The claws of ice kept scraping against the skiff’s hull, and someone on deck was moaning. These two sounds, together, became much more unnerving than either on its own. Mouth caught sight of Sophie clutching at something on her wrist, like a talisman.
A shape loomed in front of the skiff, and Mouth shouted before she even recognized one of the tricked-out fishing vessels. Besides the lance bolted onto the front, the other major modification they’d made to the ship was a skull, painted in phosphorescent green, on its hull, with unevenly shaped eye sockets. Seven people stood on the other ship’s deck, two of them holding range weapons, and they looked just as startled to have found their prey here.
Alyssa veered to try to avoid the pirate ship as the man standing closest to the prow raised a rifle. Mouth already had her own rifle out and hit the man before he could get off a shot. He toppled into the ice water. One of the surviving pirates on the boat fired another rifle, but missed.
The pirate boat still raced right toward the Resourceful Couriers, with its metal thorn aimed at the weakest part of the skiff’s hull.
“We’re super screwed this time,” Yulya said.
“This was such a bad idea,” Reynold hissed.
The cockeyed skull came close enough that you could count its teeth. Then it stopped and flipped sideways, like the skull’s owner had decided to take a rest. They must have hit one of those icebergs dead on. The skull’s smile looked whimsical, philosophical, accepting an unjust fate with a chuckle.
“We got them,” Alyssa whispered. “I can’t believe it.”
“Shit. We’re in the water! We’re sinking. It’s too cold to swim. I can’t feel my—somebody help. Please, somebody. Please help.”
Everybody looked at Kendrick, who shrugged.
“Even if I wanted to help those bastards,” said Alyssa, “I don’t think we can.”
The screams of drowning pirates fell away, leaving nothing but the crunch of ice against the hull, and Kendrick’s low curses as the skiff became less and less seaworthy.
“I can’t believe this is going to work,” said Reynold. “Just a little farther, and we can come around behind them and make for the Argelan shore. No fuss.”
Mouth didn’t see the second pirate boat until it was too late, and her warning shout came right before she felt something break irreparably under her feet.
Shouts and cheers came from the other ship, and its crew rushed forward, guns and long knives already raised.
* * *
Mouth kept thinking about her conversation with Alyssa, in the middle of fighting hand-to-hand with eight half-starved pirates. You care more about ghosts than the people around you. Maybe Mouth did feel bad for leading Bianca on, or the way her scheme had gotten the other Couriers stuck in the middle of a citywide freakout. Or maybe that guilt was just a poultice over the much deeper wound of failing to rescue the Invention, and knowing the Citizens would be forgotten when Mouth died (soon, most likely).
The pirates had abandoned their rusty guns because they had the Resourceful Couriers surrounded and that spelled a nontrivial chance of friendly fire. Mouth managed to get off three shots at actual targets, and even injured one young woman with flowing auburn hair and a strong brow who cursed and knocked the gun out of Mouth’s hands with her unhurt arm. Mouth headbutted the gorgeous pirate and felt her nose crack, then elbowed her in the neck. The freezing sea air clogged in your throat like woodsmoke, turning every breath into a misery.
“My name is Jenny, and I’m in charge here. This is our ocean, and you fuckers are trespassing,” shouted a tall woman with a huge mane of black hair and some mix of Zagreb and Ulaanbaatar features. “We’re taking your cargo either way, but we’ll spare anyone who surrenders right now. This is a one-time offer.” Nobody even responded.
Mouth usually did most of her best thinking in the midst of battle, when everything was simple for once. But this time, her thoughts were a mess, and this foggy deathtrap wasn’t making anything better.
The fight sprawled from the Resourceful Couriers’ skiff to the pirate ship that had rammed them. Freezing water pooled around their feet, sloshing as Mouth kicked a stocky man with more beard than face and the kind of bad skin that comes from serious vitamin deficiencies. Mouth’s foot connected with the man’s stomach and sent him sprawling on the wet deck, and then Mouth trampled him on the way to punch a large hair-knotted man with both fists.
