The marshes swallowed their wheels. The mudguards barely helped. Everyone on foot sank up to their knees. The air smelled like rotten fish and sewage, the marshwater glinted with daylight, and the horseflies swarmed, ready to carry off a piece of you in their mandibles.
“Yeah. Right here. Why not.” This felt like a test, of whether Mouth trusted Alyssa, or whether these poems had been worth so much scheming.
Mouth could only stall for so long.
The Citizens’ poetry was written in the old language, No?lang. The one Mouth remembered best was about an old peach tree growing by some fluke, out in the wild meadows between the towns of Untaz and Wurtaz. Every time the travelers passed, they had fresh peaches, big and purple as life, with juicy strands inside them. Until a small town sprang up around the tree. The townspeople tried to plant an orchard and harvest the fruit according to their own schedules, and make peach bread to sell to other towns.
The next time the travelers passed, the soil was dead, there was no fruit, and the town was gone.
Mouth thought of Yolanda, the Priors, everybody, and felt like throwing up.
“Come on,” Alyssa said. “Speak up. I want to hear. Please.”
Mouth recited, louder and with more oratory, like when they used to do one of their “theater troupe” things, long ago:
Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread
But never say you own the tree
The hot wind flows from the day
Tempered by a hedge, across the cooling waters
A crag guards the peach tree from ice storms
Cradled by chaos
Sing the tart juice, taste the sweet peach bread
Give praise to the meeting of day and night
Through hedge and rocks, and the generosity of fruit
You cannot organize luck, or make the perfect wind
Or bridge night and day with your foolishness
You will never again taste such beauty
Cradled by chaos
Alyssa was nodding. “That was beautiful. You have a lovely voice when you’re not threatening to kill everyone in sight.”
“I should kill people sooner and skip the threats, then. My voice would be fresher.”
Alyssa laughed at that.
“The Citizens.” Mouth hesitated. “They were supposed to give me a name. I was … I was at the age. We had a whole rite of passage. You got your real name around the time your body changed, along with the story of who you were. ‘Mouth’ is just a temporary name, for a person who hasn’t earned one yet.”
“I always wondered why you were called that.” Alyssa shook her head, swatting away horseflies. “So what happened? They all died before they could name you?”
“No.” Mouth wove the steering wheel back and forth. “They kept delaying, until I was almost too old. They said, over and over, that I wasn’t ready. Some test, I don’t know what, I never passed. And then, yeah, eventually they all died.”
Mouth had never talked to anyone about any of this. And talking about it now made her feel much worse—guilty for talking to an outsider, but also heartsick. Nothing Mouth could say might do justice to the reality of the Citizens, or just how completely Mouth had failed them, both then and now. She was out here, on the road, with one horizon blazing and the other drowning everything in its emptiness, and she felt as though the Elementals were watching her. Counting her failures.
A horsefly took a chunk out of Mouth’s hand. They came in swarms, tearing your skin, until you bled all over. Little bastards. Nearby, Reynold waved a bat around, making a splattering noise whenever it connected with two or three at a swing.
“Ugh.” Mouth drove faster through the last of the swamp, so horseflies exploded against the sled’s front window, coating it with their glutinous bodies.
They reached the rocky strip, covered with pebbles, that separated the marshlands from the Sea of Murder. Mouth climbed out of the sled and searched for the hidden skiff. There ought to be a bunch of landmarks, like this one inlet and a thumb-shaped rock, but brand-new thistles (another invasive species) waved their candy-colored heads everywhere and camouflaged the shoreline. You could memorize landscapes all you wanted, but everything was like that peach tree: here one time, gone the next.
Bianca stared out at the Sea of Murder. “It’s just so gorgeous,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures but … this is breathtaking.”
