The City in the Middle of the Night

mouth

The Sea of Murder vanished behind them, and then they had nothing but the road. Deathly shroud on one horizon, white furnace on the other. Sky so wide it pulverized you to look up. No other features but the cracks and marbling in the stone underfoot. The rhythm of their footfalls, chump chump chump, became a piece of music that never stopped, accompanied by the sled’s churning wheels. A couple times, a bison charged in from the night and tried to seize a person in its powerful maw, with more teeth than you could count, and razor-sharp threads crisscrossing between them. Once, a storm fell from a great height and set upon them, knives of rocky ice clutched in a million fists. They had to build their shelter though they could barely stand, and hug each other as they shielded the sled with their trembling bodies. At last, though, when they seemed to have walked a dozen lifetimes, they saw a glow on the horizon: the lights of Xiosphant. The lights grew prouder and then vanished, because the city was having its curfew. When the lights reappeared, they looked much closer.

Everyone cheered at the thought of unloading their cargo, unlacing muck-stiffened boots, finding a lukewarm bath, eating hot food. Except for Mouth, who felt a rising dread at the thought of being trapped inside a city again.

The other members of the Resourceful Couriers were city people who traveled for a living. Mouth was a born traveler, who tolerated cities for brief periods.

In a city, you could only walk in circles. Trouble knew where to find you. People lived with more things than they could carry, and they pretended that built structures were geographical features. Mouth couldn’t travel alone, and the Resourceful Couriers were the closest you could find to a gang of nomads in this age, but the long drags between trips were torture. Especially in Xiosphant, where the residents were obsessed with making sure you slept at the right time, and they didn’t even know how to make decent coffee.

Maybe Mouth would get lucky and the whole city would fall into a chasm before they reached it.

The city wall loomed in the distance: granite blocks, topped with tungsten spikes, which they’d raised after one of their stupid wars, generations ago. And soon the noises rang from inside that wall, and Mouth couldn’t tell factories and mining gear from shouts and musical instruments. Cities teemed with synesthesia. So many sounds and smells, a din of imagery, until your senses just gave up.

Omar gave the signal when they were almost under the wall, at the designated spot. Nothing happened. The Resourceful Couriers tried to get the sled as close to the cover of the wall as they could as its axles protested, and they all huddled there in the pale half light. The damn wall vibrated. They had started out with eight people, including three new recruits, but Jackie had taken one look at the Sea of Murder and run back to the relative safety of Argelo. Then Franz had acted like a fool on the boat, and had toppled and drowned. Even Mouth wanted to raise a glass to poor Franz, and to all their absent friends and family.

Everyone around Mouth started to panic they would be stranded at the foot of an ugly gray-brown wall forever. Omar did the signal again, and then again a moment later.

A passage opened a dozen meters away, a dark tunnel going under the base of the wall, propped up with rotten vines. Justin, their contact, told them to hurry inside because it was late. As if they hadn’t been waiting out here for an age and a half.

Justin had three people with him, and they all got hands on the sled, which kept getting caught on the tunnel’s grooves. Something about the way Justin’s helpers positioned themselves, once everyone was grunting and the sled motor started overheating, made Mouth suspicious. So she hung back. Halfway into the tunnel, Justin whipped out a gun, an ancient slow-repeater, and said he was taking the cargo. All of the Resourceful Couriers had their hands out—except for Mouth, who emerged from behind and raised Justin’s head into the support beam so hard it half collapsed the tunnel. After that, just a big knife fight in the dark.

You don’t get to be a Resourceful Courier without having blades stashed in every contour of your body.

The Resourceful Couriers eased the sled into a junkyard right before the tunnel collapsed behind them, on top of Justin and his crew. This was shit. They needed to find a new contact—because dried apricots, fancy fabrics, and swamp vodka don’t sell themselves, and who could understand the stupid money here. Plus when time came to leave town, they would need a new tunnel. All in all, a shit end to a shit journey. Nothing for it but to get ass-faced.

One thing Xiosphant did have plenty of was bars. Something about all that repression. They found a dive called the Low Road and traded a case of the swamp vodka for food, drink, and permission to crash in the back room after curfew. Soon everyone had gotten good and wasted.

Mouth had developed a persona that camouflaged the social awkwardness and the trapped-inside-walls feeling: loud, boastful, full of jokes. Sometimes even Mouth was fooled, after enough booze.

But Xiosphanti was a clumsy language to joke in—all those consonants, glottal stops, verb tenses, fancy pronouns. Mouth mangled every other sentence, even though people seemed entertained by the story about the bar brawl (adjacent to a hot oil cauldron) against a man twice Mouth’s size. At the same time, in the quiet part of Mouth’s brain, the memory kept replaying: Justin’s head giving way against the support beam, as Mouth’s muscles levered upward. Had Justin gotten a shot off? Sometimes Mouth thought yes, sometimes no. The only constant was the feeling of a man’s head losing solidity, the body tensing and then slackening, and a scent between urine and motor oil. The usual post-murder hangover nauseated Mouth, but meanwhile she was also full of furious loathing at the sort of person who would try to rob hardworking smugglers who had hauled garbage halfway around the world, crossing the goddamn Sea of Murder even. If Justin had appeared at the Low Road, somehow alive and unscathed, Mouth might have torn him apart. She couldn’t decide if the murder had left her queasy with guilt or just unsatisfied.

Both, maybe.

“Dude is dangling headfirst over the boiling hot oil, by his throat.” Mouth’s story had reached its crowd-pleasing climax all on its own. “And he looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, is that peanut oil? I’m allergic.’” Everybody howled with laughter and a couple people bought Mouth more gin-and-milk, along with some of the swamp vodka that the Resourceful Couriers had bartered in the first place.

The Low Road emptied out as the chimes signaled the Span of Reflection, the last bell before curfew. Mouth sat next to Alyssa, staring at the street full of suckers trying to outrun a clock. Alyssa was Mouth’s road buddy, meaning they spent every moment together, slept together, watched each other’s backs, and each knew what the other was thinking. By rights, they ought to be sick of each other.

“Are you excited to be back in Xiosphant?” Alyssa laughed at Mouth’s grimace. “I bet you’re overjoyed to be speaking a language that’s so full of qualifiers you can hardly get to the point,” she said in flawless Xiosphanti, the polite form. Her sentence specified what time it was, the tense implied (present conditional), and the genders and social statuses of both herself and Mouth. None of it sat right with Mouth, who never liked to be categorized.

Mouth snorted. “I don’t care. I won’t stay here long enough to let it bother me.”

“You’re an optimist,” Alyssa said in Argelan. “Remember how you caved in our tunnel with a man’s skull? And we lost our main contact? Might be a while before we get another gig. And to be honest…”

She didn’t finish that sentence. She almost didn’t have to. Here, under a roof for the first time in forever, she had all sorts of shadows and creases on her face that hadn’t been there before. Alyssa had curly dark hair, a strong jawline, and big firm hands that had clutched Mouth comfortingly whenever they had shared a sleeping nook. Alyssa had always seemed inexhaustibly young and capable of surprise—except now, she looked older.

“You want to quit.” Mouth shouldn’t have cared. The lineup of the Resourceful Couriers had always changed, since forever, except for Mouth and Omar. You couldn’t get attached.

“Not so much that I want to quit, more that I don’t know if I can go on.”

Mouth laughed. “If you were going to quit, you’d have been better off staying in Argelo. Your hometown. At least they know how to have fun there.”

“Argelo was a little too much fun last time. Actually, I like Xiosphant. It’s quiet. They make nice cakes, thanks to all the flour from those farmwheels.”

“I really hope you change your mind.” Mouth drained her jar of swamp vodka. After hauling cases of the stuff across nine kinds of hell, it didn’t taste nearly good enough. “I would hate to lose you. I don’t want to have to share a sleep nook with Reynold.”

Reynold, sitting a couple meters away, overheard and rolled his eyes. He was a big ugly dude with tattooed arms, a broken nose, and weirdly tiny hands. Nobody ever wanted to share a sleep nook with him, because he snored and farted at the same time.

“That’s not why this is upsetting you,” Alyssa said.

Mouth didn’t feel upset, but Alyssa was usually right about these things. “Why, then?”

“You’re scared that if I’m too old to keep doing this, then maybe you are too.”

“It’s different for me,” Mouth said. “I’m going to keep doing this until I die.”

“Why? Because you were raised by nomads?” Alyssa laughed. “You do get that nomads aren’t smugglers, right? Smuggling is for young people with decent reflexes. Do you think you’ll be able to break a man’s head with one hand after a few more of these trips?”

“Nomads have to break heads too sometimes.”

Mouth wanted out of this conversation.

“Are you ready to be the only old person in a crew of young smugglers?” Alyssa asked.

“I’m ready to drink until I pass out. Beyond that, I hadn’t made any plans.”

“Drink faster. Time’s running out.”

And sure enough, just as Alyssa spoke, there was that grinding, squalling sound that Mouth remembered from previous visits to Xiosphant: the shutters cranking up all over town, blocking out the half light. The Low Road went from pleasantly dim to can’t-see-your-own-feet.

Mouth hated darkness. The idea that you would want to sleep under conditions where anything could ambush you, that just closing your eyes wasn’t risk enough, seemed barbaric. Atavistic. All the other Resourceful Couriers fumbled for a corner of the back room to sleep, alone, with their road buddy, or just in some random pile. But Mouth sat, staring. She’d never really been in the dark until she’d first visited Xiosphant as a child and the shutters had closed on her. Discovering a new phobia was like the opposite of falling in love.

The road didn’t age you. Settling down somewhere, gaining attachments and expectations, assimilating—those things aged you. This was a childish way of looking at things, but Mouth couldn’t help it.

The nomads who raised Mouth had included elderly people as well as children, but they’d worked out all sorts of customs to make sure vulnerable members of the community were taken care of. And of course, the Citizens hadn’t been trying to carry fragile, semiperishable goods from one city to another at a decent speed.

Mouth barely slept, even in spite of exhaustion and tipsiness. When the shutters rolled down at long last, and the blue-gray light poured into the room, Mouth felt ugly. The bar owner, a cheery old man with short gray curls named Ray, brought around plates of hot pastries that made Mouth feel less like smashing another head or ten.

Alyssa was right: they really did know cakes in Xiosphant. But their coffee still tasted like shit.

Now the streets were filling up instead of emptying, the Resourceful Couriers all went out to explore. The streets of Xiosphant were narrower than in Argelo, but straighter and laid out in a semi-grid—and better paved, because they’d had more access to fancy technology from the Mothership when they’d laid out this town. One building they walked past had a big stone awning that had to have been fabbed, with little creatures flying around it. Then there was a narrow townhouse, with gold leaf all around the fancy piping that had crumbled to bits but still had some grandeur.

The Couriers made a big effort to clean up and look like they belonged here, because even being a foreigner in Xiosphant was basically against the law. Mouth wore a big ribbony cap that covered up her mohawk and scars, and one of those ponchos that the local women were wearing, but she drew the line at putting a lacy fringe around her ankles. Everyone else blended in, more or less. But in this town, you could tell the pipe-workers, the factory grunts, the shop kids, and the bureaucrats apart just by looking at their clothing and the stains on their hands. Everyone seemed to sneak glances at Mouth whenever she risked walking on one of the busier streets full of food vendors and schoolchildren. A few little kids pointed at Mouth’s mismatched poncho and trousers, and the lack of an ankle-skirt, and made noises.

Everything that happened now, Mouth turned into another opportunity to feel old, after everything Alyssa had said.

They had left Kendrick guarding their stuff, back in the junkyard, and it was all still there when they got back. But time was not a friend here. The police had a million eyes, and everyone in Xiosphant was too curious about your business. With Justin gone, they needed to find someone else to move the merchandise and help them get a new cargo to bring back to Argelo.

“I’ve been thinking,” Kendrick said, his high forehead crinkling in a way that made his many piercings jangle. “We won’t find another fence, not in a hurry. The black market in Xiosphant is pretty tiny, and disorganized, compared to Argelo. But I know a guy named George who might be able to help. He’s the bank for this big roofing company, which means he handles every kind of currency, not just infrastructure chits. And he does a certain amount of bartering to make sure the roofers have access to dental care and toys for their kids. I heard last time we were in town that he also does some moonlighting.”

“Let’s go see George the Bank.” Omar whooped.

They hid the rest of the swamp vodka in the back room of the Low Road, then spent ages disguising the sled with their other goods as a delivery vehicle for one of Xiosphant’s leather warehouses, using mostly stuff they found in this junkyard. Those chimes were rattling again: time running out. “We’ll just have to stick to the back alleys,” Kendrick said. “I know a route.” Kendrick was the guy who knew the way to the spiciest food or the weirdest liquor, wherever you traveled.

“I still don’t get how someone can be a bank,” muttered Yulya. She’d never even been outside Argelo until she talked Omar into letting her tag along, and everyone had expected her to freak out and run home, like Jackie. Instead, she’d taken to the wild road, carrying her share without complaint. She even kept her spirits up on the Sea of Murder. Yulya said she’d always wanted to be a traveling performer, a profession that hadn’t existed since… well, since Mouth was little.

“It’s the screwy economy here in Xiosphant,” Kendrick told her. “They have like ten different kinds of money, for different things. Food dollars, med-creds, infrastructure chits, energy rations, and so on. So the roofing company gets paid in infrastructure chits, but George the Bank also has to make sure the employees receive all other kinds of money, by making side-deals with medical providers, food companies, and the power plant. And so on.”

“That’s… literally insane,” said Yulya, still speaking Argelan, in a low voice.

“It’s their way of avoiding scarcity and hoarding.” Mouth shrugged.

“It’s how they keep everybody in line,” said Alyssa. “Everybody’s so busy trying to get enough of all the different kinds of money, nobody has time to stop and think.”

Just then, red-and-blue smoke filled the sky, which signified the midpoint between shutters-down and shutters-up.

The roofing company was all the way over on the bright side of town. Still indirect sunlight, still just creeping over a big-ass mountain, but there sure was a lot of it. Mouth could see all the little hairs on the back of her hand, and everything had colors. The air smelled different this close to the day: sulfurous, tangy, kind of salty. Sweat collected inside Mouth’s collar.

“I guess being stuck in this part of town would make you think about the importance of a good solid roof.” Alyssa snorted.

They came to a huge slab of limestone, so tall you couldn’t tell if it even had a good roof, with a sign over the corrugated shutter that read ROOF MASTERS. A few guys in coveralls were carrying boxes into the building, and Omar asked them where the Couriers could find George. Half of them ended up staying with the sled while Mouth, Omar, Alyssa, and Kendrick went through a maze of warehouse shelves and pasteboard walls, at the center of which a young man squatted on a big rubber ball, inside a wire cage.

“You really just came all the way from Argelo?” George blinked at them. He had an autofocusing lens in one eye and a scarf tied around both arms, in the same style that Mouth had seen on some of the financial professionals swarming through the streets. But he wore his dark hair in six fancy braids. On the wall behind him hung one of those overcomplicated calendars that looked like a million lines crisscrossing inside a big circle. “I never even met anyone who’s been to Argelo. We used to have open trade with them, you know. I know some elderly people who still remember this one kind of cat butter that used to be imported from Argelo, and—”

“Mason’s Salty Cat Butter,” said Omar. “We’ve got five kilograms of the stuff, in special preservation packs.”

“Well,” George said. “That might be worth rather a lot of food dollars, or whatever you’re interested in. I also know some folks over at the mines who can get you bauxite, tin, copper, and a few other things. The mines are not what they once were, but they still produce some surprises.” He used the polite form of Xiosphanti, for addressing strangers, and identified himself as a manager and the Couriers as visiting laborers.

