The City in the Middle of the Night

mouth

Xiosphant’s decorative carvings leered down as its brick walls closed in on them. Gables overhung the acute angles at the intersection of two streets, as if daring you to say these corners weren’t square. Mouth had always loathed this city, but now every step took her deeper into the past. First the shady side of town, the Warrens, with all the factories and warehouses where she’d attended all those meetings, then the fancy coffee salon where Sophie had worked—boarded up, long since closed—and the Low Road, where the Resourceful Couriers had toasted with swamp vodka. Grungy metal slats covered the windows, and the Curfew Patrols stomped the cobblestones, while people slept in their shrouded bedrooms. But the patrols never came close, because Sophie could sense them from a kilometer away, with the same alien organs she had used to find a half-repaired fissure in the wall facing the Old Mother.

Sophie kept gazing up at the shutters as if they would open and swallow her. The Gelet had given her a big musty cloak that disguised the new shape of her body, except for when she became agitated and her tentacles moved around under the cape, which happened all the time. Mouth still wore the remains of her environment suit, just in case she didn’t already look enough like a foreigner. The sky grew lighter as they walked deeper into town, and Mouth’s head pounded more and more after so long underground.

“They’re going to dissect me.” Sophie’s voice barely carried over the final bell before shutters-down. “They’ll catch us, and then they’ll dissect me.”

“Not gonna happen,” Mouth said. “This town tried to kill you once, and you laughed it off. You lived for ages as a condemned criminal here, and you never got caught. You know this town better than anybody, and you are too smart for these tight-asses. If it comes down to you versus the whole damn city of Xiosphant, my money’s on you.”

Sophie didn’t respond.

Neither of them discussed the implications of the old familiar shutters, or the Curfew Patrols, or all the other little indications that Xiosphant was still a conformist hole. Alyssa and Bianca had been left with only one vehicle and a tiny force, with kilometers of tundra yet to cross, and both Sophie and Mouth had already come to terms with their probable deaths. As much as they ever could.

Another bell, and all the slumbering houses yawned. Mouth would never get used to the spooky way this town went from empty to frantic in an eyeblink. People poured through doors, stuffing breakfast into their mouths, rushing to their jobs in half-fastened coveralls and safety gear, already scheming to get ten kinds of money. Mouth and Sophie hustled off the street into the tiniest alleyway, in the shadows, to stay hidden—but also because all these arms and legs, all these voices, all at once, felt like an assault. You forget just how noisy and smelly people are.

Sophie was already fretting out about how she would accomplish her mission. How she could find anyone who could look at her without screaming for help or alerting the cops—let alone someone who could share her gift without suffering full-on delirium, the way the Glacier Fools and Mouth had. She studied everyone who passed on the street, looking this way and that.

“This whole town is engineered to make you feel like you’re always running out of time,” Mouth said. “But we can take this slow. The one thing we do have to accomplish soon is getting me a better disguise, and also scoring some food dollars.” They had a satchel with some of those freeze-dried rations, plus some roots that tasted like pheasant according to Sophie. But those things wouldn’t last forever, plus Mouth had aspirations of getting very, very drunk and holding a private wake for Alyssa. Mouth had been sober for too long. “Also, we need whatever money you use to pay for crashspace.”

“Infrastructure chits,” Sophie said. “The Illyrian Parlour is boarded up. No idea what happened to Hernan, and Jeremy. My father and my brother Thom wouldn’t accept me even before all this. So I don’t know where we can go.” She touched the star-shaped bracelet on her wrist.

Mouth pondered. “I know someone. One of my least favorite people in the world.”

The streets were too crowded for ghosts, even when they stuck to all the side lanes. They passed near the Gymnasium, where Sophie had been a student. The place where they’d probably bring a freak of nature to their laboratories for dissection. She pulled her rough wool cloak tighter, hunched over, and cast sharp glances in every direction.

They passed a pile of rubble on the light side of town where Mouth was pretty sure she’d seen a large brick building last time, with some of those fancy high-tech decorations. Didn’t look like a controlled demolition, and they built these things to last. Mouth stopped and stared, but Sophie didn’t seem interested. Until they passed another pile, this time of whitestone and iron girders, and another. “What kind of weapon—” Mouth said.

Sophie shook her head. “Not a weapon. Weather.” She kept walking.

Mouth kept getting lost in this fake grid, and felt immobilized by lightsickness. But at last they came to the roofing plant, and the wire cage around George the Bank’s office.

“Mouth! Never thought I’d see your ugly face again.” George got out of his chair and opened some dark water. “How did you make it back here? And who’s that hiding behind you?”

“This is Sophie,” Mouth gestured. “A lot has happened. So, uh, I was hoping for some scratch. We left a lot of valuable gear with you when we had to leave town last time. Now I’m back for a while, and I want to get set up.” Speaking Xiosphanti again felt like the return of an old toothache. She had to bite her tongue to get the right verb constructions for George (manager) and herself (barbarian).

“Well, I almost feel like you owe me money, rather than the other way around,” George said. “You left me in a raw bitch of a situation when you skipped town. They were arresting anyone who might have shaken hands with you vagrants. But also, you’re trying to call in a favor that someone already used up. Your friend Alyssa made the exact same argument, and I gave her all that I could spare.”

“Alyssa came here? How long ago?”

You might as well have stuffed Mouth into a cannon and shot her over the city.

“I think it was four shutter-cycles ago.” George shrugged. “Eight Honesty after Pink.”

“I thought she was dead. I can’t believe she survived that fiasco.”

“She said the same thing about you. Like you’d gone into the night to die.”

“We all went into the night to die. Some of us were better at it than others.”

“Can’t tell you where she is now. Don’t know if you saw the rubble, but we had a cyclone. It swooped down, wrecked a couple city blocks, and then dispersed.” George sighed, even though this devastation was probably good for the roofing business. “And meanwhile, things in Xiosphant have gotten somewhat complicated, politically.”

“Have we ever had a conversation where you didn’t say that?”

George took another sip of dark water, and seemed to be debating whether it was worth throwing away some money just to get Mouth out of his office.

“Here.” He handed Mouth a wad of food dollars, infrastructure chits, and a few other types of cash. Mouth also found a big hat and a Xiosphanti poncho that would cover her scarred head and strange clothes—maybe the exact same items that Mouth had worn before. And Sophie picked up a lacy fringe to pin around her ankles.

