The City in the Middle of the Night

SOPHIE

I can’t see Hernan’s face, but he has a kink in his neck that keeps his shoulders uneven, and sadness creeps into his voice, even as he gives directions in a jolly tone. Before taking each step, he stares down at the cracks and sawteeth of this mining tunnel. These ancient mines have a hundred dead ends, and countless deep crevasses, and Hernan knows the safe route because a longtime client of the Parlour had inherited a map. Some of the wall struts seem to be starting to buckle.

I touch Hernan’s arm and whisper, “Thanks for helping Bianca and me get out of town.”

“Just keep yourself safe,” he whispers back. “I think I might disappear for a while myself, once I make sure Jeremy, Walter, and Kate are taken care of. This city barely tolerates people like us when things are calm, but during a crisis…”

“I can’t bear to think of the Illyrian Parlour disappearing.” I almost hit my shin on a tiny spur of rock, but stumble aside at the last moment.

“I always knew that place couldn’t last forever.” Hernan sighs. “We’ll preserve what we can, and reopen when we can.”

The end of the tunnel seems so brilliant at first I have to shade my eyes until they adjust.

“This is where I turn back,” Hernan says. “Don’t forget everything I taught you.”

I lean against Hernan’s slate-gray suit jacket and clutch him as tight as I can. His scent comforts me for probably the last time, the same lavender and sandalwood as the Parlour itself. I try to slow down the flow of time, the way Hernan showed me, to keep this moment from ending, because I can’t even bring myself to walk away from the man who gave me a new family and nurtured my mother in spite of herself. The man who showed me how patience could work as much transformation as a million geothermal vents.

“Thank you,” I say again, “for everything.”

“It was the very least I could do,” he murmurs. “I wish your mother could see the brave young woman you’ve grown into. She’d be as proud of you as I am. Goodbye, Sophie.”

Hernan fades into the darkness of the ancient tunnel, while the rest of us climb down to the dry riverbed that marks the outer boundary of the deadlands.

The Old Mother and the Young Father extend past the city walls, but they dwindle into mere foothills ahead of us. Beyond the mountains’ end, there’s only a reddish-gray rocky terrain that stretches past the horizon, with naked darkness swallowing one side and scorching daylight exposing the other.

As soon as we’re past the walls, the Resourceful Couriers start singing. None of them sings the same song, or in tune, but the raucous clash of shanties seems to cheer them up as we trudge and steer their wobbling sled down to somewhat more level ground.

Bianca hasn’t spoken since we left the Illyrian Parlour, but now I hear her voice, even over the six different choruses.

“I have unfinished business in that city.” Bianca doesn’t look back at the sheer stone wall. “I’m going to make sure the sacrifice of Derek and the others counts for something. Even if it takes the rest of my life. I’m going to burn that fucking Palace to the ground.” She grips her backpack in one hand, like a cudgel.

I try covering my eyes and looking down at the regolith, but the sky still hurts. Bigger than dreams, sweeping from cinder gray to acrid white, with no buildings or mountains in the way. Even if I wrench my neck, I could never see the whole thing. The “road” ahead looks lifeless, drained by Xiosphant’s endless water demands, but every now and then I see the head of some burrowing creature emerge. The reddish-gray dirt, marbled with ochre and crimson, becomes either rich embroidery or a bloody shroud, depending on which way I turn my head.

I can still look back and see the city that banished me twice; no matter how long we trudge, the golden Spire still glares at our retreat over a hill covered with tufts of scrubgrass quivering in the cold wind from the night.

When I fantasized about walking beside Bianca again, I always imagined this happening after Xiosphant had thrown away all the old rules in some unimaginable revolution, or when we had grown old and found each other again. But now she and I are together, here and now, and we’re traveling to the City That Never Sleeps, where we can be whoever we want. I can’t even trust this much good fortune.

Except that Bianca won’t even look at me.

Maybe I’ve been dead to her too long, and she can’t accept me back into life. All this unsaid garbage is heaped up between Bianca and me, as tall as the Old Mother. And she just keeps staring, red-eyed, at Mouth, the scar-headed smuggler who tricked her. Bianca hasn’t spoken since she said she had unfinished business in Xiosphant, and she hasn’t looked back once. She marches with emphatic strides and gritted teeth, as if she’s heading toward something rather than away from it.

I can’t hear the city’s chimes anymore. I don’t know what time it is, and I feel as if I’ve been out here for half my life. Only the slight changes in the landscape prove time is still passing. I feel like falling on the ground, pummeling my own knees, or refusing to walk any farther along these endless plains.

Some part of me keeps expecting things between Bianca and me to go back to the way they used to be. She’s supposed to be the one who jolts me out of my silence. She ought to be reminding me that we’re young and we can just laugh at everyone’s stupid limits.

No matter how much she ignores me, I can’t stop leaning into her line of sight and trying to get her attention, like a neglected child.

Ahead of us, a sudden wind sweeps from night to day, shaping loose soil and rocks into a shimmering fist.

My new bracelet makes my forearm itch, and I keep thinking I feel it vibrate. When I touch it with my eyes closed, I almost feel as though I’m traveling through the night instead of the dusk, on four powerful legs. I wonder if Rose, or one of the others, is out there beyond the side of the road, watching our progress. This bracelet feels like a reminder that I have other friends besides the ones I just left in Xiosphant and Bianca. But also, there’s a claim on me. I owe a debt that I haven’t repaid yet.

Sulfuric dust gets in my eyes, nose, and mouth. With no mountain in the way, the night looks like it’s right there, next to me, calling to me. And over to my right, the unquenchable blaze seems ready to burn me to cinders, like my mother.

In front of us, the sled jerks and halts, even though Kendrick, the giant with the face piercings, insists he upgraded the motor back in Xiosphant. Alongside piles of leather, ore, dried fruit, and cakes, the sled also has a quilted denim pouch on top, just big enough for two bodies to squeeze inside. That’s the sleep nook, and we’ll all take turns inside, sleeping two by two. The front of the sled seats two: Omar and Mouth. Four of us walk alongside the sled, two in front and two in back, carrying packs and rifles. Bianca’s had a bit of rifle training, but I don’t even know how to hold mine properly. The youngest smuggler, Yulya, keeps promising to give me some lessons, and maybe also teach me some Argelan—she already tried to explain about something that sounded like “Anchor-Banter,” which she says is a major concept in Argelan culture.

