Sasha starts to say, “I don’t answer to you,” but Nai just gives him a look, and he trails off. His face falls, and he slumps forward. After a moment, he says, “Fine, great. See you soon.”
“We’ve lost number-five troop transport,” Marcus says as Sasha puts on the gear, accompanied by two men and a woman from the engine section.
“What does that mean, ‘lost’?” Nai says.
“It’s just not there anymore. Maybe it fell down a crevasse. The ice is full of fissures.”
I can smell the smoke from the cracked engine, and my head swims.
“We … lost a vehicle,” Nai says.
These are the people that Bianca decided to trust with everything. She tries to give me a conspiratorial smile, cocking one eyebrow. But I just stare past her, at the instrument panel that’s gone bright pink with warning lights.
Sasha has his survival gear on, helmet in hand, and he hesitates at the inner hatch. “Okay,” he says. “I’m going outside now. If … if you still think I should.”
“Great,” Dash says. “We’ll keep it warm for you.”
Even though I hate Sasha, this loud stupid bully, I still feel nauseous watching Dash ordering him outside, likely to his death, on a mission that doesn’t require his supervision. I kept thinking I had never seen the real Dash, but maybe I just caught a glimpse. Bianca smiles at Dash, and they hold hands.
“I’ll be back soon,” Sasha says, still hesitating.
But everyone just looks at Sasha until he opens the hatch, bows his head, and goes into the outer chamber with his team, then seals the inner hatch behind them.
“Everybody keep your eyes open for more wildlife,” Dash says.
While we’re stopped and our engines silenced, the sounds of the night come through. This close to midnight, the wind makes a keening sound, but our exterior visibility is a series of illusions.
Bianca kept saying she had lost everything, right before she showed me this machine for the first time, and maybe this is her way of getting it all back. The social status, the brilliant future, the luxury of idealism in a comfortable chair among friends, all the things she had when I first knew her. I miss that life too, maybe even more than she does and in a deeper cavity of my psyche, but the increasingly thick air of this icebound assault vehicle (sweat and farts and gun residue and engine coolant and terror) is leaving me surer and surer that this whole enterprise says something indelible about her.
My bracelet thrums harder, and I adjust it under my sleeve, trying to send a response, like, I’m here. I’m sorry about before. I’m here now. I’m sorry for bringing these intruders to you.
The voices of Sasha and the engineers come over the radio.
“Why is this taking so long?”
“Give us a moment, Sasha. Inspecting the damage.”
“I saw something move.”
“There are snowdrifts. Motion is pretty much constant out here.”
“No, really. I saw—”
“Just keep working. I want to see their faces when I come back in one piece.”
“Did you hear that?”
“It’s so cold my ears are frozen shut.”
“Just keep working.”
“Watch out, there’s a—”
And then a high shriek, and no sound but the wind again for a while.
“Nikki. Shit. Nikki. Did you even see what got—”
“Stop asking if I see things.”
“Nikki’s just gone.”
“We’re seriously all going to die here.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Okay, I think I sealed the damage. Let’s get back inside before—”
And then more screams, which grow louder and more indistinct, a chorus. Then they cease, and we’re left with just the wind again.
“Let’s go,” Dash says to Marcus. “Start the engines.”
Everybody looks at Dash for a moment. The radio stays silent. So Marcus takes a deep breath through his upper teeth, eyes stretched open, and then we roll forward. As soon as we’re moving again, I feel someone pulling my wrist once more.
The engine seems to hold up, and we tear through the night as if the ghosts of Sasha and the dead engineers are chasing us. The scream of our hastily repaired drive chamber sounds higher and more ravenous than the wind. We catch up to the other vehicles in our fleet, and even pass them, racing forward until our engines protest.
“Gotta slow down,” Marcus says. Dash tosses his head.