Mouth tuned out the negotiations and poked around the room. This space was as big as the front room of the Low Road, but seemed much smaller because filing cabinets ringed the whole back area. The good kind, made out of refractory crystal with a fine aluminum rotary index. George had collected information about not just his own trades but also tons of other stuff that people had swapped, bought, or sold here in Xiosphant. This one dentist near the cold front had amassed quite the collection of old uniform insignia from the Mothership. (Still sailing overhead, in her lonely, slow-decaying orbit.) George had lists of rare and collectible items sold at various auctions around the city, too.

For a place that prided itself on having exactly the right kind of money for everyone’s needs, Xiosphant sure had a lot of deals under the table. For a moment, Mouth imagined settling down here along with Alyssa and some of the others. You could get rich and soft here. Or you could get dead—just ask Justin.

Mouth kept spinning the wheel, letting different engravings on the crystal pop up on the viewer, out of boredom, as George asked all the usual questions about Argelo and its famous parties. Like, did people really just never stop dancing, ever? Would they let someone just walk around half naked, on the street? Was it even true that they let men go with men there? They let anyone do anything in Argelo, was the answer to every one of his questions.

And then an item on one of George’s auction lists caught Mouth’s eye. Mouth nearly choked, vision gone white, like the road after a hailstorm. She must have misread—but no. There it was. She even found a picture when she pulled up the entry. And the name, written in fancy cursive Xiosphanti script. “The Invention.”

The Invention.

“Where?” Mouth coughed. Heart thrashing like a wild snake. “Where did this item end up? ‘The Invention.’ I have a friend who, uh. I have a friend who would kill to get their hands on this.”

George groaned. Mouth had interrupted just as he and Omar were getting to the fun part of their conversation about the crazy shit that went down in Argelo, the City that Never Sleeps. “Which list is that?”

Mouth scrolled back up to the top of the list and scanned for the title. “The McAllister Acquisition.” There was an amount, in luxury coins, plus some time-related details which would only make sense to a Xiosphanti.

George tutted for a moment, then said, “Oh. Right. Yeah, that was a special auction. Some rare items. As near as I can recall, it all ended up in the Palace.” Sure enough, the bottom of the manifest had a notation that included the prince’s personal seal.

The Invention was here. In Xiosphant. In that stupid cotton-candy Palace. Everything Mouth had lost, everything that the Resourceful Couriers had failed to replace. Just sitting there, and Mouth only had to go in there and grab it. Mouth lost a breath, thinking about holding the Invention, opening it up, looking inside.

She felt like passing out from happiness.

SOPHIE

The new boy is named Jeremy, and he doesn’t know how to do anything. I have to lace his sandals for him five times, and his polished leather tunic keeps threatening to fall off one shoulder. He can’t hold the tray steady, or light the candle with a supple enough wrist. He doesn’t breathe right. He keeps asking me questions, in a precise accent that reminds me of Bianca. I just shrug and keep redoing his laces and buckles and flower arrangements, hoping this time he’ll get it.

“Please,” he says. “If you won’t even talk to me, how can I ever understand anything? Hernan said you would help.” Jeremy is pale, with wavy reddish brown hair and narrow eyes with dark brown pupils, and he shuffles around in the antechamber between our tiny shared bedroom and the staging area for all the client sessions, with its racks of ornate samovars, fine plates, and tiny serving implements.

It’s true, Hernan did ask for my help: putting his hand on my shoulder and crinkling his gray eyes underneath his pale wispy eyebrows. “Sophie, I know this is hard for you. But just try to remember when you were new at this, and you felt like you were going to break everything, all the time. Other people, including Kate and Walter, went out of their way to help you. So now, it’s your turn. Please help us with Jeremy.”

As if I could forget those times when I was still so raw, one layer beneath the skin, that I felt an endless ice storm raging in my blood and my bones. The time, right after I came to the Illyrian Parlour, when I was sure the police would arrive at any moment to finish what they started. I’ve lived here long enough that I can venture out into the street, even walk past a police lorry, without trembling or trying to hide my face. Nobody would recognize me now, even if they somehow knew me from before, since I’ve grown a few centimeters, while also forcing myself to learn a whole new posture and way of holding my body. I walk even slower than I breathe, and each new breath comes and goes, as gradual as the blooming and wilting of a flower.

Yet I still can’t venture into the temperate zone, or anywhere near the Gymnasium, without hearing the drone of police engines and the shouts of the mob, echoing in my memories. Some part of me is convinced that if I walk too close to campus, men in uniforms will instantly cuff me and throw me into a police lorry.

So I try to help Jeremy as much as I can. I owe a lot to Hernan, and to all his staff, past and present. But I never liked talking to people before, and now I hate it twice as much. Part of me is still waiting to finish telling the joke I started blurting out in the basement of the Zone House. As though time halted in the midst of that one syllable, and has never found a way to resume, no matter what the calendar says.

Speaking of the calendar, it’s already 4 Wander before Blue, which means Bianca must already be at least halfway finished with the whole program at the Gymnasium, maybe closer to two-thirds finished. She’ll have forgotten me by now. She’ll have an incredible life, help so many people, make so many friends. I make friends even slower than I walk, but everyone who meets Bianca wants to love her. I’m trying not to think about it too much.

“Please,” Jeremy says again, in his voice that reminds me so much of hers. “I need to learn. I don’t have anywhere else to go but here.”

I give him what I hope is a kind look, and whisper: “Just watch me work.”

People arrive at the ornate front door of the Illyrian Parlour out of breath. They’ve rushed here from work, and they only have a short interval before they have to run back. The gears on all the timepieces keep chewing through moment after moment, and they can’t stand to walk under this cruel sky any longer. They buzz and knock a few times before the golden door opens, and we can see them out on our stoop, fidgeting and even chattering to themselves. Shoulders hunched, necks clenched enough to show tendons.

When I finally open the door, I just wave them inside, and hold out a red-and-gold-woven bag to store their timepieces. Then I show them into the waiting room, where a pendulum appears motionless at first. On the other wall, to their left, words of comfort unscroll across a cream-colored sign, so slowly you could doze off and wake to see one new word. The hand-loomed Argelan carpet absorbs all sounds once they’ve removed their shoes. On one of the chairs, a marmot named Cyrus sleeps, with rippling golden fur and blue velvety pseudopods that can extrude or disappear as needed. Most people have never seen a marmot before, let alone a full-grown one that weighs as much as a human toddler. Some of them dare to lean forward and touch Cyrus, and his contented rumble first startles and then relaxes them.

We don’t start preparing the soothing blend of coffee and the geometrically complex interlocking pastries until they arrive, and that process takes three of us a while. Most of the time, the customers’ breathing slows down little by little, and they stop jerking their heads in every direction. A few of them just get up and leave.

After the waiting room, they come into the main salon and stare at the embroidered floor cushions, low tables, wall hangings, and shelves full of books so old their crystals are fogged. They stand there, still breathing too fast and hunching forward, and try to assert themselves. And the only person facing them in that cool, persimmon-scented room is me.

I always smile and gesture for them to sit on the cushions with one palm, and then pour a little clove-scented coffee into their cup, in a thin stream. They start talking, to fill the silence, and I let them. When at last they make a silence, I whisper something, such as a line from one of Hernan’s favorite books, and they have to concentrate to hear. Eventually someone comes in, Kate or Meg, and plays soft tones on a zither.

Behind me, a pinwheel slows down at an imperceptible rate, and the music, too, slows little by little—all the tricks, aimed at putting their Timefulness to sleep, just for a while. I count my breaths, and breathe slower each time, the way I practiced. I sit languidly, ankle-skirt tucked under my feet.

And meanwhile, I study each one of them. Hernan has been training me to read people, to pay attention to all the little cues and hints about what’s really going on with them. So, in turn, I can soothe them with tiny actions. I’ve discovered a whole side to myself that I’d only glimpsed before, and I’ve found it’s easier than I expected to take control over a scene with another person, as long as I have a well-defined role and we start from a place of quiet. And I like helping these people, who keep the farmwheels spinning or the waste flowing through the reclamation plant, to believe that they can survive another turn of the shutters.

Around the time they’ve settled enough to hear me, I do something that feels like a huge exertion. I make conversation.

The Illyrian Parlour is designed to look like a coffeehouse back in Zagreb, the greatest city back on Earth at the start of the Brilliant Age. But at some point, Hernan realized that what people in Xiosphant really needed was a place to lose track of time.

The latest client has burn scars on his face that occlude one eye and create a slight inlet of baldness on one side of his head. Due to an industrial accident, perhaps, or brief exposure to direct sunlight (I think of my mother and flinch, but not visibly, so as not to upset him). “They call me Mustache Bob,” he says, “on account of my mustache.” This is a joke he’s told many times—or not quite a joke, more a deflection. His mustache is certainly impressive: dark, bushy, and tapered on the sides of his full lips.

My first instinct is to think that he just wants to be someplace where nobody will ask him about his injury, where someone can just look at him without drama. But I study him more closely: the downward eye movements, the way he clutches his multitool from work, the twinge of anxiety when I quote from a poem about the Golden Thread of obligation and care. He’s feeling guilty about something that he can’t talk about. Whatever it is, he’s afraid people will find out and destroy him—something I can identify with better than almost anyone.

So we do what Hernan calls the Indirection Dance. I don’t ask him any questions, and we just carry on a superficial chat about art, music, philosophy, all of the things nobody ever talks about in Xiosphant. Back in Zagreb, at its height, fashionable people traveled all the way from the other city-states—even as far away as Khartoum, New Shanghai, and Ulaanbaatar—via slow railways that snaked far below the toxic surface. Just so they could sit in rooms like this, and talk about nothing.

Bob won’t even let out a hint about his secret transgression, but meanwhile he gets excited talking about this cartoon he saw as a child, which they streamed at the Grand Cinema before shutters-up. He makes pictures with his hands while he tries to describe the story. Then, on a hunch, I mention other forms of art, specifically sculpture, and he shuts down.

Just before our session ends, I find out Bob’s sin: he needs to keep his hands busy when he’s monitoring all the big machines at work. So he’s taken to carving tiny figurines out of spare chunks of banyan wood, and he wants to give them away to people. But gifts make Xiosphanti people uncomfortable, suspicious, maybe even angry. If someone just gives you something, they’re saying that you need help, or they’re trying to insinuate themselves into your life. Like everyone always says, “Freely given, twice cursed.” Except maybe Bianca, I guess.

There’s no time left to find the right way to reassure Bob gently that he’s done no wrong, even though we pretend, in here, to have all the time in the world. So I just say in my soft voice, “If you come back, I’d like one of your carvings. I’ll keep it next to my bunk.” For a moment, he pulls away, because he doesn’t want my charity. But then he sees that the look on my face hasn’t changed, and he nods, smiling a little, then runs because he’s late for work.

When I get back to the staging area, Jeremy babbles a stream of praise for my craft, but he’s more scared than ever that he can’t handle this job. I shush him, and he waits a long time for me to speak. “Maybe the next client we can deal with together.” He’s way too grateful, almost crying, and I remember the part about him having nowhere else to go.

I can’t help studying Hernan the way he’s taught me to study other people. He sits in an armchair that looks more comfortable than it is, with big white wings and carvings of waves and boats on the arms. Cyrus the marmot is snuggled in his lap, growling with pleasure as Hernan scruffs his ears with his right hand.

Hernan is taking a huge risk—because Cyrus has rolled onto his back, exposing the gland on his belly that’ll squirt a half liter of acid if anything startles him. The acid won’t kill Hernan, but it would sting horribly, and could cause permanent damage. Still, Hernan looks contented, wearing his usual gold-threaded tunic and linen pants, just with no shoes. Except that Hernan’s left thumb is caught in a vise of his own fingers, like a fear he’s keeping at bay.

I’m perched on a big pile of cushions, ready to topple at any moment, in Hernan’s personal study, which is tiny and crammed with beauty. The dark walls are covered with little statues made with precious stones that must have come from a treasure meteor, red-and-gold watercolor paintings of the Young Father that someone risked blindness to create, strings of vivid blue feathers from some creature I’ve never seen.

I’ve worked here for ages, but I still don’t understand Hernan at all. Everything about him, and about the Illyrian Parlour, spits in the face of Xiosphanti values. Not just the way we try to loosen the reins of Timefulness around people’s necks, but also this elaborate tribute to Zagreb, one of the seven city-states that pooled their resources to build the Mothership and come to this planet.

There was a man in my apartment building, when I was little, who casually mentioned in public that he thought he had ancestors in the Calgary compartment on the Mothership, and people whispered that he was trying to set himself apart from everybody else. I heard my parents whisper sharp-edged little phrases about him, right before shutters-up. Soon after, he lost his job and had to move out, and I don’t know what happened to him after that.

“We’re all Xiosphanti now,” people always say, as if those seven cities dissolved into one people the moment we stepped onto this planet. Even Bianca would never talk about her roots when she and I whispered together after curfew.

Hernan proudly mentions his family came from Zagreb, which is an even more shocking confession, given what the history books say. He doesn’t flinch, or cavil, or act embarrassed by his own rudeness. He just comes out and says it, often right before he lectures me and the other servers about the beautiful way that everything was done in Old Zagreb at its peak.

He doesn’t talk so much about what came later.

But still, Hernan is afraid of something, or perhaps just waiting for tragedy to arrive. This place can’t last, we all know that—but he knows it more than we do.

“Do you know why your mother used to come here?” Hernan asks me, without looking up from Cyrus.

“Yes,” I say, without thinking about it.

“You do? Oh good. Please do tell me. I always wondered.”

“Oh, uh, well,” I say. “She was always so frazzled. My mom, you know, she was a bank for one of the farmwheels. And it was her job to fix everybody else’s messes, all the time. And then she would come home, and my father…” I stop, and pull the conversation back from what was about to be a bad place. “So she came here, to be at peace. That’s what I thought, anyway.”

“Your mother was a very talented artist who never had a chance to share her art with anyone,” Hernan says, “which you’ll find is true of many of our clients here. But she also believed in assimilation and being a good Xiosphanti, and she spent her life keeping all these wheels turning. I think on some level she disapproved of the Parlour, with all our decadence, but we were the only ones who could give her what she needed. Whatever that was. As I said, I still don’t know.”

“What kind of art?” I say, in a whisper that’s not my usual whisper. I don’t want to ruin whatever is happening here, this moment that Cyrus and I have catalyzed.

Hernan just gestures at one of the paintings cluttering the wall: a little girl, standing in front of a pile of barley fresh from the farmwheel. The girl is a smudge of light brown, set off by green-and-white highlights on her chemise and ankle-skirt, and the stalks of barley are a rusty blond.

My mother painted my picture, and I never saw her do it.

I stare for a long time, until the image resolves into brushstrokes, but I can’t turn it into a scene whatever I do. It’s just a girl, and some barley, and no context. The harder I try to imagine the whole moment and place my mother in it, the more powerful the sense of absence becomes, until absence is the meaning of the picture. I hear stuttering breaths from my own mouth, like an echo of Cyrus’s purr; I suckle my own lower lip.

When I get my voice back, I say: “She couldn’t have disapproved of this place too much. She brought me here with her.”

“True,” Hernan says, just cradling Cyrus now. “Or maybe she just thought you would need this place eventually, even more than she did.”

mouth

Alyssa and Mouth met for drinks at the Low Road, right after Mouth had come back from yet another one of those political meetings where everyone kept quoting from ancient thinkers like Mayhew and Grantham. (“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” and “People are most imprisoned by the walls they help to build.”)

“What are you even playing at?” Alyssa demanded, once she caught the stench of another dank factory basement on Mouth’s clothes. “Why are you getting sucked into politics anyway? You always told me politics is for settlers.”

“Politics is a bloody waste of time,” Mouth snorted. “This isn’t about politics.”

