory of seeing those flowers when I was little.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Barney said. “We went to Mount Abacus all the time. It was one of our sacred places. I usually stayed below and cooked for everybody.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t know anything about it at all?”

  “I don’t know anything about anything,” Barney said. “You want to know what I’ve learned? That I don’t know anything. Time passes, even when you can’t see it, and people keep grudges too long and die too soon. I’m just an old fart who makes sheep into meatloaf.”

  After that, Barney wouldn’t answer any more questions, and kept insisting that Mouth should take off for a while because she was scaring away customers. “You stay here any longer, I’m going to make you wash dishes.” Mouth’s legs had gone numb from sitting too long, but she beat some life back into them.

  * * *

  Sophie stayed at Alyssa and Mouth’s place long enough to become a fixture on their bed, sprawled out, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, and not moving except to eat or wash. Then she was gone, all at once. Alyssa and Mouth were still left with the problem of organizing some kind of memorial for Reynold. Nobody could reach Yulya or Kendrick, not even Ahmad. And Reynold didn’t seem to have any other family or friends left in Argelo. So in the end, they held a tiny wake with just Ahmad, Katrina, and Sophie, where everyone except Ahmad swigged from the same flask of swamp vodka.

  Afterward, Alyssa and Mouth wandered alone, under a weird-looking sky. The perpetual cloud cover had gotten a shade darker, and instead of the usual even sheets of off-white the clouds had started folding in on themselves. In the middle of the vortex, Mouth thought she saw a pair of beetle eyes, fixed on her personally. Mouth shuddered. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I love about Argelo,” Alyssa said without looking around. “Something’s always wrong. That’s what gives the city its special pungency.” She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her head and hunched over, in the classic stay-away posture of a hardened Argelan.

  They kept walking until they ended up in the Snake District. The light bounced off all the stucco walls and packed-mud rooftops and gave Mouth a kernel of pain behind the center of her forehead. The heat made everything smell rotten. But Alyssa was in a mood after the wake, and she had steered them toward the neighborhood where she’d grown up, more or less on purpose.