As I walk in the direction of night, I imagine what I would say to Bianca if she were here, but I no longer have any idea what she would say back.
Some of the buildings in this neighborhood have survived since the beginning of Xiosphant: you can tell by the perfect blocks of whitestone, quarried by the Mothership or an airborne excavator, plus all the classical detailing. The next oldest buildings, including the Illyrian Parlour, come from right around the time of the Great Insomnia, when half the population of Xiosphant left to found another city across the sea, or a slew of smaller towns. You can tell their age by the smoky quality of the bricks, which were fired in this one type of furnace we don’t know how to make anymore. Next, there’s a mishmash of building styles, including rougher bricks but also hand-lathed stone, hauled from beyond the Northern Ranges, with some crude attempts to copy the older style of decorations. We also had that brief period, between wars, when prospectors kept finding new treasure meteors, and trade with Argelo brought lots of beautiful handcrafted decorations. And then there’s everything from the past eight generations, when we just built as much as possible, as cheap as possible, big blocks of cement like the one I grew up in. You can see the whole history of the city, looking at the buildings in any one neighborhood.
I reach the crack in the wall that I’ve squeezed through so many times now, and remove the skirt around the cuffs of my pants. I hesitate, looking up at the side of the Old Mother and remembering the guns and the taunts, the kicks to the back of my leg. The bruises are long faded, but I still feel them under my skin.
And then I start climbing, because I’m looking forward to seeing my friend.
* * *
I know every crack and promontory on the Old Mother by touch alone, and I’m pretty sure I could scale this rock blindfolded. This climb, which nearly killed me when I did it at gunpoint, has become relaxation, a vessel to empty my mind. I let my body recite the litany of grip and hookstep, while I breathe out all my preoccupations. Even when I lose my footing or miss a ledge with my hands, I know how to recover, and I know to rest if I have a cramp. Except if I look behind me and see the steep drop and the sharp rocks at the bottom, or if I stare ahead and dwell too much on the memory of the first time I did this, then I panic. My breathing gets out of control and my fingers weaken, and those things only increase the fear, and there are guns in my face, and I’m going to fall.
That’s when I have to stop, breathe deep, and remind myself: You’re climbing by choice this time. You’re in control. This is the proof that you’re stronger than the monsters who forced you up this slope before.
When I get to the top, Rose is waiting for me. Her tentacles are cocked in big loops, like she’s been tracking my progress, and she lowers her head and opens her pincer in what I know is a gesture of welcome. Her forelegs are bent so she can crouch close enough for me to embrace her. The milky inlets on the sides of her head, above her pincer, close in slightly, giving her a wistful look. That round crocodile mouth—which always looked ravenous and vicious in all the pictures they showed at school—seems to grin, but also pants a little in the warm air. Her woolly fur shimmers with a touch of iridescence. Rose shrinks away from the light up here, but lets me approach.
“I’m so glad to see you, you have no idea,” I say, still out of breath. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. I guess I’ve become an expert at keeping people waiting, but that shouldn’t include you.”
Rose doesn’t seem to understand a word I’m saying, which is one reason I’m so comfortable talking to her. But she shows signs of picking up on my emotional states, which is more than enough. I decided to call her Rose, after the rose shape of the city she showed me the first time we met.
I open the satchel I’ve been keeping on my back during this whole long climb, and pull out some stuff for her. “It’s not much this time. I wish I could repay you properly. Or at least be a better friend.” I hand over some blackberries, which come from the smallest of the farmwheels and are almost impossible to get, except that one of my clients knows people. And then a few scraps of Xiosphanti tech.
“This tests water quality.” I hold up one gray-and-red box, shaped like a rectangle, with a big loop coming out of one end. “You hold the curved part in the water, and watch for the color on this side. We have a lot of problems with contamination, and I thought maybe you do too.”
Rose thanks me, and with one tentacle she holds up her own present for me. It’s a ball of dark green spikes with bright blue tips, connected to a long yellow-white stalk. The spikes are each as long as my ring finger, and they quiver in the wind. The frosty stem burns the skin off my fingers. I take a piece of cloth from my pocket, so I can hold it.
I stare for ages before I realize: it’s a flower. Some kind of hardy plant that grows out there in the night and exists without sunlight, maybe even without liquid water. It can’t use photosynthesis, so how does it live? The spikes catch the twilight and seem to glisten, the greens and blues seeming more vivid and delicate the longer I stare. There’s no way this flower will survive the trip back to Xiosphant, so I just commit it to memory while Rose rests next to me.
“I’m actually feeling kind of happy,” I say to Rose without taking my eye off the rippling blue-green petals. “I don’t know if I ought to be. I can’t stand to wonder what Bianca’s doing right now. But meanwhile, I have a new family, and we’re helping people. I’m doing work that I enjoy, and I can see the results. My life feels wrong, but good. Maybe that’s the best I can do.”
Rose just tilts her head toward me, like she wants to understand. The flower is already wilting. The cloth I’m pinching around the stem is soggy. The spikes droop, but as they do, they reveal an underseam of brilliant orange.
“I wish I could have talked to my mother about her paintings,” I say. “I never even knew she painted.”
Rose is holding her pincer open, ready for me to go inside again. I try not to drop the flower as I lean toward her. I’ve found that it’s easier to do this from a kneeling position, when Rose is hunkered down, than standing up. I’m still thinking about Bianca, and my mother, and the impermanence of the flower in my hand, when my face and neck make contact with the slimy tendrils, and—
—I’m out in the ice. This is the part where usually Rose shows me some aspect of the crocodiles’ society, like how they built that huge city by mining deep caverns and tempering metal in the heat of a volcano, and by growing other structures organically. Sometimes she shows me some engineering feat that would make the professors at the Gymnasium sick with envy, but then it’s tinged with a sadness, a worry, that I don’t understand.
This time, though, I don’t see other crocodiles, deep furnaces, or soaring girders. I see a young human, dying in the snow.
(This is the second time I’ve seen how I look to someone else lately, and this time I almost don’t recognize myself. To Rose’s senses, I’m a pile of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals and making vibrations in the chill air. A jittering, stumbling human, smaller than most, with upper limbs closed in on themselves. The most unusual thing about me, to Rose, is that there’s only one of me.)
I hesitate, because the smart thing in this situation would be to leave this creature to die. But something makes me stop and examine closer. We have plenty of experience with human fight-or-flight behavior, including the usual stances and the chemicals that humans give off. And this one tastes different on the wind: like some mixture of defiance and tenderness.
So instead, I approach the shivering, mewling human and embrace her. For a moment, she seems about to lash out and try to attack my tendrils, and maybe I’ll be a dead fool. But no, she moves into my embrace, and I give her one short memory, with a simple message: We have our own city. We can work together—
—I think that’s it, Rose has shown me everything she’s going to, but the memory shifts, and—
—I’m standing with a group of other crocodiles, and we’re watching one of our friends bleeding from a spear that juts out from under her carapace. She’s surrounded by humans who carry explosives and weapons that could tear through us. My stomachs grind and every heart in my body beats against its cavity with the need to help my friend, but the other crocodiles cross their tentacles in my path. It’s too late for her. I break down, venting a noxious cloud of misery and grief, as the humans lash my friend with cords. They drag her, still flailing, up the mountain toward the punishing glare—