The City in the Middle of the Night

SOPHIE

I can’t stop crying for Bianca, the whole way down. Even with the environment suits, the blankets, and the shelter of the Gelet’s tunnels, thick gusts chill my bones, and I picture Bianca surrounded by murderers and thieves, in a failing vehicle. The tunnels lead deeper and deeper under the ice, until we emerge into a cavern where steam rises from hot springs, and I remember promising to hold on to Bianca as long as I have arms. A faint light, pale green in my night vision, comes out of the hot pools, from bacteria or algae, and reveals the sawtooth shape of the walls. Bianca probably hates me now. In her mind, this is just the latest betrayal in a chain that started with me hiding from her after my execution. The Gelet urge us to move faster, into the depths, and I hear the growl of some ancient mechanism.

One of the Gelet seems to feel my agitation, and brushes my arm with one tentacle as we return to a darkness that even my visor can do almost nothing with. I stumble and reel, even with the Gelet guiding me.

My feet throb. Mouth keeps grunting, too. Steam bursts out of the ground and startles me, followed by more intense chills. My legs want to give out, but we keep moving. My disorientation is the size of a million cities, and if the Gelet let go of me for an instant, I’ll be lost forever. I can’t even tell the size of the space we’re moving in, and have to close my eyes and breathe to fight off claustrophobia.

My breath is a piston that drowns out the Gelet’s buried engines, and then I let out a wail, which gets louder until it scathes my throat.

I can’t stop screaming, after holding it in so long. I scream into my helmet, so deep inside darkness that I have no sense of direction or escape route. I scream myself hoarse, remembering how I put my heart and sinews and guts into saving Bianca from herself, and only became her fool. Mouth says something that I can’t hear. My knees fail.

On my knees, a ragged sound tearing from deep inside me, I can’t bear this cold.

One of the Gelet pulls me upright, and gently peels the neckpiece off my survival suit. I feel the warm, wet feelers on my skin, and I get a series of impressions—

—a harpoon pierces my side, my own blood slick against my tentacles, fleeing for my life. I limp back home, with the last of my strength, and then I hang in a healing cocoon for an endless, itchy spell. My muscles cramp, and I think about the dream we all crafted among us, here in the city: bringing home our friend from the dusk, leading her down here with us. Finally living together, sharing all our stories with her, maybe even learning her stories, too. We shaped that vision together, and when I leave the husk of my convalescence, all my other friends keep reminding me of the dream we all had. Do I still believe, or did the spear poison my faith as it went into me? I’m not sure. The moment when I laid out that idea before our friend from the dusk, like a whole root system of possibility, is clouded by pain now. I struggle to hold on to that dream, but my memory itself feels wounded, deep in my core between my stomachs, maybe past healing. And then our friend from the dusk is back, and she brings other humans who want to communicate, and I can sense her hope, her courage, like a hot geyser from the deepest permafrost… and it’s okay. Even when another harpoon cuts through the snowy wind, even when I lose more blood, lose my balance, chip away part of my carapace as a tiny boot comes down, I remember the pure hope that I sensed, bursting out of her. Our friend from the dusk, she carried the other humans to us on the back of that hope. One Gelet falls dead, alongside the three dead humans, but I know her now, our human friend. When I get back to the city, I tell the others that I believe once more—

—Still on my knees, my throat still hot, I gaze up at this Gelet. I notice the hole in her carapace, and I gaze up at her round, sharp-toothed mouth, and the forest of tendrils undulating inside her pincer. Maybe I haven’t ruined everything after all. Her story settles into me, and I know I’m in the right place. I just hope Bianca is too.

I take a breath, replace my neck strap, and walk forward.

More and more Gelet cluster around us, and the air gets warmer, and that’s how I know we’ve reached the city. Even with the night vision, I only glimpse pieces of the architecture here and there. In the glow from a furnace, I see a chamber stretching over my head, dotted with openings that Gelet climb through, and filled with alien machinery: sharp teeth, curved fulcrums, and blobs of living matter. I feel my way along the curved walls, with Gelet guiding me.

At last we reach a room, shaped like the inside of a bottle, where the light blinds me. I risk taking off my helmet, and I see some writing, in Noölang. Next to me, Mouth hesitates, then removes her helmet too. We’re looking at a computer, Khartoum-built like all the computers on the Mothership, and it still works. The Gelet have reverse-engineered its solar cells to use power from the hot springs. The holographic display shivers, but stays readable.

“The Gelet are talking to the Mothership,” Mouth says. “But that’s… I mean, nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations. We don’t even have the protocols anymore.”

“Poor Pedro and Susana,” I say. “And Reynold. They would have died of happiness if they could see this.”

I try to get the computer to give me a real-time view of Xiosphant, so I can zoom in enough to see if Bianca somehow arrived safely. I could at least try to locate the Command Vehicle. The interface is pretty easy to understand. But whatever I do, I only see Xiosphant at some point in the past. Maybe the Mothership is flying over somewhere else now.

Instead, I find a schematic that says something in ancient script like, “Climate Projections: Original and Revised.” The original climate projection, from when we arrived here, looks like a steady line, with some increase in temperature due to human industry but a corresponding increase in stabilizing factors. The revised version looks like a tantrum: the lines start out straight, then jerk up and down.

“Well, shit,” Mouth said. “Even I can tell that’s not good.”

“There’s going to be more storms, and more disruptions in the water table for both cities. And there’s a seventeen percent chance of… I can’t read this.” I squint and try to remember my Noölang class. “Seventeen percent chance of catastrophic atmosphere loss.”

“As in, what? Like, we can’t breathe anymore?”

I toss my head.

The Gelet have reorganized the file systems, as if they want us to see certain things. The bottom of the display has a row of numbers: “07/20/3207 17:49.” I poke at random, and a holographic video appears in the middle of the jumble. A woman wearing some kind of uniform, with features somewhat like Bianca’s, looks right at us, and speaks in Noölang.

“My name is Olivia. I don’t know if anybody will ever see this. I’ve been inside this alien city for twenty-nine Earth rotations, according to this computer. When we detected this place with our orbital scans, we couldn’t have known how deep it goes, and most of the teams concluded it was either a natural ice formation or some sort of burrow system. I remember Richardson and Mbatha suggested it could be a built structure, but everyone else regarded this as a fringe theory at best, based on flimsy data. If only the rest of the science teams could see the interior structures and the complexity of these systems. These creatures are so much more advanced than we could have guessed, and they make me want to redefine all my ideas of technological and societal development.”

She looks in all directions, as if she’s scared that she’ll be caught. “These natives seem to regard geoengineering and bioengineering as two branches of the same discipline. They’ve rebuilt both themselves and their environment to cope with this planet’s unique challenges. Back on Earth, people theorized that a tidally locked planet would need some kind of ‘air-conditioning’ system, circulating hot air from the near side to the far side, to avoid weather instability and atmospheric disruption. And these creatures seem to have created something even better, using networked chains of flora to sequester and redistribute heat energy. They cultivate them inside dormant volcanoes and lava vents. It’s incredible.”

I’m not sure how much Mouth understands, but the word “flora,” combined with “volcanoes,” makes her stare.

“They use a form of touch telepathy, via this bodily secretion that’s somewhere between a neurotransmitter and a pheromone,” Olivia says. “They touch you, and you can share their memories, and the memories they’ve taken from others. There appears to be an olfactory component. Except that I can’t always tell if they’re showing me the past or their ideas for the future.”

She shudders without any warning, weeping into her sleeve. “They want to… they want to make me the same as them. They have a surgery, or some kind of procedure, that will change me, so I can communicate the way they do. They’ve shown me what they’re planning, and I won’t let them. I still have the medi-kit, and I can take all my palliatives at once. I won’t let go of my humanity. If anybody ever finds this video, please know, these creatures are not our friends. They want to remake us, the same way they’ve changed their environment and themselves. If you see this, fight them, fight them with your last—”

The video cuts out. I’m left staring at an empty space, feeling sorrow for a woman who died a long time ago, one way or another.

Then the meaning of her words starts to sink in, and I feel so light my whole body might be made out of billowing silk. Oh, of course. I want to laugh, and then I do laugh, and I keep laughing, harder and more raucous, until I realize Mouth is staring.

I start to explain what Olivia said, but Mouth understood most of it. Her nomads used Noölang for everything sacred.

“Why would they let us watch that?” Mouth says.

“Because they wanted to make sure we understood what they plan to do with us: give us their gift of communication.”

