Now Mouth was the one sitting and clutching a sudden ulcer.
“I barely thought about the Citizens, all that time bouncing between two cities. It was just a funny story to tell people. But after I learned there was something left, the Invention, I couldn’t let go. And I can’t just forget again. Especially not now that I’ve found you.”
Barney sighed. “Let’s say I could bring all of the Citizens back from the dead. All of their shining ghosts, walking through town, singing one of those dirges that you were so determined to rescue from a vault in Xiosphant. The whole crew, including Cynthia and Yolanda. What then? What could they do that would make you happy? What do you actually want?”
Mouth thought about this for a moment. Bottomless swamp. “Well, they could give me a damn name.”
“Bring a book of baby names. We’ll flip to a random page, I’ll put my finger down. Picking a name is not hard.”
“It’s not the name. You know that. It’s the whole story that goes with it. The personal myth. The identity. They had a whole process.”
“Sure, sure. I went through that. I helped others through. It was a nice ceremony. I’m sure they would have gotten to you soon enough, if they hadn’t all died. Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to deal with a thing that you hid from yourself forever and just recently decided was a mortal wound.”
Mouth had her forearms in front of her face and her knees in her chest, against some huge projectile. She decided to throw it back in Barney’s face.
“What about you? How are you honoring our people? What are you doing? What do you want?”
Barney sighed. “Unlike you, I chose to leave the group. If I’d known I was leaving them to die … I don’t know. But I didn’t know that. So I opened this place as a way to create community. To bring people together. Maybe I aimed too low. I felt like my role in the Citizens was to cook for everyone, but also to help make a space for people to talk. And I told myself I could keep doing that. I welcome people who have no place else to go, and I promise a limited amount of safety to student radicals and people who are on the Nine Families’ hit list.”
“I’ve sat in here I don’t know how many times,” Mouth said, “and I haven’t seen you giving sanctuary to anyone.” She leaned her chair backward so it rested on two legs and put her feet against the table.
“It doesn’t happen all the time.” Barney seemed bored with this conversation, yawning and leaning on one hand. “Anyway, I don’t owe you any progress reports. I’m retired and an independent business owner. You are the one who has a problem, and I would like to help you solve it if I can. You can’t go back on the road, and I wouldn’t go back out there even if you paid me in extra life expectancy. You can’t get back the Citizens’ teachings by talking about them inside a building. How are you going to honor the dead?”
“I don’t know.” Mouth wanted to say that the dead had never honored her, that if anything, it was they who had left a debt unpaid. But maybe that would sound dumb.
“What have you ever done to help anybody?” Barney leapt to his feet and jabbed a finger at Mouth, who nearly fell flat on her back because she was leaning backward on two chair legs.
“I watched the other Couriers’ backs, while they still had backs to watch. I helped these scavengers. I kept Alyssa alive, in spite of all her best efforts.”
“A big thing in the Citizens was, we were all responsible for each other,” Barney said, sitting back down on his high stool behind the counter. “Sometimes that meant that anybody who wasn’t us could eat shit. But we tried to be generous, and interdependence was a big part of the teachings.”
“Ugh. So I should go and find some people who are bigger losers than I am, to try and lift them up.”
“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. Your own community. Everybody in this town is basically out of their mind. They might be safe under their roofs, but they’re more lost in the wilderness than we ever were. You could be doing some good around here.”
“I get it.” Mouth unkinked herself from her chair. “You want me out of your diner. I’ll go bother someone else.”
“Sure. I don’t care. Do whatever you want.”
Afterward, Mouth couldn’t stop wondering who she could be a Citizen to, as she looped around the up-and-down streets under a flat gray sky. She had a feeling it was never going to be that simple, that she couldn’t just serve meatloaf and tell herself she was honoring the dead. The dead were just like the living: they all wanted something they could never have.
* * *
When Mouth got home, Alyssa offered her a hunting knife, holding it by the blade. Mouth took the hilt by instinct, but her fingers lost their strength. The knife stabbed the floor between them.
