Afterward, Mouth didn’t like to think about what came next. You wrap yourself in layers of padding and packing tape, like a parcel, and run through the burning rain as if you could dodge the droplets. Each step kicks up sprays that make you gag. Everything looks gray, almost translucent, and it reminds you of the night vision and its smudgy view of a bloodbath. At last you reach the depository, where the guards sit on the floor and lean against the wall, staring out the window, and you throw a rain-soaked axe into the face of the first one to stand up. The next guard shoots and misses, then shreds your protective layers with a knife. You fall outside, where he headbutts you into a hot puddle. And so on.
Then your only orders are to hold the depository, so you sit with your fellow Perfectionists, plus the people you just killed. Nobody is going to relieve you until the rain stops, and the rain goes on so long you witness the dead bodies decomposing in real time, until someone has enough and flings them outside. The rainfall speeds the process of breaking them down, but it still seems to take forever. At least you’re in a food warehouse, so there’s plenty to eat.
SOPHIE
A flash illuminates the raindrops outside, turning them into slivers of tinted glass strung between statues caught in distorted poses.
I’ve memorized every tile on the wall of this Khartoum restaurant, and seen every loop of the fancy wall projections that are supposed to simulate a virtual souq. We’ve almost exhausted their stores of kisra, aseedaa, and kajaik, and Bianca keeps threatening to make a break for it using a drink tray as a rain-shield. Even with the fancy screens that filter the light into gentle waves, I still have a clear view of the street outside, where a group of men and women slash each other with long blunt knives. Their family emblems have tarnished to the point where people no longer have clear targets. At least half their guns are too old to work under this corrosive downpour, from the shouts I’ve overheard. I wish with all my heart that I’d been at Ahmad and Katrina’s place when the rain started, or even Mouth and Alyssa’s.
This view reminds me of the Glacier Fools, and I have to shut my eyes. I keep wondering if any of the Gelet died in that disaster, and whether they think I led them into an ambush on purpose.
“I don’t know how you can stand to look out that window,” Bianca says from the bar, where she’s nursing some sweet liquor. She’s still wearing her scoop-necked dress covered with the pearly scales of some rare breed of pheasant that lives past the swamps to the south.
We had come to this restaurant to reconnect, just the two of us, before the next party and the next one after that. But we’ve been trapped in here for ages, and we haven’t talked much. The restaurant staff are all hiding in the back.
Bianca comes toward me. Some wild creature that’s been trapped inside me for a long time wants to touch her. To spin around and use my momentum to pull her into my orbit, then clasp my arm around her. I remember how I held her on the Sea of Murder, when death seemed so close that I could say anything. The storm battered us, wrecked our sense of balance, until I thought the skiff would shatter under our feet. That’s become my happiest memory.
Now we’re in the middle of another vicious storm, surrounded by even more death, and I can’t find the right thing to say to make her open up.
So instead, I talk to Bianca about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre, when her ancestors killed mine onboard the Mothership. The Nagpur compartment was all but wiped out, thousands of people, and the survivors were “integrated” into the other six populations, their children raised to forget. There are no pictures, no firsthand accounts, but I sneaked inside the library at Betterment University and found one slender sociology monograph written in No?lang, full of bland statistics that made my heart go cold.
“Everybody talks plenty about what happened with the other compartments, both good and bad,” I say in Xiosphanti. “But nobody ever wants to talk about Nagpur.”
“That’s because it’s not constructive,” Bianca replies in Xiosphanti for once. “We can’t focus on building a better future if we spend all our time agonizing about things that happened a long time ago. And you won’t get people to help you change the world by telling them they’re descended from criminals. We all spend too much time caught up in the past already, and looking backward all the time is killing us.”
“But everything is different now because of what happened then,” I say. “Everyone is here, and alive, because the people from Nagpur aren’t. My people.”
