The City in the Middle of the Night

SOPHIE

Argelo sneaks up on us: I don’t even realize we’re in the city until I can’t find my way out again. A few mud-and-brick shanties hug the rocks, and the muddy trail from the shore turns to slate, and then the next time I look up the buildings are cement and brick, taller and wider than before. The slate path becomes tar and then cement, and the buildings clump into city blocks. Argelo has no skin, and its bones jut almost at random, and none of this feels like a real city to me, after Xiosphant.

Argelo doesn’t have a convenient mountain range to protect it from the day and night, or a beautifully landscaped valley, or a street grid, let alone one that was partly carved from space. The people who founded this city were fleeing Xiosphant with whatever they could grab, Alyssa explains, though they did manage to dig the Pit, and a few other underground structures. The weather is a lot rougher here, and sometimes you get rainstorms or even ice storms. Gerry the pirate says they had a new kind of rainfall, a while back, made of some substance that burned your skin away.

I’m bent nearly double, holding up a big box of leather, plus my backpack, and I’m also supporting one corner of the improvised stretcher that contains Reynold. We’re all loaded down with whatever cargo we could salvage. Alyssa keeps saying that if Reynold dies, so will Gerry—until Reynold manages to lift his head. “Stop saying stupid shit, Aly. If I die, it won’t be Gerry’s fault, at least not personally.” Meanwhile, Yulya and Mouth are holding up Kendrick. Bianca stumbles and lurches next to me under her own load.

After the huge empty landscape on the road, everything feels too close. All these walls, all these people, pushing in on me.

My bracelet hasn’t stopped twitching since the Gelet left us on the shore. Like they’re reaching out from the darkness, their claim on me strengthened by this new debt. Even across all this light and piles of stone, they’re with me.

I look up and realize Bianca is staring at me. “I can’t believe you learned how to control the crocodiles and you didn’t tell me.” Her jaw tightens and releases. “All this time. You could have made them work for the Uprising. They could have rained frozen rocks on the Palace, and we could have won almost without a fight.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I don’t control them. How could I?”

“I just saw you do it. Just now. You were telling them what to do and they did it. Fine, okay. You tamed them. Domesticated them. Is that better?” Her eyes stay fixed on me.

“They’re not pets. They’re my friends. They’re sentient creatures, just like us. They have a civilization of their own, with a huge city and everything. I call them the Gelet, because it’s the closest thing to how they think of themselves.”

Bianca snorts. “They’re animals. You remember the Biology lectures at the Gymnasium. You were still there when we did that unit. Crocodiles don’t have a complex nervous system.”

“That we recognize. That is similar to ours. The Gelet have something different.” I can’t believe that Bianca, who always taught me to question everything we were taught, is throwing textbooks in my face.

“Something different. Okay. Fine. But you have some kind of influence over them. Right? They do what you want. I knew you were amazing, but this… What else can you get them to do?”

I turn away from her, as far as I’m able, while we’re both holding up the same dying man. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you should stop talking about it.”

Everything smells like spicy food gone bad. After the knifepoints of sunlight reflected on the ocean, and then the blackout of the night, my eyes are still adjusting back to regular twilight. So my first impressions of Argelo are just scents and sounds. Music blares around us, and people shout in Argelan, a language that sounds like a throat disease. I’ve never had this experience of being surrounded by people speaking a language I don’t know, and I’m convinced everyone is yelling at me, or about me. The smoke comforts me with a coal-and-spice flavor one moment, then nauseates me with rancid fumes the next. So many fires, burning so many things, and meanwhile I haven’t heard a single bell since we got here. When I get used to the light, I see too many faces jammed close to mine, and I have to close my eyes again and convince myself that I’m not about to be carried away by a mob. At least there are almost no police here in Argelo—except a special force for certain crimes that threaten the whole city, Alyssa said.

I open my eyes again, and there’s another burst of disorientation. The streets weave and double back on themselves, widen and narrow, become tunnels or bridges, without warning. Lorries and handcarts clog the road ahead of us, and people selling food or clothes at the side of the road yell for our attention. I keep looking around for a timepiece, or burst of colored smoke, or some other cue to let me know whether people have just woken or are about to sleep, but I see a million details, all of which tell me nothing.

And everywhere I look, I see strange clothing. No ankle-skirts or chemises like back home, no coveralls or linens. People wear colorful one-piece suits or multilayered dresses made of some kind of shiny fabric, or else thick denim jackets and trousers. Or they wear outfits that celebrate whichever compartment on the Mothership they trace their ancestry to. Girls walk past, wearing glittering facsimiles of the carbon-fiber-polymer crowns for which Ulaanbaatar was famous, along with rugged woven jackets and long cotton skirts. A few people who look somewhat like me wear loose shifts and light high-waisted trousers that look like the CoolSuits people wore in old Nagpur. I see some Zagreb-style jackets and cravats that Hernan would appreciate, too. I’ve only seen tiny pictures of these clothing styles in history books. Alyssa sees me staring and says that most of the people who came to Argelo after the Great Insomnia were the ones who felt oppressed because of whichever compartment their families had arrived in, a few generations earlier, so there aren’t as many people from New Shanghai or Calgary.

Bianca shoots me another look. I ignore her.

Every joint in my body hurts and my breathing sounds like a busted motor, and even thinking about what Bianca said about the Gelet makes me want to scream. I still feel unsteady, seasick in retrospect, when I think about everything I said to her on the boat, but now that memory is cloaked with anger. But maybe I’m partly upset because Bianca’s right, on some level. She’s only seen me ask the Gelet for help with my own problems, because that’s all I’ve ever done. They’ve saved my life twice, and what did I do for them? Bring them a few nuggets of copper. Shed a few tears for their sick children and their butchered friends.

Alyssa keeps pointing out things around us and laughing. “There’s the tiny courtyard where we used to smoke and make plans for how we were going to own this city, the other Chancers and me.” She bounces, even though she’s carrying a large oak box and supporting one corner of a stretcher. “This here is where that old guy used to just turn up, selling the tastiest fish bread. Down that alley is where that saloon used to brew its own wine. God, this is a real city.”

“I thought you were sick of this place,” Mouth grunts.

Alyssa starts to answer—but a man comes out of the alley she just pointed at. He aims an oil-crusted harpoon gun at us, and says something in Argelan. Mouth is standing nearest to him, and she gets one hand on the harpoon gun and the other on his throat before I even have time to react. The man pulls the trigger without a good shot, and ends up impaled on his own weapon.

Afterward, Mouth is in an even uglier mood than usual, as if killing one more person makes any difference.

Soon everybody but Bianca and me is speaking Argelan, so we’ll make less obvious targets. I understand a word here and there, because some of the vocabulary is almost the same, and Yulya taught me a few phrases, including that confusing “Anchor-Banter” thing.

We’re passing through some neighborhood called Little Merida. The aromas of spiced meats and some kind of lime-scented fish broth come out of every doorway, and I hear strange rhythms echoing off the walls. According to Yulya, this neighborhood was where the Great Argelan Prosperity Company had its central office before they tore all that stuff down. By now, I’m sure none of us knows where we’re going. The longer I listen to the gargling racket of this language, the more I wish I could plug my ears. I’m getting lightsickness, which makes my head throb and fills my vision with streaks.

I’m about to just throw my box of leather on the street, refuse to carry it any farther, when we turn down another alley and venture inside a small tavern, or bar, where everyone hunches over small tureens that smell like hot rat stew, but also like liquor. We lay Reynold on a big oak table, and I’m able to unload the box and my rucksack onto the floor, and blood flows back into my shoulders and hands, so I feel light-headed with relief. Nearby, Yulya and Alyssa help Kendrick into a chair. When I look back at the table where we left Reynold, a man is already cleaning his wounds and has some fancy wound sealant ready. Gerry has already made himself scarce.

Over in the corner of this tavern, or whatever it is, a quartet of musicians pounds out a discordant rhythm on mandolins, drums, and a brass piano, while also playing some board game that involves beautifully carved pewter fish. I think the drummer is winning.

Alyssa, Yulya, and Mouth greet a man who looks familiar, and then I realize: he looks a lot like Omar, our dead leader. Same long curls over a cotton shawl, same whiskers and sideburns. I hear this man say the name “Omar” in the middle of a question, and then Alyssa and Mouth both shake their heads and mutter apologies. The man, whose name turns out to be Ahmad, weeps into one sleeve and brushes off all attempts to console him.

We all just sit for a while, Ahmad staring into the distance and occasionally trembling.

Somebody hands me a bowl of the pungent alcohol-spiked broth, and I force myself to gulp down a few mouthfuls because I can’t remember the last time I ate. It almost doesn’t stay down. My whole body is sore, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to be sleepy right now.

At last Ahmad comes over to Bianca and me. “You came a long way,” he says in perfect Xiosphanti. “Welcome to Argelo.”

“Omar was a really good person,” Bianca tells him. “He saved us from an awful situation back in Xiosphant, and kept us safe on the road when we were too stupid to live.” She smiles at me, and I half smile back. I’m starting to forgive her for the things she said about the Gelet.

“Thanks,” Ahmad says. I notice he’s not eating the stew. “I used to travel with my little brother, and keep an eye on him. Now I wish I hadn’t stopped.”

Bianca nods and takes a swig of the stew. “He kept his sense of humor in conditions that would make most people scream. I didn’t even realize how much he meant to all of us until he was gone.”

They talk about Omar a while longer, while the musicians pack up. I feel so exhausted and numb inside I can’t hold my head up, and I feel drunk on three spoonfuls of stew. But Ahmad’s grief reminds me just how recently Omar died, and how little time we’ve had to mourn.

At last Ahmad says, “Alyssa is hoping you can stay with my wife and me. We don’t have a lot of space, but there’s a small extra room. The goods you managed to bring from Xiosphant will cover your costs for a while.”

“Thank you,” Bianca says. “I always dreamed about coming to Argelo and experiencing real freedom, but now that we’re here… I don’t even know. How do we even live here?”

Ahmad brushes this away. “We’ll worry about that when you’re rested. Come on, I’ll show you our luxury penthouse.”

We shoulder our backpacks again, say goodbye to the Resourceful Couriers, and follow Ahmad’s swaying gait down a series of zigzag alleys coated with vomit. At one point, he says: “I remember the first time I came home to Argelo after traveling with Omar. Took me a while to get used to the noise and the chaos again.” Like he’s trying to relate to our disorientation, but also his grief is still so new that everything reminds him of Omar. We emerge into the sunny side of town, at a plain cement block.

Upstairs, the apartment is just a single long room, with a dining table, a tiny kitchen area and washroom, clean white walls, and tapestries showing beautiful patterns of geometric shapes. Ahmad and his wife sleep in the back, with their son nearby, but Ahmad shows us to a tiny storage space with two bedrolls, for Bianca and me. It’s a little bigger than the sleep nook, at least. Bianca’s already falling onto one of the bedrolls, without bothering to wash or even undress, and I join her, my boots still on.

For a moment, I feel wide-eyed with fear, bordering on delirium, because I still don’t know whether the shutters are up or down at home. Plus, too much light is coming into this space. Now that I’m back inside walls and surrounded by people again, some part of my brain expects some order to my sleeping and my waking.

I’m pulling my body into a snake shape, turned away from Bianca, when she murmurs: “I heard what you said in the storm, on the boat.” Now I’m wide awake, and I have a sprinter’s heart.

“I need you to know that I’ll never let anyone take you away from me again. I would burn everything to fine ash, both cities, the world, to keep you with me. You belong here, you’re fucking mine. Whatever comes next, we’re going to demolish it together.”

I catch my breath, and then I lose it again. I lie next to her with my heart speeding, until exhaustion drags me under. The whole time I’m asleep, I’m hearing her words in my head, and when I wake I’m not sure that I didn’t just dream them.

mouth

The light in Argelo didn’t look like the light in Xiosphant, or anywhere else. Xiosphant had those two perfect mountains to block and reflect the sunshine, creating a pale glow across the whole town that tapered as you approached the night. Out on the road, the light was naked, and you learned not to turn your head too far in either direction, but there was a different quality to the shadow—full of texture and energy—thanks to those storms that came right up to you and sometimes tore you apart. In Argelo, though, everything felt more muted because most of the city was recessed into the ground, and so you sometimes felt as though the dark was coming up out of the Pit and spreading over everything. There was a poet once who said something like, Xiosphant is the city of dawn, but Argelo is the dusk city.

Mouth and Alyssa spent most of their share of the Couriers’ haul, plus some savings, on a tiny apartment overlooking the bright end of the Knife, Argelo’s biggest nightclub district. With a balcony, so they could watch all of the party kids throwing up on each other. They filled the apartment with artisanal rattan furniture, and decorated with dried flowers and hilariously ugly paintings of children riding around on cats, using the cats’ neck spikes to steer. (In real life, if a child tried that, their parents would have one less mouth to feed.)

Mouth couldn’t lean too far over the balcony or she’d have an instant recall of hanging over sharp ice, pleading for her life. She was starting to remember how painstakingly she had built a cairn inside herself, a stable structure that kept her upright and fighting, protected her from any emotional assaults, spared her from being afraid of dying. But these things always crumble when you need them most.

Alyssa spoke up from the big rattan chair. “So. You remember that conversation we had in Xiosphant? About retiring from smuggling? Time we made it official.”

Alyssa got up and poured out some of this fancy wine, made from blackberries that grew on bushes out in the bright hills past the steppes, which only fruited once in a while, when the hot wind came off the day just right. She handed Mouth a glass, and she looked into its scrim. The smell was better than the taste: like air from a cloistered orchard, where nothing bad could happen.

“Even if I wasn’t broken after that last trip,” Alyssa said, “there’s the fact that the Couriers are basically you and me. Kendrick doesn’t want to travel ever again, if he even recovers. Yulya said one round trip was enough for her. We don’t even know if Reynold will ever wake up. We’d need to recruit a whole new crew, and neither of us is an Omar. And my guess? Nobody travels anymore. It’s just gotten too dangerous.”

Mouth felt like the wine had gone down the wrong pipe. But she put on a smile. “So. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do.” Alyssa laughed. “I’m not going to waste my remaining money on partying and gambling and buying fancy bottles of booze—even though this wine tastes lovely—the way that Argelo always wants you to do. This town is designed to separate losers from their money, and all the prices keep going up. So I’m going to live cheaply after this. Maybe invest in something. Start a business, you know, open a shop.”

“You’re going to be a shopkeeper.” Mouth couldn’t help laughing. “You? Standing in the middle of a salesroom, trying to get people to buy shirts? I can imagine you robbing a store, but not owning one.”

“Wow, thanks.” Alyssa cast her eyes at the ceiling for a moment. “Really appreciate the vote of confidence. So glad you think I’m doomed to failure.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just… You might as well shave your head and become one of those bald music teachers.”

Alyssa sat for a moment, and her face turned dark. “Seeing Ahmad made me think. He seemed happy, apart from the thing where his brother died because he wouldn’t quit smuggling.” She paused to choke down some wine. “And you know what? Ahmad used to look much older than you or me. We were kids, next to him. Not anymore. If anything, he looks younger than we do.”

Mouth bit both her lips, but still wanted to say something she would regret, some remark that might break the only worthy thing she had left. She took a breath. “Maybe you just need to take some time off. That situation with the pirates was… intense. We just need to take some time and regroup, and then we can put another crew together. I don’t think I can do it without you.”

“You probably couldn’t do it even with me,” Alyssa said. “Anyway, you just want help getting back to Xiosphant, so you can have another shot at stealing that poetry book.”

Mouth flinched. “I don’t think I get another shot at that. After what happened, the security will be way tighter. That whole town is going to be a prison.”

Even since they came to Argelo, Mouth and Alyssa had kept sleeping next to each other, in this tiny cubbyhole. The apartment had a nice sleeping area, but they still used the nook, for the same reason they slept in a knot: they were used to it. Eventually, though, you could get used to something different, if you weren’t careful.

“Listen,” Mouth said, reaching out one hand to the big rattan chair where Alyssa sat cross-legged. “You’re the closest thing to a friend that I have, who’s still alive.”

“How close, though?” Alyssa looked at the street below their balcony, where some drunks were beating each other senseless. “How close to actual friendship are we?”

“I’m good at reckoning distances, by looking at the shades of light on the ground and the length of the shadows,” Mouth said. “I’m not so good at figuring out near or far from abstract ideas.”

“To me, friend is an either/or: you’re a friend, or you’re not. You’re always saying that you’re a real traveler, you were born on the road, not like the rest of the Couriers. You always made sure we all knew you were better than the rest of us, and I always let it slide. But now? Now you have to decide if you have room to care about anyone besides your dead nomads.”

Mouth felt like getting up and storming out, maybe smashing the rattan couch on the way. But then this might be her last ever conversation with Alyssa. The two of them would become strangers, and Mouth would be even more lost.

“I thought you understood. About the pain of losing your whole extended family. When we first knew each other, you used to talk to me about the Jews, and how they were nomads, and your ancestors were almost wiped out more than once. You were the one person who was supposed to understand.” She still wanted to break things, but also to cover her stupid weak face.

“That’s just it.” Alyssa’s tone softened, and she reached out for Mouth’s hands. “You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. Or even the only one who belongs to a culture that was all but destroyed. There are still some descendants of the people who survived the Hydroponic Garden Massacre walking around. I get it, you lost your whole world when you were a child, and I can’t even imagine the awfulness. But that doesn’t give you a lifetime pass. You know?”

The Citizens had many ideas about death, but mostly, if you died on the road, then the rest of the group would carry you with them. Metaphorically, not physically. Even the group was doomed to extinction; only the road was eternal, and the only real death would be if you lost the road.

But none of this was Alyssa’s fault, and in fact she’d saved Mouth’s ass too many times. So Mouth dug up a kind voice from somewhere, clasped her hands, and said, “I get it. I can recognize reality, I swear I can. I just have a hard time with change, which is probably weird for someone who grew up on the move. But I get it. I won’t pressure you to keep smuggling. Okay?”

“Okay.” Alyssa poured some more wine. “And maybe you’re right, and we’re not cut out to be shopkeepers. Maybe there’s something else we can do to make money, since we’re going to be here for the rest of our lives.”

Mouth tried to suppress a shudder.

Mouth kept asking Alyssa where they were going, and she just laughed. At last she said, “Our new job.” She started singing one of the Couriers’ old songs, about the dog and the ostrich and the man who lived underground. This just ratcheted the tension in Mouth’s gut, which had aspirations of becoming a full-blown ulcer. Alyssa veered uptown, so close to the day that Mouth felt the first stirring of lightsickness.

Just as Alyssa got to the part of the song where the dog tugged at one neck of the ostrich and the man pulled the other, she stopped and banged on the stone door of a wooden building that was so blanched it had cracks. They were in a tight alley where four streets collided and you’d need to be a wizard to find the continuation of the street you’d come in on.

“Here we are,” she said. Mouth followed her inside a high-ceilinged one-story warehouse stacked with crates that Mouth knew at a glance would contain guns.

“This is going to be way better than opening a shop,” Alyssa said.

Mouth made sure to wear a neutral expression.

“You must be Mouth,” said a tall man with swept-back hair, tiny eyes, and a pointed beard. Behind him, a short woman wore her raven hair in two thick braids. They both looked like they identified with the Merida section of the Mothership.

