When we first became friends, and Bianca used to pull the forgotten history books out of the back of the library at the Gymnasium, this act of revealing a different past seemed to me a magical power. But now I keep wondering if there were books she chose to leave on the shelf, which talked about all the crimes of saviors, like the Hydroponic Garden Massacre. Maybe if she had read deeper, things would be different now.
Bianca sighs. “Then after that freak cyclone, everyone was scared, and frightened people always crave stability. Sophie, I really need someone I can count on here, and I still wish that could be you.”
I look out from her balcony, at a view of Xiosphant I’ve never seen. The town looks so clean, all of the beige and crimson rooftops catching the dusk rays. You can’t even see the tiny patch of cyclone damage, let alone any other blemishes. A glow comes from the top of the Young Father and casts a curtain of illumination over the warm side of town, and then as I turn my head to the left the light dissipates, until darkness lands at the feet of the Old Mother.
“I can’t believe you didn’t actually change anything.” I can see the market and the big shops on the Boulevard, and the housing towers dotting the skyline. “You were going to make everything better. All of these people trapped in cycles, the same thing over and over, everyone yearning for freedom. You were going to fix it.”
“Give me time. A generation from now, you’ll see the change. We’re going to reopen trade with Argelo, and people will be exposed to new ideas, new ways of living.”
I look away from the balcony and check Bianca out again: the rigid posture, the fidgeting ankles, the tight jaw. She’s trapped herself here in this Palace, and underneath her brash surface she’s terrified, more than when we almost drowned on the Sea of Murder. She got everything she thought she wanted, and now she’s barely holding on.
All I want to do is rescue Bianca one last time, save her from herself, as if all her mistakes—her crimes—are just another handful of food dollars that I can take on myself. The ache grows inside me until it feels too big to contain, and I want to carry her away from here.
But we’re past that now. There’s only one thing I have left to offer her.
“I need someone to count on, and I wish that could be you,” she says again. “I don’t know how you survived, and I want to hear all about it. But you came back to me, and now you can help me make all of this right. I’ve always imagined doing all of this with you by my side.”
“I’ve been living in the midnight city.” I choose my words carefully. “Everything I told you before was true. I came back here because I have something incredible to show to all the people, and you’re the one I always wanted to share everything with. What you said just now, about how you couldn’t change the system even once you were in charge, I can help you fix that. I have a way to change everything. And you and I could finally understand each other, and stop hurting each other all the time. We could be real.”
As I say those things, I feel as though I’m shaping a possible future in my mind, and inviting Bianca to shape it with me. The holiest act. I can almost see it becoming real, and maybe coming here was worth the risk after all.
“So that hive of ice monsters gave you a new political theory? Or some kind of organizational tool? I’m intrigued.”
Bianca keeps looking over her shoulder at the door, as if expecting Dash to come back. Or Nai, if Nai is somehow still alive. I stay close to the balcony, because if either of those people show up, I’ll swing out the window and up onto the roof in an instant.
I can’t help drawing my cloak tighter, to disguise the shape of my body from her. “I need to know. What scares you so much about the idea that the Gelet could be people? You wanted to use them in your invasion, so why couldn’t you accept them as equals?”
She ticks on her fingers. “Because if they’re people, then what does that make us? Invaders? Is our struggle here even meaningful, if we’re just squabbling on the margins of their history? Because I’ve eaten crocodile meat, at some of those feasts I used to go to. Because I didn’t want to lose the Sophie I knew—you know, the sweet, passionate girl who always lit up my world—and it scared me to think of you becoming something I couldn’t even understand.”
I should leave now. The calculating part of me, the part that somehow kept me alive in the midst of so much death, is yelling for me to get out of here. But I stay.
“I’ve never heard you admit to being scared before.” I move back toward her, and she actually smiles at me. Her smile still has the same power as always. I feel my center of gravity rise.
“I never had to say. You’ve always known,” she says, “and you’ve always helped me get through it. So okay. I’m here. What did you want to show me?”
I hesitate just a moment longer, then I let my cloak fall open. Bianca sees my tendrils, up above the neckline of my simple shift, and the motion of tentacles behind my head, and lets out a high gasp.
Bianca heaves, and speaks in a guttural rush. “Your body … oh shit … What did they do to you? What did they turn you into? Fuck, are you even human anymore? How can you stand to be— I think I’m going to throw up—” She makes clicking sounds in the back of her throat.
I have a sudden flash of Mouth saying, “I think you’re beautiful,” as though my subconscious is trying to protect me.
“I’m still me,” I plead. “I haven’t changed. I’m still Sophie.”
She spits and thrashes, looking past me. “No. Oh no, no, no, this is worse than I could have imagined. They turned you into … This is so much worse. We’re going to have to study you. Are they planning on doing this to other people? Is this what you wanted to show me, this … this contamination? Is it contagious? Are you going to try and infect me?”
“No, wait,” I babble, because she’s reaching for some velvet cord that will summon guards or servants. “Just wait and listen to me for once, Bianca, I haven’t even shown you what I was going to show you. Please stop. I promise it’ll be okay. I could never hurt you.”
