Mouth looked at Alyssa. Eyes all bright and wide. Nostrils flared a little, head thrown back to expose a delicate neck and collarbone. “I’m asking you, just this once. Stay out of this. I can already tell it’s going to get ugly.”
Alyssa kept arguing, but eventually she gave up and went to check on the rest of the Couriers, who were still shacked up in the back of a furniture store while George worked out the kinks in their deal.
* * *
Mouth always met her informant in the same place, at a small table made of unvarnished banyan wood, in the spicy-yeasty cellar of an oatmeal restaurant. And always at the same time: three chimes after the red-and-blue smoke. Mouth usually arrived first and then sat alone, as motionless and slumped over as one of those black banyan trees that lined the dry gullies in the Northern Ranges.
The girl arrived late, as usual, limned with a grief that dulled her gaze and put heavy lines on a face that seemed like it was made for laughter. “Hey,” she muttered as she sat opposite Mouth. “Thanks for waiting.”
Bianca had high cheekbones, ears shaped like dewdrops, and the sleek confidence of the Xiosphanti ruling class—you could tell some of her ancestors had ridden in the New Shanghai compartment, though you could never say so in this town.
“I’ve been having one of those times when I see her face everywhere, and I just want to scream,” Bianca said.
“I’ve lost a lot of people, and I’m very familiar with the thing where the past becomes an optical illusion.” Mouth chewed every other word before she spoke it.
“How do you deal with it? How do you keep from just screaming and breaking things every time you see someone that you know is dead?”
Mouth didn’t have a good answer for that. The whole reason she was meeting with Bianca was to appease the dead, but that was none of Bianca’s concern.
Those fools had stuck the Invention in a vault inside the Palace, just two kilometers away from here, and maybe this, at last, was the reason why Mouth had elbowed her way past death so many times. So Mouth tried to come up with something to say to Bianca.
“I don’t know. Dreams intrude into reality all the time, and you can’t waste your energy getting mad at them.”
The banyan trees this table was made of had been grown from Earth seeds, spliced with DNA from local flora, and the result had been oily flesh, hard-pebbled skin, and misdirected growth.
“I’m not pissed off at dreams.” Bianca laughed and shook her head. She had to stop talking because a waiter showed up, and she was ordering swamp vodka for both of them. Mouth realized that Bianca’s Xiosphanti had gotten less formal, with fewer clumsy attempts to pin a social status on Mouth, than the first time they’d talked.
Mouth had made three short visits to the Founders’ Square, near the Palace, to try to scope out entrances and exits, and had found no obvious holes in the security. But she’d noticed something else: a gang of twitchy young people who were clearly doing the same thing she was. She’d eavesdropped enough to figure out this was the Uprising, and they were planning something serious. Some kind of political action inside the Palace, and they knew about some secret passage that led all the way in. Plus they had some way of getting past the guards outside. Since then, Mouth had attended as many political gatherings as she could.
But none of the leaders of the Uprising trusted Mouth. Except for Bianca, who ate up Mouth’s stories of visiting other places where they did everything different—including Argelo, the City that Never Sleeps.
The swamp vodka arrived.
“Your friend gave her life for the Uprising, right? So you’re honoring her memory the best you can.” Mouth forced herself to drink, even though the fumes made her sick to her stomach.
Bianca shook her head. “Sophie wasn’t part of the Uprising. Neither was I, back then. We were just kids, playing at being revolutionaries. We never would have overthrown a coffee table. But then Sophie … she took the blame for a few food dollars that I borrowed.” She choked down some swamp vodka and hissed in her throat. “The ludicrous part is, if they had found that money in my pocket instead of hers, they probably would have let me off with a warning. They took one look at her and decided she ought to die.”
“They were trying to send a message,” Mouth said.
“They were being operated by the machinery of the state. They weren’t trying to do anything, really.”
A single electric torch lit the cellar behind Bianca’s head, casting shadows that gave her two black eyes and a long mouth.
“Most people die for stupid reasons. The most anyone can hope for is to make some noise before that happens.” Mouth forced herself to gulp more swamp vodka, to encourage Bianca to keep drinking.
“I never even got to tell Sophie how much she meant to me,” Bianca said. “I didn’t even realize myself, until she was gone. Nobody else ever saw the side of her that I got to see, when we were alone together. She had these amazing insights. I couldn’t wait to see what she would become. The whole world would have learned to admire her. If only—”
Bianca spat out a little blood from chewing her own tongue, but she still didn’t let the tears out, like she hadn’t earned them.
Mouth didn’t get why Bianca had to join these rebels when she was probably destined for a leadership position inside Xiosphant’s government anyhow, if she just kept her head down, and then she could change things from the inside. But Bianca kept saying she didn’t want to be co-opted, to become part of the problem, and she couldn’t play it safe after what they did to her friend.
“Well, whatever it is you and your friends are going to do sounds tricky,” Mouth whispered. “And maybe you could use my expertise at sneaking sensitive items in and out of secure locations.” Mouth tried to keep her voice casual, like she was offering to help Bianca’s friends out of pure altruism, but she could tell she was running out of time. They were going to make their move soon, and she needed to be there when they did.
Facing the end of the Resourceful Couriers felt like losing your family a second time. Like Mouth would need to recount every one of the tears she’d shed after the Citizens all died. Somehow Mouth had convinced herself that if she could just grab the Invention, and get back one small piece of the Citizens, then she’d be okay with whatever happened after that.
Mouth tried to think of the right thing to say to get past Bianca’s guard. “You won’t find anyone else in this town with as much experience moving high-value items.”
“Why would you even want to help us?” Bianca stared at Mouth and frowned. “I thought you were just passing through town. So why get involved with local politics?”
Mouth considered telling Bianca the truth. But instead, she just scratched both her ears with her knuckles, and said, “I don’t even know when I’m going to be able to leave. Our tunnel, uh, got caved in. And I can’t stand to see the way this town exploits people. Everybody here just works and sleeps, works and sleeps, until they drop dead. I’m just not the sort of person who can see injustice without wanting to tear it down with my own hands.” Mouth paused, to make sure she hadn’t oversold it.
When Mouth looked up, Bianca was studying her, like she wanted to believe that Mouth was for real, and could help. Bianca was getting ready to throw her own life away because of her pointlessly dead friend, and she was just smart enough to be terrified.
SOPHIE
I look over my shoulder all the time when I venture outside. Every soot-stained garret hanging over me, every food cart on the sidewalk, becomes a mob or a police squad, and I go stiff and breathless every time I think I’m about to get caught. Even though nobody’s looking for me, I see threats everywhere. It’s more like the memory of my execution is carved into every weathered sandstone wall and every loose brick of these streets, and I can’t go out without feeling as though the police still have me, and I’m still about to be thrown to my death.
But as I dart my head around, I see only the normal life of the city. Children play shadowseek in the big fenced-in workyard, hiding behind industrial lathing tools and carving machines. The workyard used to be an actual playground, before my time, but they decided the space was needed for more important things. Kids insist on playing there anyway. The pipe-workers are having their shift change because it’s Ninth Chime, and they all meet on this one block of sidewalk, in their muddy coveralls, where the pipe-workers going off shift say the old ritual phrases of consolation to the ones who have to work into curfew. This one old man is hand-churning cake batter, in the exact same storefront where he’s done it since my parents were little. I step on flyers for the Grand Cinema and discarded copies of a cheap magazine full of romance stories, both printed on recycled banyan wood.