Alyssa knew Mouth too well, that was the problem. She was the one who held tight during all of Mouth’s bad dreams, nursed Mouth through her bouts of lightsickness, and cried on Mouth’s shoulder when the road started to eat at her soul. Mouth had shown Alyssa how to catch those little weasels under the crust of the road, which you could live off if you had to, and Alyssa had trained Mouth to shoot a gun. Alyssa even taught Mouth some of the songs from her bat mitzvah, and the stories from the Torah, some of which were about nomads. By now, Alyssa knew all of Mouth’s tells.

“This is about what I said before, that you and I might be getting too old to be smugglers.” Alyssa sipped and made a face. “Now you’re trying to prove something by hanging out with Granthamites who are barely old enough to wank. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, love. You’re not even that much older than me. And anyway, I didn’t mean ‘old’ in terms of physical decay. I meant that I’m burning out. I have dreams about the road, and they all end with my bones in a hole. Even if we had a tunnel and a supplier, we might still be stuck here.”

Mouth sighed and guzzled gin-and-milk. This goddamn local drink tasted like cat butter that had gone bad. To be fair, even fresh cat butter tasted as if it had gone bad. Who exactly was going to trade bauxite for cat butter? Mouth understood enough of that “calendar” to know George had been stringing them along for thirty turns of the shutters.

“I’m working on something.”

“Uh-huh.” Alyssa stared at Mouth. “So you’re scamming these kids? Or what?”

Mouth looked around, like government spies could be hiding behind the ugly placard outside, which commemorated the victims of the great cattle stampede long ago, during the Seventh Age of Luck.

“I need to get inside the Palace.” Mouth gave up on trying to keep a secret from Alyssa. “There’s something in there that I need. They probably don’t even know they have it. It’s worthless to almost anybody, but it’s priceless to me. Remember how I vanished after our meeting with George the Bank? I was scoping out the entrances and exits, and there’s no way I can get inside the Palace on my own. The guards have guards.”

“So, you need a thief. Someone who knows all about breaking into places like that.” Alyssa had always loved stories of palace thieves, the whole time Mouth had known her. Something about the glamour, the disguises, or the inevitable seduction of some handsome count just did it for her. Mouth had seen Alyssa kill three people with a single knife, but she still melted when she listened to one of her old audios of long-dead actors playing out some sexy burglary. Alyssa’s hometown had no palace, no prince, no councilors. All the Argelan kids grew up with dramas and stories about the fine houses here in Xiosphant, until it became a fairytale of gold leaf, mahogany, and velvet, with trumpets and swooning any time anyone entered a room. You only fantasize about princes when you’ve never seen one.

“No thieves,” Mouth just grunted. “They don’t have a lot of thievery in the fancy part of town, after what they did to the last one they caught. Anyway, I don’t have time to recruit a debonair master of disguise, just to steal one item out of a giant vault.”

“What exactly is it?”

Mouth hesitated. “It’s… all that’s left of my culture. The people who raised me.”

“The nomads?” Alyssa perked up, because she’d always wanted to know more about Mouth’s childhood.

Mouth was going to need a lot more gin-and-milk if they were going to talk about this. She had long since turned her upbringing into a handful of cute anecdotes about “the nomads who raised me,” which she’d crafted with great care, to avoid straying into painful territory. But Alyssa was giving her that look, the one she had whenever Mouth had lightsickness and was trying to cover. And maybe Mouth owed Alyssa more than just a rehearsed story.

Just in time, Ray came over and refilled their cups.

“We called ourselves the Citizens,” Mouth said, slowly. “We had a whole other relationship with the road than the Resourceful Couriers have. Like, the road was where we lived, not just where we passed through on our way to someplace else. It sounds stupid when I say it like that. We believed that if we kept walking out there, we could learn to keep company with the day and the night. We always stopped in these small towns along the way, and we became something different each time. One town, we’d be traveling performers, like a theater troupe or some musicians. The next town, we’d be carpenters. Or pest controllers. We were experts at becoming whatever the local people wanted us to be, so we always earned our keep. Until the end, anyway.”

Now Alyssa had the same expression as when she listened to her old-timey actors having a stolen romance—like Mouth’s loss was the loveliest part of a heartbreaking story. Mouth tried not to hold it against her.

“One time,” Mouth said, “we walked farther than ever before, probably farther than anybody ever had. We came to the other side of the world, and we found a canyon. Wide enough to fit five Xiosphants inside. No way to cross, you couldn’t build a bridge wide enough even if you had all the heavy metals in the world. We just stood there and gawped at the other side, through all the mist, and tried to see all the way down to the bottom. And then we turned around and went back the way we came.”

“So how do we steal this thing that’s in the Palace?” Alyssa said.

“You don’t do anything,” Mouth said. “You enjoy your vacation and live off the spoils from our last job, assuming George doesn’t screw us, which I’m putting at fifty-fifty right now.”

“You really think I’m going to let you do this on your own?” Alyssa slapped the table with one fresh-manicured hand. “What kind of bitch do you think I am?”

“The kind of bitch who knows this is none of her business.”

“Shut your filthy hole. You’re my sleepmate. We always have each other’s backs. That doesn’t stop just because we’re off the road.”

Mouth looked at Alyssa. Eyes all bright and wide. Nostrils flared a little, head thrown back to expose a delicate neck and collarbone. “I’m asking you, just this once. Stay out of this. I can already tell it’s going to get ugly.”

Alyssa kept arguing, but eventually she gave up and went to check on the rest of the Couriers, who were still shacked up in the back of a furniture store while George worked out the kinks in their deal.

Mouth always met her informant in the same place, at a small table made of unvarnished banyan wood, in the spicy-yeasty cellar of an oatmeal restaurant. And always at the same time: three chimes after the red-and-blue smoke. Mouth usually arrived first and then sat alone, as motionless and slumped over as one of those black banyan trees that lined the dry gullies in the Northern Ranges.

The girl arrived late, as usual, limned with a grief that dulled her gaze and put heavy lines on a face that seemed like it was made for laughter. “Hey,” she muttered as she sat opposite Mouth. “Thanks for waiting.”

Bianca had high cheekbones, ears shaped like dewdrops, and the sleek confidence of the Xiosphanti ruling class—you could tell some of her ancestors had ridden in the New Shanghai compartment, though you could never say so in this town.

“I’ve been having one of those times when I see her face everywhere, and I just want to scream,” Bianca said.

“I’ve lost a lot of people, and I’m very familiar with the thing where the past becomes an optical illusion.” Mouth chewed every other word before she spoke it.

“How do you deal with it? How do you keep from just screaming and breaking things every time you see someone that you know is dead?”

Mouth didn’t have a good answer for that. The whole reason she was meeting with Bianca was to appease the dead, but that was none of Bianca’s concern.

Those fools had stuck the Invention in a vault inside the Palace, just two kilometers away from here, and maybe this, at last, was the reason why Mouth had elbowed her way past death so many times. So Mouth tried to come up with something to say to Bianca.

“I don’t know. Dreams intrude into reality all the time, and you can’t waste your energy getting mad at them.”

The banyan trees this table was made of had been grown from Earth seeds, spliced with DNA from local flora, and the result had been oily flesh, hard-pebbled skin, and misdirected growth.

“I’m not pissed off at dreams.” Bianca laughed and shook her head. She had to stop talking because a waiter showed up, and she was ordering swamp vodka for both of them. Mouth realized that Bianca’s Xiosphanti had gotten less formal, with fewer clumsy attempts to pin a social status on Mouth, than the first time they’d talked.

Mouth had made three short visits to the Founders’ Square, near the Palace, to try to scope out entrances and exits, and had found no obvious holes in the security. But she’d noticed something else: a gang of twitchy young people who were clearly doing the same thing she was. She’d eavesdropped enough to figure out this was the Uprising, and they were planning something serious. Some kind of political action inside the Palace, and they knew about some secret passage that led all the way in. Plus they had some way of getting past the guards outside. Since then, Mouth had attended as many political gatherings as she could.

But none of the leaders of the Uprising trusted Mouth. Except for Bianca, who ate up Mouth’s stories of visiting other places where they did everything different—including Argelo, the City that Never Sleeps.

The swamp vodka arrived.

“Your friend gave her life for the Uprising, right? So you’re honoring her memory the best you can.” Mouth forced herself to drink, even though the fumes made her sick to her stomach.

Bianca shook her head. “Sophie wasn’t part of the Uprising. Neither was I, back then. We were just kids, playing at being revolutionaries. We never would have overthrown a coffee table. But then Sophie… she took the blame for a few food dollars that I borrowed.” She choked down some swamp vodka and hissed in her throat. “The ludicrous part is, if they had found that money in my pocket instead of hers, they probably would have let me off with a warning. They took one look at her and decided she ought to die.”

“They were trying to send a message,” Mouth said.

“They were being operated by the machinery of the state. They weren’t trying to do anything, really.”

A single electric torch lit the cellar behind Bianca’s head, casting shadows that gave her two black eyes and a long mouth.

“Most people die for stupid reasons. The most anyone can hope for is to make some noise before that happens.” Mouth forced herself to gulp more swamp vodka, to encourage Bianca to keep drinking.

“I never even got to tell Sophie how much she meant to me,” Bianca said. “I didn’t even realize myself, until she was gone. Nobody else ever saw the side of her that I got to see, when we were alone together. She had these amazing insights. I couldn’t wait to see what she would become. The whole world would have learned to admire her. If only—”

Bianca spat out a little blood from chewing her own tongue, but she still didn’t let the tears out, like she hadn’t earned them.

Mouth didn’t get why Bianca had to join these rebels when she was probably destined for a leadership position inside Xiosphant’s government anyhow, if she just kept her head down, and then she could change things from the inside. But Bianca kept saying she didn’t want to be co-opted, to become part of the problem, and she couldn’t play it safe after what they did to her friend.

“Well, whatever it is you and your friends are going to do sounds tricky,” Mouth whispered. “And maybe you could use my expertise at sneaking sensitive items in and out of secure locations.” Mouth tried to keep her voice casual, like she was offering to help Bianca’s friends out of pure altruism, but she could tell she was running out of time. They were going to make their move soon, and she needed to be there when they did.

Facing the end of the Resourceful Couriers felt like losing your family a second time. Like Mouth would need to recount every one of the tears she’d shed after the Citizens all died. Somehow Mouth had convinced herself that if she could just grab the Invention, and get back one small piece of the Citizens, then she’d be okay with whatever happened after that.

Mouth tried to think of the right thing to say to get past Bianca’s guard. “You won’t find anyone else in this town with as much experience moving high-value items.”

“Why would you even want to help us?” Bianca stared at Mouth and frowned. “I thought you were just passing through town. So why get involved with local politics?”

Mouth considered telling Bianca the truth. But instead, she just scratched both her ears with her knuckles, and said, “I don’t even know when I’m going to be able to leave. Our tunnel, uh, got caved in. And I can’t stand to see the way this town exploits people. Everybody here just works and sleeps, works and sleeps, until they drop dead. I’m just not the sort of person who can see injustice without wanting to tear it down with my own hands.” Mouth paused, to make sure she hadn’t oversold it.

When Mouth looked up, Bianca was studying her, like she wanted to believe that Mouth was for real, and could help. Bianca was getting ready to throw her own life away because of her pointlessly dead friend, and she was just smart enough to be terrified.

SOPHIE

I look over my shoulder all the time when I venture outside. Every soot-stained garret hanging over me, every food cart on the sidewalk, becomes a mob or a police squad, and I go stiff and breathless every time I think I’m about to get caught. Even though nobody’s looking for me, I see threats everywhere. It’s more like the memory of my execution is carved into every weathered sandstone wall and every loose brick of these streets, and I can’t go out without feeling as though the police still have me, and I’m still about to be thrown to my death.

But as I dart my head around, I see only the normal life of the city. Children play shadowseek in the big fenced-in workyard, hiding behind industrial lathing tools and carving machines. The workyard used to be an actual playground, before my time, but they decided the space was needed for more important things. Kids insist on playing there anyway. The pipe-workers are having their shift change because it’s Ninth Chime, and they all meet on this one block of sidewalk, in their muddy coveralls, where the pipe-workers going off shift say the old ritual phrases of consolation to the ones who have to work into curfew. This one old man is hand-churning cake batter, in the exact same storefront where he’s done it since my parents were little. I step on flyers for the Grand Cinema and discarded copies of a cheap magazine full of romance stories, both printed on recycled banyan wood.

As I walk in the direction of night, I imagine what I would say to Bianca if she were here, but I no longer have any idea what she would say back.

Some of the buildings in this neighborhood have survived since the beginning of Xiosphant: you can tell by the perfect blocks of whitestone, quarried by the Mothership or an airborne excavator, plus all the classical detailing. The next oldest buildings, including the Illyrian Parlour, come from right around the time of the Great Insomnia, when half the population of Xiosphant left to found another city across the sea, or a slew of smaller towns. You can tell their age by the smoky quality of the bricks, which were fired in this one type of furnace we don’t know how to make anymore. Next, there’s a mishmash of building styles, including rougher bricks but also hand-lathed stone, hauled from beyond the Northern Ranges, with some crude attempts to copy the older style of decorations. We also had that brief period, between wars, when prospectors kept finding new treasure meteors, and trade with Argelo brought lots of beautiful handcrafted decorations. And then there’s everything from the past eight generations, when we just built as much as possible, as cheap as possible, big blocks of cement like the one I grew up in. You can see the whole history of the city, looking at the buildings in any one neighborhood.

I reach the crack in the wall that I’ve squeezed through so many times now, and remove the skirt around the cuffs of my pants. I hesitate, looking up at the side of the Old Mother and remembering the guns and the taunts, the kicks to the back of my leg. The bruises are long faded, but I still feel them under my skin.

And then I start climbing, because I’m looking forward to seeing my friend.

I know every crack and promontory on the Old Mother by touch alone, and I’m pretty sure I could scale this rock blindfolded. This climb, which nearly killed me when I did it at gunpoint, has become relaxation, a vessel to empty my mind. I let my body recite the litany of grip and hookstep, while I breathe out all my preoccupations. Even when I lose my footing or miss a ledge with my hands, I know how to recover, and I know to rest if I have a cramp. Except if I look behind me and see the steep drop and the sharp rocks at the bottom, or if I stare ahead and dwell too much on the memory of the first time I did this, then I panic. My breathing gets out of control and my fingers weaken, and those things only increase the fear, and there are guns in my face, and I’m going to fall.

That’s when I have to stop, breathe deep, and remind myself: You’re climbing by choice this time. You’re in control. This is the proof that you’re stronger than the monsters who forced you up this slope before.

When I get to the top, Rose is waiting for me. Her tentacles are cocked in big loops, like she’s been tracking my progress, and she lowers her head and opens her pincer in what I know is a gesture of welcome. Her forelegs are bent so she can crouch close enough for me to embrace her. The milky inlets on the sides of her head, above her pincer, close in slightly, giving her a wistful look. That round crocodile mouth—which always looked ravenous and vicious in all the pictures they showed at school—seems to grin, but also pants a little in the warm air. Her woolly fur shimmers with a touch of iridescence. Rose shrinks away from the light up here, but lets me approach.

“I’m so glad to see you, you have no idea,” I say, still out of breath. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. I guess I’ve become an expert at keeping people waiting, but that shouldn’t include you.”

Rose doesn’t seem to understand a word I’m saying, which is one reason I’m so comfortable talking to her. But she shows signs of picking up on my emotional states, which is more than enough. I decided to call her Rose, after the rose shape of the city she showed me the first time we met.

I open the satchel I’ve been keeping on my back during this whole long climb, and pull out some stuff for her. “It’s not much this time. I wish I could repay you properly. Or at least be a better friend.” I hand over some blackberries, which come from the smallest of the farmwheels and are almost impossible to get, except that one of my clients knows people. And then a few scraps of Xiosphanti tech.