As I lean toward her, I reach for a comforting memory: the pot of tea that we always took from the common room and kept on the squat little table in our dorm room at the Gymnasium. Before all of this, back when life was simple. I remember one quiet moment when she poured tea for me, and I keep it in my head, the fragile stillness of it, so I can give it to her.
But Bianca squirms and lashes out with one fist as my tendrils make contact, and I can’t find the memory of pouring tea anymore. Instead, all I can think of is staring at her from behind the War Monument, with a barrier of misshapen waves between us. My mind skips to the time I followed her and spied on her in a political meeting full of guns, and then standing in the corner of some party in Argelo, observing her. Then I’m watching someone tie a mask around her face as she recedes into a crowd. Studying her and Dash across a crowded nightclub.
“How many times did you spy on me? Were you just stalking me all the time—” Bianca makes another gagging sound.
I can’t come up with a memory that’s not of me watching Bianca from a distance. My heart is shaking itself to pieces and my tendrils tear at my skin with the effort of maintaining contact. I fumble for a happy memory and—
—Bianca is lying next to me on her bed, in our dorm room, whispering in my ear, and her breath makes my skin so sensitive that I would evaporate if she even touched me and then her body touches mine just for a moment and I feel a shiver and I’ve never even let myself want anything with the part of me that rejoices in desiring—
—Now, here, in the Palace, Bianca pulls away from me, just as I’ve realized how dangerous that last memory was, the feelings I’ve never even confessed to myself.
Bianca makes a noise between a roar and a howl, and throws me so hard I land halfway across the room.
“You forced yourself into my mind and you … Standing here with those grubby oily worms coming out of your body, thinking those disgusting thoughts about me. I can’t even stand to look at you. They
didn’t turn you into a monster, you were always a monster. How did I not know this?”
Bianca’s words have a thicket of sharp edges, and I’m still paralyzed, thinking about that desire that I never even let into myself. Bianca spits at me that I’m perverted, revolting, a creep.
All the blood is rushing to my head and I’m drowning, but there must be something I can say right now. I didn’t stalk her—and my love isn’t selfish—and I’m scared I overwhelmed her with too many memories at once. I try to blurt an explanation. “I just wanted to save—”
My shoulder is on fire. The pain spreads to my left arm and my left side. A man in a bright green breastplate has come in the door and fired an antique pulse maser at me. The wound mostly cauterized on contact, but blood still dribbles out of my shoulder. I scream.
Bianca yells at her man not to kill me, they need me alive. I pull away as she shouts at the guards pouring into the room not to shoot, for fuck’s sake. I reach the balcony, where I’d plotted an easy parabola—flipping onto the railing and then up to the roof. But I’ve lost flesh, and I’m losing blood. I try to climb, but I slip on my own mess, and I fall instead. My tentacles only just save me, catching on the Palace wall, as I drop to the balcony one floor down.
mouth
Mouth climbed down into the sewer and made her foul way under the Founders’ Square and the market stalls, to the pristine clay pipe that she was pretty sure led into the dungeon’s latrine. The pipe itself was too narrow, so she set about weakening the mortar around one of the big new stones at the base of the dungeon wall. Whoever built this new dungeon had done a poor job with the masonry, probably because Dash had broken their arms for not working fast enough. The big granite block wobbled as the mortar crumbled under pressure from the scraper in Mouth’s belt, but she still needed several lifetimes to loosen the block and pull it out of the way. Then she could climb up through the commode itself, which stunk just as much as she’d expected. She pushed aside the rotting wooden boards over the commode.
The single-room dungeon had one prisoner: Alyssa wore a chain attached to a shackle around her ankle, with the other end bolted to the wall. She looked so much older Mouth didn’t recognize her at first. Her skin clung to an emaciated face, and she bent almost double. Her eyes focused on Mouth with effort.
“You look like hot puke,” Mouth whispered. “Hold still.”
She found a file inside her tool belt and started sawing through the chain on Alyssa’s ankle.
“Make up your mind,” Alyssa hissed. “You ditch me, then you come back.”
“Shut up and let me work.”
“Can’t wait to hear your latest rationalization.” Alyssa sounded like mossy rock being dragged over rotten wood. “Not that I don’t bear some of the blame for this shitfest. I believed in Bianca—like, really believed. I spent a lot of time encouraging her to step up, after you vanished on us. Become the brilliant leader that she was meant to be. I think I may have miscalculated. Pretty much as soon as we finished murdering the entire government, I was suddenly ‘not reliable.’ I mean, fuck. I’m the most reliable person there is.”
“Shhh,” Mouth said. “You’ll have plenty of time to explain how this is really my fault after we get out of here.”
Alyssa shook her head. “You’re just going to ditch me again.”
“No, I’m not.” Mouth was about halfway through the chain, and she’d only had to switch hands three times. Both hands were raw and throbbing.
That was when the alarms started ringing. Not from the dungeon, from the Palace above. Mouth cursed. Sophie.
“I have to go,” Mouth said. “I’ll leave you the file. The commode leads to a stone I removed, then the sewers.”
“You literally said a moment ago that you wouldn’t abandon me.”
Mouth paused with one foot in the toilet, and sighed.
