“Me too,” she says, staring at the reflective panels on the other end of this enormous space. We are two tiny blobs in a swirl of muted color.
“I really hoped that you and I would reinvent ourselves together,” I say, “when we came to Argelo. Everyone said you can be whoever you want here. I thought it would be just you and me, and we could make our own lives, without worrying about anyone else.”
“I never would have been happy.” Bianca shakes her head. “I can’t let go of what happened before. I lost everything, and I was forced to leave Xiosphant, and I couldn’t let that be the end of it.”
“You didn’t lose everything. You didn’t lose me.”
I feel the way I did when the boat flipped almost on its side, on the Sea of Murder: shivering, my insides going sideways.
She acts as if I didn’t say anything. “I never would have been satisfied living a small life, after everything I lost. And now I’ve found a way to make my life count for something. To be the person I was always meant to be.”
“I wish I had been enough for you.”
“I miss our old friendship just as much as you do, but that was a long time ago.” Bianca takes a breath, and her face closes up. “You died, and you made the decision to stay dead to me. And so I spent too long turning you into a perfect human being in my mind. A martyr, you know? The one good person in this shit-eating world. I hated myself for stealing that money and letting them take you, and I hated everyone who had anything to do with sending you into the night. I wanted to make them pay for what they took from us. I still want that. It’s all I think about.”
“I’m alive. I’m here.” I touch her arm. “You don’t have to be angry anymore.”
“Oh, really? Thanks. I’ll just stop being angry. That’s a great idea. Why did I never think of that?” Her laugh feels like a slap. She leans past me and looks out the window, through the crack left by the privacy screen. “Rain’s stopped. And the bloodbath seems to be over, too. Let’s go. I promised to show you something.”
Bianca gets up and walks to the door, without looking back, and her stride makes ripples in the pearly shapes on her dress. “Everything I’ve done since we got to this city has been to help us survive. And to find a way for us to go back.” She walks into the street and almost steps in a puddle of the noxious liquid, but she sidesteps at the last moment.
We make our way down some streets that lead toward a part of town I don’t know, where big factories and warehouses cluster around junkyards. Every few steps, we have to avoid either a body or more of the corrosive liquid. Even sleep-deprived and wearing a scalloped formal dress, Bianca plants her feet with perfect sureness, while I keep almost tumbling facedown into a deadly slick, or stepping on someone’s discarded blade. The sky still looks darker, and I wonder if the rain will start again.
“Do you think you and I would have stayed friends after the Gymnasium?” Bianca leads me into a covered walkway with a rusty handrail. “I mean, if I hadn’t stolen that petty cash, and the cops hadn’t used it as a pretext. If we had just kept going, the way we had been. Maybe you and I would have just drifted apart after graduation.” She’s obviously thought about this a lot.
I think back, and remember the distinguished future that Bianca had been preparing for back in Xiosphant, when she dressed up for all those parties and dinners that I was never invited to. And meanwhile, she dabbled in insurrectionary politics as a way of proving something to herself. I nurtured all these childish fantasies about Bianca changing the world, with me by her side, but I never thought too much about what “by her side” meant. What was I going to be doing while she dazzled everybody?
Bianca waits for me to respond as we travel a series of gantries made of distressed metal. I walk heavy, stooped, with a dull pain in my stomach.
“I don’t know. I never had a friend like you before. I don’t know what trajectory we were on.” I feel as if I’ve just swallowed a few drops of this toxic runoff. Now that she’s spoken, I can see it clearly: we would have lost touch after graduation. I picture us older, pushing past each other on the street and not recognizing each other until we’ve almost gone too far to wave.
“You and I were good for each other, in this one moment in our lives, when we were young and in love with books and ideas. When we wanted to use our minds instead of sleeping when they told us to. That was our time.” We’ve reached the opening of a dark tunnel. Bianca turns to face me. Her eyes look sunken, in the encroaching gloom. “But now neither of us is the person we thought we would turn into, and we’ve gone through things together that most people would never even imagine. I just hope you’ll be on my side when the time comes.”
I’m just staring at Bianca, noticing the raised tendon in her neck, the set of her jaw.
Bianca reaches out and bangs on a mesh gate with barbed wire on top. “Open up. It’s me,” she says in Argelan. “Dash knows we’re here.” I’m pretty sure that last part is a lie.
“Don’t worry,” Bianca says in Xiosphanti, “I still want to save everyone back home. All those people trapped in pointless cycles: work and sleep, work and sleep.” She leads me into the pipe-lined tunnel, lit only by a single electric bulb swinging at eye level. “I don’t have a whole theory of labor allocation worked out, but I know we can find a better way. You can help.”
Bianca’s brocaded slippers crunch on the filthy cement floor.
I almost brain myself on one of the big metal pipes. “We can’t go back to Xiosphant. I keep telling you. You saw how hard it was, coming here. We almost died seven different ways.”
“You should know me better than that by now.”
Bianca leads me into a hangar, with just a sliver of window along the top of the wall. I realize we’ve circled around, and we’re under one of her favorite nightclubs. Not Punch Face or Emergency Session, but the one we visited the first time, where the walls themselves are speakers. The one with the glitter that sticks to your skin with some kind of chemical adhesive and doesn’t wash off. I hear the triple-beat over our heads: people dancing off the serotonin rush from the killing spree in the rain. She reaches until she finds a light switch, and then I’m looking at ten green-gray vehicles.
“Some of these belong to the Perfectionists, some to the Alva Family, and some to another group,” Bianca says. “I already had the outlines of the idea before Dash came along, but he helped me put it together. They’ve been building these since forever, collecting stuff from the night, or from treasure meteors. I think one of the reasons for this latest skirmish between the families was to get the last few pieces.”
These vehicles are all different sizes and shapes, but they all have the same armor, thick and jagged, like a bison’s overlapping plates only without any fur. They rest on thick treads with gravity-assist devices to help them cross the roughest terrain—crude, hand-machined versions of the all-terrain cruisers the Founding Settlers drove when they tried to explore the world. Someone has attached spikes to the armor, and there are empty spots where you could add weapons.
These rude metal carcasses remind me of the War Monument back in Xiosphant, the rough edges that scraped me as I hid in its shadow.
“We could bring a small army,” Bianca says. “We can do everything we used to talk about in school.”
The music upstairs stumbles and recovers, like a drunk man kicking his own foot. I put my hand on the side of the nearest vehicle and feel the shell vibrate. I try to imagine going home like this. With a “small army” of the same people I just watched slashing each other to death for no reason.
“There’s still no way,” I say, though I have a queasy feeling that I’m wrong. “I mean, these are not amphibious vehicles. You remember the Sea of Murder. You almost fell overboard a couple times. Nobody has the facilities to build the kind of vehicle carriers they had during the Second Argelan War, or the barges from the Fourth.”