Maybe this is our last chance to have a conversation, just us two, before whatever is going to happen. “I miss you,” I say.
“Me too,” she says, staring at the reflective panels on the other end of this enormous space. We are two tiny blobs in a swirl of muted color.
“I really hoped that you and I would reinvent ourselves together,” I say, “when we came to Argelo. Everyone said you can be whoever you want here. I thought it would be just you and me, and we could make our own lives, without worrying about anyone else.”
“I never would have been happy.” Bianca shakes her head. “I can’t let go of what happened before. I lost everything, and I was forced to leave Xiosphant, and I couldn’t let that be the end of it.”
“You didn’t lose everything. You didn’t lose me.”
I feel the way I did when the boat flipped almost on its side, on the Sea of Murder: shivering, my insides going sideways.
She acts as if I didn’t say anything. “I never would have been satisfied living a small life, after everything I lost. And now I’ve found a way to make my life count for something. To be the person I was always meant to be.”
“I wish I had been enough for you.”
“I miss our old friendship just as much as you do, but that was a long time ago.” Bianca takes a breath, and her face closes up. “You died, and you made the decision to stay dead to me. And so I spent too long turning you into a perfect human being in my mind. A martyr, you know? The one good person in this shit-eating world. I hated myself for stealing that money and letting them take you, and I hated everyone who had anything to do with sending you into the night. I wanted to make them pay for what they took from us. I still want that. It’s all I think about.”
“I’m alive. I’m here.” I touch her arm. “You don’t have to be angry anymore.”
“Oh, really? Thanks. I’ll just stop being angry. That’s a great idea. Why did I never think of that?” Her laugh feels like a slap. She leans past me and looks out the window, through the crack left by the privacy screen. “Rain’s stopped. And the bloodbath seems to be over, too. Let’s go. I promised to show you something.”
Bianca gets up and walks to the door, without looking back, and her stride makes ripples in the pearly shapes on her dress. “Everything I’ve done since we got to this city has been to help us survive. And to find a way for us to go back.” She walks into the street and almost steps in a puddle of the noxious liquid, but she sidesteps at the last moment.
We make our way down some streets that lead toward a part of town I don’t know, where big factories and warehouses cluster around junkyards. Every few steps, we have to avoid either a body or more of the corrosive liquid. Even sleep-deprived and wearing a scalloped formal dress, Bianca plants her feet with perfect sureness, while I keep almost tumbling facedown into a deadly slick, or stepping on someone’s discarded blade. The sky still looks darker, and I wonder if the rain will start again.
“Do you think you and I would have stayed friends after the Gymnasium?” Bianca leads me into a covered walkway with a rusty handrail. “I mean, if I hadn’t stolen that petty cash, and the cops hadn’t used it as a pretext. If we had just kept going, the way we had been. Maybe you and I would have just drifted apart after graduation.” She’s obviously thought about this a lot.
I think back, and remember the distinguished future that Bianca had been preparing for back in Xiosphant, when she dressed up for all those parties and dinners that I was never invited to. And meanwhile, she dabbled in insurrectionary politics as a way of proving something to herself. I nurtured all these childish fantasies about Bianca changing the world, with me by her side, but I never thought too much about what “by her side” meant. What was I going to be doing while she dazzled everybody?
Bianca waits for me to respond as we travel a series of gantries made of distressed metal. I walk heavy, stooped, with a dull pain in my stomach.
“I don’t know. I never had a friend like you before. I don’t know what trajectory we were on.” I feel as if I’ve just swallowed a few drops of this toxic runoff. Now that she’s spoken, I can see it clearly: we would have lost touch after graduation. I picture us older, pushing past each other on the street and not recognizing each other until we’ve almost gone too far to wave.