“I have a duty. I’m Sophie’s bodyguard, and she’s an idiot. She’s also the future of humanity, sort of. Keep working on your chain.”
Mouth had wasted too much time already. The alarms blared, and boots crashed on the pavement above. She swung back down into the sewer, trying to guess which pipe led to the fancy toilets. She picked one that looked likely, and took a hammer to the fixtures until she had made an opening. At least the alarms and shouts drowned out the racket of her clumsy swings.
* * *
“She’s not even human anymore,” Bianca said. “She got into my chamber and attacked me with some kind of psychic powers. It was horrible. We need to capture her alive if we can.”
Mouth couldn’t get over how good the inside of the Palace smelled: like fresh-cut pine, even over the sewage she tracked onto the floor (which was made of a stone so soft and warm Mouth wanted to lie down on it for a while). The Inner Council Chamber had gleaming walls of something that looked like glass but wasn’t, and the furniture was a mixture of handcrafted high-end wood and machine-fabbed steel and plastic. Beautiful ancient devices, some of them dating back to the Mothership, covered every surface.
Most of the clamor rang out from upstairs, but shouts came from the outer hallway surrounding this level. “She’s down here!” Mouth ran toward the voices.
Sophie cowered under her big cloak, hiding between two pillars, with guards closing in on her. She held her shoulder in one hand, like they’d winged her already. Just as Mouth made eye contact with Sophie, all the guards spotted Mouth.
Mouth gestured for Sophie to stay put, then ran for the nearest window, making as much commotion as she could, sliding across the polished floor. The first two rifle shots missed, but the third went through her shoulder, turning her right arm into a useless decoration. The fourth hit her left leg. She hoped this distraction had helped Sophie to escape, however unlikely that might be.
As Mouth started to bleed out on the fancy carpet, she remembered when the Resourceful Couriers had tried to get into the rug import business, working with this one community of weavers who had a workshop in the Pit back in Argelo, using techniques they claimed to have brought all the way from Earth. The Couriers had hauled a pile of their wares all the way to Xiosphant, only to find they were cheap rugs that someone had dyed just well enough to fool a group of rubes. At least now Mouth’s blood was soaking into what appeared to be a genuine antique, which meant she would have some revenge, even in death. Nothing would ever get blood out of this carpet.
“Oh, for—” Bianca was standing over her, wearing an off-the-shoulder crimson gown. “Mouth. I should have known.” She turned to the nearest guard. “Get her cleaned and patched up. Then put her in the dungeon. I want to know everything she can tell us about this monstrosity.”
Bianca leaned in close enough that Mouth could see the redness in her eyes, and the insomnia lines. Bianca looked almost as prematurely aged as Alyssa. “I should have expected you’d be here, after that creature showed up in my house. I want you to know that I destroyed your stupid poetry book the first chance I got.”
Mouth didn’t even know what book Bianca was talking about at first, and then she remembered about the Invention. She tried to shrug, but that was not happening with this bullet wound. She also couldn’t scrounge enough air to say anything about that “creature” being the only one who ever really loved Bianca. Or the fact that Bianca had been happy to use Sophie’s unique connection to January’s natives to play her geopolitical games. Mouth had summoned endless quantities of air back when she’d been saying whatever Bianca wanted to hear, but now every breath came with a sharp pain in her chest, like her lung had gotten wrapped in barbed wire.
* * *
Alyssa rolled her eyes when Mouth fell on her hands and knees in the dungeon, and the guards shackled her to another chain. “Well, you did say you would be back.” The guards locked the door behind them.
Mouth still couldn’t breathe. They had cleaned her bullet wounds and applied some sealant, but one of them felt like it still had shrapnel. She made an asthmatic rattle instead of words.
Alyssa looked
around to make sure the guards had left, and then pulled the file out of her sleeve and sawed through her chain, which was close to breaking. “This file is worthless,” she said. “What happened to the good one we used to have? The one with the specially hardened iron surface? I know you had it last.”
Mouth couldn’t get enough breath to answer, but also honestly wasn’t sure. The good file had been in that cloth bag, back in Argelo, maybe.
“You lose everything.” Alyssa rubbed the file faster. “I can’t leave a single thing with you. Literally anything I put in your hands, it’s just … gone.” One last frenzy of tugging, and her chain snapped.
Halfway to the commode, Alyssa paused and looked at Mouth, who was on the floor, hugging her knees and trying to breathe. “You only just let me down, again.”
Mouth tried to gasp that she was sorry. She had broken in here to rescue Alyssa in the first place. She had never wanted to leave Alyssa behind in the night.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t just let you stay here. Even half a reason. I’m so tired of your garbage.”
Mouth managed to squeeze out, “You have no … other friends. Everyone else … is dead.”
“Good point. Hold still, asshole.” Mouth passed out while Alyssa was filing.
A rhythmic series of slaps across her cheek made her upper bullet wound throb, and she realized her ankle was no longer chained. Mouth lurched to her feet, swaying.
“We don’t have long,” Alyssa said. “When they realize we’re gone, they’re going to notice the mess you made of that toilet. Nice subtle work, by the way.”
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 36