“My name is Carlos,” the man said, “and this is Maria.” Handshakes all around. “Alyssa tells me you’re a good person to have in a bad situation.”

Mouth gave a head tilt, which could mean “yes” or “depends,” or “I don’t know you, and don’t feel like volunteering any information.”

“We’re about to be in a world of bad,” Maria said, looking at Alyssa. “The Nine Families haven’t been managing their shit, and it’s time for some smaller, leaner operations to move up.”

“It’s all up for grabs,” Carlos said. “The sea is fished out, meteor quarries coming up empty, textile factories at half capacity. Toxic rainstorms have been trashing our crops, and the aquifers are getting polluted or drained. Shortages mean one thing: opportunity.”

Mouth could think of one other thing that shortages could mean, but just gave a tiny bob of the head. Alyssa, meanwhile, was saying, “Yeah, yeah.”

“So we’re going to hit the Perfectionists while they’re weak,” Maria said. “We understand you two have some experience at getting things where they need to go.”

“We were part of the Resourceful Couriers, as I mentioned.” Alyssa punched Mouth’s arm.

“That’s excellent. Really excellent. We don’t need you to take anything to Xiosphant, or Moorestown, let alone Untaz or Wurtaz,” Carlos said. “God knows, just getting from one end of town to the other can be vicious.”

Mouth finally spoke: “How big are the items we’ll be transporting?”

“Not super big,” Maria said. “Don’t worry, you’re not carrying these.” She gestured at the crates of guns. That had, in fact, been Mouth’s worry.

The rest of the conversation was just logistics: signal, pickup, delivery, and, most important, payment. Nobody in Argelo could ever agree on what time it was, so Carlos and Maria’s crew, the Superbosses, used tiny wireless devices that could receive up to a dozen preprogrammed signals. Complex electronics were getting harder and harder to come by as everything ran out, but someone had figured out a way to manufacture a ton of these gadgets.

After the meeting, Mouth waited until they’d walked several streets away, then said: “You fucking kidding me? That’s our new job?”

“It’s a good opportunity.”

“After everything we’ve been through, we’re going to be working for gun-running bottom-feeder gangsters.”

“You owe me,” Alyssa said. “I stuck my neck out for you so far I could barely see my own body.” They got lost while arguing. Here at the edge of morning, all the ugly streets looked the same, and they all swallowed their own tails. Even the shadows were no help.

“Listen,” Mouth said as they retraced their steps. “This isn’t like smuggling out there, on the road. It’s not open spaces, where storms and local fauna are your biggest worry, except on the water. Here, it’s enclosed, it’s all firefights in tight spaces. This city is one big killzone.”

“That’s what everyone loves about you,” Alyssa said. “Your sunny personality.”

“Don’t call me that. The sun has killed too many friends of mine.”

They ended up at a bar at the top of Archer’s Hill. From up here, the Knife seemed always to be in midswing, about to stab the Pit’s black heart. You could still see where they’d torn up a ton of the old alleys to make a grand thoroughfare back during one of the People’s Congress eras, and then more recently the Nine Families had torn down an entire neighborhood to build a few of their mansions, leaving a nest of streets that led nowhere.

“You know that I will do this if you ask me to,” Mouth said after the third overpriced swamp vodka. “Even if I didn’t owe you, you’re family. But it’s a bad idea.”

“We have to do something,” Alyssa said. “You’re starting to scare me. You get weird when you have too much time on your hands, and you’re not built for honest work.” She paused and drank enough to destroy the lining of her throat. In between coughs, she blinked tipsily at Mouth. “You really think of me as family?”

Mouth leaned across the table, almost knocking over the half-empty bottle, and caught Alyssa in a hug so encompassing, it was like one of those streets that folded in on itself. As she relaxed into the hug, Mouth whispered, “You’re my only family.”

Mouth refused to sleep while they were watching for the Superbosses’ signal, and then when at last the tiny black gadget spat out a single glyph, Alyssa all of a sudden needed to make a pit stop on their way to the pickup.

And now Mouth wished she’d slept when she had the chance, because she kept hallucinating out of the corner of one eye. Someone was selling roast pheasant on the street corner, with smoke permeating the scaly flesh and the webs between all of its legs. Alyssa bought one for each of them, and the hot juices felt like a corpse reviver.

The “pit stop” took them far from the pickup location, which was that same building on the edge of daylight. Mouth got more and more confused, following Alyssa into the guts of Argelo, and then farther into a row of muslin and silk warehouses. Alyssa knocked on a blank stone wall and said, “It’s me,” and the whole wall swung aside.

Inside the stone building, a bunch of men and women perched on expensive mahogany furniture, holding new-looking single-shot rifles with slide-loading action. Mouth recognized the flying-horse insignia of the Perfectionists, one of the nine ruling “families” here in Argelo.

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

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

Alyssa nodded.

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

Alyssa nodded again, then turned to go.

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

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

Mouth didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Damn right,” Alyssa said.

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

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

“Shut up,” Alyssa grunted.

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOPHIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should come visit Alyssa, though. She’d love to see you.” Mouth gives me one of those Argelan addresses with too many numbers and not enough words as she guides me down the riotous street.

Soon I’m sitting in a wicker basket chair, looking down into the Pit, with its perfect circles of railings going all the way down. People perch on the rails, selling junk or panhandling, while workers and shopkeepers shove past them. Mouth says if you watch long enough, you’ll see one of those rail-sitters fall into the gloomy depths.

“This lemonade costs twice as much as the last time I was in town.” Mouth sets down a pitcher of green liquid, full of brackish weeds. I still can’t get used to the idea that there’s only one type of money here—how do people know what to spend it on?

I take a sip of the lemonade, and the bitterness makes me choke at first, until I get the sweet aftertaste.

“We ought to be friends,” Mouth says in Xiosphanti. “I can help you learn Argelan. It’s a deceptively simple language. If you just go by the meaning of the words, you’ll miss half of what’s being said.”

“A good language for liars, then,” I mutter.

Mouth snorts. “Every language is good for lying. Even body language. If we didn’t lie, we couldn’t communicate. Here in Argelo, they’re fond of the concept of ‘miser generosity,’ which is like you’re being generous by being stingy. They write songs about it. If you only give a little bit—of the truth, of your time, of money—then you’re being sincere. Give too much, and you’re probably just careless, and it means nothing.”

I feel all of my defenses rise, making me want to close myself off, but something about Mouth’s defense of lies goads me into talking. “Bianca opened herself up to you, the same way she did to me when I was a scared young student. And you used her, and you treated her like a disposable piece in your stupid game, and now I’m afraid she’ll never open up that way again. So no, we can’t be friends.”

Mouth’s impassive “bruiser” persona drops away for a moment and she looks stricken, the same as when she tried to joke about Alyssa’s injury.

“I don’t know what to say. I used to have a handle on ethics,” she says. “Maybe if I had access to the Invention and could read all the teachings, I would be a good person again. When I was in the Citizens, every situation had a guiding principle, but now I have to figure out everything by myself. If I had rescued the Invention, it would be like getting to talk to them one more time.”

“That book wouldn’t have helped you,” I say. “If you read those poems by yourself, they’d just be more of your words. More ‘stingy generosity.’ You can’t replace people with words, especially if you’re a liar.”

In the Pit, an elderly woman has her hat out, asking for loose change or extra food, and everyone ignores her.

Mouth changes the subject. “I can’t believe you went into the night and learned to speak with the crocodiles. We spent a lot of time talking about them in the Citizens, and some people thought the night was the land of the dead and they were there to guide us. Or maybe they were just wise spirits. But in any case, the Citizens would have considered you some kind of mystic. Or maybe even a saint.”

I feel a weight, like Mouth is trying to settle some crown onto my head that will slowly break my neck. The word “saint” feels even worse than when Bianca said the Gelet were my pets.

Mouth sees me shrinking into my basket chair and says, “I’m just saying, I owe you my life, but even more, I’m in awe of you. And maybe there’s a way for you to use your gift to help more people. I know here in Argelo there are scavengers who go into the night looking for the wreckage of environment suits and land cruisers our ancestors left out there. They could really use someone to help them reach an understanding with the crocodiles.”

At this point, I’m done with this conversation, because the idea of making a profit off my relationship with the Gelet is the worst insult yet. I get up and walk back toward Ahmad’s place without even looking to see if Mouth is following. I only get lost three or four times.

Everywhere we go, people stare at Bianca, because of her New Shanghai features that look like nobody else’s in this town, and because she can’t help being loud and excited, with an obvious foreign accent. At first she glared at people, with a barb in the wrong language on the tip of her tongue. But now she’s decided that if she’s going to be a spectacle either way, she might as well have fun with it. She’s wearing a sheer silver dress that leaves her shoulders and most of her legs exposed, a wrap made of loose filaments, and silver sandals. Plus blue-and-silver streaks around her eyes. I’m wearing a golden dress made out of some fabric I’ve never seen before that clings to my body in coruscating ripples.

“Everybody is going to stare at me,” I grouse under my breath.

“Good.” Bianca claps her hands. “They should. You look glorious.”

Goose bumps raise up on my bare arm. Bianca smiles at me, and I remember what she said in the storeroom when we first slept here: We’re going to demolish this together. I smile at her, too, and she takes my hand, right out on the street, like she’s letting everybody know we’re together. I almost don’t care anymore that we haven’t talked.

She’s wearing some fragrant oil, and every time I breathe it in, I feel dizzy, half wild with joy, out of control. We’re holding hands! In the street! She’s chattering to me about the place she wants to take me, in the nightclub district. The Knife. We’re going to dance together, just the two of us, at some club that has walls made of speakers and air made of glitter. I can’t help feeling like this is some buoyant fantasia, like I fell asleep watching an opera, and now I’m dreaming in song.

Bianca’s hand and the Gelet bracelet are guiding me in different directions, at right angles to each other. I silently promise to find my way to the night as soon as I can.

“Everybody who’s anybody will be there, and it’s our chance to start getting an introduction to the right people,” Bianca says in Argelan.

“I don’t care about the right people,” I breathe. “I’m just so happy to be here with you.” I keep remembering how she said she would burn the world for me, and I’m so ready to set at least a few small fires—together. I keep noticing more things, like the way some of these older buildings look influenced by Xiosphanti architecture, but with cruder decorations and other kinds of rock painted to look like whitestone. I whisper and point, and she nods.

I can tell we’re getting closer to the Knife, because bright lights shine from every building, and I hear the thumps and whistles of a dozen kinds of loud music in the distance. Argelan dance music is like Xiosphanti ragtime, only much faster and with more drums.

“Maybe we can find some students to hang out with,” I say in her ear. “People our age, who are studying the same things that we were studying. Having the same conversations we were having. I bet there are some groups like the Progressive Students here.”

She shrugs. “I’m not interested in spending time with a bunch of naive students. We’re going to need powerful friends to survive in this city and achieve all our goals. You heard Ahmad, that’s how it works here.”

I still feel the bracelet pulling me in the opposite direction, but it only bothers me if I pay attention to it.

“We’re finally here, in the place we always talked about back home, the city where anything can happen,” Bianca says. “We’re young, and we’re free, and our city tried to kill us. Let’s make some noise!”

I would burn the world for you, I hear in my head.

“Yeah. Let’s make some noise.” I clasp her hand tighter.

We round a steep corner on this potholed street, and then we’re standing at the hilt of the Knife. I’ve never seen so many colors in one place: every nightclub and bar has a sign that glows pink, or red, or a color between blue and green that I don’t even know the name of. The sharp edge of the Knife curves away from us, along a street paved with reflective stones that look like candies. Each building has a different style and texture, from burnished steel beams to whitestone columns to a huge transparent cube, and out front, a sea of young people sways and drifts from place to place, holding drinks or gnarled pipes. Most of the people in the crowd are only a little older than Bianca and me, and they wear sheer clothing that exposes parts of their bodies. The sky looks just as gray as ever, but everyone’s face is bathed in a hundred shades of orange and green. I can’t help gasping at this radiance, this decadence, this liberation.

I stop resisting and let Bianca pull me into the throng. Every time the scent of perfumed sweat and the view of squirming exposed flesh start to overwhelm me, I look at Bianca. Her whole face is bright and open as she points out each new thing, and everything shines with more beauty because she’s showing it to me.

mouth

Mouth didn’t know how long they’d been in Argelo. Long enough for the money to start running out, and for all the prices to rise again. She was already sick of overhearing pretentious Argelan conversations about living in harmony with nature, and whether the unchanging canopy overhead granted liberation from all constraints, or merely required a greater exertion of individual will to keep sleeping, working, playing, and eating in their right proportions and intervals. And so on. People could talk forever here.

At least back in Xiosphant, Mouth had known what people saw when they looked past her camouflage: a foreigner. Here in Argelo, somebody might see an enforcer for one of the Nine Families, or a mercenary, or an escapee from the undercity. Everyone squinted at Mouth and wanted to know which compartment her ancestors had occupied on the Mothership (the nearest guess was usually Ulaanbaatar) or, worse, to speculate about her scars. People kept propositioning Mouth, for business or sex, and she just scowled until they went away. You could do whatever you felt like in Argelo, but so could everybody else.

Mouth visited every bakeshop in the city, looking for those little cactus-pork crisps that Alyssa ate. Something about almost losing Alyssa reminded Mouth of all the other deaths she’d seen, which led to thinking about the Citizens, which in turn led to remembering that she would never know how to mourn, because all the rituals were stuck in a book in a vault in a damned Palace. But at least there was one person left alive for Mouth to treat to fried food.

The cactus-pork crisps were still hot, still carrying the tart scent of the tiny bakeshop near the bottom of the Pit, when Mouth got them back to the apartment. Alyssa barely needed her cane to get around anymore, and her energy seemed to be back. Mouth was about to say that Alyssa needed rest, then realized that they weren’t alone. A short, elderly man sat in one of the big rattan chairs, holding a chipped cup full of coffee in one veiny, pale hand and a huge stack of books and notepads in the other.

“There you are,” Alyssa said. “I’ve got a surprise for you. I hunted and hunted, it took forever, but this was so worth it.”

Mouth just stared at the old man, who had a thin mustache, tiny glasses, and a threadbare muslin suit. “I brought you a surprise too.” She held up the greasy bag.

“Oh yum. We’ll all share them.” Alyssa bustled to the kitchen, fetching plates and brushing off Mouth’s attempts to handle kitchen stuff. “Mouth, this is Professor Martindale. He teaches at the Betterment University, up on the morning side of town. He’s a professor of religious studies.”

“I’ve enjoyed talking to Alyssa,” Martindale said, taking a plate with a cactus-pork crisp on it with a smile. “I haven’t met a Jewish person in quite a while. There’s only one temple left in Argelo, as far as I know. No offense.”

“None taken,” Alyssa said. “But never mind about me. Professor Martindale, tell her.”

“So… Alyssa tells me you were a member of an itinerant group called the Citizens,” Martindale said. “I’ve been studying them my whole career, both before and after they vanished. I used to interview their leader—her name was Yolanda, correct?—and several other members. I have a section of my archive devoted to them.”

The floor was unsteady, like this building could have been set adrift on the Sea of Murder. “What did you say?”

“I’ve been studying the—”

“Alyssa,” said Mouth. “Can we talk in the kitchen?”

“Uh,” Alyssa said. “Sure. We’ll be right back.”

They crammed into the tiny kitchen, which was only separated from the rest of the apartment by a flimsy partition. “What’s up?” Alyssa said, pouring herself more coffee.

“I don’t want to talk to this guy.”

“What do you—”

“I don’t want to hear some outsider tell me about the Citizens, or what some ‘expert’ figured out. They were my family. My community. I’m not interested in what some fancy professor has to say.”

“But he talked to them. He interviewed that Yolanda woman over and over. He can tell you—”

“I don’t want to know!” Mouth was shaking, light-headed. Seeing flame trails. She tasted salt again. “I don’t want to hear somebody’s stupid, overeducated… I don’t want my people to be his specimens that he dissects. He probably wants me to share more of the secrets. It’s none of his business. It’s none of your business.”

“I see how it is.” Alyssa choked down her dark water and then poured some more. “You were willing to sacrifice all of us to get your hands on that stupid book, because you needed answers and closure. But here’s the guy who can give you answers and fucking closure, you stupid bitch. He’s sitting right there, in our living room, because I turned this whole city upside down to find him.”

“I’m sorry.” Every word Mouth spoke was colored by weeping. “I’m sorry. I know I’m selfish. I try not to be. I brought you the crisps.”

“Never mind the fucking crisps. Let people do for you. Let me do for you. I found that professor guy to help you. Those nomads died before you even finished puberty, right? You never got to know them as an adult. I know you’re scared that you’ll taint your memories of them, but I can tell you it doesn’t work like that. You’ll only add to your understanding. That’s all.”

“Okay.” Mouth hugged Alyssa with a ferocious strength. “Okay.”

Maybe you don’t get to choose how you make peace, or what kind of peace you make. You count yourself lucky if peace doesn’t run away from you.

“Let me do for you,” Alyssa said again. Mouth nodded.

Then Alyssa was back out in the front of the apartment. “Sorry about that interruption,” she was telling the professor. “Mouth wanted to remind me that we have better plates than these, and we always save them for company, and then the one time we have company over we forget to use them.” Hearing this, Mouth reached to the top shelf in the kitchen and pulled down all three of the good plates.

Mouth sat in the rattan armchair and listened to the professor talking about how the nomads were among the few examples of a type-three intentional community in recorded history, even on Earth. “What’s particularly interesting about the Citizens is the teaching that everybody gets to have their own personal mythology, as though you don’t have full Citizenship unless they construct a cosmology that explains how the Elementals brought you to the road.” This was the thing that Mouth had never earned, according to Yolanda and the other Priors.

“I never knew the details of how it worked,” Mouth said to fill the silence.

“When I used to speak to Yolanda, she always said the Priors would walk from morning to evening and back to morning, to consult with both the day and night Elementals, and then they would know what someone’s personal myth ought to be,” said the professor.

Mouth just grunted at that.

Then Martindale pulled out a thought box. “Ever seen one of these before?”

Mouth nearly fell out of her chair. Nobody was supposed to have one of those, and this college teacher was handling it like a regular wooden cube. The wood had been harvested from one particular grove, beyond the last frontier town, way farther than anyone else ever journeyed, and then the Priors had stained it with a lacquer that they made out of the resin from a different copse, on almost the opposite side of the world, and then carefully blackened it over an open fire. Mouth had only held a thought box one single time, when they’d said, You’re still not ready for a name.

“Where did you get that?” Mouth slid back onto her seat, trying not to act shaken.

“At this little market stall, down seven levels from the shoe repair man, in the Pit,” said the professor, with a faint smile. “You can probably still buy one for yourself. The Citizens used to come through town and sell these, and they built them to last.”

Mouth stared at the box, which was scored with all the markings that Mouth was told never to explain to an outsider, along with other signs that even Mouth had never understood. People were buying these in the Pit, like they were ashtrays or cactus-pork crisps. The Citizens had encouraged this. “Did—” Mouth swallowed. “Did they sell these as religious artifacts? Or just as random boxes to put your stuff into?”

“Both. You should talk to Jerome. He runs the woodcrafts stall, and he did business with the Citizens all the time, whenever they passed through. I’m sure he’d love to meet you. The Citizens were pretty pragmatic about it—they knew some people would love to own an authentic religious item from a ‘primitive’ community, but other people just wanted a nice box to store jewelry in.”