“Consider this a retainer,” George said. “I might have a job for you pretty soon, so check back.”

Mouth started to thank him, but then saw the face at the center of one of the food dollars. Not the best likeness, but they’d captured the eyes pretty well. Hold the dollar one way, she seemed to gaze at Mouth like she believed that they would transform this town together. Look at the money from a higher angle, and she looked furious at Mouth’s betrayal. You could follow the entire course of their relationship, just by moving a dollar around.

Bianca.

“Our new vice regent,” George said. “I told you: complicated. Whole new government.”

Mouth showed the money to Sophie, who swayed like she might faint, or drop to her knees. Cloak moving up in the back, just a little. She stared into those eyes, and seemed to have a whole different dialogue with them than Mouth. Then Sophie looked up and saw George studying her too, trying to guess what this was about. She straightened up and cleansed all emotion from her face.

“I have to go see her,” Sophie said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea just yet.” Mouth gestured at George. “Like the man said, it’s complicated.”

“It’s Bianca.”

“Let’s just take this one step at a time. If I can find Alyssa, she can give us the—”

George looked out his window and cursed. “Hide. Hide now!” He gestured for Mouth and Sophie to get behind the row of filing cabinets, with the info crystals where Mouth had first learned about the Palace vault, with the Invention.

“So good to see you and your friends,” George was saying to a visitor. “Want some dark water?”

“George, this is not a social call, and I don’t appreciate seeing you drink during business time. The work is behind schedule.” It was a man’s voice, with a slight Argelan accent. Mouth took a moment to identify the speaker, whom she hadn’t heard speaking Xiosphanti before. “We don’t want to have to play rough.”

“Dash, don’t be like that. Your new Palace roof is going to be beautiful, made of wrought iron. People will wonder if you had it fabbed somehow.” Mouth had never heard George sound so upset, not even when she’d quoted a political slogan by accident. No, not upset. Terrified. George was terror-stricken. Mouth didn’t much care what happened to George, but this still made her nauseous. “I mean. We’re also overbooked, thanks to all the cyclone damage. And we’re doing this job for you guys for free.”

“You’re not doing it for free, George. You’re doing your patriotic duty. When you say things like that, I feel as though you don’t appreciate the honor we’re giving you.”

Sophie moved forward, to do something. Confront Dash? Punch him, the way she did Reynold that one time? Strangle him with her tentacles? Mouth got in her way and whispered, “Not now. Not here.” Sophie hunched down again.

“Of course, we’re honored,” George said. “Such an honor.”

The next thing Mouth heard was a loud crack, followed by George making a sound like a starving baby.

“So,” Dash said over George’s wailing. “The way I understand, your facility is just qualified to receive infrastructure chits. Am I right? Great. So the only way you can get other types of money is through private arrangements.” George let out a high gasp. Dash continued: “Y’know, I wonder if somebody should look into that. Make sure it’s all on the level.”

“If you were going to threaten me with a currency fraud investigation…” George panted. “Why did you have to break my leg?”

You could hear in Dash’s voice that he was flipping his hands. “I don’t know. Nostalgia, mostly. Or maybe homesickness. Plus, pain drives the message home.” His footsteps moved away, then stopped. “Oh, one more thing. I heard you had a visit from a mutual friend.”

“She—ahhh. Wanted my help. I didn’t.”

“Next time you meet an enemy of the state, tell me. Of course, Alyssa’s been handled. We built her a special dungeon under the Palace. So romantic, just like those storybooks I used to love. Okay, see you, George.”

Alyssa had never seemed so free as the last time Mouth had seen her, and now she was in some ironically “romantic” dungeon. Mouth found herself desperately wishing she was still able to inflict harm.

Mouth and Sophie waited until they were sure Dash was gone, then rushed out and tried to help set George’s broken leg. “Just go,” he hissed. “I’ll be fine. Clean break. Go. Never come back.”

So they took their money, including the food dollars with the haunting eyes, and left. Now, with Mouth’s big hat and Sophie’s hood, they both looked fully ridiculous.

“We have to rescue Bianca,” Sophie said when they got out on the street. “It’s obvious they’re holding her prisoner in the Palace. Using her as a figurehead while Dash and his goons run everything.”

“Keep your voice down.” Words that Mouth never expected to say to Sophie. “I don’t know what’s going on, and neither do you. But now we know where Alyssa is. I learned the hard way, breaking into that Palace is impossible, but I bet anything this new dungeon is a different matter. They probably built it adjacent to the sewers.”

Sophie stared at Mouth, maybe thinking that Mouth would rescue Alyssa and let Bianca rot, for selfish reasons. There was a nugget of truth to this.

“Just let me talk to Alyssa first,” Mouth said. “We need more information. Please just hang tight for now.”

Sophie started to argue, then just shrugged and said, “Okay. Go see your friend. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not going to try and see Bianca?”

“No, of course not. Go do what you have to do.”

So Mouth left Sophie hiding in an air vent on a redbrick tower, and hoped for the best.

SOPHIE

Bianca has learned this way of flexing her wrist joint when she listens, and her eyes draw closer as her nose wrinkles. She perches on a wooden chaise with gold leaf, with a crimson gown hanging off one shoulder, and a tiny glass of some fluky green spirit sitting on a side table next to her. Dash is here, talking to her about the delays in finishing the new Palace roof, and she’s giving him an exasperated look.

“This is important. We need a stronger roof, before the next cyclone comes over the Young Father and just rips everything apart,” she says.

Seeing Bianca again, my heart gets pulled off-kilter. All of my old feelings rise up out of the past, as though her smile and her voice have the power to bend light, restructure time, make everything new.

“This is not what I thought I’d be spending my time doing here, in the Clockwork City,” Dash says in Argelan.

“What did you think you’d be doing, Dash?” Bianca laughs. “Just eating fancy cakes all the time? Doing elaborate dances, and scattering petals everywhere? I’m dying to know.”

He shakes his head. “I used to find your sarcasm so intoxicating. I actually thought about marrying you, did you know that? I pictured you and me marching through Founders’ Square, wearing the most resplendent silks and lace, and getting the High Magistrate to officiate the biggest wedding this town ever saw.”

“We executed the High Magistrate, remember? It was a whole occasion.”

