The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  “Bianca made her own choices.” Sophie raised herself up, so she was kneeling across Mouth’s waist and lap. “The rest of it, I don’t know. But Bianca, she deserves to take the blame for her mistakes. I wanted to put all of it on you so I could keep her pure in my mind, but that’s not fair to her, either. I still blame you for the parts that were yours, but…”

  Mouth sat, her hands just touching Sophie’s. “I thought if I could make up for what I did with Bianca and the others … I thought I could be a good person. But now, I feel like … I don’t know. I feel like I should do something to make sure what happened to the Citizens never happens again.”

  Sophie twitched with fear, like Mouth could be about to suggest doing something drastic: revenge or something. And maybe Mouth should hate these creatures for killing her people, who had never intended any harm. But she couldn’t get the image of the marching icecap, full of burning rain, out of her head.

  Mouth shook her head. “I mean, people need to understand. Maybe more people need to become like you.”

  “They already told me that they want me to go back, to find other humans who could become hybrids,” Sophie said. “I don’t want to. I want to live here forever. You don’t even know how great it is, being able to share everything.”

  Mouth would never forgive the Gelet for what they had done, but she could understand it. You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.

  * * *

  Sophie led Mouth on tours of the city, which had innumerable wonders when you perceived it through Sophie’s senses. Mouth learned not to cringe, at least not too much, when Gelet came near. Some of their food tasted decent when you got used to the slurry texture and rough, chewy edges.

  Sophie still wanted to convince Mouth to give in, to let go of humanity and learn to perceive all the beauty, the dream geography, of this city. To become like her. But Mouth would never have simple feelings about the Gelet, and there would always be some hate in the mix. Plus, her mind couldn’t open itself up the way Sophie’s did. If Mouth tried to live with those new senses, plus all of the vivid access to other people’s memories and ideas, her head would explode. “Even if I didn’t have all this toxic emotion, I wouldn’t have the right kind of brain,” Mouth kept trying to explain.

  “This is the way to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, you said so yourself.”

  Mouth shook her head. Memories still pressed on the upper part of her spine. “You’ll find other people who can handle it, you’re good at reading people. You can find the ones who have nothing to lose, who have learned to listen with both ears so they can know when the powerful will come down on them next. The people Bianca was willing to die for. You’ll spot them, and offer them a different chance.”

  “I can’t,” Sophie said. “This is going to destroy me. However sick you feel inside, when you imagine letting the Gelet reach you ever again, imagine that times a hundred. That’s how I feel about going back among humans. Even if I were normal. But looking like this … everyone who sees me will be disgusted.”

  Mouth had gotten used to how Sophie looked. Her face was the same as ever, her eyes still clear and searching, her mouth wide and expressive. She had a protective hide around her shoulders and torso, which could appear like a suit if you weren’t looking carefully. But the tentacles, which seemed to help her see in the dark, and the moist grubs, which grew under her collarbone and waved like kelp in the water, would be harder to disguise.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” Mouth said.

  Sophie just scowled. “I’ll be dead the moment I set foot in Xiosphant.”

  Mouth knew the next few words she spoke would change her life, maybe ruin what was left of it. But she had no choice: “I’ll protect you.” Sophie was staring at her, and maybe didn’t know how to trust someone whose head was a sealed vault. Mouth added, “I still can’t fight, or use a weapon. And I know I haven’t always kept my promises. But I mean it. I’ll guard you with my life.”

  Sophie seemed like she was about to say something back, then thought better of it. She didn’t speak the whole rest of the time they walked around the city, even though Mouth couldn’t make much sense of the “tour” without Sophie’s narration. They walked through giant chambers and around the edges of deep pits, but though Mouth could take in just enough detail to recognize tremendous engineering, she mostly saw just tentacles and huge legs moving in the gloom.

  No matter what Mouth said now, Sophie had stopped talking, as if they’d stepped back in time to when they had been strangers. Mouth tried to break through her wall, by making awkward jokes about the noxious gin-and-milk that everyone insisted on drinking in Xiosphant, but Sophie just shrugged and kept walking. Mouth lost Sophie a few times, but then Sophie would tug at Mouth’s wrist from out of the darkness. Mouth ended up back in her hammock, alone, with a few boxes of freeze-dried survival rations for company. One of them contained actual chocolate, which was more tart than she had expected.

  Mouth had nothing to do but lie there, with a riot of ghosts. She read more books, and also decided that the sides of her head had healed enough to shave them once more, using some supplies from an old medi-kit. She had no clue how long she stayed there alone, but when Sophie reappeared, she still wasn’t speaking. This went on so long Mouth almost forgot what Sophie’s voice even sounded like.

  SOPHIE

  I can’t go back to Xiosphant. I’ll die. I’d rather go into the night and freeze to death than return to the city that tried so hard to break me. Especially looking like this.

  I try to explain to Jean: I imagine running out into the night, exposing myself to the elements, and I make the image as real as I can. This terrifies Jean, who was considered a suicide risk for such a long time, but she still responds with the same old idea of me walking among my own kind again, happy and useful. The decision has been made.

