When I picture myself, I no longer imagine a shy girl with high cheekbones, a round face, and swept-back black hair. Instead, I’m a collection of tendrils and limbs: smaller than a regular Gelet and less mobile, but still the same in the ways that matter. I no longer notice when I’m in the dark for long periods, because my senses are all about the vibrations underground, the nonvisible wavelengths of radiation that swim around me, the movement of other people nearby.
I’m with River in one of those smaller salons, where the natural warmth from the springs comes up through a big spout in the middle of the room, and I’m cozy in a blanket of bioengineered fuzz. I’m drowsing, my tendrils braided with River’s without sharing any particular thought, and River sends me a memory that I must have shared sometime in the past.
I’m a human, in Argelo, and Bianca is saying, “—this amazing drink that you are about to try for the very first—” and then the taste of an Amanuensis, the sweet kick, still delicious after all this time.
I don’t know what makes me sicker: seeing Bianca, smelling the sugary sweat that fogged the air in Punch Face, or just being exposed to human speech again. Whatever it is, I have a panic reaction that feels like an old forgotten friend, along with the agony of reawakening parts of myself that I put to sleep, long ages ago. I excuse myself and pull away from River. I need to take care of myself, by myself.
I haven’t even wanted to think too much about the memories of my old life since I got used to living here. The few times lately that someone brought up a memory that I had shared about my family, or Bianca, or the Parlour, or going to the White Mansion in Argelo, I would just freeze up. People learned not to talk to me about that weird, messy human stuff.
Some time later, Jean and I are leaning against the wall after we’ve just watched one of those puppet shows, and I don’t even notice that my tendrils are fully extended and linked to Jean’s—until she shares a memory of the time I followed Bianca around Xiosphant and I saw her meeting with Mouth, in a roomful of guns. The memory is there, as fresh as a moment ago: Bianca’s neck poking out of her fashionable coat, her hair pinned back, the sneaky way she looked around, as if she didn’t realize how easy she was to follow, the weight of my longing as I hid from her. All at once, I’m young and foolish and unaltered, and pining for someone who thinks I’m dead.
I turn firm and brittle, choke on my own breath. I haven’t shared any memories of being human in a long time, but I must have shared a lot of them, early on, when I was learning to communicate.
I almost pull away from Jean, break the connection. But I don’t want her to go around sharing a memory of me being an oversensitive fool with everybody else. So I just try to relax and take it in. I chose to make this moment available, so I can’t blame Jean if she decides to give it back to me.
But then more human memories flood back, one by one. The first time I almost died on the Sea of Murder. My failed attempt to avoid joining Bianca’s invasion plan. The Curfew Patrol chasing Bianca and me, while alarms blare all around us. The Glacier Fools shouting in their delirium.
Now, I lose control of my breathing altogether. I pant faster, without drawing any oxygen. I feel light-headed, my limbs gone dead, and all my old memory-panic is back. I can’t stand to think of myself as having a human body, or a voice that could expel sounds that human ears could catch and ingest. I thought I’d made peace with these memories.
I’m not handling this as well as Jean hoped—and that’s when I realize: this is something the Gelet have decided to do. They’re going to keep reminding me of what it felt like to be among humans, until I can take it without breathing too fast, going numb, or throwing angry, misshapen thoughts back at them. Jean shows me a happy memory of a glacier until I stop twitching and fighting. Still, all of these memories, one after the other, crush me with so much anger, love, and fear, I still feel my skin crawl, my heart pound, a pain like lightsickness, only worse.
For the first time since they put these tendrils and all these other new organs inside me, I want to tear it all out with my bare hands.
Jean wants to understand why I can’t handle the memories that I chose to share in the first place. How can I explain, in a way that a Gelet will understand?