“You and I were good for each other, in this one moment in our lives, when we were young and in love with books and ideas. When we wanted to use our minds instead of sleeping when they told us to. That was our time.” We’ve reached the opening of a dark tunnel. Bianca turns to face me. Her eyes look sunken, in the encroaching gloom. “But now neither of us is the person we thought we would turn into, and we’ve gone through things together that most people would never even imagine. I just hope you’ll be on my side when the time comes.”
I’m just staring at Bianca, noticing the raised tendon in her neck, the set of her jaw.
Bianca reaches out and bangs on a mesh gate with barbed wire on top. “Open up. It’s me,” she says in Argelan. “Dash knows we’re here.” I’m pretty sure that last part is a lie.
“Don’t worry,” Bianca says in Xiosphanti, “I still want to save everyone back home. All those people trapped in pointless cycles: work and sleep, work and sleep.” She leads me into the pipe-lined tunnel, lit only by a single electric bulb swinging at eye level. “I don’t have a whole theory of labor allocation worked out, but I know we can find a better way. You can help.”
Bianca’s brocaded slippers crunch on the filthy cement floor.
I almost brain myself on one of the big metal pipes. “We can’t go back to Xiosphant. I keep telling you. You saw how hard it was, coming here. We almost died seven different ways.”
“You should know me better than that by now.”
Bianca leads me into a hangar, with just a sliver of window along the top of the wall. I realize we’ve circled around, and we’re under one of her favorite nightclubs. Not Punch Face or Emergency Session, but the one we visited the first time, where the walls themselves are speakers. The one with the glitter that sticks to your skin with some kind of chemical adhesive and doesn’t wash off. I hear the triple-beat over our heads: people dancing off the serotonin rush from the killing spree in the rain. She reaches until she finds a light switch, and then I’m looking at ten green-gray vehicles.
“Some of these belong to the Perfectionists, some to the Alva Family, and some to another group,” Bianca says. “I already had the outlines of the idea before Dash came along, but he helped me put it together. They’ve been building these since forever, collecting stuff from the night, or from treasure meteors. I think one of the reasons for this latest skirmish between the families was to get the last few pieces.”
These vehicles are all different sizes and shapes, but they all have the same armor, thick and jagged, like a bison’s overlapping plates only without any fur. They rest on thick treads with gravity-assist devices to help them cross the roughest terrain—crude, hand-machined versions of the all-terrain cruisers the Founding Settlers drove when they tried to explore the world. Someone has attached spikes to the armor, and there are empty spots where you could add weapons.
These rude metal carcasses remind me of the War Monument back in Xiosphant, the rough edges that scraped me as I hid in its shadow.
“We could bring a small army,” Bianca says. “We can do everything we used to talk about in school.”
The music upstairs stumbles and recovers, like a drunk man kicking his own foot. I put my hand on the side of the nearest vehicle and feel the shell vibrate. I try to imagine going home like this. With a “small army” of the same people I just watched slashing each other to death for no reason.
“There’s still no way,” I say, though I have a queasy feeling that I’m wrong. “I mean, these are not amphibious vehicles. You remember the Sea of Murder. You almost fell overboard a couple times. Nobody has the facilities to build the kind of vehicle carriers they had during the Second Argelan War, or the barges fr
om the Fourth.”
“But we won’t need any boats.” Bianca touches my hand where I’m still touching the lorry. “You showed me another way. The sea is frozen over, as solid as rock, in the night. You have this incredible paranormal gift, which I don’t claim to understand. But you can communicate with them, with the crocodiles, and they’ll help us cross through the night safely. You’re the key to all of this, Sophie. Everyone in Argelo has been nursing this dream for generations, especially since their resources have been running out. When I told them about you, their heads almost exploded.”
My mind fills with soldiers, uniforms, guns, a forced march into the night. All the old deathly feelings come back, just the same as if I’d never worked so hard to cope with them at all. Police helmets, massacres, the dying sounds of the Glacier Fools—I run through the whole catalog in a heartbeat. But even the memory-panic feels as though it’s happening a long way off. I turn to stone, rough-hewn, my head laced with shards of obsidian and granite. I can’t see or hear, every breath a struggle. The pragmatic part of me, that voice that keeps me steady and alert in a bad situation, is screaming the worst curses I know.