This Palace probably is impossible to sneak into, just as Mouth said—unless you have your own tentacles, with cilia that grip harder than any mechanical clamps. I managed to keep them hidden under my cloak, even as they helped me scale the wall overlooking the quiet rear plaza, adjacent to the market stalls. I could sense the Palace guards moving underneath me, hear their chatter. Any moment, they were going to look up and see me, and I would die. I had to stop and melt into the wall a few times until I felt calm again. But I had no choice. I needed to see her. Now I’m clinging to the ledge outside her window.

“I’m not the marrying type,” Bianca is saying to Dash. “But we did have fun, didn’t we? We make a good team, and we’re just getting started.”

Dash comes over to the window to look out over the city, and I scoot out of the way just in time. “This town always sounded so adorable when that fussy old tutor was teaching me Xiosphanti. All the elaborate phrasings, and the way every moment in time seemed to have its own special name. But the real Xiosphant turned out to be just a sad gray husk.”

I don’t need to see Bianca’s face to know she bristles at that. “You’ll learn to love this town the way I do. And maybe then you’ll understand how to get what you want without shouting and hitting people.”

“Sure. Maybe.” Dash turns away and heads for the door to Bianca’s gilt-edged chamber. “But for now, I have to go browbeat more tradespeople. I wish we could just throw another party.”

“We’ll party when we have a reason to celebrate.”

“That’s a barbaric notion. Parties are only fun if they’re unreasonable. See you later.”

They kiss for several endless heartbeats, and then Dash walks out, shutting the door behind him.

I only came here to learn more information, as Mouth suggested, and now I’ve learned quite a bit. So I should leave, quietly as I came, slip away and plan my next move. But she’s so close to me, and I never thought I’d get another chance to speak to her again, and her flowery scent reaches me from all the way across the room. Maybe now that I can communicate in a whole new way, everything can be different between us.

I’m next to Bianca before she even knows I’m there.

Bianca looks up and lets out a gasp. Her face turns to clay and she coughs, spits, and starts to cry. The liqueur glass falls and lands intact. She gasps for breath, with a hyperactive twist to her mouth and red borders around her eyes. Bianca and I are both stiff, made of brittle wire, until she reaches out and pulls me into a hug. I pull her head onto my shoulder, careful to keep my tendrils away, and she weeps on my neck.

Neither of us talks for a long time, and I’m flooded with an emotion that I can’t even name. I told myself I was finished with Bianca, but this feeling clamps onto me with sharp teeth, sunk deep.

Then I break the silence, for once. “I thought you were dead. I thought you died out there in the night, or else when you tried to invade here. But you won. You won. I can’t even imagine.”

“We were so lucky,” she says between sobs. “I can’t believe you’re alive too. I didn’t want that to be our last conversation. Here you are, back from the dead one more time, but this time I have even more things that I never got to say. I couldn’t believe you just walked away and left us there, lost in the middle of the ice fields.”

“I asked you to come with me.”

Bianca doesn’t seem to hear me. “You promised to trust me and stick with me, forever. And then you left me to die in the wilderness. But I didn’t die. We made it home. We won.”

I mourned Bianca so hard in the midnight city, I forgot how alive she really was. Now I step back and look at her. The multilayered hairstyle, jewelry, and shimmering turquoise powder around her eyelids can’t distract from the radiance of her eyes. She could conquer anything.

“We came over the side of the Old Mountain, and here was Xiosphant, just wide open.” She pours herself another green drink. “We only had one transport left, remember, and just two dozen soldiers. But this city never saw us coming. I knew they would never expect anyone to invade from the night, and those blockheads assumed that people would only attack the city when their shutters were open, because they’d gotten so used to thinking of their sleep cycle as natural. The Curfew Patrols were pathetic. By the time everyone opened their shutters, we were inside the Palace, and we had captured the prince. We killed the vice regent, and all the Privy Council, everybody, and then we were in charge.”

She uses the most informal syntax, as if we were cousins by marriage, not vice regent and outlaw. And something inside me, underneath my spread of tendrils, opens up at the sound of Bianca’s voice: like clear water flowing down the side of one of those marble fountains, in just the right amount of partial sunlight, back in Argelo. I almost don’t care that she’s telling me about murdering so many people.

This is the tallest room I’ve ever been in, with walls a good four or five meters high, and a vibrant painting of the Xiosphanti crest, Gelet and tigers embracing, on the ceiling.

Her drink scathes her throat, and she coughs, and then smiles at me, so I feel myself flush. “Back at the Gymnasium, I always wished I could be more like you. You used to talk about how you had clawed your way out of the dark side of town, and meanwhile I was just swept along by other people’s expectations. You were just so real, Sophie, as if you couldn’t help being yourself. Maybe this whole time, I’ve been trying to find the person that I can’t help being.”

The burnt-orange aroma of her liqueur overcomes my new senses, and I’m overaware of a hum in the room, something grinding against itself. I can’t get rid of the dumb fantasy that I’ve somehow scored one more chance with Bianca, that I can still fix things between us.

“But so, you won,” I say. “And you were in charge. Right? And you had all these reforms, I remember you talked about them so often, all these reforms you wanted to make.”

She sighs and covers her face with one hand. “We tried. We really did. But you can’t just change one part of the system without upsetting the rest of it. The farmwheels turn on a strict schedule that synchronizes perfectly with the shutters going up and down, and the water pumps are optimized for the farmwheels, but also for everybody washing at certain times. The sewage is optimized for peak times as well. And so on. You start tinkering, and the whole city falls apart, and then everybody starves.”

I don’t know what to say. Everything she’s saying about the system, we were taught in school, until we all knew it by heart. But she’s acting as if she just discovered it for the first time.

“Oh, it’s one thing to read about it.” She laughs and rolls her eyes at my expression. “But I didn’t really get it until I tried to make adjustments. Plus meanwhile, I have just a small number of Argelan fighters left who are loyal to Dash and me. Mostly, I have to rely on the Palace guards, and they’re only behind me so long as I have the prince in a safe place. I’ve been hand-picking my own people, smart Xiosphanti, to take key jobs. But I still have to rely on the old bureaucrats and administrators to implement my decisions, and they fight me every step of the way.”

When we first became friends, and Bianca used to pull the forgotten history books out of the back of the library at the Gymnasium, this act of revealing a different past seemed to me a magical power. But now I keep wondering if there were books she chose to leave on the shelf, which talked about all the crimes of saviors, like the Hydroponic Garden Massacre. Maybe if she had read deeper, things would be different now.

Bianca sighs. “Then after that freak cyclone, everyone was scared, and frightened people always crave stability. Sophie, I really need someone I can count on here, and I still wish that could be you.”

