“We can sleep later!” Bianca pulls my arm toward the door. “This is Argelo, remember? We’ll sleep when we damn well feel like it.”
Ali is dozing in the corner. Ahmad and Katrina trudge to their own bed and draw a curtain, but Bianca keeps jumping up and down. “Let’s go out to the Knife. We’ve had our coming-out party, and now we need to be seen in all the best crowds. Come on. Let’s go dancing!”
I just stare, because she must be joking.
“I get it,” she says at last. “You can’t shake off the Xiosphanti mind-set. You’re still internalizing all the nonsense they taught you at home, and there’s a wheel inside your head that won’t ever stop turning. But don’t try to hold me down.”
At last Bianca agrees to climb into the storage area, and we peel out of our complicated outfits. We lay there, with Bianca squished against my chest just like in the Couriers’ sleep nook. I dream of riot cops and ice, same as always, but Bianca wakes me, thrashing and yelling, “I have to warn them, they need to know,” over and over. This is what she said to me in Xiosphant, right before the end.
When I wake again, she’s already gone, and I’m still weary. But I feel the weight of the bracelet on my wrist more than ever, and my arm keeps landing in the direction of evening. I’m sick of being trapped in my own skin, and I crave that experience of going outside myself, when I let go of my memories and sink into someone else’s. I can almost feel the softness of the tendrils, and smell the faint residue they leave behind. Those rare occasions when I remember a happy dream, it’s always about venturing inside the midnight city. So I get up and put on the warmest clothes I can find.
* * *
When I slip past the last ramshackle buildings before full night, I still see nothing but faint snowdrifts, and the frost still tries to drain the life out of me. The extra layers of clothing feel useless, and I can’t see which way is daylight. This is the farthest I’ve ever been into the night on my own, and I’m already too cold to move.
As I walk, I’m remembering the party, and how I finally got to be a part of something that Bianca always did on her own back in Xiosphant. And she burned me, but then afterward she opened up to me at last. I hope this is the beginning of the two of us sharing everything.
Just when I’m about to turn and go in the opposite direction of the bracelet’s pull, I spy an indistinct glimmer in my torchlight. A Gelet tilts her body until I see her pincer flex, right in front of me. I try to speak, even though the air chills my mouth. “I came out here as soon as I could. It’s been complicated. I’m sorry I didn’t bring anything for you this time. Next time, I promise.”
I hear something move, somewhere behind me, but then it stops.
The big claw closes around my mouth and nose, like usual, and—
—I’m in the Gelet city: the giant vaults and galleries, struts of ice and iron and stone, machinery deep beneath our continental shelf. I see clearer than ever that the Gelet city is alive, with a heart of fire from inside our mountains, and a mind made up of the shared memories of every Gelet who’s ever lived there.
But this time, I’m not one of the Gelet, crawling inside their own city. I’m there as a human. As myself. I see Gelet leading me down the walkways, and everyone comes out to greet me. This isn’t a memory, it’s a vision of something that they hope will happen. Like when Rose asked me for copper, except more detailed, as if they’ve thought about this a lot. The Gelet are celebrating my arrival, as though I’m a friend who’s been away a long time, and I’m rejoicing too, at being someplace safe—
“You want—” I stammer as this Gelet pulls away. That vision of myself in the midnight city lingers, as real as my own senses. “You want … me to come live with you. You’re inviting me. But I mean, I wish, so much, but … Bianca. She’s my friend. You met her, or a few of you did, and she needs me—”
The frozen air shatters. The Gelet falls backward, and my searchlight reveals a dark line sticking out of her side. I hear men shouting in Argelan, like they have glass in their throats.
I reach out and touch a harpoon, from one of those harpoon guns, and then the Gelet shakes, and the harpoon flies off her. I feel hot ink spatter my hand. Not ink. Blood. “No, no. Please. No, please no. I’m so sorry.”
The voices get closer, men and women, shouting. I hear them call to me.
“Run!” I hiss. She flees into the darkness. A jolt of light from some huge lamp blinds me.
The humans beckon me, and I understand most of their chatter. They saw this Gelet holding my throat in her claw, and they thought she was strangling me. As I get closer, three men and one woman step onto the brittle frost, their faces ghostly in their floodlight. The biggest of them holds a harpoon gun that also shines a beam of light from its stock. He aims at the Gelet, who’s too injured to leap to safety.
I throw myself at the man with the harpoon, shouting, “Do not kill” in Argelan. (A moment later, I realize I got the word order wrong, so I was shouting, “Would not have killed.”) I knock the man on his back, and his second harpoon shot goes wild. As he falls, he lashes out and knocks the woman to the ground while the other two men shout. The big man and I roll on the frozen ground, until I bite his hand and smash my forehead into his.
I pull myself free and run back to the city, hoping with every panting lurch forward that I didn’t just get a friend killed.
mouth
Budkhi was a small town, about four hundred kilometers south of Argelo, the opposite direction from Xiosphant. A giant bog produced this one kind of moss there that tasted kind of decent if you grilled it, plus the bog-fish were good to eat if you removed their poison sacs first. A lot of people died when they first settled there, but that was true of every place.
The Citizens had passed through Budkhi every once in a while, but most of their visits had ended with them being chased out with axes and slings. What did the people in this swamp-gas village need from a group of odd strangers? The Citizens tried trading, bringing supplies from Argelo or one of the bigger towns to exchange for food and woven swamp-grass, but the Budkhians had a taboo on using anything they hadn’t made themselves. So maybe the Citizens could be a theater troupe instead? Or just offer additional labor, for anything that needed some extra hands? Or they could be teachers? Doctors? Priests? Each time the Citizens arrived, they tried to present themselves as something new and different, and then the Budkhians only doubted them more. Yolanda kept saying, “Every community has a need that it cannot meet in itself. The more they say they do not need us, the harder we must try to become what they need most.”
But the truth was, the Citizens needed the Budkhians much more than the other way around, because this was the only town within a hundred kilometers in either direction, and the food sources in and around that bog were not easy for visiting strangers to harvest. The last time the Citizens tried to visit, the townspeople saw them coming and lit bonfires on the road, with a large shirtless man spinning a lit torch in each hand, as a warning to come no closer.
Still, Budkhi was always the last stop on the way to a big volcano, which was one of the Citizens’ sacred places. So the Citizens skirted around town as best they could, coming perilously close to darkness, and pulled some just-about-edible frog eggs out of the bog on their way out.
Mouth was starting to realize it was odd for a religious order to be so willing to play any role you wanted, in any given situation. Mouth hadn’t spent that much time around other faiths—Alyssa had talked about her Jewish upbringing, and there were a few mosques, two churches, and assorted other houses of worship here in Argelo. But as far as Mouth knew, most people who devoted their lives to a creed wanted everyone to know about it. You only put on different identities for different people if you didn’t care about spreading the good reputation of your teachings.
So Mouth had been trying to break the old habits, and to be the same person with everyone. This was more difficult than you might think, because it turned out, everybody wanted you to be someone else, depending on their needs. A soldier, a friend, an enemy, a reminder of the past. Treating other people with honor was harder than Mouth had ever expected.
* * *