For some reason, I still haven’t woken up all the way, even though her voice and her stiff posture alarm me. I ought to be wide awake, alert, but I feel half present.
“What plan?” I whisper. “What are you talking about? There’s no way back—”
Bianca rolls her head and shushes me. “You can’t ask me that. This is why I said you need to trust me. I’m risking everything, even having this conversation with you. People in this city are so paranoid, they’ll lose their minds if they find out what I’m doing.”
Everything shrinks in on me, as if the shadows deform and I’m about to be crushed.
She leans closer and I feel her breath on my face. “Remember when I said I have unfinished business in Xiosphant? We both do. You were just telling me you still feel haunted by what they did to you, and maybe the only way for you to get past it is to face those monsters, and to see them brought down. Take it from me, you don’t just walk away from the place that made you.”
I can tell she expected a different reaction from me—like, she thought I would be excited. But everything about her tone is scaring me.
And meanwhile, I can’t stop remembering when the Gelet came and invited me to their city, and then blood, and then blood. Those people thought they were rescuing me.
“I have my own way of dealing with my past,” I say. “And we have a chance, we can start over here. We can get jobs. I can work in a coffee shop again. I thought you were having fun here, dancing, going to parties. You keep saying we’re famous, and everything is fantastic.”
“Sure, yeah, good times. But it’s all been a means to an end, and it’s finally paying off.” Bianca puts her hands on my shoulders, and I feel an immediate flush of comfort, even in the middle of a terrible conversation. “And Argelo isn’t going to be fun much longer, from the whispers I’m hearing.”
She looks over her shoulder. “I have to go. You need to tell me now: do you trust me or not? Did you mean it on the Sea of Murder when you said you’d always support me?”
I hesitate just a few heartbeats more, and then toss my head, in the Argelan style. “Yes. Of course. You know I do. But you should tell me—”
Bianca’s gone. I hear her dress rustle in the room outside, and then the front door clacking shut.
* * *
No way I can sleep after that conversation. I get dressed in silver threads and wander down to the place where I’m most likely to find Bianca. On the way down, I keep thinking about the three food dollars. Back at the Gymnasium, I had fallen in love with the idea of newness, and I’d let myself believe that none of our small rebellions would ever have any consequences. Bianca had convinced me the world could start all over again, untethered to the weight of everything that had happened before we were born. But now we’re older, and she still can’t accept that some burdens are unshakable, fused to the skin, no matter how you try to turn them into unfinished business. And I’m scared she’s going to destroy us both.
The Knife is even more packed than ever with people in rainbow clothing, and they’re all out of their minds on booze or something else. Two shirtless men embrace each other, one kissing the other’s neck, and I look away, blushing, and when I look back, they’re gone. As soon as the crowd swallows me up, I feel trapped, stiff, chafed in my armpits by the memory of police gloves. But I breathe, and let the feelings claim me for as long as they need to. I touch my bracelet, and it reminds me of running across ice, on powerful legs. I imagine the community of Gelet, the closeness that comes from navigating around sinkholes and predators together, across vast distances, without any secrets. I try not to think about the dark blood on my hand.
Bianca’s sitting at a VIP table on the second floor of the Emergency Session, a nightclub that’s tricked out to look like the audience chambers of the old Argelan People’s Congress. Austere wood paneling, crimson carpets and wall hangings, framed pictures of men and women with wild hair, wearing stiff collars and thick-rimmed glasses. I’ve heard bits and pieces about the People’s Congress, which was some kind of anarchist regime that governed after the collapse of the Great Argelan Prosperity Company. Bianca sees me and waves me upstairs, past the bouncer.
“Sophie! There you are. I was hoping you’d turn up. You remember Dash, don’t you?” Bianca gestures at the only other person sitting in the soundproofed VIP booth: the beautiful man from that fancy ball who told me that was his house. “He was just telling me about this revival of a classic Zagreb opera that he went to recently. It sounds fascinating.”