“Okay, so how do we defend ourselves… I mean, I told you, I can’t fight anymore. And even if I could—”

“I want this.” I take Mouth’s shoulders and look into her wide-open eyes. “I’m going to say yes. I need to talk to the Gelet as an equal. And I am so tired of using this clumsy human voice. I never even liked talking. People lie every time they speak. I can finally understand, and be understood, and oh, of course I am going to do this! I have never wanted anything half as much.”

“But your humanity!” Mouth grips the side of the computer table with both hands. “I mean, you can’t let go of—”

“Did you actually read any of Mayhew’s writing? Back when you were pretending to be a young radical?” I ignore Mouth’s squirming, because we’re past that now. “He talked a lot about human nature. We can’t stay the same forever. New world, new people.”

Mouth startles me by quoting from Mayhew’s Treatise on Inhumanity, almost verbatim: “‘We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.’ But still, stop and think. You’ll be throwing away everything…” She pauses and looks down at her boots. “You know what? I’m the worst person to give anybody advice. Do what you want.”

“Thank you.”

All this hope catches me off-balance. I’m scared, too—what if they kill me by accident? What if I look hideous to other humans? But this is worth any risk. Everything I’ve lost and suffered, all of it will be a cheap price if this works.

“But there’s no way I’m letting them do that to me,” Mouth says.

“I don’t think you should. The one time you tried to communicate with them, you couldn’t handle it. Any more than the others.” I flinch at the memory of the scavengers, arguing about whether there should be a Spoon to go with the Knife. I’ll never stop blaming myself for that bloodbath, even if the Gelet have forgiven me. I need to do better. And now, maybe I can.

I sit in three-quarter darkness, holding conversations with Bianca in my head. “Don’t go,” I tell her. “You don’t want to go home. You want to go back to being the person you used to be. Even if you succeed in conquering Xiosphant with a handful of foreigners, you’ll only be killing what’s left of your old self. Come with me to the Gelet city. We’ll sit in the dark and ask each other stupid questions, and keep each other warm.” But even an imaginary Bianca won’t listen to me. She’s probably dead by now.

I’m not ready for how much I miss people, after always wishing I could escape from them. I hear Mouth grumbling in the opposite corner, but I’ve never been this far from a crowd before. Their loud voices, the inadvertent touches, and the scraps of personal information that people always give in passing. All the tiny ways that people help each other to exist.

Food appears from time to time, dropped in my lap from someplace: weird pastes that feel clammy in my mouth but warm in my stomach; roots; and, once or twice, some freeze-dried rations from the Mothership, still edible after so long. I sleep a lot, on a makeshift bed of old survival gear.

At last some Gelet come and herd me into a cavernous space, whose dimensions I only discern because of the echoes of my own stumbles. Every time I move, I almost topple. One of these Gelet puts her pincer around my face, the first time they’ve done this since I came inside the city, and shows me what they plan to do: an array of dark spikes going into soft flesh, and a cradle of bone being pried apart with great care. I see things that look like worms and blobs of fat being stuffed inside a cavity that wasn’t meant to hold them. Skin being reshaped.

I understand: This will be painful. This will be impossible to undo. They’ll need to take me apart and reassemble me, and they cannot guarantee mastery.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Do it. I want that. Please. Yes.”

They can’t tell that I’m agreeing, so I spread my arms as wide as I can, indicating openness.

“I’m ready. I want to be able to speak to you. I want to be part of your society. Let’s do this.”

I keep broadcasting eagerness, as loud as I can. I can’t contemplate that kind of pain, let alone the disfigurement, without going stiff with fear. But I know for sure, this is what I came here for.

Even when they take me into the chamber and remove all my clothing, exposing me to a chill, leavened by heat from deep-running springs, I don’t flinch. When they offer some sedatives from some old human medi-kit, I take them eagerly. In a half doze, I have inklings that they’re opening me up and taking away pieces, somewhere below my floating head. The drugs help me not to mind, but I don’t mind in any case. They can take anything, as long as they give me what they promised.

When they finish remaking me, they seal up my insides, while one of them envelopes my forehead in her pincer, tenderly, showing me a comforting memory (dream?) of a snowdrift being rearranged, slowly, by a languid wind that moves tons of loose powder in ornate whorls. Kilometers of bright lace, in constant motion.

mouth

Mouth sat in one of the Gelet’s weird sticky hammocks and heard their limbs scuttling in the trails going up and down outside the room where she was resting up. They had left a stack of old human books in here, and she’d read a couple of them in the meager illumination. Mouth didn’t think she was a prisoner, exactly, but if she wandered out into the Gelet city, she’d just get lost, or wind up in total darkness. And the thought of exploring this hive filled Mouth with dread. The Citizens had been fond of dread, which they’d viewed as a profound spiritual rapture that suffused your whole body, even to the hairs on your skin and the arches of your feet. Dread lasted longer, and went deeper, than awe or joy.

Mouth couldn’t force her mind to accept that she was in this alien place, with its hissing turbines and its swarming creatures. Instead, she tried to picture Alyssa sitting down here with her, and to guess what Alyssa would say about all this.

Maybe Mouth and Alyssa had never seen each other clearly. Mouth had always thought of Alyssa as a fully formed person who had already made all her big choices. But really, Alyssa had been a kid when they’d first met, and Mouth had only lately known Alyssa as an adult. She’d been trying to step up and become a boss for ages, but her relationship with Mouth had remained stuck in their old dynamic. And maybe she’d always cling to the impression of Mouth that she had formed as a wild-eyed girl with messy hair, leaving home for the first time.

Two pairs of snapping pincers appeared next to Mouth’s hammock, and a tentacle brushed her skin. She flinched but didn’t try to pull away. Up close, without the deafening wind, she could hear the teeth clicking in the wide mouth, and see the oily secretion glistening on the grubs in between the pincers. The Gelet smelled like damp cloth and fresh-baked bread, and they didn’t have “heads” at all. Instead, these protrusions rose over their front legs, like your thumb climbs out of your wrist, and culminated in those two big indentations that seemed to change shape, looking sad or wistful or mirthful as the light shifted.

The Gelet guided Mouth out of the hammock and gave her something to wear: a kind of dry moss or algae that hugged her body wherever she wrapped it around herself, and kept her warm and comfortable. Then they led her into a maze of shadows.

Mouth had lost her night-vision helmet along with the rest of her gear, and she saw nothing but depthless chasms and knife edges everywhere. The tentacles steadied her but also wore away at her calm, with their soft cilia and thick flesh. In the occasional flickering from distant foundries and bioluminescent growths, Mouth glimpsed segmented bodies moving in the dark, and she jumped each time. She had no reserves of bloody-mindedness left. She lost track of how many turns they took, or how many paces, and she started to believe she’d never see again.

They arrived at a large space, one of those high vaults with a number of galleries or balconies coming off at regular intervals, all the way up to the black pinprick of sky. Light came from far ahead, pale yellow and red. Four or five Gelet stood together, with all of their pincers turned sideways and open wide, to allow all of their tendrils to connect in some group conversation. Their gaping pincers, all interlocking, looked like those thistles that were overrunning the shore of the Sea of Murder. Their hind legs flexed. Mouth turned away by instinct, then forced herself to look, and saw that one of these Gelet was not a Gelet at all.

Sophie disengaged herself from the group and walked toward Mouth, who almost didn’t recognize her. She walked taller, with her head raised, and she had a blissful smile on her face, even amid all the gloom. Mouth was so distracted by her new posture and attitude she almost didn’t notice the tentacles rising up from Sophie’s back, or the wormy flesh wriggling on her chest, below the collarbone.

Then, once Mouth saw those things, she couldn’t see anything else. She felt sick to her stomach.

“There you are,” Sophie said, then shook her head. “It feels strange to speak aloud now.” She guided Mouth until they were sitting on a kind of bench that was lit by a greenish glow from some living flesh hanging over their heads.

“So you… wow. So you did it. You went ahead and became… this,” Mouth said. “They never even thought of making a law against what you’ve done, but you’re still the greatest outlaw in history.”

“Coming from you, that’s a compliment. Right?”

Mouth didn’t know what to say. She sat on her hands and stammered, without making any syllables. She knew what would happen now: Sophie would want to slime her so she could communicate without words. Maybe she’d force Mouth to experience her memories of witnessing all of Mouth’s selfish behavior, when they’d first met and Mouth had been tricking Bianca, and this would be the final strike to Mouth’s heart.

But Sophie didn’t come any closer. “You’ll get used to it,” she said in a near-inaudible voice that sounded like the old Sophie again.

“I’m sure I will,” Mouth said.

Mouth could hear the husky sound of Sophie’s new appendages rubbing together in distress.