Mouth keeps nudging Omar and pointing out a million dangers on the road, from sinkholes to storms to deadly wildlife charging out of the night. The two of them have a whole shorthand that doesn’t sound like language. I keep watching out for the horseflies that will descend without warning and eat a person whole, or maybe infect you with a flesh-eating disease. Yulya keeps saying you can go from safe to dead in an eyeblink out here.

As soon as we’re away from Xiosphant, Omar adjusts his clothes, lets down his mane of dark hair, and wraps a big scarf with an elaborate pattern around his neck. Some time later, I hear him say to Reynold, “You know, Khartoum built all the computers on the Mothership, and then they got shafted.” Then Omar looks over his shoulder at Bianca and me, because of course you’re not supposed to talk about such things in Xiosphant, and he can sense our discomfort. “Better get used to it.” He laughs. “Everywhere else, you better believe we talk about this stuff.”

To hear Omar tell it, New Shanghai built the Mothership’s life support, food supply, and gardens before leaving Earth, while Calgary built the water reclamation and sewers. And then once the Mothership had launched, those two compartments ended up in a position to demand whatever they wanted—and all this time later, their descendants still rule Xiosphant. That’s not the version we were taught in school, and it makes me wonder what else we were taught that nobody else believes.

Not knowing the time makes me feel young and ancient at once. I don’t know if the shutters are up or down at home, whether people are eating sweet pastries or savory pies, if the children are playing in the scrapyard. I could get used to seeing a dark horizon and a line of bright red occupying the same sky more easily than this unawareness. I don’t even know how weary I am. The knapsack straps gnaw on my shoulders, and I keep zoning out as I walk.

All those people who paid Hernan to lose track of the passage of time could have just come out here, to the deadlands.

A few times, the trail slopes downward, and the night rises up, making a hillock or cliff against the darkness. Maybe I glimpse a shape standing on the cliffside, a big shadow on the edge of night, flexing tentacles and a great pincer, or maybe I’m dreaming on my feet. Even if I could survive walking into the night, the smugglers would think I’d gone delirious if I even tried.

I brought a toothbrush, but there’s no spray and I just have to use some weird soap they gave me. And I’ll never get used to squatting behind a rock to go to the toilet, and then running to catch up with the sled.

Every time I catch sight of Bianca—her still eyes downcast, shoulders caving under her own giant pack—I forget to breathe. She’s the only thing worth looking at, even with the coruscating light coming off the mineral deposits on the rock formations. But she watches her own footfalls, without seeing much of anything.

But then I hear the tattooed man called Reynold mutter in Xiosphanti: “Waste of food. Why do we even bother to keep these two girls alive when there’s no way they’ll make it to Argelo in one piece? If you ask me, we should just—”

I charge forward, overtaking the sled, with my face searing hot and my fist already wound up. My knuckles connect with Reynold’s jaw, and I hear a sound like a door slamming. The big ugly man falls and rolls out of the way of the sled’s wheels right before he gets run over. He looks up and has a good view of the fury in my eyes.

“Sorry,” Reynold blurts. He stumbles to his feet and jogs to catch up to the sled, where Omar laughs in his throat.

“So, that’s going to leave a nice bruise,” says Alyssa, who’s also walking up front. “I like this one. She doesn’t need to talk, she expresses herself just fine.”

A massive storm comes over the horizon ahead of us, but dissipates before we reach it.

I see shapes on the edge of the night, but nothing comes to try its luck—and I never even glimpse a Gelet, though my bracelet still keeps throbbing, especially whenever I veer toward the light.

My entire body throbs from the repetitive motion of stepping on the hard ground, over and over, steadying my load with each footfall. I brought my best pair of mountain-climbing boots, but they’re already wearing out. The sky feels like it’s crushing me under its gray weight.

Maybe I’m dead already, just condemned to keep walking forever, with the angry ghost of Bianca by my side.

Long after I’m sure that I’m going to fall and they’re just going to leave me in the dust, Omar announces it’s time to change sleep shifts. Kendrick and Yulya slide down out of the sleep nook in a smooth practiced motion. But when Bianca and I try to climb inside with the sled rolling, we misjudge our leap, falling in the dirt while everyone laughs and cheers. We make it on the third try.

I’m lying face-to-face with Bianca, in the blindfolded warmth of a quilted tube just big enough for us, resting on all the precious leather. I breathe in a hint of the floral soap Bianca always used, laced with our sweat and the tang of rawhide. My knees rest against her thighs.

“I’m sorry about your friends,” I whisper in Bianca’s ear. “I know you think you could have saved them somehow, but you would have just died with them. And if anything had happened to you, I couldn’t even…”

“Let’s just sleep,” Bianca mutters. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’m sure I won’t be able to sleep, but then I black out. For once, my sleeping mind doesn’t replay scenes of cops pulling me by the armpits, or hunters hauling a wounded Gelet away. Instead, I remember a time that never was, when Bianca and I lived in a hollow space carved into the center of a tall rock face, which was perfectly round on the inside, like a globe. The two of us furnished the space with a hundred kinds of fragrant grass, and brewed hot drinks that took a whole lifetime to steep.

When I wake up, someone’s screaming.

“Omar! Fuck. It got Omar! Fucking, it fucking ate Omar. Kill it! It’s getting away!”

Bianca and I have as much trouble getting out of the sleep nook as we had climbing in, and we tumble onto the hard ground just in time to see the lower half of Omar’s body vanish into the night, in the jaws of a bison. Muscles ripple underneath ochre fur-covered plates, and a forked tail thrashes so hard it carves the air around us. The sled careens, in danger of tipping over, without anyone left to steer. Mouth lunges across Omar’s seat and wrestles with the steering levers.

Kendrick takes a shot at the bison, but misses. Omar’s face has a look of dismay, but not pain, as if the razor-sharp threads in the bison’s mouth severed his lower half too fast for him to feel anything.

The sled stops moving. Everyone just stares at Omar’s head and torso, then at each other. Mouth still leans over from the passenger seat, her hands shaking. She mutters something under her breath, and I realize that it’s a prayer in the original language, Noölang: something about the Elementals, and footsteps in dirt. Next to the driver’s seat, Alyssa’s hands splay, rigid as claws.

mouth

Mouth’s final memory of Omar would always be laughter.

