“How? How can you…” Bianca bites her tongue, the way she always used to when she worked through a logic problem, twice as fast as anybody else. “Oh shit. They locked you up. Didn’t they? You’ve been in some dark cell this whole time. I thought they killed you, forced you outside, but all along you’ve been in some dark hole, and I didn’t even look for you. Did you only just escape? What happened?” She wheezes a little. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have searched for you.”
I shake my head. “It’s not … they didn’t lock me up. They tried—they tried to execute me, but I didn’t … I got away.”
I’m still sitting on top of Bianca, half straddling her. I feel her heart convulse, as the realization spreads across her face: I was alive and free this whole time, and I chose to let her think I was dead.
“It’s not like that.” I’m still juddering, unsteadying myself. “I just couldn’t come back to you. I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way, and I…” I don’t have the words to explain how the fear immobilized me whenever I tried to reveal myself to her.
Bianca looks forlorn through the sheen of tears, as if she just lost me in a whole new way. Or even worse, as if she’s just realized that I was never really hers, and this realization is costing her some part of herself. Her expression resolves into something as blunt and unbending as the rifle in her bed.
“Fucking … I would have broken everything, I would have killed anybody, to have you back here with me. I would have torn it all down. I can’t even tell you. And you were just alive the whole time, and you, what? You didn’t bother to let me know.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammer-whisper.
My mouth is a desert, but the rest of me is chilled. I know for sure that even if we survive this, she’ll never smile at me the way she used to.
Bianca sits up, though I’m still pinioning her lower half, and she raises her arms as if she wants to embrace me, but she can’t.
“I would have torn it all down,” she says again. “I still might.”
I’m clutching her bedcovers with one hand. “I came to warn you. You can’t trust that smuggler. Mouth. She’s just using you. I heard her telling her friend.”
Another moment of Timefulness—because everything has changed, the world is all askew, and it will never turn back.
“I should have known. That bitch. I should have seen the signs, but I wanted this too much.” Bianca pushes me off her and jumps out of bed, already dressed, including boots and a belt crammed with supplies. “She knows the whole plan. We have to warn everyone.” Bianca heads for the open window, gun slung over one shoulder, with its long handle and fluted barrel.
“Wait,” I say, but she’s already swinging herself out the window and pulling herself down, the same way I climbed up.
Bianca is already halfway across the residential quarter of campus by the time I catch up with her. “I seriously have been living in a dark tunnel since they took you away,” Bianca hisses. “I can’t even tell you. Where the hell have you been hiding?”
Bianca walks too fast for me to catch up, talks too loud for curfew. She doesn’t wait for an answer, if I even had one.
“How long have you been hanging around, and just not letting me out of all this grief? How long?” She spits on the ground. “And then you decide to show up, right when I’m finally ready to avenge you. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me?”
I don’t know what to say, and she’s moving away too fast, and the sky is much too bright here, and we’re out in the open where anyone could see us. I have to shut my eyes for a moment without slowing my march, to keep the memory at bay. I feel certain this is our final moment, and I have one last chance to rebuild our friendship, if I can just say the right thing. The sunswept pavement burns my eyes, without any other people to cast shadows.
I grab Bianca by the arm and she turns to face me, so I can see the pain still only starting to unfold inside her.
“I thought of you every moment,” I say, as she pulls me forward. “But I couldn’t come back to where—”
We round the corner, and a Curfew Patrol is standing in front of us. Two men and a woman, carrying much newer rifles than Bianca’s, with opaque helmets and vests just like the police who paraded me through the streets. My lungs, my heart, turn to stone.
Bianca seizes me and pulls me back around the corner, and then the two of us are sprinting, as the leader of the patrol shouts a warning. I spot one of the city’s narrow crosswise alleyways, on the right, and drag Bianca inside just as the first gunshots slice through the air. We keep running—ducking under a low canopy, jumping over rotten boxes, veering into a long tiny space between two rows of buildings—as the alarms sound and more boots land on the streets around us.
mouth
Mouth had gone out in Xiosphant during curfew a few times before, so she was prepared for the wide-open eeriness of empty streets as she crept out of the Low Road. But this time, the city teemed with people wearing black suits with corrugated sleeves and carrying guns and batons. As if the whole town had decided to play dress-up instead of sleeping.
Mouth headed for the dark side of town, first by following the same alley the Couriers had used to move the sled uptown, and then by climbing a hemp-shrouded scaffolding that ran lengthwise along the front of a grand old building with apartments above shops. Five meters off the ground, Mouth crept along the jostling side boards as Curfew Patrols, cops, and even soldiers marched under her feet. Mouth had taken far too long to travel just a few blocks, and she had another kilometer and a half to cross before the rendezvous point, that old paint factory.
Hand-carved granite figures on a ledge acted out the stages of life, from birth to apprenticeship to marriage to mastery to death, and their giant bulbous faces leered at Mouth as she crept along the scaffolding. In the background of each panel, complicated designs showed how each stage of life corresponded to part of the cycle of sleep and work, from shutters-down to shutters-up. Mouth remembered Bianca saying that she used to think the root of all Xiosphanti oppression was planted in culture and ideology, until they’d taken her friend away—and then Bianca had decided that violence was the real answer.
Stuck between these educational gargoyles above, and the police below, Mouth couldn’t find a clean way to separate ideology from force.
One of Derek’s people must have gotten caught, or turned informant. So these thugs were going to tear the whole town apart, twice, to catch anyone who might have ever had a subversive dream. Mouth hoped the Resourceful Couriers had found a good place to lie low. From overhead, the people and their weapons made a shape like hinges, and Mouth tried to tell herself a story about how she could still turn this to her advantage.
She needed to find Bianca, in whom she’d invested so much time, and then secure her help getting inside the Palace. Bianca might even lean on Mouth harder than ever, with everything falling apart.
But when Mouth reached the paint factory, choking on the formaldehyde mist, there was no sign of Bianca. The one person who you’d expect to show up no matter what, to berate everyone else for being even a little tardy, and she wasn’t here. Instead, Derek stood in the middle of the maintenance pod, with nine people around him, including Vicki, Jeff, and the Gumdrops, and he was giving them a rousing speech. “We can’t give up now. This is still our moment. They’re still not expecting a strike against the Palace.”
If Mouth could just snag those bombs and get them to the Palace herself, she could still use them to get inside. She could slip past those patrols and get to the vault while the authorities were focused on the Uprising’s last stand in this paint factory. But Mouth scanned the room, and poked into the crawlspace and storage lockers behind her, and found nothing. Derek probably hadn’t been dumb enough to store the explosives inside the same building where he held his strategy meetings.
Derek spotted Mouth searching a gantry, a half level up from the maintenance pod, and shouted, “Mouth, get down here. We need to figure out a new strategy.”
She nodded, then turned and climbed back out of the building without saying a word. Mouth was wasting time here without Bianca to vouch for her, and these people were already dead. She heard Derek shouting for her to come back as she turned sideways to squeeze into one of those tight throughways between buildings, trying to put as much distance as she could between herself and the Uprising.
“Shit.” Vicki’s voice still carried. “She just left us. Without even saying anything.”
The building opposite the Uprising HQ had a door with a busted lock, and Mouth climbed the stairs and stole down a filthy unlit corridor to an unshuttered window that looked down on the street, where people in riot gear clustered like a cloud of horseflies. They had the paint factory surrounded and were parking two armored lorries in the street.