“You know, you don’t have to be alone,” Sophie said after they had sat for a while. “This pain you’re holding inside yourself, all the memories of your dead nomads. You could share it with everyone here, if you became like me. You just form the memory in your head, and anyone you touched could remember it too, and share it. You don’t know how light it feels.”

“I can’t do what you’ve done,” Mouth said. “I really can’t. I used to be brave, but…” Even thinking about the deaths of the Citizens, too, brought a desolation, like the whole of the road was wound around the inside of her frame. Mouth didn’t want to share that anguish, to make it common property. She didn’t want consolation, or a sponge to soak up her grief.

But then, on some weird light-starved impulse, Mouth said: “But I can tell you about it, and you can share the memory of me telling you with your friends, if you want.”

Sophie nodded.

Mouth talked until she tasted salt and bile. She told Sophie how she’d heard the voices in the distance, and then seen these blue creatures filling all the spaces around and between the Citizens. The chopping and whirring of a million pairs of wings, the whole encampment turned to a blue haze. The Priors, the helpers, the old people, the children, all singing with pain, until they went silent. Mouth running on her awkward child legs, fresh from a growth spurt, toward an orchard of skeletons with blue petals clinging. And then the shiny wings were gone, leaving just bones in the dirt. Mouth had painstakingly collected every one of those bones, even the smallest, even the ones that crumbled in her hand, and piled them in one spot. Then she’d fumbled with a tinderbox, trying to turn all the tiny wheels and open the valves, but only succeeded in burning her own fingers. At last she got a spark but the bones wouldn’t catch until she’d baled dead grass from a kilometer away and spread it, and then the flame near took her face off.

Mouth had almost lost the power of speech by the time she got to the part where she’d walked away from the still-burning pyre and gotten lost, going in circles, even though the night was right there and the day on the other side, and you could see the plume of smoke. Her eyes stung, her heart beat louder and louder.

She had no strength left when she finished telling the story, and this was the most she had ever told anyone about what had happened, even Barney.

“I am going to be walking away from that fire for the rest of my life,” she said, and this was something she had never admitted to herself before. “My hair could turn to white silk, my skin could turn to dry leaves, and I would still be walking with my back to the flames that consumed what was left of my people. I’m not ever going to be Argelan, or Xiosphanti, or Gelet, or any other nationality.”

Mouth risked looking at Sophie. The girl’s human eyes had a layer of moisture in them and around them, and her face was trembling. The thicket of fingers coming out of her upper rib cage wriggled, but the human face showed sadness, kindness, helplessness. Sophie rose, and without saying a word she went to share Mouth’s testimonial with the Gelet.

Mouth sat alone, in a split-wall chamber that seemed dimmer than ever. She stared past the opening in the wall, into a superstructure of swaying material that looked like coral or limestone. The city’s motors sounded like submerged avalanches.

Gelet came to fetch Mouth, three of them with their tentacles spread in a gesture that looked like sheltering, or guarding. Mouth had almost gotten used to not seeing, except for when a shape appeared nearby and startled her. They seemed to handle her with more care this time, after getting her story from Sophie, and the gentle nudges and enveloping tentacles only made Mouth angrier, because she was not some injured child. She pushed the Gelet off her, and made her own way.

She was so intent on brushing off her escort she marched right into a Gelet’s waiting tendrils.

As soon as the slippery digits made contact, Mouth was somewhere else. She had known this was coming, had tried to prepare so she wouldn’t lose her mind again. No fear, just stillness. But this Gelet vision was even more vivid than before—but also easier to understand, instead of the jumble of images they had dumped on her last time.

Mouth stood on the edge of the night, observing the road with inhuman senses. A mob of people walked from place to place, carrying everything on their backs or in a few carriages, straying into places that humans had never invaded before.

The Citizens became bolder as their numbers grew, and they even started going into Mount Abacus, the great rocky fist on the other side of the world from Xiosphant and Argelo. From the Gelet’s vantage point, Mouth watched the Citizens climbing into the mountain that straddled the road, exploring every crack until they found this miraculous substance: a dry, chalky bloom that glowed in the dark and crumbled as they pulled it out of the caves. Mouth remembered the acrid smell of that stuff, the way the Citizens would smear it on their faces for some of their rituals, how they would gather every last bit, because it had a million uses. The Citizens had called that substance nightfire, because of the way it glowed in the dark.

Gelet had spent lifetimes cultivating this bloom. Mouth felt their terror and shock as it was stripped away, as the root system deep inside the vents began to wither and collapse. These plants laced throughout the world, collecting heat energy on the day side and redirecting it to the night, exhaling gases that calmed the skies. Over several visits, the Citizens ripped out every piece of nightfire they could find, until the sky changed. The clouds whirled until they ripped at the ice sheets and created brand-new mountains, as big as Mount Abacus, that moved through the night with the force of a million harpoon guns firing over and over.

A walking mountain of ice, with caustic liquid falling inside it—just like the downpour that had left burn scars on Mouth’s scalp and hands—came upon a Gelet nest full of untold thousands of newborns. The protective layers of rock and coral collapsed, turning to sharp fragments, and then the rain burned everything that had been exposed to the air. These fresh infants screamed as they suffocated and starved, no way to save them.

As they struggled to save their young, the Gelet saw the Citizens going back to harvest another batch of the nightfire.

Mouth knew what was coming next, and she tried to pull away from these tendrils. But the Gelet held her fast. The blue swarm, a last resort, something the Gelet had created long ago to deal with a species of pests coming in from the road. She felt their remorse as the blue knives took wing from a hatchery deep under the ice and flew to the nearest food source in the warm twilight.

Mouth was screaming and pushing the Gelet with her hands and feet. She begged for release. She bit her own tongue and kept barking. She wailed and thrashed. The emptiness inside her was worse than ten thousand bones burnt to ash. When they let go, she fell on her hands and face, watering the dirt and clawing at her own scars.

She threw up on the floor and her own knees, the remains of some meal supplements the Gelet had rescued from a human transport coming in ugly pieces. The puke in her mouth only reminded her of the noxious rainfall that had flooded the Gelet’s nest and destroyed their children.

“Please,” Mouth said over and over, as if she could petition some authority to take away the ugliness.

The Gelet waited until she had stopped writhing and making sounds, and then they reached out, lightly, as if she could still lash out or fall to pieces. They helped her to her feet and led her back to the chamber with the hammock, the old books, and the bags of freeze-dried survival rations from some doomed ancient expedition into the night.

SOPHIE

You can go to the fifth central hub, downtown, and get these boiled chestnuts from a chef who gets them direct from the source, a chestnut patch buried under the thickest part of the night. Jean told me about it. The chestnuts melt against the roof of my mouth—so rich, after a diet of ancient human field rations. And once you’ve had enough chestnuts, you can go down the side chute and find yourself in a party where the “music” is made by an orchestra of countless tiny trumpets, which pressurize and depressurize the air around me in subtle fluctuations that human ears couldn’t even register. Here in the midnight city, there’s always a gathering, a celebration, someplace. I explore until my feet hurt, and I keep coming across another marvel. Like a school, where children, whose pincers look more like beaks, learn science and math from a teacher whose pincer encompasses all five of their tiny foreheads at once. (Their math begins with geometric shapes, and builds to patterns that remind me of the hangings on Ahmad’s walls.) And just up the street, there’s a theater where a dozen Gelet hang from stone ledges, and lean in to wrap all their pincers around a great tangle of flesh descending from the ceiling, which imparts a story to all of them at the same time. At another spot, a wide chamber with a low ceiling, the Gelet play a sport involving ice crystals and pressure-sensitive pads.

I navigate the city and almost don’t care when I walk in total darkness, except when I suddenly notice, and I heave with terror for a moment. I still get too scared to move from time to time, thinking of cops forcing me up a mountain, or a bloodbath under toxic rain, or being trapped in the Command Vehicle. But I’ve shared all of those memories with the Gelet, in as much detail as I could stand—and in the process I’ve learned to look at each terror, to peel it apart into tiny moments, and to place it alongside the countless generations of their memories that I’ve been absorbing. I’ve joined a family whose firsthand experience traces back to before humans even had a concept of history.

I haven’t seen what my new shape looks like, not with my eyes anyway, but my whole sense of my boundaries and my personal space has changed. I can “see” things happening far away, and “hear” the shape of the walls, thanks to my tentacles, which are smaller than a normal Gelet’s. I don’t always know exactly what I’m sensing, but it gets easier over time.