I look out from her balcony, at a view of Xiosphant I’ve never seen. The town looks so clean, all of the beige and crimson rooftops catching the dusk rays. You can’t even see the tiny patch of cyclone damage, let alone any other blemishes. A glow comes from the top of the Young Father and casts a curtain of illumination over the warm side of town, and then as I turn my head to the left the light dissipates, until darkness lands at the feet of the Old Mother.

“I can’t believe you didn’t actually change anything.” I can see the market and the big shops on the Boulevard, and the housing towers dotting the skyline. “You were going to make everything better. All of these people trapped in cycles, the same thing over and over, everyone yearning for freedom. You were going to fix it.”

“Give me time. A generation from now, you’ll see the change. We’re going to reopen trade with Argelo, and people will be exposed to new ideas, new ways of living.”

I look away from the balcony and check Bianca out again: the rigid posture, the fidgeting ankles, the tight jaw. She’s trapped herself here in this Palace, and underneath her brash surface she’s terrified, more than when we almost drowned on the Sea of Murder. She got everything she thought she wanted, and now she’s barely holding on.

All I want to do is rescue Bianca one last time, save her from herself, as if all her mistakes—her crimes—are just another handful of food dollars that I can take on myself. The ache grows inside me until it feels too big to contain, and I want to carry her away from here.

But we’re past that now. There’s only one thing I have left to offer her.

“I need someone to count on, and I wish that could be you,” she says again. “I don’t know how you survived, and I want to hear all about it. But you came back to me, and now you can help me make all of this right. I’ve always imagined doing all of this with you by my side.”

“I’ve been living in the midnight city.” I choose my words carefully. “Everything I told you before was true. I came back here because I have something incredible to show to all the people, and you’re the one I always wanted to share everything with. What you said just now, about how you couldn’t change the system even once you were in charge, I can help you fix that. I have a way to change everything. And you and I could finally understand each other, and stop hurting each other all the time. We could be real.”

As I say those things, I feel as though I’m shaping a possible future in my mind, and inviting Bianca to shape it with me. The holiest act. I can almost see it becoming real, and maybe coming here was worth the risk after all.

“So that hive of ice monsters gave you a new political theory? Or some kind of organizational tool? I’m intrigued.”

Bianca keeps looking over her shoulder at the door, as if expecting Dash to come back. Or Nai, if Nai is somehow still alive. I stay close to the balcony, because if either of those people show up, I’ll swing out the window and up onto the roof in an instant.

I can’t help drawing my cloak tighter, to disguise the shape of my body from her. “I need to know. What scares you so much about the idea that the Gelet could be people? You wanted to use them in your invasion, so why couldn’t you accept them as equals?”

She ticks on her fingers. “Because if they’re people, then what does that make us? Invaders? Is our struggle here even meaningful, if we’re just squabbling on the margins of their history? Because I’ve eaten crocodile meat, at some of those feasts I used to go to. Because I didn’t want to lose the Sophie I knew—you know, the sweet, passionate girl who always lit up my world—and it scared me to think of you becoming something I couldn’t even understand.”

I should leave now. The calculating part of me, the part that somehow kept me alive in the midst of so much death, is yelling for me to get out of here. But I stay.

“I’ve never heard you admit to being scared before.” I move back toward her, and she actually smiles at me. Her smile still has the same power as always. I feel my center of gravity rise.

“I never had to say. You’ve always known,” she says, “and you’ve always helped me get through it. So okay. I’m here. What did you want to show me?”

I hesitate just a moment longer, then I let my cloak fall open. Bianca sees my tendrils, up above the neckline of my simple shift, and the motion of tentacles behind my head, and lets out a high gasp.

Bianca heaves, and speaks in a guttural rush. “Your body… oh shit… What did they do to you? What did they turn you into? Fuck, are you even human anymore? How can you stand to be— I think I’m going to throw up—” She makes clicking sounds in the back of her throat.

I have a sudden flash of Mouth saying, “I think you’re beautiful,” as though my subconscious is trying to protect me.

“I’m still me,” I plead. “I haven’t changed. I’m still Sophie.”

She spits and thrashes, looking past me. “No. Oh no, no, no, this is worse than I could have imagined. They turned you into… This is so much worse. We’re going to have to study you. Are they planning on doing this to other people? Is this what you wanted to show me, this… this contamination? Is it contagious? Are you going to try and infect me?”

“No, wait,” I babble, because she’s reaching for some velvet cord that will summon guards or servants. “Just wait and listen to me for once, Bianca, I haven’t even shown you what I was going to show you. Please stop. I promise it’ll be okay. I could never hurt you.”

As I lean toward her, I reach for a comforting memory: the pot of tea that we always took from the common room and kept on the squat little table in our dorm room at the Gymnasium. Before all of this, back when life was simple. I remember one quiet moment when she poured tea for me, and I keep it in my head, the fragile stillness of it, so I can give it to her.

But Bianca squirms and lashes out with one fist as my tendrils make contact, and I can’t find the memory of pouring tea anymore. Instead, all I can think of is staring at her from behind the War Monument, with a barrier of misshapen waves between us. My mind skips to the time I followed her and spied on her in a political meeting full of guns, and then standing in the corner of some party in Argelo, observing her. Then I’m watching someone tie a mask around her face as she recedes into a crowd. Studying her and Dash across a crowded nightclub.

“How many times did you spy on me? Were you just stalking me all the time—” Bianca makes another gagging sound.

I can’t come up with a memory that’s not of me watching Bianca from a distance. My heart is shaking itself to pieces and my tendrils tear at my skin with the effort of maintaining contact. I fumble for a happy memory and—

—Bianca is lying next to me on her bed, in our dorm room, whispering in my ear, and her breath makes my skin so sensitive that I would evaporate if she even touched me and then her body touches mine just for a moment and I feel a shiver and I’ve never even let myself want anything with the part of me that rejoices in desiring—

—Now, here, in the Palace, Bianca pulls away from me, just as I’ve realized how dangerous that last memory was, the feelings I’ve never even confessed to myself.

Bianca makes a noise between a roar and a howl, and throws me so hard I land halfway across the room.

“You forced yourself into my mind and you… Standing here with those grubby oily worms coming out of your body, thinking those disgusting thoughts about me. I can’t even stand to look at you. They didn’t turn you into a monster, you were always a monster. How did I not know this?”

