She looks up and her eyes widen, and I feel her teeth sink into the fat of my thumb. She has too many tears for me to see her reaction. Her nostrils flare, and the bulky stock of her gun juts between us. I freeze, the old tremors rising. I have a million things to say, but I can’t speak. I slowly lift my hand away.
“Sophie.” Bianca’s breath feels hot enough to scald the skin off my hand. “You’re— You’re— Am I going delirious at last? Is this delirium? Am I just dreaming? Say something. Fuck you, say something now.”
“I’m alive,” I whisper. “It’s me. I’m alive. I’m here.” Everything in this room smells of laundry detergent and stale cakes and tea and comfort.
“How? How can you…” Bianca bites her tongue, the way she always used to when she worked through a logic problem, twice as fast as anybody else. “Oh shit. They locked you up. Didn’t they? You’ve been in some dark cell this whole time. I thought they killed you, forced you outside, but all along you’ve been in some dark hole, and I didn’t even look for you. Did you only just escape? What happened?” She wheezes a little. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have searched for you.”
I shake my head. “It’s not … they didn’t lock me up. They tried—they tried to execute me, but I didn’t … I got away.”
I’m still sitting on top of Bianca, half straddling her. I feel her heart convulse, as the realization spreads across her face: I was alive and free this whole time, and I chose to let her think I was dead.
“It’s not like that.” I’m still juddering, unsteadying myself. “I just couldn’t come back to you. I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way, and I…” I don’t have the words to explain how the fear immobilized me whenever I tried to reveal myself to her.
Bianca looks forlorn through the sheen of tears, as if she just lost me in a whole new way. Or even worse, as if she’s just realized that I was never really hers, and this realization is costing her some part of herself. Her expression resolves into something as blunt and unbending as the rifle in her bed.
“Fucking … I would have broken everything, I would have killed anybody, to have you back here with me. I would have torn it all down. I can’t even tell you. And you were just alive the whole time, and you, what? You didn’t bother to let me know.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammer-whisper.
My mouth is a desert, but the rest of me is chilled. I know for sure that even if we survive this, she’ll never smile at me the way she used to.
Bianca sits up, though I’m still pinioning her lower half, and she raises her arms as if she wants to embrace me, but she can’t.
“I would have torn it all down,” she says again. “I still might.”
I’m clutching her bedcovers with one hand. “I came to warn you. You can’t trust that smuggler. Mouth. She’s just using you. I heard her telling her friend.”
Another moment of Timefulness—because everything has changed, the world is all askew, and it will never turn back.
“I should have known. That bitch. I should have seen the signs, but I wanted this too much.” Bianca pushes me off her and jumps out of bed, already dressed, including boots and a belt crammed with supplies. “She knows the whole plan. We have to warn everyone.” Bianca heads for the open window, gun slung over one shoulder, with its long handle and fluted barrel.
“Wait,” I say, but she’s already swinging herself out the window and pulling herself down, the same way I climbed up.
Bianca is already halfway across the residential quarter of campus by the time I catch up with her. “I seriously have been living in a dark tunnel since they took you away,” Bianca hisses. “I can’t even tell you. Where the hell have you been hiding?”
Bianca walks too fast for me to catch up, talks too loud for curfew. She doesn’t wait for an answer, if I even had one.
“How long have you been hanging around, and just not letting me out of all this grief? How long?” She spits on the ground. “And then you decide to show up, right when I’m finally ready to avenge you. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me?”
I don’t know what to say, and she’s moving away too fast, and the sky is much too bright here, and we’re out in the open where anyone could see us. I have to shut my eyes for a moment without slowing my march, to keep the memory at bay. I feel certain this is our final moment, and I have one last chance to rebuild our friendship, if I can just say the right thing. The sunswept pavement burns my eyes, without any other people to cast shadows.
I grab Bianca by the arm and she turns to face me, so I can see the pain still only starting to unfold inside her.
