The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  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.

/>   PART

  FOUR

  SOPHIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  Bianca shoots me another look. I ignore her.

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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