“So charming to see you again.”
I stare, until I realize what makes Dash unique, besides the stunning features that I can’t identify as being from any one heritage. He’s not wearing any insignia to let me know which of the Nine Families he belongs to, the way everyone else in this nightclub is. He sees me looking at all the places his crest could be, and laughs.
“Nope, I’m not wearing one. I don’t need to. Anybody who sees me and doesn’t know which family I belong to is already in trouble.” I still don’t get it, so he adds: “I’m the head of the Alva Family. I’m probably the most famous person in Argelo, in all modesty.”
“I’ll get us drinks,” Bianca says, touching my arm and giving me a wink. “Talk amongst yourselves.” She hustles down the stairs, leaving me alone with Dash. I lower myself onto the couch opposite him.
“It’s good to meet someone who doesn’t already know who I am. I can make a first impression for once. Except that I always say the wrong thing, and I’m terrible at meeting new people, so I’m terribly afraid your first impression of me will be a dreadful one.” I’m trying to read him, the way I used to read the clients at the Parlour, but Dash’s posture gives me nothing. He’s so handsome that it hurts to look at him.
“I’m obsessed with Xiosphanti history,” Dash adds. “The founders of that city had a valid theory of human nature, but they took it too far. That’s the problem with grand social ideas in general, they break if you put too much weight on them.”
I realize with a jolt that he’s been speaking formal Xiosphanti, even including the time (just after shutters-up), and identifying his social status (foreigner) and mine (student).
“Bianca’s the most unusual person I’ve ever met.” Dash doesn’t seem to mind that he’s the only one talking. “Everybody can’t stop gossiping about her. But I think you might be even more unusual, in your own way. Bianca mentioned that the police tried to send you into the night, and you escaped. But you didn’t, did you? Escape, I mean. You made it all the way past evening, and survived. I find that just too fascinating. You have no idea how important you are.”
I back away from him, burrowing into the crack between the sofa cushions as if I could disappear.
Just then, Bianca comes back with a tray of cocktails. “What did I miss?” she says.
“I was just making an ass of myself,” Dash says. “This is just what I was just saying, about being terrible with new people. Everything I say, I sound like a smarmy git.”
Bianca sits next to Dash and holds hands with him. “I’m sure you were perfect, just like always.” He puts his free arm around her shoulders.
“I miss Xiosphanti food,” Dash says, as if that was the conversation we had been having. “There used to be a Xiosphanti restaurant here in Argelo that made that spicy oatmeal, and those odd little cakes that fall apart if you don’t eat them right. It was staggeringly expensive, but so worth it.”
They both raise their glasses, and after a moment’s hesitation, I take mine too. This cocktail is sour, with a cloying aftertaste.
“Maybe I could cook for you,” Bianca says, her face just a few centimeters away from Dash’s. They look perfect together, the two most ideal faces in the world, with the most immaculate bone structures, and their children would be angels, and the cloying flavor lodges in my throat. I look away, at all the people dancing under a candelabra made of spent bullet casings, before Bianca and Dash start kissing.
Some time later, Dash has
to leave to attend some meeting of the leadership of the Nine Families, to address shortages, hyperinflation, the recent interfamily tensions, and other issues. Once Bianca and I are alone, she scoots next to me and gives me her gentlest frown. “I can tell you don’t like Dash, but he’s a really good guy. He’s the only Argelan I’ve met who understands all the Xiosphanti bullshit I grew up with, all the pressure they used to put on me to live up to some ideal. And he’s self-aware enough to poke fun at himself.”
“He does that as a tactic,” I say. “I don’t think we’ve met the real Dash.”
Bianca shakes her head and pulls away from me. “You never really know anybody, in my experience. But Dash and I share the same goals, which is the most important thing for a good relationship. And he’s crazy about you. I hope you’ll become friends soon.”