Bianca’s words have a thicket of sharp edges, and I’m still paralyzed, thinking about that desire that I never even let into myself. Bianca spits at me that I’m perverted, revolting, a creep.

All the blood is rushing to my head and I’m drowning, but there must be something I can say right now. I didn’t stalk her—and my love isn’t selfish—and I’m scared I overwhelmed her with too many memories at once. I try to blurt an explanation. “I just wanted to save—”

My shoulder is on fire. The pain spreads to my left arm and my left side. A man in a bright green breastplate has come in the door and fired an antique pulse maser at me. The wound mostly cauterized on contact, but blood still dribbles out of my shoulder. I scream.

Bianca yells at her man not to kill me, they need me alive. I pull away as she shouts at the guards pouring into the room not to shoot, for fuck’s sake. I reach the balcony, where I’d plotted an easy parabola—flipping onto the railing and then up to the roof. But I’ve lost flesh, and I’m losing blood. I try to climb, but I slip on my own mess, and I fall instead. My tentacles only just save me, catching on the Palace wall, as I drop to the balcony one floor down.

mouth

Mouth climbed down into the sewer and made her foul way under the Founders’ Square and the market stalls, to the pristine clay pipe that she was pretty sure led into the dungeon’s latrine. The pipe itself was too narrow, so she set about weakening the mortar around one of the big new stones at the base of the dungeon wall. Whoever built this new dungeon had done a poor job with the masonry, probably because Dash had broken their arms for not working fast enough. The big granite block wobbled as the mortar crumbled under pressure from the scraper in Mouth’s belt, but she still needed several lifetimes to loosen the block and pull it out of the way. Then she could climb up through the commode itself, which stunk just as much as she’d expected. She pushed aside the rotting wooden boards over the commode.

The single-room dungeon had one prisoner: Alyssa wore a chain attached to a shackle around her ankle, with the other end bolted to the wall. She looked so much older Mouth didn’t recognize her at first. Her skin clung to an emaciated face, and she bent almost double. Her eyes focused on Mouth with effort.

“You look like hot puke,” Mouth whispered. “Hold still.”

She found a file inside her tool belt and started sawing through the chain on Alyssa’s ankle.

“Make up your mind,” Alyssa hissed. “You ditch me, then you come back.”

“Shut up and let me work.”

“Can’t wait to hear your latest rationalization.” Alyssa sounded like mossy rock being dragged over rotten wood. “Not that I don’t bear some of the blame for this shitfest. I believed in Bianca—like, really believed. I spent a lot of time encouraging her to step up, after you vanished on us. Become the brilliant leader that she was meant to be. I think I may have miscalculated. Pretty much as soon as we finished murdering the entire government, I was suddenly ‘not reliable.’ I mean, fuck. I’m the most reliable person there is.”

“Shhh,” Mouth said. “You’ll have plenty of time to explain how this is really my fault after we get out of here.”

Alyssa shook her head. “You’re just going to ditch me again.”

“No, I’m not.” Mouth was about halfway through the chain, and she’d only had to switch hands three times. Both hands were raw and throbbing.

That was when the alarms started ringing. Not from the dungeon, from the Palace above. Mouth cursed. Sophie.

“I have to go,” Mouth said. “I’ll leave you the file. The commode leads to a stone I removed, then the sewers.”

“You literally said a moment ago that you wouldn’t abandon me.”

Mouth paused with one foot in the toilet, and sighed.

“I have a duty. I’m Sophie’s bodyguard, and she’s an idiot. She’s also the future of humanity, sort of. Keep working on your chain.”

Mouth had wasted too much time already. The alarms blared, and boots crashed on the pavement above. She swung back down into the sewer, trying to guess which pipe led to the fancy toilets. She picked one that looked likely, and took a hammer to the fixtures until she had made an opening. At least the alarms and shouts drowned out the racket of her clumsy swings.

“She’s not even human anymore,” Bianca said. “She got into my chamber and attacked me with some kind of psychic powers. It was horrible. We need to capture her alive if we can.”

Mouth couldn’t get over how good the inside of the Palace smelled: like fresh-cut pine, even over the sewage she tracked onto the floor (which was made of a stone so soft and warm Mouth wanted to lie down on it for a while). The Inner Council Chamber had gleaming walls of something that looked like glass but wasn’t, and the furniture was a mixture of handcrafted high-end wood and machine-fabbed steel and plastic. Beautiful ancient devices, some of them dating back to the Mothership, covered every surface.

Most of the clamor rang out from upstairs, but shouts came from the outer hallway surrounding this level. “She’s down here!” Mouth ran toward the voices.

Sophie cowered under her big cloak, hiding between two pillars, with guards closing in on her. She held her shoulder in one hand, like they’d winged her already. Just as Mouth made eye contact with Sophie, all the guards spotted Mouth.

Mouth gestured for Sophie to stay put, then ran for the nearest window, making as much commotion as she could, sliding across the polished floor. The first two rifle shots missed, but the third went through her shoulder, turning her right arm into a useless decoration. The fourth hit her left leg. She hoped this distraction had helped Sophie to escape, however unlikely that might be.

As Mouth started to bleed out on the fancy carpet, she remembered when the Resourceful Couriers had tried to get into the rug import business, working with this one community of weavers who had a workshop in the Pit back in Argelo, using techniques they claimed to have brought all the way from Earth. The Couriers had hauled a pile of their wares all the way to Xiosphant, only to find they were cheap rugs that someone had dyed just well enough to fool a group of rubes. At least now Mouth’s blood was soaking into what appeared to be a genuine antique, which meant she would have some revenge, even in death. Nothing would ever get blood out of this carpet.

“Oh, for—” Bianca was standing over her, wearing an off-the-shoulder crimson gown. “Mouth. I should have known.” She turned to the nearest guard. “Get her cleaned and patched up. Then put her in the dungeon. I want to know everything she can tell us about this monstrosity.”

Bianca leaned in close enough that Mouth could see the redness in her eyes, and the insomnia lines. Bianca looked almost as prematurely aged as Alyssa. “I should have expected you’d be here, after that creature showed up in my house. I want you to know that I destroyed your stupid poetry book the first chance I got.”