“This tests water quality.” I hold up one gray-and-red box, shaped like a rectangle, with a big loop coming out of one end. “You hold the curved part in the water, and watch for the color on this side. We have a lot of problems with contamination, and I thought maybe you do too.”

Rose thanks me, and with one tentacle she holds up her own present for me. It’s a ball of dark green spikes with bright blue tips, connected to a long yellow-white stalk. The spikes are each as long as my ring finger, and they quiver in the wind. The frosty stem burns the skin off my fingers. I take a piece of cloth from my pocket, so I can hold it.

I stare for ages before I realize: it’s a flower. Some kind of hardy plant that grows out there in the night and exists without sunlight, maybe even without liquid water. It can’t use photosynthesis, so how does it live? The spikes catch the twilight and seem to glisten, the greens and blues seeming more vivid and delicate the longer I stare. There’s no way this flower will survive the trip back to Xiosphant, so I just commit it to memory while Rose rests next to me.

“I’m actually feeling kind of happy,” I say to Rose without taking my eye off the rippling blue-green petals. “I don’t know if I ought to be. I can’t stand to wonder what Bianca’s doing right now. But meanwhile, I have a new family, and we’re helping people. I’m doing work that I enjoy, and I can see the results. My life feels wrong, but good. Maybe that’s the best I can do.”

Rose just tilts her head toward me, like she wants to understand. The flower is already wilting. The cloth I’m pinching around the stem is soggy. The spikes droop, but as they do, they reveal an underseam of brilliant orange.

“I wish I could have talked to my mother about her paintings,” I say. “I never even knew she painted.”

Rose is holding her pincer open, ready for me to go inside again. I try not to drop the flower as I lean toward her. I’ve found that it’s easier to do this from a kneeling position, when Rose is hunkered down, than standing up. I’m still thinking about Bianca, and my mother, and the impermanence of the flower in my hand, when my face and neck make contact with the slimy tendrils, and—

—I’m out in the ice. This is the part where usually Rose shows me some aspect of the crocodiles’ society, like how they built that huge city by mining deep caverns and tempering metal in the heat of a volcano, and by growing other structures organically. Sometimes she shows me some engineering feat that would make the professors at the Gymnasium sick with envy, but then it’s tinged with a sadness, a worry, that I don’t understand.

This time, though, I don’t see other crocodiles, deep furnaces, or soaring girders. I see a young human, dying in the snow.

(This is the second time I’ve seen how I look to someone else lately, and this time I almost don’t recognize myself. To Rose’s senses, I’m a pile of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals and making vibrations in the chill air. A jittering, stumbling human, smaller than most, with upper limbs closed in on themselves. The most unusual thing about me, to Rose, is that there’s only one of me.)

I hesitate, because the smart thing in this situation would be to leave this creature to die. But something makes me stop and examine closer. We have plenty of experience with human fight-or-flight behavior, including the usual stances and the chemicals that humans give off. And this one tastes different on the wind: like some mixture of defiance and tenderness.

So instead, I approach the shivering, mewling human and embrace her. For a moment, she seems about to lash out and try to attack my tendrils, and maybe I’ll be a dead fool. But no, she moves into my embrace, and I give her one short memory, with a simple message: We have our own city. We can work together—

—I think that’s it, Rose has shown me everything she’s going to, but the memory shifts, and—

—I’m standing with a group of other crocodiles, and we’re watching one of our friends bleeding from a spear that juts out from under her carapace. She’s surrounded by humans who carry explosives and weapons that could tear through us. My stomachs grind and every heart in my body beats against its cavity with the need to help my friend, but the other crocodiles cross their tentacles in my path. It’s too late for her. I break down, venting a noxious cloud of misery and grief, as the humans lash my friend with cords. They drag her, still flailing, up the mountain toward the punishing glare—

—Rose lets me go. I’m already on my knees, but I sink further, and double over, sick to my stomach. My face is moist from the secretions on Rose’s tendrils, which create an afterimage when I breathe deeply. I’m hyperventilating, which makes Rose’s memories flicker in and out of my head.

“Why don’t you just hate us?” I stammer. “Why don’t you want to kill us?”

Rose just pulls away slowly, and pulls herself up on her hind legs.

“I know you could. I’ve seen enough of your geoengineering by now. You could bring rocks and ice down on our city, and we’d never even know what happened.” I take a deep breath and rise up on one knee, swaying. “I’m… I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend.”

I’ve never eaten crocodile meat. Few people have, it’s a huge delicacy. But I’ve seen the hunting parties leaving town before, young people full of loud songs and swagger, and I watched Frank take one apart with knives and spikes. Something rotten settles in my guts and I have to hug my knees. “That was evil. And I wish there was something more I could do.”

The ice flower is a dark smudge on the ground.

Rose can sense my distress, like before, and maybe she understands I’m expressing remorse. She comes back again, and opens her pincer one more time. I rise up and bring my face in, and I get a single impression of a block of glossy orange metal. Copper. I feel its cool weight on my hand. She pulls away again.

“Okay,” I say, still unsteady on my feet, still heartsick. “I’ll get you some copper.”

Rose turns and clambers over the edge, back toward the night, her front legs picking at the rocks so she doesn’t overbalance. A moment later, she’s gone, and I turn back to stare at the complacent city, washed in its usual gradient. The farmwheels and tar rooftops shine like new.

I think about how in the world I can score some copper, and then it hits me: I’ll need to go back to the temperate zone, the home of all my fear and regret. For a moment, I’m sure I’ll die—that if I go anywhere near the Gymnasium, people will see me, they’ll shout, the cops will arrive, and this time—

Then I breathe and remind myself, You’re in control. You’re stronger than those monsters. I pick myself up and hurry back to town before they ring the last curfew bell, running down the slope so fast I nearly kick myself as I skid and spill onto the ground.

mouth

Mouth and Bianca took a walk on the edge of the slaughterhouse district, where livestock raised outside Xiosphant came in to be butchered, on lorries or in long trains of wide-eyed cows and fidgeting goats. These buildings clustered near the city wall, on the side facing the Northern Ranges, and they made a crisp profile of clay-brick gables and steeples against the wall’s edge. Mouth had only eaten meat occasionally in Xiosphant, but she did appreciate the leather.

Since they were out in the open, walking along a wide slate-paved road with the indentations of countless lorry wheels, they spoke in whispers, and only discussed politics obliquely. Still, Mouth welcomed a meeting someplace besides the oatmeal restaurant.

“When they took Sophie, I lost all my dumb illusions about how the world works,” Bianca said. “I had all these lofty theories about culture, and internalized mechanisms of control, but I hadn’t ever faced up to how much the world runs on crude, mindless violence until it was right in front of me.”

“Violence doesn’t settle everything,” Mouth grunted. “Sometimes violence just postpones a conversation that’s bound to happen sooner or later. But that can be useful in itself, to some people.”

Bianca had barely slapped anyone in her life, and Mouth was the first person she’d ever met who’d killed people as part of her job. At times, Bianca seemed to crave reassurance: that she could do this, that fighting and maybe killing would come naturally, that it would pay off. Other times, she almost seemed to wish Mouth would say, You’re not cut out for this, leave this to the professionals. To justify Bianca’s qualms, or make a space for her anxiety about whether her grief over Sophie would give her enough strength.

Sometimes at the oatmeal place, Bianca would quiz Mouth about her skills. How many people had she killed? Could she fight in close quarters? What weapons did she have particular experience with? Those questions always came with an appraising stare, like Mouth was a piece of merchandise that might be overpriced.

Now, in the wide driveway near the rows of abattoirs, Mouth tried to remember what the Citizens had said about self-defense when they’d trained every child to hold a weapon. Bianca seemed lost in thought.

At last Mouth said, “Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violent. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”

“That almost sounds like a quote from Mayhew.” Bianca laughed, then covered her mouth because they were out in the open, where any number of government spies could be lurking behind these walls, along with the muffled drone of cutting machines.

The longer Mouth stayed in Xiosphant, the further off-center everything drove her. They had foods that you could only eat right after the shutters opened, and other foods you ate right before they closed. People would raise a glass before the blue-and-red smoke filled the sky, because they expected it. When Bianca talked about the workers’ rebellion that happened during her great-grandparents’ time, she couldn’t help saying it took place during the Third Age of Plenty.

And right now, Mouth was hustling to George’s roofing plant, because the klaxons said the city was getting ready to pull up all the shutters. You could smell the starchy aroma of everyone’s pre-sleep meal, and the soapy fumes of last-chance laundry. The sky remained pale, and calm, thanks to those mountains cutting off the worst of the weather systems, but people rushed as if they were about to get hailed on. A look of good-natured anxiety on everyone’s face. You could almost hear them mutter, “Oh dear, this is very bad, well, it’s okay, but it’s very bad, must get indoors, if only I had a little more time, oh dear.”

Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just as long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.

George was in a good mood, because he’d been able to unload some of the textiles they’d brought from Argelo, and had done some wizardry to get them a “basket of currencies” in return.

“Is that like money?” Reynold snorted.

Mouth had to help the other Couriers to carry the crates of silk and muslin across town. They couldn’t use the sled because it drew too much attention, and they had to move these crates before the shutters closed. George came along, since he knew all the teeny alleyways that cut between the big boulevards and the crisscrossing avenues. The main obstacle in these shortcuts: heaps of garbage that smelled like the poisonous swamps out past Argelo, where they made vodka out of the sap of this one carnivorous plant. (Swamp vodka tasted better if you didn’t know where it came from.)

Six of them carried crates on their shoulders, nearly tripping over rubbish every few steps, and Mouth heard Alyssa cursing as she stepped in puddles. Their route took them closer and closer to the night.

The final bell sounded, meaning they were too damn late.

“Here it is.” George pointed at a stone staircase, at the end of a narrow alley.

By the time they hoisted the crates up the uneven stairs into the garment factory, the shutters were going up all over town, with a sound like Xiosphant was grinding its teeth.

“We’ll have to stay here until the shutters drop again,” Omar said before they even had a chance to look around the garment factory. Looms, rows and rows of sewing machines with rusty pedals, vats of dyes and ammonia. The place smelled even worse than the alleys, or the sub-basements where Mouth had snuck into political meetings. No place to lie down, and only those benches to sit on. The factory manager apologized in a few grunts as he handed over the “basket of currencies” in a bag made of cheap canvas, then locked himself in his office with the single cot.

“I can tell I’m not going to be able to sleep here,” Mouth said.

“Better get some shut-eye if you can. It’s also illegal to sleep when the shutters are open,” Alyssa said, settling onto one of those benches in front of a sewing machine.

“That’s not true.” Yulya gaped, speaking in broken Xiosphanti. “Is it true?”

“Actually,” said George, “the penalties are almost as bad for sleeping during shutters-down as for being out and about during shutters-up. You’re supposed to be contributing to society when everyone’s awake, so we’re all united. They’ve put people to death for being repeat offenders: sleeping at the wrong time more than once.”

“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” Mouth said, without even thinking.

George leapt to his feet and looked around, like they were all about to be arrested. “Where did you hear that?”

Everyone stared at Mouth. Alyssa raised one eyebrow. Omar’s eyes narrowed. The Resourceful Couriers had an informal rule against getting involved in local politics, for obvious reasons, and Mouth had sort of forgotten.

“I dunno.” Mouth tilted her head. “I was drinking somewhere and there were these students. I thought it was a funny thing to say.”

“It’s a dangerous ideology,” George said, “aimed at cutting my throat. Cutting all our throats. Wrecking our whole society. People don’t realize how much we’re all just hanging on by our fingernails. This planet really doesn’t want us here.”

“I don’t know.” Alyssa decided to rescue Mouth from an awkward moment. “Maybe people in this town could stand to loosen up just a tad, you know? I’ve been in synagogues in Argelo that were more laid-back.”

“I know you people have been to other places, where they deal with this hostile environment differently,” George said. “But we have almost a million people in Xiosphant, and everyone has food and shelter, pretty much.” He turned back to Mouth. “That phrase you quoted was part of a whole manifesto about living in harmony with nature, which on this planet is antithetical to human life.”

Mouth was starting to understand what that guy had meant when he said people were the most trapped by the walls they helped to build. But she just nodded at George and pretended to fall asleep.

Once the shutters came down again, Mouth would pretend to be awake.

SOPHIE

The memorial to the Second Argelan War looks even uglier up close: the seams in the lumpy black underside, the ochre streaks where it’s rusting away.

The sculptor tried to create the impression of waves and froth below the little section of boat, but they were working with an ungainly metal that couldn’t hold any fine details. I always heard that parts of this sculpture were made of melted-down artillery, but either way the result came out crude, like something your somnambulist hands might shape in the throes of a bad dream. Above the slice of deck, a faceless man in a heavy uniform stands holding a weapon on one shoulder, ready to fire some projectile.

I hunch behind the statue until I hear her voice, then I peer between the soldier’s legs. Bianca walks across the Gymnasium’s plaza with a satchel across her almost-translucent chemise, and her laugh sounds as dazzling as ever. She smiles and waves to the other students who trot past her on their way to class, and then she stops and talks to Cally, an earnest red-haired girl, about homework. I can almost guess which class they’re heading to, and what jibes Bianca is making about the professor.

The crumbling edges of the statue scrape my arms and repel my attempts to lean against them. The soldier scans for enemy boats in the distance. I sink below his leaden feet and look at a tiny rip in my ankle-skirt.

I tell myself this is what I wanted for Bianca. I wanted her to let me go, to get on with her life and be happy. I knew she was bound to forget me. If anything, I should be relieved. But I feel as if I’m made of the same dead weight as this top-heavy soldier, who seems more and more doomed to pitch over. I see nothing but rust and metal fatigue, but Bianca’s voice still comes, from far off.

Copper nuggets weigh down my jacket pockets. I took all the infrastructure chits I’d ever earned at the Illyrian Parlour and went around town to all the markets and scrapyards, buying a little at a time. I couldn’t buy too much in one place, or someone would ask questions.

I’m about to sneak back to the nearest alley, a dozen meters away. But I turn back for one last look. Something to preserve in my mind for later. This time, I see a different Bianca.

She stands alone in the plaza, and her posture has transformed, now that she thinks nobody sees her. She stoops forward, her mouth wraps into a scowl, and her eyes have dark lines. Her right hand makes a half fist. All of the other students have gone, because class is starting, but Bianca stares at the paving stones. At last she forces herself to go to class, walking short measures that make her loose skirt ripple.

My heart wakes at the thought of running over to Bianca. I want to pull her into a hug and cradle her head with one hand, tell her that I’m here. I’m alive. I came back for her. I stare at the tight lines around Bianca’s mouth as she walks to class, and I feel so much longing and compassion and joy and sadness and rage I can’t help stepping around the statue, right in broad view.

But as soon as I’m out in the open, the memory-panic hits. I imagine the cops seeing me, in the middle of campus, and surrounding me. Their black faceplates blotting everything, their hands on my arms and legs. I won’t escape this time. All my former classmates will swarm outside to watch.

I feel my body go taut, and my lungs empty. I’m never going to escape that moment, no matter what I do. I almost white out from oxygen starvation. My armpits feel fresh-bruised, but the rest of my body has no sensation. I manage to stagger back behind the cover of the statue, praying nobody saw me, and then I sink into its shadow. By the time I get blood back in my head, Bianca has gone inside one of the classroom buildings.

I’m left alone, catching my breath, next to the whitestone plaque commemorating our heroic dead.

I can’t stop cursing myself as I work my way back toward the darker end of town. Bianca was right there, she needed me, and I did what? I stayed hidden, because when I saw the Gymnasium and the students and everything, my execution turned brand new, as if it had just happened. They took me away from her, and they’re still taking me from her. It’s not my fault. I know it’s not my fault. The whole purpose of arresting me and hauling me away, with so much fanfare, was to put fear into people.