The vibrations from the floor seep up through my feet, and the stale-cocktail scent overpowers me. “I’ll give him a chance. Maybe I’ll understand what you see in him.” She’s already gathering her things. “Is he something to do with the plan you mentioned before? Is he part of whatever you’re working on?”
Bianca ignores my questions and smiles, as if all I said was the part about giving Dash a chance. “I have to go. The Unifiers are having a cocktail party. Can you find your own way home? I’m so glad we had this moment together, because you and Dash are both so important to me and I want you to like each other. You’ll see. He’s going to make our dreams come true.”
She hustles down the stairs from the VIP room, into a tangle of sweaty bodies and socialist kitsch. She waves at me from the bottom of the staircase, when I’m still standing at the top.
* * *
Ahmad is talking to me about old Khartoum at the kitchen table, while Ali sits nearby, bored because he’s heard all of this before. “Everyone in Khartoum was a cyborg, and they all wore bioneural interfaces around their heads, making them smarter than a hundred regular people, and they built on a legacy of Islamic science and math that went back a thousand years. But then we came to this planet, and we were taught that our heritage was meaningless.”
“Until I came to Argelo, I didn’t think of ancient cultures as having meaning,” I say. “Or that anybody tried to suppress them. I just thought, we’re on January now, and we decided to leave the old world behind. But I should have known better.”
Katrina told me her father was pretty sure he had ancestors in the Zagreb compartment, but her mother’s grandparents traced five lineages between them. It’s not like anybody kept careful records in the generations after landfall, so you belong to whatever your parents belonged to. Ali has grown up thinking of himself as a descendant of Khartoum, because of his father.
Ahmad asks if I know anything about my mother’s Nagpuri roots. I found one single grayscale picture in one of the old books that Bianca rescued from the back of the library, and I used to stare at the image of people in CoolSuits in front of this gorgeous fusion of ancient and modern architecture: grand pointed arches and soaring crystalline vaults. I always wished I could ask my mother what her own parents had told her about our old home.
“Nagpur designed all of the interiors of the Mothership, all the living areas and all the work areas,” Ahmad says. “They had the task of engineering an enclosed space that people could stand to live inside for generations, and they used a million tricks of light and shadow to defeat claustrophobia. And then the Mothership had all of the radiation leaks and the explosive decompressions, and all the tiny wars, and then there wasn’t enough space for everyone after all. What happened to the Nagpur compartment was the most shameful thing.”
Ahmad lowers his head, hands behind his simple linen collar, and just adds, “Everything that’s wrong with us now started on the Mothership.”
As he speaks, I remember the one brief mention of the Hydroponic Garden Massacre in one of Bianca’s old books. The phrase almost sounded funny at the time. But now I feel the same way as when I flew off the edge of the Old Mother. Like there’s no bottom to anything, and I could just fall forever. Maybe all this time, I’ve been lonely for people who were never even born, or a culture I never got to know.
I want to ask Ahmad for more details, but he’s already waving his hands as if to say that’s all he knows. Or he doesn’t want to talk about unpleasant topics in front of Ali.
And then he changes the subject, abruptly. “So. Bianca’s not sleeping here, and I kind of feel like she’s not really sleeping much anywhere. I can only imagine. You grow up with these strict rules, and then as soon as you taste freedom, you don’t know how to handle it.” He glances at Ali. “That’s why it’s better to let the little bastards run wild, and make their mistakes young.” Ali scowls, then sticks his tongue out.
I stare at the wall-hanging across from me, with a million shapes all on top of each other. Every time I look, I see a different pattern, circles or diamonds or stars, depending on my angle and how long I gaze.
“Bianca and I have been through frozen hell, and we’re still together,” I say. “But I keep saving her from herself. I think … I think she’s my Anchor-Banter.”
Ahmad just rolls his eyes. “Don’t use words if you don’t know what they mean.”
