Ancient memories sluiced into Mouth’s brain, cutting across all of her own thoughts and pulling down every structure she’d built to sequester the worst parts of herself. Delirium would have been welcome, compared to this. Mouth struggled to pull away, but the claw held her fast. The crocodile thoughts crowded out her own memories, like she could forget being human all at once. Digging through ice with big forelegs, sifting through snow with tentacles. Mouth felt all her defenses shattering.
Just before Mouth got enough leverage to shove the crocodile away, there was a glimpse of something else. She ran with a group of crocodiles, on a hazardous journey into a scalding vent, to place fleshy seeds, horned with sprouts, in the middle of a volcano. Time passed, and the seeds became wildflowers, spreading their thick petals in the lava, with knotted roots that went deep inside the mantle of January, crossing vast distances. The volcanoes went inactive, or erupted, but the mesh of roots held strong. Mouth felt all the hope, the careful treatment of these blooms, for generations … until the flowers were gone. The root system withered. After that, Mouth felt nothing but fear, and a sense of corruption and death.
Somehow, amid all this, there was a message: Something beautiful died. Everyone will suffer.
Then Mouth felt the night air again, the paralyzing cold, and fumbled to get her protective garments back in place. Noises came from all around her, too many to separate or understand at first.
“What the fuck—” Reynold sounded undone. “What did I just see?”
“Seeds, far under the ground.” Laura was retching. “Giant seeds. Hundreds of squirming shapes.”
“I saw death,” Pedro said. “I saw nothing … but death. My god.”
Mouth wanted to speak, help get the situation back together, but she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get back to being Mouth. Part of her was still trying to see without sight, to feel the frozen air with tentacles she didn’t have.
“What did you do,” Reynold’s voice rose.
“Walls of death coming down—”
“What did you do to me?”
“Seeds, goddamn ugly seeds, squirming.”
“What did you do?”
Mouth had come into this as nobody, and now these alien memories had surged into all her hollow spaces. Her stomach churned. Strange thoughts that weren’t thoughts, visions of life in permanent darkness, a rose-shaped ice city. Mouth was weeping and retching, but she realized the others were much worse. She needed to get a handle on herself.
Reynold shouted, “Keep away—” Then, the bark of a harpoon gun firing.
Mouth got her eyes back and pulled herself back together in time to see one crocodile on her back, a harpoon jutting from her side. The crocodile that had just opened its claw to Mouth was prone on the ice but unharmed, until someone (Pedro?) fell on it screaming. A blur of flailing arms and tentacles, and then Mouth heard nothing but alarms. One of them was the Critical Suit Breach klaxon, which meant someone was about to freeze to death. The others Mouth couldn’t recognize, except that all the alarms stopped about the same time the other nearby suits stopped registering living occupants.
Mouth ran back toward Argelo. Stumbling and sliding, collecting bruises on both knees. Every footstep was a battle against the deep snowdrifts and thick ice, but terror kept goading her forward. The suit’s readouts were useless, except one: the tiny notch that showed where to find light and warmth again.
When Mouth reached the first glimmers on the skyline, and pulled off the thick headgear, Argelo had vanished.
She sank to her knees, holding on to the ground with both hands, and watched her helmet roll away. The city was just gone. Mouth had another moment of trying to use alien senses she didn’t have, as if Argelo were somehow hidden from human awareness. She kept hearing the final screams of the Glacier Fools, but also remembering the image of ruined blooms inside a volcano.
Mouth stumbled in circles, staring at cracks in the dry soil and the thin line of bright orange off in the distance. She tried to listen to the road, but she couldn’t make sense of anything. At last she stumbled across some broken-down shacks on the outskirts of Argelo, and realized: she’d come out of the night too far south. As she walked toward density and saw people carrying food or building materials, the world came back to her. But she still felt half present.
She wished she could believe the crocodiles were monsters, and that was why their touch had poisoned her mind. She was pretty sure it was the opposite: she was too void of goodness to share their thoughts. The memory of the dead flowers in the volcano confirmed this to be true.