I share a memory with Jean of my lowest moment ever—not the part when the cops pulled me out of the Zone House and forced me up a mountainside and I knew my life was over, but later, afterward, when I soaked in a hot bath at the Illyrian Parlour. When I was safe but knew I’d never be safe again, warm but chilled inside, scrubbed but forever dirty. And the one thing that consoled me in that moment was tucking myself back inside the memory that Rose had shared, of running in the night with all the other Gelet, on our way to build something with our powerful limbs.
I keep showing Jean, over and over, how that borrowed memory saved me at my lowest point. I capture the exact moment when my despair gave way to wonder.
Jean still doesn’t get why even my happiest experiences of living with humans bring me nothing but pain. Even after everything Jean went through, she still thinks happy memories ought to cheer you up.
A while later, I’m not even surprised when another Gelet, whom I call Felice, wants to give me back another memory I shared long ago.
I’m back in the dorm, and Bianca and I are sitting and studying after she’s returned from some party or formal ball, and this one kept her away from me forever. I’m staring at my book, trying to concentrate, but then I look up at Bianca, who’s already looking at me with this tiny smile. I make some face at her, and she breaks into cackles, and then we’re both laughing.
That’s it, the whole memory. Felice teases out all of the little details, like the way Bianca’s smile starts sad and then the indentations around her mouth and eyes change shape. The surprise in Bianca’s face when I make whatever face I’m making, and then the giggle.
I tense up, but Felice is already showing me a comforting memory of snow washing across an ice field, kilometers away from anything.
I don’t know why the Gelet are trying to hurt me like this. Except, of course I know.
I find myself going to all my favorite places in the midnight city, greedy to stockpile memories for what I already realize is coming. The area where they put new organs inside me, removing part of a lung, feels sore and fatigued. Some strain, deep under the skin and bone.
I clamber down, out of my favorite hammock in the plaza, and Jean and River are both standing nearby, come to visit me. They both open their pincers, extending their tendrils to touch my chest. I brace myself for another old memory of when I was human.
Instead, though, Jean and River show me a plan. Me, as I am now—with sensitive, vulnerable tendrils on my sternum, two tentacles climbing out of my back, and indistinct shapes on my abdomen—walking the streets of Xiosphant. Using the gifts the Gelet have given me to help other humans understand. In time, recruiting other humans who can become like me, so we can create whole families of hybrids, who can also recruit.
They’re going to send me away. Send me home. Looking like this, hideous to human eyes, with no protection. I saw this coming, but I wasn’t prepared, and trying to see myself through the eyes of Xiosphanti makes me feel sick to my core. I let out a tiny gasp, which sounds monstrously loud to me after so long keeping silent.
mouth
Mouth almost went into a coma after the Gelet showed her how they had destroyed the Citizens. She wanted to. She even tried to. She made every effort to let the darkness around her suffuse her. She could not recall the walking mountain of ice, weeping its astringent blood, without hand tremors. She could never accept the Gelet visions, or whatever they were, in any case, but her mind could do almost nothing with that toxic ice, destroying a crèche full of infants, except rebel against itself.
The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet—servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness—but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or t
o people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.
Her mind kept offering up more and more details of what they had shown her, as if Mouth couldn’t process it all at once. No way to shut off the thoughts, even when she slept.
Sophie had not been present when Mouth had received the story of the nightfire. She had stayed away on purpose. But she came to Mouth’s bedchamber much later, crouched under the hammock so she was just a voice drifting from the bottom of the room. Mouth sometimes lunged, to pull her closer or to push her away, but she was never within reach. Sophie spoke haltingly, because she had never loved talking even when she’d had no other way.
“The nature of the Gelet’s consciousness is such that, I mean, you have to understand, the past is all one.” Sophie stammered far below Mouth’s bed. “To the Gelet, the decision to spare Xiosphant from destruction is as fresh as when they chose to wipe out the Citizens, even though they took place so many generations apart. For the Gelet, they both happened at the same time. I think they evolved this way because they live in never-ending darkness, with frozen winds that obliterate all sound and erase all writing. They worked for hundreds of generations to stabilize their climate by engineering special flora, and, to them, that work also just happened.”