  But who made this decision? I’ve been understanding their society for so long, and I know the city backward and forward—I even met the magistrate—but I still don’t know who’s in charge, or how I can change their mind. I have no clue what they believe in, what principles guide their decisions. Nobody even understands when I try to ask. I show them the prince and the Privy Council, or the Nine Families, and they grasp that some humans are treated better than others. They respond with a memory of a time, right after Jean was hurt in that snowy rockslide, when the others tried to bring Jean her favorite foods, or play complicated music involving countless pressure variations.

  I slip away from Jean and sneak down to the deepest, hottest levels of the city, where nobody’s ever brought me. If there’s a leader, or a ruling council, or something, it must be down here somewhere. I search every tunnel, but never find any seat of power.

  Then I stumble into a wide, rocky chamber that’s so hot I have to shield my eyes. Sweat pours down my face. In the middle of this vault, a fleshy mass writhes inside a sticky web. These are the half-born children, just like Rose showed me so long ago, still hungry and sick. Still stunted from the toxins leaching through the ice and soil, with nubs where their pincers ought to be and thin wriggling limbs coming off their clay-soft skin. Their distress comes through my cilia, as if my new senses pick up some chemical they’re giving off, and the sudden weight of despair crushes me. They’re trapped, with no way to see a future, and everything hurts, and nobody can bring them any comfort. Rose already shared an impression of these suffering children, but this feels different. I want to step forward and cradle the entire brood in my arms. I can’t stand in front of all this misery and do nothing, and these might as well be my own children. I feel hotter and hotter, until I have to flee, back the way I came, back to the cool silence.

  Afterward, those fear chemicals soak into me, and I keep remembering. It’s worse each time.

  Nothing will change, unless more humans learn to be like me. I remember the climate projections
, and the rising trend line. We can’t fix this problem in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but we need to start now. There are places Gelet can’t go and things they can’t do, but humans can.

  I treat this decision the way I learned to treat my memory-panic. I stop, and I give myself space to feel all the worst emotions. Then I move forward.

  * * *

  One by one, each of the Gelet shares their favorite impression of me. River remembers me volunteering to be changed, how my determination never wavered, even though I had seen that ancient hologram. Jean volunteers some moment of kindness that I didn’t even remember, when I reached out to make sure she was okay. Felice recalls how I laughed, watching the puppet show about humans. The Gelet who suffered a harpoon wound and still showed up again when I brought the Glacier Fools, whom I haven’t seen since I was changed, shares a random memory of me helping some children cross a narrow walkway. Another Gelet was there on the Sea of Murder, when I was trapped on the ice with the Resourceful Couriers, and shows me how brave I was.

  At last a Gelet I’ve never seen here in the city approaches, shy and hesitant, and opens her pincer to share her own memory: me climbing to the plateau of the Old Mother, to thank her for saving me. Rose holds up my father’s timepiece, carefully, at the end of one tentacle.

  * * *

  Mouth won’t stop chattering, even as I’m trying to say goodbye to my whole family. We ride some kind of seed-shaped carriage, part volcanic rock and part living creature, through steep ice tunnels. Mouth’s head is freshly shaved, and she’s wearing her environment suit again. But mine doesn’t fit anymore, so I’m just covered with layers of protective moss. I shiver, though not from the cold, and share again my worst memories of Xiosphant: cops dragging me into the street and shooting protestors, the Curfew Patrol aiming guns at Bianca and me. But Rose and the others already know how vicious Xiosphant can be, since their friends have been sliced up and roasted there.

  Rose keeps reminding me of when I used to visit her. She shows me how I looked that first time, out on the ice wearing my secondhand trendy clothes, dying and terrified. She showed me that memory before, but this time I can identify more easily with Rose’s perspective.

  I’m Rose, and I see this human, shivering from cold and terrified rage, and she does that animal thing of tensing to fight or run. But then, instead, she does something no human has ever willingly done before: tilt her head back, let my tendrils touch her bare flesh. I feel Rose’s surprise, her euphoria, the sense that something perverted and maybe wonderful is happening.

  When I came to the city, Rose stayed away, because she needed this to work so much she was worried that she would overwhelm me. But she shared everyone else’s impressions of me, and helped to shape the consensus that the time had come for me to go home.

  I try to ask Rose the question that’s been bothering me since I came here: What do the Gelet believe in? I have to ask several times, and then she seems to get it, because she unfolds an ancient memory, the oldest that anyone has ever shared with me. Or maybe not a memory, a legend—or a little of both. I can tell its age by the smooth edges, the lack of sensory detail, and the easy flow of the events, the same way humans can spot that a story has been told and retold by a long chain of people, because it makes too much sense.

  Long ago, before the first civilization that I saw rise and fall in those shared visions, everyone lived in scattered burrows all over the night, with no more than a hundred people per burrow. They wove their tendrils together when anyone wanted to share information about what she had seen, or done. Or somebody might come up with a simple idea that she shared with everyone else, like a way to harvest more roots and grubs to feed into the web where their children were developing. Or how to strengthen their barriers against iceslides and avalanches.

