By now, Bianca and I are both wearing secondhand Argelan work clothes: loose pants, long-sleeved denim smocks, thick canvas belts. I pull my sleeve down to cover my spiky bracelet. I’m learning how to walk like an Argelan girl, swinging my arms and shuffling my feet, but my body carries all these memories from the Old Mother and the Sea of Murder, and they catch me off-balance. I wonder what it would be like to try to dress like my ancestors. Like, if I wore a Calgary jersey, like my father’s people, or a sari, CoolSuit, or embroidered silk jacket with long tapered sleeves, like my mother’s. I’ve been thinking about my mother more often lately, trying to imagine what she would think of all these strange sights and sounds, all this clutter.
Sometimes I see Bianca by my side and feel so grateful my heart almost breaks, as though I still can’t trust this much luck. But another part of me can’t stop worrying at the distance between us. I wonder if Argelan has a word for when you get what you’ve always wanted, but it’s still not right.
Soon I’m dreaming in Argelan (mostly about the same thing as always: glass-faced men forcing me to climb a freezing mountain). Bianca and I start speaking to each other in Argelan, which turns our conversations stilted but weirdly direct, because we just spit out nouns and verbs, like “I eat food.” When I try to slip back into Xiosphanti, to try to draw Bianca into talking about what happened back in Xiosphant, and the things she said to me when we first went to sleep here, she just keeps responding in Argelan. “Let’s keep practicing. I want to make the most of our time here.”
Whenever we go outside, I feel the bracelet pull harder in the direc tion of the night. I’m wasting time here, when I ought to be following this summons. But if I wander too far on these streets, I’ll never even find my way back to Ahmad’s apartment.
* * *
I’m sitting in the front of Ahmad’s restaurant, reading the same page in one of Ali’s old schoolbooks for the ninth time, and I look up to see Mouth towering over me. “Hi, Sophie,” she says in an easy drawl. “Want to take a walk? I’ll buy you some lemonade. The good stuff. I just want to talk about, you know, our friends in the night.”
I stare into the wide planes of her face. “You can’t tell anybody about what I did, or the fact that I can understand them. It’s complicated.” Almost the first words I’ve ever spoken to her.
“I won’t tell anyone, I swear. I just want to talk to you about it. Please.” I shrug and stand up. I need to talk to someone about the Gelet, and I can’t talk to Bianca without hearing more of her nonsense. Plus I could use a break from studying this ridiculous language.
Mouth decides to take me to one of the fancy drink stands in the Pit, which is a giant subterranean complex that the Mothership dug for Argelo before we lost contact with it. On the way down there, she tells me that Alyssa got herself shot, but she’s fine. “She only needs one more gunshot wound, and then she gets a free stuffed marmot.” While Mouth cracks jokes about Alyssa’s injury, her neck creases and her lip trembles.
“You should come visit Alyssa, though. She’d love to see you.” Mouth gives me one of those Argelan addresses with too many numbers and not enough words as she guides me down the riotous street.
Soon I’m sitting in a wicker basket chair, looking down into the Pit, with its perfect circles of railings going all the way down. People perch on the rails, selling junk or panhandling, while workers and shopkeepers shove past them. Mouth says if you watch long enough, you’ll see one of those rail-sitters fall into the gloomy depths.
“This lemonade costs twice as much as the last time I was in town.” Mouth sets down a pitcher of green liquid, full of brackish weeds. I still can’t get used to the idea that there’s only one type of money here—how do people know what to spend it on?
I take a sip of the lemonade, and the bitterness makes me choke at first, until I get the sweet aftertaste.
“We ought to be friends,” Mouth says in Xiosphanti. “I can help you learn Argelan. It’s a deceptively simple language. If you just go by the meaning of the words, you’ll miss half of what’s being said.”
“A good language for liars, then,” I mutter.
Mouth snorts. “Every language is good for lying. Even body language. If we didn’t lie, we couldn’t communicate. Here in Argelo, they’re fond of the concept of ‘miser generosity,’ which is like you’re being generous by being stingy. They write songs about it. If you only give a little bit—of the truth, of your time, of money—then you’re being sincere. Give too much, and you’re probably just careless, and it means nothing.”
