Alyssa sat for a moment, and her face turned dark. “Seeing Ahmad made me think. He seemed happy, apart from the thing where his brother died because he wouldn’t quit smuggling.” She paused to choke down some wine. “And you know what? Ahmad used to look much older than you or me. We were kids, next to him. Not anymore. If anything, he looks younger than we do.”
Mouth bit both her lips, but still wanted to say something she would regret, some remark that might break the only worthy thing she had left. She took a breath. “Maybe you just need to take some time off. That situation with the pirates was … intense. We just need to take some time and regroup, and then we can put another crew together. I don’t think I can do it without you.”
“You probably couldn’t do it even with me,” Alyssa said. “Anyway, you just want help getting back to Xiosphant, so you can have another shot at stealing that poetry book.”
Mouth flinched. “I don’t think I get another shot at that. After what happened, the security will be way tighter. That whole town is going to be a prison.”
Even since they came to Argelo, Mouth and Alyssa had kept sleeping next to each other, in this tiny cubbyhole. The apartment had a nice sleeping area, but they still used the nook, for the same reason they slept in a knot: they were used to it. Eventually, though, you could get used to something different, if you weren’t careful.
“Listen,” Mouth said, reaching out one hand to the big rattan chair where Alyssa sat cross-legged. “You’re the closest thing to a friend that I have, who’s still alive.”
“How close, though?” Alyssa looked at the street below their balcony, where some drunks were beating each other senseless. “How close to actual friendship are we?”
“I’m good at reckoning distances, by looking at the shades of light on the ground and the length of the shadows,” Mouth said. “I’m not so good at figuring out near or far from abstract ideas.”
“To me, friend is an either/or: you’re a friend, or you’re not. You’re always saying that you’re a real traveler, you were born on the road, not like the rest of the Couriers. You always made sure we all knew you were better than the rest of us, and I always let it slide. But now? Now you have to decide if you have room to care about anyone besides your dead nomads.”
Mouth felt like getting up and storming out, maybe smashing the rattan couch on the way. But then this might be her last ever conversation with Alyssa. The two of them would become strangers, and Mouth would be even more lost.
“I thought you understood. About the pain of losing your whole extended family. When we first knew each other, you used to talk to me about the Jews, and how they were nomads, and your ancestors were almost wiped out more than once. You were the one person who was supposed to understand.” She still wanted to break things, but also to cover her stupid weak face.
“That’s just it.” Alyssa’s tone softened, and she reached out for Mouth’s hands. “You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. Or even the only one who belongs to a culture that was all but destroyed. There are still some descendants of the people who survived the Hydroponic Garden Massacre walking around. I get it, you lost your whole world when you were a child, and I can’t even imagine the awfulness. But that doesn’t give you a lifetime pass. You know?”
The Citizens had many ideas about death, but mostly, if you died on the road, then the rest of the group would carry you with them. Metaphorically, not physically. Even the group was doomed to extinction; only the road was eternal, and the only real death would be if you lost the road.
But none of this was Alyssa’s fault, and in fact she’d saved Mouth’s ass too many times. So Mouth dug up a kind voice from somewhere, clasped her hands, and said, “I get it. I can recognize reality, I swear I can. I just have a hard time with change, which is probably weird for someone who grew up on the move. But I get it. I won’t pressure you to keep smuggling. Okay?”
“Okay.” Alyssa poured some more wine. “And maybe you’re right, and we’re not cut out to be shopkeepers. Maybe there’s something else we can do to make money, since we’re going to be here for the rest of our lives.”
Mouth tried to suppress a shudder.
* * *
Mouth kept asking Alyssa where they were going, and she just laughed. At last she said, “Our new job.” She started singing one of the Couriers’ old songs, about the dog and the ostrich and the man who lived underground. This just ratcheted the tension in Mouth’s gut, which had aspirations of becoming a full-blown ulcer. Alyssa veered uptown, so close to the day that Mouth felt the first stirring of lightsickness.