“We used these to contain our negative, harmful thoughts. It was a whole cleansing ritual.” Mouth would have given anything to have access to a thought box back when the others had all died and there was no place to put all of the guilt.

“Well, I would love to hear more about what it was like to be raised among the Citizens.” Martindale put the box back into his old satchel. “I already gathered some background from Yolanda and the others when they were in town before. And of course, since the Citizens vanished, I’ve been able to get more context from talking to Barney.”

“Barney?”

“Apologies.” He looked over at Alyssa, who was shaking her head with a skittish look, like maybe this was all too much, too soon, after all. Mouth tried to smile. “You probably knew him as Barnabas,” the professor went on. “He was a member of the Citizens for most of his life. He left the group during their final visit to Argelo, and his place is just a kilometer and a half from here. I assumed you were already in touch with him.”

Mouth had forgotten all about Barnabas, who had cooked for the group and used to sing and laugh at the same time during feast breaks, but now a few scattered memories came back. Nobody had talked about Barnabas after he’d gone missing, that last time in Argelo, and Mouth had just assumed Barnabas was dead.

“Thanks for coming over, Professor,” Alyssa was saying, by way of letting Martindale know that maybe this was enough for now, and they didn’t want to make anyone’s head explode. “We’ll be in touch. I am sure Mouth will be excited to talk some more about the Citizens, and their unique culture.”

“Great, great.” Martindale got up and tugged on Mouth’s hand and then Alyssa’s, and then he was gone.

Mouth stayed glued in the big rattan chair, staring at the chair opposite, where the professor had sat handling the thought box and talking about the ancient mysteries like they were a funny story. Day and night might as well have changed places.

“He doesn’t have a copy of that book you were trying to steal,” Alyssa said. “I already asked him.”

She saw the look on Mouth’s face and sat down in the chair where Martindale had sat, offering her hands.

“Look,” Alyssa said. “I know that was weird, and I shouldn’t have sprung that on you as a surprise, I guess. But you need to find out more about your nomads, or they’ll always be the people who judged you when you were a little kid and then died before you could stand eye-to-eye with them as an adult. I can’t even imagine.”

“You’re right.” These were the two hardest words Mouth had ever spoken.

“I am?” Alyssa was so relieved she laughed and then started to cry. “I thought you were going to kill me for a moment.”

“No, you are right about this. And thank you.” Mouth was in horrible pain, all the way down to the cellular level where all that guilt had lived for so long. But maybe this pain would turn out to be the healing kind. Clutching Alyssa with both arms, Mouth let out a deep, ugly, gasping breath of what might eventually be relief.

SOPHIE

“I found this place,” Bianca says, “where they make this drink. You will never want to drink gin-and-milk again.” As if making me hate gin-and-milk is some accomplishment.

I still stick to the same main streets most of the time, because otherwise I’ll get lost and Argelo will just swallow me whole. I can’t get used to a place where so many people shove each other, and I can never tell who’s just woken up and who’s about to go to bed. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be tired, and that makes me more tired. Random people want to talk to me about Nagpur, a place I know almost nothing about.

But Bianca already knows all the best places in every neighborhood. “This is the café where they do these donuts. Abraham here is a genius at grinding the stalks and getting them just the right muddy consistency.” She drags me by the arm into a wooden cavern, which reminds me of the Illyrian Parlour except they just drink coffee by the light of tiny candles. She gives me a bite of a donut, and it’s incredible: sweet and crumbly, pure happiness. Abraham, a big guy with a bald head and stretched-out ears, pauses in the middle of grating some dark sticks into a bowl to wave at her.

I stare at all the people crammed onto all the seats, stools, and ledges in this thick air. Two girls squeeze onto a single oak chair, holding hands and whispering. At the table next to ours, a group of students wearing loose, torn clothing argue about the nature of consciousness, in a flurry of Argelan that I about half understand. Are we conscious because we perceive the outside world, or because we are aware of our own thoughts? One young man, with a high forehead and bony shoulders, says that by definition consciousness is the ability to act on our environment with intent, because otherwise sleep would be a form of consciousness. What about crocodiles? someone asks. They have some kind of insectoid hive behavior, but does that make them conscious, or just a complex manifestation of instinct? I tune out this conversation, because they’re idiots. And meanwhile, the two girls are kissing, right in front of the whole café. I can’t stop looking at these girls, with a Xiosphanti voice inside my head blaring Unnatural—and then I’m ashamed to be caught staring, and I look away with my face hot. Bianca’s already standing up, ready to leave.

“Here’s what I learned about Argelo.” Bianca stops to wave at everyone who passes on the street, and they all wave back. “People spend all their time and energy trying to live in the perfect spot, with just enough light to let you see some color. And then, once you’ve got your home in the light, you spend all your remaining money in bars and cafés, where it’s pitch dark.” Bianca dresses like a fashionable Argelan lady, with ribbons, silk, and lace, but people still gawp at her, especially now that she’s put a bold red streak into her lopsided black hair and started wearing luminescent makeup.

At last Bianca takes me to the place with that wondrous drink. It’s one of the hottest bars in the Knife, called Punch Face. (The name in Argelan sounds a lot like the word for “shutter malfunction” in Xiosphanti.) The darkness inside Punch Face is so thick and smoky I almost step on a famous torch singer named Marilynne.

But Bianca sees better than me, and also she knows the whole scene by heart. She talks in my ear, just in Argelan, except for a few words in Xiosphanti. “That man you almost kicked, that’s Gabriel. He’s been making a fortune speculating on sour cherries, because they are in huge demand right now thanks to being a key ingredient in this amazing drink that you are about to try for the very first time.” The drink is called an Amanuensis, and my first sip is tart, but with a fizzy sweet afterburn. “See? Forget you ever even tasted gin-and-milk. You could rob Gabriel right now, and nobody would care. Except don’t rob him in here, because I don’t want to get thrown out of my favorite club.”

Punch Face looks no bigger than the Zone House back home, as far as I can tell, without ever seeing the walls. The center of the room is taken up with a black fire, which devours light instead of giving it off—this is something they rescued from one of the old space shuttles, and it has a complicated explanation that I cannot hear over the noise. A group of musicians hunch on one side of the space, slapping a pair of drums and grinding out a rhythmic melody on guitars and a piano, with a singer hissing, “You can trust me, I want to bite you.” People dance in loose clothes that billow like the waves of the Sea of Murder. The air has a sugary tang, as if everyone is sweating out their sweet drinks.

The music speeds up. We all crush into the center of the room, arms under legs. Our torsos slide sideways across each other, and I’m going to implode with happiness. I don’t know this dance we’re doing, but I don’t need to. I follow the music and the other people, and our bodies speak to each other with heat and pressure. All my nerve endings go wide awake. We put everything we have up in the air, then fall on top of each other. I hear Bianca laugh, feel her grabbing my waist with both hands to lift me into the air. And then there’s a man nearby, with no shirt and sweat running along the ridges of his muscles. He laughs too, as his body whips between us. All my usual anxiety is gone. Everything feels brilliant. Bianca and I are alive and we’re together, here on the other side of the world, in this dark warm room full of beautiful dancers. I want to fall into this moment forever.

Bianca keeps trying to pull me toward another food stall, or a trendy bar. “Come on,” she pleads, “there’s so much you haven’t seen yet.” But I follow my bracelet in the direction of the night, because I’ve put this off for much too long.

“You should come with me,” I say to her. “You can learn to understand the Gelet the way I do, then you’ll know they’re not animals. They can show you their city, and all of the incredible things they witnessed before our ancestors even arrived.”

Bianca considers this. “If I talk to them now, would they come when I called, the way they did for you? Would they help me out if I needed to cross through the night?”

I stop and look at her, and a cart runs into me, loaded up with fabrics on this narrow winding street, with a large man pedaling.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I spent a long time earning their trust and getting things for them. Maybe they would expect the same from you.”

“That seems like a huge commitment. And you’re basically saying I would have to be their servant.” Bianca purses her lips. “No offense, but this whole thing feels creepy. Do you even know what these creatures are doing to you? Like, are they controlling your mind?”

I turn and start walking again, down darker and darker streets. I don’t know how to respond to any of this.

“Plus you can’t just walk into the night from here,” Bianca says behind me. “You heard what Ahmad said. There’s no wall, no mountain, between us and the edge. A lot of people live right up against the evening, and it’s the worst part of town. I bet the crocodiles won’t even come anywhere near that place.” I give her a look, and she says, “I mean the Gelet. Right.”

I pause, because this already feels like night. Rough clay-brick buildings still cluster around me, but I almost can’t see my own hand, a few centimeters from my face, even with a small electric torch. I feel frost-sick, even wearing three layers. Farther ahead, I can almost make out more buildings, and people moving, but they could be my imagination. If you starve your eye enough, it will invent things.

“If anything happens to you, I’ll lose my mind.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Good luck with that,” Bianca says. “There’s some effect I read about, where every hundred meters you go deeper into the night, the temperature drops exponentially. Plus you won’t even know which direction the day is. Seriously, come back with me now. I’ll buy you donuts. Please.”

I turn to look at Bianca, who’s a few gray lines. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.” At least this time, I have my torch, and the warmest padded jacket and pants I could find in Katrina’s closet.

“I’m turning back. You should too. I’m sure the crocodiles—Gelet—don’t want you to just get yourself killed.” The horizon only has a dim ember left. Bianca disappears back into the city.

I almost collide with a house before I see it. The structure shakes at my touch, and if I’d run into it with my whole body I’d have left just a pile of boards. Someone has lashed some pieces of an old temporary shelter to rotting poles, under a roof of packed mud and slate, and I could stick my hand through with no effort. I can’t imagine what they do when there’s an ice storm.

“Did you find it?” someone inside the tiny house asks. “Please tell me you found it. I can’t hold on much longer. I only need a little bit.” I almost turn away, but instead I grope until I find the door, and it opens inward.

Inside the shack, a figure huddles under a pile of survival cloths and old torn strips of insulation. A tiny lamp perches on a few crates next to this “bed.” The tenant keeps asking if I have it, in a voice like an old man. But I get closer and realize I’m looking at a girl, a little younger than me, with no hair and shrunken features. She raises a hand with no fingers.

“Do you have it? Did you bring it?” She squints upward, realizes I’m nobody she knows, and gasps.

I reach in my bag for all the food I have—the remains of a fish pie from this place Bianca took me to—and I put it next to her bed. Then I turn and run out of there, and don’t look back.

Back in Argelo, the streets spin me around again. Music blasts from all sides, and under my feet. I smell kettles of whiskey-scented stew. Laughter rings out from a half-open doorway, just upstairs on my right. But I can’t stop thinking about the girl in the bed of old survival gear. I feel sick—like nausea, but duller and deeper. Even closer to the temperate zone, I have to step over beggars every couple of meters, something I never saw in Xiosphant.

A sickening phrase comes back to me: “miser generosity.”

By the time I get back to Ahmad’s, my horror has hardened into pure fury. What kind of city is this? They have enough resources to spare for light shows and sour cherry drinks, but not enough to rescue the people living in a shantytown at the edge of evening. Every self-satisfied chuckling face I pass, I want to scream into.

But Bianca is in high spirits. “Oh, thank goodness you’re back safely,” she says in Argelan. “I’ve been worrying myself to pieces. Did you manage to meet with your friends?”

“No,” I say. “You were right, it was awful. I just saw the ugliest side of this city, and now I can’t unsee it.”

“Well, cheer up, because you’re about to see a whole other side.” She holds up a golden card, embossed with our names and a bunch of Argelan directions that I can’t understand. “My persistence has paid off! I was dancing at Punch Face, and I met one of the top lieutenants in the Unifiers. You remember them, right?”

I toss my head, because of course I do. Ahmad made us memorize the Unifiers’ insignia, along with the other eight ruling families here in Argelo.

“They’re hosting a giant formal ball, with two of the other families, and I just scored the two of us an invite. Absolutely everybody who matters in this town is going to be there.” She claps her hands together. “We’ll have to get ball gowns made, and borrow some jewelry, and dance until we can’t even see straight, and then dance some more, and it’s going to be epic.”

I still see the fingerless girl in my mind as I shake my head. “I can’t. I just can’t. You should just go without me.”

“Sophie.” Bianca takes my shoulders and looks into my face, and she looks like the fearless rebel who stole all my waking thoughts back at the Gymnasium again. “I want to share this with you. I want to dress you up in the most stunning piece of clothing you have ever worn, and then show off your beauty to all of the fancy people here in Argelo. This is going to be the greatest experience of our lives. I promise you, I know what I’m doing, and this is all for a good cause. But for now, just trust me, and come with me to the ball.”

I’m so startled that she called me beautiful I find myself smiling and nodding. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go to the ball together.”

mouth

The tiny diner had three tables and seven chairs, with a wide counter along the back, at the bottom of a small hill where two streets made of stone slabs converged. The name BARNEY’S was etched across the front window in chipped gold letters, and there was a faded menu. Mouth stood outside and studied the proprietor’s round, beard-shadowed face, and didn’t recognize him. But Mouth mostly remembered Barnabas as a loud voice, and the scent of stews cooking.

Barney had owned this restaurant for as long as anyone could remember, not far from the college where Martindale taught, on the light side of town. Martindale hadn’t even realized there was a surviving ex-Citizen selling cheap food to students and some faculty right down the hill from his office until recently.

Mouth wanted to keep standing outside and staring at the old man in the dirty apron, but Martindale was already pulling the glass door open. Barney saw the professor enter and gave a welcoming shout from behind the counter, then came over and put fresh plates and cheap silverware on the innermost table, with a grin that exposed his front teeth.

Barney filled every moment with patter. “Good to see you, Professor. I got some of that meatloaf you like, and I think we’ve got a few bottles of that grape juice, too. It’s always great to see you. We’ve been lucky enough to get a lot of students coming in here lately. I always treat them right. Students always have the most interesting conversations, you know, Professor. Reminds me of when I used to live on the road, and we’d have all sorts of deep introspective talk when we were miles from anywhere, with nothing but sky in all directions. A man starts to feel his true size against the vastness of the universe. You know? What are your friends having?”

“Actually, I’ve got something of a surprise for you, Barney.” The professor was enjoying himself way too much.

“Oh?” Barney was putting meatloaf onto a tray, and the meatloaf looked, or maybe smelled, familiar in a way that Barney’s face hadn’t.

Martindale gestured at Mouth, who fidgeted and backed toward the door. “This here is another surviving member of the Citizens. Barney, meet Mouth.”

“Oh. Oh!” Barney rushed over and looked up into Mouth’s face, searching for something. Barney’s eyes widened. “Mouth. Of course. Little Mouth, I remember you. Such a tiny pain in the ass. You nearly lit my cooking tent on fire one time. I always wondered what name they ended up giving you.”

“They didn’t,” Mouth said. “Never got around to it.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. Well, I’m sure they would be proud if they could…” Barney stopped and looked down, into the glistening slab of meatloaf. “I mean, if they could be here. If they were still around. To see you grown so big, and so self-sufficient. Not that they really valued self-sufficiency, I guess. They were always about interdependence. It drove me nuts. You couldn’t wipe your ass without…” Barney trailed off again.

There was a long silence. Alyssa grabbed Mouth’s arm, as if one or the other of them needed reassurance in this moment.

“I never found out what happened,” Barney said. “All I knew is, we would come through town pretty regular when I was a member. And then I quit the group, and they never came back. I asked around, nobody saw them again.”

“It was ugly,” Mouth said. “You were lucky.”

Barney had half sat down, but raised himself up again. He staggered over to the front door of the deli, suddenly moving like a much older, frailer man, and flipped the placard to indicate the place was closed. Then he went behind the counter and dug out a bottle of swamp vodka so dirty, it could have come straight from the swamp.

“So you were there?” Barney whispered. “You actually saw?”

Professor Martindale chose this moment to try to reassert his control over the reunion that he had facilitated. “Well, this is all very fascinating, and I think it’s important that everything about this first meeting between two former members of the Citizens be documented for posterity. I’m interested to see the two of you compare notes, as it were.” He pulled out a large stenotype machine, the kind that let you write quickly with one hand.

Barney and Mouth looked at each other, and then at the professor, and stayed silent.

The professor tried a couple of times to start the discussion going again, by making an assertion like, “Well, of course, the Citizens are known to have placed a heavy emphasis on direct revelation, via spiritual experiences which would come, for example, as a result of visiting certain dormant volcanoes or other natural formations.” And everyone would nod, and the silence would continue.

At last Alyssa poured herself some swamp vodka and destroyed the lining of her throat in a single gulp. “What I want to know is”—she panted a little—“what the hell were they even thinking? I mean, sorry, Mouth, but I’ve been on the road more than most people, and the only thing that ever made the road tolerable was knowing we would get off it for a long spell once we reached civilization again. What kind of people decide to just go out and lug all their stuff from town to town forever?”

Mouth kicked Alyssa under the table so hard she yelped.

But Barney just laughed and poured more swamp vodka. “That’s a good question. I used to wonder about that all the time. Just like Mouth, I was born into the Citizens, and I lived with them for most of my life. I heard lots of stories of how the Citizens came to be, but they were all contradictory and full of weird holes. But here’s what I think.”

Mouth had switched from kicking Alyssa to trying to kick Barney before he said something he shouldn’t, but Barney was a nimble old shit and kept moving just out of reach of Mouth’s boot.

“The operative word in what you said was ‘civilization.’” Barney swigged vodka, and poured more for Professor Martindale, who hesitated and then took a swig. “A lot of what people call civilization is just neglect. Most people on this planet live in the two major cities, because that’s where we have the infrastructure, right? We have the farms and the factories, the power plants and sewers. Although the Argelan sewage system is breaking down, because none of the Nine Families is responsible for it. And the shortages are getting worse and worse, and prices keep going up and up. But anyway, with that many people on top of each other, you don’t know who the people around you are. You might interact with a hundred people in a row without knowing much about any of them. Versus a smaller community, where you’re surrounded by people you’ve known your whole life.”

“When I used to talk to Yolanda and Daniel, the leaders of the Citizens, they said that walking outdoors for long periods of time was almost like a form of meditation.” Martindale drank a little vodka, to be polite, and gagged. Barney encouraged the professor to wash it down with more vodka. “If you categorize religious activities on a three-dimensional map, with prayer as one fixed origin and meditation as another, you could helpfully classify the Citizens’ travels as a hybrid devotional-transcendental activity.”

“Yeah.” Barney poured more vodka for everybody, making sure Martindale got plenty. “I mean, so you used to travel from one city to the other with your smuggler crew, right?” Alyssa tossed her head. “So you were out on the road for one trip at a time. Probably felt like it lasted forever, until you were back in a city, and then the road was just a dream you’d had. But when you’re living out there, everything is different. You were born on the road, you lost your baby teeth on the road, you grew old on the road. And just moving forward, with the world stretching as far as you can see, your mind starts to empty out. You get in tune with the subtle changes in the wind, the way the landscape changes as you travel, the way that day and night can seem near or far, depending on the terrain. People did feel like they heard the landscape talking to them. Like they were closer to something real.”

“I hate to break it to you.” Alyssa pounded her vodka and took some more. “But the changes in the wind are not subtle out on the road. It can get ugly in no time.”