I feel all of my defenses rise, making me want to close myself off, but something about Mouth’s defense of lies goads me into talking. “Bianca opened herself up to you, the same way she did to me when I was a scared young student. And you used her, and you treated her like a disposable piece in your stupid game, and now I’m afraid she’ll never open up that way again. So no, we can’t be friends.”
Mouth’s impassive “bruiser” persona drops away for a moment and she looks stricken, the same as when she tried to joke about Alyssa’s injury.
“I don’t know what to say. I used to have a handle on ethics,” she says. “Maybe if I had access to the Invention and could read all the teachings, I would be a good person again. When I was in the Citizens, every situation had a guiding principle, but now I have to figure out everything by myself. If I had rescued the Invention, it would be like getting to talk to them one more time.”
“That book wouldn’t have helped you,” I say. “If you read those poems by yourself, they’d just be more of your words. More ‘stingy generosity.’ You can’t replace people with words, especially if you’re a liar.”
In the Pit, an elderly woman has her hat out, asking for loose change or extra food, and everyone ignores her.
Mouth changes the subject. “I can’t believe you went into the night and learned to speak with the crocodiles. We spent a lot of time talking about them in the Citizens, and some people thought the night was the land of the dead and they were there to guide us. Or maybe they were just wise spirits. But in any case, the Citizens would have considered you some kind of mystic. Or maybe even a saint.”
I feel a weight, like Mouth is trying to settle some crown onto my head that will slowly break my neck. The word “saint” feels even worse than when Bianca said the Gelet were my pets.
Mouth sees me shrinking into my basket chair and says, “I’m just saying, I owe you my life, but even more, I’m in awe of you. And maybe there’s a way for you to use your gift to help more people. I know here in Argelo there are scavengers who go into the night looking for the wreckage of environment suits and land cruisers our ancestors left out there. They could really use someone to help them reach an understanding with the crocodiles.”
At this point, I’m done with this conversation, because the idea of making a profit off my relationship with the Gelet is the worst insult yet. I get up and walk back toward Ahmad’s place without even looking to see if Mouth is following. I only get lost three or four times.
* * *
Everywhere we go, people stare at Bianca, because of her New Shanghai features that look like nobody else’s in this town, and because she can’t help being loud and excited, with an obvious foreign accent. At first she glared at people, with a barb in the wrong language on the tip of her tongue. But now she’s decided that if she’s going to be a spectacle either way, she might as well have fun with it. She’s wearing a sheer silver dress that leaves her shoulders and most of her legs exposed, a wrap made of loose filaments, and silver sandals. Plus blue-and-silver streaks around her eyes. I’m wearing a golden dress made out of some fabric I’ve never seen before that clings to my body in coruscating ripples.
“Everybody is going to stare at me,” I grouse under my breath.
“Good.” Bianca claps her hands. “They should. You look glorious.”
Goose bumps raise up on my bare arm. Bianca smiles at me, and I remember what she said in the storeroom when we first slept here: We’re going to demolish this together. I smile at her, too, and she takes my hand, right out on the street, like she’s letting everybody know we’re together. I almost don’t care anymore that we haven’t talked.
She’s wearing some fragrant oil, and every time I breathe it in, I feel dizzy, half wild with joy, out of control. We’re holding hands! In the street! She’s chattering to me about the place she wants to take me, in the nightclub district. The Knife. We’re going to dance together, just the two of us, at some club that has walls made of speakers and air made of glitter. I can’t help feeling like this is some buoyant fantasia, like I fell asleep watching an opera, and now I’m dreaming in song.
Bianca’s hand and the Gelet bracelet are guiding me in different directions, at right angles to each other. I silently promise to find my way to the night as soon as I can.
“Everybody who’s anybody will be there, and it’s our chance to start getting an introduction to the right people,” Bianca says in Argelan.