“I thought of you every moment,” I say, as she pulls me forward. “But I couldn’t come back to where—”
We round the corner, and a Curfew Patrol is standing in front of us. Two men and a woman, carrying much newer rifles than Bianca’s, with opaque helmets and vests just like the police who paraded me through the streets. My lungs, my heart, turn to stone.
Bianca seizes me and pulls me back around the corner, and then the two of us are sprinting, as the leader of the patrol shouts a warning. I spot one of the city’s narrow crosswise alleyways, on the right, and drag Bianca inside just as the first gunshots slice through the air. We keep running—ducking under a low canopy, jumping over rotten boxes, veering into a long tiny space between two rows of buildings—as the alarms sound and more boots land on the streets around us.
mouth
Mouth had gone out in Xiosphant during curfew a few times before, so she was prepared for the wide-open eeriness of empty streets as she crept out of the Low Road. But this time, the city teemed with people wearing black suits with corrugated sleeves and carrying guns and batons. As if the whole town had decided to play dress-up instead of sleeping.
Mouth headed for the dark side of town, first by following the same alley the Couriers had used to move the sled uptown, and then by climbing a hemp-shrouded scaffolding that ran lengthwise along the front of a grand old building with apartments above shops. Five meters off the ground, Mouth crept along the jostling side boards as Curfew Patrols, cops, and even soldiers marched under her feet. Mouth had taken far too long to travel just a few blocks, and she had another kilometer and a half to cross before the rendezvous point, that old paint factory.
Hand-carved granite figures on a ledge acted out the stages of life, from birth to apprenticeship to marriage to mastery to death, and their giant bulbous faces leered at Mouth as she crept along the scaffolding. In the background of each panel, complicated designs showed how each stage of life corresponded to part of the cycle of sleep and work, from shutters-down to shutters-up. Mouth remembered Bianca saying that she used to think the root of all Xiosphanti oppression was planted in culture and ideology, until they’d taken her friend away—and then Bianca had decided that violence was the real answer.
Stuck between these educational gargoyles above, and the police below, Mouth couldn’t find a clean way to separate ideology from force.
One of Derek’s people must have gotten caught, or turned informant. So these thugs were going to tear the whole town apart, twice, to catch anyone who might have ever had a subversive dream. Mouth hoped the Resourceful Couriers had found a good place to lie low. From overhead, the people and their weapons made a shape like hinges, and Mouth tried to tell herself a story about how she could still turn this to her advantage.
She needed to find Bianca, in whom she’d invested so much time, and then secure her help getting inside the Palace. Bianca might even lean on Mouth harder than ever, with everything falling apart.
But when Mouth reached the paint factory, choking on the formaldehyde mist, there was no sign of Bianca. The one person who you’d expect to show up no matter what, to berate everyone else for being even a little tardy, and she wasn’t here. Instead, Derek stood in the middle of the maintenance pod, with nine people around him, including Vicki, Jeff, and the Gumdrops, and he was giving them a rousing speech. “We can’t give up now. This is
still our moment. They’re still not expecting a strike against the Palace.”
If Mouth could just snag those bombs and get them to the Palace herself, she could still use them to get inside. She could slip past those patrols and get to the vault while the authorities were focused on the Uprising’s last stand in this paint factory. But Mouth scanned the room, and poked into the crawlspace and storage lockers behind her, and found nothing. Derek probably hadn’t been dumb enough to store the explosives inside the same building where he held his strategy meetings.
Derek spotted Mouth searching a gantry, a half level up from the maintenance pod, and shouted, “Mouth, get down here. We need to figure out a new strategy.”
She nodded, then turned and climbed back out of the building without saying a word. Mouth was wasting time here without Bianca to vouch for her, and these people were already dead. She heard Derek shouting for her to come back as she turned sideways to squeeze into one of those tight throughways between buildings, trying to put as much distance as she could between herself and the Uprising.