  And that’s when their greatest love story took place. These two people, who had grown up in different burrows, came together after some brutal ice storms drove them away from their homes. The two refugees became inseparable, and their tendrils were intertwined whenever they weren’t working or eating. They slept with their pincers wrapped around each other, in their own mossy nook where the cool air ran over their carapaces. Their dreams flowed back and forth between them, and their memories of fleeing their homes blended together until they almost shared the same past. Everyone else recoiled, because this couldn’t be healthy for them, plus they were excluding the rest of the community, which was hurtful. People tried to pry the two of them apart, physically, or sent one or the other of them on long errands outside the burrow. At last one of the oldest and most patient of the burrow’s residents decided to talk to both of them together, and find out exactly what perversion they had been drawn into—and then there were three of them. Entangled, inextricable. People began talking about evicting all three of them.

  What had seduced them into this unnatural closeness? A set of designs for a water wheel, using the nearby underground river to operate a crude mill that would help them separate out the poisonous part of some mushrooms that grew in the caves. This was such a complex idea that one person couldn’t invent it alone and then share it with everyone else—the concept needed to be shaped among two or more people, working together. They couldn’t even share it with the others until they had the concept. And these lovers had discovered a powerful thrill, a joy that went all the way down to their stomachs, in weaving a big idea together. Like some wild rapture, the sensation of helping others to imagine something bigger than yourselves.

  Somehow, this weird love story is the foundation of this community’s politics, or religion. Rose lingers on the oddest parts, like when they finally reveal their invention to the rest of the community, or the tenderness when the couple becomes a trio. I sense the echoes from all the countless other times that people have passed this legend around, and the lesson that comes with it: to join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community. Even the other communities that live apart from the midnight city, scattered all over the night in smaller cities or towns, share this origin story.

  Just as she finishes explaining, we roll to a stop. I look out and see the unmistakable crags of the Old Mother rising over the permafrost, with just a tiny wedge of light behind it. I squint as hard as I can, but the light still burns.

  PART

  SEVEN

  mouth

  Xiosphant’s decorative carvings leered down as its brick walls closed in on them. Gables overhung the acute angles at the intersection of two streets, as if daring you to say these corners weren’t square. Mouth had always loathed this city, but now every step took her deeper into the past. First the shady side of town, the Warrens, with all the factories and warehouses where she’d attended all those meetings, then the fancy coffee salon where Sophie had worked—boarded up, long since closed—and the Low Road, where the Resourceful Couriers had toasted with swamp vodka. Grungy metal slats covered the windows, and the Curfew Patrols stomped the cobblestones, while people slept in their shrouded bedrooms. But the patrols never came close, because Sophie could sense them from a kilometer away, with the same alien organs she had used to find a half-repaired fissure in the wall facing the Old Mother.

  Sophie kept gazing up at the shutters as if they would open and swallow her. The Gelet had given her a big musty cloak that disguised the new shape of her body, except for when she became agitated and her tentacles moved around under the cape, which happened all the time. Mouth still wore the remains of her environment suit, just in case she didn’t already look enough like a foreigner. The sky grew lighter as they walked deeper into town, and Mouth’s head pounded more and more after so long underground.

  “They’re going to dissect me.” Sophie’s voice barely carried over the final bell before shutters-down. “They’ll catch us, and then they’ll dissect me.”

  “Not gonna happ
en,” Mouth said. “This town tried to kill you once, and you laughed it off. You lived for ages as a condemned criminal here, and you never got caught. You know this town better than anybody, and you are too smart for these tight-asses. If it comes down to you versus the whole damn city of Xiosphant, my money’s on you.”

  Sophie didn’t respond.

  Neither of them discussed the implications of the old familiar shutters, or the Curfew Patrols, or all the other little indications that Xiosphant was still a conformist hole. Alyssa and Bianca had been left with only one vehicle and a tiny force, with kilometers of tundra yet to cross, and both Sophie and Mouth had already come to terms with their probable deaths. As much as they ever could.

  Another bell, and all the slumbering houses yawned. Mouth would never get used to the spooky way this town went from empty to frantic in an eyeblink. People poured through doors, stuffing breakfast into their mouths, rushing to their jobs in half-fastened coveralls and safety gear, already scheming to get ten kinds of money. Mouth and Sophie hustled off the street into the tiniest alleyway, in the shadows, to stay hidden—but also because all these arms and legs, all these voices, all at once, felt like an assault. You forget just how noisy and smelly people are.

  Sophie was already fretting out about how she would accomplish her mission. How she could find anyone who could look at her without screaming for help or alerting the cops—let alone someone who could share her gift without suffering full-on delirium, the way the Glacier Fools and Mouth had. She studied everyone who passed on the street, looking this way and that.

  “This whole town is engineered to make you feel like you’re always running out of time,” Mouth said. “But we can take this slow. The one thing we do have to accomplish soon is getting me a better disguise, and also scoring some food dollars.” They had a satchel with some of those freeze-dried rations, plus some roots that tasted like pheasant according to Sophie. But those things wouldn’t last forever, plus Mouth had aspirations of getting very, very drunk and holding a private wake for Alyssa. Mouth had been sober for too long. “Also, we need whatever money you use to pay for crashspace.”