I concentrate on taking in diesel-scented air through my nose, letting out rank gasps through my mouth.
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” I force the words out, after a long time.
Like slow-dancing with a rockfall.
“I know, I know, they’re not your pets. I’m sorry I said that before. They’re an intelligent species, with their own society, and maybe one day we’ll be strong enough to trade with them. Though, remember that lecturer at the Gymnasium? Dr. Dawson? He always said that in a meeting between any two species, one always domesticates the other. Or they don’t coexist. Was he wrong? I don’t know.”
“They won’t do what I ask. I can’t even speak to them. Their communication is all one-way.” I never explained to her about my bracelet, and now I’m glad.
“They showed up when you called for help. They escorted us to safety. I was there.”
Feeling returns to my body, and mostly it consists of nausea. I can’t even look at Bianca. I remember all the times I told myself that I would do anything to make her happy, and the memories all have a dark red stain.
“I can’t.” I stutter. “I just can’t. There’s no way.”
Bianca seems to worry we’ve been in this hangar too long, so she hustles me back into the tunnel and locks the door behind us. Instead of going back the way we came, she leads me down another junction, and we emerge close to the Knife, right by that row of fish-bread shops. She finds a place that sells crystalized plum syrup on a stick and buys one for each of us.
“I love Argelo, and hate it at the same time.” She hands me my stick, and I bite into it. “But our hometown could use a little dose of Argelo. Progress isn’t always decorous. Sophie. I know what I’m doing. And I really want to go home. I want to finish what we started. I thought that’s what you wanted too.”
The sugar rush, on top of the dead feeling inside me, is making my head throb. I cling to a memory of Bianca saying both cities, the world, but I still have a scream caught in my throat that I can’t let out.
“Dash and the others, they don’t want to hurt anybody,” Bianca says. “Their main interest is in reopening trade with Xiosphant, on favorable terms. They need your help with the crocodiles, but also they need my understanding of Xiosphanti governance, or what passes for it. We’ll bring hand-picked soldiers who know how to behave themselves. We’ll do it with minimal casualties. We’ll just force those tools to liberalize, to loosen their chokehold on all the people back home.”
My eyes are closed. I don’t remember closing them. My mouth is glued with syrup.
“All we want is safe passage,” Bianca says. “Nothing else. I know you can do that. The crocodiles are the main reason why every vehicle that ever went into the night is a pile of wreckage.”
I don’t even know if any Gelet ever want to meet me again, after what happened with the Glacier Fools. I summoned them to a meeting, and then they were ambushed. I’ve been trying not to lose my mind over it. The Gelet had invited me to come live in their city, before all of that violence. Is that invitation even still open? If I do what Bianca wants, the Gelet would probably despise me once and for all, and they’d be right to.
“Sophie, please.” She grabs my arm. My eyes stay shut. “I know this is scary and strange. I know you wish we could just have a perfect little life together, you and me, but that’s not the world we live in.” My eyes reopen, but I still can’t look at her.
We’ve finished the gritty sweets. Our sticks are just sticks. I don’t know what to say to Bianca. Just a little while ago, I was saying I trusted her.
“Sophie, you’ve always needed me to push you or whatever, to give you an excuse to do the things you were too scared to do on your own.” Still speaking Xiosphanti, Bianca pulls me out into the wet street, where a masked dance party has started. Bianca joins the dancers, pulling me in with her. Her arms fly around my neck, and she speaks in my ear over the drums. “So I’m going to make this easy for you. We’re doing this, and it’s too late to stop it. Those vehicles are almost ready to go, and you and I are going to do this together. It’s already decided. There’s no need for you to torture yourself about this.”