Mouth didn’t even know what book Bianca was talking about at first, and then she remembered about the Invention. She tried to shrug, but that was not happening with this bullet wound. She also couldn’t scrounge enough air to say anything about that “creature” being the only one who ever really loved Bianca. Or the fact that Bianca had been happy to use Sophie’s unique connection to January’s natives to play her geopolitical games. Mouth had summoned endless quantities of air back when she’d been saying whatever Bianca wanted to hear, but now every breath came with a sharp pain in her chest, like her lung had gotten wrapped in barbed wire.

Alyssa rolled her eyes when Mouth fell on her hands and knees in the dungeon, and the guards shackled her to another chain. “Well, you did say you would be back.” The guards locked the door behind them.

Mouth still couldn’t breathe. They had cleaned her bullet wounds and applied some sealant, but one of them felt like it still had shrapnel. She made an asthmatic rattle instead of words.

Alyssa looked around to make sure the guards had left, and then pulled the file out of her sleeve and sawed through her chain, which was close to breaking. “This file is worthless,” she said. “What happened to the good one we used to have? The one with the specially hardened iron surface? I know you had it last.”

Mouth couldn’t get enough breath to answer, but also honestly wasn’t sure. The good file had been in that cloth bag, back in Argelo, maybe.

“You lose everything.” Alyssa rubbed the file faster. “I can’t leave a single thing with you. Literally anything I put in your hands, it’s just… gone.” One last frenzy of tugging, and her chain snapped.

Halfway to the commode, Alyssa paused and looked at Mouth, who was on the floor, hugging her knees and trying to breathe. “You only just let me down, again.”

Mouth tried to gasp that she was sorry. She had broken in here to rescue Alyssa in the first place. She had never wanted to leave Alyssa behind in the night.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t just let you stay here. Even half a reason. I’m so tired of your garbage.”

Mouth managed to squeeze out, “You have no… other friends. Everyone else… is dead.”

“Good point. Hold still, asshole.” Mouth passed out while Alyssa was filing.

A rhythmic series of slaps across her cheek made her upper bullet wound throb, and she realized her ankle was no longer chained. Mouth lurched to her feet, swaying.

“We don’t have long,” Alyssa said. “When they realize we’re gone, they’re going to notice the mess you made of that toilet. Nice subtle work, by the way.”

Alyssa hoisted Mouth over her shoulder and helped her stumble through the slippery tunnel that smelled like generations of diarrhea. Mouth breathed into Alyssa’s ear, barely managing to croak, “Can we,” and some time later, “start over?”

No response to that, except that much later, when Mouth had collapsed on a bed in a tiny flop that Alyssa had rented over a tannery in the Warrens, and Alyssa was poking a tiny syringe into Mouth’s lung, she heard Alyssa say, in Argelan: “There’s no starting over. There’s only starting again.”

Mouth tossed her head.

“So, you’re Sophie’s bodyguard now?”

Mouth tossed her head again. “Need to find her.” She could breathe a little better now.

“Ugh. That girl. Beginning to think you’re each other’s jinxes. Well, okay.” She sighed. “I haven’t thrown my life away for a lost cause in a little while. Tell me about it when you can talk.”

“Okay.” Mouth passed out again.

When Mouth regained consciousness in a filthy room darkened by shutters, she half expected Alyssa to be gone. But Alyssa sat at the tiny cork table, dismantling the shackle on her own ankle, and that was the most beautiful surprise of all. Mouth attempted to smile up at Alyssa, who smiled back and reached to take her hand. Mouth squeezed Alyssa’s palm, like some talisman promising safety, redemption, or maybe just not dying alone.

Mouth took a deep, miraculous breath. “When I thought you were dead, I was planning one hell of a wake. I was going to get so drunk I’d never see straight again.”

Alyssa snorted. “I never got a chance to drink to you being dead either. Your wake was going to be incredible: those gross cakes you always liked, fancy high-end liquor, plus maybe some little kids who could sing and pretend to be sad.”

“Your wake would have been way better than that,” Mouth said. “I was going to set a few dozen firebombs all over town, in honor of your career as a child arsonist. Heaps of food. Including those disgusting cactus-pork crisps. Liters of swamp vodka. The whole town would have passed out.”

“Fuck off. Your wake would have been the best wake in the history of wakes.” Alyssa poked Mouth’s leg. “Flowers and parades and flamethrowers, and I would have given a whole speech about how you were too dumb to live, but too fuck-faced to die of stab wounds or gunshots, like everyone else.”

As she spoke, Alyssa leaned forward and put one arm around Mouth’s uninjured shoulder and leaned on her chest, with care. Mouth heard a sigh of almost unbearable tenderness.

“Your wake would have ended with a thousand more people dead,” Mouth said.

“Pffft. Your wake would have been an extinction-level event.” Alyssa moved closer, until all of Mouth’s uninjured parts were swathed in arms and legs. “But now I guess we’ll just have to drink to being alive, like boring people.”

They fell asleep tangled in each other, like old times.

SOPHIE

I see my face everywhere: a terrible likeness printed with streaky ink on the Palace’s ancient printing press, but still me. Bianca gives a speech in the Founders’ Square, standing in the same spot where her predecessor as vice regent announced a reduction in med-creds and triggered a riot. “We’ve been invaded by something evil that followed us out of the night,” Bianca says. Behind her, the prince looks pale and lightsick. “Some creature that we’ve never seen before has learned to imitate human form. It may look like a beautiful woman, but don’t let it get close, because its slightest touch will end your life.” Around me, the crowd shrills. I pull my hood tighter, hiding my face. I can’t help remembering when I was swept up by this same mob, and imagining what they’ll do if they find me this time.

Then I close my eyes, and let the feelings take hold of me, before I remind myself that I’m not trapped now. I’m strong, and I can climb any surface, and I can sense danger approaching before it even sees me.

I keep thinking that if I could have just showed Bianca that one memory of drinking tea, when we were too young to understand anything, things would have turned out differently. The teapot was like a harmless sun, radiating heat without the assault of light, and we clustered around it, gossiping and making up stories about what we were going to do when we got free.

As I leave the Square, my cloak snags on the rusted metal of an old stairway rail, revealing the shape of my body for one eyeblink. I’m not sure if anyone saw, but I duck into an alley piled with old linens and climb one wall, gripping with the ends of my tentacles. Around the next corner, I scale an eave and hide on a crumbling sill covered with laser-carved angels while people walk underneath me.

I don’t know what happened to that teapot. My old memories haven’t gotten any clearer thanks to my gift, and I only remember what I remember. So the teapot only lives in that one moment, and a few others. Maybe we broke it, maybe it got lost, maybe it’s still in a cupboard at the Gymnasium somewhere. In my recollection, it had green cornflowers painted on it, and a thin crack where the lid connected.

