“You’re not the only one who’s reconnected with their heritage lately.” Alyssa gazed at a lane between two tall buildings, so narrow you couldn’t walk with arms outstretched. Weeds had come up through the cracks between flagstones, mostly those claw-leafed stalks that covered the rocks out past the Southern Wastes. Native to this planet, unlike a lot of the other greenery that ran wild around here.
“I never thought about Argelo much, except as a place to drop off stuff and pick up other stuff, and maybe spend some of our pay on swamp vodka and blue-jean dancers,” Alyssa said. “It’s only now that I’ve been stuck here that I’m realizing just how much of Argelo is inside me.”
They were walking through the places Alyssa played when she was little, the places her mother and uncles all worked. She kept pointing out where the Chancers, her old crew, had stolen something or tricked somebody. “One time Natalie didn’t look in the right place for the insignia and she accidentally robbed a guy with the Unifier crest. We had to stay underground for what felt like our whole lives. Oooh, there’s my favorite building that we were paid to set on fire. Don’t worry, nobody was inside at the time. You can still see the scorchmarks. Beautiful stripe shapes.”
Some of the Chancers had gone south and settled in some dirt-pit, making booze to sell in the city. “I guess I wasn’t prepared for nostalgia to kick me in the face the way it did. I guess that’s why I wanted to go back into the old gangster life.”
Alyssa needed to hear something, but Mouth was coming up empty. Mouth used to know how to respond to things, she had a whole catalog, but now even situations that ought to be familiar left her fumbling in her mind.
Mouth kept picturing snow washing over the faces of the corpses in the night, Reynold and the others, covering them but also distorting their features as they turned solid. The cold and sensory deprivation of full night had torn away some of Mouth’s armor, and then something about experiencing life in an utterly different physical shape, and feeling all the foreign emotions, had poked decent-sized holes in her sense of self. But most of all, the image of delicate blossoms in the heart of a mountain felt like a message from death itself.
Mouth said, “Sometimes I wish I had died at the same time as the other nomads. I don’t know why I deserved to survive.”
“Oh, daylight and ashes. Who cares why you survived? It’s probably because you’re so annoying that even death couldn’t stand to put up with you,” Alyssa said.
“I think me surviving was the worst thing that could have happened, because I’ve only kept a cruel mockery of the Citizens alive in my head.”
By now they had gotten back toward the nicer part of the town, where you could hear drums and laughter, and smell the scent of fish pies still crisp from the oven. Plus someone frying stale bread, an Argelan custom, meant to commemorate some citywide moment of confession and reconciliation, a long time ago, that nobody could agree on the details of now.
“I really hoped getting you in touch with that professor would help you to figure out your past, and then you would come back to me,” Alyssa said. “But I feel like I’m having to watch my own back, with a bullet wound still healing in my side.”
The dead flowers in the core of the mountain seemed different each time Mouth remembered, but she always thought of sickness, corruption, in the heart of the Citizens’ holiest place. An enemy of life.
“This is not the Mouth I chose as my sleepmate and road buddy. Remember when we met? You stood out from the rest of the Resourceful Couriers like a daisy in a field of shit. Afraid of nothing, foul-mouthed, full of contempt for everyone’s rules. You punched more people than you spoke to. You lied to more people than you let touch you. That’s the Mouth I want back.”
Mouth tried to take Alyssa’s words inside her, as if they were blueprints for something Mouth could build from scraps. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
* * *
They kept walking down the winding streets, ducking out of the way of hand-carts and a couple of small lorries. They argued about music and games and whether they were better combined, while Mouth tried to avoid looking up. Until a man fell dead at their feet.
The women who had shot him ran away, guns raised. Mouth was going to shrug this off, but Alyssa spotted the four-winged horse on the man’s lapel and said, “We have to kill those ladies.” But as soon as they had brought down the two shooters, who wore the Brilliant crest on their jackets, gunshots came from a second-story window. The bullets tore into the two Brilliant corpses as Mouth and Alyssa hunched behind a trash cart. At last Alyssa tagged the second-story shooter and he fell next to the first dead man with the Perfectionist badge.
Mouth’s pager lit up at the same time as Alyssa’s. Mouth fumbled in one of her pockets for the four-winged-horse badge, which she hardly bothered to wear.
They headed for the Perfectionist HQ. When they were a block away, the sky changed again, and Mouth felt something splash on her face. A droplet of liquid fire. Her skin sizzled, with a sensation like a scalpel cut. Another drop fell, then another, and before Mouth and Alyssa could finish remarking on the first rainfall in ages, this caustic liquid was descending in a constant barrage. People ran for shelter, chemical burns on their faces and hands.
Inside the Perfectionist building, with its dark-stained wood walls and nightclub decor, someone was explaining that this toxic rain had happened a couple other times lately. Scientists said a whole ocean of magma flowed across part of the day, bothering nobody—until recently, when the temperature had increased slightly. Some of the magma had evaporated, and seeded the atmosphere with alkali deposits. The beauty of nature.
Sasha was handing out rifles from a crate. “You took your sweet time getting here.”