My bracelet thrums, as if in warning, but before I can make sense of it, I feel a sickening twist, as if the world has come apart underneath us. For one stomach-dropping moment, I think we’ve fallen into a sinkhole. But no—a splintering, shattering sound comes from two kilometers behind us, and the rear topographic scans show the ice shelf breaking apart. The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below, and all the other vehicles are caught in the middle of it.
mouth
At first, they thought some seismic event had torn through the ice. Or maybe some submerged mine left over from one of those ancient wars, a final revenge from some dead sailor. They bickered and debated, even as the road rose up vertical in front of them. Sweated, spat, pleaded, prayed, boasted, grandstanded. The grav-assist treads pawed at the unsteady fragments of tundra, groping in vain for some purchase. But the mist cleared, and Alyssa spotted the cause of the eruption: one tentacle, covered with iridescent feathers and tipped with a leaf-shaped barb the size of a tenement, had burst upward from the frozen ocean, filling the space like a new monument. One of the giant squids that lurked at the bottom of the Sea of Murder had detected food on the surface, and decided to go hunting.
Alyssa unsnapped her harness, while all the Perfectionists in the number-seven transport wasted time bemoaning their fate, and pushed through the passenger compartment until she reached the cockpit. She leaned over an older Perfectionist loyalist named Winston, who sat in the pilot’s seat, and unfastened his safety harness for him. “You better let me drive,” she said. Winston hesitated, and she added: “Do you want to live, or do you want to feel good about yourself in your final moments? One of us here knows the Sea of Murder, and it’s not you.”
Winston slid out of his chair, and Alyssa climbed in, securing herself inside. Mouth came and stood next to her, mostly to watch what promised to be an excellent show.
The fleshy protrusion rose thirty meters over their heads, its tip swaying as if searching for prey. Then it curled, whip-fast, and ensnared two vehicles in a single fluid motion, dragging them back through its hole in the ice.
“Bloody hell,” Winston breathed. “Those poor people.”
“Pretty quick death. Better than most.” Alyssa kept her eyes fixed on the topographic scans, looking for any tiny fluctuations or perturbations in the ice, while easing the ATV forward at a tantalizing speed. They crawled ahead until they reached one of the darkest blue spots, and then Alyssa spun them almost 90 degrees and sped up, so the terrain streaked past for a moment. Then she pulled back on the throttle again, and they were back to baby steps.
“Shouldn’t we be just making a break for it, while that monster is distracted?” Jimmy, another senior Perfectionist, muscled his way forward. He was the enormous man with the spiral scar across his hairless scalp, who had searched Mouth and Bianca at the White Mansion. “Why are we playing games instead of just getting the fuck out of here?”
The other five vehicles were following Jimmy’s idea, barreling at top speed away from the jagged patch of exposed ocean, toward the waiting Command Vehicle. But the ice ripped open in the space between the rumbler and two of the troop transports, propelling massive chunks at their armored sides. The tip of the squid’s tentacle pulled one of the transports down into the ocean, twirling with the measured elegance of a coffee server at the Illyrian Parlour. Then another.
“That’s why,” Alyssa said. “Any other questions?”
Jimmy’s brow furrowed, so that the sharp end
of his scar pointed at one glowering eye, while Alyssa executed a three-point turn, and then coasted the vehicle across a thin sheet of permafrost that seemed to tremble as they passed over it.
* * *
“I don’t trust either of you smugglers,” Jimmy was saying to Mouth in a chatty tone, like he was discussing an unsatisfying meal. Jimmy was so tall and wide he had to hunch over inside the troop transport, and his arms kept bumping against the sides. “We should have left you behind in Argelo.”
“I wish you had,” Mouth said.
Some of the leaders of this expedition, like Nai and Sasha, had wanted to ditch Mouth and Alyssa, or even put them to death for the stunt they tried to pull with Sophie. But Bianca was still convinced that their smuggling experience would be invaluable when (if) this expedition reached the walls of Xiosphant. Mouth still felt bound by the promise she’d made to Bianca at the White Mansion, even though this invasion seemed like a worse and worse idea. At least Mouth had managed to spend some time answering Professor Martindale’s countless annoying questions before they left, so whatever happened to her, the memory of the Citizens could be preserved.