I take refuge in the very hottest part of town. Corroded corrugated aluminum, hot to the touch, right next to my face. I huddle there, sweating and suffocating, during the twelfth bell, the recessional chimes, and, at last, the shutters-up warning. My shoulder still burns, and I worry it’s infected. I’ve been so stupid. The Gelet are counting on my help, but I can’t stop throwing away my life for Bianca. It’s all I ever do.

Mouth probably died at the Palace. Even now that Bianca is lost to me, the idea of Mouth being dead cuts deeper than I could have expected. I remember her story of the blue wings, and the way the Gelet recoiled when I conveyed it to them. I should have helped Mouth find another name, one that didn’t remind her constantly of bones and lost chances.

My love for Bianca feels like a feature of the landscape that recedes farther into the distance the longer I stare. I wonder how much she’s sleeping now that she’s home, and whether she dreams of me.

I need to leave my hiding place to find some food, and that’s when I spot the symbol. Painted in yellow on the peeling stucco wall of an empty shoe factory, the glyph twists in on itself, with the shape of wings and one long tooth. I stare awhile before I remember where I saw it before: on some of the books in Hernan’s study, at the Illyrian Parlour. I hesitate one moment longer, and then push open the tiny door.

Jeremy crouches in a wide-armed chair next to a coffee urn in the style of Old Zagreb, with a cloudy ancient copy of a Mayhew tract in both hands. Cyrus the marmot stretches out on one arm of the chair, grumbling. Jeremy looks up and smiles at me. “You made it. I saw your picture all over town, so I tried to leave a message that only you would understand. I’m so glad you’re here.”

He gives me food, and clean water, and a place to sit, and then he sets about tending my shoulder.

Jeremy talks twice as fast as before, now that we’re a long way from the Parlour. And meanwhile, Cyrus seems even more languid than ever, though he cozies up to Jeremy the same way he used to with Hernan. Jeremy says Hernan kept the Parlour open for a while, and things seemed to quiet down after I left. But some time later, there was another crackdown on anti-Circadianist elements, and Hernan had to close shop after all. This all happened ages ago. I keep being shocked by how much time passed while I was away. It’s already 4 Silence after Crimson, according to the calendar on the wall. Hernan ended up on the run, and eventually died of an infection that spread to his blood.

Besides Cyrus and the samovar, Jeremy has saved a few other things from the Parlour. He digs in a wooden crate until he pulls out a scrap of wax paper: my mother’s painting of me standing near some barley stalks. “Hernan told me to give you this, if I ever saw you again.” I stare at the tiny figure, whose face is turned away, and the light, from somewhere out of the frame, that limns her cheek and the tips of the newly harvested crops. I count every brushstroke, as if I could see my mother’s hand if I concentrate hard enough. And then I roll it, tenderly, and tuck it inside a pouch in my cloak.

Then I sit with Jeremy, and he tells me about the new Uprising: he and his friends are working to unseat our new vice regent and her foreign allies. This dusty storage room, scorching even with the shutters closed, is one of his hideouts.

“All of that training Hernan gave us.” Jeremy shakes his head. “Turns out it’s quite helpful for politics. I know how to fire people up, by doing more or less the opposite of what you and I used to do.”

I start to try to explain about Bianca, how I still believe she never wanted to hurt anyone, even now, and Jeremy hushes me.

“I don’t need you to tell me anything,” he says. “I want you to show me.”

I just stare. His face, lit by a single beam from an old handheld light, looks like a landscape of arid gullies. Cyrus is peering up at me too; maybe he recognizes me, or wonders what’s going on.

“You want me to…” I whisper.

“That’s why I made all this effort to find you. I’ve been hearing rumors, from someone who works at the Palace and heard her talking to Dash after you got away. They say that you can show people the things you’ve seen, and that’s why the vice regent is scared of you. You know all her secrets, you know the whole truth about her, and anyone who touches you can experience it, as if they had been there in person.”

I hesitate, fingering the sides of my cloak.

“Please, show me,” he says again.

I open my cloak. When I bring the tendrils closer to his face, he lets out a slow breath, like steam escaping the coffee urn. I show him Bianca speaking to the Progressive Students, then try to take him through the glimmering parties in Argelo, Bianca flirting with these oligarchs, and the fleet of armored vehicles. Forcing myself to revisit these things feels like a whole new kind of memory-panic, except with crushing sadness instead of anxiety.

Jeremy untangles his face from my tendrils, and I realize after a moment that he’s shaking with happiness.

“This… this is amazing. You could be the single most effective recruitment tool in the history of political organizing. People will want to try this for themselves, and once they do, they’ll be on our side forever. I can see why the vice regent is scared out of her mind.”

I step away from him, all my senses heightened as if danger could arrive from anywhere. This storage room feels both too claustrophobic and too exposed.

“I didn’t come back home to be some living piece of propaganda,” I say.

“She’s trying to destroy you,” Jeremy says. “You have to destroy her first. That’s how it works.”

“Thanks for the food.” I move away from him, climbing the half stairway toward the blinding glare coming through the doorframe. “And for tending my shoulder. I feel much better. Please take good care of Cyrus.”

Hearing his name, Cyrus growls and stretches his pseudopods.

“Please stay here. I have an extra bedroll. We can talk more later. You don’t have to rush into anything. But this is a way for both of us to get our lives back. Now that I’ve experienced your power, I…” Jeremy rushes behind me, hands raised, but makes no move to stop me. “You can control the thing that most of us are controlled by. We could do so much together.”

I pause at the door. “If you want to become like me,” I say, “climb the Old Mother and just wait at the top. Go alone, no weapons. They’ll come and find you.” Then I walk outside, shielding my face against the sunbaked heat, and hurry back to my hiding place before the shutters open.

My shoulder still burns, and I don’t know whether to curse myself or Bianca against the pain. I needed to run away from Jeremy, because I was afraid I would end up agreeing to let myself be used again. Maybe I’d have tried to share the story of Bianca in a way that made people want to forgive her, even as they rise up against her. And that might be the only way I’ll ever get to share my abilities with anyone, without them reacting the way the Glacier Fools did, or Bianca. People can stand things for the sake of politics that they would never endure for love or profit. But even if I could do that to Bianca without loathing myself, I know I couldn’t stand to deliver that story to people, over and over. I would turn to ice if I even tried.