“Weather’s gotten more violent.” Mouth spoke for the first time in ages. “Since I was with the Citizens, the storms have gotten worse, and more frequent. Used to be easier to travel, even without pirates.”

Barney shrugged. “We get storms here, too. Toxic rain, even. We just hunker down underground.”

“They’re worse out there, closer to the ocean and the deadlands.”

Professor Martindale was swaying, like a losing brawler.

“Oh, looks like you had a bit too much, man. Better lie down a moment,” said Barney, already supporting the professor out of his chair and helping him over to a little cot behind the counter, near the cookstove. Soon he was out cold.

“Some people just can’t handle the good stuff.” Alyssa noticed the professor’s vodka cup was still half full, and took possession.

“He’s a decent fellow.” Barney gestured at the sleeping professor. “Sometimes makes you feel like a bug under glass. But I get the feeling he and Yolanda appreciated each other. They both loved to hear themselves talk about theoretical questions of how many teeth make a bite. Whatever. Still. There are some things you don’t talk about with outsiders.”

Barney looked at Alyssa as he said that, and Alyssa made a big show of getting up to leave, but Mouth said, “She’s family. She can stay.”

“Okay.” Barney brought a fried ham out of some cubby behind the counter, and carved a few slabs. “So, they really never gave you a name? That’s cold.”

“What made you leave? Why would you just abandon us like that?” Mouth did not mean to sound angry or wounded, since after all it was the past now, and Barney couldn’t have made any difference if he’d stayed.

“What happened to them?” Barney demanded in return.

“You first,” Mouth said.

“I left because I got arthritis, and they insisted I could get over it if I just listened harder to the road. I left because we were trying to sell our sacred shit to trendy people here in Argelo, for them to use as conversation pieces in their fancy homes, but meanwhile as Yolanda got older she got more sure that she was right about everything, and she wouldn’t listen to anyone. But also, I… I felt like I got it.”

“You… got it?” Mouth said.

“I had reached the goal. I had the clear head, the voices of the Elementals in the back of my mind, the whole concept of being able to look into the night without losing your will, that thing they taught of having evening and morning inside you, so you could reconcile the extremes within yourself. I had it. I was sure. It felt right. It still feels that way.”

Mouth had been ready for Barney to say he had left because he lost faith, or realized it was all a sham, or anything defiling and dirty. But this was impossible to hear. Mouth felt drunker than the professor for a moment.

“But if you really had the clearness, the reconciliation, all of that,” said Mouth. “That’s even more reason for you to stay. So you could help teach the rest of us. I mean, shit. If there had been an actual sage, a real day-and-night integrator, living among us, I might have turned out different. Maybe I would have become somebody.”

“You are somebody,” Barney said. “Look at you. You turned out fine.”

“I am nobody,” Mouth said. “That’s the lesson they left me with. No name, no myth, no identity. I never got any of it. And now it’s too late.”

“Listen.” Barney seemed to pity Mouth, which was the worst insult. “I couldn’t teach anybody. What I learned—if it was even real, it felt real to me, but who knows—what I learned could not be taught, I was pretty sure. And Yolanda didn’t want me around anyway after I told her. The point of religion, for Yolanda, was to keep trying to reach someplace, and the last thing you want is for someone to actually feel like they’ve reached it. I couldn’t stay. But I’m sorry for how they treated you.”

Mouth had sometimes fantasized about hearing an apology from Yolanda, Cynthia, or one of the other Priors, for the no-name, no-self thing. But this was as close as she’d ever get, and it felt like hot dust.

“Whatever,” Mouth said. “I was a child. Now I’m an adult. I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes since the other Citizens died out. I mostly wished I had a name and status so there could be someone to mourn them all. If I’d even known how.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.” Barney touched Mouth’s hand and poured more booze for everyone. Alyssa was looking at Mouth too, because she had never heard the story either. Nobody had.

Mouth swallowed some spit, drank some vodka, hesitated, and decided to tell a cleaned-up version. “We stopped in the plains, near Pennance Hollow. I went to this lagoon to get some water for our new cook, who wasn’t as good as you had been.” Barney smiled at this. “I was carrying the water back to the encampment, in that big tub that had all the weird faces on it. And then I heard loud voices coming from the camp.”

Even remembering that much drained all the life out of Mouth. Like sleep deprivation, or muscle fatigue, but much harder.

Alyssa rested her face on Mouth’s chest for a moment, then sat up and poured more swamp vodka.

“At first I thought they were singing, like I had somehow missed a ritual, or a celebration. Then it sounded more like an argument. The idea that they were screaming, that I was hearing their death cries, didn’t even figure. Then I got to the top of the ridge and it was like an ocean had appeared in our campsite.”

“An ocean?” Barney said, so loud that Professor Martindale stirred.

Mouth didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Now Alyssa was the one kicking Mouth under the table. Certain words burned. Chest wall encroaching on what it contained, eyes pushed out of focus.

“An ocean, just, bluer,” Mouth said after a long time. Every word its own stammer. “I didn’t even see the wings at first. So many wings. It was… it was a swarm of blue roaches. They rippled and waved, and then I was running toward them down the slope with the tub in my hands. They broke before I got there. They became a cloud, and then they spread out in the sky. They left nothing but bones. Bones and metal.”

“They ate through everything?” Barney’s voice was barely audible. “The crystal books? The ceremonial garments? The tents? The carts? All of it?”

Mouth just nodded.

Now Barney was weeping too, and so was Alyssa. They were probably all drunk. Mouth made an inarticulate wheezing sound, like an apology for sharing this horrible story, or maybe for having survived. They hunched over with the bottle in the middle, and their three foreheads met, and maybe their spines would never straighten again. Mouth felt lonelier and more unconsoled than before, when that story had been a one-person secret. Alyssa’s hand clutched at the back of Mouth’s neck and head. She was whispering something like I’m sorry it’s okay, and Mouth just breathed into her hair.

The three of them stayed huddled like that for a long time, until a noise shook them so much they nearly cracked their heads together. Professor Martindale was waking up, groaning, with an almighty headache.

SOPHIE

I can’t even move in this ball gown. If I lift my arms more than halfway, I feel the seams strain. Even though red taffeta, tulle, lace, and ribbons have nothing in common with the gloved hands of Xiosphanti police, I still have a suffocating threat reaction to these restraints. But I close my eyes, and give myself patience, like Jeremy taught me. And then I breathe, and smile, because Bianca’s looking at me, beaming, and clapping her hands. “People will lose their minds when they see you.”

Bianca can’t stop giggling and twirling in her dress, making her skirt billow. Bianca wears another kind of fragrant oil, with hints of cinnamon and marigold, and her face glows, thanks to the bright lines around her eyes and the faint contours accentuating her perfect face bones.

My starfruit bracelet looks out of place with all the sparkle strung from my neck and arms, but I draped a flowery wristlet over it. I feel the gentle pressure on my wrist all the time, even when I sleep—reminding me that I owe the Gelet much more than just my life. I need to try again soon to find a way past that shantytown, into the night.

“So how do we even know when this party is starting?” I ask Bianca, who’s studying the golden invitation she scored at Punch Face.

“There’s this one angel fountain on the edge of the fancy residential area,” Bianca says. “The party starts the next time it starts flowing, and you can predict when that’ll happen if you know about the water levels in the city’s reserve pumps. It’s like a game, sort of.”

Bianca leads me past the Pit, and we get on a train inside a pneumatic tube, which rushes us to the southernmost part of town, facing away from Xiosphant. Soon we’re in a vast granite courtyard, ringed with a spiked iron fence, facing a ten-garreted mansion made of bricks so white they sting my eyes. We introduce ourselves to a man in a dark purple suit, who checks some list for our names.

I can’t stop staring at the layers of crimson satin across Bianca’s shoulders, and the delicacy of her every tiny movement. Back when we were roommates, at the Gymnasium, she would start to move like flowing water, and her voice would grow more cultured and precise, right before she went out to one of her galas or banquets. I always sat on my bed-shelf, watched the petals on her dress refract the light as she swayed, and fantasized about going as her escort, only so I could admire this other version of Bianca in her proper setting, among all the lights, perfumed candles, and soaring waltzes. Now, here we are.

But that thought just makes me wish that we could go back to our dorm after this party, to cradle our teacups and talk about books we’ve read, brand-new ideas we’ve discovered, things that nobody but us realizes are wrong.

The man in purple leads us to a giant space, full of marble floors that reflect the overhead light in bold streaks, walls made of some dark wood I don’t know the name for, and billowing drapes of velvet. All the men are wearing collages of different-colored fabric strips that create an effect like a million shards of tinted glass, while the women wear costumes that make the red gown I’m wearing look plain: feathers, glowing threads, tight corsets, shimmering strands of beads. Someone hands me a drink, and it has the same effect on my taste buds as all these colors on my eyes. I realize the room is divided into three groups, and each group wears the same insignia, as jewelry or a badge, to mark which family they belong to.

I stand, frozen, as everyone studies us. I’d much rather be on the edge of the night, receiving the Gelet visions and learning about all the spaces beyond the narrow road, than be stuck trying to impress these people.

But the next thing I know, Bianca has a small crowd around her, and she’s telling them how she got here, in a melodramatic style, like something from a storybook. Everyone here in Argelo grew up reading glossy romances about palace intrigue in Xiosphant, Ahmad told us, and she plays to this sentiment. “They killed all of my friends and hunted me in the street,” Bianca says. “I fled from my home with only what I could carry, and we faced every kind of death on the Sea of Murder.” Nobody can look away from her eyes. Her crimson gown exposes a teardrop of skin on the small of her back, above where the pleats grow out of her waist like petals, and every time she moves, the entire room forgets to breathe.

To distract myself from my nerves, I study a giant silver-relief frieze along one wall that depicts one of the great stories of “Anchor-Banter,” which seems to involve people riding on top of old-fashioned crawling machines and fighting with sticks that light up. And then in the middle of all the scenes of machine-jousting and voyages across the steppes, two silvery people intertwine, half naked, like lovers or maybe like wrestlers. I can’t tell if they’re men or women, or one of each.

Men and women in purple costumes walk past, offering piles of food and more goblets of expensive liquor, and I can’t help taking some. The most beautiful man I have ever seen strides up to me just as my mouth is full of food, and I chew as fast as I can while he asks my name and says that Xiosphant must be a desolate waste, with its two brightest lights gone.

I’m still chewing, and the man keeps asking questions. This food is delicious but takes an entire lifetime to reduce to something I can swallow. And after I swallow the food, I still can only stare at this gorgeous person, with his wide face, limpid brown eyes, and square jaw.

“Forgive my rudeness. My name is Dash.” He gestures around. “This is my house.”

Bianca notices that I’m stuck, and comes to my side. “I’m Bianca. Thank you for your hospitality. This is the coolest party I’ve ever been to.”

“Well, you are the best thing that could possibly have happened to my party.” Dash kisses her hand, like a prince in one of those Argelan storybooks.

“You’ll have to forgive Sophie,” Bianca says, with a stage wave. “She’s been through a lot. It’s a terrible story. She was wrongly accused of a crime and torn away from the rest of us by the Xiosphanti police, who paraded her through the street and humiliated her in front of the whole town. And then they drove her to the mountainside and tried to force her to climb the steep slope, into the night. She nearly died! She was cast out of society and had to hide from everybody. It was really something.”

I stare at Bianca, and though the food is gone, I still have trouble swallowing.

Afterward, when we step off the train near the Pit, Bianca can’t stop laughing and flouncing in her dress. “That was the biggest rush of my entire life. I forgot how good it feels to sweep into a giant room full of immaculate people, and just dominate all of their attention. This is what I was made for. I haven’t been this happy since…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just stare, because she must be joking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOPHIE

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

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

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

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

For some reason, I still haven’t woken up all the way, even though her voice and her stiff posture alarm me. I ought to be wide awake, alert, but I feel half present.

“What plan?” I whisper. “What are you talking about? There’s no way back—”

Bianca rolls her head and shushes me. “You can’t ask me that. This is why I said you need to trust me. I’m risking everything, even having this conversation with you. People in this city are so paranoid, they’ll lose their minds if they find out what I’m doing.”

Everything shrinks in on me, as if the shadows deform and I’m about to be crushed.

She leans closer and I feel her breath on my face. “Remember when I said I have unfinished business in Xiosphant? We both do. You were just telling me you still feel haunted by what they did to you, and maybe the only way for you to get past it is to face those monsters, and to see them brought down. Take it from me, you don’t just walk away from the place that made you.”

I can tell she expected a different reaction from me—like, she thought I would be excited. But everything about her tone is scaring me.

And meanwhile, I can’t stop remembering when the Gelet came and invited me to their city, and then blood, and then blood. Those people thought they were rescuing me.

“I have my own way of dealing with my past,” I say. “And we have a chance, we can start over here. We can get jobs. I can work in a coffee shop again. I thought you were having fun here, dancing, going to parties. You keep saying we’re famous, and everything is fantastic.”

“Sure, yeah, good times. But it’s all been a means to an end, and it’s finally paying off.” Bianca puts her hands on my shoulders, and I feel an immediate flush of comfort, even in the middle of a terrible conversation. “And Argelo isn’t going to be fun much longer, from the whispers I’m hearing.”

She looks over her shoulder. “I have to go. You need to tell me now: do you trust me or not? Did you mean it on the Sea of Murder when you said you’d always support me?”

I hesitate just a few heartbeats more, and then toss my head, in the Argelan style. “Yes. Of course. You know I do. But you should tell me—”

Bianca’s gone. I hear her dress rustle in the room outside, and then the front door clacking shut.

No way I can sleep after that conversation. I get dressed in silver threads and wander down to the place where I’m most likely to find Bianca. On the way down, I keep thinking about the three food dollars. Back at the Gymnasium, I had fallen in love with the idea of newness, and I’d let myself believe that none of our small rebellions would ever have any consequences. Bianca had convinced me the world could start all over again, untethered to the weight of everything that had happened before we were born. But now we’re older, and she still can’t accept that some burdens are unshakable, fused to the skin, no matter how you try to turn them into unfinished business. And I’m scared she’s going to destroy us both.

The Knife is even more packed than ever with people in rainbow clothing, and they’re all out of their minds on booze or something else. Two shirtless men embrace each other, one kissing the other’s neck, and I look away, blushing, and when I look back, they’re gone. As soon as the crowd swallows me up, I feel trapped, stiff, chafed in my armpits by the memory of police gloves. But I breathe, and let the feelings claim me for as long as they need to. I touch my bracelet, and it reminds me of running across ice, on powerful legs. I imagine the community of Gelet, the closeness that comes from navigating around sinkholes and predators together, across vast distances, without any secrets. I try not to think about the dark blood on my hand.

Bianca’s sitting at a VIP table on the second floor of the Emergency Session, a nightclub that’s tricked out to look like the audience chambers of the old Argelan People’s Congress. Austere wood paneling, crimson carpets and wall hangings, framed pictures of men and women with wild hair, wearing stiff collars and thick-rimmed glasses. I’ve heard bits and pieces about the People’s Congress, which was some kind of anarchist regime that governed after the collapse of the Great Argelan Prosperity Company. Bianca sees me and waves me upstairs, past the bouncer.

“Sophie! There you are. I was hoping you’d turn up. You remember Dash, don’t you?” Bianca gestures at the only other person sitting in the soundproofed VIP booth: the beautiful man from that fancy ball who told me that was his house. “He was just telling me about this revival of a classic Zagreb opera that he went to recently. It sounds fascinating.”

“So charming to see you again.”

I stare, until I realize what makes Dash unique, besides the stunning features that I can’t identify as being from any one heritage. He’s not wearing any insignia to let me know which of the Nine Families he belongs to, the way everyone else in this nightclub is. He sees me looking at all the places his crest could be, and laughs.

“Nope, I’m not wearing one. I don’t need to. Anybody who sees me and doesn’t know which family I belong to is already in trouble.” I still don’t get it, so he adds: “I’m the head of the Alva Family. I’m probably the most famous person in Argelo, in all modesty.”

“I’ll get us drinks,” Bianca says, touching my arm and giving me a wink. “Talk amongst yourselves.” She hustles down the stairs, leaving me alone with Dash. I lower myself onto the couch opposite him.

“It’s good to meet someone who doesn’t already know who I am. I can make a first impression for once. Except that I always say the wrong thing, and I’m terrible at meeting new people, so I’m terribly afraid your first impression of me will be a dreadful one.” I’m trying to read him, the way I used to read the clients at the Parlour, but Dash’s posture gives me nothing. He’s so handsome that it hurts to look at him.

“I’m obsessed with Xiosphanti history,” Dash adds. “The founders of that city had a valid theory of human nature, but they took it too far. That’s the problem with grand social ideas in general, they break if you put too much weight on them.”

I realize with a jolt that he’s been speaking formal Xiosphanti, even including the time (just after shutters-up), and identifying his social status (foreigner) and mine (student).

“Bianca’s the most unusual person I’ve ever met.” Dash doesn’t seem to mind that he’s the only one talking. “Everybody can’t stop gossiping about her. But I think you might be even more unusual, in your own way. Bianca mentioned that the police tried to send you into the night, and you escaped. But you didn’t, did you? Escape, I mean. You made it all the way past evening, and survived. I find that just too fascinating. You have no idea how important you are.”

I back away from him, burrowing into the crack between the sofa cushions as if I could disappear.

Just then, Bianca comes back with a tray of cocktails. “What did I miss?” she says.

“I was just making an ass of myself,” Dash says. “This is just what I was just saying, about being terrible with new people. Everything I say, I sound like a smarmy git.”

Bianca sits next to Dash and holds hands with him. “I’m sure you were perfect, just like always.” He puts his free arm around her shoulders.

“I miss Xiosphanti food,” Dash says, as if that was the conversation we had been having. “There used to be a Xiosphanti restaurant here in Argelo that made that spicy oatmeal, and those odd little cakes that fall apart if you don’t eat them right. It was staggeringly expensive, but so worth it.”

They both raise their glasses, and after a moment’s hesitation, I take mine too. This cocktail is sour, with a cloying aftertaste.

“Maybe I could cook for you,” Bianca says, her face just a few centimeters away from Dash’s. They look perfect together, the two most ideal faces in the world, with the most immaculate bone structures, and their children would be angels, and the cloying flavor lodges in my throat. I look away, at all the people dancing under a candelabra made of spent bullet casings, before Bianca and Dash start kissing.

Some time later, Dash has to leave to attend some meeting of the leadership of the Nine Families, to address shortages, hyperinflation, the recent interfamily tensions, and other issues. Once Bianca and I are alone, she scoots next to me and gives me her gentlest frown. “I can tell you don’t like Dash, but he’s a really good guy. He’s the only Argelan I’ve met who understands all the Xiosphanti bullshit I grew up with, all the pressure they used to put on me to live up to some ideal. And he’s self-aware enough to poke fun at himself.”

“He does that as a tactic,” I say. “I don’t think we’ve met the real Dash.”

Bianca shakes her head and pulls away from me. “You never really know anybody, in my experience. But Dash and I share the same goals, which is the most important thing for a good relationship. And he’s crazy about you. I hope you’ll become friends soon.”

The vibrations from the floor seep up through my feet, and the stale-cocktail scent overpowers me. “I’ll give him a chance. Maybe I’ll understand what you see in him.” She’s already gathering her things. “Is he something to do with the plan you mentioned before? Is he part of whatever you’re working on?”