Nobody tries to stop me from roaming, now that I’m healed enough to move without feeling a million hacksaws tearing into me with every step. Everywhere I go, they’re curious, but polite. When someone does stop me to ask a question, it’s more along the lines of “How are you enjoying your stay?” or “Is there anything you need?” I’m the first foreigner among them in countless generations, maybe since the woman in that video, but they know me already.

When someone asks how I’m enjoying my stay, it comes not as words, but as a set of images and memory fragments that somehow evoke the concept of a solicitous host. When I reply, I babble. I share a memory of when I first arrived in Argelo, and I was scared to be in this crazy stormy city, and Ahmad taught me to make this fish bread that they all eat there. And I share another memory of Argelo, the first time I went to the Pit on my own, not to look for Bianca but because I craved those vapors. And how I felt, seeing people who celebrated having ancestors from Nagpur, for the first time. Then a flash of all the kindness I’ve received thus far, here in the midnight city.

This is way too much information, but they just send back an image of a perfect ice crystal: a kind of smile.

I keep trying to understand what the Gelet believe in. What religion, what politics? They give vague answers, like images of rock faces being worn away by the wind, or huge power generators turning somewhere underground. I wonder if one of these Gelet is Rose, my friend from the Old Mother, but they’ve all shared those memories among themselves, so everyone seems to feel as though they personally were up there with me. Gelet don’t have names, like humans, but each newborn Gelet is given a kind of blessing, or hope for their future. So Jean’s personal blessing was something like “good learner, future genius,” and the part of my brain that still uses language decided to shorten that to “Jean.” I’m not even sure how I tell each individual Gelet apart, but it’s some combination of scent, variations in size and shape, and some kind of “hum” that my new senses can perceive.

Exhaustion has a sudden reach for toppling me off my heels and bringing back the pain from my surgeries. I’ll explore, sticking my head into every archway—there are no doors here—and thrill at the discovery of a shop floor where Gelet are toiling in a circle over a set of gears that they shape according to a design they are sharing via touch. Or, in the next opening, a great bath where hot springs rise up and the Gelet cleanse their bodies. And then, just as I’m feeling the hunger to discover more, I’ll teeter and fall. The cold seeps back into my bones, and I remember I’m trapped underground, in total darkness, and my head spins.

The first few times I grow weak and sleep-deprived, some Gelet lift me and take me back to the room with the bed, where I recovered from surgery. But after that, they find it easier to bring me to the place where they themselves rest.

In a great plaza, lined with brick and slabs of polished granite, Gelet throng, hundreds at a time, and pile themselves into slings and specially grown hammocks, which suspend their carapaces in a mist that feels warm and sweet. I bathe in the spray, which grows thicker and clings to my skin. The liquid fills the air until I float in a sensation of reassurance and acceptance, surrounded by all my friends.

Just as I slip into a dream, I remember the words that suicidal woman said in the hologram: they seem to regard geoengineering and bioengineering as the same thing. Of course, I think drowsily, of course they built a whole cave system where the vapors cause changes to their minds and soothe their bodies.

In my dream, I enter another level of the midnight city: a river of solid ice that encases but does not feel cold, rushing into a frozen reservoir under a sky full of stars. I’ve never seen stars, except once at the Sea of Murder, and these keep growing and shrinking, changing their position, flaring and subsiding. Time rolls backward, and tall cities emerge from the tundra, great gleaming fortresses that withstand storms and quakes for countless generations. These cities climb into the night, drawing energy from the relentless wind and the flows of water and lava under the surface, and then I see them being built piece by piece. A whole earlier Gelet civilization rises up in front of me, after I already saw it fall.

I witness the slow progress of history, the changing shape of Gelet society, long before humans arrived.

A huge presence comes among us sleepers, and I cannot tell if it’s inside the dream with us, or out in the plaza where our physical bodies are suspended in the solidified mist, which has formed sticky trails attached to my skin. One way or the other, this new arrival looms over all of us, much taller than a normal Gelet, with a pincer that looks large enough to encompass my entire body.

Somehow I can tell this is the leader, or more like the magistrate, of the Gelet, from the way all the other dreamers lower their pincers and focus their minds. This magistrate turns to each of us in turn, searching our hearts and examining our stories, with tendrils that slip past our skins and bones, and all of the walls we might have tried to build around our souls. When the magistrate comes to me, a powerful mind reaches all the way inside me and takes stock, and there’s a long, terrible pause. I start to worry—maybe I’ve failed, been found wanting, or made a mistake. I panic, even in my sleep, twitching and contorting. But the magistrate just reaches all the way inside me and pulls out a childish memory I half forgot, from grammar school. Back when Mark tried to snatch my hand and I ran away from him, and then I was startled by the freedom, the safety, of not being courted. I feel that memory rise to the surface, coming to define me, but also becoming known to the other Gelet through our shared sleep.

I still obsess about whether this magistrate approves of me, but then I realize: this leader, whoever she is, has been dead since long before my grandparents’ grandparents were born. This visitor is a shared memory, kept alive in all of us. I start to wonder if the entire government of the Gelet is made up of ghosts and dreams.

Most of my sleep is not so dramatic. I feel the motion of hot liquids underground, the cycles of water and lava and tectonics, and I sense the life of the planet, from deep underground to the high atmosphere, from beginning to end. At one point, I lie in the mesh, on an undulating hammock, and sense the motion of a glacier across the night: steady, unreasonable, pure.

I start to crave that experience of dozing on the hammock surrounded by Gelet, linked by sticky webs of shared memory, or secondhand fantasies.

For some reason, I keep thinking of all the Gelet as “she,” but I don’t know if they have any concept of male or female, or anything else. I’ve glimpsed how they reproduce, and they have many types of protrusions and openings, so everyone shares something and also takes something inside themselves. And then their babies start out as an unformed mass, inside a fungal mesh, although I’ve only glimpsed all this in their memories.

The spires of the midnight city soar hundreds of meters over the main plaza, made of some kind of crystal agate that sings, actually sings to my human ears, as the hot vapors come up from far below. Every time I go out into the city, I find something else that amazes me. A fountain channels water from some deep aquifer and makes it soar in two intersecting arcs that end in funnels that vanish inside the walls. A huge turbine spins in the depths, and powers a hundred ravenous machines. A ribbon of lava never stops streaming, close enough to singe me as I sidle past on the boulevard downtown.

When I’m not in the plaza, asleep among the Gelet, I visit the laboratory where they brew strains of amino acids that are designed to help them survive the latest unstable weather events, like these caustic rains. They’ve built a structure inside solid rock that I realize is a kind of centrifuge, in which specially grown shells whirl around too fast for even my new senses to encompass. When the circle stops spinning, a Gelet lifts one of these “vials” out delicately, aided by the fine motor control of her thousands of cilia.

I even find the hidden cul-de-sacs where the city’s vices happen—the deep pit where Gelet meet to consume the powder from drying and grinding up certain roots, which makes them dream of running away from their friends and just getting lost in the night alone. Or the tiny nooks where the Gelet disappear, when they think nobody can see them, to connect to memories and fantasies that are forbidden for one reason or another: things everyone agrees were better left behind. No matter how often I ask, I can never quite understand what they forbid, and how.

Soon, I know the streets of this city better than I ever knew Argelo. I know just where to turn to find the back passage that leads to a tiny workshop, and sometimes they’ve gotten some old computers working, so they can play a skein of sad music from my homeworld, the sounds of strings and drums teased by long-dead fingers, echoing through the ice and stone of the midnight city. I also know where to go to find an ice slide that carries me down forty or fifty meters, in a hair-raising glide path, straight into the middle of a festival where puppets reenact a famous scene: the arrival of humans on the bright edge of the day.

The humans emerged from their shuttles and landers, intent on striding onto the surface of this new planet. And then they all fell on the ground, in pain. The higher gravity, the stinky air, the white light, all made them go fetal. They stayed down, moaning, for ages. Some of them never got up again. Many of the colonists who had survived the wars and accidents and atrocities onboard the Mothership died soon after arrival.

Far away, in the night, the Gelet set about trying to understand these people: how they lived, how they communicated, what they worked for. After some of the humans had tried to go into the night, and the Gelet had been forced to bring down their flying machines and wreck their lorries, the Gelet understood about speech. But even once they reproduced the vibrations, the Gelet couldn’t replicate them.

They couldn’t ask the magistrate for advice, because she had been dead for generations, and as far as she was concerned the dusk remained quiet, a clean buffer before the turbulence of the day.