Just as Alyssa got to the part of the song where the dog tugged at one neck of the ostrich and the man pulled the other, she stopped and banged on the stone door of a wooden building that was so blanched it had cracks. They were in a tight alley where four streets collided and you’d need to be a wizard to find the continuation of the street you’d come in on.
“Here we are,” she said. Mouth followed her inside a high-ceilinged one-story warehouse stacked with crates that Mouth knew at a glance would contain guns.
“This is going to be way better than opening a shop,” Alyssa said.
Mouth made sure to wear a neutral expression.
“You must be Mouth,” said a tall man with swept-back hair, tiny eyes, and a pointed beard. Behind him, a short woman wore her raven hair in two thick braids. They both looked like they identified with the Merida section of the Mothership.
“My name is Carlos,” the man said, “and this is Maria.” Handshakes all around. “Alyssa tells me you’re a good person to have in a bad situation.”
Mouth gave a head tilt, which could mean “yes” or “depends,” or “I don’t know you, and don’t feel like volunteering any information.”
“We’re about to be in a world of bad,” Maria said, looking at Alyssa. “The Nine Families haven’t been managing their shit, and it’s time for some smaller, leaner operations to move up.”
“It’s all up for grabs,” Carlos said. “The sea is fished out, meteor quarries coming up empty, textile factories at half capacity. Toxic rainstorms have been trashing our crops, and the aquifers are getting polluted or drained. Shortages mean one thing: opportunity.”
Mouth could think of one other thing that shortages could mean, but just gave a tiny bob of the head. Alyssa, meanwhile, was saying, “Yeah, yeah.”
“So we’re going to hit the Perfectionists while they’re weak,” Maria said. “We understand you two have some experience at getting things where they need to go.”
“We were part of the Resourceful Couriers, as I mentioned.” Alyssa punched Mouth’s arm.
“That’s excellent. Really excellent. We don’t need you to take anything to Xiosphant, or Moorestown, let alone Untaz or Wurtaz,” Carlos said. “God knows, just getting from one end of town to the other can be vicious.”
Mouth finally spoke: “How big are the items we’ll be transporting?”
“Not super big,” Maria said. “Don’t worry, you’re not carrying these.” She gestured at the crates of guns. That had, in fact, been Mouth’s worry.
The rest of the conversation was just logistics: signal, pickup, delivery, and, most important, payment. Nobody in Argelo could ever agree on what time it was, so Carlos and Maria’s crew, the Superbosses, used tiny wireless devices that could receive up to a dozen preprogrammed signals. Complex electronics were getting harder and harder to come by as everything ran out, but someone had figured out a way to manufacture a ton of these gadgets.
After the meeting, Mouth waited until they’d walked several streets away, then said: “You fucking kidding me? That’s our new job?”
“It’s a good opportunity.”
“After everything we’ve been through, we’re going to be working for gun-running bottom-feeder gangsters.”
“You owe me,” Alyssa said. “I stuck my neck out for you so far I could barely see my own body.” They got lost while arguing. Here at the edge of morning, all the ugly streets looked the same, and they all swallowed their own tails. Even the shadows were no help.
“Listen,” Mouth said as they retraced their steps. “This isn’t like smuggling out there, on the road. It’s not open spaces, where storms and local fauna are your biggest worry, except on the water. Here, it’s enclosed, it’s all firefights in tight spaces. This city is one big killzone.”
“That’s what everyone loves about you,” Alyssa said. “Your sunny personality.”
“Don’t call me that. The sun has killed too many friends of mine.”
They ended up at a bar at the top of Archer’s Hill. From up here, the Knife seemed always to be in midswing, about to stab the Pit’s black heart. You could still see where they’d torn up a ton of the old alleys to make a grand thoroughfare back during one of the People’s Congress eras, and then more recently the Nine Families had torn down an entire neighborhood to build a few of their mansions, leaving a nest of streets that led nowhere.