Her hands rest on my neck, light as moth wings. I try to think of something to say, to change her mind. That feeling I had before—that this is our last chance to talk—is back, stronger than ever, but I still have no voice. Around me, people jostle in masks of velvet and feathers, shrieking with delight. I lean into Bianca’s ear, but no words come. I’m lost.
She spies some friends and releases her hold on me, then floats away. I let the crowd separate us. My last glimpse of Bianca is her head bobbing up and down in a churn of upflung arms, as someone ties a pointed mask around her eyes.
mouth
Barney had gotten a musical act at the diner, and it crushed all the customer tables into the other half of the tiny space. A mandolin, a xylophone, a trumpet, and a tin piano argued at cross-purposes. The usual roster of students and shift laborers crowded inside and ignored the spiky metal fence of rhythms and dark chords, even when the old man playing the xylophone started muttering to himself, in a repetitive melody, had a friend who needed a hand, had a hand that needed a glove, had a glove that needed a mate, and so on. Mouth wasn’t a music lover, but this left her colder than most kinds, and she never saw any evidence that this band brought in any customers. These musicians weren’t even playing a board game that you could place side bets on. But with all this racket, Mouth couldn’t ask Barney any more questions.
At last the honky-tonk group wore itself out, and the place went empty, and Barney was wiping down tables and moving them back into their old positions. Mouth tried to think of something to say before the diner filled up again.
Barney spoke first. “I know what you want. And it’s not going to happen.”
“What do I want?”
“You want me to go out on the road with you, the two of us, the last two Citizens. So I can walk you through it. So you can finish your education. There’s just no way. I’m too old.”
That possibility hadn’t even occurred to Mouth. Although now that Barney had brought it up, she could imagine how great it could be. Or they might just kill each other after the first few kilometers.
She laughed. “You think I want the two of us on the road, without anybody else watching our backs? When was the last time you left the city?”
Barney rolled his neck. “Not since you were a kid. Not since I dropped out.”
“I told you before. The road isn’t the same as back then. Two people out there would be eaten before you could get halfway to the Sea of Murder or the Southern Wastes. You need a whole crew, and a vehicle with a sleeping nook in it, and weapons, and all sorts of other shit. And even then, you’d die.”
“Oh.” Barney had been in the middle of checking the rack full of spoons,
hooks, and knives, but he sat down, as if he’d lost his balance. He turned, all at once, into a person who had a stomach ulcer and heart trouble. “Yeah, you did say.”
“The crew I traveled with was ready for anything. We didn’t make it.”
“So you don’t want to go out on the road?”
“I do. I just can’t. I’ve been trying to make my peace with being a city-dweller. I still hate it. But I can’t change reality.”
“Well, then, I suggest you forget about the Citizens. There’s no point in thinking about them, or trying to make sense of anything. Their lessons were only useful on the road, and you can’t understand their ways while sitting here, inside walls within walls, between other walls. You can’t be on your own and have the mind-set of the Citizens. There’s no point. And even if I could teach you any of the old secrets, you couldn’t use them here. You can’t even see the day and the night at the same time when you’re in a city.”
“I can’t just pretend I grew up in a house,” Mouth said.
“Who cares where you grew up? You’re here now. The point is, the Citizens’ teachings are like one of those wispy pale flowers that used to grow out in the Drylands. Remember those? Imagine ripping it out at the root and trying to plant it in the Noisy Fen.”
“I just want to keep our culture alive.”
“You can’t.” Barney had revived and was wiping tables and checking napkins again. “You can’t keep something alive that’s already dead. You can only preserve the remains, the way that Martindale bullfrog is trying to do. If you want to do something to save our old culture, you should try to help the professor as much as you can. Maybe volunteer as his assistant. He’s absolutely the only hope for the thing you say you want.”
“That’s a horrible thought.”
“I don’t know why you’re so down on him. He’s a pompous oaf, but he wants to do the right thing. He cares about this, bless his heart.”
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 26