So why be surprised that the fear is in me?

Those gloved hands haven’t loosened their hold on me, even after all this time.

I have to stop and check myself, because I’m carrying valuable metal and I don’t want to be noticed in this neighborhood. I try to clear my mind and pretend I’m playing a game of shadowseek.

Every child in my neighborhood learns to play shadowseek at a young age, even middle-class kids like myself. To win, you have to know where the shadows are, and move from one to another without a break. The shadows never change shape or position, so a clever child can memorize them in advance. And if you’re really good, you can stay in the shadows by pure instinct.

But my mind is stuck in the moment when Bianca let her grief show and I almost went to her. I hardly even see my surroundings, because in my mind I’m still stepping out from behind a decaying metal slab, about to console her with an indelible tenderness. All the potential that was in that moment, I let it fill me up so that maybe next time I can…

That thought consumes me—so I don’t even notice the mob until it’s rushing toward me.

They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time.

But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness. We arrive in Founders’ Square, facing the Council Building and the Spire.

I stand, pressed in on all sides by people, and stare down at the paving stones, which have a pattern that looks like star charts when the light hits them. My parents used to bring me here to listen to the vice regent or even the prince, and instead of looking up at all the gaudy costumes, or the grandeur of the Palace and the Spire and everything around me, I just ran my fingers over this pavement, marveling at the flecks of mica and agate.

Trumpets sound, and the vice regent comes out on the plinth: a tall man with a slack chin and mean eyes, wearing a long gold tunic held together with a bright red sash. We hear his voice around the square, thanks to speakers but also the amazing acoustics that our ancestors engineered.

The vice regent talks about all the achievements of Xiosphant since our great-grandparents’ time, when the Fourth Age of Beauty began. We were falling into decadence, our society was collapsing, all our resources were dwindling. But then we severed contact with Argelo, we stopped tolerating disruptive elements, and we renewed our Xiosphanti values, thanks to the Circadian Restoration. Now we’re truer to our ideals than ever. And yet, we’ve made sacrifices—like all the people who just journeyed past the Northern Ranges to find more arable soil for the farmwheels, steering lorries across thousands of kilometers, with only their timepieces to tell them when to sleep.

The vice regent puts on his most comforting voice. “Thanks to these brave souls, and our hardworking farmers, I’m delighted to announce an increase of two percent in the supply of food dollars. Alas, at the same time we are still facing… certain resource constraints. And thus, the supply of both water tokens and med-creds is being reduced by ten percent each. I’m sure we’ll all make the best of this challenging situation, because we’re Xiosphanti, and we—”

Everyone roars. I don’t hear the end of that sentence, because the mob is rushing forward again, this time charging straight at the vice regent’s plinth, in front of the Council Building. A woman standing next to me has a moldy radish that she must have brought just for this moment, and she flings it at one of the riot cops in front of us. People chant slogans, but I only hear vowels. The vice regent tries to restore order, but the officers have clubs and shields raised.

I have no choice but to run toward a line of police, who wear the same murky faceplates as the figures in my worst memory. They’re raising weapons and clubs, and I feel myself blank out as the people in front of me crash into the wall of the Council Building. We speed up as we hit. I have to close my eyes for a moment. They’re going to clutch me, I’m trapped. When I look again, the people closest to the front are crushed between the mob and the police shields, and I hear them scream. The police bring their clubs down.

The calm part of my mind takes over, the same part that figured out how to communicate with Rose the first time. I pull back and look at this whole situation as if from far above. I stop staring at the mob and the armored cops, and search instead for a way to survive. I don’t let myself look at the helmets and guns, or think about how close they are.

The woman next to me snarls and hoists another vegetable. Then the whip-crack sound of a gun, and she’s gone. Just… vanished. I don’t even think to look down at first, and then I see her. A red mess has replaced most of her head, but the people around me trample her body.

I’m still not letting myself feel any of this. The crowd has broken. People shove each other in all directions. Someone pushes me and I nearly fall in the path of more trampling feet. But I recover, and then I spot the golden statue of Jonas, and I dodge the flailing limbs and angry faces to reach it. I pull myself up into the hollow underside of Jonas’s shimmering All-Environment Survival Suit and hide. I hear shouts, falling bodies, and more gunshots.

The noises peter out, but I don’t leave my hiding place. A few times, I’m about to make a move, when I hear the police making another sweep or, later on, the aggrieved cleanup crew trying to mop all the blood and dirt off the spangled paving stones. But at last they all decide to knock off and get some gin-and-milk, so I risk slipping away.

I reach the Parlour with just one bell left to shutters-up, and turn the brass doorknob three times left and four times right, as I was taught. Five people with severe windburn and ill-fitting Xiosphanti clothes are sitting in the entry lounge, with Cyrus sneering at this invasion of his cozy space, exposing his lower incisors. One of these strangers has a spiky haircut that covers only the middle of her scarred head, and another has metal sticking out of his face. I almost turn and leave again, because these people don’t look like clients. The images of the police shields and helmets, the gunshot and the headless woman are still seeping into my mind, and I can already tell they’re going to replay in my dreams.

But Hernan appears and waves one arm. “Sophie, come on in. These lovely people are the Resourceful Couriers, and they’re visiting from Argelo. They won’t be staying long. I’ve done business with them in the past, and this time they’ve brought some great delicacies, including genuine cat butter.”

I can’t help gawping. I’ve never even met any foreigners before. The Resourceful Couriers nod at me, and one tall man with a large black mustache and neat beard does a little bow. They’re all staring at me, and the need to get away from all these people is almost overwhelming. But I’m curious, too.

“I was worried about you,” Hernan says to me. “I thought you might have gotten caught up in the… unpleasantness at the Founders’ Square.” He measures his syllables, as if to remind me that, inside the Parlour, we do not rush.

“Some unpleasantness, yes.” The leader of the Resourceful Couriers, the man with the dark whiskers, laughs. “People here are not accustomed to seeing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.” Omar’s accent sounds like nothing I’d ever heard, and his syntax keeps slipping from polite to familiar.

“In my experience,” says Hernan, “absolutely everyone can pretend to be a pacifist, just so long as there’s enough money to go all the way around.”

I want to keep listening, but without anyone paying too much attention to me. So I fetch a pot of lukewarm coffee and load up a tray with tiny cups.

The youngest Resourceful Courier is a woman named Yulya, close to my age, with long dark hair and skin that looks less windscarred than everyone else’s. Yulya believes her ancestors traveled in the Zagreb compartment, just like Hernan’s, and she stares at every little item and decoration. “I can’t believe you managed to build all of this. In Xiosphant, of all places,” she says, with worse grammar than Omar. “I wish my father could see this place.”

“I always heard that Zagreb didn’t put in its fair share when they were pooling resources to build the Mothership,” says the large man with the metal piercing his face. I think his name is Kendrick.

“That’s what they say, when they talk about it at all,” Hernan says.

I’ve heard Hernan’s version of the story a few times now. By the time the great city-states of Earth were building the Mothership to escape a ruined planet, Zagreb was in steep decline from its worldwide supremacy back at the start of the Brilliant Age. But you still couldn’t call yourself cosmopolitan if you hadn’t spent time there, so all the other cities made concessions to allow Zagreb to have a compartment on the ship. In return, the Zagreb contingent made sure to bring everything from musical instruments to cooking spices to beautiful handcrafted furniture to great works of literature—everything you’d need to re-create true civilization.

But after the radiation leaks, the explosive decompression, the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, and all the tiny wars, the Zagreb stock ended up ruined. They arrived with nothing. All anybody remembered about Zagreb was that they didn’t contribute as much as all the other city-states, but we let them come along out of charity.

Hernan grew up believing he came from a long line of beggars. He and all his extended family lived on the bright edge of town, where the shutters conducted heat and you felt like you were cooking alive in the dark, and he hated every one of his relatives. Until Hernan somehow discovered a long-forgotten book about the salons of Old Zagreb. That’s why he opened the Illyrian Parlour, although he had to pretend that it was just a beautiful coffeehouse, and downplay any Zagreb connection, or else they’d never have let him accept food dollars instead of just luxury coins.

Some of the other Resourceful Couriers pipe up with their own theories and stories about things that happened to their distant ancestors on the Mothership, during the journey, or after planetfall. This conversation has strayed into territory that would get all of us arrested, at a time when the city has already set about eating itself, and then I realize the smugglers are amused by my discomfort, to varying degrees. Which makes me more uncomfortable.

Thank goodness everyone realizes the shutters are about to close, and the conversation ends. The Resourceful Couriers leave the Parlour in a hurry, looking flustered, almost like proper Xiosphanti.

Four of us sleep in a tiny room, even smaller than I used to share with Bianca, with two rows of bunks. I’m sleeping above Jeremy, who thrashes when he dreams about whatever drove him away from his comfortable old existence. All Jeremy has told me about his past is that he was doing an extended course in geophysics, hoping to help solve the great riddle of our world: how the climate can be so stable, with fire and ice so close together, and whether it’ll stay that way. But there was some scandal, an improper romance, and he had to flee.

Opposite us are Kate and Walter, who’ve been here the longest and always start shoving, running, and pillow-fighting the moment we’re done playing at languid slowness.

Everyone else seems to be asleep, but I just lie there and hug myself. I remember the defiance on that woman’s face at the Square, right before she didn’t have a face anymore. All of my old fears feel even more rational than before, and the gloved fingers grip my armpits more tightly. My last thought before sleep is of Bianca’s ghost smile, slowly dispelling.

When the shutters open, I wake groggy, and remember dreaming of helmets on a mountainside. Meanwhile, Walter, Kate, and Jeremy are whispering that our next clients will be the worst, now that everyone knows someone who got trampled or shot at. A feeling of dread seeps through all of the hand-gilded murals and reproductions of classic wooden furniture.

Hernan takes me aside as soon as I’ve dressed and tied my wavy hair back with a neat ribbon. “Sophie, I know you had a terrible experience. Do you feel up to working this shift? We can always give you some time off.”

Over in the far corner, Jeremy’s eyes widen, because if I take a surprise vacation, Jeremy will be left dealing with all these people on his own, and he’s still not ready.

I shrug. “I’ll be okay.”

Hernan stares, because he knows I’m lying.

“I’m close enough to okay,” I say. “I know how to get out of a situation if I start feeling less okay.”

“That will have to do, I suppose.” Hernan smiles, and then offers me a hug. I hesitate a moment, then lean into his stocky chest, close enough to see a loose silver thread on his brocaded jacket. “I wish I knew why you were sneaking off all the time, with my old padded jacket and those new boots that you spent all your clothing vouchers on. You never quite explained how you survived being forced up that mountain, and now I wonder… I just hope that whatever you’re doing, you keep yourself safe.”

I feel like saying, Nobody is ever safe, but instead I smile and say, “Of course.”

Long after I have forgotten what everything in the Illyrian Parlour looks like, the scents will stay with me. The musk that hangs in the air after I’ve slept in our tiny bunkroom with Jeremy, Walter, and Kate, the flowery, pungent scent of coffee brewing in the tiny cracked-tile kitchen behind the beautiful client room, the aroma of sandalwood and fresh-cut lavender, the comfort of soap. These scents have come to feel like home, and if I even notice a hint of sandalwood or dark coffee anywhere else, I feel a recognition that my mind only catches up with after a moment.

I find myself trying to memorize every detail, so I’ll remember this place whatever happens, and also because Hernan created a place where the world feels bigger, and yet also more intimate, than anywhere else in this city. I wish I could figure out how he pulled that off. My mother used to smile at me and say these funny things, which I now recognize as quotes from the books Hernan has made me memorize. A fen has more dignity than a mountain, because the fen settles according to its own weather. Or: Listen to yourself, hear your own footsteps, your breaths, your heartbeats, oh, how many rhythms you make as you come and go! you are an orchestra. I remember my mother saying that to me: “You are an orchestra.” And laughing, until I laughed too without getting the joke.

Jeremy and I work together, while Kate and Walter play music or hustle behind the scenes, and Jeremy’s grateful enough that I’m working that he covers for me when I have to shut my eyes and ride out a small memory-panic. Some part of my mind has combined the guns that forced me up a mountain with the ones that took a woman’s head apart, as if those were one incident. And meanwhile, the people who sit across from us flail around, grope for stillness, and make too much noise and commotion, in spite of all our work. Jacek, a pipe-worker who always seems ashamed of his fetid odor in this clean, fragrant space, keeps looking in all directions, biting all his fingers one by one, muttering, “They didn’t need to shoot anyone, they didn’t,” and twitching. Our next client, a tall athletic woman from the power plant, seems better, breathing slow and shallow, hands on knees, until I realize she’s in shock.

Nobody is okay. Nothing we do helps. I breathe slower and louder, confuse them with morsels of old stories, sprinkle petals in their coffee. Client after client. The shutters close, and open again, and it’s the same thing again. Even after two more shutter-cycles.

It’s okay, I want to say, I know how you feel. Like slow-dancing with a rockfall.

After another endless shift, I let myself slump, so exhausted my arms fall like rags. I turn to Jeremy and ask, “Have you ever had something happen to you that scared you so much you felt like you were going to keep reliving it forever?”

Jeremy pauses for a moment, his round face creasing. “Hernan always says that a perfect moment of beauty can last forever. But maybe some moments are so ugly that they never end, either. All you can do is be patient with yourself.”

mouth

Mouth spent way too much time obsessing about how to get inside Bianca’s head when the two of them weren’t sitting together in the oatmeal place, eating overseasoned mush and drinking bad liquor. Bianca’s main weakness seemed to be the dead girl, Sophie. Mention that name, and she just devolved into a weepy mess, but this always led to a conversation about loss and revenge rather than any actionable information about their Palace job.

“Every time the shutters roll down and the light comes into my room I lay there, and I just look up at the milky sky. I curse, and I stare at the shelf where Sophie used to sleep.” Bianca closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. “Hope doesn’t get me out of bed. Duty definitely does not get me out of bed. The only thing that does is making the bastards who took her from me pay.”

By this point, Bianca had talked about the dead girl half a dozen different times—but Sophie never once sounded like a real person. According to Bianca, Sophie had possessed no flaws, not even the slightest jealousy or negativity. “She always wanted to see the good in everyone.” Bianca held the bowl of oatmeal to her face and breathed in the sour vapor. “She managed to see through all the hypocrisy, using kindness instead of anger.”

“There’s no way to replace someone who had so much life. But I guess you can still make her death worth something.” Mouth could smell all the spices and the rankness of boiled tomatoes in the kitchen upstairs. The scent brought back a powerful recall of this one herb that the Citizens used to pick out in the far plains way past the other side of Argelo, which Yolanda insisted was great for your digestion, but which tasted like salty dirt.

“You’re the only person I can talk to about her,” Bianca said. “Everybody at the Gymnasium just decided to pretend Sophie never even existed as soon as she was gone. And Derek and the other organizers of the Uprising don’t want to hear about my selfish motivations for joining the fight. Everybody’s supposed to be in this for the pure light of justice, and liberation from the endless cycle of toil.”

“There’s no right reason for wanting to make a difference.” Mouth kept seeing that picture of the Invention from the catalog in her head. She imagined picking it up and letting light into all its contours, and feeling as though maybe her life had a purpose after all.

“Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the Uprising. I think Xiosphant was a great place once, before the wars and the isolationism and the Circadian Restoration, but now it’s grown into something elitist and corrupt.” Bianca looked up at the pockmarked clay ceiling. “The only goal this city has is to maintain. We’re just supposed to keep the city the same for another four or five generations, and after that, everything breaks beyond our ability to repair.”

Mouth wanted to say, You shouldn’t get yourself killed in a pointless gesture. But she thought about the Invention, and instead she said, “I bet Sophie would be proud of what you’re doing.”