“What are we even fighting about?” Mouth asked.
Sasha looked at Mouth with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Alyssa kicked Mouth’s ankle.
“Blame those assholes, the Superbosses. They made us look weak. And then we had to make a deal with the Alva Family to stay afloat. The peace in Argelo was all about people owing each other favors, an ecosystem. But it was always fragile, and everybody got something. The Jamersons are killing the Absolutists, and the Unifiers are slaughtering the Mandrakes.”
At first, Mouth didn’t recognize the emotion on the faces of all the Perfectionists: relief. Everyone was relieved to be fighting at last. No more making nice, they could finally kill (almost) everyone who ever got on their nerves.
The rain was too dense to see through. The pavement smoked.
“Fuck the Unifiers!” A woman shoved a burly man onto the pavement, not caring that the rain spattered her face. The man pulled a machete and swung it at the woman, with skinless hands. She splashed his face with rainwater using her bare hands, then sucker-punched him.
Across the street, two men ran past. They held a sheet of metal over their own heads, which would fall unless they both held it up. They kept slashing at each other with knives in their free hands.
Alyssa was talking to one woman in the corner of the space, who had fresh rain burns on her cheek and a gun clutched in both hands. Her name was Janice, and she was an economist who had gone to Perfectionist schools and now lived in Perfectionist housing in the nice part of the dusk, where all her neighbors were Perfectionists too. She spent most of her time trying to solve the problem of hyperinflation when she wasn’t trying to kill everyone in sight. “I need to get back out there,” she snarled, “I don’t need rest, I need justice. I’ll rest after justice is done.”
“Mouth. Got a job for you.” Sasha came over, rifle under one arm. “We need to take over the central food depository. People ought to see we’re protecting the food supply, so they’ll respect our authority. Plus everyone will need to kiss our asses unless they want to starve. Only trouble is, these dickfaces with bolo guns are guarding it. And we can’t risk damaging the food.”
“Shouldn’t we just wait until the rain stops?” Mouth already knew that was the wrong thing to say.
>
“Who says the rain is going to stop?” Sasha said.
Mouth was about to argue further, but Alyssa grabbed her arm with both hands and pulled her aside. “We promised to fight for these people. We owe them.” She stared at Mouth with a quirk in her left eye. “This is what I keep telling you. I need you to be here for me now, not stuck in the past with dead people who never even cared about you.”
Mouth took a rifle from Sasha, then turned back to Alyssa. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “I ought to honor my promises, or nobody will put up with me, right?” Alyssa smiled and tossed her head, then wished Mouth luck.
* * *
Afterward, Mouth didn’t like to think about what came next. You wrap yourself in layers of padding and packing tape, like a parcel, and run through the burning rain as if you could dodge the droplets. Each step kicks up sprays that make you gag. Everything looks gray, almost translucent, and it reminds you of the night vision and its smudgy view of a bloodbath. At last you reach the depository, where the guards sit on the floor and lean against the wall, staring out the window, and you throw a rain-soaked axe into the face of the first one to stand up. The next guard shoots and misses, then shreds your protective layers with a knife. You fall outside, where he headbutts you into a hot puddle. And so on.
Then your only orders are to hold the depository, so you sit with your fellow Perfectionists, plus the people you just killed. Nobody is going to relieve you until the rain stops, and the rain goes on so long you witness the dead bodies decomposing in real time, until someone has enough and flings them outside. The rainfall speeds the process of breaking them down, but it still seems to take forever. At least you’re in a food warehouse, so there’s plenty to eat.
SOPHIE
A flash illuminates the raindrops outside, turning them into slivers of tinted glass strung between statues caught in distorted poses.
I’ve memorized every tile on the wall of this Khartoum restaurant, and seen every loop of the fancy wall projections that are supposed to simulate a virtual souq. We’ve almost exhausted their stores of kisra, aseedaa, and kajaik, and Bianca keeps threatening to make a break for it using a drink tray as a rain-shield. Even with the fancy screens that filter the light into gentle waves, I still have a clear view of the street outside, where a group of men and women slash each other with long blunt knives. Their family emblems have tarnished to the point where people no longer have clear targets. At least half their guns are too old to work under this corrosive downpour, from the shouts I’ve overheard. I wish with all my heart that I’d been at Ahmad and Katrina’s place when the rain started, or even Mouth and Alyssa’s.
This view reminds me of the Glacier Fools, and I have to shut my eyes. I keep wondering if any of the Gelet died in that disaster, and whether they think I led them into an ambush on purpose.
“I don’t know how you can stand to look out that window,” Bianca says from the bar, where she’s nursing some sweet liquor. She’s still wearing her scoop-necked dress covered with the pearly scales of some rare breed of pheasant that lives past the swamps to the south.
We had come to this restaurant to reconnect, just the two of us, before the next party and the next one after that. But we’ve been trapped in here for ages, and we haven’t talked much. The restaurant staff are all hiding in the back.