People in Xiosphant never knew how close the city came to destruction. The Young Father is a dormant volcano, and the Gelet had a lot of experience controlling those. They couldn’t understand us, but they took our machines apart, and our technology told a story about people who never quit building and killing. They swapped ideas back and forth, of what could happen: humans invading the night in force, launching some extreme terraforming project, ordering the Mothership to drop meteorites on the midnight city. Plus if they waited, Xiosphant could become too well protected for them to destroy.

The city survived because the Gelet made a better assessment of humanity’s technical abilities. They saw we were losing touch with the Mothership, and we didn’t have the meta-materials we needed to keep building onboard control systems, weather shielding, and various other things. We showed lots of ingenuity in inventing new ways to produce food and handle our waste, and keep people alive in this environment, but most of our technology was sliding backward. But also, they saw us digging up metals from our mountains and the meteors we’d brought down—copper, bauxite, cobalt—and saw how we could be useful.

After many visits to the hammocks in the plaza, sharing the collective memory/dream, I realize that human civilization is based on forgetting. If I own a pair of shoes that used to belong to you, then my ownership relies on your forgetfulness. Humans are experts at storing knowledge and forgetting facts, which is why we saw this city from orbit and then pushed all the evidence into a hole. And I can’t help thinking of what Bianca said when I asked her about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre: that progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t “constructive.” I don’t know if our power to forget makes humans stronger, more self-destructive, or maybe both.

The Mothership still has a store of ancient media from Earth, and when I find my way back to the bottle-shaped room with the computer I call up images and films of Nagpur. They called it the Winter Capital, but the holographic recordings show a red sky and people wearing light summer clothes in bright colors. They move along walkways and tramlines that look like filaments, strung high above the gleaming domes and stupas on the ground. There are films of people dancing in unison; doing a coming-of-age ritual that involves wrapping a thread around a boy about Ali’s age; building vast swarms of tiny robots that soar outside the weather-shield; sharing a meal of thick bread and vegetables that look like nothing I’ve seen before; sending probes deep inside the Earth to harvest geological energy. These clips have numbers at the bottom that start with things like “2439,” and I’m realizing this is some archaic calendar. Then I find a hologram stamped with “2527,” showing a family from Nagpur: mother, father, squirming giggling son, all wearing modified CoolSuits with an emblem on them. Someone I can’t see asks in Noölang, “Are you excited to be leaving home? What are your hopes for this long voyage?” The father jokes, “I just hope those Calgary idiots don’t make a mess of the sewers, or it’s going to be a long flight.” The mother slaps his arm, lightly, and looks straight ahead. “I hope Partha makes plenty of friends on the ship, and doesn’t end up mixing with the wrong kids. Peer pressure in an enclosed environment is always the worst.” Her husband rolls his eyes, but she ignores him. “Partha’s children, or maybe his grandchildren, will live to see this new planet. I hope they remember where they came from.” The image fades. I’ll never know what happened to Partha, though I can guess. But now that I’ve seen these things, I can share them with everyone, and they’ll never disappear, even after the Mothership’s systems fail.

Jean has a broken left tentacle that the Gelet could not fix, even with all their advanced biohacking. She can still lift small objects with her other tentacle, and can make adjustments to the great machines underground with her cilia. She worked some stints in the farms, the foundries, and the water-treatment canals, but the physical labor wore her out, and meanwhile she has a good personality for teaching and counseling. That’s why they encourage Jean to spend time with me. She shows me the memory of traveling across an ice floe in the middle of a violent snowfall, when a nearby outcropping broke just as she passed, sending sharp rocks cascading down. From her viewpoint, the snow grew teeth. She was trapped under the rock for a painful age until her friends could get her out, and her whole left side is still racked with chronic pain. She also shows me the rockfall from the viewpoint of a few others who witnessed it from a distance: the mountain crag coming apart, the boulders in free fall. By now, she remembers the disaster as much from far away as up close, because she and others have shared the distant vantage point so many times. Maybe that’s good for her recovery.

The Gelet work hard, without getting rewarded with food dollars or marks, or threatened with conscription. Instead, they just talk about work all the time. Everyone shares their memories of all the work they’ve done, and thus everybody knows just how hard everybody else has worked since the last time they’ve gotten together. Nobody ever lies, and I don’t know if they’re exactly capable of lying.

Jean still moves different from the others, and everybody knows her story. After her accident, Jean fell into a deep depression that nobody could shake her out of, according to another Gelet, whom I’ve started calling River. River and I are sitting in a sort of canteen, eating stewed roots that look odd but taste like roast pheasant, and her pincer is wide open so I can extend my tendrils and entangle them with hers. I’m still getting used to doing that.

According to River, Jean wasn’t depressed just because of the chronic pain, but because everybody treated her different. Every time they shared memories, even of unrelated things, the Gelet couldn’t help letting their worry about Jean, even their pity, leak through, and this made her flesh crawl underneath her carapace. Everyone talked among themselves about how to make Jean feel better, and then they couldn’t hide this from her. Their concern for Jean became an infestation that left sticky strands of poison through every thought and desire they shared, however benign.

This had happened before. Long before humans arrived on January, another Gelet was caught in a tectonic experiment that went awry. This scientist was unhurt physically, but she kept reliving the fear and pain, the feeling as the plate shifted and everything came unstuck. The moment when she realized everything was not under control after all, and then the rest of her team died. All the others revisited her memory of that instant when power gave way to powerlessness, but it was not their memory, it was hers. They all observed her sullenness since the accident, and they talked endlessly about how to cheer her up. So they showed her comforting memories of when someone else had survived a bison attack, or they shared with her their recollections of happy occasions. But the more they tried to help her, the more they reminded her of how bad she was feeling, and the worse she felt. This turned into a self-reinforcing spiral, and eventually she killed herself.

So everybody tried to handle Jean differently. They knew Jean was a gentle soul, with more patience than most, so they gave her a job working with the newborn children, just split off from the mass. They all had noticed those moments when Jean showed her gentleness, and everyone shared them more and more. You’re the only one who can do this. Jean knew perfectly well that she was being handled, that they were all going out of their way to support her, but she decided to put up with it, and anyway she liked her new job.

But everybody still notices Jean’s injury, even when they try not to, and she hates the moments when they pause in her presence. The way their tentacles quiver as they try not to sense what’s right in front of them. That’s one thing Jean likes about spending time with me: her difference is nothing compared to mine. When the two of us walk around together, nobody even notices her.

I have no idea how long I’ve been in the midnight city, but my old life feels like a surreal dream. I’ve healed enough to start thinking about finding a job here. Like, I could help harvest roots or grubs from the deep crevices that a regular Gelet can’t get inside. Or I could help in one of the laboratories, because I’ve always loved science. Bianca used to say that Xiosphant’s only goal was to keep things the same and maintain our current level of technology, and that this forced Xiosphanti scientists into a contradiction—because the true goal of science is to make progress and discover new things. But Gelet science seems to be different, with experiments that have been in progress for generations, involving processes that move too slowly to observe in one lifetime. Plus, since the climate destabilized, their main goal has been to protect future generations. They can remember every disaster, the same way they remember every failed experiment from the past.

When I picture myself, I no longer imagine a shy girl with high cheekbones, a round face, and swept-back black hair. Instead, I’m a collection of tendrils and limbs: smaller than a regular Gelet and less mobile, but still the same in the ways that matter. I no longer notice when I’m in the dark for long periods, because my senses are all about the vibrations underground, the nonvisible wavelengths of radiation that swim around me, the movement of other people nearby.

I’m with River in one of those smaller salons, where the natural warmth from the springs comes up through a big spout in the middle of the room, and I’m cozy in a blanket of bioengineered fuzz. I’m drowsing, my tendrils braided with River’s without sharing any particular thought, and River sends me a memory that I must have shared sometime in the past.

I’m a human, in Argelo, and Bianca is saying, “—this amazing drink that you are about to try for the very first—” and then the taste of an Amanuensis, the sweet kick, still delicious after all this time.

I don’t know what makes me sicker: seeing Bianca, smelling the sugary sweat that fogged the air in Punch Face, or just being exposed to human speech again. Whatever it is, I have a panic reaction that feels like an old forgotten friend, along with the agony of reawakening parts of myself that I put to sleep, long ages ago. I excuse myself and pull away from River. I need to take care of myself, by myself.

I haven’t even wanted to think too much about the memories of my old life since I got used to living here. The few times lately that someone brought up a memory that I had shared about my family, or Bianca, or the Parlour, or going to the White Mansion in Argelo, I would just freeze up. People learned not to talk to me about that weird, messy human stuff.