Mouth never responded to anything Sophie said, other than with her arms and legs.
“Humans couldn’t have survived on this planet without all the work the Gelet had done before we got here,” Sophie said. “We wouldn’t have lasted more than a generation or two before the storms would have wiped us out. The farmwheels in Xiosphant, the fisheries and orchards of Argelo, they wouldn’t even have existed. Everything we keep fighting over.”
Sophie grew tired of speaking, as Mouth had known she would. If she climbed up and tried to use her new body parts to send ideas or memories straight to Mouth’s hind brain, Mouth was scared she might hurt Sophie involuntarily, even with her pacifist hands. But Sophie never came near. Mouth just heard Sophie breathing, over the scrape of the stone engines.
Mouth had her own personal memory of the blue swarm, the bones that broke apart when she tried to gather them up, the flames too close to her face. This was her own experience, and now that she’d worked so hard to reconstruct it for Barney and then Sophie, she couldn’t push it back into the hole where she’d kept it for so long. But she also couldn’t get rid of the memory of the great spout of ice, drizzling deadly slush as it traveled. Both things made her want to shut down.
“I eavesdropped when you met with Bianca, back when you wanted to trick her into helping you steal your poetry book,” Sophie said from the darkness below. “I remember you said, ‘The truth should hurt. Truth should knock you on your butt. Lies make it easy to stand.’”
Mouth broke her silence at last. “You paid more attention to me than I paid to myself.”
“The Gelet have been giving me back my own memories, which is the first cruel thing they’ve ever done to me. But you sounded impressive. I actually wanted to believe you.”
“I was just repeating things I heard somewhere,” Mouth said. “Things the Citizens used to say, things I overheard in political meetings. I combined them, changed them around.”
“That’s all anyone ever does,” Sophie said. “People never say anything new.”
Sophie fell silent again, but she wouldn’t leave Mouth alone. Like Mouth had taken some bad pills, and Sophie had to hold vigil while she rode them out. Mouth tried a couple times to say that Sophie owed her nothing, but Sophie just stayed, on the floor, breathing quietly.
“I want to show you something,” Sophie said after a long time. “I think it’ll be easier coming from me than from one of the Gelet.”
Mouth understood what Sophie meant by “show,” and she began to protest, to protect her face and neck with upthrust elbows.
But Sophie shushed Mouth and made soothing noises, and touched her rain-scarred neck with one palm. Sophie’s face caught the one shaft of light coming into the chamber from some distant furnace, and her round features looked more composed than Mouth had ever seen. Maybe they’d changed places at some point: Mouth was the scared kid now. Sophie kissed between Mouth’s eyes, which gave out more of their seemingly endless supply of tears.
“Don’t worry,” Sophie said. “I can take you down gently.”
Mouth nodded at last. “Okay. Do it.” Sophie’s face jostled, and Mouth realized that this was her own body shaking. She made herself go slack.
Sophie leaned closer, until her chest was touching Mouth’s, and then her wriggling little tongues snaked out. Mouth stiffened again at the last moment, but she felt the light touch of a few dozen surfaces, almost like moistened fingers, making contact with less pressure than the Gelet had used. Sophie shushed Mouth again. Her face was so close that she had three eyes, and you could feel her breathing almost like it was your own.
When Mouth closed her eyes, she could see something taking shape, an image or something, but it felt like an afterimage, a half impression. The picture kept pulsing in and out, and Mouth found herself concentrating, straining to see it more clearly.
“There you go,” Sophie said. “Just let it take you.”
Mouth leaned back in the hammock to let Sophie put more weight onto her. She felt Sophie’s knees around her waist, Sophie’s body resting against hers, and Sophie’s face on her face. Then she went into Sophie’s vision, and all these sensations vanished.