Bianca ignores my questions and smiles, as if all I said was the part about giving Dash a chance. “I have to go. The Unifiers are having a cocktail party. Can you find your own way home? I’m so glad we had this moment together, because you and Dash are both so important to me and I want you to like each other. You’ll see. He’s going to make our dreams come true.”

She hustles down the stairs from the VIP room, into a tangle of sweaty bodies and socialist kitsch. She waves at me from the bottom of the staircase, when I’m still standing at the top.

Ahmad is talking to me about old Khartoum at the kitchen table, while Ali sits nearby, bored because he’s heard all of this before. “Everyone in Khartoum was a cyborg, and they all wore bioneural interfaces around their heads, making them smarter than a hundred regular people, and they built on a legacy of Islamic science and math that went back a thousand years. But then we came to this planet, and we were taught that our heritage was meaningless.”

“Until I came to Argelo, I didn’t think of ancient cultures as having meaning,” I say. “Or that anybody tried to suppress them. I just thought, we’re on January now, and we decided to leave the old world behind. But I should have known better.”

Katrina told me her father was pretty sure he had ancestors in the Zagreb compartment, but her mother’s grandparents traced five lineages between them. It’s not like anybody kept careful records in the generations after landfall, so you belong to whatever your parents belonged to. Ali has grown up thinking of himself as a descendant of Khartoum, because of his father.

Ahmad asks if I know anything about my mother’s Nagpuri roots. I found one single grayscale picture in one of the old books that Bianca rescued from the back of the library, and I used to stare at the image of people in CoolSuits in front of this gorgeous fusion of ancient and modern architecture: grand pointed arches and soaring crystalline vaults. I always wished I could ask my mother what her own parents had told her about our old home.

“Nagpur designed all of the interiors of the Mothership, all the living areas and all the work areas,” Ahmad says. “They had the task of engineering an enclosed space that people could stand to live inside for generations, and they used a million tricks of light and shadow to defeat claustrophobia. And then the Mothership had all of the radiation leaks and the explosive decompressions, and all the tiny wars, and then there wasn’t enough space for everyone after all. What happened to the Nagpur compartment was the most shameful thing.”

Ahmad lowers his head, hands behind his simple linen collar, and just adds, “Everything that’s wrong with us now started on the Mothership.”

As he speaks, I remember the one brief mention of the Hydroponic Garden Massacre in one of Bianca’s old books. The phrase almost sounded funny at the time. But now I feel the same way as when I flew off the edge of the Old Mother. Like there’s no bottom to anything, and I could just fall forever. Maybe all this time, I’ve been lonely for people who were never even born, or a culture I never got to know.

I want to ask Ahmad for more details, but he’s already waving his hands as if to say that’s all he knows. Or he doesn’t want to talk about unpleasant topics in front of Ali.

And then he changes the subject, abruptly. “So. Bianca’s not sleeping here, and I kind of feel like she’s not really sleeping much anywhere. I can only imagine. You grow up with these strict rules, and then as soon as you taste freedom, you don’t know how to handle it.” He glances at Ali. “That’s why it’s better to let the little bastards run wild, and make their mistakes young.” Ali scowls, then sticks his tongue out.

I stare at the wall-hanging across from me, with a million shapes all on top of each other. Every time I look, I see a different pattern, circles or diamonds or stars, depending on my angle and how long I gaze.

“Bianca and I have been through frozen hell, and we’re still together,” I say. “But I keep saving her from herself. I think… I think she’s my Anchor-Banter.”

Ahmad just rolls his eyes. “Don’t use words if you don’t know what they mean.”

At another elaborate party, Bianca kept asking what Anchor-Banter was, and everyone insisted that the only way to understand Anchor-Banter was to read these epic romances, full of duels and battles on the plains, disasters and narrow escapes, and then yell at your friends about them. And then after you got drunk and had terrifying dreams, you’d wake up understanding Anchor-Banter. But I wasn’t sure how much of that was a joke.

“What’s with that bracelet?” Ahmad asks, startling me out of a reverie. “You keep touching it with an odd expression on your face.”

I look at the bracelet, which has an inky stain in the groove between two spikes, which I keep imagining is the blood of that Gelet. “It’s a reminder that I owe a debt, and the longer I go without repaying it, the bigger it gets.” The rotted metal of the harpoon scrapes my hand again, sticking out of hot vulnerable flesh, as though I’m touching it here and now. I need to get into the night, without any more desperate people shooting at me.

Something occurs to me. “Mouth told me that there are scavengers. They go into the night looking for old technology that our ancestors lost out there. Do you know how I could get in touch with some of them?”

Ahmad laughs. “Well, you do like to live dangerously. But you’re in luck. Not only do I know some scavengers, one of them is an old friend of yours.”

Reynold traps me in a hug and lifts me off the ground, laughing and shouting for his new friends to come and meet me. “I haven’t bothered to look up the other Resourceful Couriers since I got back on my feet, but I was so happy when Ahmad said you wanted to see me.” Not the reaction I expected from the man I knocked to the ground with my fist. Is he drunk or something? Yes, he’s very drunk. But also sincere. “Everybody, this is Sophie,” he shouts. “She helped bring me home after ten enormous pirate boats attacked us.”

Reynold’s friends come out of the gameroom in a three-story redbrick building, onto the front stoop that bakes under an excess of morning sun.

“I thought you were making that whole story up,” says one of the friends, who sports ferocious whiskers, wild shaggy hair, and overcrowded teeth. “Did they really have ten boats?” Everyone at this gameroom has the same excess hair, including the two women. Reynold looks different with his face enveloped.

I’m wearing my new disguise, a copy of a CoolSuit that I bought from a vendor in the Pit whose racks were half empty. The blouse hangs loose around my midriff, covered with blue fish shapes over a crimson background, and the trousers hang straight down. I put my hair up in a clasp, so I look more like the few other Nagpuri girls I’ve seen—and less like the best friend of Argelo’s latest celebrity. Nobody even glanced at me during my walk here, except another girl in Nagpuri dress, who gave me a quick sideways smile.

Reynold leads me inside a large windowless game lounge with big metal pillars in between the couches and little tables. They don’t have any food to share, because the shelves at the local grocery were pretty empty.

Reynold’s boss is named Pedro, and he’s missing a finger. One other guy sitting in the back is down four, plus his nose appears damaged. Frostbite. I force myself to meet Pedro’s gaze as he sizes me up. I hate staring contests.

“Being a scavenger is way better than being a smuggler.” Reynold hands me an assortment of angular game pieces. “Even with the cold, and the wildlife attacks. It’s short-haul versus long-haul. Plus, instead of semiperishable goods that we have to keep fresh, it’s ancient stuff that’s been out there forever. I wish I’d been doing this all along.”

I choose four pieces, and they spread out a board: Reynold, Pedro, a curvy woman named Susana, and me. They shake a tray full of colored foam, until one foam piece flutters to the ground, and Susana laughs. “Red! I’m on a streak.” She rubs her hands together, then puts a piece on the board. Katrina told me that Argelans love games with complicated rules, along with intricate dances and poetry with a strict rhyme scheme and meter: they love structure in anything, except for their actual lives.

“Course, the farther into the night you go, the worse it gets. Harder to move, harder to navigate, even with sensors.” Reynold puts his own piece on the board. “The wind, the darkness, the cold. If you go too far out, even the atmosphere gets denser. Plus, something about being in the night makes you go delirious, like it triggers some primitive fear from before our ancestors discovered fire back on Earth.”

Susana takes Reynold’s piece, and throws all the foam in the air. My move.

“But the profit,” Susana says. “The profit margin, it just blows everything else away. Our ancestors had drones! They had shuttles, scoutships, survival suits. They had computers! And most of it is just sitting out there, where it got crashed by the weather, or the wildlife.”

“The Gelet,” I mutter, too low to hear. “The Gelet broke that stuff on purpose, to keep people away.”

“One day we’ll find a whole all-terrain cruiser, and I’ll die fat and rich,” Susana says.

“Our equipment is crap,” Pedro says. “I’m just going to come out and say that right away. We have garbage protective gear that we scraped together from a dozen sources, and we only survive if we remember that we’re relying on shit.” Something in Pedro’s tone tells me this is a recruitment pitch, and they already want me to join.

I can’t pronounce this group’s name no matter how I try, but it means “Glacier Fools.” Whenever Pedro takes the game pieces and fluff, I notice he’s careful with his damaged hand.

Reynold’s lived in every neighborhood in Argelo, including the Narrows, Khartoumtown, the Snake District, and even the bottom of the Pit. But he likes it here, in Little Merida, where the scents of sopa de lima and poc-chuk rise up from every stairwell, and embroidered wall hangings depict the shining launch bays of the Merida Space Center, where they crafted the engines and avionics of the Mothership. All the scavengers live upstairs from this gameroom.

After I lose a few more games without ever understanding all the rules, Pedro formally invites me to join their next expedition. I toss my head. Everyone warns me again: this is deadly work, with a high death rate, and I’ll probably die. I give another head-toss. Then Pedro hands me a little metal rectangle that’ll display an odd shape when they need me.

Reynold walks me outside. Back on the stoop, under the merciless glare, I touch his arm. “Uh. How much do you remember about what happened, after the pirates attacked?”

He rolls his head. “I was pissing blood, from all over my body. Next thing I know, I’m in Argelo, where they have this miraculous wound care.” He pauses. “I feel like we went into the night for a moment.”

This is going to be harder than I thought, but I have to find a way to talk about this, or I’m done. I look him in the eyes. “I can communicate with the, uh… the crocodiles. They’re my… friends. I call them the Gelet. They’re intelligent and technological, and they want to be friends with everyone. I might be able to teach the rest of you how to talk to them, maybe. But either way, they won’t bother you as long as I’m there. The most important thing is, if you see one of them, don’t start shooting.”

“Honestly,” he said. “If we run into a crocodile, we usually just run the other way. If we even see it in time. But I’ll tell the others. I mean, if we could have the crocodiles on our side, or even if they just leave us alone, that would make our job twice as easy. Uh… so how do you talk to them, anyway?”

I explain three times, squeezing my own thumbs inside my fingers. The whole thing sounds weird when I say it aloud.

Reynold’s eyes get wider and he sucks in breath. “Whoa. I don’t think I’m drunk enough to even contemplate doing that. I have a feeling that’s going to be a hard no, for most of us. But I’ll tell the others about this. And for sure, we won’t attack any crocodiles if they approach.” Then he goes back inside to play another confusing game.

I carry on conversations with Bianca in my head all the time: as I cut across town along the tiny lanes that avoid the traffic around the Knife, as I watch pickpockets work their way through the crowds, as I see the slow corrosion in the girders supporting the big covered walkway. I talk to my imaginary Bianca about impermanence, and how the lack of Timefulness here only makes everything appear more temporary. Like, without small units of time, I’m more aware of the big units of time, the city inhaling the sun-spiked air and exhaling decay. The only thing that never disappears is the past.

This is the sort of conversation that Bianca and I never have anymore, except in my mind. Back in school, we used to talk about everything from big ideas to stupid peeves, but we never discussed our relationship. Now, everything’s backward: we profess our undying sisterhood, but we never talk. I find myself going to the dark café, with Abraham’s donuts, just to eavesdrop in the starchy, smoky air as the students bicker about the meaning of existence. Sometimes one of the girls who seems about my age looks at me and smiles. Sometimes I even smile back, and feel a different shyness from my normal kind.

Dash and Bianca are both waiting for me when I arrive at the vegetarian restaurant, where the walls and ceiling are made of some kind of artificial diamond that refracts into endless swirls of color. Bianca is leaning toward Dash, lips parted and nostrils flared.

Dash and Bianca have seen a lot of each other since the last time I saw either of them. They ran into each other at an art gallery opening, and then Dash took Bianca to a fondue place, and they went shopping, and toured all the most memorable buildings. The architecture isn’t as stunning as Xiosphant’s, but there was a revival of Zagreb-style vaulted ceilings and wide towers, and some very fine glasswork and wrought iron, during the era of the Great Argelan Prosperity Company.

“You should have seen it.” Bianca looks at Dash the way she used to look at Matthew in the Progressive Students. Except that she also has an involuntary twitch in her left eye, and some redness, from lack of sleep.

I realize that I’ve never seen any of the things Bianca’s wearing, and they don’t look like they came from a secondhand store or from the seamstress Katrina sent us to for that ball. The sleeve of her white dress hangs in a shimmering line, and her crystal necklace picks up all the colors coming off the walls. She couldn’t have afforded these things with the marks we got from the Couriers—and then I understand what she means when she says she and Dash went shopping: he bought her a new wardrobe. She looks more than ever like one of the pictures of Xiosphanti aristocrats in the silly storybooks that everyone here in Argelo loves.

Dash says, “I grew up famous, and I have a million issues. I should probably try that exhaustion therapy that everyone’s talking about. But you two, you’re in the spotlight for the first time, aren’t you? You can so easily get a kind of false self-image.”

One of Dash’s favorite tactics is to confess how vulnerable or insecure he is, so everyone else lets their guard down.

“Except”—Bianca helps herself to some kind of lentil paste on flatbread—“Sophie doesn’t care what anybody thinks of her. That’s one reason she’s such a hero.” I squirm, but only on the inside. On the outside, I try to look bored.

“Is that true?” Dash leans toward me. “Sophie, do you really not care about anybody’s opinion of you? I’m so jealous I’m practically dying.”

I just stare at him and fashion my lips into a smile. I try to imagine that I’m standing on the tundra, a hundred kilometers from the nearest light source.

Bianca asked if I trusted her, and I said yes, and I meant it. This thing with Dash is just part of whatever she’s planning, and she’s in control of the whole situation. I look at the taut line of her pale neck and exposed back, as she leans toward Dash, and I choose to see a harpoon gun, aimed and cocked.

I lie in the storage room, knees to face, half dreaming of all the usual terrors, but half thinking about Bianca and Dash. He’s still the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, but he’s also charming, which is something different. And his charm doesn’t work on me, which bothers him. Why does he care what I think? I figure none of this out, but I fall into a short dream in which I’m on the Old Mother and the Xiosphanti police are shooting a Gelet, so its blood sprays onto me.

The signal device wakes me up, with a funny little squiggle. Time to go back to the game lounge and put on some inadequate safety gear with the Glacier Fools.

When I reach the front steps of the gameroom, Mouth is standing out front, cradling a helmet in her hands. She keeps looking downward, with wide-open eyes. “Reynold told me what you were doing, and I asked if I could come along. I still owe you my life.”

I toss my head and walk inside.

In the gameroom, Reynold hands me my own survival suit. “You saw Mouth, right?” I toss my head again, then concentrate on arranging these straps and buckles the right way. This looks like a child’s drawing of a spacesuit, huge and bulky, with a million pieces that don’t quite fit together. Strap bricks to every inch of my body, and I’d move more easily.

Once we’re suited up except for helmets, Pedro calls the six of us together, including Susana, Reynold, Mouth, and a laughing blue-eyed girl named Laura. “I cannot emphasize this enough for the newcomers,” Pedro said. “Visibility is shit out there. Watch the readouts. Keep track of the person to your immediate right, so you don’t lose the group.” He talks about the cumbersome procedures, once we find some ancient tech, for freeing it from the ice without causing further damage.

“So, you guys remember what I said before,” Reynold says, “about Sophie and the crocodiles.”

“We were all pretty drunk,” Susana says.

Pedro shushes them and turns to me. “I want to hear this from the source. Reynold says you have some technique for communicating with one of the deadliest predators in the night, and even getting them to help you. And you can teach the rest of us?”

“I was there when she did it,” Mouth says. “Couldn’t believe how amazing.”

“What part of ‘I want to hear this from Sophie’ did you not understand?” Pedro grunts.

I have that buzzing-under-the-skin feeling that hits whenever I have to talk to strangers, or to a whole group of people at once. But I make myself overcome it, because if this works, if these people can learn to understand the Gelet, then maybe this could be the beginning of other people forming relationships with them, even trading and sharing technology. People will understand that they’re friendly, and advanced, and stop trying to eat them all the time. So I talk the Glacier Fools through it, taking time to make sure everything sinks in.

“They’ll shield you from the cold,” I say. “You won’t freeze. Just expose your face and throat to the little tongues. You’ll see their memories, except not with your eyes.”

The others, even Reynold, are making remarks and nudging each other. But Pedro glares until they shut up. “We’ll follow your lead,” Pedro says. “If this works, it could be huge for us.”

When I step away from the group, Mouth follows, walking heavily in her suit. “The secret that you’ve shared,” she says, “it’s the most precious thing in the world. And you’re just opening it to us. I thought everyone was selfish. I thought, that’s the world we live in. But then you go and offer this to us. I can’t tell you what it means.”

“If you try to tell me I’m a saint again,” I whisper, “I’m going to bite your face.”

Mouth backs away a little, gloved hands raised. “I won’t. I know you’re just a person. That’s what makes this so extraordinary. I know you don’t want to see me, but I need to thank you anyway. I keep thinking I’ve lost all my faith, and then I lose some faith that I forgot I still had. So, thank you.”

I turn away and go back to Reynold, who’s fastening the last of his suit.

“I hope you don’t mind that I told Mouth about your plan to join our crew,” he says. “I still can’t get past that shitty stunt she pulled the last time we were in Xiosphant. And yet, she’s one of the best people to have around in a bloody situation.”

I realize I don’t hate Mouth anymore. I want to keep hating her, but the hatred just won’t come, as though I’ve used it all up. I look at her struggling to tie the boots on her environment suit with her gloves already on, sweat gleaming on the shaved sides of her scarred head.

The Glacier Fools use a very particular route from their game salon to the edge of night, to minimize the chance someone will see this valuable protective gear just walking around and try to rob us. We weave and jag, go down into disused rail tunnels, and squeeze our bulky bodies through narrow spaces between buildings.

At last the city fades out. I put on my helmet, and I might as well be in space.

The helmet has a visor with a tiny strip of reinforced plastic, so I can see the void outside. There’s also a “night vision” display, which shows just lumps of topography; every now and then, a fuzzy shape glows orange or yellow at the edge of my range. The third display has a handful of dots, representing the other Glacier Fools’ transponders, plus a little blip at the bottom, which shows that daylight is behind us. My bracelet wakes up.

My own body sounds so loud inside this suit, and I think of my mother saying, You are an orchestra.

Once we’re walking into the night, the scavengers start talking like kids on a sugar high.

“Did you ever try that kebab place over by the Spoon?”

“It was okay. The kebabs were about half swamp turtle. And nobody calls that neighborhood the Spoon. Just because we have the Knife doesn’t mean we also need a neighborhood called the Spoon.”

“It makes sense, though. It’s actually shaped like a spoon.”

“You know what I’ve been missing lately? Those stuffed mushrooms they used to sell halfway down the Pit. Those were nice.”

Every step chills and weakens me, until I’m half dead. The insulation on these suits is worn thin, patched with tape. I can barely move, and I hear nothing over my own deafening breathing, and my fingers go numb. I’ve never gone this far into the night, and the night vision just swims. The blobs indicating the other scavengers turn blurry and faint. I could walk off a cliff right now. A snowdrift could fall and crush me to death. I feel my heart drumming, and try to slow my breathing, counting the way I did at the Illyrian Parlour.

Pedro says something about promising readings eighty meters ahead, but a scream tears through the intercom. Then stops. No way to tell who screamed, from which direction, or what happened.