“I hope so.” Bianca smiled, and the backlit shadows turned it into a scowl. “I just can’t keep feeling like this. Ever since they took her, I’ve hated every breath. And I want to take all of this pain and give it to someone else. Let them see how they like it.”

Mouth sensed she was running out of time to find out how these revolutionaries were going to get inside the Palace. If she could just sneak inside under their cover, she’d only need a few hundred heartbeats to get upstairs, crack the vault, and grab the Invention.

Mouth almost said, You know, you’ll just end up killing the working stiffs if you attack the Palace. The guards, the cleaning staff, the drudges. You’ll never even touch the people in power. Instead, she poured Bianca more swamp vodka and said, “You need to stay angry, and remember why you’re fighting. Hold on to that fire, because you owe it to your friend. Trust me, you can’t leave these debts unpaid, or it’ll ruin you over time.”

As Mouth spoke, she was thinking of the fire that had consumed the Citizens’ remains, and the debt that she had carried ever since. Bianca was nodding, heavily, and Mouth made herself smile.

SOPHIE

The last few times I visited Rose at the summit of the Old Mother, I’ve been empty-handed, because it took me some time to figure out how to get copper. This time, I’m weighed down. To add to the chunks I bought in the temperate zone, I stripped some old wiring that I scrounged in an alley near the Illyrian Parlour, and found a few more bits in a scrapyard, plus one of our clients made me a present of a pendant that has some copper in it. The extra load adds to the strain on my already-stiff arms with every steep rise. I keep taking breaks, and thinking about Bianca’s heartsick expression.

When I reach the plateau, I sit and wait, staring outward, and I try to make sense of all this mess. No human being has ever shared their thoughts with me the way Rose has. I know more about what it feels like to watch hunters drag my friend into the searing twilight than I’ll ever know about most human experiences, and every time I think about that image I feel something lower than shame. Even with all the other anxieties that overturn my thoughts, the image of a crocodile being dragged away for an obscene feast, bound and bleeding, keeps coming back.

I hear a crunch, and a massive shape rises out of the dark. I nearly lose my balance on the slice of rock where I’m perching, even though I’ve been waiting for Rose. The wind ruffles her fur, and her front legs crinkle as she plants her wide, clawed feet. She shields herself from the meager daylight with her tentacles, and crouches near me, greeting me in the crocodile fashion. Her round mouth seems to smile.

“Hi,” I say, over the sorrowful wind. “It’s good to see you. I hope you’ve been safe out there. I hope all your friends are holding up. Things in Xiosphant have been… intense. Everyone is so freaked out they almost can’t think straight.”

I’m ashamed of my tiny amount of copper, which Rose clutches in one tentacle before tucking it under her woolly carapace. We used to have tons of the stuff, because the Mothership had steered a lot of ore-rich asteroids down to us. People used copper to decorate everything, but all the treasure meteors are exhausted and our mines are empty. Scientists believe that a lot of the most valuable metals on this planet are concentrated on the day side, where we can’t mine or even investigate.

So to make up for this sad bundle, I reach into my satchel and pull out the timepiece my father gave me when I was a child, to help me pay attention. I had this tiny clock in my jeans pocket when they banished me to this place, and the fine metalwork survived somehow. You can still make out the care that somebody put into every angel, every flower, and the way the fine gears turn.

“This is important to my people,” I say. “This is how we know what to do, or what everyone else is doing right now. If you could read this, and you knew enough about me, you could use this to know where I am, all the time.” I try to show Rose how to wind it, and which dial points to day or night, the different times and settings. She seems to pay attention, or at least to understand I’m making a fuss about this object. When I place the timepiece into her tentacle, she tries to give it back. I press it into her grasp and let go.

“A present. For you.”

Rose accepts the clock, placing it next to the copper. Then she beckons with her open pincer, and I only hesitate for a moment. I push my face and neck into the fulcrum, where slick warm fingers brush my face—

—We live in a great city, far from here, under the crust of the night. Cliffs of ice, deep fissures, towering structures of stone and metal, and wheels turning far beneath us, fueled by underground rivers, and furnaces hotter than the touch of the sun. At the heart of our city, tiny creatures who look like us hang in a mesh of warm, dark threads, helpless and spindly. They cry out, their tentacles and pincers still too tiny to communicate properly, but we can feel their distress, and our blood runs thin. They stay inside that web because their slender bodies haven’t finished developing, and when an adult places some bright roots among the threads holding them, the babies absorb this nourishment right away. The roots shrivel as the web swells with nourishment. But these infants still cry out. Their pincers open and close, and the message is clear: I’m cold. It hurts. I’m scared. No matter what we do, these children aren’t growing the way they’re supposed to. Their soft unshelled bodies hang, weaker and weaker, as they struggle to take in any nutrition.

We don’t understand the cause of the sickness for a long time. But then we discover: a poison rain, falling on the ice sheets far above, gives off scents that make us almost lose consciousness if we even approach. Some caustic liquid that was trapped long ago, somewhere in the hottest part of the day, has been released into a cloud, because the sky has gone out of balance. Even the slightest touch burns the cilia off your tentacles, and it turns the air too noxious too breathe. This poison seeps down into the soil, until it reaches the protective threads around our children, tainting them. We feel sorrow, trapped in our deepest cores like a memory too painful to share, when we travel back down into the depths of the city and see their toothless mouths open and close, their unshaped tentacles reaching out for nothing. This sickness taints a whole generation of our children, and there will be nobody to give our most cherished memories to before we die—

—When Rose releases me, I reel, and topple in the direction of the night before I recover. My face is wet, even apart from the residue from her tendrils. I fall on my back, looking up at the dark clouds.

I babble something. “Those babies. I’m sorry. I wish… I don’t know what I can do. How can I help? What is there? I’m so sorry. I would do anything—”

Rose just lowers her head again, like she’s encouraging me to climb up on her back and ride. We stand there, on the line between one world and the other. I hear thunder a long way off, on the other side of endless ice fields, but never see any lightning. I wonder how long that toxic rainfall has been blighting the crocodiles’ nurseries, and what caused it. There was a sliver of an idea buried in Rose’s shared memory: the atmosphere was in balance for a long time, the day and night in perfect arrangement, but now the sky itself has gone wrong.

I’m too cold to stay up here any longer, even with Hernan’s warm padded jacket, and I hear the chimes sound the Span of Reflection. I touch the end of one tentacle, gently, then pick my way back down the mountainside.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about toxic rain falling on a city thousands of kilometers away, across an endless field of ice and storms. I can’t banish that image, but I also can’t make my mind encompass it.

So I find myself drifting back to my other obsession.

I need to make sure Bianca’s okay, after I’ve seen so many other people flying out of their skins. I’m not even sure how many times the shutters have gone up since the riot, but at last I dredge up the courage to go check on her again.

When I walk near the Gymnasium, I feel myself freeze up again. But this time I’m expecting it, and so I take Jeremy’s advice: I’m patient with myself. I stay in a safe alcove, protected by shadows, until the worst passes. Then I find another hiding place and watch Bianca, chatting with the other students, striding away from campus. I see her stroll past Matthew and a couple other old members of the Progressive Students, and they barely acknowledge each other. Good. The police are probably still watching that whole group, including her, and right now they’re ready to shoot anyone who makes them the slightest bit nervous.

I almost try again to talk to Bianca, but there are always too many people around. Instead, I just walk a safe distance behind her as she strides downtown. Bianca doesn’t look at the Plaza, the Market, or the row of clothing stores along the Grand Boulevard. She just keeps her head down, and doesn’t even change her posture when she passes through the cold front. Colored smoke fills the sky, and the bakery switches from wake-up pastries to after-work treats. Watching Bianca from a safe distance, I feel so homesick, in the middle of my chest and the prow of my back.

Bianca wanders into the grayest part of town, close to the Warrens, and knocks on a plain metal door in an abandoned paint factory. I find a tiny window, on the other side of the building, that has a view into the dingy room where she emerges and starts hefting an ancient rifle in both hands. Around her, people study plans and maps of the Founders’ Square.

Seeing Bianca next to this pile of guns, I feel the cold go through me. She’s going to do something stupid. Spots fill my eyes, almost like an attack of lightsickness, as I think about the helmets, the guns, the casual murder. The thick gloves seizing Bianca this time, or hoisting her dead body.

I have to close my eyes and picture myself out in the ice floes, kilometers from the nearest drop of illumination, clawing the tundra in total darkness.

When I make myself look into the basement again, I notice someone who seems out of place, even among rebels and misfits. They turn their head, and I recognize one of the foreigners who came to the Parlour. The Resourceful Couriers, they called themselves. This is the tall, angry one, with the strip of hair cutting across the hash of pale scars on her head. She’s hoisting a large gun in both arms, like a baton in some obscure game.

mouth

The air felt sickly, like the chemicals from the old paint factory had seeped through the groaning cement ceiling and the meter-thick insulation down to this maintenance pod. They’d taken all of Mouth’s weapons, except the two that were hidden in places nobody ever searched. Bianca escorted her past a couple of smudge-faced pipe-workers and three artfully scruffy Coliseum students, until they reached a small pale man with a wispy beard.

“Derek, this is Mouth. She’s the foreigner I was telling you about.”

“Bianca says good things about you.” Derek gestured at a well-annotated map of the Palace, the Spire, Founders’ Square, and the surrounding areas. “We’re ready to move soon. When they shot unarmed protestors, they showed their real faces and exposed the contradictions at the heart of this broken system. If we strike now, the people will be on our side.”

Derek worked at a shoe-tacking place, and his callused fingers were always moving things around and making marks on paper. Everyone in Xiosphant seemed to have fidgety hands.

Besides Derek, the other key people included a physics student named Jeff (tall, with big hands and a great mane of black braids), a rangy, red-faced pipe-worker named Vicki (who made sculptures from detritus she found in the abandoned mine tunnels), and a big crusher named Brock, whose shaved pink scalp had lost too many fights with ringworm. Plus three skinny white-haired men who worked together in the same linen factory, whom everybody called the Gumdrops, on account of the bright-colored stains on their faces and hands.

“I’ve seen you at a few of our meetings, sitting way at the back.” Derek squinted. “You always stood out, even with your head covered up.”

“I wanted to see if I could help.” Mouth smiled. “Somebody needs to do something about this town.” Then she quoted from Grantham: “‘The worst way to deal with failing technology is to transform human beings into machines.’”

“So, you’ve been paying attention.” Derek grinned, revealing crooked teeth that he hadn’t had enough med-creds to fix. And he seemed to reach a snap decision. “Here’s what we could use your help with. We have seven incendiary devices we put together, and they’re located in a safe place nearby. Somebody needs to transport them to the Founders’ Square after the next shutters-up, arriving before the Span of Industry.”

“That’s when the blue-and-red cloud appears, right?” Mouth said.

“Right. If you can help us get them to the far end of the street market off the Founders’ Square, you’ll be met by our team there. The explosives will create a lot of noise and smoke, but they won’t hurt anyone. The perfect distraction for me to lead a small team inside the Palace service tunnels by removing this solar power transformer box, which provides access to the maintenance crawlway. We’ll take the High Magistrate hostage when his guards move him from the Receiving Room to a secure location once they hear the blast.”

“Okay,” Mouth said. She only half listened to Derek, because she was trying to memorize the maps and plans in front of her. Now that she knew how they planned to get in, she could just go right now, make a run at that vault—but she’d probably have a better chance during the chaos after those incendiaries went off.

Whoever designed the Palace had gone for a circular design, in homage to Jonas’s original principles of Circadianism, but the rooms were still rectangular, which created some weird bottlenecks. A handful of access hallways bisected those “spokes,” but most of the rooms only opened onto the central hub. The service corridors ran around the outside of the circle, with stairs leading down to the basement level, where the kitchens and maintenance areas were, or up to the second floor, where that vault lay at the end of a side corridor. Mouth imagined herself holding the Invention. Reattaching a long-lost part of herself. She had been half awake for too long.

“This Palace is made of chokepoints,” Mouth said aloud. “You get into a firefight with Palace guards, they’ll get you from both sides.”

“We’ll worry about that,” Derek said. “You just help Bianca get the explosives into position.” Then he turned to Bianca. “You’re responsible for this smuggler, since you brought her in. Keep her with you the whole time.”

“Will do,” Bianca said, with a sober expression.

“Okay,” Derek said. “Both of you show up here right after the next shutters-up. This place will be our rally point.” He walked away to talk to the Gumdrops, who were inspecting some rifles.

“I can’t believe it’s going to happen,” Bianca whispered as she led Mouth back to the entrance. “Just one more shutter-cycle, and we’re doing this. What if we succeed? What if we really capture the High Magistrate, and force them to negotiate? I can’t even imagine what it would look like for Xiosphant to treat everyone like an actual human being.”

Brittle ice coated every nerve lacing through Mouth’s body, but her blood was hot. She looked at Bianca and saw the same confusion of symptoms. “You’re doing the right thing,” Mouth said. She repeated this, like a blessing. “You’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the right thing.”

“I’m so glad I met you.” Bianca put her hand on Mouth’s forearm, right when she was in the middle of strapping all her weapons back into place.

“I’m glad we met too.” Mouth smiled. “You’re going to set this old town on fire. After this, everyone will remember Sophie’s name.” Then Mouth heard those fucking bells, once again, and realized she was late to meet up with the Resourceful Couriers.

On her way back into the glare, Mouth stuck to the trashy alleys, and tried to convince herself that she had some kind of shot. Derek’s plan had enough weak spots to ensure that every single member of the Uprising died, including poor Bianca—but all Mouth needed to do was give Bianca the slip after they delivered the bombs, and make her way to that loose solar power transformer in time to follow Derek’s crew inside. Then it was just twenty meters from the maintenance hatch to the service staircase leading to the second floor, with the vault, while the Palace guards were distracted. Mouth tried to form a clear mental image of how this would go down, and then she realized someone was following her.

Even with this ridiculous hat and poncho, Mouth had enough visibility to catch the motion in her blind spot, and whoever it was ducked behind a garbage pile or a doorway whenever she turned. Mouth retraced her own steps, until she came to the spy’s hiding place, a narrow gap between two factory buildings.

Mouth’s tail was the quiet girl from the Illyrian Parlour, the one who’d brought spiced coffee while they’d unloaded some of their cat butter. Dark, pretty, big hazel eyes, small twitchy nose—she looked solidly Xiosphanti middle class. Full mouth, which never smiled or opened. She recoiled, but showed no fear, even though Mouth outweighed her by a lot.

Mouth smiled. “Did I forget to pay for my coffee?”

The girl just stared, not flinching or backing away. Mouth let go of her collar.

“Why were you following me?” Mouth said. “Who do you work for? What’s your game?”

No response. Mouth hadn’t heard her speak at the coffee place, either. Maybe she was mute? That would be a handy trait in a spy. Mouth tried a few more questions, but got nothing.

The two of them were stuck together in the pale shadow of the leatherwares plant. Dank, reddish smog pooling around them. Mouth didn’t want to hurt this girl, not without a much better reason. No point trying to capture her, because then you’d be stuck with her.

This whole situation felt weird, like Mouth had been stalking the girl instead of the other way round. At last Mouth gave up.

“Don’t follow me anymore. Or I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands.”

She turned and walked away, without looking to see if the girl had obeyed.

When Mouth got to George’s roofing plant, Alyssa was waiting out front. “Don’t go inside,” she said. “Just walk away right now, before anyone sees you.”

Mouth turned and walked in the opposite direction, and Alyssa walked alongside her.

“They’ve all gotten wind of some of your political activities,” she whispered. “Omar is pissed. He’s pretty close to putting together a deal to carry some Xiosphanti leather to Argelo. But they’re going to hit you with an ultimatum: you quit with the politics, or the Couriers leave you behind when we go.”