Some time later, Jean and I are leaning against the wall after we’ve just watched one of those puppet shows, and I don’t even notice that my tendrils are fully extended and linked to Jean’s—until she shares a memory of the time I followed Bianca around Xiosphant and I saw her meeting with Mouth, in a roomful of guns. The memory is there, as fresh as a moment ago: Bianca’s neck poking out of her fashionable coat, her hair pinned back, the sneaky way she looked around, as if she didn’t realize how easy she was to follow, the weight of my longing as I hid from her. All at once, I’m young and foolish and unaltered, and pining for someone who thinks I’m dead.

I turn firm and brittle, choke on my own breath. I haven’t shared any memories of being human in a long time, but I must have shared a lot of them, early on, when I was learning to communicate.

I almost pull away from Jean, break the connection. But I don’t want her to go around sharing a memory of me being an oversensitive fool with everybody else. So I just try to relax and take it in. I chose to make this moment available, so I can’t blame Jean if she decides to give it back to me.

But then more human memories flood back, one by one. The first time I almost died on the Sea of Murder. My failed attempt to avoid joining Bianca’s invasion plan. The Curfew Patrol chasing Bianca and me, while alarms blare all around us. The Glacier Fools shouting in their delirium.

Now, I lose control of my breathing altogether. I pant faster, without drawing any oxygen. I feel light-headed, my limbs gone dead, and all my old memory-panic is back. I can’t stand to think of myself as having a human body, or a voice that could expel sounds that human ears could catch and ingest. I thought I’d made peace with these memories.

I’m not handling this as well as Jean hoped—and that’s when I realize: this is something the Gelet have decided to do. They’re going to keep reminding me of what it felt like to be among humans, until I can take it without breathing too fast, going numb, or throwing angry, misshapen thoughts back at them. Jean shows me a happy memory of a glacier until I stop twitching and fighting. Still, all of these memories, one after the other, crush me with so much anger, love, and fear, I still feel my skin crawl, my heart pound, a pain like lightsickness, only worse.

For the first time since they put these tendrils and all these other new organs inside me, I want to tear it all out with my bare hands.

Jean wants to understand why I can’t handle the memories that I chose to share in the first place. How can I explain, in a way that a Gelet will understand?

I share a memory with Jean of my lowest moment ever—not the part when the cops pulled me out of the Zone House and forced me up a mountainside and I knew my life was over, but later, afterward, when I soaked in a hot bath at the Illyrian Parlour. When I was safe but knew I’d never be safe again, warm but chilled inside, scrubbed but forever dirty. And the one thing that consoled me in that moment was tucking myself back inside the memory that Rose had shared, of running in the night with all the other Gelet, on our way to build something with our powerful limbs.

I keep showing Jean, over and over, how that borrowed memory saved me at my lowest point. I capture the exact moment when my despair gave way to wonder.

Jean still doesn’t get why even my happiest experiences of living with humans bring me nothing but pain. Even after everything Jean went through, she still thinks happy memories ought to cheer you up.

A while later, I’m not even surprised when another Gelet, whom I call Felice, wants to give me back another memory I shared long ago.

I’m back in the dorm, and Bianca and I are sitting and studying after she’s returned from some party or formal ball, and this one kept her away from me forever. I’m staring at my book, trying to concentrate, but then I look up at Bianca, who’s already looking at me with this tiny smile. I make some face at her, and she breaks into cackles, and then we’re both laughing.

That’s it, the whole memory. Felice teases out all of the little details, like the way Bianca’s smile starts sad and then the indentations around her mouth and eyes change shape. The surprise in Bianca’s face when I make whatever face I’m making, and then the giggle.

I tense up, but Felice is already showing me a comforting memory of snow washing across an ice field, kilometers away from anything.

I don’t know why the Gelet are trying to hurt me like this. Except, of course I know.

I find myself going to all my favorite places in the midnight city, greedy to stockpile memories for what I already realize is coming. The area where they put new organs inside me, removing part of a lung, feels sore and fatigued. Some strain, deep under the skin and bone.

I clamber down, out of my favorite hammock in the plaza, and Jean and River are both standing nearby, come to visit me. They both open their pincers, extending their tendrils to touch my chest. I brace myself for another old memory of when I was human.

Instead, though, Jean and River show me a plan. Me, as I am now—with sensitive, vulnerable tendrils on my sternum, two tentacles climbing out of my back, and indistinct shapes on my abdomen—walking the streets of Xiosphant. Using the gifts the Gelet have given me to help other humans understand. In time, recruiting other humans who can become like me, so we can create whole families of hybrids, who can also recruit.

They’re going to send me away. Send me home. Looking like this, hideous to human eyes, with no protection. I saw this coming, but I wasn’t prepared, and trying to see myself through the eyes of Xiosphanti makes me feel sick to my core. I let out a tiny gasp, which sounds monstrously loud to me after so long keeping silent.

mouth

Mouth almost went into a coma after the Gelet showed her how they had destroyed the Citizens. She wanted to. She even tried to. She made every effort to let the darkness around her suffuse her. She could not recall the walking mountain of ice, weeping its astringent blood, without hand tremors. She could never accept the Gelet visions, or whatever they were, in any case, but her mind could do almost nothing with that toxic ice, destroying a crèche full of infants, except rebel against itself.

The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet—servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness—but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.

Her mind kept offering up more and more details of what they had shown her, as if Mouth couldn’t process it all at once. No way to shut off the thoughts, even when she slept.

Sophie had not been present when Mouth had received the story of the nightfire. She had stayed away on purpose. But she came to Mouth’s bedchamber much later, crouched under the hammock so she was just a voice drifting from the bottom of the room. Mouth sometimes lunged, to pull her closer or to push her away, but she was never within reach. Sophie spoke haltingly, because she had never loved talking even when she’d had no other way.

“The nature of the Gelet’s consciousness is such that, I mean, you have to understand, the past is all one.” Sophie stammered far below Mouth’s bed. “To the Gelet, the decision to spare Xiosphant from destruction is as fresh as when they chose to wipe out the Citizens, even though they took place so many generations apart. For the Gelet, they both happened at the same time. I think they evolved this way because they live in never-ending darkness, with frozen winds that obliterate all sound and erase all writing. They worked for hundreds of generations to stabilize their climate by engineering special flora, and, to them, that work also just happened.”

Mouth never responded to anything Sophie said, other than with her arms and legs.

“Humans couldn’t have survived on this planet without all the work the Gelet had done before we got here,” Sophie said. “We wouldn’t have lasted more than a generation or two before the storms would have wiped us out. The farmwheels in Xiosphant, the fisheries and orchards of Argelo, they wouldn’t even have existed. Everything we keep fighting over.”

Sophie grew tired of speaking, as Mouth had known she would. If she climbed up and tried to use her new body parts to send ideas or memories straight to Mouth’s hind brain, Mouth was scared she might hurt Sophie involuntarily, even with her pacifist hands. But Sophie never came near. Mouth just heard Sophie breathing, over the scrape of the stone engines.

Mouth had her own personal memory of the blue swarm, the bones that broke apart when she tried to gather them up, the flames too close to her face. This was her own experience, and now that she’d worked so hard to reconstruct it for Barney and then Sophie, she couldn’t push it back into the hole where she’d kept it for so long. But she also couldn’t get rid of the memory of the great spout of ice, drizzling deadly slush as it traveled. Both things made her want to shut down.

“I eavesdropped when you met with Bianca, back when you wanted to trick her into helping you steal your poetry book,” Sophie said from the darkness below. “I remember you said, ‘The truth should hurt. Truth should knock you on your butt. Lies make it easy to stand.’”

Mouth broke her silence at last. “You paid more attention to me than I paid to myself.”

“The Gelet have been giving me back my own memories, which is the first cruel thing they’ve ever done to me. But you sounded impressive. I actually wanted to believe you.”

“I was just repeating things I heard somewhere,” Mouth said. “Things the Citizens used to say, things I overheard in political meetings. I combined them, changed them around.”

“That’s all anyone ever does,” Sophie said. “People never say anything new.”

Sophie fell silent again, but she wouldn’t leave Mouth alone. Like Mouth had taken some bad pills, and Sophie had to hold vigil while she rode them out. Mouth tried a couple times to say that Sophie owed her nothing, but Sophie just stayed, on the floor, breathing quietly.

“I want to show you something,” Sophie said after a long time. “I think it’ll be easier coming from me than from one of the Gelet.”

Mouth understood what Sophie meant by “show,” and she began to protest, to protect her face and neck with upthrust elbows.

But Sophie shushed Mouth and made soothing noises, and touched her rain-scarred neck with one palm. Sophie’s face caught the one shaft of light coming into the chamber from some distant furnace, and her round features looked more composed than Mouth had ever seen. Maybe they’d changed places at some point: Mouth was the scared kid now. Sophie kissed between Mouth’s eyes, which gave out more of their seemingly endless supply of tears.

