—A crocodile built a flying machine and soared over the flaming glaciers, shielded against the sun, but still cowering a little under its rays. Crocodiles stood on great soaring platforms, making a study of the atmosphere. The sky on fire, gouts of flame roaring into the ice. A team of crocodiles journeyed to the very end of the world, going inside a mountain with smoke pouring out of it. The sky turning and reversing, turning and reversing, clouds doing a strange dance. None of this stuff makes any sense to me, until I form those images into a story: the sky was on fire, when the world was young, and we risked everything to find a solution.
Then I sense the weight of the bracelet that just closed around my own wrist, only it hangs on the tentacle of an elder crocodile who travels across a shale landscape dotted with frost in a carriage that is half rock, half flesh. She may not make it back home before she dies, she feels weary in her clicking joints, and a sense of fallowness leaches into her core when she thinks of being away from her extended family. But the bracelet grunts in answer to her lonesomeness, and it connects her to all the explorers and scientists—the menders—who had flown above an icefield painted with flames—
—Rose pulls away, and I touch the bracelet, which now seems an emblem as well as a device.
“Thank you.” I put my arms around her, as gentle as I can. “I wish I could tell you … I don’t really have a family anymore, but I’m going to feel like you’re with me, wherever I go, as long as I wear this. No matter how far into the light I travel. And I need to stop calling your people crocodiles, because that’s just a dumb name that humans decided to call you.”
I look at Rose, and at last I don’t see her body only in terms of sheer power. I was taught to see her as a great destroyer, and in my fear I had wanted to keep seeing her that way—so I could identify with her, and feel powerful by association. Her front legs move like great pistons, but they’re also supple, made for exploring tricky spots. Her tentacles swirl and grip like serpents, but their cilia are exquisite, sensitive, delicate.
I remember a word that came to me, during the last thing she shared: “menders.”
“My ancestors should have tried to call you what you called yourselves,” I say aloud. Rose cants her pincer a little, as though she’s listening in her own way. “You think of yourselves as menders, as builders, as explorers. There’s no one word for all those things in Xiosphanti, but the old language, No?lang, had one: Gelet. It’s like architect, and traveler, and five other things, all in one. So … I’m going to start calling your people the Gelet.”
Then I remember about Bianca, and turn to rush back to the city. “Thank you,” I say again. “I hope I do something to deserve this.” Rose is already halfway off the plateau, her massive frame clambering back down into the dark.
* * *
When I pull myself through the hole in the fence and get back inside the city, I hear the clatter of all the people trying to finish their business before shutters-up. Parents hustle their children, or try to do one last odd job to score infrastructure chits, med-creds, or water tokens. The repair crews apply their last bits of sealant to the cracked walkways. I haven’t carried a timepiece since I gave mine away to Rose, but I can tell you what the clock says just by the scents of cooking, cleaning, or brewing of hot drinks. The laundry steam, the long line at the bakery, fathers carrying their children home from school. You can’t fight Circadianism, because it’s soaked into our pores.
Jeremy finds me sitting on the steps leading to the Parlour’s lacquer door, staring at my new bracelet. My face must diagram all the suffering in my heart, the way I’m seeing Bianca’s death more vividly than my own feet under their tiny skirt, just as the crocodile visions—the Gelet visions—always seem realer than real. Being ashamed of fear doesn’t make me less afraid.
“I’ve tried to cut off my old life,” I whisper. “But I have a friend from school, and she’s trusting someone that she shouldn’t. She’s going to throw her life away. I’m scared to face her, and everyone at school will lose their minds if they see me.”
Jeremy sits next to me and breathes, deliberate and even, as if I’m a client and he wants to steal away my awareness that time is flowing. He doesn’t have that easy look on his face, though.
“You can’t hide from the people you care about. A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.” I have a feeling he’s quoting one of the books we were supposed to memorize, but I don’t care.
I say nothing back—just take the biggest breath I can of the ozone-scented air, touch Jeremy’s shoulder with one hand, and walk toward the light.
* * *
Everybody said if my mother had lived a bit longer she could have prepared me: for my body changing, for marriage, for life as an adult. She’d been waiting for the right time to explain to me what was expected, everyone said. But sometimes I wonder if my mother would have sat me down and told me to grab as much freedom as I could, as hard as I could, instead of getting stuck in a marriage to a man who called her the Brick, because of the way she slept in a rigid fetal position. Maybe my mom was working on a way to break free of my dad. I’ll never know.
My mother was with a group of managers, inspecting their farmwheel, and the crops burst into flames at the top of the superstructure. Someone had come up with a scheme to raise the farmwheel slightly, expose the food to more light, increase yields. This plan worked for a while, but they didn’t count on one thing: erosion. A few boulders fell off the Young Father, or the peak just grew shorter, and the crops caught a full sunbeam. My mother was one of the people closest to the disaster, and while everybody else screamed and laid blame, she climbed up and stopped the fire from spreading. But the rays of the sun roasted her skin and boiled her eyes, and even if she hadn’t fallen, she would have been dead anyway. Everyone called her a hero, but I always wondered if she had seen a way out of her dead-end life and had taken it, without even stopping to think about me.
* * *
The final warning sounds, and I hear the shutters close, but I keep playing shadowseek in these empty streets. I can’t loosen the chokehold inside me. The sky looks like a flat pan of dirty water, which brightens as I make my way. The closer I get to daylight, the higher my risk of arrest for curfew violation. I hear a few patrols, but I always manage to slip out of view before they get close.
The Gymnasium looks the same as ever. The War Monument swallows the same light in which all the whitestone buildings bask. But emptied of students, teachers, and staff, these places look abandoned, as if after some catastrophe. I let the old familiar anxiety claim a few heartbeats, then I touch my new bracelet and remember I’m not alone. And I make my hypervigilance work for me, scanning in all directions. I’ve already seen the worst, and I’m still here.
I unpin my skirt and climb the wall of my old dorm—anybody could see me, awash in pallid light—and swing from sill to sill without making a noise, until I reach my old window. I lean on the shutters with all the strength I’ve developed climbing a mountain so many times, and they go down, with a rusty groan.
Looking into the dorm room where I used to sit and talk after curfew is the most powerful experience of Timefulness I’ve ever known, reminding me that time is real, the past is the past, and part of me really did die when they executed me. I always thought moments of Timefulness should be either practical or wistful—but here’s an acrid chunk of poison lodged in my throat.
Bianca rests on her little shelf, same as always. I almost expect to see myself sleeping there, on the opposite shelf, but it’s empty. Bianca looks so happy and peaceful I almost want to let her sleep. Then I see some shape hidden under the blankets beside her. Something rigid, bulky. A crutch? No, an ancient rifle. She’s cuddling a gun in her bed, as though the fight could begin any moment. Bianca keeps opening one eye, watching for something.
She notices too much light coming in the window and opens both eyes. She reaches for her gun, while I get the window open and stumble inside. By the time she has her gun out of the snarl of blankets, I’m on top of her, with a hand on her mouth.
She looks up and her eyes widen, and I feel her teeth sink into the fat of my thumb. She has too many tears for me to see her reaction. Her nostrils flare, and the bulky stock of her gun juts between us. I freeze, the old tremors rising. I have a million things to say, but I can’t speak. I slowly lift my hand away.
“Sophie.” Bianca’s breath feels hot enough to scald the skin off my hand. “You’re— You’re— Am I going delirious at last? Is this delirium? Am I just dreaming? Say something. Fuck you, say something now.”
“I’m alive,” I whisper. “It’s me. I’m alive. I’m here.” Everything in this room smells of laundry detergent and stale cakes and tea and comfort.