At another elaborate party, Bianca kept asking what Anchor-Banter was, and everyone insisted that the only way to understand Anchor-Banter was to read these epic romances, full of duels and battles on the plains, disasters and narrow escapes, and then yell at your friends about them. And then after you got drunk and had terrifying dreams, you’d wake up understanding Anchor-Banter. But I wasn’t sure how much of that was a joke.
“What’s with that bracelet?” Ahmad asks, startling me out of a reverie. “You keep touching it with an odd expression on your face.”
I look at the bracelet, which has an inky stain in the groove between two spikes, which I keep imagining is the blood of that Gelet. “It’s a reminder that I owe a debt, and the longer I go without repaying it, the bigger it gets.” The rotted metal of the harpoon scrapes my hand again, sticking out of hot vulnerable flesh, as though I’m touching it here and now. I need to get into the night, without any more desperate people shooting at me.
Something occurs to me. “Mouth told me that there are scavengers. They go into the night looking for old technology that our ancestors lost out there. Do you know how I could get in touch with some of them?”
Ahmad laughs. “Well, you do like to live dangerously. But you’re in luck. Not only do I know some scavengers, one of them is an old friend of yours.”
* * *
Reynold traps me in a hug and lifts me off the ground, laughing and shouting for his new friends to come and meet me. “I haven’t bothered to look up the other Resourceful Couriers since I got back on my feet, but I was so happy when Ahmad said you wanted to see me.” Not the reaction I expected from the man I knocked to the ground with my fist. Is he drunk or something? Yes, he’s very drunk. But also sincere. “Everybody, this is Sophie,” he shouts. “She helped bring me home after ten enormous pirate boats attacked us.”
Reynold’s friends come out of the gameroom in a three-story redbrick building, onto the front stoop that bakes under an excess of morning sun.
“I thought you were making that whole story up,” says one of the friends, who sports ferocious whiskers, wild shaggy hair, and overcrowded teeth. “Did they really have ten boats?” Everyone at this gameroom has the same excess hair, including the two women. Reynold looks different with his face enveloped.
I’m wearing my new disguise, a copy of a CoolSuit that I bought from a vendor in the Pit whose racks were half empty. The blouse hangs loose around my midriff, covered with blue fish shapes over a crimson background, and the trousers hang straight down. I put my hair up in a clasp, so I look more like the few other Nagpuri girls I’ve seen—and less like the best friend of Argelo’s latest celebrity. Nobody even glanced at me during my walk here, except another girl in Nagpuri dress, who gave me a quick sideways smile.
Reyn
old leads me inside a large windowless game lounge with big metal pillars in between the couches and little tables. They don’t have any food to share, because the shelves at the local grocery were pretty empty.
Reynold’s boss is named Pedro, and he’s missing a finger. One other guy sitting in the back is down four, plus his nose appears damaged. Frostbite. I force myself to meet Pedro’s gaze as he sizes me up. I hate staring contests.
“Being a scavenger is way better than being a smuggler.” Reynold hands me an assortment of angular game pieces. “Even with the cold, and the wildlife attacks. It’s short-haul versus long-haul. Plus, instead of semiperishable goods that we have to keep fresh, it’s ancient stuff that’s been out there forever. I wish I’d been doing this all along.”
I choose four pieces, and they spread out a board: Reynold, Pedro, a curvy woman named Susana, and me. They shake a tray full of colored foam, until one foam piece flutters to the ground, and Susana laughs. “Red! I’m on a streak.” She rubs her hands together, then puts a piece on the board. Katrina told me that Argelans love games with complicated rules, along with intricate dances and poetry with a strict rhyme scheme and meter: they love structure in anything, except for their actual lives.
“Course, the farther into the night you go, the worse it gets. Harder to move, harder to navigate, even with sensors.” Reynold puts his own piece on the board. “The wind, the darkness, the cold. If you go too far out, even the atmosphere gets denser. Plus, something about being in the night makes you go delirious, like it triggers some primitive fear from before our ancestors discovered fire back on Earth.”
Susana takes Reynold’s piece, and throws all the foam in the air. My move.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 22