Sophie wasn’t showing Mouth a memory, the way Mouth had expected. She had braced herself for another glimpse into the terrible features of history or, worse, some slice of their shared past from Sophie’s perspective. Instead, they were flying, Sophie and Mouth, floating above the clouds that had been the upper limit of the world for Mouth’s entire life. Mouth looked at Sophie, who was gliding with a placid focus in her eyes, like she did this every day. Sophie gazed upward, and Mouth followed her line of sight to see the blackness of the sky overhead, dotted with tiny lights. A rounded mirror splashed them with reflected light, and Mouth realized this was the moon.
How are we doing this? Mouth tried to ask Sophie, but there was no air up here.
Sophie’s voice came, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t a memory, not really. Some of it is. The Gelet have memories of being in flying machines that they’ve shared with me. But this is also just my imagination, mixing with the real sensations. Think of it as a fantasy.”
Mouth could see the sweep of the ground, passing underneath, in between the thick ropes of clouds. The ground was pitch dark, because they were over the night, and the clouds wouldn’t let even a drop of moonlight through. Mouth wasn’t sure how they could see down there, but this made dream sense rather than regular sense. They passed over the curve of the world, and Mouth saw a burning light on the horizon. She tried to turn and fly in the opposite direction, because the sunlight would shrivel her to cinders, but Sophie kept driving forward. “Nothing can hurt us,” she whispered.
In the dream, Sophie gave Mouth a tiny smile, like they were two fliers moving independent of each other, and then they came into more light than Mouth had ever seen. Even through the clouds, she could see the arid ground sizzling, the very dirt being scoured by hot winds. How Sophie had gotten this image, Mouth couldn’t guess, since Gelet would never be able to withstand full daylight, in a flying machine or otherwise. Then Mouth looked down and saw crystal formations, gleaming and pulsing: another city.
Sophie pointed upward, and at last Mouth knew where she had gotten these images of the day, seen from above. A spaceship passed right over their heads: a silver shape, like a man crouching on his elbows and knees, with the sun painting its ancient skin a million shades of red and blue, rippling into each other. The Mothership had never stopped waiting, never lost faith in the people crawling in the dirt below.
They flew through clouds, ducked around tiny windstorms, and wove in and out of the day. Sophie beckoned Mouth with one finger, and they flew higher and higher, up into the bl
ackness, past the edge of the atmosphere. They hovered far above even the Mothership, near the great yellow-orange crags of the moon. And they looked at January, the bright half and the dark half, not motionless at all but always turning. The day wasn’t just red fire, but had veins of blue and green, like jewels against a bright cloak. The night had a texture like velvet, with a dark purple sheen to it. Mouth stood in space, looking down at the world, and she was flooded with an emotion she couldn’t even identify. She almost couldn’t stand how beautiful January was from up here, and how wonderfully wrong it felt, to see so much daylight with what seemed to be her own eyes.
They drifted down, not even seeming to get any closer to the clouds at first, then picked up speed. Mouth almost screamed as she fell into the cloud layer, but it became a laugh instead. The clouds yawned and swallowed them, and then they descended in the night, racing over frozen peaks and canyons wider than anything on the road. At last they found the city in the middle of the night, and descended through an airshaft. Mouth saw her own body, inside a tiny chamber, with Sophie sprawled on top of her, and then she fell inside her own head and her eyes opened.
Mouth realized her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she and Sophie were stuck to each other. She didn’t want to peel away, because she felt her heart drumming, her blood so rich it dazzled her eyes, her skin wide awake. Sophie had given her an incredible gift, and she didn’t know what to do with it. She pulled her arms out from between Sophie’s knees, and hugged Sophie as tight as she could.
“I thought you hated me,” Mouth whispered in Sophie’s ear.
“I did, for a long time.” Sophie was breathing in sharp bursts. “But you’re my jinx. I guess I have to find a way to live with you.”
“I’m…” Mouth felt overcome for a moment, with stammering tears. “I’m sorry about Bianca. I’m sorry for all of it. I keep wishing I had died with the rest of the Citizens. I wish we hadn’t destroyed this delicate miracle that the Gelet had created. We should have paid attention.”
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 33