“Laura, was that you?” Pedro says.

“I’m here. I think that was Susana.”

“Susana? You there?”

One of the dots on the screen showing our crewmates is fading. No, it’s gone.

“Shit. I think it was a bison,” Reynold says. “Not that I saw anything, of course. But they come out of nowhere like that.”

“It could have been a sinkhole,” Mouth volunteers.

“No point standing here, arguing about cause of death, unless we want to be next,” Pedro says. “Fucking hell. Susana.”

We keep going. My bracelet vibrates so hard I feel like it’s yanking my wrist. Stumbling and sweeping my legs, I make my frozen body move in that direction.

“Uh, Sophie. Please stay with the group. I see your transponder, you’re going the wrong—”

I ignore Pedro and keep kicking forward. Each step costs twice as much as the last.

My flickering night vision fills with a huge shape, straight ahead. I stop and look up at the rounded body in motion. I look for a pincer, or writhing tentacles. Instead, my screen slowly paints a picture of a bison’s open maw, sharp threads pulled taut, ready to slice me into chunks. The mouth grows so big I can’t see anything else. Everyone calls my name, but I just freeze.

Nothing happens. And then I realize the bison isn’t moving. An eyeblink later, it’s gone from my night vision, like something just tore it to pieces.

But, wait—my night vision hasn’t gone empty. Tentacles move in the darkness. A pincer snaps open right next to me.

“Damn,” Reynold growls. “That is an awful lot of giant, tentacled killer monsters. Trying to remember why this was a good idea.”

“They’re surrounding us.” Laura sounds ready to lose her stomach.

The Gelet make us tiny by comparison, raised on their hind legs. They could embrace each other over our heads, and make a tent for us to cower inside. I feel fear radiate off everyone else. They make little squirming, whimpering noises over the intercom.

I breathe slow, stay in the moment.

Then I realize one of these Gelet is holding something in its front legs: one of those mossy blankets. I move inside, and she and I are wrapped in a cocoon together. Still, the moment I loosen the neck strap on my suit, I feel the wind trying to cut my throat. I show my exposed skin, to prove we’re here to listen.

“We went over this.” Pedro tries to restore calm. “Everybody, follow Sophie’s lead. Let them wrap you up. Show them your throats. That’s a fucking order.”

I hear them breathing and grumbling as they each get right inside a Gelet’s kill radius and unsnap their protective gear. They let in the cold, and brace themselves to let in something else. They can’t hear my reassurance over their own moaning.

“I can’t.” Reynold sounds like he’s fumbling with his harpoon gun. “I can’t, this is—”

“Trust,” I say as loud as my weak voice can go. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”

Then I hear all of them breathing heavier as the other Gelet make contact. I sigh, because they’ve done it, it’s happening. Now they’ll understand for themselves. I don’t have to be the only one to carry this anymore.

The Gelet inside my “cocoon” comes closer, so I feel the warmth of its tendrils. They touch my face, just for a moment, and—

—I’m with all the Gelet in their city, long before humans first arrived. We had technology that shaped the rivers of water and fire, deep beneath the mantle, and ways to reshape living flesh, and we shared these techniques with everyone. We had music, and poetry, and the belief that you could own history but not the future. We had complicated mating dances, a dozen Gelet at a time joining together at the heart of a mountain, carapaces opening to let fleshy appendages come out and mingle together. Some looked like blades, others like fingers, or strange flowers. All the Gelet tremble in ecstasy, and here and now, I shake with them, as the essence pours out of us all, and into all of us—

—I experience all of this in an eyeblink, and then I pull away, because something’s wrong. Loud noises blow out my intercom’s speaker. Screams, wails, and curses. And then the crack-neck sound of a harpoon gun discharging.

mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Walls of death coming down—”

“What did you do to me?”

“Seeds, goddamn ugly seeds, squirming.”

“What did you do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not fair,” Mouth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t know anything about it at all?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not the only one who’s reconnected with their heritage lately.” Alyssa gazed at a lane between two tall buildings, so narrow you couldn’t walk with arms outstretched. Weeds had come up through the cracks between flagstones, mostly those claw-leafed stalks that covered the rocks out past the Southern Wastes. Native to this planet, unlike a lot of the other greenery that ran wild around here.

“I never thought about Argelo much, except as a place to drop off stuff and pick up other stuff, and maybe spend some of our pay on swamp vodka and blue-jean dancers,” Alyssa said. “It’s only now that I’ve been stuck here that I’m realizing just how much of Argelo is inside me.”

They were walking through the places Alyssa played when she was little, the places her mother and uncles all worked. She kept pointing out where the Chancers, her old crew, had stolen something or tricked somebody. “One time Natalie didn’t look in the right place for the insignia and she accidentally robbed a guy with the Unifier crest. We had to stay underground for what felt like our whole lives. Oooh, there’s my favorite building that we were paid to set on fire. Don’t worry, nobody was inside at the time. You can still see the scorchmarks. Beautiful stripe shapes.”

Some of the Chancers had gone south and settled in some dirt-pit, making booze to sell in the city. “I guess I wasn’t prepared for nostalgia to kick me in the face the way it did. I guess that’s why I wanted to go back into the old gangster life.”

Alyssa needed to hear something, but Mouth was coming up empty. Mouth used to know how to respond to things, she had a whole catalog, but now even situations that ought to be familiar left her fumbling in her mind.

Mouth kept picturing snow washing over the faces of the corpses in the night, Reynold and the others, covering them but also distorting their features as they turned solid. The cold and sensory deprivation of full night had torn away some of Mouth’s armor, and then something about experiencing life in an utterly different physical shape, and feeling all the foreign emotions, had poked decent-sized holes in her sense of self. But most of all, the image of delicate blossoms in the heart of a mountain felt like a message from death itself.

Mouth said, “Sometimes I wish I had died at the same time as the other nomads. I don’t know why I deserved to survive.”

“Oh, daylight and ashes. Who cares why you survived? It’s probably because you’re so annoying that even death couldn’t stand to put up with you,” Alyssa said.

“I think me surviving was the worst thing that could have happened, because I’ve only kept a cruel mockery of the Citizens alive in my head.”

By now they had gotten back toward the nicer part of the town, where you could hear drums and laughter, and smell the scent of fish pies still crisp from the oven. Plus someone frying stale bread, an Argelan custom, meant to commemorate some citywide moment of confession and reconciliation, a long time ago, that nobody could agree on the details of now.

“I really hoped getting you in touch with that professor would help you to figure out your past, and then you would come back to me,” Alyssa said. “But I feel like I’m having to watch my own back, with a bullet wound still healing in my side.”

The dead flowers in the core of the mountain seemed different each time Mouth remembered, but she always thought of sickness, corruption, in the heart of the Citizens’ holiest place. An enemy of life.

“This is not the Mouth I chose as my sleepmate and road buddy. Remember when we met? You stood out from the rest of the Resourceful Couriers like a daisy in a field of shit. Afraid of nothing, foul-mouthed, full of contempt for everyone’s rules. You punched more people than you spoke to. You lied to more people than you let touch you. That’s the Mouth I want back.”

Mouth tried to take Alyssa’s words inside her, as if they were blueprints for something Mouth could build from scraps. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

They kept walking down the winding streets, ducking out of the way of hand-carts and a couple of small lorries. They argued about music and games and whether they were better combined, while Mouth tried to avoid looking up. Until a man fell dead at their feet.

The women who had shot him ran away, guns raised. Mouth was going to shrug this off, but Alyssa spotted the four-winged horse on the man’s lapel and said, “We have to kill those ladies.” But as soon as they had brought down the two shooters, who wore the Brilliant crest on their jackets, gunshots came from a second-story window. The bullets tore into the two Brilliant corpses as Mouth and Alyssa hunched behind a trash cart. At last Alyssa tagged the second-story shooter and he fell next to the first dead man with the Perfectionist badge.

Mouth’s pager lit up at the same time as Alyssa’s. Mouth fumbled in one of her pockets for the four-winged-horse badge, which she hardly bothered to wear.

They headed for the Perfectionist HQ. When they were a block away, the sky changed again, and Mouth felt something splash on her face. A droplet of liquid fire. Her skin sizzled, with a sensation like a scalpel cut. Another drop fell, then another, and before Mouth and Alyssa could finish remarking on the first rainfall in ages, this caustic liquid was descending in a constant barrage. People ran for shelter, chemical burns on their faces and hands.

Inside the Perfectionist building, with its dark-stained wood walls and nightclub decor, someone was explaining that this toxic rain had happened a couple other times lately. Scientists said a whole ocean of magma flowed across part of the day, bothering nobody—until recently, when the temperature had increased slightly. Some of the magma had evaporated, and seeded the atmosphere with alkali deposits. The beauty of nature.

Sasha was handing out rifles from a crate. “You took your sweet time getting here.”

“What are we even fighting about?” Mouth asked.

Sasha looked at Mouth with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Alyssa kicked Mouth’s ankle.

“Blame those assholes, the Superbosses. They made us look weak. And then we had to make a deal with the Alva Family to stay afloat. The peace in Argelo was all about people owing each other favors, an ecosystem. But it was always fragile, and everybody got something. The Jamersons are killing the Absolutists, and the Unifiers are slaughtering the Mandrakes.”

At first, Mouth didn’t recognize the emotion on the faces of all the Perfectionists: relief. Everyone was relieved to be fighting at last. No more making nice, they could finally kill (almost) everyone who ever got on their nerves.

The rain was too dense to see through. The pavement smoked.

“Fuck the Unifiers!” A woman shoved a burly man onto the pavement, not caring that the rain spattered her face. The man pulled a machete and swung it at the woman, with skinless hands. She splashed his face with rainwater using her bare hands, then sucker-punched him.

Across the street, two men ran past. They held a sheet of metal over their own heads, which would fall unless they both held it up. They kept slashing at each other with knives in their free hands.

Alyssa was talking to one woman in the corner of the space, who had fresh rain burns on her cheek and a gun clutched in both hands. Her name was Janice, and she was an economist who had gone to Perfectionist schools and now lived in Perfectionist housing in the nice part of the dusk, where all her neighbors were Perfectionists too. She spent most of her time trying to solve the problem of hyperinflation when she wasn’t trying to kill everyone in sight. “I need to get back out there,” she snarled, “I don’t need rest, I need justice. I’ll rest after justice is done.”

“Mouth. Got a job for you.” Sasha came over, rifle under one arm. “We need to take over the central food depository. People ought to see we’re protecting the food supply, so they’ll respect our authority. Plus everyone will need to kiss our asses unless they want to starve. Only trouble is, these dickfaces with bolo guns are guarding it. And we can’t risk damaging the food.”

“Shouldn’t we just wait until the rain stops?” Mouth already knew that was the wrong thing to say.

“Who says the rain is going to stop?” Sasha said.

Mouth was about to argue further, but Alyssa grabbed her arm with both hands and pulled her aside. “We promised to fight for these people. We owe them.” She stared at Mouth with a quirk in her left eye. “This is what I keep telling you. I need you to be here for me now, not stuck in the past with dead people who never even cared about you.”

Mouth took a rifle from Sasha, then turned back to Alyssa. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “I ought to honor my promises, or nobody will put up with me, right?” Alyssa smiled and tossed her head, then wished Mouth luck.

Afterward, Mouth didn’t like to think about what came next. You wrap yourself in layers of padding and packing tape, like a parcel, and run through the burning rain as if you could dodge the droplets. Each step kicks up sprays that make you gag. Everything looks gray, almost translucent, and it reminds you of the night vision and its smudgy view of a bloodbath. At last you reach the depository, where the guards sit on the floor and lean against the wall, staring out the window, and you throw a rain-soaked axe into the face of the first one to stand up. The next guard shoots and misses, then shreds your protective layers with a knife. You fall outside, where he headbutts you into a hot puddle. And so on.

Then your only orders are to hold the depository, so you sit with your fellow Perfectionists, plus the people you just killed. Nobody is going to relieve you until the rain stops, and the rain goes on so long you witness the dead bodies decomposing in real time, until someone has enough and flings them outside. The rainfall speeds the process of breaking them down, but it still seems to take forever. At least you’re in a food warehouse, so there’s plenty to eat.

SOPHIE

A flash illuminates the raindrops outside, turning them into slivers of tinted glass strung between statues caught in distorted poses.

I’ve memorized every tile on the wall of this Khartoum restaurant, and seen every loop of the fancy wall projections that are supposed to simulate a virtual souq. We’ve almost exhausted their stores of kisra, aseedaa, and kajaik, and Bianca keeps threatening to make a break for it using a drink tray as a rain-shield. Even with the fancy screens that filter the light into gentle waves, I still have a clear view of the street outside, where a group of men and women slash each other with long blunt knives. Their family emblems have tarnished to the point where people no longer have clear targets. At least half their guns are too old to work under this corrosive downpour, from the shouts I’ve overheard. I wish with all my heart that I’d been at Ahmad and Katrina’s place when the rain started, or even Mouth and Alyssa’s.

This view reminds me of the Glacier Fools, and I have to shut my eyes. I keep wondering if any of the Gelet died in that disaster, and whether they think I led them into an ambush on purpose.

“I don’t know how you can stand to look out that window,” Bianca says from the bar, where she’s nursing some sweet liquor. She’s still wearing her scoop-necked dress covered with the pearly scales of some rare breed of pheasant that lives past the swamps to the south.

We had come to this restaurant to reconnect, just the two of us, before the next party and the next one after that. But we’ve been trapped in here for ages, and we haven’t talked much. The restaurant staff are all hiding in the back.

Bianca comes toward me. Some wild creature that’s been trapped inside me for a long time wants to touch her. To spin around and use my momentum to pull her into my orbit, then clasp my arm around her. I remember how I held her on the Sea of Murder, when death seemed so close that I could say anything. The storm battered us, wrecked our sense of balance, until I thought the skiff would shatter under our feet. That’s become my happiest memory.

Now we’re in the middle of another vicious storm, surrounded by even more death, and I can’t find the right thing to say to make her open up.

So instead, I talk to Bianca about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, when her ancestors killed mine onboard the Mothership. The Nagpur compartment was all but wiped out, thousands of people, and the survivors were “integrated” into the other six populations, their children raised to forget. There are no pictures, no firsthand accounts, but I sneaked inside the library at Betterment University and found one slender sociology monograph written in Noölang, full of bland statistics that made my heart go cold.

“Everybody talks plenty about what happened with the other compartments, both good and bad,” I say in Xiosphanti. “But nobody ever wants to talk about Nagpur.”

“That’s because it’s not constructive,” Bianca replies in Xiosphanti for once. “We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonizing about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.”

“But everything is different now because of what happened then,” I say. “Everyone is here, and alive, because the people from Nagpur aren’t. My people.”

“Your ‘people’ are the Xiosphanti,” Bianca says, “and they’re still suffering right now. There are plenty of atrocities and selfish decisions to worry about without having to reach so far back in time. So many mistakes, just since the start of the Circadian Restoration.” She speaks Xiosphanti as if the red-and-blue smoke just erupted, and addresses me as a fellow student.

“Ahmad says that everything that’s wrong with us is because of things that happened on the Mothership,” I say. “Maybe the past is all we are. The same people who flushed thousands of bodies into space went on to invent Circadianism.”

Even though Bianca is trying to tell me that the mass murder of my ancestors doesn’t matter, that wild creature inside me is climbing all over itself with happiness, because at least Bianca and I are debating again, like in our dorm room.

Bianca gropes and finds a hidden control on one wall that causes some privacy screens to roll down, covering the window and blocking our view of the dead bodies hissing in the rain. Now the two of us perch behind shuttered windows, and this feels even more like old times.

“What would it even look like for Xiosphant to be fair?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” Bianca snaps a little, like she’s not in the mood to talk anymore. “I suppose we would need to redefine how we think about ‘work.’ Like, some jobs you can’t do your whole life. Some jobs are almost twice as hard as others, and maybe those shifts need to be shorter. Some people have a higher capacity than others. Work is more complicated than people realize.”

Bianca still has the look of someone who hasn’t slept, more than a nod here or there, in forever. Her head darts, like a cat searching for prey, and she stares, as if she needs to see things for a while before the image settles.

“Who makes those decisions, though? How do you create a system that allocates—”

“I don’t know. Stop asking me weird questions. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re in the middle of a killzone. I tried to warn you that Argelo was about to stop being fun.” Bianca gets up and pours herself another drink, grimacing. She tries to make one for me, too, but I push it away.

I can’t hear the fighting outside, because this restaurant has next-level soundproofing.

Bianca comes and sits next to me, touching my shoulder with one palm. “I know that you went and did something reckless. I saw the windburn on your neck, and I heard that Reynold is dead. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?” She’s switched back to Argelan, as if to say the schoolgirl conversation is over. “You said you trusted me, but you really don’t.”

“You’re right, I did something dumb,” I say in Argelan. I can’t keep all of the bitterness out of my voice. I’ve held a million inquests inside my own head, but this guilt remains as fresh as ever. “People died, and it was my fault. I was trying to do something good.”

“I’m sorry,” Bianca says, still touching my shoulder. I feel myself relax into her side. “I know what it’s like to want to make things better, and to have it turn to shit. That’s how we got here, right?”

She goes to get herself some more liquor, and I say, “I do trust you.”

Bianca looks at me, drink in hand, and seems to reach a decision. “When this fucking rain stops, if it ever does, I’m going to show you everything. You can see what we’ve been working on. Fuck the timetable.”

I feel like I’m starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep, so I lie down on the one couch next to the bar, across from the window. I don’t expect Bianca to join me, but then I feel her grudgingly work herself into the space beside me. I feel safe, as though her decelerating breath on my face is a hopeful sign that we’re still sleepmates, and also road buddies. Our breathing synchronizes into slow iambs, and I drift off.

Then I jerk awake, panting as though I’ve run a hundred kilometers and I’ll never be able to force enough air into my lungs. I don’t even remember the dream I was in, but I’m drowning, bloody choking, and then I realize that next to me Bianca is screaming.

Bianca’s voice comes in a high rattle, much too loud. She pummels the cushion next to her with both fists. I can’t hear what she’s screaming, but it’s in a rhythm with her punches.

Bianca wakes too, and we both just breathe for a moment, looking opposite ways. She gets up to fetch herself another drink, and smoothes out her shimmering dress.

She sits beside me again, but neither of us goes back to sleep.

We sit without talking, long enough for her drink to disappear and our dreams to feel like places we visited long ago. I hear sounds from the kitchen. I think either the fighting or the rain has stopped. Maybe both.

Maybe this is our last chance to have a conversation, just us two, before whatever is going to happen. “I miss you,” I say.

“Me too,” she says, staring at the reflective panels on the other end of this enormous space. We are two tiny blobs in a swirl of muted color.

“I really hoped that you and I would reinvent ourselves together,” I say, “when we came to Argelo. Everyone said you can be whoever you want here. I thought it would be just you and me, and we could make our own lives, without worrying about anyone else.”

“I never would have been happy.” Bianca shakes her head. “I can’t let go of what happened before. I lost everything, and I was forced to leave Xiosphant, and I couldn’t let that be the end of it.”

“You didn’t lose everything. You didn’t lose me.”

I feel the way I did when the boat flipped almost on its side, on the Sea of Murder: shivering, my insides going sideways.

