I turn away and go back to Reynold, who’s fastening the last of his suit.
“I hope you don’t mind that I told Mouth about your plan to join our crew,” he says. “I still can’t get past that shitty stunt she pulled the last time we were in Xiosphant. And yet, she’s one of the best people to have around in a bloody situation.”
I realize I don’t hate Mouth anymore. I want to keep hating her, but the hatred just won’t come, as though I’ve used it all up. I look at her struggling to tie the boots on her environment suit with her gloves already on, sweat gleaming on the shaved sides of her scarred head.
The Glacier Fools use a very particular route from their game salon to the edge of night, to minimize the chance someone will see this valuable protective gear just walking around and try to rob us. We weave and jag, go down into disused rail tunnels, and squeeze our bulky bodies through narrow spaces between buildings.
At last the city fades out. I put on my helmet, and I might as well be in space.
The helmet has a visor with a tiny strip of reinforced plastic, so I can see the void outside. There’s also a “night vision” display, which shows just lumps of topography; every now and then, a fuzzy shape glows orange or yellow at the edge of my range. The third display has a handful of dots, representing the other Glacier Fools’ transponders, plus a little blip at the bottom, which shows that daylight is behind us. My bracelet wakes up.
My own body sounds so loud inside this suit, and I think of my mother saying, You are an orchestra.
Once we’re walking into the night, the scavengers start talking like kids on a sugar high.
“Did you ever try that kebab place over by the Spoon?”
“It was okay. The kebabs were about half swamp turtle. And nobody calls that neighborhood the Spoon. Just because we have the Knife doesn’t mean we also need a neighborhood called the Spoon.”
“It makes sense, though. It’s actually shaped like a spoon.”
“You know what I’ve been missing lately? Those stuffed mushrooms they used to sell halfway down the Pit. Those were nice.”
Every step chills and weakens me, until I’m half dead. The insulation on these suits is worn thin, patched with tape. I can barely move, and I hear nothing over my own deafening breathing, and my fingers go numb. I’ve never gone this far into the night, and the night vision just swims. The blobs indicating the other scavengers turn blurry and faint. I could walk off a cliff right now. A snowdrift could fall and crush me to death. I feel my heart drumming, and try to slow my breathing, counting the way I did at the Illyrian Parlour.
Pedro says something about promising readings eighty meters ahead, but a scream tears through the intercom. Then stops. No way to tell who screamed, from which direction, or what happened.
“Laura, was that you?” Pedro says.
“I’m here. I think that was Susana.”
“Susana? You there?”
One of the dots on the screen showing our crewmates is fading. No, it’s gone.
“Shit. I think it was a bison,” Reynold says. “Not that I saw anything, of course. But they come out of nowhere like that.”
“It could have been a sinkhole,” Mouth volunteers.
“No point standing here, arguing about cause of death, unless we want to be next,” Pedro says. “Fucking hell. Susana.”
We keep going. My bracelet vibrates so hard I feel like it’s yanking my wrist. Stumbling and sweeping my legs, I make my frozen body move in that direction.
“Uh, Sophie. Please stay with the group. I see your transponder, you’re going the wrong—”
I ignore Pedro and keep kicking forward. Each step costs twice as much as the last.
My flickering night vision fills with a huge shape, straight ahead. I stop and look up at the rounded body in motion. I look for a pincer, or writhing tentacles. Instead, my screen slowly paints a picture of a bison’s open maw, sharp threads pulled taut, ready to slice me into chunks. The mouth grows so big I can’t see anything else. Everyone calls my name, but I just freeze.
Nothing happens. And then I realize the bison isn’t moving. An eyeblink later, it’s gone from my night vision, like something just tore it to pieces.
But, wait—my night vision hasn’t gone empty. Tentacles move in the darkness. A pincer snaps open right next to me.
“Damn,” Reynold growls. “That is an awful lot of giant, tentacled killer monsters. Trying to remember why this was a good idea.”
“They’re surrounding us.” Laura sounds ready to lose her stomach.
The Gelet make us tiny by comparison, raised on their hind legs. They could embrace each other over our heads, and make a tent for us to cower inside. I feel fear radiate off everyone else. They make little squirming, whimpering noises over the intercom.
I breathe slow, stay in the moment.
Then I realize one of these Gelet is holding something in its front legs: one of those mossy blankets. I move inside, and she and I are wrapped in a cocoon together. Still, the moment I loosen the neck strap on my suit, I feel the wind trying to cut my throat. I show my exposed skin, to prove we’re here to listen.
“We went over this.” Pedro tries to restore calm. “Everybody, follow Sophie’s lead. Let them wrap you up. Show them your throats. That’s a fucking order.”
I hear them breathing and grumbling as they each get right inside a Gelet’s kill radius and unsnap their protective gear. They let in the cold, and brace themselves to let in something else. They can’t hear my reassurance over their own moaning.
“I can’t.” Reynold sounds like he’s fumbling with his harpoon gun. “I can’t, this is—”
“Trust,” I say as loud as my weak voice can go. “I’ve done this a thousand times.”
Then I hear all of them breathing heavier as the other Gelet make contact. I sigh, because they’ve done it, it’s happening. Now they’ll understand for themselves. I don’t have to be the only one to carry this anymore.
The Gelet inside my “cocoon” comes closer, so I feel the warmth of its tendrils. They touch my face, just for a moment, and—
—I’m with all the Gelet in their city, long before humans first arrived. We had technology that shaped the rivers of water and fire, deep beneath the mantle, and ways to reshape living flesh, and we shared these techniques with everyone. We had music, and poetry, and the belief that you could own history but not the future. We had complicated mating dances, a dozen Gelet at a time joining together at the heart of a mountain, carapaces opening to let fleshy appendages come out and mingle together. Some looked like blades, others like fingers, or strange flowers. All the Gelet tremble in ecstasy, and here and now, I shake with them, as the essence pours out of us all, and into all of us—
—I experience all of this in an eyeblink, and then I pull away, because something’s wrong. Loud noises blow out my intercom’s speaker. Screams, wails, and curses. And then the crack-neck sound of a harpoon gun discharging.
mouth
When the crocodile opened its jagged maw and Mouth went inside, she saw nothing but darkness, more absolute than night, without even gradations of shadow. Mouth fell with no gravity, no direction, no childhood or old age. Like delirium, but emptier. But then the dark opened, and Mouth found the reason behind it. The crocodiles had other ways of “seeing,” and Mouth let go enough to see without eyes.
A great city, shaped like a rose or some fungal bloom, stretched under the ice and extended downward, heated by a geyser and powered by lava. Mouth glimpsed walnut-shaped bodies on walkways, in cubby holes and hammocks. And in deep buried chambers, where they studied the movements of the oceans under the ice, the swirl of the atmosphere. Mouth glimpsed celebrations, rescue missions. Ancient crocodiles built some huge structure—or grew a living creature—to stop a glacier. Around the steam jets at the city’s edge, the crocodiles danced.