—Rose lets me go. I’m already on my knees, but I sink further, and double over, sick to my stomach. My face is moist from the secretions on Rose’s tendrils, which create an afterimage when I breathe deeply. I’m hyperventilating, which makes Rose’s memories flicker in and out of my head.
“Why don’t you just hate us?” I stammer. “Why don’t you want to kill us?”
Rose just pulls away slowly, and pulls herself up on her hind legs.
“I know you could. I’ve seen enough of your geoengineering by now. You could bring rocks and ice down on our city, and we’d never even know what happened.” I take a deep breath and rise up on one knee, swaying. “I’m … I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend.”
I’ve never eaten crocodile meat. Few people have, it’s a huge delicacy. But I’ve seen the hunting parties leaving town before, young people full of loud songs and swagger, and I watched Frank take one apart with knives and spikes. Something rotten settles in my guts and I have to hug my knees. “That was evil. And I wish there was something more I could do.”
The ice flower is a dark smudge on the ground.
Rose can sense my distress, like before, and maybe she understands I’m expressing remorse. She comes back again, and opens her pincer one more time. I rise up and bring my face in, and I get a single impression of a block of glossy orange metal. Copper. I feel its cool weight on my hand. She pulls away again.
“Okay,” I say, still unsteady on my feet, still heartsick. “I’ll get you some copper.”
Rose turns and clambers over the edge, back toward the night, her front legs picking at the rocks so she doesn’t overbalance. A moment later, she’s gone, and I turn back to stare at the complacent city, washed in its usual gradient. The farmwheels and tar rooftops shine like new.
I think about how in the world I can score some copper, and then it hits me: I’ll need to go back to the temperate zone, the home of all my fear and regret. For a moment, I’m sure I’ll die—that if I go anywhere near the Gymnasium, people will see me, they’ll shout, the cops will arrive, and this time—
Then I breathe and remind myself, You’re in control. You’re stronger than those monsters. I pick myself up and hurry back to town before they ring the last curfew bell, running down the slope so fast I nearly kick myself as I skid and spill onto the ground.
mouth
Mouth and Bianca took a walk on the edge of the slaughterhouse district, where livestock raised outside Xiosphant came in to be butchered, on lorries or in long trains of wide-eyed cows and fidgeting goats. These buildings clustered near the city wall, on the side facing the Northern Ranges, and they made a crisp profile of clay-brick gables and steeples against the wall’s edge. Mouth had only eaten meat occasionally in Xiosphant, but she did appreciate the leather.
Since they were out in the open, walking along a wide slate-paved road with the indentations of countless lorry wheels, they spoke in whispers, and only discussed politics obliquely. Still, Mouth welcomed a meeting someplace besides the oatmeal restaurant.
“When they took Sophie, I lost all my dumb illusions about how the world works,” Bianca said. “I had all these lofty theories about culture, and internalized mechanisms of control, but I hadn’t ever faced up to how much the world runs on crude, mindless violence until it was right in front of me.”
“Violence doesn’t settle everything,” Mouth grunted. “Sometimes violence just postpones a conversation that’s bound to happen sooner or later. But that can be useful in itself, to some people.”
Bianca had barely slapped anyone in her life, and Mouth was the first person she’d ever met who’d killed people as part of her job. At times, Bianca seemed to crave reassurance: that she could do this, that fighting and maybe killing would come naturally, that it would pay off. Other times, she almost seemed to wish Mouth would say, You’re not cut out for this, leave this to the professionals. To justify Bianca’s qualms, or make a space for her anxiety about whether her grief over Sophie would give her enough strength.
Sometimes at the oatmeal place, Bianca would quiz Mouth about her skills. How many people had she killed? Could she fight in close quarters? What weapons did she have particular experience with? Those questions always came with an appraising stare, like Mouth was a piece of merchandise that might be overpriced.
Now, in the wide driveway near the rows of abattoirs, Mouth tried to remember what the Citizens had said about self-defense when they’d trained every child to hold a weapon. Bianca seemed lost in thought.
At last Mouth said, “Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violent. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”
“That almost sounds like a quote from Mayhew.” Bianca laughed, then covered her mouth because they were out in the open, where any number of government spies could be lurking behind these walls, along with the muffled drone of cutting machines.
* * *
The longer Mouth stayed in Xiosphant, the further off-center everything drove her. They had foods that you could only eat right after the shutters opened, and other foods you ate right before they closed. People would raise a glass before the blue-and-red smoke filled the sky, because they expected it. When Bianca talked about the workers’ rebellion that happened during her great-grandparents’ time, she couldn’t help saying it took place during the Third Age of Plenty.
And right now, Mouth was hustling to George’s roofing plant, because the klaxons said the city was getting ready to pull up all the shutters. You could smell the starchy aroma of everyone’s pre-sleep meal, and the soapy fumes of last-chance laundry. The sky remained pale, and calm, thanks to those mountains cutting off the worst of the weather systems, but people rushed as if they were about to get hailed on. A look of good-natured anxiety on everyone’s face. You could almost hear them mutter, “Oh dear, this is very bad, well, it’s okay, but it’s very bad, must get indoors, if only I had a little more time, oh dear.”
Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just as long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.
George was in a good mood, because he’d been able to unload some of the textiles they’d brought from Argelo, and had done some wizardry to get them a “basket of currencies” in return.
“Is that like money?” Reynold snorted.
Mouth had to help the other Couriers to carry the crates of silk and muslin across town. They couldn’t use the sled because it drew too much attention, and they had to move these crates before the shutters closed. George came along, since he knew all the teeny alleyways that cut between the big boulevards and the crisscrossing avenues. The main obstacle in these shortcuts: heaps of garbage that smelled like the poisonous swamps out past Argelo, where they made vodka out of the sap of this one carnivorous plant. (Swamp vodka tasted better if you didn’t know where it came from.)
Six of them carried crates on their shoulders, nearly tripping over rubbish every few steps, and Mouth heard Alyssa cursing as she stepped in puddles. Their route took them closer and closer to the night.
The final bell sounded, meaning they were too damn late.
“Here it is.” George pointed at a stone staircase, at the end of a narrow alley.
By the time they hoisted the crates up the uneven stairs into the garment factory, the shutters were going up all over town, with a sound like Xiosphant was grinding its teeth.
“We’ll have to stay here until the shutters drop again,” Omar said before they even had a chance to look around the garment factory. Looms, rows and rows of sewing machines with rusty pedals, vats of dyes and ammonia. The place smelled even worse than the alleys, or the sub-basements where Mouth had snuck into political meetings. No place to lie down, and only those benches to sit on. The factory manager apologized in a few grunts as he handed over the “basket of currencies” in a bag made of cheap canvas, then locked himself in his office with the single cot.
“I can tell I’m not going to be able to sleep here,” Mouth said.
“Better get some shut-eye if you can. It’s also illegal to sleep when the shutters are open,” Alyssa said, settling onto one of those benches in front of a sewing machine.
“That’s not true.” Yulya gaped, speaking in broken Xiosphanti. “Is it true?”
“Actually,” said George, “the penalties are almost as bad for sleeping during shutters-down as for being out and about during shutters-up. You’re supposed to be contributing to society when everyone’s awake, so we’re all united. They’ve put people to death for being repeat offenders: sleeping at the wrong time more than once.”
“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” Mouth said, without even thinking.
George leapt to his feet and looked around, like they were all about to be arrested. “Where did you hear that?”