“You’re all dead,” Captain Jenny kept shouting, even as her voice grew hoarse from screaming into the sea wind. “You’re going to feed the squids. You fucking smug city people, I’m going to kill you all.” She had a big corkscrew-shaped blade with a handguard, and Kendrick howled as she stabbed him in the leg.
Everything stank of rotten fish and human entrails.
Mouth had seen too much death and not enough life, and maybe that was as bad as not letting in both the night and the day. Her knee connected with the face of the knot-headed pirate, who was already bent double, and he went overboard into the icy surf. Those young radicals, Derek and the rest, had been doomed from the start. But Mouth found herself getting stuck on the part where she’d encouraged Bianca to leap into the abyss in spite of all her doubts. Or maybe Mouth only felt remorse because her efforts hadn’t done a thing to preserve the Citizens’ memory.
Kendrick was losing a lot of blood from his leg wound, and Mouth was standing over him, holding Jenny by the throat. The pirate’s corkscrew sword was coated with blood.
What was the point of feeling guilty, when people just kept hurting each other all the time?
Mouth tightened her forearm against Jenny’s neck. “Time to close down the show. We’re all going to drown here.”
“My people live on this ocean. We eat and sleep and fuck these winds and these currents.” Jenny laughed. “I never expected to die any other way.”
She managed to pivot and bite Mouth’s ear, so hard you could both smell and taste the blood. Mouth managed to get a foot on her instep and wreck her balance. Jenny fell mid-swing of the corkscrew blade and toppled over the side of the boat into the cold water.
But Mouth had leaned too far, with too many limbs off-balance, and so went overboard too.
Mouth grabbed at the slippery edge of the boat, suspended over blades of ice that moved faster than her eye could track. Her fingers clutched the rotten wood, and only managed to collect wet splinters. Terror chilled Mouth’s insides, and the tastes of bile and sea foam blurred together. All the regret churning around her head had left her too raw. She couldn’t help screaming.
She almost got a purchase on the lip of the Couriers’ skiff, but the metal crumbled. She clutched instead at the barb jutting off the pirate boat, her feet kicking just above the sharp ice teeth. When the last of the Citizens died, their lore would die too, like all those songs they had forced her to memorize. Mouth probably should have tried to write some of it down, but couldn’t manage that old-fashioned script. Everything the Citizens ever taught, everything they ever learned in all the generations, wiped out forever.
Nobody could hear her, and tears pooled in her scars.
A hand reached down, then stopped. Bianca leaned over. “I should just let you get cut to fucking pieces by the ice,” she said. “I should just watch you die.”
“Please, please help me up. Please, I’m begging you. I don’t want to die.”
Mouth would have expected, without question, to meet this situation with dignity. The Resourceful Couriers always faced death with a “well, fuck” attitude, like they’d expected to die, and now was as good a time as any. Mouth had almost died before, with a heart of stone. But this time, fear owned her—or more like, fear was building a house inside her, one with too many windows. Mouth wanted to try to get her dignity back, but she couldn’t stop whinnying.
“I can’t believe I trusted you. All your talk about loss and fighting back,” Bianca spat. “I thought you were for real. You were just laughing at me for actually daring to believe in something.”
Mouth’s fingers froze and lost their strength, and she kicked against the side of the boat in vain. Bianca’s raw hatred looked like an amplification of the face she’d worn in the shadows of the oatmeal restaurant all those times Mouth had been working on her. Mouth heard herself back in Xiosphant, telling Bianca to stay angry, and her vertigo and chills grew worse, as though she were falling an infinite distance to a bed of frozen knives.
“I wasn’t laughing,” Mouth babbled. Her fingers slipped. “I never laughed at you. I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s my fault. Everything’s my fault. I’m a shitty person. I don’t deserve to live, but I can’t die like this. Please.”
“You’re horrifying,” Bianca said. “I can’t even stand to touch you.” But she reached down and grabbed Mouth’s wrist with both hands. She leaned so far she was in danger of falling herself.