“Still?” Alyssa said, and cursed.
Lately, whenever Mouth tried to hold a weapon, her fingers turned into cotton strips. She could hold tools, pieces of food, shoes, or whatever, but she couldn’t grip a gun or machete to save her life. Her hands wouldn’t even assume the shape of fists. This had started right after the rain fight, when she had finished occupying the food depository, and Alyssa still wasn’t convinced Mouth wasn’t pulling some weird joke.
“You know I wouldn’t joke about weapons,” Mouth said. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but it’s probably temporary.”
Alyssa sighed and sank into a rattan chair, which was already flaking apart. “This is all my fault. I should have stuck to my original idea and opened a shop. You would have come around after a while. I feel like I threw away a one-time opportunity to start over, try something different.”
“What kind of shop, though? You never said.” Mouth sat down next to her.
“We could have opened a restaurant, like Ahmad, or that Barney guy.” Alyssa laughed. “Or a brewery. Or an antique store, after how much experience we had moving rare goods. Whatever. Something we could grow old doing. Instead, I decided we needed some excitement, and I wanted to help you reconnect with your long-lost nomads.”
Mouth shrugged. “Everybody made choices. You already know my regrets.”
“I just got blindsided by all my nostalgia for the old times, with the Chancers, once I was actually living here again. I wanted to recapture my glory days as a happy arsonist. And now we’re supposed to keep fighting for the Perfectionists, and you can’t even defend yourself with a toothpick.”
Right on cue, both their pagers went off, with a brand-new symbol that Mouth had never seen before: gnarled in on itself, like a sea-snake. Alyssa had to look this glyph up in the list they’d been given, and then she gasped. “Oh shit. We’re being summoned to the White Mansion.”
She jumped to her feet, and Mouth followed. While Mouth was pulling the door open, Alyssa handed her a small dark shape, so casually that Mouth couldn’t even tell what Alyssa was offering at first. The gun slipped out of Mouth’s hand and thudded to the floor. Alyssa cursed. At least the gun’s safety was on, so nobody got another new bullet wound.
* * *
Mouth had never been to the White Mansion, or even walked near it, because they didn’t appreciate loitering in this part of town. But the barbed spikes of the iron fence, the huge marble courtyard, and the ten garrets, each with a window large enough to drive the Couriers’ sled through, stirred Mouth even more than she’d expected, with a mixture of awe and disgust.
They’d torn down a dozen tenement buildings, with over a thousand people living in them, to make room for just this one pile, which they’d painted bright enough to throw reflected sunlight in your face.
“I just hope there are snacks,” Alyssa said, punching Mouth’s arm. “I was a kid when this place was still under construction, and I can’t wait to see the inside. But there better be fried oysters, or I’m burning the whole thing down.”
“You probably shouldn’t talk about arson here,” Mouth muttered.
They were met at the front door by a huge bruiser named Jimmy, who worked for the Perfectionists. He had a spiral scar on his hairless scalp, all the
way from his eyes to the nape of his neck, and he always boasted that someone had stuck his head into one of those kitchen machines that hollows out a melon from the inside, during a fight that he’d won. Jimmy took all of Alyssa’s weapons, and then insisted on searching Mouth five times, because he couldn’t believe Mouth was unarmed.
“I know, I know,” Alyssa said. “I’ve been saying.” But she didn’t tell Jimmy about Mouth’s new condition.
Everything in the White Mansion had a scent that reminded Mouth of the first sweet thing she’d ever tasted as a child, when just the concept of sweetness had seemed revelatory.
Jimmy led them down a long hallway, past a huge ballroom with velvet drapes, to a side room that could still fit a hundred people comfortably. There, Bianca was sitting on a huge sofa made of some red leather that Mouth could tell at a glance would be softer than moss.
“There you are!” Bianca waved and gestured to a couple of chairs facing her couch. “Come join me.”