She acts as if I didn’t say anything. “I never would have been satisfied living a small life, after everything I lost. And now I’ve found a way to make my life count for something. To be the person I was always meant to be.”

“I wish I had been enough for you.”

“I miss our old friendship just as much as you do, but that was a long time ago.” Bianca takes a breath, and her face closes up. “You died, and you made the decision to stay dead to me. And so I spent too long turning you into a perfect human being in my mind. A martyr, you know? The one good person in this shit-eating world. I hated myself for stealing that money and letting them take you, and I hated everyone who had anything to do with sending you into the night. I wanted to make them pay for what they took from us. I still want that. It’s all I think about.”

“I’m alive. I’m here.” I touch her arm. “You don’t have to be angry anymore.”

“Oh, really? Thanks. I’ll just stop being angry. That’s a great idea. Why did I never think of that?” Her laugh feels like a slap. She leans past me and looks out the window, through the crack left by the privacy screen. “Rain’s stopped. And the bloodbath seems to be over, too. Let’s go. I promised to show you something.”

Bianca gets up and walks to the door, without looking back, and her stride makes ripples in the pearly shapes on her dress. “Everything I’ve done since we got to this city has been to help us survive. And to find a way for us to go back.” She walks into the street and almost steps in a puddle of the noxious liquid, but she sidesteps at the last moment.

We make our way down some streets that lead toward a part of town I don’t know, where big factories and warehouses cluster around junkyards. Every few steps, we have to avoid either a body or more of the corrosive liquid. Even sleep-deprived and wearing a scalloped formal dress, Bianca plants her feet with perfect sureness, while I keep almost tumbling facedown into a deadly slick, or stepping on someone’s discarded blade. The sky still looks darker, and I wonder if the rain will start again.

“Do you think you and I would have stayed friends after the Gymnasium?” Bianca leads me into a covered walkway with a rusty handrail. “I mean, if I hadn’t stolen that petty cash, and the cops hadn’t used it as a pretext. If we had just kept going, the way we had been. Maybe you and I would have just drifted apart after graduation.” She’s obviously thought about this a lot.

I think back, and remember the distinguished future that Bianca had been preparing for back in Xiosphant, when she dressed up for all those parties and dinners that I was never invited to. And meanwhile, she dabbled in insurrectionary politics as a way of proving something to herself. I nurtured all these childish fantasies about Bianca changing the world, with me by her side, but I never thought too much about what “by her side” meant. What was I going to be doing while she dazzled everybody?

Bianca waits for me to respond as we travel a series of gantries made of distressed metal. I walk heavy, stooped, with a dull pain in my stomach.

“I don’t know. I never had a friend like you before. I don’t know what trajectory we were on.” I feel as if I’ve just swallowed a few drops of this toxic runoff. Now that she’s spoken, I can see it clearly: we would have lost touch after graduation. I picture us older, pushing past each other on the street and not recognizing each other until we’ve almost gone too far to wave.

“You and I were good for each other, in this one moment in our lives, when we were young and in love with books and ideas. When we wanted to use our minds instead of sleeping when they told us to. That was our time.” We’ve reached the opening of a dark tunnel. Bianca turns to face me. Her eyes look sunken, in the encroaching gloom. “But now neither of us is the person we thought we would turn into, and we’ve gone through things together that most people would never even imagine. I just hope you’ll be on my side when the time comes.”

I’m just staring at Bianca, noticing the raised tendon in her neck, the set of her jaw.

Bianca reaches out and bangs on a mesh gate with barbed wire on top. “Open up. It’s me,” she says in Argelan. “Dash knows we’re here.” I’m pretty sure that last part is a lie.

“Don’t worry,” Bianca says in Xiosphanti, “I still want to save everyone back home. All those people trapped in pointless cycles: work and sleep, work and sleep.” She leads me into the pipe-lined tunnel, lit only by a single electric bulb swinging at eye level. “I don’t have a whole theory of labor allocation worked out, but I know we can find a better way. You can help.”

Bianca’s brocaded slippers crunch on the filthy cement floor.

I almost brain myself on one of the big metal pipes. “We can’t go back to Xiosphant. I keep telling you. You saw how hard it was, coming here. We almost died seven different ways.”

“You should know me better than that by now.”

Bianca leads me into a hangar, with just a sliver of window along the top of the wall. I realize we’ve circled around, and we’re under one of her favorite nightclubs. Not Punch Face or Emergency Session, but the one we visited the first time, where the walls themselves are speakers. The one with the glitter that sticks to your skin with some kind of chemical adhesive and doesn’t wash off. I hear the triple-beat over our heads: people dancing off the serotonin rush from the killing spree in the rain. She reaches until she finds a light switch, and then I’m looking at ten green-gray vehicles.

“Some of these belong to the Perfectionists, some to the Alva Family, and some to another group,” Bianca says. “I already had the outlines of the idea before Dash came along, but he helped me put it together. They’ve been building these since forever, collecting stuff from the night, or from treasure meteors. I think one of the reasons for this latest skirmish between the families was to get the last few pieces.”

These vehicles are all different sizes and shapes, but they all have the same armor, thick and jagged, like a bison’s overlapping plates only without any fur. They rest on thick treads with gravity-assist devices to help them cross the roughest terrain—crude, hand-machined versions of the all-terrain cruisers the Founding Settlers drove when they tried to explore the world. Someone has attached spikes to the armor, and there are empty spots where you could add weapons.

These rude metal carcasses remind me of the War Monument back in Xiosphant, the rough edges that scraped me as I hid in its shadow.

“We could bring a small army,” Bianca says. “We can do everything we used to talk about in school.”

The music upstairs stumbles and recovers, like a drunk man kicking his own foot. I put my hand on the side of the nearest vehicle and feel the shell vibrate. I try to imagine going home like this. With a “small army” of the same people I just watched slashing each other to death for no reason.

“There’s still no way,” I say, though I have a queasy feeling that I’m wrong. “I mean, these are not amphibious vehicles. You remember the Sea of Murder. You almost fell overboard a couple times. Nobody has the facilities to build the kind of vehicle carriers they had during the Second Argelan War, or the barges from the Fourth.”

“But we won’t need any boats.” Bianca touches my hand where I’m still touching the lorry. “You showed me another way. The sea is frozen over, as solid as rock, in the night. You have this incredible paranormal gift, which I don’t claim to understand. But you can communicate with them, with the crocodiles, and they’ll help us cross through the night safely. You’re the key to all of this, Sophie. Everyone in Argelo has been nursing this dream for generations, especially since their resources have been running out. When I told them about you, their heads almost exploded.”

My mind fills with soldiers, uniforms, guns, a forced march into the night. All the old deathly feelings come back, just the same as if I’d never worked so hard to cope with them at all. Police helmets, massacres, the dying sounds of the Glacier Fools—I run through the whole catalog in a heartbeat. But even the memory-panic feels as though it’s happening a long way off. I turn to stone, rough-hewn, my head laced with shards of obsidian and granite. I can’t see or hear, every breath a struggle. The pragmatic part of me, that voice that keeps me steady and alert in a bad situation, is screaming the worst curses I know.

I concentrate on taking in diesel-scented air through my nose, letting out rank gasps through my mouth.

“You don’t know what you’re asking.” I force the words out, after a long time.

Like slow-dancing with a rockfall.

“I know, I know, they’re not your pets. I’m sorry I said that before. They’re an intelligent species, with their own society, and maybe one day we’ll be strong enough to trade with them. Though, remember that lecturer at the Gymnasium? Dr. Dawson? He always said that in a meeting between any two species, one always domesticates the other. Or they don’t coexist. Was he wrong? I don’t know.”

“They won’t do what I ask. I can’t even speak to them. Their communication is all one-way.” I never explained to her about my bracelet, and now I’m glad.

“They showed up when you called for help. They escorted us to safety. I was there.”

Feeling returns to my body, and mostly it consists of nausea. I can’t even look at Bianca. I remember all the times I told myself that I would do anything to make her happy, and the memories all have a dark red stain.

“I can’t.” I stutter. “I just can’t. There’s no way.”

Bianca seems to worry we’ve been in this hangar too long, so she hustles me back into the tunnel and locks the door behind us. Instead of going back the way we came, she leads me down another junction, and we emerge close to the Knife, right by that row of fish-bread shops. She finds a place that sells crystalized plum syrup on a stick and buys one for each of us.

“I love Argelo, and hate it at the same time.” She hands me my stick, and I bite into it. “But our hometown could use a little dose of Argelo. Progress isn’t always decorous. Sophie. I know what I’m doing. And I really want to go home. I want to finish what we started. I thought that’s what you wanted too.”

The sugar rush, on top of the dead feeling inside me, is making my head throb. I cling to a memory of Bianca saying both cities, the world, but I still have a scream caught in my throat that I can’t let out.

“Dash and the others, they don’t want to hurt anybody,” Bianca says. “Their main interest is in reopening trade with Xiosphant, on favorable terms. They need your help with the crocodiles, but also they need my understanding of Xiosphanti governance, or what passes for it. We’ll bring hand-picked soldiers who know how to behave themselves. We’ll do it with minimal casualties. We’ll just force those tools to liberalize, to loosen their chokehold on all the people back home.”

My eyes are closed. I don’t remember closing them. My mouth is glued with syrup.

“All we want is safe passage,” Bianca says. “Nothing else. I know you can do that. The crocodiles are the main reason why every vehicle that ever went into the night is a pile of wreckage.”

I don’t even know if any Gelet ever want to meet me again, after what happened with the Glacier Fools. I summoned them to a meeting, and then they were ambushed. I’ve been trying not to lose my mind over it. The Gelet had invited me to come live in their city, before all of that violence. Is that invitation even still open? If I do what Bianca wants, the Gelet would probably despise me once and for all, and they’d be right to.

“Sophie, please.” She grabs my arm. My eyes stay shut. “I know this is scary and strange. I know you wish we could just have a perfect little life together, you and me, but that’s not the world we live in.” My eyes reopen, but I still can’t look at her.

We’ve finished the gritty sweets. Our sticks are just sticks. I don’t know what to say to Bianca. Just a little while ago, I was saying I trusted her.

“Sophie, you’ve always needed me to push you or whatever, to give you an excuse to do the things you were too scared to do on your own.” Still speaking Xiosphanti, Bianca pulls me out into the wet street, where a masked dance party has started. Bianca joins the dancers, pulling me in with her. Her arms fly around my neck, and she speaks in my ear over the drums. “So I’m going to make this easy for you. We’re doing this, and it’s too late to stop it. Those vehicles are almost ready to go, and you and I are going to do this together. It’s already decided. There’s no need for you to torture yourself about this.”

Her hands rest on my neck, light as moth wings. I try to think of something to say, to change her mind. That feeling I had before—that this is our last chance to talk—is back, stronger than ever, but I still have no voice. Around me, people jostle in masks of velvet and feathers, shrieking with delight. I lean into Bianca’s ear, but no words come. I’m lost.

She spies some friends and releases her hold on me, then floats away. I let the crowd separate us. My last glimpse of Bianca is her head bobbing up and down in a churn of upflung arms, as someone ties a pointed mask around her eyes.

mouth

Barney had gotten a musical act at the diner, and it crushed all the customer tables into the other half of the tiny space. A mandolin, a xylophone, a trumpet, and a tin piano argued at cross-purposes. The usual roster of students and shift laborers crowded inside and ignored the spiky metal fence of rhythms and dark chords, even when the old man playing the xylophone started muttering to himself, in a repetitive melody, had a friend who needed a hand, had a hand that needed a glove, had a glove that needed a mate, and so on. Mouth wasn’t a music lover, but this left her colder than most kinds, and she never saw any evidence that this band brought in any customers. These musicians weren’t even playing a board game that you could place side bets on. But with all this racket, Mouth couldn’t ask Barney any more questions.

At last the honky-tonk group wore itself out, and the place went empty, and Barney was wiping down tables and moving them back into their old positions. Mouth tried to think of something to say before the diner filled up again.

Barney spoke first. “I know what you want. And it’s not going to happen.”

“What do I want?”

“You want me to go out on the road with you, the two of us, the last two Citizens. So I can walk you through it. So you can finish your education. There’s just no way. I’m too old.”

That possibility hadn’t even occurred to Mouth. Although now that Barney had brought it up, she could imagine how great it could be. Or they might just kill each other after the first few kilometers.

She laughed. “You think I want the two of us on the road, without anybody else watching our backs? When was the last time you left the city?”

Barney rolled his neck. “Not since you were a kid. Not since I dropped out.”

“I told you before. The road isn’t the same as back then. Two people out there would be eaten before you could get halfway to the Sea of Murder or the Southern Wastes. You need a whole crew, and a vehicle with a sleeping nook in it, and weapons, and all sorts of other shit. And even then, you’d die.”

“Oh.” Barney had been in the middle of checking the rack full of spoons, hooks, and knives, but he sat down, as if he’d lost his balance. He turned, all at once, into a person who had a stomach ulcer and heart trouble. “Yeah, you did say.”

“The crew I traveled with was ready for anything. We didn’t make it.”

“So you don’t want to go out on the road?”

“I do. I just can’t. I’ve been trying to make my peace with being a city-dweller. I still hate it. But I can’t change reality.”

“Well, then, I suggest you forget about the Citizens. There’s no point in thinking about them, or trying to make sense of anything. Their lessons were only useful on the road, and you can’t understand their ways while sitting here, inside walls within walls, between other walls. You can’t be on your own and have the mind-set of the Citizens. There’s no point. And even if I could teach you any of the old secrets, you couldn’t use them here. You can’t even see the day and the night at the same time when you’re in a city.”

“I can’t just pretend I grew up in a house,” Mouth said.

“Who cares where you grew up? You’re here now. The point is, the Citizens’ teachings are like one of those wispy pale flowers that used to grow out in the Drylands. Remember those? Imagine ripping it out at the root and trying to plant it in the Noisy Fen.”

“I just want to keep our culture alive.”

“You can’t.” Barney had revived and was wiping tables and checking napkins again. “You can’t keep something alive that’s already dead. You can only preserve the remains, the way that Martindale bullfrog is trying to do. If you want to do something to save our old culture, you should try to help the professor as much as you can. Maybe volunteer as his assistant. He’s absolutely the only hope for the thing you say you want.”

“That’s a horrible thought.”

“I don’t know why you’re so down on him. He’s a pompous oaf, but he wants to do the right thing. He cares about this, bless his heart.”

Now Mouth was the one sitting and clutching a sudden ulcer.

“I barely thought about the Citizens, all that time bouncing between two cities. It was just a funny story to tell people. But after I learned there was something left, the Invention, I couldn’t let go. And I can’t just forget again. Especially not now that I’ve found you.”

Barney sighed. “Let’s say I could bring all of the Citizens back from the dead. All of their shining ghosts, walking through town, singing one of those dirges that you were so determined to rescue from a vault in Xiosphant. The whole crew, including Cynthia and Yolanda. What then? What could they do that would make you happy? What do you actually want?”

Mouth thought about this for a moment. Bottomless swamp. “Well, they could give me a damn name.”

“Bring a book of baby names. We’ll flip to a random page, I’ll put my finger down. Picking a name is not hard.”

“It’s not the name. You know that. It’s the whole story that goes with it. The personal myth. The identity. They had a whole process.”

“Sure, sure. I went through that. I helped others through. It was a nice ceremony. I’m sure they would have gotten to you soon enough, if they hadn’t all died. Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to deal with a thing that you hid from yourself forever and just recently decided was a mortal wound.”

Mouth had her forearms in front of her face and her knees in her chest, against some huge projectile. She decided to throw it back in Barney’s face.

“What about you? How are you honoring our people? What are you doing? What do you want?”

Barney sighed. “Unlike you, I chose to leave the group. If I’d known I was leaving them to die… I don’t know. But I didn’t know that. So I opened this place as a way to create community. To bring people together. Maybe I aimed too low. I felt like my role in the Citizens was to cook for everyone, but also to help make a space for people to talk. And I told myself I could keep doing that. I welcome people who have no place else to go, and I promise a limited amount of safety to student radicals and people who are on the Nine Families’ hit list.”

“I’ve sat in here I don’t know how many times,” Mouth said, “and I haven’t seen you giving sanctuary to anyone.” She leaned her chair backward so it rested on two legs and put her feet against the table.

“It doesn’t happen all the time.” Barney seemed bored with this conversation, yawning and leaning on one hand. “Anyway, I don’t owe you any progress reports. I’m retired and an independent business owner. You are the one who has a problem, and I would like to help you solve it if I can. You can’t go back on the road, and I wouldn’t go back out there even if you paid me in extra life expectancy. You can’t get back the Citizens’ teachings by talking about them inside a building. How are you going to honor the dead?”

“I don’t know.” Mouth wanted to say that the dead had never honored her, that if anything, it was they who had left a debt unpaid. But maybe that would sound dumb.

“What have you ever done to help anybody?” Barney leapt to his feet and jabbed a finger at Mouth, who nearly fell flat on her back because she was leaning backward on two chair legs.

“I watched the other Couriers’ backs, while they still had backs to watch. I helped these scavengers. I kept Alyssa alive, in spite of all her best efforts.”

“A big thing in the Citizens was, we were all responsible for each other,” Barney said, sitting back down on his high stool behind the counter. “Sometimes that meant that anybody who wasn’t us could eat shit. But we tried to be generous, and interdependence was a big part of the teachings.”

“Ugh. So I should go and find some people who are bigger losers than I am, to try and lift them up.”

“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. Your own community. Everybody in this town is basically out of their mind. They might be safe under their roofs, but they’re more lost in the wilderness than we ever were. You could be doing some good around here.”

“I get it.” Mouth unkinked herself from her chair. “You want me out of your diner. I’ll go bother someone else.”

“Sure. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”

Afterward, Mouth couldn’t stop wondering who she could be a Citizen to, as she looped around the up-and-down streets under a flat gray sky. She had a feeling it was never going to be that simple, that she couldn’t just serve meatloaf and tell herself she was honoring the dead. The dead were just like the living: they all wanted something they could never have.

When Mouth got home, Alyssa offered her a hunting knife, holding it by the blade. Mouth took the hilt by instinct, but her fingers lost their strength. The knife stabbed the floor between them.

“Still?” Alyssa said, and cursed.

Lately, whenever Mouth tried to hold a weapon, her fingers turned into cotton strips. She could hold tools, pieces of food, shoes, or whatever, but she couldn’t grip a gun or machete to save her life. Her hands wouldn’t even assume the shape of fists. This had started right after the rain fight, when she had finished occupying the food depository, and Alyssa still wasn’t convinced Mouth wasn’t pulling some weird joke.

“You know I wouldn’t joke about weapons,” Mouth said. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but it’s probably temporary.”

Alyssa sighed and sank into a rattan chair, which was already flaking apart. “This is all my fault. I should have stuck to my original idea and opened a shop. You would have come around after a while. I feel like I threw away a one-time opportunity to start over, try something different.”

“What kind of shop, though? You never said.” Mouth sat down next to her.

“We could have opened a restaurant, like Ahmad, or that Barney guy.” Alyssa laughed. “Or a brewery. Or an antique store, after how much experience we had moving rare goods. Whatever. Something we could grow old doing. Instead, I decided we needed some excitement, and I wanted to help you reconnect with your long-lost nomads.”

Mouth shrugged. “Everybody made choices. You already know my regrets.”