Mouth followed her eyeline, and had to gasp after all. You spent all your time on the Sea of Murder trying not to end up one of the corpses who drift down to the bottom to be eaten by the giant squids that lurked inside the hulks of old warships. But the water smelled crisp and salty, especially nice after the swamp gas. Moonlight spangled the waves—and that was the other thing. You could see the moon. Stars, too. Something about convection, or the air currents, peeled away the clouds that kept an off-white haze overhead everywhere else. The sky turned a dark creamy blue, and you could make out a handful of craters in the shape of a footprint on the moon. Bianca was probably seeing stars with her own eyes for the first time.
“One guy I knew,” said Mouth, “swore he saw the Mothership fly overhead when we were out on the ocean.”
“That’s incredible,” Bianca said. “He could actually see it? I always thought if I saw it, I would make a wish or something. Did he make a wish?”
“I don’t know,” Mouth said. “He was dead a moment later. Because he was looking up at the sky in the middle of the Sea of Murder, instead of paying attention.”
Bianca laughed, which made Mouth like her again.
Mouth searched for ages before she found their boat, and then they had to clean a swan’s nest out of the intakes while Mouth steered the sled gingerly onto the deck. But at last they chuffed across the Sea of Murder. Alyssa steered them along treacherous currents, between two deadly extremes.
Mouth helped Yulya, Kendrick, and Reynold to hoist Omar’s remains and heave them overboard, making a pitifully tiny splash in the cold water. “We’ll drink to his memory in Argelo,” said Kendrick, who was sort of in charge now. “For now, we all stay watchful.”
They were closer to the night than the day, so they could just make out the ice shelf where the sea froze. But if you squinted at the horizon to your right, you could see where the water hit daylight and boiled, creating a wall of steam so high you couldn’t see the top.
SOPHIE
I can’t stop throwing up. This boat is just a crumbling wooden platform built on top of a rusted metal frame, with an ancient polymer sac on its underside, which battery-operated pumps inflate, making a stuttering gasp that sounds more and more feeble. We secured the sled on the deck via a dozen attachment points, and there’s a silty blue platform for the “crew” to stand on, including a panel with the knobs that Alyssa uses to operate the rudder. The deck tilts in one direction and then the other, until I’m sure a giant squid has us in its grip. Seawater sprays up and burns all the places where the horseflies tore me open, and I can’t keep my damn stomach inside. I lean over the unfirm guardrail and spray into the water, with only Yulya’s grip keeping me from tumbling over the side.
I’m going to die, long before we can cross this ocean. I’ve never been so sick in my life, and the laughter of the Resourceful Couriers doesn’t make things any better.
“Ice! Watch out! Ice!” Reynold shouts. Total darkness, almost dead ahead, swallows up the water and the sky. Frozen chunks drift past, bobbing with a rhythm that makes me sick once more.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” Alyssa wrenches at the controls. “Watching Omar steer this boat is one thing, but steering it myself is—ugh—something else. Grab ahold.”
Just as Alyssa says that, we lurch so hard I fall on top of Yulya, and Bianca slides across the deck so fast she almost falls overboard before I grab her. A scraping sound, loud enough to feel in your teeth, fills the boat as we rub against a blade of ice. Some of the hull plating snags on the ice for a moment, then we’re free. I touch my bracelet and think of Rose.
“Keep it steady,” someone shouts.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Alyssa growls.
No more ice, and the sky lightens enough to see ahead. The other horizon glows once again, sending flashes along the water that hurt my eyes. Jets of bright vapor rise up from where the ocean is always boiling.
Bianca and I both try to scan the horizon for danger, but everything looks equally terrifying. My stomach has subsided and I have a moment of awe at the impetuousness of this ocean, which tosses waves in our path and tries to shake us off. I can’t help thinking of the Sea of Murder as a beautiful giant beast that needs nobody and obeys nothing.
Bianca still isn’t talking to me, and I’m trying not to look at her. But she must have seen the starvation in my eyes, because she comes and stands beside me against the rail as the sea goes calm for once.
“I don’t know how you expect me to deal with you being alive,” she mutters. The pale mist turns her spectral. “After I threw away everything to avenge your death. You’ve been living at some gracious coffeehouse, and meanwhile I’ve just been falling apart, piece by piece.”