She had been lucky to sit in the passenger seat, on watch, where she could enjoy a long conversation with three participants: Mouth, Omar, and the landscape. They had been reminiscing about a time the sled broke down in the marshes, and Omar had chuckled, remembering how upset they’d all been. And they’d pointed out things to each other, like the furrows in the stabgrass near the day that could be from some creature, or an air-pressure drop that could mean a storm. Plus all the native Earth plants that’d spread since their last trip—like the soybeans, engineered to flourish in local soil, which had mutated into something inedible. Mouth had been thinking that Omar, out of all the Resourceful Couriers, could have been at home among the Citizens. This warm feeling had pushed away some of Mouth’s remaining sickness from the failed Palace heist, like she still had friends and still belonged here.

And then the bison had cut Omar clean in half.

Now Mouth stumbled out of the passenger seat and fell on the clay ground, trying to get away from Omar’s unseeing gaze. She went numb, her vision unfocused, her ears hissing. No sense left but smell.

“Fuck no,” Kendrick was saying. “He was like a brother, he… This isn’t right.”

“He kept me from losing my shit out here, so many times,” Alyssa said.

“Omar… Omar was the heart of this group,” Yulya said. “He never once made me feel like the newest. Even after Jackie and Franz.”

“We need to keep moving,” Kendrick said. “If Omar was alive, he’d say we can’t stop here, where we’re easy targets for more bison attacks.”

Alyssa sighed. “We’ll give him a burial at sea. Mouth, you’ve driven this sled before, right?”

Mouth gave a toss of the head in the Argelan style, meaning yes. “But I don’t want to be in charge.”

Kendrick snorted. “Given that you almost got thrown out for breaking our most important rule, that seems wise.”

Mouth helped Alyssa and Kendrick to lift Omar’s torso, gently, out of the front seat, and wrapped him in some of the cloths secured at the top of their cargo. Every time Mouth glimpsed Omar’s face, she went hypothermic.

There was no time to clean Omar’s guts off the driver’s seat before Mouth sat and got them moving again. Alyssa slid into the passenger seat, cursing in Argelan. The day and the night loomed on either side, like old enemies that could wait forever for their chance to finish you off.

They stayed silent apart from the crunch of their boots and the chugging of the sled, until Reynold spat on the ground. “We’re so screwed without Omar. He was the only one who knew how to make this journey in one piece. Can we even find the boat without him? Does anybody else know how to reach our contact in Argelo?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Alyssa said in a lifeless monotone.

“He’s got a point,” Kendrick said. “What’s the point of hauling all this junk now? The one guy who kept the Resourceful Couriers going is dead.”

“Oh yeah, we’re done,” Yulya groaned. “We’re so done.”

“We’re still moving because we’re too dumb to realize we’re already dead,” Reynold said.

They all kept encouraging each other to panic, until everyone was shouting and crying at once.

“Whoa!” Bianca yelled from behind the sled. She rushed forward and tried to shoot her rifle into the air, but she’d left the safety on. “Whoa whoa whoa! Everybody shut up.”

They all went quiet, and turned to look at Bianca.

“I thought you dicks were supposed to be the greatest smugglers,” Bianca said. “You keep bragging about how you walked through the jaws of death so many times you became their personal dentists. I know it sucks, you lost your number-one guy, but he seemed pretty anal retentive. He must have left contingency plans, right? I bet this asshole knows what you’re supposed to do.”

Bianca was pointing at Mouth, who still felt frozen. Mouth shrugged. “Maybe I know some stuff.”

“See? This lying shitstain may have used me, and betrayed everyone, and gotten my friends killed over a damn poetry book, but she still has her uses.”

Mouth couldn’t look at Bianca, and not just because she had to watch the road.

“I didn’t get anybody killed. The cops were already on high alert when I went out to meet you. Someone else must have turned informant, or gotten themselves caught after curfew.”

“Not the right time to sort this out,” Alyssa said. “But Bianca’s right. We don’t just quit because we lost our leader. We’re smarter than that. We’ve survived so much already.”

“The Resourceful Couriers always complete the job,” Reynold said.

“So? Let’s complete the job,” Bianca said.

Everybody got back into position, flanking the sled, and put on an imitation of their usual swagger. They marched in silence, casting more watchful gazes into the night.

Mouth kept having bouts of lightsickness: stabbing pain behind her face that gave birth to white haloes, whenever she spent too long outdoors, with all this sun and shadow. She tried to concentrate on driving straight, but everything hurt. And then she realized Alyssa was looking at her instead of scanning for more bison, or axle-snapping craters, or those burrowing mud-crabs.

“What is it?” Mouth asked when the first glimmers of marsh appeared. Thank the Elementals, her head was clearing somewhat. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Just thinking,” Alyssa said. “I didn’t realize Bianca was one of those revolutionaries that you were using to get at your poetry book. And now all her friends are dead. And yet she saved all of us from self-destructing just now.”

“I feel bad for her too,” Mouth said. “I wish I could have helped. But loyalty isn’t some sugary confection that you hand out to everyone. And Bianca’s the one who chose to get dragged into politics.”

The marshes lapped at their wheels, and the people walking sloshed with every step. Here come the horseflies.

“Wasn’t your thing political too? Getting this book that belonged to your dead tribe?”

“That was cultural survival.” Mouth swerved to avoid a sinkhole. “It’s different. Politics changes all the time, and it doesn’t matter who’s in charge now versus a generation ago or a generation from now. But culture ought to last forever, if we protect it like we’re supposed to.”

“I guess I just value actual breathing people, who are alive now, more than the writings of people who are already dead.”

“You were the one who wanted to help me steal the Invention—anyway, it’s over. I failed. I’ll never get another shot. And I couldn’t have saved Bianca’s friends. They were doomed before I met them.”

“Maybe the part that worries me is where you care about ghosts more than the people who are right in front of you,” said Alyssa, who sat close enough for the scent of sweat and hair oil to reach Mouth. “You know, with Omar gone, we depend on each other to survive more than ever.”

“I’m here,” Mouth grunted. “I’m not carrying any ghosts. And now that we’re out of that city, I feel more alive than in ages. Walls and other people’s rules fuck me up.”