* * *
Sophie sat, hunched over, on the steps of Mouth’s apartment building. She was covered with dirt and frost burns, and looked like she’d finally lost one thing too many. She straightened when Mouth approached, but didn’t stand. Mouth braced herself, because if Sophie hated her before, just imagine now. They were both still wearing their suits, without helmets.
“I didn’t know where else to go.” Sophie’s voice was too quiet, after the howling of the night. “I figured if anybody else came home alive, it would be you.” She looked down at the cracked stair. “This was my fault. I made another mistake. I thought I could help you and the others through it, and that this would be the beginning of something.”
They sat without talking for a while. Like their brains were so overstuffed with horror they had no space left to put words together.
Mouth felt faint. All this light hurt, after going without, and the alien sensations blared in her mind. “You had never even tried sharing this thing with anyone. There was literally no way you could know what would happen until you tried. We were the ones who let fear control us.” She had to close her eyes and bend over. “I need to get indoors. You should come up with me. We’ll give you crisps, and some meatloaf that this weird old guy gave me. Nothing like the gourmet dishes you’ve been eating lately, but still good.”
When Mouth squinted her eyes open, Sophie was staring, like she couldn’t decide if this was another trap.
“Remember how I said Alyssa would like to see you?” Mouth said. “She keeps asking after you. She misses you.” Sophie hesitated a moment longer, then bobbed her head.
Upstairs, Alyssa took one look at the two of them, and barked a string of Argelan curses. She didn’t need her cane much anymore, but she leaned on it as she gathered coffee and dark water and greasy fried things. Sophie fell into the big rattan chair, where Martindale had sat. Mouth slouched opposite.
Sophie’s face had always shown her feelings, thanks to her wide hazel eyes and the way her cheeks dimpled whenever she smiled. But now she had just shut down. She wasn’t even scowling, like when she’d followed Mouth around back in Xiosphant. She just stared ahead, with her mouth slightly open.
Some time passed, maybe a lot of time, before Mouth could get words out again.
“I’m out there in total nothing, feeling the shadows creep over me, and then this creature is showing me a million things at once. Felt like I was falling into that canyon at the end of the world. My mind keeps vomiting up crocodile memories.” Mouth let the steam from the coffee burn her sore eyes. “I don’t know how you handle it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just let it overwhelm me. The first time it happened, I was desperate to leave my own body.”
Mouth didn’t know what to say to make this any better. Mouth had been hoping for some kind of Answer, the kind of truth she couldn’t get from Barney, or from the Invention. But it was worse for Sophie—she’d strung way too many hopes onto this one thing, and they’d all broken at once.
This was just too much death at once, without a clean way to mourn.
Alyssa was still piecing together what had happened, and her stream of Argelan curses and sayings still hadn’t slowed down.
Sophie looked up at her. “What did you say? That last thing. What was that?”
“Oh,” Alyssa said. “I was saying, it’s like Mouth is your jinx.”
“Wow, thanks,” Mouth said. “I already feel bad enough.”
This distracted Sophie, so she stopped torturing herself for a moment. “I’ve been trying to understand that phrase ever since I got here. I thought maybe it meant a troubled friendship, or a love that can’t ever become real.”
Sophie pronounced “jinx” all wrong, like “an-kur-ban-tir.”
Alyssa laughed, scaring Sophie and Mouth, who were both still in shock. “No, not exactly.” She explained slowly, in Xiosphanti: “This word just means bad luck. I’m oversimplifying. But your jinx is the person who always shows up and ruins everything for you, just by being there. You can’t get rid of them, whatever you do. Like your fate is intertwined with theirs, and you can’t escape until you figure out why you’re connected. Or if you can learn to live with your jinx, then sometimes the two of you can cooperate to wreck things for everyone else.”
“It’s more sentimental Argelan shit.” Mouth barely had enough energy to be insulted. “And that’s not really what it means. It can be a good thing, if you make peace with it.”