“Don’t worry,” Sophie said. “I can take you down gently.”

Mouth nodded at last. “Okay. Do it.” Sophie’s face jostled, and Mouth realized that this was her own body shaking. She made herself go slack.

Sophie leaned closer, until her chest was touching Mouth’s, and then her wriggling little tongues snaked out. Mouth stiffened again at the last moment, but she felt the light touch of a few dozen surfaces, almost like moistened fingers, making contact with less pressure than the Gelet had used. Sophie shushed Mouth again. Her face was so close that she had three eyes, and you could feel her breathing almost like it was your own.

When Mouth closed her eyes, she could see something taking shape, an image or something, but it felt like an afterimage, a half impression. The picture kept pulsing in and out, and Mouth found herself concentrating, straining to see it more clearly.

“There you go,” Sophie said. “Just let it take you.”

Mouth leaned back in the hammock to let Sophie put more weight onto her. She felt Sophie’s knees around her waist, Sophie’s body resting against hers, and Sophie’s face on her face. Then she went into Sophie’s vision, and all these sensations vanished.

Sophie wasn’t showing Mouth a memory, the way Mouth had expected. She had braced herself for another glimpse into the terrible features of history or, worse, some slice of their shared past from Sophie’s perspective. Instead, they were flying, Sophie and Mouth, floating above the clouds that had been the upper limit of the world for Mouth’s entire life. Mouth looked at Sophie, who was gliding with a placid focus in her eyes, like she did this every day. Sophie gazed upward, and Mouth followed her line of sight to see the blackness of the sky overhead, dotted with tiny lights. A rounded mirror splashed them with reflected light, and Mouth realized this was the moon.

How are we doing this? Mouth tried to ask Sophie, but there was no air up here.

Sophie’s voice came, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t a memory, not really. Some of it is. The Gelet have memories of being in flying machines that they’ve shared with me. But this is also just my imagination, mixing with the real sensations. Think of it as a fantasy.”

Mouth could see the sweep of the ground, passing underneath, in between the thick ropes of clouds. The ground was pitch dark, because they were over the night, and the clouds wouldn’t let even a drop of moonlight through. Mouth wasn’t sure how they could see down there, but this made dream sense rather than regular sense. They passed over the curve of the world, and Mouth saw a burning light on the horizon. She tried to turn and fly in the opposite direction, because the sunlight would shrivel her to cinders, but Sophie kept driving forward. “Nothing can hurt us,” she whispered.

In the dream, Sophie gave Mouth a tiny smile, like they were two fliers moving independent of each other, and then they came into more light than Mouth had ever seen. Even through the clouds, she could see the arid ground sizzling, the very dirt being scoured by hot winds. How Sophie had gotten this image, Mouth couldn’t guess, since Gelet would never be able to withstand full daylight, in a flying machine or otherwise. Then Mouth looked down and saw crystal formations, gleaming and pulsing: another city.

Sophie pointed upward, and at last Mouth knew where she had gotten these images of the day, seen from above. A spaceship passed right over their heads: a silver shape, like a man crouching on his elbows and knees, with the sun painting its ancient skin a million shades of red and blue, rippling into each other. The Mothership had never stopped waiting, never lost faith in the people crawling in the dirt below.

They flew through clouds, ducked around tiny windstorms, and wove in and out of the day. Sophie beckoned Mouth with one finger, and they flew higher and higher, up into the blackness, past the edge of the atmosphere. They hovered far above even the Mothership, near the great yellow-orange crags of the moon. And they looked at January, the bright half and the dark half, not motionless at all but always turning. The day wasn’t just red fire, but had veins of blue and green, like jewels against a bright cloak. The night had a texture like velvet, with a dark purple sheen to it. Mouth stood in space, looking down at the world, and she was flooded with an emotion she couldn’t even identify. She almost couldn’t stand how beautiful January was from up here, and how wonderfully wrong it felt, to see so much daylight with what seemed to be her own eyes.

They drifted down, not even seeming to get any closer to the clouds at first, then picked up speed. Mouth almost screamed as she fell into the cloud layer, but it became a laugh instead. The clouds yawned and swallowed them, and then they descended in the night, racing over frozen peaks and canyons wider than anything on the road. At last they found the city in the middle of the night, and descended through an airshaft. Mouth saw her own body, inside a tiny chamber, with Sophie sprawled on top of her, and then she fell inside her own head and her eyes opened.

Mouth realized her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she and Sophie were stuck to each other. She didn’t want to peel away, because she felt her heart drumming, her blood so rich it dazzled her eyes, her skin wide awake. Sophie had given her an incredible gift, and she didn’t know what to do with it. She pulled her arms out from between Sophie’s knees, and hugged Sophie as tight as she could.

“I thought you hated me,” Mouth whispered in Sophie’s ear.

“I did, for a long time.” Sophie was breathing in sharp bursts. “But you’re my jinx. I guess I have to find a way to live with you.”

“I’m…” Mouth felt overcome for a moment, with stammering tears. “I’m sorry about Bianca. I’m sorry for all of it. I keep wishing I had died with the rest of the Citizens. I wish we hadn’t destroyed this delicate miracle that the Gelet had created. We should have paid attention.”

“Bianca made her own choices.” Sophie raised herself up, so she was kneeling across Mouth’s waist and lap. “The rest of it, I don’t know. But Bianca, she deserves to take the blame for her mistakes. I wanted to put all of it on you so I could keep her pure in my mind, but that’s not fair to her, either. I still blame you for the parts that were yours, but…”

Mouth sat, her hands just touching Sophie’s. “I thought if I could make up for what I did with Bianca and the others… I thought I could be a good person. But now, I feel like… I don’t know. I feel like I should do something to make sure what happened to the Citizens never happens again.”

Sophie twitched with fear, like Mouth could be about to suggest doing something drastic: revenge or something. And maybe Mouth should hate these creatures for killing her people, who had never intended any harm. But she couldn’t get the image of the marching icecap, full of burning rain, out of her head.

Mouth shook her head. “I mean, people need to understand. Maybe more people need to become like you.”

“They already told me that they want me to go back, to find other humans who could become hybrids,” Sophie said. “I don’t want to. I want to live here forever. You don’t even know how great it is, being able to share everything.”

Mouth would never forgive the Gelet for what they had done, but she could understand it. You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.

Sophie led Mouth on tours of the city, which had innumerable wonders when you perceived it through Sophie’s senses. Mouth learned not to cringe, at least not too much, when Gelet came near. Some of their food tasted decent when you got used to the slurry texture and rough, chewy edges.

Sophie still wanted to convince Mouth to give in, to let go of humanity and learn to perceive all the beauty, the dream geography, of this city. To become like her. But Mouth would never have simple feelings about the Gelet, and there would always be some hate in the mix. Plus, her mind couldn’t open itself up the way Sophie’s did. If Mouth tried to live with those new senses, plus all of the vivid access to other people’s memories and ideas, her head would explode. “Even if I didn’t have all this toxic emotion, I wouldn’t have the right kind of brain,” Mouth kept trying to explain.

“This is the way to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, you said so yourself.”

Mouth shook her head. Memories still pressed on the upper part of her spine. “You’ll find other people who can handle it, you’re good at reading people. You can find the ones who have nothing to lose, who have learned to listen with both ears so they can know when the powerful will come down on them next. The people Bianca was willing to die for. You’ll spot them, and offer them a different chance.”

“I can’t,” Sophie said. “This is going to destroy me. However sick you feel inside, when you imagine letting the Gelet reach you ever again, imagine that times a hundred. That’s how I feel about going back among humans. Even if I were normal. But looking like this… everyone who sees me will be disgusted.”

Mouth had gotten used to how Sophie looked. Her face was the same as ever, her eyes still clear and searching, her mouth wide and expressive. She had a protective hide around her shoulders and torso, which could appear like a suit if you weren’t looking carefully. But the tentacles, which seemed to help her see in the dark, and the moist grubs, which grew under her collarbone and waved like kelp in the water, would be harder to disguise.

“I think you’re beautiful,” Mouth said.

Sophie just scowled. “I’ll be dead the moment I set foot in Xiosphant.”

Mouth knew the next few words she spoke would change her life, maybe ruin what was left of it. But she had no choice: “I’ll protect you.” Sophie was staring at her, and maybe didn’t know how to trust someone whose head was a sealed vault. Mouth added, “I still can’t fight, or use a weapon. And I know I haven’t always kept my promises. But I mean it. I’ll guard you with my life.”