Alyssa’s hand was on the back of Mouth’s neck, which was the first clue that Mouth was bent double and heaving, with a stream of vomit pooling on the slate pavement below. Mouth had gotten into a crash position without even realizing—she just kept breathing harder, tasting more puke.

“I can’t,” Mouth said. “I can’t. Please, I can’t.”

“Oh fuck,” Alyssa said. “I’ve never… I thought nothing ever got to you. What the hell. This is a whole new side of you, and I don’t…”

“I’m sorry.” Mouth was face-to-knees panicking. “I’m sorry. I’ll get it together. I will, in a moment. I just, this is all too… I mean, they have the last surviving piece of my childhood, my heritage, in that stupid Palace. It’s the only thing that can save what’s left of me. I can’t just walk away from it. But I can’t be trapped here, either. This town. I just hate it. I hate it so much. I think this town thrives on hate.”

“Well.” This was the problem-solving, reasonable tone, which usually meant Alyssa was about to cut through some logistical issue on the road. “The thing you’re trying to get, the Invention, isn’t going anywhere. Right? I mean, they’ve had it for a while. They’ll still have it for ages more. We can grab it the next time we come back to this dump.”

“Can’t risk it.” Mouth straightened up. “Anything could happen. I could die. They could burn that ugly mausoleum down in one of their stupid political actions. They could decide to clean house and throw away a bunch of stuff. I have a duty. I can’t explain this right. I owe everything to the Citizens, the nomads who raised me. And this is all I can do. I just have to string those revolutionaries along a little longer.”

“Well,” Alyssa said. “If you want to leave town with us, you better move fast.”

“Please, just stall them,” Mouth said. “Tell them I got too drunk to walk. They’ll believe that.”

“As long as you never hear Omar’s ultimatum, you might not get in trouble for disobeying it.” Alyssa smiled. “That’s why I grabbed you before you could go in there.”

Everything still tasted awful. Alyssa looked down and gave Mouth a radiant smile, in spite of how gross she must look hunched over, with bile on her chin.

“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” Mouth said.

She laughed. “Nah. It’s more like, I’d be a shitty friend if I gave you what you deserved.” Alyssa punched Mouth’s arm. “And you’ve gone all the way to the edge of the night for me, more times than I can count.” Mouth couldn’t actually think of a single time, but let it go.

“Well, thank you,” Mouth said. “I… I really care about you a lot, and I can’t imagine what I would do if I had to break in a new sleepmate.”

“Ugh. I’m the only one who can put up with your kicking. Anyway, get out of here. I need to get back before they start to wonder why I’m taking so long in the bathroom.”

Alyssa hugged Mouth, who clutched her tight for a moment. She was gone a moment later, and Mouth was left almost choking on puke and carbon dioxide again.

“Please,” Mouth whispered again, to the sunburnt air. “Please, please, don’t fuck me over this time. I know that a good traveler is supposed to leave everything in their dust. I know that impermanence and loss are just the distance markers on the road. I know that. Just please, this one time. I can’t get fucked this time, or I don’t know what will happen. Please.”

Then Mouth stood up straight and pulled herself into fighting shape. She was running out of time—and depending on other people was worse than tasting your own digestive fluids.

SOPHIE

I grapple with the last handholds before the ridge of the Old Mother, like a clumsy old bear. Once on top, I stumble and teeter toward the other side, then I sit and stare at the textureless dark, trying to imagine the city out there, all the great machines, the webs full of sick children. I think about that smuggler—Mouth—telling her friend, I just have to string these revolutionaries along a little more. This was after she told me not to follow her, but I just followed her anyway. In my mind, the cops are already on their way to arrest Bianca, and I don’t know what to do.

Nothing moves in front of me. No shapes grow, or change their position. I’m wasting my time looking for help here, when Bianca needs me. I slap my legs to get blood back into them, and try to stand.

Rose raises her head up over the cliff, tentacles and front legs straining. She finally gets her whole body up in front of me, and I see the soft, tawny hide around her front legs. I hand her the pitiful amount of copper and tin I’ve scrounged this time, and she studies it with the cilia on the end of one tentacle, then puts it away on her back.

“I’m sorry, I need your help again. I don’t know what to do. My friend is in trouble. I know your people have amazing technology. You showed it to me. But do you have any weapons? Weapons? Something to protect a person from getting hurt.”

Rose bows her head, big indentations on top narrowing, like she’s frowning or sad. She raises a tentacle to touch me, and I let her brush against my face and feel my pulse through my neck. She wants to understand, and not just because I brought her copper.

I push my face toward her tendrils. “I’m scared. Please understand that I’m scared. I’m still scared from the way I almost died, back when you saved me, and now I’m scared that something will happen to Bianca. She’s everything to me. Can you feel my fear? Can you at least understand the feeling, even if you get nothing else?”

Rose seems to nod, or maybe it’s just my imagination. She reaches into her own wool-covered carapace, searches, and pulls something out, holding it in a knot of her tentacles. The size and shape of a starfruit, the object has five spines, going off in different directions. I almost try to bite into it, but I look closer and realize it’s made of some metallic alloy, with flecks of a crystal or mineral, like quartz. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen, but I can tell that somebody designed these diamond shapes and the complex way they intersect.

Still, this device is just as confusing to me as my clock was to Rose, and I hold it up to the twilight, squinting.

Rose lets me fumble for a moment, then finds another, identical metal-and-crystal starfruit. She twists one of the diamond-shaped segments around, so it’s at a strange angle to the others, and the one in my hand vibrates, giving off a faint rumbling sound.

“Wow. What did you—” I grapple with my own device for a few moments before I manage to turn one of the slices, and a similar growl comes out of Rose’s device. So it’s like an old-style phone, or the telex machines in Xiosphant. And maybe you can use one of these to find the other? Rose helps me to rearrange the diamond slices until the device forms a circle. I snap it around my right wrist: a spiky bangle.

I stare at this device, snug against the base of my thumb. These creatures must have invented it over a long time, as they found materials under the ice, dug up metal and rocks and studied what they did and how they worked, and put them together. It’s not like almost all our technology in Xiosphant, which people invented millions of kilometers away on Earth, dozens of generations ago, and we’re just trying to keep it all working.

Rose comes closer, slow and careful, and puts her claw around my face and neck again. I always have to make a conscious effort not to pull away as these tongues affix themselves to my skin, but it gets easier each time—

—A crocodile built a flying machine and soared over the flaming glaciers, shielded against the sun, but still cowering a little under its rays. Crocodiles stood on great soaring platforms, making a study of the atmosphere. The sky on fire, gouts of flame roaring into the ice. A team of crocodiles journeyed to the very end of the world, going inside a mountain with smoke pouring out of it. The sky turning and reversing, turning and reversing, clouds doing a strange dance. None of this stuff makes any sense to me, until I form those images into a story: the sky was on fire, when the world was young, and we risked everything to find a solution.

Then I sense the weight of the bracelet that just closed around my own wrist, only it hangs on the tentacle of an elder crocodile who travels across a shale landscape dotted with frost in a carriage that is half rock, half flesh. She may not make it back home before she dies, she feels weary in her clicking joints, and a sense of fallowness leaches into her core when she thinks of being away from her extended family. But the bracelet grunts in answer to her lonesomeness, and it connects her to all the explorers and scientists—the menders—who had flown above an icefield painted with flames—

—Rose pulls away, and I touch the bracelet, which now seems an emblem as well as a device.

“Thank you.” I put my arms around her, as gentle as I can. “I wish I could tell you… I don’t really have a family anymore, but I’m going to feel like you’re with me, wherever I go, as long as I wear this. No matter how far into the light I travel. And I need to stop calling your people crocodiles, because that’s just a dumb name that humans decided to call you.”

I look at Rose, and at last I don’t see her body only in terms of sheer power. I was taught to see her as a great destroyer, and in my fear I had wanted to keep seeing her that way—so I could identify with her, and feel powerful by association. Her front legs move like great pistons, but they’re also supple, made for exploring tricky spots. Her tentacles swirl and grip like serpents, but their cilia are exquisite, sensitive, delicate.

I remember a word that came to me, during the last thing she shared: “menders.”

“My ancestors should have tried to call you what you called yourselves,” I say aloud. Rose cants her pincer a little, as though she’s listening in her own way. “You think of yourselves as menders, as builders, as explorers. There’s no one word for all those things in Xiosphanti, but the old language, Noölang, had one: Gelet. It’s like architect, and traveler, and five other things, all in one. So… I’m going to start calling your people the Gelet.”

Then I remember about Bianca, and turn to rush back to the city. “Thank you,” I say again. “I hope I do something to deserve this.” Rose is already halfway off the plateau, her massive frame clambering back down into the dark.

When I pull myself through the hole in the fence and get back inside the city, I hear the clatter of all the people trying to finish their business before shutters-up. Parents hustle their children, or try to do one last odd job to score infrastructure chits, med-creds, or water tokens. The repair crews apply their last bits of sealant to the cracked walkways. I haven’t carried a timepiece since I gave mine away to Rose, but I can tell you what the clock says just by the scents of cooking, cleaning, or brewing of hot drinks. The laundry steam, the long line at the bakery, fathers carrying their children home from school. You can’t fight Circadianism, because it’s soaked into our pores.

Jeremy finds me sitting on the steps leading to the Parlour’s lacquer door, staring at my new bracelet. My face must diagram all the suffering in my heart, the way I’m seeing Bianca’s death more vividly than my own feet under their tiny skirt, just as the crocodile visions—the Gelet visions—always seem realer than real. Being ashamed of fear doesn’t make me less afraid.

“I’ve tried to cut off my old life,” I whisper. “But I have a friend from school, and she’s trusting someone that she shouldn’t. She’s going to throw her life away. I’m scared to face her, and everyone at school will lose their minds if they see me.”

Jeremy sits next to me and breathes, deliberate and even, as if I’m a client and he wants to steal away my awareness that time is flowing. He doesn’t have that easy look on his face, though.

“You can’t hide from the people you care about. A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.” I have a feeling he’s quoting one of the books we were supposed to memorize, but I don’t care.

I say nothing back—just take the biggest breath I can of the ozone-scented air, touch Jeremy’s shoulder with one hand, and walk toward the light.

Everybody said if my mother had lived a bit longer she could have prepared me: for my body changing, for marriage, for life as an adult. She’d been waiting for the right time to explain to me what was expected, everyone said. But sometimes I wonder if my mother would have sat me down and told me to grab as much freedom as I could, as hard as I could, instead of getting stuck in a marriage to a man who called her the Brick, because of the way she slept in a rigid fetal position. Maybe my mom was working on a way to break free of my dad. I’ll never know.

My mother was with a group of managers, inspecting their farmwheel, and the crops burst into flames at the top of the superstructure. Someone had come up with a scheme to raise the farmwheel slightly, expose the food to more light, increase yields. This plan worked for a while, but they didn’t count on one thing: erosion. A few boulders fell off the Young Father, or the peak just grew shorter, and the crops caught a full sunbeam. My mother was one of the people closest to the disaster, and while everybody else screamed and laid blame, she climbed up and stopped the fire from spreading. But the rays of the sun roasted her skin and boiled her eyes, and even if she hadn’t fallen, she would have been dead anyway. Everyone called her a hero, but I always wondered if she had seen a way out of her dead-end life and had taken it, without even stopping to think about me.

The final warning sounds, and I hear the shutters close, but I keep playing shadowseek in these empty streets. I can’t loosen the chokehold inside me. The sky looks like a flat pan of dirty water, which brightens as I make my way. The closer I get to daylight, the higher my risk of arrest for curfew violation. I hear a few patrols, but I always manage to slip out of view before they get close.

The Gymnasium looks the same as ever. The War Monument swallows the same light in which all the whitestone buildings bask. But emptied of students, teachers, and staff, these places look abandoned, as if after some catastrophe. I let the old familiar anxiety claim a few heartbeats, then I touch my new bracelet and remember I’m not alone. And I make my hypervigilance work for me, scanning in all directions. I’ve already seen the worst, and I’m still here.

I unpin my skirt and climb the wall of my old dorm—anybody could see me, awash in pallid light—and swing from sill to sill without making a noise, until I reach my old window. I lean on the shutters with all the strength I’ve developed climbing a mountain so many times, and they go down, with a rusty groan.

Looking into the dorm room where I used to sit and talk after curfew is the most powerful experience of Timefulness I’ve ever known, reminding me that time is real, the past is the past, and part of me really did die when they executed me. I always thought moments of Timefulness should be either practical or wistful—but here’s an acrid chunk of poison lodged in my throat.

Bianca rests on her little shelf, same as always. I almost expect to see myself sleeping there, on the opposite shelf, but it’s empty. Bianca looks so happy and peaceful I almost want to let her sleep. Then I see some shape hidden under the blankets beside her. Something rigid, bulky. A crutch? No, an ancient rifle. She’s cuddling a gun in her bed, as though the fight could begin any moment. Bianca keeps opening one eye, watching for something.

She notices too much light coming in the window and opens both eyes. She reaches for her gun, while I get the window open and stumble inside. By the time she has her gun out of the snarl of blankets, I’m on top of her, with a hand on her mouth.

She looks up and her eyes widen, and I feel her teeth sink into the fat of my thumb. She has too many tears for me to see her reaction. Her nostrils flare, and the bulky stock of her gun juts between us. I freeze, the old tremors rising. I have a million things to say, but I can’t speak. I slowly lift my hand away.

“Sophie.” Bianca’s breath feels hot enough to scald the skin off my hand. “You’re— You’re— Am I going delirious at last? Is this delirium? Am I just dreaming? Say something. Fuck you, say something now.”

“I’m alive,” I whisper. “It’s me. I’m alive. I’m here.” Everything in this room smells of laundry detergent and stale cakes and tea and comfort.

“How? How can you…” Bianca bites her tongue, the way she always used to when she worked through a logic problem, twice as fast as anybody else. “Oh shit. They locked you up. Didn’t they? You’ve been in some dark cell this whole time. I thought they killed you, forced you outside, but all along you’ve been in some dark hole, and I didn’t even look for you. Did you only just escape? What happened?” She wheezes a little. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have searched for you.”

I shake my head. “It’s not… they didn’t lock me up. They tried—they tried to execute me, but I didn’t… I got away.”

I’m still sitting on top of Bianca, half straddling her. I feel her heart convulse, as the realization spreads across her face: I was alive and free this whole time, and I chose to let her think I was dead.

“It’s not like that.” I’m still juddering, unsteadying myself. “I just couldn’t come back to you. I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way, and I…” I don’t have the words to explain how the fear immobilized me whenever I tried to reveal myself to her.

Bianca looks forlorn through the sheen of tears, as if she just lost me in a whole new way. Or even worse, as if she’s just realized that I was never really hers, and this realization is costing her some part of herself. Her expression resolves into something as blunt and unbending as the rifle in her bed.

“Fucking… I would have broken everything, I would have killed anybody, to have you back here with me. I would have torn it all down. I can’t even tell you. And you were just alive the whole time, and you, what? You didn’t bother to let me know.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammer-whisper.

My mouth is a desert, but the rest of me is chilled. I know for sure that even if we survive this, she’ll never smile at me the way she used to.

Bianca sits up, though I’m still pinioning her lower half, and she raises her arms as if she wants to embrace me, but she can’t.

“I would have torn it all down,” she says again. “I still might.”

I’m clutching her bedcovers with one hand. “I came to warn you. You can’t trust that smuggler. Mouth. She’s just using you. I heard her telling her friend.”

Another moment of Timefulness—because everything has changed, the world is all askew, and it will never turn back.

“I should have known. That bitch. I should have seen the signs, but I wanted this too much.” Bianca pushes me off her and jumps out of bed, already dressed, including boots and a belt crammed with supplies. “She knows the whole plan. We have to warn everyone.” Bianca heads for the open window, gun slung over one shoulder, with its long handle and fluted barrel.