The giant squid extended its reach farther over the ice, feathers curving outward as they searched for the other caches of protein. The other three lorries had stopped moving, probably hoping the squid would ignore them if they made no vibrations, but they rested on undulating promontories of ice.
The whole back of Mouth’s troop transport was full of people chanting, Oh fuck fuck shit fuck, or spilling bodily fluids on the floor. The stench gave Mouth a crushing headache. Alyssa was humming something that Mouth couldn’t make out at first, then she twigged: it was that song about the Decapitating Sisters, the two women who could snick a man’s head off before his thoughts even reached his gun hand, the pair of them a coordinated neck-severing machine of such beauty that people risked death to watch them work. Alyssa spun the lorry on its axis and scooted away from the tentacle as she broke into the chorus: “And oh, the heads, the heads, the heads, the rolling heads as they danced.”
Alyssa had already gotten them past the two fast-expanding holes that the squid had made, and they were gliding forward, with their engines stilled. “Shit,” Winston breathed. “We’re gonna make it after all.”
The fleshy tip of the squid’s long arm landed right in front of the ATV, blocking their path. Blotting out the rest of the world, even. The frond-shaped growth wriggled, almost playfully, and its huge feathers undulated in the wind.
“You had to say that,” Alyssa grunted at Winston as she squeezed their brake lever, as gentle as soothing a baby.
* * *
Jimmy fumbled for the thick gloves that would allow him to operate the flamethrower, which was housed in a small alcove next to Mouth’s seat. “Gonna teach that thing a lesson, send it back where it belongs.” His nostrils flared and his mouth stretched out.
The ground underneath the ATV heaved and buckled, and the spire-sized tentacle turned in a lazy half circle, as if groping for its prey.
“Don’t use the fucking flamethrower when we’re already on broken ice,” Alyssa shouted.
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m going to finish this.”
“Mouth, don’t let him use the fucking flamethrower.”
Mouth was already placing her body between Jimmy and the flamethrower controls. Jimmy balled his fists, and Mouth tried to shape her body into some imitation of a fighting stance. “Step back,” Mouth said, “I don’t want to hurt you”—as if that was even a possibility. Jimmy took a swing at her head, and she ducked just in time, and then his knee connected with her thigh. Mouth had no room to dodge, and her hands wouldn’t even organize into fists.
A clanging filled the compartment, like one of those endless bells in Xiosphant, and Jimmy landed in a heap at Mouth’s feet. Alyssa had whacked him in the back of the head, right at the center of his swirl of scar tissue, with a metal spanner.
“Gravestones all over the world have ‘Should’ve Listened to Alyssa the First Time’ written on them.” Alyssa made sure Jimmy was still breathing, then glanced at Mouth on her way to get the environment suits. By the time Mouth had her helmet and gloves on, Winston had joined them and was getting suited up.
“Any other volunteers?” Alyssa called out, and all of the men and women strapped into seats just looked at the soupy floor. “You know, I’m starting to understand why you complain about city people,” she whispered to Mouth.
“So what’s the plan?” Winston asked as he clicked his helmet into place.
Alyssa stuffed meal rations and a few explosives into a big duffel bag, which she handed to Mouth. “We’re going to use the flamethrower. Just a different way than Jimmy had in mind.”
Soon they were trudging through the sightless wind, away from the number-seven troop transport and any hint of warmth. Mouth had the flamethrower perched on her shoulder, and she’d handed the bag full of supplies off to Winston. This suit had much higher-grade night vision than the ancient gear the Glacier Fools had used, but her visibility was only a bit better.
The Citizens used to send young people into the night, with a rope tied around their waists to let them find their way out again, and leave them long enough to experience this unbearable disorientation, so they understood the importance of family, the significance of the people who see and understand you. “Absolution,” the Citizens had called that moment of returning to the group after stumbling alone—meaning that the group was accepting you back into its embrace, but also that you understood how absolutely terrible life was without that warmth.
