Speaking of, Barney was a whole other person when he was waiting on a table of students—clowning, doing little dance moves, snapping his dirty rag. Mouth watched Barney work, wondering if this really could be a living sage, until Barney noticed and came over. “Mouth, good to see you.” Barney smiled so hard his eyebrows changed shape, but his posture also straightened, and he looked older. “Didn’t know you were coming. What you in the mood for? I have a nut roast that’s pretty similar to the stuff I used to cook on the road.”
Mouth got some straw tea from the table against the far wall, choking just a little on the rank aftertaste. She ate the nut loaf—which did bring back powerful sense memories—and drank two more cups of the bitter tea. The starchy aroma made all the old memories of the Citizens feel more present, and Mouth had caught Barney in a good mood.
He watched her eat with a half-open smile, peppering her with odd reminiscences. “Remember that old blanket Yolanda always wrapped around herself, that was so frayed it looked like scrubgrass? And ugh, those canvas shoes that Cynthia made for everyone, with the spongy soles that started so comfortable and always melted after the first hundred kilometers. Remember those?” Mouth kept nodding while she ate.
She’d started visiting the diner regularly, whenever she wasn’t running errands for the Perfectionists, or helping with Alyssa’s rehab. Sometimes so many students were sitting on every available surface and on top of each other you couldn’t get in. Other times, the diner was closed, with a sign saying that the place would reopen when the university raised its study flag. Argelo was full of things like that: your favorite candy store would open whenever the crosstown train was running, and the crosstown train ran whenever the hydraulic systems were primed, and the hydraulics depended on the water levels in the reservoir, which fluctuated in a more or less predictable fashion. If you knew all these things by heart, you’d be able to get to the candy shop at the right time to buy those peppermints you liked.
But even when Mouth could get into the diner, Barney was often too busy to talk. And if Mouth managed to arrive when the diner was both open and empty, Barney would be intent on cleaning dishes rather than answering Mouth’s questions. “You already know everything,” Barney had said over and over. “Seriously, you got it. You made a life for yourself, didn’t you? You know what you know, and there’s no need to know any more. The Citizens are long gone. Although sometimes I wake up and it feels like I’m in the middle of the camp, and everyone is packing up around me, and it takes me a couple eyeblinks to remember where I am.”
Once in a while, Mouth would catch Barney in a thoughtful mood, and he would muse about everything they had all been through, and all the things the Citizens had tried to do. “We kept to ourselves, you know, but we did try to help people integrate their lives, whenever we could. We would come into these smaller towns as a group of carpenters or plumbers, but after we’d done the work, sometimes people would ask us questions. And we’d try to share some thoughts about how to pay attention, and stop getting distracted by trivial crap. Hang on, I need to check the oven. Where was I? Oh. So we talked, and listened as well. People in those frontier towns see the craziest things.”
“Before Alyssa found you, I thought I had blown my last chance to understand any of it,” Mouth told Barney when the nut roast was gone. “I found a copy of the Invention in a vault in Xiosphant. The only copy, I guess. I just wanted to say the right verses for the dead. A lot of people died, pointlessly, and I didn’t even get the book.”
“Mostly I remember that book being a lot of doggerel,” Barney said. “Their way of keeping everybody from complaining during those long hikes. I mean, don’t get me wrong. If I read it again, maybe it’d speak to me. I do remember there were a few moving passages here and there.”
You might as well have kicked Mouth in both sides of the head at once.
“Really?” Mouth said. “The Invention? I mean, it was our most sacred book, I thought. It was the story of us. I was ready to kill for it.”
“It’s been a while, and I was pretty burned out by the time I left,” Barney said. “You were at an impressionable age when you lost them, so maybe it was the opposite.”
“But you’re a sage. Or at least that’s what you claimed. You said you achieved the goal,” Mouth said.
“Don’t take my word for it. I wouldn’t, in your situation. You have no way of knowing if I’m telling the truth, or what that even means.”
Mouth tried to remember a single line of the Invention, a single beautiful passage or moving sentiment. Everything came as a jumble, and now that Barney had called it doggerel, that’s what the words sounded like in her head.
SOPHIE
I lie half awake in the storeroom, remembering the sensation of standing inside a fortress of ice and stone, of feeling welcomed by a whole community, and then how it ended. The Gelet’s blood, dark and thick, was still on my hand when I got back to Ahmad and Katrina’s place. I can still smell it now. The bracelet hasn’t stopped urging me to come back to the night, but I don’t know how to make it there. Shouts and discordant music blare from someplace nearby.
Bianca opens the slatted door and stands over me. She looks as if she hasn’t slept since the Founding of January: there are puffy blotches under her eyes, which seem red and unable to focus. Her arms keep making tiny gestures, too fast to make sense of. I hope she’s come here to sleep next to me, but instead she nudges my shoulder, harder than she probably means to, and says, “Sophie. Do you trust me?”
I almost say yes right away, but something makes me stop and look up at her.
“I need to know,” she says. “Because I have a plan, but it won’t work unless you trust me with your life. I did it, I found a way for us to go home. We can go back and fix everything we left behind in Xiosphant. We can take down the corrupt machine that decided you were disposable. If Mouth taught me one thing, it’s always cut them when they’re not looking. But I need to know. Right now. Do you trust me?”
For some reason, I still haven’t woken up all the way, even though her voice and her stiff posture alarm me. I ought to be wide awake, alert, but I feel half present.
“What plan?” I whisper. “What are you talking about? There’s no way back—”
Bianca rolls her head and shushes me. “You can’t ask me that. This is why I said you need to trust me. I’m risking everything, even having this conversation with you. People in this city are so paranoid, they’ll lose their minds if they find out what I’m doing.”
Everything shrinks in on me, as if the shadows deform and I’m about to be crushed.
She leans closer and I feel her breath on my face. “Remember when I said I have unfinished business in Xiosphant? We both do. You were just telling me you still feel haunted by what they did to you, and maybe the only way for you to get past it is to face those monsters, and to see them brought down. Take it from me, you don’t just walk away from the place that made you.”
I can tell she expected a different reaction from me—like, she thought I would be excited. But everything about her tone is scaring me.
And meanwhile, I can’t stop remembering when the Gelet came and invited me to their city, and then blood, and then blood. Those people thought they were rescuing me.
“I have my own way of dealing with my past,” I say. “And we have a chance, we can start over here. We can get jobs. I can work in a coffee shop again. I thought you were having fun here, dancing, going to parties. You keep saying we’re famous, and everything is fantastic.”
“Sure, yeah, good times. But it’s all been a means to an end, and it’s finally paying off.” Bianca puts her hands on my shoulders, and I feel an immediate flush of comfort, even in the middle of a terrible conversation. “And Argelo isn’t going to be fun much longer, from the whispers I’m hearing.”
She looks over her shoulder. “I have to go. You need to tell me now: do you trust me or not? Did you mean it on the Sea of Murder when you said you’d always support me?”
I hesitate just a few heartbeats more, and then toss my head, in the Argelan style. “Yes. Of course. You know I do. But you should tell me—”
Bianca’s gone. I hear her dress rustle in the room outside, and then the front door clacking shut.
* * *