Sophie seemed like she was about to say something back, then thought better of it. She didn’t speak the whole rest of the time they walked around the city, even though Mouth couldn’t make much sense of the “tour” without Sophie’s narration. They walked through giant chambers and around the edges of deep pits, but though Mouth could take in just enough detail to recognize tremendous engineering, she mostly saw just tentacles and huge legs moving in the gloom.

No matter what Mouth said now, Sophie had stopped talking, as if they’d stepped back in time to when they had been strangers. Mouth tried to break through her wall, by making awkward jokes about the noxious gin-and-milk that everyone insisted on drinking in Xiosphant, but Sophie just shrugged and kept walking. Mouth lost Sophie a few times, but then Sophie would tug at Mouth’s wrist from out of the darkness. Mouth ended up back in her hammock, alone, with a few boxes of freeze-dried survival rations for company. One of them contained actual chocolate, which was more tart than she had expected.

Mouth had nothing to do but lie there, with a riot of ghosts. She read more books, and also decided that the sides of her head had healed enough to shave them once more, using some supplies from an old medi-kit. She had no clue how long she stayed there alone, but when Sophie reappeared, she still wasn’t speaking. This went on so long Mouth almost forgot what Sophie’s voice even sounded like.

SOPHIE

I can’t go back to Xiosphant. I’ll die. I’d rather go into the night and freeze to death than return to the city that tried so hard to break me. Especially looking like this.

I try to explain to Jean: I imagine running out into the night, exposing myself to the elements, and I make the image as real as I can. This terrifies Jean, who was considered a suicide risk for such a long time, but she still responds with the same old idea of me walking among my own kind again, happy and useful. The decision has been made.

But who made this decision? I’ve been understanding their society for so long, and I know the city backward and forward—I even met the magistrate—but I still don’t know who’s in charge, or how I can change their mind. I have no clue what they believe in, what principles guide their decisions. Nobody even understands when I try to ask. I show them the prince and the Privy Council, or the Nine Families, and they grasp that some humans are treated better than others. They respond with a memory of a time, right after Jean was hurt in that snowy rockslide, when the others tried to bring Jean her favorite foods, or play complicated music involving countless pressure variations.

I slip away from Jean and sneak down to the deepest, hottest levels of the city, where nobody’s ever brought me. If there’s a leader, or a ruling council, or something, it must be down here somewhere. I search every tunnel, but never find any seat of power.

Then I stumble into a wide, rocky chamber that’s so hot I have to shield my eyes. Sweat pours down my face. In the middle of this vault, a fleshy mass writhes inside a sticky web. These are the half-born children, just like Rose showed me so long ago, still hungry and sick. Still stunted from the toxins leaching through the ice and soil, with nubs where their pincers ought to be and thin wriggling limbs coming off their clay-soft skin. Their distress comes through my cilia, as if my new senses pick up some chemical they’re giving off, and the sudden weight of despair crushes me. They’re trapped, with no way to see a future, and everything hurts, and nobody can bring them any comfort. Rose already shared an impression of these suffering children, but this feels different. I want to step forward and cradle the entire brood in my arms. I can’t stand in front of all this misery and do nothing, and these might as well be my own children. I feel hotter and hotter, until I have to flee, back the way I came, back to the cool silence.

Afterward, those fear chemicals soak into me, and I keep remembering. It’s worse each time.

Nothing will change, unless more humans learn to be like me. I remember the climate projections, and the rising trend line. We can’t fix this problem in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but we need to start now. There are places Gelet can’t go and things they can’t do, but humans can.

I treat this decision the way I learned to treat my memory-panic. I stop, and I give myself space to feel all the worst emotions. Then I move forward.

One by one, each of the Gelet shares their favorite impression of me. River remembers me volunteering to be changed, how my determination never wavered, even though I had seen that ancient hologram. Jean volunteers some moment of kindness that I didn’t even remember, when I reached out to make sure she was okay. Felice recalls how I laughed, watching the puppet show about humans. The Gelet who suffered a harpoon wound and still showed up again when I brought the Glacier Fools, whom I haven’t seen since I was changed, shares a random memory of me helping some children cross a narrow walkway. Another Gelet was there on the Sea of Murder, when I was trapped on the ice with the Resourceful Couriers, and shows me how brave I was.

At last a Gelet I’ve never seen here in the city approaches, shy and hesitant, and opens her pincer to share her own memory: me climbing to the plateau of the Old Mother, to thank her for saving me. Rose holds up my father’s timepiece, carefully, at the end of one tentacle.

Mouth won’t stop chattering, even as I’m trying to say goodbye to my whole family. We ride some kind of seed-shaped carriage, part volcanic rock and part living creature, through steep ice tunnels. Mouth’s head is freshly shaved, and she’s wearing her environment suit again. But mine doesn’t fit anymore, so I’m just covered with layers of protective moss. I shiver, though not from the cold, and share again my worst memories of Xiosphant: cops dragging me into the street and shooting protestors, the Curfew Patrol aiming guns at Bianca and me. But Rose and the others already know how vicious Xiosphant can be, since their friends have been sliced up and roasted there.

Rose keeps reminding me of when I used to visit her. She shows me how I looked that first time, out on the ice wearing my secondhand trendy clothes, dying and terrified. She showed me that memory before, but this time I can identify more easily with Rose’s perspective.

I’m Rose, and I see this human, shivering from cold and terrified rage, and she does that animal thing of tensing to fight or run. But then, instead, she does something no human has ever willingly done before: tilt her head back, let my tendrils touch her bare flesh. I feel Rose’s surprise, her euphoria, the sense that something perverted and maybe wonderful is happening.

When I came to the city, Rose stayed away, because she needed this to work so much she was worried that she would overwhelm me. But she shared everyone else’s impressions of me, and helped to shape the consensus that the time had come for me to go home.

I try to ask Rose the question that’s been bothering me since I came here: What do the Gelet believe in? I have to ask several times, and then she seems to get it, because she unfolds an ancient memory, the oldest that anyone has ever shared with me. Or maybe not a memory, a legend—or a little of both. I can tell its age by the smooth edges, the lack of sensory detail, and the easy flow of the events, the same way humans can spot that a story has been told and retold by a long chain of people, because it makes too much sense.

Long ago, before the first civilization that I saw rise and fall in those shared visions, everyone lived in scattered burrows all over the night, with no more than a hundred people per burrow. They wove their tendrils together when anyone wanted to share information about what she had seen, or done. Or somebody might come up with a simple idea that she shared with everyone else, like a way to harvest more roots and grubs to feed into the web where their children were developing. Or how to strengthen their barriers against iceslides and avalanches.

And that’s when their greatest love story took place. These two people, who had grown up in different burrows, came together after some brutal ice storms drove them away from their homes. The two refugees became inseparable, and their tendrils were intertwined whenever they weren’t working or eating. They slept with their pincers wrapped around each other, in their own mossy nook where the cool air ran over their carapaces. Their dreams flowed back and forth between them, and their memories of fleeing their homes blended together until they almost shared the same past. Everyone else recoiled, because this couldn’t be healthy for them, plus they were excluding the rest of the community, which was hurtful. People tried to pry the two of them apart, physically, or sent one or the other of them on long errands outside the burrow. At last one of the oldest and most patient of the burrow’s residents decided to talk to both of them together, and find out exactly what perversion they had been drawn into—and then there were three of them. Entangled, inextricable. People began talking about evicting all three of them.

What had seduced them into this unnatural closeness? A set of designs for a water wheel, using the nearby underground river to operate a crude mill that would help them separate out the poisonous part of some mushrooms that grew in the caves. This was such a complex idea that one person couldn’t invent it alone and then share it with everyone else—the concept needed to be shaped among two or more people, working together. They couldn’t even share it with the others until they had the concept. And these lovers had discovered a powerful thrill, a joy that went all the way down to their stomachs, in weaving a big idea together. Like some wild rapture, the sensation of helping others to imagine something bigger than yourselves.

Somehow, this weird love story is the foundation of this community’s politics, or religion. Rose lingers on the oddest parts, like when they finally reveal their invention to the rest of the community, or the tenderness when the couple becomes a trio. I sense the echoes from all the countless other times that people have passed this legend around, and the lesson that comes with it: to join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community. Even the other communities that live apart from the midnight city, scattered all over the night in smaller cities or towns, share this origin story.

Just as she finishes explaining, we roll to a stop. I look out and see the unmistakable crags of the Old Mother rising over the permafrost, with just a tiny wedge of light behind it. I squint as hard as I can, but the light still burns.