Mouth and Alyssa sat, and Jimmy withdrew to the far end of the room, out of earshot. Bianca fixed both of them with her easiest smile, as if they’d all gone to university together. They hadn’t talked since Bianca had called Mouth horrifying and almost consigned her to death. Somehow, Mouth found herself thinking about Barney’s parting words, about helping people find their way. Any wilderness where Bianca might be lost, Mouth had helped lead her into.
They made chitchat for a few moments, about Argelan food, and poor Reynold, and some rugby game that had been delayed due to rain. Then Bianca got to the point.
“Mouth, I have some excellent news for you. That book you wanted? From the Palace? The one with all the poems and things? We can get it for you. I will hand it to you myself.”
At first, Mouth couldn’t even process the words Bianca was speaking. A snatch of some other conversation, from a different time and place. Then Alyssa kicked Mouth, and the meaning sank in.
“Oh,” Mouth said.
“That’s all you’re going to say? After everything you put me through just to steal that one book? And now I’m telling you, it’s yours.”
Mouth tried to bring back the vision she had nurtured in her mind that whole time in Xiosphant, of lifting the crystal volume and paging through it. Seeing all of the old wisdom about how to see both horizons with a clear mind. That vision had quickened her soul back in Xiosphant, but now she just felt sad, and a little lightsick. She couldn’t think of the Invention without hearing Barney say “doggerel,” or remembering that vision of precious fragile blooms dying inside an ancient mountain, which some old book wasn’t going to help her understand.
The Invention might as well be a heap of blank pages now.
“Oh,” Mouth said again.
“We’re going on a mission soon,” Bianca said. “It’s a huge secret, but I’m letting you two in on it, because we’ll need some stealth experts. We’re going back to Xiosphant.” She kept talking: armored vehicles, heavy weaponry, a hand-picked force.
Alyssa kept nodding. “You’ve got it all figured out. This is a solid plan.”
Mouth was remembering when Bianca used to ask her, How many people have you killed? And Mouth had answered with a boastful vagueness, as if the fact that she hadn’t kept track made her a better role model. She remembered the first person she’d killed, a tubercular, silt-voiced Argelan man who’d seized her throat from behind when the Citizens’ funeral ashes were still fresh on her hands, and the last, one of the men guarding the food depository. But in between?
“You know whose house this is.” Bianca gestured at the mahogany walls and the view out the window, of a tiny walled grove of what looked like apple trees. “He runs the Alva Family, which now controls the Perfectionists, who you both swore allegiance to, according to the badges you’re wearing. So we could just order you to do this, but I’m choosing to be nice.”
“I’m kind of retired from traveling,” Alyssa said. “But, well, this sounds like a whole other trip, and I’m dying to see how it turns out. And truth be told, I’ve been missing all those Xiosphanti grains. Need more fiber in my diet.” She elbowed Mouth in the side.
“I thought you would be on your knees thanking me for this opportunity,” Bianca said to Mouth. “I honestly don’t understand you at all. I used to think you were so wise. I hung on every word you spoke to me. Now you just look like some kind of tragic vagrant.”
“A lot’s happened,” Mouth said. Then she tossed her head. “I promised to help you before, in Xiosphant, but I had my own agenda, and I was selfish, even though I thought it was for a higher cause. So I owe you my help now. You don’t need to bribe me.”
Bianca’s eyes misted up, as sudden as a weather shift on the road. “If you had only said that to me a long time ago, a lot of things might be different now.” Then she glanced up at Jimmy, signaling the interview was over. “We’ll be in touch about logistics. Keep your pagers with you at all times.” She got up and walked out of the room without looking back at them.