“Shit.” Vicki’s voice still carried. “She just left us. Without even saying anything.”
The building opposite the Uprising HQ had a door with a busted lock, and Mouth climbed the stairs and stole down a filthy unlit corridor to an unshuttered window that looked down on the street, where people in riot gear clustered like a cloud of horseflies. They had the paint factory surrounded and were parking two armored lorries in the street.
Even from this distance, Mouth could hear Derek’s hectoring voice from inside the paint factory, though she couldn’t make out any words. Then an exchange of gunfire. What if Mouth just ran toward the Palace right now and slipped inside while everyone in a uniform was distracted? The Xiosphanti authorities would grow exponentially dumber as the crisis grew out of control. She could still do this.
No way Mouth could leave without the Invention. She could see herself pulling it off a shelf inside that vault, hoisting it, tucking it under one arm. The Invention would make sense of everything, justify all the walls of shit.
Just as Mouth was getting up the nerve to run headlong into the temperate zone, she heard a noise that was so loud it had no other characteristics besides loudness. She lost her balance and crashed halfway out the window. Then Mouth saw a coil of smoke rising up from a few blocks away: Derek’s bombs had gone off early.
As the police stormed the disused paint factory where the Uprising had holed up, the sound of gunfire became more continuous and drowned any further shouts. Someone turned and saw Mouth looking down at them. A bullet caromed off the wall nearby, and Mouth turned and ran back the way she’d come.
A tower of smoke still undulated, a deeper ash gray against the night sky. Mouth heard Derek’s voice one last time, some shout of defiance that ended midsyllable with another chorus of gunshots that descanted on the ones closer at hand.
This was not going to work out.
Mouth heard voices from the stairway. Cops, coming up to search this building. Mouth shrank against the wall, staying low, until they reached her, and then she stabbed one in the leg with her longest knife and elbowed the other in the neck. They both went down, and Mouth helped herself to the nightstick that the one with the leg injury was carrying. She left both cops unconscious but alive, and then a third officer came up the stairs. Mouth swung the nightstick, and the officer ducked, leaving herself open to the knife in Mouth’s other hand. Mouth stabbed the cop’s thigh and arm in quick succession, trying to avoid any arteries, and then drove the woman’s head into the wall.
The musty smell of blood unsettled Mouth’s stomach, already queasy from paint fumes, and she missed a stair. This staircase was arranged in a spiral, around a central pillar, because everything had to be circular in this stupid town. Mouth slid down the stairs on one leg, around the next curve, and spotted the two cops coming up the stairs before they saw her. She left them in a heap, leaning against the inside of the stairwell.
By the time Mouth reached the street, she had other people’s blood all over her. Her whole body ached from the exertion, but also from the draining away of her righteous purpose. She kept trying to tamp down the awareness that she’d blown it, the Palace job had ended before it even started, those smug bastards still had custody of Mouth’s heritage. She should just let the police take her, because where could she go now? She took a breath as she pushed through the building’s front door and forced herself to keep walking.
When the rattling came from beneath her and around her, Mouth mistook it for another weapon. Then she stuck her head out and saw the metal sheaths coming off all the nearby windows. She muttered a quick thanks to the Elementals, and then lost herself in the swarm of people in coveralls and neat suits who had erupted into the streets, on their way to work.
Nothing stopped the Xiosphanti rank and file from keeping the gears revolving, not even a citywide emergency. Mouth couldn’t help thinking of those sculptures on the side of the building, with their bulging red eyes and slanted grins. She pulled out that stupid Xiosphanti hat, squished it down onto her head, and stayed low inside a group of farmwheel bureaucrats as they pushed past the police cordons.
* * *
The Low Road sat empty, except for a few cups and plates, and the dust caught in the light from the big front window. No sign of the Resourceful Couriers. Mouth went about searching for clues, but just then Alyssa came up from the cellar, with her backpack and Mouth’s. “There you are,” she said. “The other Couriers left already. Things got too hot around here.”