Mouth needed half her concentration to drive the sled, and the other half to avoid falling into despair. She kept thinking that if she only had the Invention, she could have said the right words over Omar’s corpse, a proper goodbye to one of the few decent people she’d ever known. The Invention would’ve helped her to cope, to understand what she had lost when she was a child, and all the loss since then. But instead, the loss of the Citizens felt like an old wound gone septic.

But Mouth tried to put on a good face for Alyssa, who’d risked her neck waiting for her at the Low Road after the others had gone. They’d been sleepmates for five and a half round trips now, and there was something about your sleep patterns syncing with another person’s that felt like intimacy. Mouth wasn’t sure how to say any of this out loud.

“Do you remember any of it?” Alyssa said a while later. By now, the marshes were a stained-glass mirror spread before them.

“Any of what?” Mouth was grappling with the control for the mudguards.

“Any of that poetry. The poems you were so desperate to get your hands on.”

“I guess. More just the rhythm than any actual words. Snatches.”

Mouth tried to reconstruct one of the verses in her head, and her heart beat so fast she thought she might die. She had a sudden memory of Yolanda leading all of them in one of the songs of gratitude, and had to gasp out loud. That ball of barbed wire was back inside her chest.

“Could you recite some of the poetry now? For me?”

Mouth looked around. None of the other Couriers could hear. Sophie and Bianca were all the way behind the sled, having some fancy student drama.

The marshes swallowed their wheels. The mudguards barely helped. Everyone on foot sank up to their knees. The air smelled like rotten fish and sewage, the marshwater glinted with daylight, and the horseflies swarmed, ready to carry off a piece of you in their mandibles.

“Yeah. Right here. Why not.” This felt like a test, of whether Mouth trusted Alyssa, or whether these poems had been worth so much scheming.

Mouth could only stall for so long.

The Citizens’ poetry was written in the old language, Noölang. The one Mouth remembered best was about an old peach tree growing by some fluke, out in the wild meadows between the towns of Untaz and Wurtaz. Every time the travelers passed, they had fresh peaches, big and purple as life, with juicy strands inside them. Until a small town sprang up around the tree. The townspeople tried to plant an orchard and harvest the fruit according to their own schedules, and make peach bread to sell to other towns.

The next time the travelers passed, the soil was dead, there was no fruit, and the town was gone.

Mouth thought of Yolanda, the Priors, everybody, and felt like throwing up.

“Come on,” Alyssa said. “Speak up. I want to hear. Please.”

Mouth recited, louder and with more oratory, like when they used to do one of their “theater troupe” things, long ago:

Alyssa was nodding. “That was beautiful. You have a lovely voice when you’re not threatening to kill everyone in sight.”

“I should kill people sooner and skip the threats, then. My voice would be fresher.”

Alyssa laughed at that.

“The Citizens.” Mouth hesitated. “They were supposed to give me a name. I was… I was at the age. We had a whole rite of passage. You got your real name around the time your body changed, along with the story of who you were. ‘Mouth’ is just a temporary name, for a person who hasn’t earned one yet.”

“I always wondered why you were called that.” Alyssa shook her head, swatting away horseflies. “So what happened? They all died before they could name you?”

“No.” Mouth wove the steering wheel back and forth. “They kept delaying, until I was almost too old. They said, over and over, that I wasn’t ready. Some test, I don’t know what, I never passed. And then, yeah, eventually they all died.”

Mouth had never talked to anyone about any of this. And talking about it now made her feel much worse—guilty for talking to an outsider, but also heartsick. Nothing Mouth could say might do justice to the reality of the Citizens, or just how completely Mouth had failed them, both then and now. She was out here, on the road, with one horizon blazing and the other drowning everything in its emptiness, and she felt as though the Elementals were watching her. Counting her failures.

A horsefly took a chunk out of Mouth’s hand. They came in swarms, tearing your skin, until you bled all over. Little bastards. Nearby, Reynold waved a bat around, making a splattering noise whenever it connected with two or three at a swing.

“Ugh.” Mouth drove faster through the last of the swamp, so horseflies exploded against the sled’s front window, coating it with their glutinous bodies.

They reached the rocky strip, covered with pebbles, that separated the marshlands from the Sea of Murder. Mouth climbed out of the sled and searched for the hidden skiff. There ought to be a bunch of landmarks, like this one inlet and a thumb-shaped rock, but brand-new thistles (another invasive species) waved their candy-colored heads everywhere and camouflaged the shoreline. You could memorize landscapes all you wanted, but everything was like that peach tree: here one time, gone the next.

Bianca stared out at the Sea of Murder. “It’s just so gorgeous,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures but… this is breathtaking.”

Mouth followed her eyeline, and had to gasp after all. You spent all your time on the Sea of Murder trying not to end up one of the corpses who drift down to the bottom to be eaten by the giant squids that lurked inside the hulks of old warships. But the water smelled crisp and salty, especially nice after the swamp gas. Moonlight spangled the waves—and that was the other thing. You could see the moon. Stars, too. Something about convection, or the air currents, peeled away the clouds that kept an off-white haze overhead everywhere else. The sky turned a dark creamy blue, and you could make out a handful of craters in the shape of a footprint on the moon. Bianca was probably seeing stars with her own eyes for the first time.

“One guy I knew,” said Mouth, “swore he saw the Mothership fly overhead when we were out on the ocean.”

“That’s incredible,” Bianca said. “He could actually see it? I always thought if I saw it, I would make a wish or something. Did he make a wish?”

“I don’t know,” Mouth said. “He was dead a moment later. Because he was looking up at the sky in the middle of the Sea of Murder, instead of paying attention.”

Bianca laughed, which made Mouth like her again.

Mouth searched for ages before she found their boat, and then they had to clean a swan’s nest out of the intakes while Mouth steered the sled gingerly onto the deck. But at last they chuffed across the Sea of Murder. Alyssa steered them along treacherous currents, between two deadly extremes.

Mouth helped Yulya, Kendrick, and Reynold to hoist Omar’s remains and heave them overboard, making a pitifully tiny splash in the cold water. “We’ll drink to his memory in Argelo,” said Kendrick, who was sort of in charge now. “For now, we all stay watchful.”

They were closer to the night than the day, so they could just make out the ice shelf where the sea froze. But if you squinted at the horizon to your right, you could see where the water hit daylight and boiled, creating a wall of steam so high you couldn’t see the top.

