Mouth understood what Sophie meant by “show,” and she began to protest, to protect her face and neck with upthrust elbows.
But Sophie shushed Mouth and made soothing noises, and touched her rain-scarred neck with one palm. Sophie’s face caught the one shaft of light coming into the chamber from some distant furnace, and her round features looked more composed than Mouth had ever seen. Maybe they’d changed places at some point: Mouth was the scared kid now. Sophie kissed between Mouth’s eyes, which gave out more of their seemingly endless supply of tears.
“Don’t worry,” Sophie said. “I can take you down gently.”
Mouth nodded at last. “Okay. Do it.” Sophie’s face jostled, and Mouth realized that this was her own body shaking. She made herself go slack.
Sophie leaned closer, until her chest was touching Mouth’s, and then her wriggling little tongues snaked out. Mouth stiffened again at the last moment, but she felt the light touch of a few dozen surfaces, almost like moistened fingers, making contact with less pressure than the Gelet had used. Sophie shushed Mouth again. Her face was so close that she had three eyes, and you could feel her breathing almost like it was your own.
When Mouth closed her eyes, she could see something taking shape, an image or something, but it felt like an afterimage, a half impression. The picture kept pulsing in and out, and Mouth found herself concentrating, straining to see it more clearly.
“There you go,” Sophie said. “Just let it take you.”
Mouth leaned back in the hammock to let Sophie put more weight onto her. She felt Sophie’s knees around her waist, Sophie’s body resting against hers, and Sophie’s face on her face. Then she went into Sophie’s vision, and all these sensations vanished.
Sophie wasn’t showing Mouth a memory, the way Mouth had expected. She had braced herself for another glimpse into the terrible features of history or, worse, some slice of their shared past from Sophie’s perspective. Instead, they were flying, Sophie and Mouth, floating above the clouds that had been the upper limit of the world for Mouth’s entire life. Mouth looked at Sophie, who was gliding with a placid focus in her eyes, like she did this every day. Sophie gazed upward, and Mouth followed her line of sight to see the blackness of the sky overhead, dotted with tiny lights. A rounded mirror splashed them with reflected light, and Mouth realized this was the moon.
How are we doing this? Mouth tried to ask Sophie, but there was no air up here.
Sophie’s voice came, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t a memory, not really. Some of it is. The Gelet have memories of being in flying machines that they’ve shared with me. But this is also just my imagination, mixing with the real sensations. Think of it as a fantasy.”
Mouth could see the sweep of the ground, passing underneath, in between the thick ropes of clouds. The ground was pitch dark, because they were over the night, and the clouds wouldn’t let even a drop of moonlight through. Mouth wasn’t sure how they could see down there, but this made dream sense rather than regular sense. They passed over the curve of the world, and Mouth saw a burning light on the horizon. She tried to turn and fly in the opposite direction, because the sunlight would shrivel her to cinders, but Sophie kept driving forward. “Nothing can hurt us,” she whispered.
In the dream, Sophie gave Mouth a tiny smile, like they were two fliers moving independent of each other, and then they came into more light than Mouth had ever seen. Even through the clouds, she could see the arid ground sizzling, the very dirt being scoured by hot winds. How Sophie had gotten this image, Mouth couldn’t guess, since Gelet would never be able to withstand full daylight, in a flying machine or otherwise. Then Mouth looked down and saw crystal formations, gleaming and pulsing: another city.
Sophie pointed upward, and at last Mouth knew where she had gotten these images of the day, seen from above. A spaceship passed right over their heads: a silver shape, like a man crouching on his elbows and knees, with the sun painting its ancient skin a million shades of red and blue, rippling into each other. The Mothership had never stopped waiting, never lost faith in the people crawling in the dirt below.
They flew through clouds, ducked around tiny windstorms, and wove in and out of the day. Sophie beckoned Mouth with one finger, and they flew higher and higher, up into the blackness, past the edge of the atmosphere. They hovered far above even the Mothership, near the great yellow-orange crags of the moon. And they looked at January, the bright half and the dark half, not motionless at all but always turning. The day wasn’t just red fire, but had veins of blue and green, like jewels against a bright cloak. The night had a texture like velvet, with a dark purple sheen to it. Mouth stood in space, looking down at the world, and she was flooded with an emotion she couldn’t even identify. She almost couldn’t stand how beautiful January was from up here, and how wonderfully wrong it felt, to see so much daylight with what seemed to be her own eyes.
They drifted down, not even seeming to get any closer to the clouds at first, then picked up speed. Mouth almost screamed as she fell into the cloud layer, but it became a laugh instead. The clouds yawned and swallowed them, and then they descended in the night, racing over frozen peaks and canyons wider than anything on the road. At last they found the city in the middle of the night, and descended through an airshaft. Mouth saw her own body, inside a tiny chamber, with Sophie sprawled on top of her, and then she fell inside her own head and her eyes opened.
Mouth realized her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she and Sophie were stuck to each other. She didn’t want to peel away, because she felt her heart drumming, her blood so rich it dazzled her eyes, her skin wide awake. Sophie had given her an incredible gift, and she didn’t know what to do with it. She pulled her arms out from between Sophie’s knees, and hugged Sophie as tight as she could.
“I thought you hated me,” Mouth whispered in Sophie’s ear.
“I did, for a long time.” Sophie was breathing in sharp bursts. “But you’re my jinx. I guess I have to find a way to live with you.”
“I’m…” Mouth felt overcome for a moment, with stammering tears. “I’m sorry about Bianca. I’m sorry for all of it. I keep wishing I had died with the rest of the Citizens. I wish we hadn’t destroyed this delicate miracle that the Gelet had created. We should have paid attention.”
“Bianca made her own choices.” Sophie raised herself up, so she was kneeling across Mouth’s waist and lap. “The rest of it, I don’t know. But Bianca, she deserves to take the blame for her mistakes. I wanted to put all of it on you so I could keep her pure in my mind, but that’s not fair to her, either. I still blame you for the parts that were yours, but…”
Mouth sat, her hands just touching Sophie’s. “I thought if I could make up for what I did with Bianca and the others … I thought I could be a good person. But now, I feel like … I don’t know. I feel like I should do something to make sure what happened to the Citizens never happens again.”
Sophie twitched with fear, like Mouth could be about to suggest doing something drastic: revenge or something. And maybe Mouth should hate these creatures for killing her people, who had never intended any harm. But she couldn’t get the image of the marching icecap, full of burning rain, out of her head.
Mouth shook her head. “I mean, people need to understand. Maybe more people need to become like you.”
“They already told me that they want me to go back, to find other humans who could become hybrids,” Sophie said. “I don’t want to. I want to live here forever. You don’t even know how great it is, being able to share everything.”
Mouth would never forgive the Gelet for what they had done, but she could understand it. You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.
* * *
Sophie led Mouth on tours of the city, which had innumerable wonders when you perceived it through Sophie’s senses. Mouth learned not to cringe, at least not too much, when Gelet came near. Some of their food tasted decent when you got used to the slurry texture and rough, chewy edges.
Sophie still wanted to convince Mouth to give in, to let go of humanity and learn to perceive all the beauty, the dream geography, of this city. To become like her. But Mouth would never have simple feelings about the Gelet, and there would always be some hate in the mix. Plus, her mind couldn’t open itself up the way Sophie’s did. If Mouth tried to live with those new senses, plus all of the vivid access to other people’s memories and ideas, her head would explode. “Even if I didn’t have all this toxic emotion, I wouldn’t have the right kind of brain,” Mouth kept trying to explain.