“You should have gone with them,” Mouth grunted and took her backpack from Alyssa.
“If I had, we might have left town without you. And I couldn’t just leave you. I promised.” She looked closer. “Oh shit, you’re covered with blood.”
“Not mine.”
Mouth let her backpack fall long enough to fold her arms around Alyssa, who leaned against her bloody torso. She felt warm, and her cheek was soft against Mouth’s shoulder. But her body was tense.
“I should have let Omar stop you. I was sure you must be dead. Shit, I thought we were dead, a few times. They’ve been dragging people in the streets for even looking unusual, let alone foreign.”
“This town knows how to throw a party,” Mouth said.
Alyssa didn’t laugh. When Mouth pulled away, Alyssa had a wan expression, like when she’d said she was ready to retire from smuggling.
“So, did you get it? Your artifact from the Palace vault?”
“No. Didn’t even get close.” Just saying this aloud gave Mouth a barbed knot inside her chest. “They probably have a hundred items that they plundered from other cultures sitting inside that vault, and nobody even bothers to look at any of it.”
“I’m sorry.” Then Alyssa looked over her shoulder. “We’d better join the others.”
Xiosphant felt like a whole different city. Everywhere Mouth looked, police lorries blocked every major intersection, and people blurted instructions into megaphones until all their voices merged into a shrill din. The air tasted different: cordite, static electricity, and the tang of pepper spray instead of the usual starchy turpentine fug.
The sky had already flashed blue and red, and a few chimes had rung by the time they managed to reach the Illyrian Parlour, where the other Resourceful Couriers were fidgeting.
The marmot, Cyrus, had curled up on a plump cushion in the corner and was squinting at all of these intruders, flexing his snout.
“There she is.” Omar was on his feet, coming toward them. “Time for an explanation. First you start spouting political slogans, and then this whole town loses what little mind it ever had. We damn near got skinned alive out there. What have you been playing at? I’m still tempted to leave you behind.”
Mouth hadn’t managed to think of a good lie. “Uh … I didn’t get involved in politics. I swear. It wasn’t that. It’s just … You know how I was raised by nomads?”
“You only mention that fact every time I
see you,” Omar said.
“Well, they’re all dead. Nothing left of them. Nothing to show that we were ever here, except for me, and you might have noticed I’m not looking too durable. But I got wind that there was … an artifact locked inside the Palace vault. The last surviving trace of the Citizens. I wanted to try and snag it. And it went kind of bad.”
Omar was already rolling his big brown eyes, like he didn’t have time for this idiocy. Which was a good sign. “Just promise me this was a one-time foul.”
“I promise,” Mouth said. “I had to try. I failed. If I live long enough, I’ll put this behind me.”
Omar shrugged, and was about to say something else, like driving home the message that Mouth was on probation now, or this could never happen again. But just then, the proprietor emerged from some inner room with cups of spiced coffee, leaves floating on top. Hernan was wearing a plain dark suit instead of the silk brocade he had last time.
“So, I trust we have a deal.” Hernan handed the coffees around, with a little smile. “I show you another route out of town, a disused mining track big enough for you and your vehicle. And you bring along one of my employees, who’s drawn some undue attention from the local law enforcement. Plus her friend.”
“Sure,” Omar said. “If they can pull their weight. Then yes.”
Hernan gestured, and two girls stepped forward out of the back room. One was Bianca, who glared at Mouth, as if Mouth could somehow be to blame for everything falling apart. Eyes like broken weapons, shoulders sagging under the weight of her big rucksack. Mouth tried to say something, but she wouldn’t reply.
The other girl Hernan ushered forward was the mute, the one who’d followed Mouth around. She looked at Mouth as if she was seeing pure evil for the first time ever.
Mouth looked at Alyssa, who just shrugged, as if reminding her that she was lucky to be here at all.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 11
