“I hate to break it to you.” Alyssa pounded her vodka and took some more. “But the changes in the wind are not subtle out on the road. It can get ugly in no time.”
“Weather’s gotten more violent.” Mouth spoke for the first time in ages. “Since I was with the Citizens, the storms have gotten worse, and more frequent. Used to be easier to travel, even without pirates.”
Barney shrugged. “We get storms here, too. Toxic rain, even. We just hunker down underground.”
“They’re worse out there, closer to the ocean and the deadlands.”
Professor Martindale was swaying, like a losing brawler.
“Oh, looks like you had a bit too much, man. Better lie down a moment,” said Barney, already supporting the professor out of his chair and helping him over to a little cot behind the counter, near the cookstove. Soon he was out cold.
“Some people just can’t handle the good stuff.” Alyssa noticed the professor’s vodka cup was still half full, and took possession.
“He’s a decent fellow.” Barney gestured at the sleeping professor. “Sometimes makes you feel like a bug under glass. But I get the feeling he and Yolanda appreciated each other. They both loved to hear themselves talk about theoretical questions of how many teeth make a bite. Whatever. Still. There are some things you don’t talk about with outsiders.”
Barney looked at Alyssa as he said that, and Alyssa made a big show of getting up to leave, but Mouth said, “She’s family. She can stay.”
“Okay.” Barney brought a fried ham out of some cubby behind the counter, and carved a few slabs. “So, they really never gave you a name? That’s cold.”
“What made you leave? Why would you just abandon us like that?” Mouth did not mean to sound angry or wounded, since after all it was the past now, and Barney couldn’t have made any difference if he’d stayed.
“What happened to them?” Barney demanded in return.
“You first,” Mouth said.
“I left because I got arthritis, and they insisted I could get over it if I just listened harder to the road. I left because we were trying to sell our sacred shit to trendy people here in Argelo, for them to use as conversation pieces in their fancy homes, but meanwhile as Yolanda got older she got more sure that she was right about everything, and she wouldn’t listen to anyone. But also, I … I felt like I got it.”
“You … got it?” Mouth said.
“I had reached the goal. I had the clear head, the voices of the Elementals in the back of my mind, the whole concept of being able to look into the night without losing your will, that thing they taught of having evening and morning inside you, so you could reconcile the extremes within yourself. I had it. I was sure. It felt right. It still feels that way.”
Mouth had been ready for Barney to say he had left because he lost faith, or realized it was all a sham, or anything defiling and dirty. But this was impossible to hear. Mouth felt drunker than the professor for a moment.
“But if you really had the clearness, the reconciliation, all of that,” said Mouth. “That’s even more reason for you to stay. So you could help teach the rest of us. I mean, shit. If there had been an actual sage, a real day-and-night integrator, living among us, I might have turned out different. Maybe I would have become somebody.”
“You are somebody,” Barney said. “Look at you. You turned out fine.”
“I am nobody,” Mouth said. “That’s the lesson they left me with. No name, no myth, no identity. I never got any of it. And now it’s too late.”
“Listen.” Barney seemed to pity Mouth, which was the worst insult. “I couldn’t teach anybody. What I learned—if it was even real, it felt real to me, but who knows—what I learned could not be taught, I was pretty sure. And Yolanda didn’t want me around anyway after I told her. The point of religion, for Yolanda, was to keep trying to reach someplace, and the last thing you want is for someone to actually feel like they’ve reached it. I couldn’t stay. But I’m sorry for how they treated you.”
Mouth had sometimes fantasized about hearing an apology from Yolanda, Cynthia, or one of the other Priors, for the no-name, no-self thing. But this was as close as she’d ever get, and it felt like hot dust.
“Whatever,” Mouth said. “I was a child. Now I’m an adult. I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes since the other Citizens died out. I mostly wished I had a name and status so there could be someone to mourn them all. If I’d even known how.”
“You still haven’t told me what happened.” Barney touched Mouth’s hand and poured more booze for everyone. Alyssa was looking at Mouth too, because she had never heard the story either. Nobody had.
Mouth swallowed some spit, drank some vodka, hesitated, and decided to tell a cleaned-up version. “We stopped in the plains, near Pennance Hollow. I went to this lagoon to get some water for our new cook, who wasn’t as good as you had been.” Barney smiled at this. “I was carrying the water back to the encampment, in that big tub that had all the weird faces on it. And then I heard loud voices coming from the camp.”
Even remembering that much drained all the life out of Mouth. Like sleep deprivation, or muscle fatigue, but much harder.
Alyssa rested her face on Mouth’s chest for a moment, then sat up and poured more swamp vodka.
“At first I thought they were singing, like I had somehow missed a ritual, or a celebration. Then it sounded more like an argument. The idea that they were screaming, that I was hearing their death cries, didn’t even figure. Then I got to the top of the ridge and it was like an ocean had appeared in our campsite.”
“An ocean?” Barney said, so loud that Professor Martindale stirred.
Mouth didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Now Alyssa was the one kicking Mouth under the table. Certain words burned. Chest wall encroaching on what it contained, eyes pushed out of focus.
“An ocean, just, bluer,” Mouth said after a long time. Every word its own stammer. “I didn’t even see the wings at first. So many wings. It was … it was a swarm of blue roaches. They rippled and waved, and then I was running toward them down the slope with the tub in my hands. They broke before I got there. They became a cloud, and then they spread out in the sky. They left nothing but bones. Bones and metal.”
“They ate through everything?” Barney’s voice was barely audible. “The crystal books? The ceremonial garments? The tents? The carts? All of it?”
Mouth just nodded.
Now Barney was weeping too, and so was Alyssa. They were probably all drunk. Mouth made an inarticulate wheezing sound, like an apology for sharing this horrible story, or maybe for having survived. They hunched over with the bottle in the middle, and their three foreheads met, and maybe their spines would never straighten again. Mouth felt lonelier and more unconsoled than before, when that story had been a one-person secret. Alyssa’s hand clutched at the back of Mouth’s neck and head. She was whispering something like I’m sorry it’s okay, and Mouth just breathed into her hair.
The three of them stayed huddled like that for a long time, until a noise shook them so much they nearly cracked their heads together. Professor Martindale was waking up, groaning, with an almighty headache.
SOPHIE
I can’t even move in this ball gown. If I lift my arms more than halfway, I feel the seams strain. Even though red taffeta, tulle, lace, and ribbons have nothing in common with the gloved hands of Xiosphanti police, I still have a suffocating threat reaction to these restraints. But I close my eyes, and give myself patience, like Jeremy taught me. And then I breathe, and smile, because Bianca’s looking at me, beaming, and clapping her hands. “People will lose their minds when they see you.”
Bianca can’t stop giggling and twirling in her dress, making her skirt billow. Bianca wears another kind of fragrant oil, with hints of cinnamon and marigold, and her face glows, thanks to the bright lines around her eyes and the faint contours accentuating her perfect face bones.
My starfruit bracelet looks out of place with all the sparkle strung from my neck and arms, but I draped a flowery wristlet over it. I feel the gentle pressure on my wrist all the time, even when I sleep—reminding me that I owe the Gelet much more than just my life. I need to try again soon to find a way past that shantytown, into the night.
“So how do we even know when this party is starting?” I ask Bianca, who’s studying the golden invitation she scored at Punch Face.
“There’s this one angel fountain on the edge of the fancy residential area,” Bianca says. “The party starts the next time it starts flowing, and you can predict when that’ll happen if you know about the water levels in the city’s reserve pumps. It’s like a game, sort of.”