SOPHIE

I can’t stop throwing up. This boat is just a crumbling wooden platform built on top of a rusted metal frame, with an ancient polymer sac on its underside, which battery-operated pumps inflate, making a stuttering gasp that sounds more and more feeble. We secured the sled on the deck via a dozen attachment points, and there’s a silty blue platform for the “crew” to stand on, including a panel with the knobs that Alyssa uses to operate the rudder. The deck tilts in one direction and then the other, until I’m sure a giant squid has us in its grip. Seawater sprays up and burns all the places where the horseflies tore me open, and I can’t keep my damn stomach inside. I lean over the unfirm guardrail and spray into the water, with only Yulya’s grip keeping me from tumbling over the side.

I’m going to die, long before we can cross this ocean. I’ve never been so sick in my life, and the laughter of the Resourceful Couriers doesn’t make things any better.

“Ice! Watch out! Ice!” Reynold shouts. Total darkness, almost dead ahead, swallows up the water and the sky. Frozen chunks drift past, bobbing with a rhythm that makes me sick once more.

“I’m trying! I’m trying!” Alyssa wrenches at the controls. “Watching Omar steer this boat is one thing, but steering it myself is—ugh—something else. Grab ahold.”

Just as Alyssa says that, we lurch so hard I fall on top of Yulya, and Bianca slides across the deck so fast she almost falls overboard before I grab her. A scraping sound, loud enough to feel in your teeth, fills the boat as we rub against a blade of ice. Some of the hull plating snags on the ice for a moment, then we’re free. I touch my bracelet and think of Rose.

“Keep it steady,” someone shouts.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Alyssa growls.

No more ice, and the sky lightens enough to see ahead. The other horizon glows once again, sending flashes along the water that hurt my eyes. Jets of bright vapor rise up from where the ocean is always boiling.

Bianca and I both try to scan the horizon for danger, but everything looks equally terrifying. My stomach has subsided and I have a moment of awe at the impetuousness of this ocean, which tosses waves in our path and tries to shake us off. I can’t help thinking of the Sea of Murder as a beautiful giant beast that needs nobody and obeys nothing.

Bianca still isn’t talking to me, and I’m trying not to look at her. But she must have seen the starvation in my eyes, because she comes and stands beside me against the rail as the sea goes calm for once.

“I don’t know how you expect me to deal with you being alive,” she mutters. The pale mist turns her spectral. “After I threw away everything to avenge your death. You’ve been living at some gracious coffeehouse, and meanwhile I’ve just been falling apart, piece by piece.”

The deck plummets without warning, and we both cling to the railing.

I breathe spray and blink salt out of my eyes, and Bianca is blurrier than ever. My longing feels so intense it’s more like raw panic. This could be our last moment alive, and I feel nauseous, and I don’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wanted to spare you, I didn’t want to hurt you.” I have to talk much too loud just to be heard over this wind. “I thought, I don’t know, I thought you deserved to be free, and live your life, and you would have so many other people who cared about you, and you would just forget about me eventually.”

The ocean erupts with gray foam. I think I glimpse dark shapes far beneath the surface, but they’re gone before I can be sure.

The wind surges, but over the boat’s terrible creaking I hear Bianca’s voice. “How could you think I would just move on and find new friends, after what they did to you? How could you even think that? When they took you, they tore a hole in my—”

A wave strikes almost hard enough to flip the boat over and sprays both of us with freezing water. Drenched and gripping the railing with raised knuckles, Bianca still stares at me, tears mixing with the seawater on her face. Every inch of me is soaked, and I’m sure the next wave will snatch me into the depths.

The wind subsides again, by some mercy. For a moment, I have a clear view of the shadowed icebergs on one side, the geysers on the other, and the moon and stars above.

“You’re the most alive person I ever met,” I say, eyes burning, chest closing up. “I was sure you would find a way to keep going. I knew you were going to amaze everybody, with or without me.”

Everything else on the ship holds steady for a moment, but Bianca still clutches the rail and sways with the echoes of turbulence. “Maybe if you’d trusted me, I wouldn’t have been so stupid. But I trusted the wrong person.” She glances at Mouth, who’s too far away to hear us. “And now a lot of good people are dead, and my heart is just this rotten pile. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me sooner? Why couldn’t you come back to me—”

She breaks into sobs and lets go of the railing to hug herself as her shoulders rise and fall. The Resourceful Couriers are busy watching the ocean, so nobody sees me put my arm around Bianca. She stares at me, like she still can’t look at me without reliving my execution and everything that followed.

Then Bianca puts her face on my neck and sobs so hard it feels like she’ll shake herself to pieces. My grip is strong enough to hold her up, and to encompass her crying jag.

“Storm!” Kendrick shouts. “Storm coming!”

I hear the typhoon, without seeing. The roaring starts low and hoarse, then gets louder and shriller. The shrieking feels as though it’s inside my own head.

The Resourceful Couriers rush to cover the sled and the precious cargo as much as possible with their last tarpaulins. Everyone secures themselves to the deck with ropes and chains, and Bianca and I imitate them. I try to wrap my bracelet with some loose twine, though I don’t know if it’s prone to water damage. Alyssa stays put, trying to keep the ship on course.

Bianca has tied a thick rope around her waist, but the rope snaps and she careens down the wet planks, toward the rail. Her mouth is open, but I can’t hear her.

Part of me gets lost in the memory of tumbling down the Old Mother, but then the part that stays hyperfocused in a crisis takes over. I grab her just in time, and hold on to her with all my strength. I still have a chain slung around my belt, lashed to one of the deck’s attachment points.

“I am not letting you fall,” I say, though Bianca probably can’t hear. Her face is pale, her eyes wide and nostrils flared. “I am never letting go, ever again,” I say louder, in her ear, over the screaming wind.

The boat shakes almost onto one side, and she almost slips away, but I tighten my hold.

“I’m here,” I say. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’m going to keep holding on for as long as I have arms. You’re safe in my love.”

I keep saying these things as the winds wrench the ship one way, and then the other. A million jets of water knock us flat on the deck and try to wash us off the ship altogether.

“I will never again let you out of my sight,” I say as the front of the skiff draws upward, like a foot kicking a ball. “I’ll guard you while you sleep.” The hull makes a cracking sound and the motors sputter. “I’ve got you. You’re safe in my love.”

