“You do? Oh good. Please do tell me. I always wondered.”
“Oh, uh, well,” I say. “She was always so frazzled. My mom, you know, she was a bank for one of the farmwheels. And it was her job to fix everybody else’s messes, all the time. And then she would come home, and my father…” I stop, and pull the conversation back from what was about to be a bad place. “So she came here, to be at peace. That’s what I thought, anyway.”
“Your mother was a very talented artist who never had a chance to share her art with anyone,” Hernan says, “which you’ll find is true of many of our clients here. But she also believed in assimilation and being a good Xiosphanti, and she spent her life keeping all these wheels turning. I think on some level she disapproved of the Parlour, with all our decadence, but we were the only ones who could give her what she needed. Whatever that was. As I said, I still don’t know.”
“What kind of art?” I say, in a whisper that’s not my usual whisper. I don’t want to ruin whatever is happening here, this moment that Cyrus and I have catalyzed.
Hernan just gestures at one of the paintings cluttering the wall: a little girl, standing in front of a pile of barley fresh from the farmwheel. The girl is a smudge of light brown, set off by green-and-white highlights on her chemise and ankle-skirt, and the stalks of barley are a rusty blond.
My mother painted my picture, and I never saw her do it.
I stare for a long time, until the image resolves into brushstrokes, but I can’t turn it into a scene whatever I do. It’s just a girl, and some barley, and no context. The harder I try to imagine the whole moment and place my mother in it, the more powerful the sense of absence becomes, until absence is the meaning of the picture. I hear stuttering breaths from my own mouth, like an echo of Cyrus’s purr; I suckle my own lower lip.
When I get my voice back, I say: “She couldn’t have disapproved of this place too much. She brought me here with her.”
“True,” Hernan says, just cradling Cyrus now. “Or maybe she just thought you would need this place eventually, even more than she did.”
mouth
Alyssa and Mouth met for drinks at the Low Road, right after Mouth had come back from yet another one of those political meetings where everyone kept quoting from ancient thinkers like Mayhew and Grantham. (“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” and “People are most imprisoned by the walls they help to build.”)
“What are you even playing at?” Alyssa demanded, once she caught the stench of another dank factory basement on Mouth’s clothes. “Why are you getting sucked into politics anyway? You always told me politics is for settlers.”
“Politics is a bloody waste of time,” Mouth snorted. “This isn’t about politics.”
Alyssa knew Mouth too well, that was the problem. She was the one who held tight during all of Mouth’s bad dreams, nursed Mouth through her bouts of lightsickness, and cried on Mouth’s shoulder when the road started to eat at her soul. Mouth had shown Alyssa how to catch those little weasels under the crust of the road, which you could live off if you had to, and Alyssa had trained Mouth to shoot a gun. Alyssa even taught Mouth some of the songs from her bat mitzvah, and the stories from the Torah, some of which were about nomads. By now, Alyssa knew all of Mouth’s tells.
“This is about what I said before, that you and I might be getting too old to be smugglers.” Alyssa sipped and made a face. “Now you’re trying to prove something by hanging out with Granthamites who are barely old enough to wank. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, love. You’re not even that much older than me. And anyway, I didn’t mean ‘old’ in terms of physical decay. I meant that I’m burning out. I have dreams about the road, and they all end with my bones in a hole. Even if we had a tunnel and a supplier, we might still be stuck here.”
Mouth sighed and guzzled gin-and-milk. This goddamn local drink tasted like cat butter that had gone bad. To be fair, even fresh cat butter tasted as if it had gone bad. Who exactly was going to trade bauxite for cat butter? Mouth understood enough of that “calendar” to know George had been stringing them along for thirty turns of the shutters.
“I’m working on something.”
“Uh-huh.” Alyssa stared at Mouth. “So you’re scamming these kids? Or what?”
Mouth looked around, like government spies could be hiding behind the ugly placard outside, which commemorated the victims of the great cattle stampede long ago, during the Seventh Age of Luck.
“I need to get inside the Palace.” Mouth gave up on trying to keep a secret from Alyssa. “There’s something in there that I need. They probably don’t even know they have it. It’s worthless to almost anybody, but it’s priceless to me. Remember how I vanished after our meeting with George the Bank? I was scoping out the entrances and exits, and there’s no way I can get inside the Palace on my own. The guards have guards.”
“So, you need a thief. Someone who knows all about breaking into places like that.” Alyssa had always loved stories of palace thieves, the whole time Mouth had known her. Something about the glamour, the disguises, or the inevitable seduction of some handsome count just did it for her. Mouth had seen Alyssa kill three people with a single knife, but she still melted when she listened to one of her old audios of long-dead actors playing out some sexy burglary. Alyssa’s hometown had no palace, no prince, no councilors. All the Argelan kids grew up with dramas and stories about the fine houses here in Xiosphant, until it became a fairytale of gold leaf, mahogany, and velvet, with trumpets and swooning any time anyone entered a room. You only fantasize about princes when you’ve never seen one.
“No thieves,” Mouth just grunted. “They don’t have a lot of thievery in the fancy part of town, after what they did to the last one they caught. Anyway, I don’t have time to recruit a debonair master of disguise, just to steal one item out of a giant vault.”
“What exactly is it?”
Mouth hesitated. “It’s … all that’s left of my culture. The people who raised me.”
“The nomads?” Alyssa perked up, because she’d always wanted to know more about Mouth’s childhood.
Mouth was going to need a lot more gin-and-milk if they were going to talk about this. She had long since turned her upbringing into a handful of cute anecdotes about “the nomads who raised me,” which she’d crafted with great care, to avoid straying into painful territory. But Alyssa was giving her that look, the one she had whenever Mouth had lightsickness and was trying to cover. And maybe Mouth owed Alyssa more than just a rehearsed story.
Just in time, Ray came over and refilled their cups.
“We called ourselves the Citizens,” Mouth said, slowly. “We had a whole other relationship with the road than the Resourceful Couriers have. Like, the road was where we lived, not just where we passed through on our way to someplace else. It sounds stupid when I say it like that. We believed that if we kept walking out there, we could learn to keep company with the day and the night. We always stopped in these small towns along the way, and we became something different each time. One town, we’d be traveling performers, like a theater troupe or some musicians. The next town, we’d be carpenters. Or pest controllers. We were experts at becoming whatever the local people wanted us to be, so we always earned our keep. Until the end, anyway.”
Now Alyssa had the same expression as when she listened to her old-timey actors having a stolen romance—like Mouth’s loss was the loveliest part of a heartbreaking story. Mouth tried not to hold it against her.
“One time,” Mouth said, “we walked farther than ever before, probably farther than anybody ever had. We came to the other side of the world, and we found a canyon. Wide enough to fit five Xiosphants inside. No way to cross, you couldn’t build a bridge wide enough even if you had all the heavy metals in the world. We just stood there and gawped at the other side, through all the mist, and tried to see all the way down to the bottom. And then we turned around and went back the way we came.”
“So how do we steal this thing that’s in the Palace?” Alyssa said.
“You don’t do anything,” Mouth said. “You enjoy your vacation and live off the spoils from our last job, assuming George doesn’t screw us, which I’m putting at fifty-fifty right now.”
“You really think I’m going to let you do this on your own?” Alyssa slapped the table with one fresh-manicured hand. “What kind of bitch do you think I am?”
“The kind of bitch who knows this is none of her business.”
“Shut your filthy hole. You’re my sleepmate. We always have each other’s backs. That doesn’t stop just because we’re off the road.”