Mouth took the token and tried to look overjoyed, because she could already tell that Sasha had been surrounded by sycophants for too long.
Here’s what Mouth learned about Sasha from eavesdropping: he collected paving stones from different towns here on January, plus a few that supposedly came from Earth. He loved to play that type of music where you also play a game at the same time, and everybody let him win. He only ate humanely raised meat, and he made a big deal out of the fact that he’d never killed anyone with his own hands.
“You look like you had some ancestors in the Ulaanbaatar compartment,” Sasha said.
“People tell me that,” Mouth said. “Never even knew who my biological parents were.”
“Well, it’s a good thing. Most of us in the Perfectionists can trace our roots back to old Ulaanbaatar. The greatest civilization that ever was, back on Earth. They built this one tower that held twice as many people as Argelo, with its own built-in farms. I’ve seen pictures. Ulaanbaatar was where they made the outer hull of the Mothership.”
Mouth rotated her hands. “I always thought it was a sad story. They were lifelong travelers. Horse-herders. They lived in tents, found whatever they needed. Then they put down roots and became city people.”
“You could see what they had built from space.” Sasha was not used to being contradicted. “They built to last, something people in this town could learn from.”
“Of course,” Mouth said. Alyssa was the one who knew how to handle people like this. “They were amazing. You’re right.”
Mouth wouldn’t leave Alyssa’s bedside, except for bathroom breaks. No matter how much Mouth tried to keep Alyssa clean, or beg others for help, she kept marinating in her own piss and sweat. Alyssa’s eyes, which usually laughed or scowled or glared or rolled in reaction to the stupidity around her, stayed closed and motionless. Mouth couldn’t stand to see Alyssa like this, but also would not look away.
Mouth wept into her own free sleeve. Gave a silent prayer to the Elementals.
She had started having little bursts of dreamsleep where crocodiles were standing next to Alyssa’s bed, or the walls crumpled, when Alyssa opened her eyes. “What the fuck” were Alyssa’s first words out of her coma. “Did you just dump me in a ditch? Am I in a ditch now? What ditch am I in?”
“You’re not in a ditch.” Mouth sobbed with relief. “You’re in a bed. You’re safe. You’re here, with me. I fixed it. You’re being taken care of.” Then Mouth screamed for the doctors so loud Alyssa tried to raise an atrophied hand to cover one ear.
Some time later, a doctor showed up, shone a light in Alyssa’s eye, and examined her. Concussion, she said. No lasting damage. Should make a full recovery, but take it slow at first. Lots of fluids, painkillers, and gentle physical therapy.
“Thank you.” Mouth’s eyes were so wet the light refracted into those cheap rainbows you see on soap bubbles.
“How long have you been sitting here watching me?” Alyssa asked, and Mouth had no answer. “You should get some sleep. You look like shit.”
“You look shittier,” Mouth said. “You look like if shit took a shit.”
“You look like if shit made a shitty monument to the god of shit.”
“You look like if shit built a whole shit city, but then it went to shit.”
They went on like this for a while, and then Mouth fell asleep in mid-sentence. This time Alyssa watched Mouth sleep, or at least her gaze was the first thing Mouth saw on waking.
SOPHIE
My bracelet keeps giving tiny nudges in the direction of the night, which feels just like a person grabbing my wrist and pulling me toward them. I want to jump out of my banyan-wood chair in the front room of Ahmad’s apartment and run headlong toward the dark so I can talk to one of the Gelet that rescued us from the Sea of Murder. We didn’t even get a chance to speak after they saved us, and I can only guess at what they were thinking. These were the first Gelet I’d ever met other than Rose, but I know nothing about them. And I keep thinking that this might be a turning point, when I actually asked for the Gelet to help, and now I belong to them even more than I did before.
Bianca can’t stop talking about everything we’re going to do now that we’re in the City That Never Sleeps. “I want to go to the Knife,” she keeps saying. “I want to find all the best parties, and meet absolutely everybody. We have one chance to make a huge splash.” Bianca sounds giddy—all of Argelo is a present she’s dying to unbox—but then I catch her staring into the corner, her hands coiled into fists.
Whenever I see Bianca falling into this silent rage, her face compressed and her hand clutching at some invisible weapon, I try to distract her by talking about all the fun we’re going to have. “We can dress up in colorful clothes, like the ladies here. We can explore together, just the two of us, as a team,” I say. She smiles and nods, and her posture slackens.
But first we need to speak the language. I’ve been studying Argelan for ages, but I still can’t make any of the sounds, and I hate the bludgeoning syntax: the order in which you say the words makes them subject or object, past or present, and so on. No tenses, qualifiers, or distinctions. And then, in the empty space where they’ve removed all the useful parts of speech, Argelan substitutes a million different terms for relationships: lovers, parent/child, teacher/student, friends, some combination of those. Many of these relationship terms don’t translate to Xiosphanti—not to mention the strange thing that Yulya tried to teach me about on the road, the phrase that sounds like “Anchor-Banter.” You could be father/daughter, creditor/debtor, murderer/victim, but “Anchor-Banter” will replace or transcend any of those. Whatever that means.
Even the body language is different here: people toss their heads off to one side, meaning “yes,” and sort of roll their heads for “no,” and I can’t tell these gestures apart.
Ahmad wants us to memorize the crests of the Nine Families of Argelo so we can avoid messing with anyone who bears one of them. “You tangle with anyone wearing one of these emblems,” Ahmad says, pointing, “you’re basically dead.” Are the Nine Families the government? Bianca asks, and Ahmad just laughs.
Time passes, and we sleep sometimes, both of us breathing like swimmers. Sometimes I get up and wander to the washroom across the hall, then realize the rest of the household is sleeping, and I feel a surge of guilt, like I’m awake at the wrong time. Or I catch sight of a window without any shutters, and feel a jolt of worry, as if there are Curfew Patrols on the street, and they’ll see the uncovered panes and rush inside to grab us.
At some point, Ahmad starts organizing a proper funeral for Omar, and he invites Bianca and me. But I can tell he’s being polite, and it’s more of a family gathering, so we stay home.
Ahmad’s wife, Katrina, is a short round woman with spiky brown hair and pale skin who laughs constantly, and seems happy to have more people in the house even though she speaks almost no Xiosphanti. She gives us bowls of some kind of spicy fish and root vegetables, plus mugs of bitter tea. Their son Ali, who looks a bit younger than I was when I went to the Gymnasium, comes and goes without talking to us.
Bianca keeps asking questions: How do you know when to go to work here? How does Ahmad know when to pray, or go to a mosque? How do women keep track of their cycles? Ahmad’s answer to all the questions is the same: You make your own arrangements.
We get outdoors whenever we can, with Ahmad or Katrina, but I still don’t understand enough to distinguish between regular crowd behavior and a mob coming to tear me to shreds. People come too close and speak too fast, and I stiffen, and start seeing every angle at once, looking for a way out. Everything feels wrong, and I go from hungry to nauseous without any warning, and these streets all look the same and lead in circles.
I start helping Ahmad in the kitchen, learning how to slice carrots against the grain, and peel the thick shells off swamp crabs. I’ve almost gotten used to a diet with more dairy, fish, root vegetables, soybeans, and seaweed. Argelo has no farmwheels, but they have orchards and swamps, plus types of cloth that we don’t have in Xiosphant: muslin, silk, denim, and some polymers.