“Wait,” I say, but she’s already swinging herself out the window and pulling herself down, the same way I climbed up.

Bianca is already halfway across the residential quarter of campus by the time I catch up with her. “I seriously have been living in a dark tunnel since they took you away,” Bianca hisses. “I can’t even tell you. Where the hell have you been hiding?”

Bianca walks too fast for me to catch up, talks too loud for curfew. She doesn’t wait for an answer, if I even had one.

“How long have you been hanging around, and just not letting me out of all this grief? How long?” She spits on the ground. “And then you decide to show up, right when I’m finally ready to avenge you. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me?”

I don’t know what to say, and she’s moving away too fast, and the sky is much too bright here, and we’re out in the open where anyone could see us. I have to shut my eyes for a moment without slowing my march, to keep the memory at bay. I feel certain this is our final moment, and I have one last chance to rebuild our friendship, if I can just say the right thing. The sunswept pavement burns my eyes, without any other people to cast shadows.

I grab Bianca by the arm and she turns to face me, so I can see the pain still only starting to unfold inside her.

“I thought of you every moment,” I say, as she pulls me forward. “But I couldn’t come back to where—”

We round the corner, and a Curfew Patrol is standing in front of us. Two men and a woman, carrying much newer rifles than Bianca’s, with opaque helmets and vests just like the police who paraded me through the streets. My lungs, my heart, turn to stone.

Bianca seizes me and pulls me back around the corner, and then the two of us are sprinting, as the leader of the patrol shouts a warning. I spot one of the city’s narrow crosswise alleyways, on the right, and drag Bianca inside just as the first gunshots slice through the air. We keep running—ducking under a low canopy, jumping over rotten boxes, veering into a long tiny space between two rows of buildings—as the alarms sound and more boots land on the streets around us.

mouth

Mouth had gone out in Xiosphant during curfew a few times before, so she was prepared for the wide-open eeriness of empty streets as she crept out of the Low Road. But this time, the city teemed with people wearing black suits with corrugated sleeves and carrying guns and batons. As if the whole town had decided to play dress-up instead of sleeping.

Mouth headed for the dark side of town, first by following the same alley the Couriers had used to move the sled uptown, and then by climbing a hemp-shrouded scaffolding that ran lengthwise along the front of a grand old building with apartments above shops. Five meters off the ground, Mouth crept along the jostling side boards as Curfew Patrols, cops, and even soldiers marched under her feet. Mouth had taken far too long to travel just a few blocks, and she had another kilometer and a half to cross before the rendezvous point, that old paint factory.

Hand-carved granite figures on a ledge acted out the stages of life, from birth to apprenticeship to marriage to mastery to death, and their giant bulbous faces leered at Mouth as she crept along the scaffolding. In the background of each panel, complicated designs showed how each stage of life corresponded to part of the cycle of sleep and work, from shutters-down to shutters-up. Mouth remembered Bianca saying that she used to think the root of all Xiosphanti oppression was planted in culture and ideology, until they’d taken her friend away—and then Bianca had decided that violence was the real answer.

Stuck between these educational gargoyles above, and the police below, Mouth couldn’t find a clean way to separate ideology from force.

One of Derek’s people must have gotten caught, or turned informant. So these thugs were going to tear the whole town apart, twice, to catch anyone who might have ever had a subversive dream. Mouth hoped the Resourceful Couriers had found a good place to lie low. From overhead, the people and their weapons made a shape like hinges, and Mouth tried to tell herself a story about how she could still turn this to her advantage.

She needed to find Bianca, in whom she’d invested so much time, and then secure her help getting inside the Palace. Bianca might even lean on Mouth harder than ever, with everything falling apart.

But when Mouth reached the paint factory, choking on the formaldehyde mist, there was no sign of Bianca. The one person who you’d expect to show up no matter what, to berate everyone else for being even a little tardy, and she wasn’t here. Instead, Derek stood in the middle of the maintenance pod, with nine people around him, including Vicki, Jeff, and the Gumdrops, and he was giving them a rousing speech. “We can’t give up now. This is still our moment. They’re still not expecting a strike against the Palace.”

If Mouth could just snag those bombs and get them to the Palace herself, she could still use them to get inside. She could slip past those patrols and get to the vault while the authorities were focused on the Uprising’s last stand in this paint factory. But Mouth scanned the room, and poked into the crawlspace and storage lockers behind her, and found nothing. Derek probably hadn’t been dumb enough to store the explosives inside the same building where he held his strategy meetings.

Derek spotted Mouth searching a gantry, a half level up from the maintenance pod, and shouted, “Mouth, get down here. We need to figure out a new strategy.”

She nodded, then turned and climbed back out of the building without saying a word. Mouth was wasting time here without Bianca to vouch for her, and these people were already dead. She heard Derek shouting for her to come back as she turned sideways to squeeze into one of those tight throughways between buildings, trying to put as much distance as she could between herself and the Uprising.

“Shit.” Vicki’s voice still carried. “She just left us. Without even saying anything.”

The building opposite the Uprising HQ had a door with a busted lock, and Mouth climbed the stairs and stole down a filthy unlit corridor to an unshuttered window that looked down on the street, where people in riot gear clustered like a cloud of horseflies. They had the paint factory surrounded and were parking two armored lorries in the street.

Even from this distance, Mouth could hear Derek’s hectoring voice from inside the paint factory, though she couldn’t make out any words. Then an exchange of gunfire. What if Mouth just ran toward the Palace right now and slipped inside while everyone in a uniform was distracted? The Xiosphanti authorities would grow exponentially dumber as the crisis grew out of control. She could still do this.

No way Mouth could leave without the Invention. She could see herself pulling it off a shelf inside that vault, hoisting it, tucking it under one arm. The Invention would make sense of everything, justify all the walls of shit.

Just as Mouth was getting up the nerve to run headlong into the temperate zone, she heard a noise that was so loud it had no other characteristics besides loudness. She lost her balance and crashed halfway out the window. Then Mouth saw a coil of smoke rising up from a few blocks away: Derek’s bombs had gone off early.

As the police stormed the disused paint factory where the Uprising had holed up, the sound of gunfire became more continuous and drowned any further shouts. Someone turned and saw Mouth looking down at them. A bullet caromed off the wall nearby, and Mouth turned and ran back the way she’d come.

A tower of smoke still undulated, a deeper ash gray against the night sky. Mouth heard Derek’s voice one last time, some shout of defiance that ended midsyllable with another chorus of gunshots that descanted on the ones closer at hand.

This was not going to work out.

Mouth heard voices from the stairway. Cops, coming up to search this building. Mouth shrank against the wall, staying low, until they reached her, and then she stabbed one in the leg with her longest knife and elbowed the other in the neck. They both went down, and Mouth helped herself to the nightstick that the one with the leg injury was carrying. She left both cops unconscious but alive, and then a third officer came up the stairs. Mouth swung the nightstick, and the officer ducked, leaving herself open to the knife in Mouth’s other hand. Mouth stabbed the cop’s thigh and arm in quick succession, trying to avoid any arteries, and then drove the woman’s head into the wall.

The musty smell of blood unsettled Mouth’s stomach, already queasy from paint fumes, and she missed a stair. This staircase was arranged in a spiral, around a central pillar, because everything had to be circular in this stupid town. Mouth slid down the stairs on one leg, around the next curve, and spotted the two cops coming up the stairs before they saw her. She left them in a heap, leaning against the inside of the stairwell.

By the time Mouth reached the street, she had other people’s blood all over her. Her whole body ached from the exertion, but also from the draining away of her righteous purpose. She kept trying to tamp down the awareness that she’d blown it, the Palace job had ended before it even started, those smug bastards still had custody of Mouth’s heritage. She should just let the police take her, because where could she go now? She took a breath as she pushed through the building’s front door and forced herself to keep walking.

When the rattling came from beneath her and around her, Mouth mistook it for another weapon. Then she stuck her head out and saw the metal sheaths coming off all the nearby windows. She muttered a quick thanks to the Elementals, and then lost herself in the swarm of people in coveralls and neat suits who had erupted into the streets, on their way to work.

Nothing stopped the Xiosphanti rank and file from keeping the gears revolving, not even a citywide emergency. Mouth couldn’t help thinking of those sculptures on the side of the building, with their bulging red eyes and slanted grins. She pulled out that stupid Xiosphanti hat, squished it down onto her head, and stayed low inside a group of farmwheel bureaucrats as they pushed past the police cordons.

The Low Road sat empty, except for a few cups and plates, and the dust caught in the light from the big front window. No sign of the Resourceful Couriers. Mouth went about searching for clues, but just then Alyssa came up from the cellar, with her backpack and Mouth’s. “There you are,” she said. “The other Couriers left already. Things got too hot around here.”

“You should have gone with them,” Mouth grunted and took her backpack from Alyssa.

“If I had, we might have left town without you. And I couldn’t just leave you. I promised.” She looked closer. “Oh shit, you’re covered with blood.”

“Not mine.”

Mouth let her backpack fall long enough to fold her arms around Alyssa, who leaned against her bloody torso. She felt warm, and her cheek was soft against Mouth’s shoulder. But her body was tense.

“I should have let Omar stop you. I was sure you must be dead. Shit, I thought we were dead, a few times. They’ve been dragging people in the streets for even looking unusual, let alone foreign.”

“This town knows how to throw a party,” Mouth said.

Alyssa didn’t laugh. When Mouth pulled away, Alyssa had a wan expression, like when she’d said she was ready to retire from smuggling.

“So, did you get it? Your artifact from the Palace vault?”

“No. Didn’t even get close.” Just saying this aloud gave Mouth a barbed knot inside her chest. “They probably have a hundred items that they plundered from other cultures sitting inside that vault, and nobody even bothers to look at any of it.”

“I’m sorry.” Then Alyssa looked over her shoulder. “We’d better join the others.”

Xiosphant felt like a whole different city. Everywhere Mouth looked, police lorries blocked every major intersection, and people blurted instructions into megaphones until all their voices merged into a shrill din. The air tasted different: cordite, static electricity, and the tang of pepper spray instead of the usual starchy turpentine fug.

The sky had already flashed blue and red, and a few chimes had rung by the time they managed to reach the Illyrian Parlour, where the other Resourceful Couriers were fidgeting.

The marmot, Cyrus, had curled up on a plump cushion in the corner and was squinting at all of these intruders, flexing his snout.

“There she is.” Omar was on his feet, coming toward them. “Time for an explanation. First you start spouting political slogans, and then this whole town loses what little mind it ever had. We damn near got skinned alive out there. What have you been playing at? I’m still tempted to leave you behind.”

Mouth hadn’t managed to think of a good lie. “Uh… I didn’t get involved in politics. I swear. It wasn’t that. It’s just… You know how I was raised by nomads?”

“You only mention that fact every time I see you,” Omar said.

“Well, they’re all dead. Nothing left of them. Nothing to show that we were ever here, except for me, and you might have noticed I’m not looking too durable. But I got wind that there was… an artifact locked inside the Palace vault. The last surviving trace of the Citizens. I wanted to try and snag it. And it went kind of bad.”

Omar was already rolling his big brown eyes, like he didn’t have time for this idiocy. Which was a good sign. “Just promise me this was a one-time foul.”

“I promise,” Mouth said. “I had to try. I failed. If I live long enough, I’ll put this behind me.”

Omar shrugged, and was about to say something else, like driving home the message that Mouth was on probation now, or this could never happen again. But just then, the proprietor emerged from some inner room with cups of spiced coffee, leaves floating on top. Hernan was wearing a plain dark suit instead of the silk brocade he had last time.

“So, I trust we have a deal.” Hernan handed the coffees around, with a little smile. “I show you another route out of town, a disused mining track big enough for you and your vehicle. And you bring along one of my employees, who’s drawn some undue attention from the local law enforcement. Plus her friend.”

“Sure,” Omar said. “If they can pull their weight. Then yes.”

Hernan gestured, and two girls stepped forward out of the back room. One was Bianca, who glared at Mouth, as if Mouth could somehow be to blame for everything falling apart. Eyes like broken weapons, shoulders sagging under the weight of her big rucksack. Mouth tried to say something, but she wouldn’t reply.

The other girl Hernan ushered forward was the mute, the one who’d followed Mouth around. She looked at Mouth as if she was seeing pure evil for the first time ever.

Mouth looked at Alyssa, who just shrugged, as if reminding her that she was lucky to be here at all.

Hernan was talking about the two girls, both of whom looked about the same age as Yulya, and he mentioned the name Sophie. Mouth looked at the mute girl again and realized: this was Bianca’s dead friend, except not so dead. Bianca had said this girl was some kind of saint, with both a pure heart and a brilliant mind. But that perfect dead girl was standing here, watching Mouth with the worst expression anyone had ever aimed at her.

A too-familiar death rattle signaled that the shutters were closing, and Omar said, “Now’s our chance. Let’s just get going before this town gets any nuttier. Just show us the way out of this shitpile, and let’s get our sled and go.”

Everyone drained their coffees and loaded their packs up with all the provisions Hernan had to spare. Mouth was trying not to stare at Bianca and the not-dead Sophie, and they in turn seemed to be sharing a complicated silence.

If Mouth was lucky, maybe both these girls would catch something nasty from one of those giant insects in the deadlands, or get swept overboard in the Sea of Murder. You didn’t want to wish anyone dead, of course, but Mouth couldn’t handle the thought of traveling all the way to Argelo, empty-handed, under both of these accusing stares.

Mouth slid a massive pack on her back and prepared to brave the empty streets, which were still full of checkpoints and hyperactive triggers. Omar came up and grabbed Mouth’s shoulder in one long-fingered hand. “So I believe you when you say you didn’t get involved in politics and you were just pulling some ridiculous hustle. But I just need to know. What exactly was this thing you were trying to steal from the Palace?”

Bianca was standing right behind them, listening in. So was Sophie, the undead saint.

Mouth swallowed. She and Omar went a long way back, plus she owed him a lot right now, so she couldn’t look him in the face and give him a glib line. Not to mention, this particular disappointment was too fresh for her to have turned into a cute story yet.

“We called it the Invention. It, uh, it was a big crystal volume? It contained all of our songs and lyric writings. And verses.”

“A poetry book.” Omar laughed much too loud as the Couriers crept out into the tiny side street. “You tried to break into the Palace to steal a fucking poetry book?”

Mouth was tensing up, but got a grip just in time. The fists she had made turned back into hands, and Mouth found a smile someplace. “Yeah. It was the only copy, though.”

“Now I know you’re a maniac. A poetry book. You’ll have to do a recital for us once we’re out in the deadlands.” Omar was still chuckling as he strode in the direction of the junkyard where they’d hidden the sled full of merchandise once more, hunched over from his backpack. Lorry engines squeaked in the distance, and smoke billowed from no particular direction. Mouth turned and saw the hatred in Bianca’s eyes, until the rest of the Resourceful Couriers bumped against them, in a hurry to escape this city at last.

As they rushed across one of the main thoroughfares, Mouth spotted scraps of cheap paper that had been trampled into the cobbles: a poster declaring that the leaders of the Uprising would be executed in Founders’ Square after two more turns of the shutters. She tried to avoid stepping on the drawing of Derek’s bony face, out of respect.

At last they came to the junkyard. The wide-open street looked gloomy, here on the edge of night. All of the metal slats on the windows seemed to reject them, and the air seemed colder than usual. Every step Mouth took in defiance of her own rust-spiked heart. The Citizens had been good people, just trying to go through the world making themselves useful, and striving to preserve their culture as best they could. The world had stepped on their memory like it was dirt, and Mouth had blown her one chance to salvage something.

Alyssa came alongside Mouth and whispered, “Keep your shit together.” Mouth nodded, and she tried to empty her mind, the way she had so many times before.