“I never thought about Argelo much, except as a place to drop off stuff and pick up other stuff, and maybe spend some of our pay on swamp vodka and blue-jean dancers,” Alyssa said. “It’s only now that I’ve been stuck here that I’m realizing just how much of Argelo is inside me.”
They were walking through the places Alyssa played when she was little, the places her mother and uncles all worked. She kept pointing out where the Chancers, her old crew, had stolen something or tricked somebody. “One time Natalie didn’t look in the right place for the insignia and she accidentally robbed a guy with the Unifier crest. We had to stay underground for what felt like our whole lives. Oooh, there’s my favorite building that we were paid to set on fire. Don’t worry, nobody was inside at the time. You can still see the scorchmarks. Beautiful stripe shapes.”
Some of the Chancers had gone south and settled in some dirt-pit, making booze to sell in the city. “I guess I wasn’t prepared for nostalgia to kick me in the face the way it did. I guess that’s why I wanted to go back into the old gangster life.”
Alyssa needed to hear something, but Mouth was coming up empty. Mouth used to know how to respond to things, she had a whole catalog, but now even situations that ought to be familiar left her fumbling in her mind.
Mouth kept picturing snow washing over the faces of the corpses in the night, Reynold and the others, covering them but also distorting their features as they turned solid. The cold and sensory deprivation of full night had torn away some of Mouth’s armor, and then something about experiencing life in an utterly different physical shape, and feeling all the foreign emotions, had poked decent-sized holes in her sense of self. But most of all, the image of delicate blossoms in the heart of a mountain felt like a message from death itself.
Mouth said, “Sometimes I wish I had died at the same time as the other nomads. I don’t know why I deserved to survive.”
“Oh, daylight and ashes. Who cares why you survived? It’s probably because you’re so annoying that even death couldn’t stand to put up with you,” Alyssa said.
“I think me surviving was the worst thing that could have happened, because I’ve only kept a cruel mockery of the Citizens alive in my head.”
By now they had gotten back toward the nicer part of the town, where you could hear drums and laughter, and smell the scent of fish pies still crisp from the oven. Plus someone frying stale bread, an Argelan custom, meant to commemorate some citywide moment of confession and reconciliation, a long time ago, that nobody could agree on the details of now.
“I really hoped getting you in touch with that professor would help you to figure out your past, and then you would come back to me,” Alyssa said. “But I feel like I’m having to watch my own back, with a bullet wound still healing in my side.”
The dead flowers in the core of the mountain seemed different each time Mouth remembered, but she always thought of sickness, corruption, in the heart of the Citizens’ holiest place. An enemy of life.
“This is not the Mouth I chose as my sleepmate and road buddy. Remember when we met? You stood out from the rest of the Resourceful Couriers like a daisy in a field of shit. Afraid of nothing, foul-mouthed, full of contempt for everyone’s rules. You punched more people than you spoke to. You lied to more people than you let touch you. That’s the Mouth I want back.”
Mouth tried to take Alyssa’s words inside her, as if they were blueprints for something Mouth could build from scraps. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
* * *
They kept walking down the winding streets, ducking out of the way of hand-carts and a couple of small lorries. They argued about music and games and whether they were better combined, while Mouth tried to avoid looking up. Until a man fell dead at their feet.
The women who had shot him ran away, guns raised. Mouth was going to shrug this off, but Alyssa spotted the four-winged horse on the man’s lapel and said, “We have to kill those ladies.” But as soon as they had brought down the two shooters, who wore the Brilliant crest on their jackets, gunshots came from a second-story window. The bullets tore into the two Brilliant corpses as Mouth and Alyssa hunched behind a trash cart. At last Alyssa tagged the second-story shooter and he fell next to the first dead man with the Perfectionist badge.
Mouth’s pager lit up at the same time as Alyssa’s. Mouth fumbled in one of her pockets for the four-winged-horse badge, which she hardly bothered to wear.
They headed for the Perfectionist HQ. When they were a block away, the sky changed again, and Mouth felt something splash on her face. A droplet of liquid fire. Her skin sizzled, with a sensation like a scalpel cut. Another drop fell, then another, and before Mouth and Alyssa could finish remarking on the first rainfall in ages, this caustic liquid was descending in a constant barrage. People ran for shelter, chemical burns on their faces and hands.
Inside the Perfectionist building, with its dark-stained wood walls and nightclub decor, someone was explaining that this toxic rain had happened a couple other times lately. Scientists said a whole ocean of magma flowed across part of the day, bothering nobody—until recently, when the temperature had increased slightly. Some of the magma had evaporated, and seeded the atmosphere with alkali deposits. The beauty of nature.
Sasha was handing out rifles from a crate. “You took your sweet time getting here.”
“What are we even fighting about?” Mouth asked.
Sasha looked at Mouth with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Alyssa kicked Mouth’s ankle.
“Blame those assholes, the Superbosses. They made us look weak. And then we had to make a deal with the Alva Family to stay afloat. The peace in Argelo was all about people owing each other favors, an ecosystem. But it was always fragile, and everybody got something. The Jamersons are killing the Absolutists, and the Unifiers are slaughtering the Mandrakes.”
At first, Mouth didn’t recognize the emotion on the faces of all the Perfectionists: relief. Everyone was relieved to be fighting at last. No more making nice, they could finally kill (almost) everyone who ever got on their nerves.
The rain was too dense to see through. The pavement smoked.
“Fuck the Unifiers!” A woman shoved a burly man onto the pavement, not caring that the rain spattered her face. The man pulled a machete and swung it at the woman, with skinless hands. She splashed his face with rainwater using her bare hands, then sucker-punched him.
Across the street, two men ran past. They held a sheet of metal over their own heads, which would fall unless they both held it up. They kept slashing at each other with knives in their free hands.
Alyssa was talking to one woman in the corner of the space, who had fresh rain burns on her cheek and a gun clutched in both hands. Her name was Janice, and she was an economist who had gone to Perfectionist schools and now lived in Perfectionist housing in the nice part of the dusk, where all her neighbors were Perfectionists too. She spent most of her time trying to solve the problem of hyperinflation when she wasn’t trying to kill everyone in sight. “I need to get back out there,” she snarled, “I don’t need rest, I need justice. I’ll rest after justice is done.”
“Mouth. Got a job for you.” Sasha came over, rifle under one arm. “We need to take over the central food depository. People ought to see we’re protecting the food supply, so they’ll respect our authority. Plus everyone will need to kiss our asses unless they want to starve. Only trouble is, these dickfaces with bolo guns are guarding it. And we can’t risk damaging the food.”
“Shouldn’t we just wait until the rain stops?” Mouth already knew that was the wrong thing to say.
“Who says the rain is going to stop?” Sasha said.
Mouth was about to argue further, but Alyssa grabbed her arm with both hands and pulled her aside. “We promised to fight for these people. We owe them.” She stared at Mouth with a quirk in her left eye. “This is what I keep telling you. I need you to be here for me now, not stuck in the past with dead people who never even cared about you.”
Mouth took a rifle from Sasha, then turned back to Alyssa. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “I ought to honor my promises, or nobody will put up with me, right?” Alyssa smiled and tossed her head, then wished Mouth luck.
* * *