SOPHIE
The most famous story of Anchor-Banter, which I still don’t completely understand, is about a prince and a tailor, in the fairy-tale version of Xiosphant that everyone loves here: twinkling castles, rowdy banquets, valiant knights. The prince has a perfect life, except he’s in love with a beautiful young apprentice in the royal gardens whose touch restores every rare bloom to health. The prince keeps trying to woo her, with tiny flying machines and musicians, but every plan goes awry. And this ugly old royal tailor is always nearby, giving a crooked leer, whenever another disaster ruins the prince’s courtship. At last the prince decides to have the tailor imprisoned, on some pretext—but then the prince loses everything and becomes a beggar, outside the walls of his own palace. The beautiful apprentice gardener throws a flower into the former prince’s cap every now and then, without knowing him. The prince stays out there for uncounted ages, in the dirt, but his royal garments never tear or sully, and they become a pillow and quilt when the city sleeps. These clothes are a miracle, and at last the prince realizes: that tailor never received proper payment for his work, or credit from the throne. With that, the curse is broken, and the prince is able to return and kill everyone who betrayed him.
The first time I tried to understand this story, I had thought “Anchor-Banter” referred to the apprentice gardener, and the prince’s destructive love for her. I didn’t even get the thing about the tailor. Alyssa’s explanation helped a lot, though the whole thing still seemed incongruously mystical.
Still, Alyssa says when you identify your Anchor-Banter, you have two choices: You can figure out why this person is connected to you. Or you can join forces with them, and cause trouble for everyone else.
* * *
According to Mouth, every pile in this scrapyard tells a different story about Argelo. She points out a wire-mesh bundle of filthy, corroded old Founders’ Celebration rattles, from a brief period when Argelo tried to mass-produce cheap junk to send to Xiosphant in exchange for food or technology. On the other side, a heap of busted shell casings and shattered bayonets, from the last great war with Xiosphant (either the fifth or the sixth, depending on how you reckoned). She gestures at a wall of garbage that includes: melted plastic farm implements from when the Argelan People’s Congress launched an “Everyone Farms” campaign; tarnished badges from political parties and families that nobody even remembers; rust-eaten prospector gear from the heyday of treasure meteorites; packages for various fad cures for lightsickness, fungal infections, and delirium; and rotted placards depicting the great exodus from Xiosphant to Argelo.
I wrap a cloth around my mouth and nose to protect against the fumes from some combination of rotting plastic and battery acid.
“Well, you said you wanted to talk someplace where nobody could hear us,” Mouth says, gesturing around at the brightly colored piles.
“Yeah, I did. I need your help, and I don’t trust anybody in this blighted city anymore.”
Ever since Bianca showed me her
invasion fleet, I’ve been dizzy, as if the sheer weight of my rage has sprung my inner ear. I feel like wrecking this whole city with my bare hands. Every time my anger runs out of fuel, I fall into mourning, as if my feelings for Bianca have gone sour forever. Part of me still can’t believe that Bianca has changed, but another buried part has seen this happening for a long time. I keep thinking back to everything that’s happened since we left home. The look on Bianca’s face after we survived the Sea of Murder, the way she insisted on seeing the Gelet as my servants, the frenzy with which she threw herself into high society. Even the things she said in the storeroom, when we first slept here. She’s been planning to use me, almost since we left home.
Mouth is looking at me, and I realize I haven’t spoken for a while. “I need you to help me disappear for a while,” I say. I start to tell Mouth what Bianca’s planning, and it turns out she already knows most of it, except for my part.
“I’ll do what I can, but you should know that I can’t fight.” Mouth looks down. “My hands won’t cooperate, no matter what I try, ever since the rainstorm. Wasn’t like I chose to become a pacifist or anything, just that my body decided on its own.”
Mouth somehow looks even worse than she did after the Glacier Fools. She has fresh burn scars on her neck from that scorching rain, and a cut on her cheek that looks infected. She hasn’t been able to keep shaving the sides of her head, and the hair came back uneven.
“I don’t need you to fight anybody. Just help me get out of town, find a place to lie low until everyone gives up on this invasion foolishness. Preferably, someplace where I can go into the night without passing through slums full of people with harpoon guns.”
Mouth perks up, because here is a challenge that she’s comfortable with. She starts spinning out extraction plans, disguises, camouflages, and places I could hide, including a hidden distillery that some of Alyssa’s old friends are running, forty kilometers south of here.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 27
