“You know that I will do this if you ask me to,” Mouth said after the third overpriced swamp vodka. “Even if I didn’t owe you, you’re family. But it’s a bad idea.”
“We have to do something,” Alyssa said. “You’re starting to scare me. You get weird when you have too much time on your hands, and you’re not built for honest work.” She paused and drank enough to destroy the lining of her throat. In between coughs, she blinked tipsily at Mouth. “You really think of me as family?”
Mouth leaned across the table, almost knocking over the half-empty bottle, and caught Alyssa in a hug so encompassing, it was like one of those streets that folded in on itself. As she relaxed into the hug, Mouth whispered, “You’re my only family.”
* * *
Mouth refused to sleep while they were watching for the Superbosses’ signal, and then when at last the tiny black gadget spat out a single glyph, Alyssa all of a sudden needed to make a pit stop on their way to the pickup.
And now Mouth wished she’d slept when she had the chance, because she kept hallucinating out of the corner of one eye. Someone was selling roast pheasant on the street corner, with smoke permeating the scaly flesh and the webs between all of its legs. Alyssa bought one for each of them, and the hot juices felt like a corpse reviver.
The “pit stop” took them far from the pickup location, which was that same building on the edge of daylight. Mouth got more and more confused, following Alyssa into the guts of Argelo, and then farther into a row of muslin and silk warehouses. Alyssa knocked on a blank stone wall and said, “It’s me,” and the whole wall swung aside.
Inside the stone building, a bunch of men and women perched on expensive mahogany furniture, holding new-looking single-shot rifles with slide-loading action. Mouth recognized the flying-horse insignia of the Perfectionists, one of the nine ruling “families” here in Argelo.
“I got the signal,” Alyssa said to the man nearest the door, a wall of muscle with long dark hair, a neat beard and mustache, and a tailored black one-piece. “We’re supposed to move the stuff into position.”
“The pickup location you told us?” the guy said.
Alyssa nodded.
“Great,” said another large man with no beard, sitting closer to the bar area on a five-legged stool. Nobody bothered to introduce themselves to Mouth. “Do it just like we talked about. When you get their route, follow it as long as you can, and then make a detour on the dogfish lane. End up at the maiden’s fountain, and we’ll collect your cargo. Meantime, we’ll deal with the social climbers.”
Alyssa nodded again, then turned to go.
This time, Mouth didn’t even wait until they had gotten a block away. “You’ve seriously lost your shit.”
“Too late to discuss now. You going to back my play or what?”
Mouth didn’t answer.
“This is Argelo,” Alyssa said. “This is how you move up here. I grew up in this town, you didn’t.”
Alyssa had started out in the boiling-hot Snake District, with her mother and uncles, and became the leader of her own gang of kids. Petty theft and arson for hire, mostly, but a few other hustles. Alyssa had thought they would stick together forever, but all the other members of the Chancers had decided to graduate to the big leagues. By then, Alyssa’s family had all died of skin cancer, and that was when she’d decided to try smuggling.
“Look at it this way,” Alyssa added. “You’ll be doing your part to keep the fabric of society intact. And those are good people to have a relationship with.”
“As you know, social cohesion and making friends are my two primary concerns,” Mouth said.
At the cracked wooden building, Carlos handed them a banyan-wood crate that was smaller than the gun crates, but still a good square meter, and almost too heavy for the two of them to carry alone. “We don’t need to know what’s in here, I guess,” Mouth said. “But we do need to know if anything will happen if we drop it or bring it too close to an open flame.”
“Let’s just say the contents are delicate,” Carlos said. “I would handle with extreme care.” He handed Alyssa a map, which had as many words as lines, then wished them luck.
“See you soon,” Alyssa said. Then they were off.
“Please tell me we at least have a way to make this box less conspicuous,” Mouth said. It was already making inroads into her shoulder. “I don’t much care, but we did tell them we were professionals.”
“Way ahead of you.” Alyssa steered the box down a steep slope and an outdoor staircase to a tiny cul-de-sac below street level. There, Alyssa pulled some potted plants aside and revealed blue delivery smocks and sticky labels from the grocery store nearby. Mouth followed her lead and helped her put stickers all over the box. A moment later, they were two grocers carrying a box of potatoes and carrots.
“Okay, I have to admit, you did good.”
“Damn right,” Alyssa said.
Now all they had to do was make this heavy, “delicate” box look like root vegetables. Mouth tried to square it against her chest, but Alyssa still had to hoist her end over her shoulder to keep it level, and they were both gasping after a few of these up-and-down streets.
“Makes me hungry for some fried carrots,” Mouth said.
“Shut up,” Alyssa grunted.
Gunshots seemed to come from every direction, thanks to the bunk acoustics. Mouth was pretty sure they were getting closer to the fighting. She flinched, but even before Alyssa said anything, they both knew they just had to keep walking.
“Hang on,” Alyssa said. “I gotta check the map.”
“Really?”
They laid the cube down, straining not to drop it, and Alyssa pulled out the map that Carlos had given her. “Oh, man. I think we already took a wrong turn.”
A naked man fell out of a window in front of them, blood already spurting from a wound in his shoulder before he even hit the pavement. “Fuck,” he said, and died.
Mouth did not want to know what would happen if a bullet hit the crate. She was reliving the memory of hanging over the ice, babbling supplication. She tried to stay businesslike, rough-hewn. “I guess we ought to move.”
Alyssa nodded, and they got the crate in motion again.
“Potatoes,” Mouth said. “Get your fresh potatoes.”
“Shut up.”
The way forward was blocked by the large bearded man they’d met at the Perfectionist building. “You made it,” he said, and Mouth realized that ugly blob behind him must be the maiden’s fountain. “Nai is going to hear about your service, and you’re going to be—”
A hole had opened in the man’s forehead. He pitched forward, onto the pavement.
Standing behind him, gun raised, was Maria, wearing a floral dress that was probably nice before it got coated with the blood of four or five different people, going by the spray patterns. “Fucking smugglers,” she said.
“You don’t want to shoot us while we’re holding up this crate,” Alyssa said.
“We all do things we don’t want to do,” Maria said, and shot Alyssa.
* * *
People in Argelo had no real way of reckoning the passage of time, but they had plenty of ways to talk about regret. A million phrases to describe what might have happened, what you should have done. Several major sentence constructions in Argelan had to do with information that had been knowable in the past: knowledge that a person had taken to her grave, observations that could have been collected, texts that were no longer readable. The Argelans had developed dwelling on lost opportunities into an art form, but they couldn’t say with any precision when any of those doors had closed.
Alyssa hadn’t woken up, and the longer that continued, the worse her prognosis. The bullet had missed everything major, but she’d lost blood and suffered head trauma from her fall. Mouth kept replaying the scene, trying to figure out what could have gone different. As Maria had shot Alyssa, Mouth had thrown the crate, which turned out to contain batteries. Now the Perfectionists had gotten Alyssa a bed in a back room at one of their health facilities, with tubes gnawing at her.
Now that Mouth had helped clean up what was left of the Superbosses, the number-two guy in the Perfectionists, Sasha, held out a token with the four-winged horse.
“Keep this where people can see it,” Sasha said. “Nobody will ever hassle you. You’ll get the best stuff. If you ever have kids, they can go to one of our schools. Finest schools in the city.”
Sasha was that clean-shaven bruiser who’d been sitting in the back when Alyssa had stopped by to tell the Perfectionists she’d gotten the signal. Up close, he had a receding hairline that you could still see, even with his head shaved, and lines on his face that charted how quickly his smile could turn vicious.