Sophie disengaged herself from the group and walked toward Mouth, who almost didn’t recognize her. She walked taller, with her head raised, and she had a blissful smile on her face, even amid all the gloom. Mouth was so distracted by her new posture and attitude she almost didn’t notice the tentacles rising up from Sophie’s back, or the wormy flesh wriggling on her chest, below the collarbone.
Then, once Mouth saw those things, she couldn’t see anything else. She felt sick to her stomach.
“There you are,” Sophie said, then shook her head. “It feels strange to speak aloud now.” She guided Mouth until they were sitting on a kind of bench that was lit by a greenish glow from some living flesh hanging over their heads.
“So you … wow. So you did it. You went ahead and became … this,” Mouth said. “They never even thought of making a law against what you’ve done, but you’re still the greatest outlaw in history.”
“Coming from you, that’s a compliment. Right?”
Mouth didn’t know what to say. She sat on her hands and stammered, without making any syllables. She knew what would happen now: Sophie would want to slime her so she could communicate without words. Maybe she’d force Mouth to experience her memories of witnessing all of Mouth’s selfish behavior, when they’d first met and Mouth had been tricking Bianca, and this would be the final strike to Mouth’s heart.
But Sophie didn’t come any closer. “You’ll get used to it,” she said in a near-inaudible voice that sounded like the old Sophie again.
“I’m sure I will,” Mouth said.
Mouth could hear the husky sound of Sophie’s new appendages rubbing together in distress.
“You know, you don’t have to be alone,” Sophie said after they had sat for a while. “This pain you’re holding inside yourself, all the memories of your dead nomads. You could share it with everyone here, if you became like me. You just form the memory in your head, and anyone you touched could remember it too, and share it. You don’t know how light it feels.”
“I can’t do what you’ve done,” Mouth said. “I really can’t. I used to be brave, but…” Even thinking about the deaths of the Citizens, too, brought a desolation, like the whole of the road was wound around the inside of her frame. Mouth didn’t want to share that anguish, to make it common property. She didn’t want consolation, or a sponge to soak up her grief.
But then, on some weird light-starved impulse, Mouth said: “But I can tell you about it, and you can share the memory of me telling you with your friends, if you want.”
Sophie nodded.
Mouth talked until she tasted salt and bile. She told Sophie how she’d heard the voices in the distance, and then seen these blue creatures filling all the spaces around and between the Citizens. The chopping and whirring of a million pairs of wings, the whole encampment turned to a blue haze. The Priors, the helpers, the old people, the children, all singing with pain, until they went silent. Mouth running on her awkward child legs, fresh from a growth spurt, toward an orchard of skeletons with blue petals clinging. And then the shiny wings were gone, leaving just bones in the dirt. Mouth had painstakingly collected every one of those bones, even the smallest, even the ones that crumbled in her hand, and piled them in one spot. Then she’d fumbled with a tinderbox, trying to turn all the tiny wheels and open the valves, but only succeeded in burning her own fingers. At last she got a spark but the bones wouldn’t catch until she’d baled dead grass from a kilometer away and spread it, and then the flame near took her face off.
Mouth had almost lost the power of speech by the time she got to the part where she’d walked away from the still-burning pyre and gotten lost, going in circles, even though the night was right there and the day on the other side, and you could see the plume of smoke. Her eyes stung, her heart beat louder and louder.
She had no strength left when she finished telling the story, and this was the most she had ever told anyone about what had happened, even Barney.
“I am going to be walking away from that fire for the rest of my life,” she said, and this was something she had never admitted to herself before. “My hair could turn to white silk, my skin could turn to dry leaves, and I would still be walking with my back to the flames that consumed what was left of my people. I’m not ever going to be Argelan, or Xiosphanti, or Gelet, or any other nationality.”
Mouth risked looking at Sophie. The girl’s human eyes had a layer of moisture in them and around them, and her face was trembling. The thicket of fingers coming out of her upper rib cage wriggled, but the human face showed sadness, kindness, helplessness. Sophie rose, and without saying a word she went to share Mouth’s testimonial with the Gelet.
* * *
Mouth sat alone, in a split-wall chamber that seemed dimmer than ever. She stared past the opening in the wall, into a superstructure of swaying material that looked like coral or limestone. The city’s motors sounded like submerged avalanches.
Gelet came to fetch Mouth, three of them with their tentacles spread in a gesture that looked like sheltering, or guarding. Mouth had almost gotten used to not seeing, except for when a shape appeared nearby and startled her. They seemed to handle her with more care this time, after getting her story from Sophie, and the gentle nudges and enveloping tentacles only made Mouth angrier, because she was not some injured child. She pushed the Gelet off her, and made her own way.
She was so intent on brushing off her escort she marched right into a Gelet’s waiting tendrils.
As soon as the slippery digits made contact, Mouth was somewhere else. She had known this was coming, had tried to prepare so she wouldn’t lose her mind again. No fear, just stillness. But this Gelet vision was even more vivid than before—but also easier to understand, instead of the jumble of images they had dumped on her last time.
Mouth stood on the edge of the night, observing the road with inhuman senses. A mob of people walked from place to place, carrying everything on their backs or in a few carriages, straying into places that humans had never invaded before.
The Citizens became bolder as their numbers grew, and they even started going into Mount Abacus, the great rocky fist on the other side of the world from Xiosphant and Argelo. From the Gelet’s vantage point, Mouth watched the Citizens climbing into the mountain that straddled the road, exploring every crack until they found this miraculous substance: a dry, chalky bloom that glowed in the dark and crumbled as they pulled it out of the caves. Mouth remembered the acrid smell of that stuff, the way the Citizens would smear it on their faces for some of their rituals, how they would gather every last bit, because it had a million uses. The Citizens had called that substance nightfire, because of the way it glowed in the dark.
Gelet had spent lifetimes cultivating this bloom. Mouth felt their terror and shock as it was stripped away, as the root system deep inside the vents began to wither and collapse. These plants laced throughout the world, collecting heat energy on the day side and redirecting it to the night, exhaling gases that calmed the skies. Over several visits, the Citizens ripped out every piece of nightfire they could find, until the sky changed. The clouds whirled until they ripped at the ice sheets and created brand-new mountains, as big as Mount Abacus, that moved through the night with the force of a million harpoon guns firing over and over.
A walking mountain of ice, with caustic liquid falling inside it—just like the downpour that had left burn scars on Mouth’s scalp and hands—came upon a Gelet nest full of untold thousands of newborns. The protective layers of rock and coral collapsed, turning to sharp fragments, and then the rain burned everything that had been exposed to the air. These fresh infants screamed as they suffocated and starved, no way to save them.
As they struggled to save their young, the Gelet saw the Citizens going back to harvest another batch of the nightfire.
Mouth knew what was coming next, and she tried to pull away from these tendrils. But the Gelet held her fast. The blue swarm, a last resort, something the Gelet had created long ago to deal with a species of pests coming in from the road. She felt their remorse as the blue knives took wing from a hatchery deep under the ice and flew to the nearest food source in the warm twilight.
Mouth was screaming and pushing the Gelet with her hands and feet. She begged for release. She bit her own tongue and kept barking. She wailed and thrashed. The emptiness inside her was worse than ten thousand bones burnt to ash. When they let go, she fell on her hands and face, watering the dirt and clawing at her own scars.
She threw up on the floor and her own knees, the remains of some meal supplements the Gelet had rescued from a human transport coming in ugly pieces. The puke in her mouth only reminded her of the noxious rainfall that had flooded the Gelet’s nest and destroyed their children.