“I just got blindsided by all my nostalgia for the old times, with the Chancers, once I was actually living here again. I wanted to recapture my glory days as a happy arsonist. And now we’re supposed to keep fighting for the Perfectionists, and you can’t even defend yourself with a toothpick.”

Right on cue, both their pagers went off, with a brand-new symbol that Mouth had never seen before: gnarled in on itself, like a sea-snake. Alyssa had to look this glyph up in the list they’d been given, and then she gasped. “Oh shit. We’re being summoned to the White Mansion.”

She jumped to her feet, and Mouth followed. While Mouth was pulling the door open, Alyssa handed her a small dark shape, so casually that Mouth couldn’t even tell what Alyssa was offering at first. The gun slipped out of Mouth’s hand and thudded to the floor. Alyssa cursed. At least the gun’s safety was on, so nobody got another new bullet wound.

Mouth had never been to the White Mansion, or even walked near it, because they didn’t appreciate loitering in this part of town. But the barbed spikes of the iron fence, the huge marble courtyard, and the ten garrets, each with a window large enough to drive the Couriers’ sled through, stirred Mouth even more than she’d expected, with a mixture of awe and disgust.

They’d torn down a dozen tenement buildings, with over a thousand people living in them, to make room for just this one pile, which they’d painted bright enough to throw reflected sunlight in your face.

“I just hope there are snacks,” Alyssa said, punching Mouth’s arm. “I was a kid when this place was still under construction, and I can’t wait to see the inside. But there better be fried oysters, or I’m burning the whole thing down.”

“You probably shouldn’t talk about arson here,” Mouth muttered.

They were met at the front door by a huge bruiser named Jimmy, who worked for the Perfectionists. He had a spiral scar on his hairless scalp, all the way from his eyes to the nape of his neck, and he always boasted that someone had stuck his head into one of those kitchen machines that hollows out a melon from the inside, during a fight that he’d won. Jimmy took all of Alyssa’s weapons, and then insisted on searching Mouth five times, because he couldn’t believe Mouth was unarmed.

“I know, I know,” Alyssa said. “I’ve been saying.” But she didn’t tell Jimmy about Mouth’s new condition.

Everything in the White Mansion had a scent that reminded Mouth of the first sweet thing she’d ever tasted as a child, when just the concept of sweetness had seemed revelatory.

Jimmy led them down a long hallway, past a huge ballroom with velvet drapes, to a side room that could still fit a hundred people comfortably. There, Bianca was sitting on a huge sofa made of some red leather that Mouth could tell at a glance would be softer than moss.

“There you are!” Bianca waved and gestured to a couple of chairs facing her couch. “Come join me.”

Mouth and Alyssa sat, and Jimmy withdrew to the far end of the room, out of earshot. Bianca fixed both of them with her easiest smile, as if they’d all gone to university together. They hadn’t talked since Bianca had called Mouth horrifying and almost consigned her to death. Somehow, Mouth found herself thinking about Barney’s parting words, about helping people find their way. Any wilderness where Bianca might be lost, Mouth had helped lead her into.

They made chitchat for a few moments, about Argelan food, and poor Reynold, and some rugby game that had been delayed due to rain. Then Bianca got to the point.

“Mouth, I have some excellent news for you. That book you wanted? From the Palace? The one with all the poems and things? We can get it for you. I will hand it to you myself.”

At first, Mouth couldn’t even process the words Bianca was speaking. A snatch of some other conversation, from a different time and place. Then Alyssa kicked Mouth, and the meaning sank in.

“Oh,” Mouth said.

“That’s all you’re going to say? After everything you put me through just to steal that one book? And now I’m telling you, it’s yours.”

Mouth tried to bring back the vision she had nurtured in her mind that whole time in Xiosphant, of lifting the crystal volume and paging through it. Seeing all of the old wisdom about how to see both horizons with a clear mind. That vision had quickened her soul back in Xiosphant, but now she just felt sad, and a little lightsick. She couldn’t think of the Invention without hearing Barney say “doggerel,” or remembering that vision of precious fragile blooms dying inside an ancient mountain, which some old book wasn’t going to help her understand.

The Invention might as well be a heap of blank pages now.

“Oh,” Mouth said again.

“We’re going on a mission soon,” Bianca said. “It’s a huge secret, but I’m letting you two in on it, because we’ll need some stealth experts. We’re going back to Xiosphant.” She kept talking: armored vehicles, heavy weaponry, a hand-picked force.

Alyssa kept nodding. “You’ve got it all figured out. This is a solid plan.”

Mouth was remembering when Bianca used to ask her, How many people have you killed? And Mouth had answered with a boastful vagueness, as if the fact that she hadn’t kept track made her a better role model. She remembered the first person she’d killed, a tubercular, silt-voiced Argelan man who’d seized her throat from behind when the Citizens’ funeral ashes were still fresh on her hands, and the last, one of the men guarding the food depository. But in between?

“You know whose house this is.” Bianca gestured at the mahogany walls and the view out the window, of a tiny walled grove of what looked like apple trees. “He runs the Alva Family, which now controls the Perfectionists, who you both swore allegiance to, according to the badges you’re wearing. So we could just order you to do this, but I’m choosing to be nice.”

“I’m kind of retired from traveling,” Alyssa said. “But, well, this sounds like a whole other trip, and I’m dying to see how it turns out. And truth be told, I’ve been missing all those Xiosphanti grains. Need more fiber in my diet.” She elbowed Mouth in the side.

“I thought you would be on your knees thanking me for this opportunity,” Bianca said to Mouth. “I honestly don’t understand you at all. I used to think you were so wise. I hung on every word you spoke to me. Now you just look like some kind of tragic vagrant.”

“A lot’s happened,” Mouth said. Then she tossed her head. “I promised to help you before, in Xiosphant, but I had my own agenda, and I was selfish, even though I thought it was for a higher cause. So I owe you my help now. You don’t need to bribe me.”

Bianca’s eyes misted up, as sudden as a weather shift on the road. “If you had only said that to me a long time ago, a lot of things might be different now.” Then she glanced up at Jimmy, signaling the interview was over. “We’ll be in touch about logistics. Keep your pagers with you at all times.” She got up and walked out of the room without looking back at them.

SOPHIE

The most famous story of Anchor-Banter, which I still don’t completely understand, is about a prince and a tailor, in the fairy-tale version of Xiosphant that everyone loves here: twinkling castles, rowdy banquets, valiant knights. The prince has a perfect life, except he’s in love with a beautiful young apprentice in the royal gardens whose touch restores every rare bloom to health. The prince keeps trying to woo her, with tiny flying machines and musicians, but every plan goes awry. And this ugly old royal tailor is always nearby, giving a crooked leer, whenever another disaster ruins the prince’s courtship. At last the prince decides to have the tailor imprisoned, on some pretext—but then the prince loses everything and becomes a beggar, outside the walls of his own palace. The beautiful apprentice gardener throws a flower into the former prince’s cap every now and then, without knowing him. The prince stays out there for uncounted ages, in the dirt, but his royal garments never tear or sully, and they become a pillow and quilt when the city sleeps. These clothes are a miracle, and at last the prince realizes: that tailor never received proper payment for his work, or credit from the throne. With that, the curse is broken, and the prince is able to return and kill everyone who betrayed him.

The first time I tried to understand this story, I had thought “Anchor-Banter” referred to the apprentice gardener, and the prince’s destructive love for her. I didn’t even get the thing about the tailor. Alyssa’s explanation helped a lot, though the whole thing still seemed incongruously mystical.

Still, Alyssa says when you identify your Anchor-Banter, you have two choices: You can figure out why this person is connected to you. Or you can join forces with them, and cause trouble for everyone else.

According to Mouth, every pile in this scrapyard tells a different story about Argelo. She points out a wire-mesh bundle of filthy, corroded old Founders’ Celebration rattles, from a brief period when Argelo tried to mass-produce cheap junk to send to Xiosphant in exchange for food or technology. On the other side, a heap of busted shell casings and shattered bayonets, from the last great war with Xiosphant (either the fifth or the sixth, depending on how you reckoned). She gestures at a wall of garbage that includes: melted plastic farm implements from when the Argelan People’s Congress launched an “Everyone Farms” campaign; tarnished badges from political parties and families that nobody even remembers; rust-eaten prospector gear from the heyday of treasure meteorites; packages for various fad cures for lightsickness, fungal infections, and delirium; and rotted placards depicting the great exodus from Xiosphant to Argelo.

I wrap a cloth around my mouth and nose to protect against the fumes from some combination of rotting plastic and battery acid.

“Well, you said you wanted to talk someplace where nobody could hear us,” Mouth says, gesturing around at the brightly colored piles.

“Yeah, I did. I need your help, and I don’t trust anybody in this blighted city anymore.”

Ever since Bianca showed me her invasion fleet, I’ve been dizzy, as if the sheer weight of my rage has sprung my inner ear. I feel like wrecking this whole city with my bare hands. Every time my anger runs out of fuel, I fall into mourning, as if my feelings for Bianca have gone sour forever. Part of me still can’t believe that Bianca has changed, but another buried part has seen this happening for a long time. I keep thinking back to everything that’s happened since we left home. The look on Bianca’s face after we survived the Sea of Murder, the way she insisted on seeing the Gelet as my servants, the frenzy with which she threw herself into high society. Even the things she said in the storeroom, when we first slept here. She’s been planning to use me, almost since we left home.

Mouth is looking at me, and I realize I haven’t spoken for a while. “I need you to help me disappear for a while,” I say. I start to tell Mouth what Bianca’s planning, and it turns out she already knows most of it, except for my part.

“I’ll do what I can, but you should know that I can’t fight.” Mouth looks down. “My hands won’t cooperate, no matter what I try, ever since the rainstorm. Wasn’t like I chose to become a pacifist or anything, just that my body decided on its own.”

Mouth somehow looks even worse than she did after the Glacier Fools. She has fresh burn scars on her neck from that scorching rain, and a cut on her cheek that looks infected. She hasn’t been able to keep shaving the sides of her head, and the hair came back uneven.

“I don’t need you to fight anybody. Just help me get out of town, find a place to lie low until everyone gives up on this invasion foolishness. Preferably, someplace where I can go into the night without passing through slums full of people with harpoon guns.”

Mouth perks up, because here is a challenge that she’s comfortable with. She starts spinning out extraction plans, disguises, camouflages, and places I could hide, including a hidden distillery that some of Alyssa’s old friends are running, forty kilometers south of here.

“I already promised to help Bianca,” Mouth says. “But I guess I can help both of you.”

“The Gelet, when I went into the night, they trusted me with something precious,” I say. “Not just their shared past, like what they tried to share with you, but even more than that, a… a kinship. They chose me to be their friend here in the twilight, and I’ve failed them over and over, in so many ways. But no matter how I try to make Bianca understand, she still just thinks I have some kind of power that she can use to get what she wants.”

I squint at all the bright colors, eaten away by rust or mold. We’re surrounded by the detritus of other people’s bold visions for the future. I keep gagging on the stench of outgassing polymers.

“You learned to overcome the worst fear and communicate across the great divide, and you’ve overturned everything we thought we understood about this world,” Mouth says, chewing her knuckles. “So of course someone was bound to try and weaponize you. I’m just sorry it was Bianca.”

When my mother died, I was just on the cusp of thinking of myself as a separate person, with independent opinions, and I had a hard time separating her death from my own life. I kept thinking I must have done something wrong, or she must have rejected me, and I imagined her final moments over and over: her skin seared away, her final thoughts worrying about the well-being of strangers. Bianca was the first person who ever soothed my derelict heart after that, so of course I threw all of my love at her.

Hernan said my mother would be proud of me. I wonder if it’s true, and what she would say if she saw me now. I’ve taken to wearing the CoolSuit, or even a light cotton sari over a blouse and pants, whenever I go outside without Bianca. At some point, I stopped thinking of this as a disguise, and started just taking comfort in anything that makes me easier in my skin.

Mouth comes back and says, “It’s all arranged. Alyssa’s on her way to help us. She just had to make a pit stop on her own, to take care of something first.”

I start to thank her for the risk she’s taking, but just then Alyssa shows up—with Bianca.

“That was your pit stop?” Mouth throws her hands over her head. “You went to fetch her?”

“We pledged our loyalty to the Perfectionists, and I take that seriously, not to mention all the promises we just made to Bianca. I wasn’t about to sneak around behind her back.” Alyssa shrugs. “Plus, I actually think Bianca would make an amazing leader. She kept the Resourceful Couriers from melting down after Omar died, and she’s been playing the Argelan game better than most people who were born here.”

“Thanks.” Bianca nods at Alyssa. “I’d be lucky to have someone like you on my team.”

Mouth looks at the two of them with her arms still raised, a comical statue.

“Don’t worry: Dash and the others don’t know about your little betrayal, and I hope we can keep it that way,” Bianca says to Mouth. “I can’t believe that right after you promised to help me, you went behind my back and tried to sabotage the mission. Actually, I can believe it, because it’s bloody typical. Everything I know about lies and manipulation, I learned from you.”

“Both you and Sophie asked for my help, and I couldn’t choose between you. But my promise to you still stands.”

“Don’t blame Mouth,” I whisper. “This was my idea.”

“Were you even going to say goodbye to me this time?” Bianca comes over to me, shivering in her crimson party dress. “Or were you just going to disappear again, and leave me wondering if you were alive or dead?”

I’d made up my mind that I would never see Bianca again, so she appears like a sliver of lost time. I feel the old yearning to comfort her, to sustain her with my near silence, but then I remember how she laughed as she told me that it was too late to stop her plans, and then the sight of a thorn mask halfway on her face. The cavities in the rough metal vehicles with their fresh uneven coats of paint, large enough to hold the most destructive weapons humanity still has. The casual way she said, Do you think we would have stayed friends?

This feeling is the opposite of what a Gelet’s touch does to me: I feel crushed by the reality of my own body, my own surroundings, my own mistakes.

“I would have died to avenge you, and you’re still at the center of my world, but you won’t fucking believe in me,” Bianca says.

“You and Sophie are like a single soul in two bodies,” Mouth is saying to Bianca. “I’ve seen how much you care about each other. Don’t let it go like this. Just work it out. We can find another way.”

I still can’t look at Bianca. I close my eyes, and instead I see an assault vehicle with empty weapon ports.

“There is no other way,” Bianca says. “We’re doomed if these two cities don’t start working together. The sky only just pissed alkali a short while ago, remember, and the southern root gardens and orchards are ruined. Argelo is running out of food and clean water, and meanwhile Xiosphant is a collection of ancient machines that can’t go much longer. This is a harsh, ugly planet, and we need to pool our resources or we all starve in our own filth.”

Alyssa shrugs and says to Mouth, “Can’t really argue with any of her logic. Those fucking complacent Xiosphanti need something to wake them up, make them care about the rest of us. Remember when we thought we were going to be stuck there for the rest of our lives? Ugh.”

I feel Bianca’s hands on my arms, smell the warm yeasty liquor on her breath. “Sophie, I need you. I can’t face any of this without you. Everything we used to talk about after curfew, all of the dreams we had, we can make all of it real. When the two of us are united, nothing can stop us. Please look at me. Sophie, please.”

I look, just in time to see tears streaking the metallic paint around Bianca’s eyes, illuminating the lines on her face. I want to put my arms around her, but I’m still deadlocked.

“Sophie has an amazing gift,” Mouth says. “Something that nearly killed me when I tried to do it. She can touch something that maybe nobody else has ever touched. And you’re forcing her to use it for destruction.”

“For liberation,” Bianca says through a wet curtain. “I want to save everyone in Xiosphant from the prison of endless repetition.”

“But Sophie doesn’t want—” Mouth starts to say.

“Everybody shut up, just shut up, shut up and let me talk. I’m sick of all your stupid voices. Just stop talking, stop talking, shut your faces.” The words come out of me in one breath, in a low, guttural rush.

Alyssa, Mouth, and Bianca all stare at me. The night wind rustles through the twine-wrapped bundles of rubbish.

“I never wanted to give up on you,” I say to Bianca in Xiosphanti. “All I ever wanted was to keep following you around and seeing each new thing through your eyes. But I can’t stand to watch you chasing power, or revenge, or whatever it is that you think you crave. You cannot force me to be your tool of conquest, as if I’m the last section of ablative shielding for one of those war machines. And if you insist on trying, then maybe you were right before, and our friendship belongs in the past.”

I pause to draw a toxic breath, the gears of my anger still scraping. And then, I realize. When I spoke Xiosphanti just now, I identified myself as a student, same as always—but I labeled Bianca an aristocrat, my social better. And I used the formal syntax, as if addressing a stranger.

Bianca realizes this the same time as I do, and her face collapses under its coating of reflective paint.

“I’ve screwed everything up,” Bianca says when she can talk again. “But I can still get it right.”

Mouth touches my arm. I almost forgot she and Alyssa were here. “If Bianca was telling the truth and nobody else knows what we’re doing, then we have a narrow window to get you out of town before everything explodes. She’ll be missed long before we will.”

I pull away from Bianca. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Mouth looks at Alyssa.

“Well, of course I’m going to help you, you fuckhead,” Alyssa groans. “It’s not like I was getting used to my life not being a giant nest of fetid swamp dogs or anything.”

I’m turning to leave and searching for a way to thank Alyssa and Mouth for the risk they’re taking on my behalf, when Bianca speaks.

“Please don’t leave me. Please, I can’t lose you again.” Bianca’s voice sounds almost the same as when the police were dragging me away from the Zone House. “Please. I know that I’m selfish, but you make me better, and after everything we’ve been through we share a bond, you and me, and it goes way beyond any simple college friendship. Sophie, please. I get it, you’re scared to go home, but it’ll be okay, I won’t let anything hurt you ever again. You’ll be a hero. Sophie! Don’t walk away from me.”

I almost walk into a wall of placards, but Alyssa steers me.

Mouth is already muttering to Alyssa about the best routes out of town, the easiest way to vanish. I concentrate on trudging.

And then, from somewhere behind me, Bianca says, “I love you.”

All of the strength leaves me and I fall, and Alyssa barely catches my limp body as my eyes wash out. My face feels hot and Alyssa’s shoulder smells like soaked-in sweat. Alyssa lays a hand beneath my nape, gingerly, and lets me rest on her as I tremble and spasm. The hurt I’ve crammed inside every joint and sinew for too long rushes to the surface, and my anger falls away, and I can’t hold any of this inside anymore. Nobody speaks, as my jag goes on and on, and I can’t think past the words I just heard Bianca speak, I can’t stand this hope.

Alyssa’s stiff denim shirt is soaked and she supports me, both arms now, without offering any false reassurance.

At last I pull myself upright. “I can’t leave her. I just can’t.”

“Oh.” Mouth bites her lip, then shrugs with her head slung forward.

Paint runs down Bianca’s cheeks in uneven lines, but she’s giving me the smile that used to make me want to dance on my bunk at the Gymnasium. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll be by your side the whole time, I promise.” She pulls me close, and soon I’m crying in her arms instead of Alyssa’s.

My tears mingle with Bianca’s, and I realize the two of us have never cried at the same time before. I’m convulsing and clutching at Bianca, trying to pull her closer and also push her away, and my heart is a dented bell, and the junkyard shrinks in on us, and I hold on tight to her declaration of love, as if it could save me from all of the horrors that lie ahead.