The storm falls away, and we can hear and see again. The sea and sky shimmer—blues and greens and reds that leave afterimages even when I close my eyes—because we’ve drifted too close to the day. The wall of steam soars ahead of us: taller than mountains, wider than cities. I can’t look at the white churn without squinting, and my face feels burnt. Alyssa isn’t sure she can steer, with all this damage to the undercarriage, but she fights with the controls until we turn away from the cauldron. The engine sputters. I’m startled to be alive. I was sure that “love” would be the final word I ever spoke.

I don’t know if Bianca heard anything I said, and I’m scared to look at her face. I hear her disentangle herself from the railing while I keep my eyes on the simmering ocean and the dark clouds congregating over the waves in the distance. Bianca moves closer, and then her hand reaches out and touches mine. I turn to face her.

The pure white light of day, filtered through steam, bathes Bianca’s face. Her eyes are all pupil, opaque with tears, and her hair looks electric. She smiles at me, still weeping softly, and takes several gusts of warm sea air in through her mouth. Her hand remains on top of mine as we veer back into the middle of the ocean and the air turns damp and chilly once more.

mouth

The pirates sounded their horn just as the skiff got back on course, tearing through the air like a bison’s attack cry. Fucking pirates. They approached in three tiny fishing boats, with barbed hooks made of rusted iron attached to the gunk-smeared prows. Seven or eight scrawny people to a boat, some of them holding rifles or harpoon guns. Their floating jack-knives could outmaneuver the skiff even without storm damage, and they moved in a pincer formation that they must have practiced.

“We’re gonna be surrounded,” Reynold said. “Are you guys seeing this?”

“We see it,” Kendrick grunted.

“Those attachments on the front are sharp enough to rip a giant chunk out of our hull,” Alyssa said. “If they get us with one of those, we’ve got a long swim ahead.”

Mouth raised her own rifle and tried taking a shot at the main ship, the one in the center, but her aim was for shit with these unruly waves. She couldn’t stop remembering how Alyssa had accused her of caring more about ghosts than the people around her. There had to be some way Mouth could prove that she had everyone’s back, just like always.

These pirates were just stupid fishing people who’d overfished their shore, so they’d turned to other ways of surviving. The Couriers’ skiff must have been the first vessel to cross their path in ages, and Mouth pictured them rushing to bolt these corroded abominations onto their sturdiest trawlers.

“So what do we do? Maybe if we surrender they’ll just take a cut of our cargo and let us go,” Reynold said.

Alyssa shook her head. “They’ll take everything. Ships don’t come along often enough to make it worth just collecting a tariff.” She looked at the three boats, bobbing in and out of view, and seemed to reach a decision. “Everybody hold your junk, and if you need to scream, do it in your own head.”

Alyssa gave a little smile, like someone hatching a prank, and wrenched the controls so the skiff swerved toward the ice. The ship listed so far it seemed about to flip over, and the railing seemed about to buckle under Mouth’s weight. Then they flattened out again and sailed into near darkness, with just a tiny glow to orient them.

A dense mist rose from the freezing water and turned everyone into an outline, like a reflection in a plate-glass window. You couldn’t see the ice crags in the skiff’s feeble lights until they were dead ahead. Alyssa kept jerking the rudder to and fro, and the boat quaked.

The sound of a thousand men grinding their teeth came from beneath. “We’re going to need a new hull,” said Yulya.

“The hull will make it,” Kendrick said. “Remember how carefully Omar maintained that undercarriage? We can handle this.”

“If we can just keep it level, we can slip past them,” Alyssa muttered.

The claws of ice kept scraping against the skiff’s hull, and someone on deck was moaning. These two sounds, together, became much more unnerving than either on its own. Mouth caught sight of Sophie clutching at something on her wrist, like a talisman.

A shape loomed in front of the skiff, and Mouth shouted before she even recognized one of the tricked-out fishing vessels. Besides the lance bolted onto the front, the other major modification they’d made to the ship was a skull, painted in phosphorescent green, on its hull, with unevenly shaped eye sockets. Seven people stood on the other ship’s deck, two of them holding range weapons, and they looked just as startled to have found their prey here.

Alyssa veered to try to avoid the pirate ship as the man standing closest to the prow raised a rifle. Mouth already had her own rifle out and hit the man before he could get off a shot. He toppled into the ice water. One of the surviving pirates on the boat fired another rifle, but missed.

The pirate boat still raced right toward the Resourceful Couriers, with its metal thorn aimed at the weakest part of the skiff’s hull.

“We’re super screwed this time,” Yulya said.

“This was such a bad idea,” Reynold hissed.

The cockeyed skull came close enough that you could count its teeth. Then it stopped and flipped sideways, like the skull’s owner had decided to take a rest. They must have hit one of those icebergs dead on. The skull’s smile looked whimsical, philosophical, accepting an unjust fate with a chuckle.

“We got them,” Alyssa whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

“Shit. We’re in the water! We’re sinking. It’s too cold to swim. I can’t feel my—somebody help. Please, somebody. Please help.”

Everybody looked at Kendrick, who shrugged.

“Even if I wanted to help those bastards,” said Alyssa, “I don’t think we can.”

The screams of drowning pirates fell away, leaving nothing but the crunch of ice against the hull, and Kendrick’s low curses as the skiff became less and less seaworthy.

“I can’t believe this is going to work,” said Reynold. “Just a little farther, and we can come around behind them and make for the Argelan shore. No fuss.”

Mouth didn’t see the second pirate boat until it was too late, and her warning shout came right before she felt something break irreparably under her feet.

Shouts and cheers came from the other ship, and its crew rushed forward, guns and long knives already raised.

Mouth kept thinking about her conversation with Alyssa, in the middle of fighting hand-to-hand with eight half-starved pirates. You care more about ghosts than the people around you. Maybe Mouth did feel bad for leading Bianca on, or the way her scheme had gotten the other Couriers stuck in the middle of a citywide freakout. Or maybe that guilt was just a poultice over the much deeper wound of failing to rescue the Invention, and knowing the Citizens would be forgotten when Mouth died (soon, most likely).