“Your ‘people’ are the Xiosphanti,” Bianca says, “and they’re still suffering right now. There are plenty of atrocities and selfish decisions to worry about without having to reach so far back in time. So many mistakes, just since the start of the Circadian Restoration.” She speaks Xiosphanti as if the red-and-blue smoke just erupted, and addresses me as a fellow student.
“Ahmad says that everything that’s wrong with us is because of things that happened on the Mothership,” I say. “Maybe the past is all we are. The same people who flushed thousands of bodies into space went on to invent Circadianism.”
Even though Bianca is trying to tell me that the mass murder of my ancestors doesn’t matter, that wild creature inside me is climbing all over itself with happiness, because at least Bianca and I are debating again, like in our dorm room.
Bianca gropes and finds a hidden control on one wall that causes some privacy screens to roll down, covering the window and blocking our view of the dead bodies hissing in the rain. Now the two of us perch behind shuttered windows, and this feels even more like old times.
“What would it even look like for Xiosphant to be fair?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Bianca snaps a little, like she’s not in the mood to talk anymore. “I suppose we would need to redefine how we think about ‘work.’ Like, some jobs you can’t do your whole life. Some jobs are almost twice as hard as others, and maybe those shifts need to be shorter. Some people have a higher capacity than others. Work is more complicated than people realize.”
Bianca still has the look of someone who hasn’t slept, more than a nod here or there, in forever. Her head darts, like a cat searching for prey, and she stares, as if she needs to see things for a while before the image settles.
“Who makes those decisions, though? How do you create a system that allocates—”
“I don’t know. Stop asking me weird questions. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re in the middle of a killzone. I tried to warn you that Argelo was about to stop being fun.” Bianca gets up and pours herself another drink, grimacing. She tries to make one for me, too, but I push it away.
I can’t hear the fighting outside, because this restaurant has next-level soundproofing.
Bianca comes and sits next to me, touching my shoulder with one palm. “I know that you went and did something reckless. I saw the windburn on your neck, and I heard that Reynold is dead. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?” She’s switched back to Argelan, as if to say the schoolgirl conversation is over. “You said you trusted me, but you really don’t.”
“You’re right, I did something dumb,” I say in Argelan. I can’t keep all of the bitterness out of my voice. I’ve held a million inquests inside my own head, but this guilt remains as fresh as ever. “People died, and it was my fault. I was trying to do something good.”
“I’m sorry,” Bianca says, still touching my shoulder. I feel myself relax into her side. “I know what it’s like to want to make things better, and to have it turn to shit. That’s how we got here, right?”
She goes to get herself some more liquor, and I say, “I do trust you.”
Bianca looks at me, drink in hand, and seems to reach a decision. “When this fucking rain stops, if it ever does, I’m going to show you everything. You can see what we’ve been working on. Fuck the timetable.”
I feel like I’m starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep, so I lie down on the one couch next to the bar, across from the window. I don’t expect Bianca to join me, but then I feel her grudgingly work herself into the space beside me. I feel safe, as though her decelerating breath on my face is a hopeful sign that we’re still sleepmates, and also road buddies. Our breathing synchronizes into slow iambs, and I drift off.
Then I jerk awake, panting as though I’ve run a hundred kilometers and I’ll never be able to force enough air into my lungs. I don’t even remember the dream I was in, but I’m drowning, bloody choking, and then I realize that next to me Bianca is screaming.
Bianca’s voice comes in a high rattle, much too loud. She pummels the cushion next to her with both fists. I can’t hear what she’s screaming, but it’s in a rhythm with her punches.
Bianca wakes too, and we both just breathe for a moment, looking opposite ways. She gets up to fetch herself another drink, and smoothes out her shimmering dress.
She sits beside me again, but neither of us goes back to sleep.
We sit without talking, long enough for her drink to disappear and our dreams to feel like places we visited long ago. I hear sounds from the kitchen. I think either the fighting or the rain has stopped. Maybe both.
Maybe this is our last chance to have a conversation, just us two, before whatever is going to happen. “I miss you,” I say.