Mouth is looking at me, and I realize I haven’t spoken for a while. “I need you to help me disappear for a while,” I say. I start to tell Mouth what Bianca’s planning, and it turns out she already knows most of it, except for my part.
“I’ll do what I can, but you should know that I can’t fight.” Mouth looks down. “My hands won’t cooperate, no matter what I try, ever since the rainstorm. Wasn’t like I chose to become a pacifist or anything, just that my body decided on its own.”
Mouth somehow looks even worse than she did after the Glacier Fools. She has fresh burn scars on her neck from that scorching rain, and a cut on her cheek that looks infected. She hasn’t been able to keep shaving the sides of her head, and the hair came back uneven.
“I don’t need you to fight anybody. Just help me get out of town, find a place to lie low until everyone gives up on this invasion foolishness. Preferably, someplace where I can go into the night without passing through slums full of people with harpoon guns.”
Mouth perks up, because here is a challenge that she’s comfortable with. She starts spinning out extraction plans, disguises, camouflages, and places I could hide, including a hidden distillery that some of Alyssa’s old friends are running, forty kilometers south of here.
“I already promised to help Bianca,” Mouth says. “But I guess I can help both of you.”
“The Gelet, when I went into the night, they trusted me with something precious,” I say. “Not just their shared past, like what they tried to share with you, but even more than that, a … a kinship. They chose me to be their friend here in the twilight, and I’ve failed them over and over, in so many ways. But no matter how I try to make Bianca understand, she still just thinks I have some kind of power that she can use to get what she wants.”
I squint at all the bright colors, eaten away by rust or mold. We’re surrounded by the detritus of other people’s bold visions for the future. I keep gagging on the stench of outgassing polymers.
“You learned to overcome the worst fear and communicate across the great divide, and you’ve overturned everything we thought we understood about this world,” Mouth says, chewing her knuckles. “So of course someone was bound to try and weaponize you. I’m just sorry it was Bianca.”
* * *
When my mother died, I was just on the cusp of thinking of myself as a separate person, with independent opinions, and I had a hard time separating her death from my own life. I kept thinking I must have done something wrong, or she must have rejected me, and I imagined her final moments over and over: her skin seared away, her final thoughts worrying about the well-being of strangers. Bianca was the first person who ever soothed my derelict heart after that, so of course I threw all of my love at her.
Hernan said my mother would be proud of me. I wonder if it’s true, and what she would say if she saw me now. I’ve taken to wearing the CoolSuit, or even a light cotton sari over a blouse and pants, whenever I go outside without Bianca. At some point, I stopped thinking of this as a disguise, and started just taking comfort in anything that makes me easier in my skin.
Mouth comes back and says, “It’s all arranged. Alyssa’s on her way to help us. She just had to make a pit stop on her own, to take care of something first.”
I start to thank her for the risk she’s taking, but just then Alyssa shows up—with Bianca.
“That was your pit stop?” Mouth throws her hands over her head. “You went to fetch her?”
“We pledged our loyalty to the Perfectionists, and I take that seriously, not to mention all the promises we just made to Bianca. I wasn’t about to sneak around behind her back.” Alyssa shrugs. “Plus, I actually think Bianca would make an amazing leader. She kept the Resourceful Couriers from melting down after Omar died, and she’s been playing the Argelan game better than most people who were born here.”
“Thanks.” Bianca nods at Alyssa. “I’d be lucky to have someone like you on my team.”
Mouth looks at the two of them with her arms still raised, a comical statue.
“Don’t worry: Dash and the others don’t know about your little betrayal, and I hope we can keep it that way,” Bianca says to Mouth. “I can’t believe that right after you promised to help me, you went behind my back and tried to sabotage the mission. Actually, I can believe it, because it’s bloody typical. Everything I know about lies and manipulation, I learned from you.”
“Both you and Sophie asked for my help, and I couldn’t choose between you. But my promise to you still stands.”
“Don’t blame Mouth,” I whisper. “This was my idea.”
“Were you even going to say goodbye to me this time?” Bianca comes over to me, shivering in her crimson party dress. “Or were you just going to disappear again, and leave me wondering if you were alive or dead?”
I’d made up my mind that I would never see Bianca again, so she appears like a sliver of lost time. I feel the old yearning to comfort her, to sustain her with my near silence, but then I remember how she laughed as she told me that it was too late to stop her plans, and then the sight of a thorn mask halfway on her face. The cavities in the rough metal vehicles with their fresh uneven coats of paint, large enough to hold the most destructive weapons humanity still has. The casual way she said, Do you think we would have stayed friends?
This feeling is the opposite of what a Gelet’s touch does to me: I feel crushed by the reality of my own body, my own surroundings, my own mistakes.
“I would have died to avenge you, and you’re still at the center of my world, but you won’t fucking believe in me,” Bianca says.
“You and Sophie are like a single soul in two bodies,” Mouth is saying to Bianca. “I’ve seen how much you care about each other. Don’t let it go like this. Just work it out. We can find another way.”
I still can’t look at Bianca. I close my eyes, and instead I see an assault vehicle with empty weapon ports.
“There is no other way,” Bianca says. “We’re doomed if these two cities don’t start working together. The sky only just pissed alkali a short while ago, remember, and the southern root gardens and orchards are ruined. Argelo is running out of food and clean water, and meanwhile Xiosphant is a collection of ancient machines that can’t go much longer. This is a harsh, ugly planet, and we need to pool our resources or we all starve in our own filth.”
Alyssa shrugs and says to Mouth, “Can’t really argue with any of her logic. Those fucking complacent Xiosphanti need something to wake them up, make them care about the rest of us. Remember when we thought we were going to be stuck there for the rest of our lives? Ugh.”
I feel Bianca’s hands on my arms, smell the warm yeasty liquor on her breath. “Sophie, I need you. I can’t face any of this without you. Everything we used to talk about after curfew, all of the dreams we had, we can make all of it real. When the two of us are united, nothing can stop us. Please look at me. Sophie, please.”
I look, just in time to see tears streaking the metallic paint around Bianca’s eyes, illuminating the lines on her face. I want to put my arms around her, but I’m still deadlocked.
“Sophie has an amazing gift,” Mouth says. “Something that nearly killed me when I tried to do it. She can touch something that maybe nobody else has ever touched. And you’re forcing her to use it for destruction.”
“For liberation,” Bianca says through a wet curtain. “I want to save everyone in Xiosphant from the prison of endless repetition.”
“But Sophie doesn’t want—” Mouth starts to say.
“Everybody shut up, just shut up, shut up and let me talk. I’m sick of all your stupid voices. Just stop talking, stop talking, shut your faces.” The words come out of me in one breath, in a low, guttural rush.
Alyssa, Mouth, and Bianca all stare at me. The night wind rustles through the twine-wrapped bundles of rubbish.
“I never wanted to give up on you,” I say to Bianca in Xiosphanti. “All I ever wanted was to keep following you around and seeing each new thing through your eyes. But I can’t stand to watch you chasing power, or revenge, or whatever it is that you think you crave. You cannot force me to be your tool of conquest, as if I’m the last section of ablative shielding for one of those war machines. And if you insist on trying, then maybe you were right before, and our friendship belongs in the past.”
I pause to draw a toxic breath, the gears of my anger still scraping. And then, I realize. When I spoke Xiosphanti just now, I identified myself as a student, same as always—but I labeled Bianca an aristocrat, my social better. And I used the formal syntax, as if addressing a stranger.
Bianca realizes this the same time as I do, and her face collapses under its coating of reflective paint.
“I’ve screwed everything up,” Bianca says when she can talk again. “But I can still get it right.”