The pirates had abandoned their rusty guns because they had the Resourceful Couriers surrounded and that spelled a nontrivial chance of friendly fire. Mouth managed to get off three shots at actual targets, and even injured one young woman with flowing auburn hair and a strong brow who cursed and knocked the gun out of Mouth’s hands with her unhurt arm. Mouth headbutted the gorgeous pirate and felt her nose crack, then elbowed her in the neck. The freezing sea air clogged in your throat like woodsmoke, turning every breath into a misery.

“My name is Jenny, and I’m in charge here. This is our ocean, and you fuckers are trespassing,” shouted a tall woman with a huge mane of black hair and some mix of Zagreb and Ulaanbaatar features. “We’re taking your cargo either way, but we’ll spare anyone who surrenders right now. This is a one-time offer.” Nobody even responded.

Mouth usually did most of her best thinking in the midst of battle, when everything was simple for once. But this time, her thoughts were a mess, and this foggy deathtrap wasn’t making anything better.

The fight sprawled from the Resourceful Couriers’ skiff to the pirate ship that had rammed them. Freezing water pooled around their feet, sloshing as Mouth kicked a stocky man with more beard than face and the kind of bad skin that comes from serious vitamin deficiencies. Mouth’s foot connected with the man’s stomach and sent him sprawling on the wet deck, and then Mouth trampled him on the way to punch a large hair-knotted man with both fists.

“You’re all dead,” Captain Jenny kept shouting, even as her voice grew hoarse from screaming into the sea wind. “You’re going to feed the squids. You fucking smug city people, I’m going to kill you all.” She had a big corkscrew-shaped blade with a handguard, and Kendrick howled as she stabbed him in the leg.

Everything stank of rotten fish and human entrails.

Mouth had seen too much death and not enough life, and maybe that was as bad as not letting in both the night and the day. Her knee connected with the face of the knot-headed pirate, who was already bent double, and he went overboard into the icy surf. Those young radicals, Derek and the rest, had been doomed from the start. But Mouth found herself getting stuck on the part where she’d encouraged Bianca to leap into the abyss in spite of all her doubts. Or maybe Mouth only felt remorse because her efforts hadn’t done a thing to preserve the Citizens’ memory.

Kendrick was losing a lot of blood from his leg wound, and Mouth was standing over him, holding Jenny by the throat. The pirate’s corkscrew sword was coated with blood.

What was the point of feeling guilty, when people just kept hurting each other all the time?

Mouth tightened her forearm against Jenny’s neck. “Time to close down the show. We’re all going to drown here.”

“My people live on this ocean. We eat and sleep and fuck these winds and these currents.” Jenny laughed. “I never expected to die any other way.”

She managed to pivot and bite Mouth’s ear, so hard you could both smell and taste the blood. Mouth managed to get a foot on her instep and wreck her balance. Jenny fell mid-swing of the corkscrew blade and toppled over the side of the boat into the cold water.

But Mouth had leaned too far, with too many limbs off-balance, and so went overboard too.

Mouth grabbed at the slippery edge of the boat, suspended over blades of ice that moved faster than her eye could track. Her fingers clutched the rotten wood, and only managed to collect wet splinters. Terror chilled Mouth’s insides, and the tastes of bile and sea foam blurred together. All the regret churning around her head had left her too raw. She couldn’t help screaming.

She almost got a purchase on the lip of the Couriers’ skiff, but the metal crumbled. She clutched instead at the barb jutting off the pirate boat, her feet kicking just above the sharp ice teeth. When the last of the Citizens died, their lore would die too, like all those songs they had forced her to memorize. Mouth probably should have tried to write some of it down, but couldn’t manage that old-fashioned script. Everything the Citizens ever taught, everything they ever learned in all the generations, wiped out forever.

Nobody could hear her, and tears pooled in her scars.

A hand reached down, then stopped. Bianca leaned over. “I should just let you get cut to fucking pieces by the ice,” she said. “I should just watch you die.”

“Please, please help me up. Please, I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”

Mouth would have expected, without question, to meet this situation with dignity. The Resourceful Couriers always faced death with a “well, fuck” attitude, like they’d expected to die, and now was as good a time as any. Mouth had almost died before, with a heart of stone. But this time, fear owned her—or more like, fear was building a house inside her, one with too many windows. Mouth wanted to try to get her dignity back, but she couldn’t stop whinnying.

“I can’t believe I trusted you. All your talk about loss and fighting back,” Bianca spat. “I thought you were for real. You were just laughing at me for actually daring to believe in something.”

Mouth’s fingers froze and lost their strength, and she kicked against the side of the boat in vain. Bianca’s raw hatred looked like an amplification of the face she’d worn in the shadows of the oatmeal restaurant all those times Mouth had been working on her. Mouth heard herself back in Xiosphant, telling Bianca to stay angry, and her vertigo and chills grew worse, as though she were falling an infinite distance to a bed of frozen knives.

“I wasn’t laughing,” Mouth babbled. Her fingers slipped. “I never laughed at you. I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s my fault. Everything’s my fault. I’m a shitty person. I don’t deserve to live, but I can’t die like this. Please.”

“You’re horrifying,” Bianca said. “I can’t even stand to touch you.” But she reached down and grabbed Mouth’s wrist with both hands. She leaned so far she was in danger of falling herself.

Sophie appeared alongside her friend, and then her strong hands had Mouth’s other arm. Mouth spilled onto the deck of the damaged pirate boat, coughing up a ruckus. The deck was flooding, four or five centimeters deep already.

Mouth pulled herself together, still looking at Bianca. “I would have done anything for my people, the same as you would for yours. I don’t know why you thought I was going to risk my life for your cause. You can’t control anyone unless you know what they want.”

Bianca recoiled. Then her face closed up, and she took on the same dead-eyed expression that Mouth had seen on the faces of so many practiced killers. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll try and remember that.”

Back on the Resourceful Courier’s skiff, four or five meters away, Alyssa faced off with the last pirate. “Hey, can I get some help over here?” But the pirate had surrendered by the time Mouth, Sophie, and Bianca arrived.

“There’s no point.” The pirate, a pale Zagreb-looking dude with a long beard and no eyebrows, was throwing all of his weapons into the thick water on deck. “No point fighting any more. My name is Gerry. I surrender. We’re all dead anyway. I hope your stupid cargo was worth it.”

So the survivors of all this were Mouth, Alyssa, Bianca, Sophie, Yulya, Gerry, and the badly injured Reynold and Kendrick. You couldn’t even tell how Reynold was injured, he was just red all over, leaning on the sled with no strength. “I used to have a lot more blood. Funny the things you take for granted.”