Bianca comes toward me. Some wild creature that’s been trapped inside me for a long time wants to touch her. To spin around and use my momentum to pull her into my orbit, then clasp my arm around her. I remember how I held her on the Sea of Murder, when death seemed so close that I could say anything. The storm battered us, wrecked our sense of balance, until I thought the skiff would shatter under our feet. That’s become my happiest memory.
Now we’re in the middle of another vicious storm, surrounded by even more death, and I can’t find the right thing to say to make her open up.
So instead, I talk to Bianca about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, when her ancestors killed mine onboard the Mothership. The Nagpur compartment was all but wiped out, thousands of people, and the survivors were “integrated” into the other six populations, their children raised to forget. There are no pictures, no firsthand accounts, but I sneaked inside the library at Betterment University and found one slender sociology monograph written in Noölang, full of bland statistics that made my heart go cold.
“Everybody talks plenty about what happened with the other compartments, both good and bad,” I say in Xiosphanti. “But nobody ever wants to talk about Nagpur.”
“That’s because it’s not constructive,” Bianca replies in Xiosphanti for once. “We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonizing about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.”
“But everything is different now because of what happened then,” I say. “Everyone is here, and alive, because the people from Nagpur aren’t. My people.”
“Your ‘people’ are the Xiosphanti,” Bianca says, “and they’re still suffering right now. There are plenty of atrocities and selfish decisions to worry about without having to reach so far back in time. So many mistakes, just since the start of the Circadian Restoration.” She speaks Xiosphanti as if the red-and-blue smoke just erupted, and addresses me as a fellow student.
“Ahmad says that everything that’s wrong with us is because of things that happened on the Mothership,” I say. “Maybe the past is all we are. The same people who flushed thousands of bodies into space went on to invent Circadianism.”
Even though Bianca is trying to tell me that the mass murder of my ancestors doesn’t matter, that wild creature inside me is climbing all over itself with happiness, because at least Bianca and I are debating again, like in our dorm room.
Bianca gropes and finds a hidden control on one wall that causes some privacy screens to roll down, covering the window and blocking our view of the dead bodies hissing in the rain. Now the two of us perch behind shuttered windows, and this feels even more like old times.
“What would it even look like for Xiosphant to be fair?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Bianca snaps a little, like she’s not in the mood to talk anymore. “I suppose we would need to redefine how we think about ‘work.’ Like, some jobs you can’t do your whole life. Some jobs are almost twice as hard as others, and maybe those shifts need to be shorter. Some people have a higher capacity than others. Work is more complicated than people realize.”
Bianca still has the look of someone who hasn’t slept, more than a nod here or there, in forever. Her head darts, like a cat searching for prey, and she stares, as if she needs to see things for a while before the image settles.
“Who makes those decisions, though? How do you create a system that allocates—”
“I don’t know. Stop asking me weird questions. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re in the middle of a killzone. I tried to warn you that Argelo was about to stop being fun.” Bianca gets up and pours herself another drink, grimacing. She tries to make one for me, too, but I push it away.
I can’t hear the fighting outside, because this restaurant has next-level soundproofing.
Bianca comes and sits next to me, touching my shoulder with one palm. “I know that you went and did something reckless. I saw the windburn on your neck, and I heard that Reynold is dead. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?” She’s switched back to Argelan, as if to say the schoolgirl conversation is over. “You said you trusted me, but you really don’t.”
“You’re right, I did something dumb,” I say in Argelan. I can’t keep all of the bitterness out of my voice. I’ve held a million inquests inside my own head, but this guilt remains as fresh as ever. “People died, and it was my fault. I was trying to do something good.”
“I’m sorry,” Bianca says, still touching
my shoulder. I feel myself relax into her side. “I know what it’s like to want to make things better, and to have it turn to shit. That’s how we got here, right?”
She goes to get herself some more liquor, and I say, “I do trust you.”
Bianca looks at me, drink in hand, and seems to reach a decision. “When this fucking rain stops, if it ever does, I’m going to show you everything. You can see what we’ve been working on. Fuck the timetable.”
I feel like I’m starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep, so I lie down on the one couch next to the bar, across from the window. I don’t expect Bianca to join me, but then I feel her grudgingly work herself into the space beside me. I feel safe, as though her decelerating breath on my face is a hopeful sign that we’re still sleepmates, and also road buddies. Our breathing synchronizes into slow iambs, and I drift off.
Then I jerk awake, panting as though I’ve run a hundred kilometers and I’ll never be able to force enough air into my lungs. I don’t even remember the dream I was in, but I’m drowning, bloody choking, and then I realize that next to me Bianca is screaming.
Bianca’s voice comes in a high rattle, much too loud. She pummels the cushion next to her with both fists. I can’t hear what she’s screaming, but it’s in a rhythm with her punches.
Bianca wakes too, and we both just breathe for a moment, looking opposite ways. She gets up to fetch herself another drink, and smoothes out her shimmering dress.
She sits beside me again, but neither of us goes back to sleep.
We sit without talking, long enough for her drink to disappear and our dreams to feel like places we visited long ago. I hear sounds from the kitchen. I think either the fighting or the rain has stopped. Maybe both.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 25