The shutters open, and close again, and open again, while I hold myself still and keep my back to the brazier of the Young Father. My shoulder still hurts when I move, but I think it’s getting better.

I sleep inside my crawlspace without any regard to the state of the shutters, and maybe I’ve just been away too long to sink back into the old rhythm. If anything, now I prefer going out when everyone else sleeps. I don’t fear the Curfew Patrols, not with all my new senses, and Xiosphant looks lovelier when you can see every stone and adornment without people in the way, the interplay of ancient technology and the more recent handcrafted imitations. I can’t believe how much odd little things delight me, like a fluttering wrapper from the cakes we used to get at grammar school, or a sign for the Grand Cinema, the tiny space where they screen old hard-light dramas. Sometimes I catch the acrid scent of tannery smoke, or notice the shimmer of the air in the Cold Front, and I can’t help feeling this tawdry nostalgia.

But actual people are more complicated. After so much exposure to Argelan culture, I can’t look at random strangers here in Xiosphant without trying to guess which compartment their families traveled in, and how that lines up with their social class here.

A Curfew Patrol marches away from me, nowhere nearby, but I hear another set of footsteps that sound more furtive, stopping and starting as if someone keeps hiding. I creep over the lintels and around the smokestacks of bleached-brick buildings, getting closer to the temperate zone, until I lower myself into the street in front of Alyssa.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she says in Argelan. “We’d better get off the street. I know a place we can lie low.” I follow her down more alleys until I realize we’re circling closer to the Palace and I’m sure that I’ve trusted the wrong person again. But at the edge of the fanciest street market, Alyssa opens a trapdoor and helps me into a small space under one of the market stalls. This is the closest to the night I’ve been in a while, and my bracelet gives a faint buzz.

Alyssa shines a small torch around the tiny wooden space. “We waited out the curfew in here on my first visit to Xiosphant. Mouth was bleeding all over the place. Look, you can still see the stains.”

Her curly brown hair is longer, and she has a couple of new scars on the left side of her face, right next to her wide, protruding ear. She winces when she moves, and even her smile has thicker lines, but her laugh still sounds the same as ever. I hug her and she leans on my shoulder for a moment.

“Mouth sent me to find you. I’m not letting her out of bed until her lung sounds like a lung again. But she’s been climbing out of her skin with worry. She made me promise to keep looking for you.”

“I can’t believe Mouth is alive. I saw her take at least two bullets at the Palace.”

“Must be tough to be a masochist when your entire body is scar tissue, without a single nerve ending left.” Alyssa seems to laugh, but then she stares at me with her mouth pursed. “She was willing to die for you. She didn’t even hesitate.”

“You should have seen her face when she heard that you were alive, and then when she found out you were in a dungeon. I’ve never seen joy go dark so fast.”

“Huh.” She raises her eyes for a moment, thinking about Mouth, then looks back at me. “I suppose you’re going to just show me what her face looked like. That’s your new thing, right?”

I wince, thinking about Jeremy. All his big plans for me.

“I’m not anybody’s recording device,” I say.

“Good. The only thing that makes life tolerable is that people forget all the stupid things I say as soon as I’ve finished saying them.”

We sit in the tiny hutch under the market square for a while, and I can tell this place brings back conflicted old memories for Alyssa. She mentioned Mouth’s blood, long since dried.

I think something and say it at the same time: “You’ve always been the strongest, out of all of us.”

Alyssa half laughs, half just shakes her head. “Doesn’t feel like it, most of the time. But then I think about my ancestors, and everything they went through for me to be here, and I just find a way. That’s what this town tried to keep you from having, I guess, because they wanted you to be weak. And now look at you.”

The scent of old blood has been thickening since we closed the lid, along with a musty loam funk. Something about this earthiness reminds me of the Resourceful Couriers’ sleep nook.

“Mouth searched for ages for something to believe in, and I couldn’t give it to her,” Alyssa says. “Even this Barney guy, who used to be one of the Citizens, couldn’t. But you did. And now she wants me to join your cult, or your security detail, whichever. But… I can’t be disappointed again. I just can’t. The next disappointment is going to snap me in half.”

I want to say that I don’t need Mouth’s protection, or Alyssa’s either. But Mouth just took two bullets for me. So I say, “What will you do, if Mouth wants to stay with me, and you decide not to?”

“Don’t know. I can’t go home. I guess I could turn mercenary, see if the new Uprising wants a fighter. But I think I need a break from overthrowing governments for a while. I could work at a dive bar. The Low Road, maybe.” She makes a peevish noise with her mouth. “I really thought Bianca was going to be great. She had me convinced. How do I know it’s going to be any different if I decide to follow you?”

I watch her face close enough to see a flicker of hope, in among all the twinges. I don’t want anybody to follow me, or to believe in me. I want to sleep for another five or six turns of the shutters.

But I was sent back here to teach. So I feel the calm settle into me.

“There won’t be any safe place soon,” I say. “Good weather’s gone forever. Imagine if the next cyclone hits one of the farmwheels.”

“All the more reason to lie low,” Alyssa says. “Why should I put my faith in you now?”

I breathe deep, as if I could take time itself into my lungs and hold it there until I’m ready for the next moment to arrive.

“Don’t believe in me,” I say. “Believe in them.”

I spread my arms and unwrap my cloak to let her see, if she wants to see. Alyssa hesitates a moment, then comes forward.

I bring her down easy, remembering all my mistakes, and show her nothing but the play of snow on the wind, until I feel her relax into it. Then I bring her inside the city in the middle of the night, down through walls of ice and living matter, which resonate with all the music from below. I show her the galleries, the huge girders, strengthened by fire from the center of the world, and supported by a shared history that goes all the way back to the taming of the sky. The Gelet approach, not as some inhuman shapes that swarm out of a hostile landscape, but as friends whose tentacles extend in welcome and whose pincers open to let you see inside their hearts. I close in on one memory in particular, of when Rose held up my father’s timepiece, and how this looked to my human eyes as well as to my new senses, all the ways I knew she was keeping faith with me. I don’t try to tell a story, or share a chain of events, I just open up the feeling of being home, in a place where everybody knows your damage, and I let it seep out of me. The memories I have to share are clean and true.

When I disengage, Alyssa holds me tighter, as though she doesn’t want me to ever let go. Her eyes are so wet they look like silver.