“You idiots chose to fight,” Gerry said. “We were fighting for our whole community. You don’t even know what it’s like to grow up hearing the shallow splash of fishing boats coming home empty, and seeing the exhaustion on people’s faces, the sheer inability to keep trying to pull life out of these waters.”

“You can just shut up,” Yulya spat at Gerry. “You fuckers attacked us.”

The skiff and Red Jenny’s boat were well on their way to sinking. “We need to get as much of the cargo onto that boat as possible.” Alyssa gestured at the remaining pirate boat, which looked ancient but still seaworthy.

But Sophie, the mute girl with the big dark braids, pointed while grabbing Alyssa’s arm.

At first, Mouth didn’t see what Sophie was pointing at, but then it made sense: she was pointing at nothing.

“That’s full night.” Alyssa cursed. “We’re too late.”

How are you supposed to prepare for death, anyway? The Citizens had done a whole hospice thing, where you were supposed to make peace, and leave the world the same way you left your campsite: clean and empty, except for whatever knowledge might be helpful to those who came after you.

The others were discussing whether they should all get in the pirate boat and hope it held up better than the skiff. But no boat could survive hitting the ice shelf.

“Wait,” Mouth said. “The sled. The sled has those big tires that we took off an old all-terrain rover.”

“Help me untie it,” Alyssa said. They worked quickly, Mouth, Alyssa, and Sophie, cutting the ropes that secured the sled to the skiff. And then they helped Reynold and Kendrick into the driver’s seat. Everyone else climbed on top of the cargo, crawling under the tarps.

The impact of the skiff’s metal underside against the thick ice floor almost knocked Mouth off the sled. “Hang tight!” shouted Alyssa. The sled rolled off the doomed skiff and hit the ice with so much force Mouth’s jaw and spine contracted. Then they slid forward.

“I can’t see where we’re going,” said Kendrick.

“Can we stop?” Alyssa said. “Try and stop.”

“I’m trying!”

They kept sliding on the ice, and their headlights provided no guidance. Mouth kept wanting to crawl out from under the tarp and help, but couldn’t. At last the sled hit a snowbank, with another bone-splitting impact.

SOPHIE

I wrap myself around Bianca, trying to shield her from the freezing wind, and I try not to think about the look on her face when she almost let Mouth die. The night feels even colder here than near the Old Mother, thanks to the frigid sea air. Every breath feels like swallowing an open flame. My eyelashes turn solid, like needles, and my lips freeze. Mouth and Alyssa wave electric torches, but everyone else fades into the mist.

Someone tugs my wrist, hard enough to jolt me. I don’t even realize at first that the bracelet has woken up and is trying to pull me deeper into the night. I nearly stumble away from Bianca and the others before I get my footing.

Rose gave me this bracelet so I wouldn’t be alone, no matter where I went, and there has to be some way I can call for help. The bracelet exerts more pressure, trying to coax me into deeper darkness, and I keep trying to figure out the interface.

Alyssa has the tarp from the top of the sled, and she wraps it around all of us, even Gerry the pirate. We all huddle together, sharing as much warmth as we can.

My bracelet stops yanking at my wrist, and instead makes a low warbling that carries over the squalling wind. As if my message has been received.

“What the hell is that sound?” Alyssa says.

I whisper to Bianca, “I managed to contact a friend of mine. They’re sending help. We’re going to be okay. But when they show up, everyone needs to stay calm.”

“What are you talking about?” Bianca says aloud, each syllable chopped up by shivers. “What friend? How could you have friends out here?” But I just shush her, because I can’t draw enough breath to explain, even if I knew how.

So Bianca just repeats my message to the others, and adds, “You idiots shouldn’t do anything stupid. Just keep it together.”

Everybody is too cold to talk, except for Mouth, who murmurs something that I can’t make out at first. Then I realize Mouth is speaking Noölang, which we studied at the Gymnasium—something like, “Keep my face a secret until you are ready to make a safe place for me, oh Elementals, keep me unknown even to myself unless I can know my friends by the sound of their feet on the road. Keep me cold naked unless I warm myself with compassion. Keep the road straight. Keep me safe between day and night in your eyes.”

“I knew you guys were maniacs, but shut up already,” Gerry the pirate stammers.

“You shut up,” Alyssa hisses at him. “You don’t get to have opinions.”

My bracelet gives a louder, more insistent spasm, and I look up to see soaring mounds gathered around us on all sides: a whole group of Gelet, though I’m the only one who can identify them by faint torchlight. Bianca yelps with surprise, and the others all stiffen. But then the Gelet lean forward and wrap each of us with the same mossy blankets that warmed me after I was banished into the night.

I nudge Bianca, until she says, “These are, uh, Sophie’s friends. They’re here to help us.”

Everybody tries to spit out questions, but I just ignore them. The Gelet nudge us forward, and we push the sled along the ice with us. Next to me, Mouth falls face-first on the ice, picks herself up, and keeps going.

I can’t make out enough details, with these feeble torches, to tell if any of these Gelet is Rose. Even if I could see better, I still probably couldn’t tell. I sense their tenderness, their concern, as they usher me forward through uncountable meters of snow. I can count on a few fingers the number of humans who have cared for me as much as these night-dwellers seem to. I’m conscious, even through my frost-drunk haze, that my debt to the Gelet has doubled.

Just as I’m feeling as though we’ve been walking our whole lives and any memories from before must be false, I see a glimmer on the horizon. Everything wakes up and gains substance. We come into the twilight on the far shore of the Sea of Murder, close enough to see the swaying of the waves and the distant notch of the last pirate boat.

“Well, I guess we made it after all.” Mouth sounds deliberately casual, like this was a lark.

“Sea of Murder, always a rare pleasure,” Kendrick grunts, his leg still bleeding despite his crude attempt at a bandage.

The Gelet are already retreating back into the night, tentacles swirling and pincers flexing, but not before Bianca gets a good look at them and squeezes my arm in shock.

Now that our faces are visible once more, I turn and smile at Bianca. I still don’t know if she heard anything I said during that storm at sea, and the longer this goes on the more I wish I could unspeak those words. Before Bianca looks away, I glimpse the same stony expression as when she almost let Mouth fall onto the blades of ice.