You could mistake the resting tentacle for a natural formation, like a ridge in the snow, from the murky view in this night vision. The transport resembled a misshapen hillock, as a thickening coat of ice covered it, and Mouth wondered if the engine would even run after sitting still too long. Even with the suit, Mouth felt the chill air draining the life from her body. But Alyssa had gotten a jostle back in her walk, even with the effort every step cost.
“You’re in a good mood,” Mouth said between shivers. “All this time you kept saying you never wanted to travel again, but you’re having the time of your life.”
“Eh,” Alyssa said. “This is a lot different than our usual slog, and the goal is something more than just moving some junk from one city to another. Bianca was right when she said these cities are both screwed unless they work together, and y’know, this feels like an excellent cause.”
Alyssa turned her helmet to face Mouth’s. Maybe she was smiling, hard to tell.
Mouth kept seeing Alyssa’s swagger out here on death’s icy threshold, and having two reactions at once. She was happy for Alyssa, and grateful that she’d taken charge and figured out a save. But also, Mouth sensed that something had changed between the two of them, the culmination of all of Alyssa’s attempts to fix Mouth back in Argelo. Alyssa had wanted her own crew, people she could count on who shared her goals, and now she’d found that by joining this slapdash invasion. Maybe Alyssa just didn’t need Mouth anymore.
They had gotten far enough away from the transport, and Alyssa set about building a pyramid of rations, and setting tiny charges at key points, with fussy artistry. “It has to smell like food, and smolder for a while without melting through the ice,” she muttered. From the flamethrower, she removed the fuel tank, which she splashed around her pile. One of the explosives had a crude timer, which they turned to its furthest setting: a picture of a zebra.
“Beautiful.” Alyssa seemed to want to stand and admire her own sculpture, but Mouth tugged at her sleeve. By now, the cold had seeped into their joints, hindering their range of motion.
Nobody talked as they trudged back to the ATV, and Mouth could think only about taking off this unwieldy gear and being warm again. She didn’t want to think any further than that. They had almost made it back when the puffed end of the squid’s tentacle lashed out and poked at the lorry, the edges of its feathers tearing a huge gash in the side.
&
nbsp; The squid seemed to be trying to decide if the whole number-seven transport was worth hauling down into the ocean when Alyssa’s beautiful pyramid caught fire, a green flash far outshining everything else on the night vision. Like some sacred offering in the wilderness, the pyramid of food and accelerants blazed, sending smoke upward to join the low-lying cloud cover. Alyssa, Mouth, and Winston held their breath inside their helmets until the tentacle slid away from them to go investigate this new source of warmth and nourishing smells.
* * *
Mouth had an attack of lightsickness, climbing inside the well-lit transport, until she turned her night vision off. The gash in the side had let in the night air too fast for anyone to react, and their icy bodies were contorted into outlandish shapes, some of them with their mouths still opened to shout a warning or scream for mercy. Jimmy still lay where Alyssa had left him, like he’d never woken up. You would need heavy tools to dislodge these people from where they’d died.
Alyssa ran to the cockpit without bothering to glance at the dead, and gunned the engine, which miraculously still ran. She scooted them forward, as quiet as she could, fumbling at the controls with her thick gloves.
“We’re not seriously going to drive across the night in a lorry full of icy corpses.” Winston looked over his shoulder and shuddered at the unspeakable tableau.
“Pretty much, yeah,” Alyssa said. “You guys should strap in.”
“Good thing they’re frozen solid.” Winston gazed at the faces suspended in terror and agony. “When those defrost, it’s going to be revolting.”
Once they had gone a kilometer away from the undulating tentacle, Alyssa sped up, and soon they had gotten far enough away that it probably wouldn’t find them again. Then they drove past one of the remaining vehicles: the rumbler, upside down, with a busted axle and a hole big enough to do jumping jacks inside.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 29
