The Sea of Murder vanished behind them, and then they had nothing but the road. Deathly shroud on one horizon, white furnace on the other. Sky so wide it pulverized you to look up. No other features but the cracks and marbling in the stone underfoot. The rhythm of their footfalls, chump chump chump, became a piece of music that never stopped, accompanied by the sled’s churning wheels. A couple times, a bison charged in from the night and tried to seize a person in its powerful maw, with more teeth than you could count, and razor-sharp threads crisscrossing between them. Once, a storm fell from a great height and set upon them, knives of rocky ice clutched in a million fists. They had to build their shelter though they could barely stand, and hug each other as they shielded the sled with their trembling bodies. At last, though, when they seemed to have walked a dozen lifetimes, they saw a glow on the horizon: the lights of Xiosphant. The lights grew prouder and then vanished, because the city was having its curfew. When the lights reappeared, they looked much closer.
Everyone cheered at the thought of unloading their cargo, unlacing muck-stiffened boots, finding a lukewarm bath, eating hot food. Except for Mouth, who felt a rising dread at the thought of being trapped inside a city again.
The other members of the Resourceful Couriers were city people who traveled for a living. Mouth was a born traveler, who tolerated cities for brief periods.
In a city, you could only walk in circles. Trouble knew where to find you. People lived with more things than they could carry, and they pretended that built structures were geographical features. Mouth couldn’t travel alone, and the Resourceful Couriers were the closest you could find to a gang of nomads in this age, but the long drags between trips were torture. Especially in Xiosphant, where the residents were obsessed with making sure you slept at the right time, and they didn’t even know how to make decent coffee.
Maybe Mouth would get lucky and the whole city would fall into a chasm before they reached it.
The city wall loomed in the distance: granite blocks, topped with tungsten spikes, which they’d raised after one of their stupid wars, generations ago. And soon the noises rang from inside that wall, and Mouth couldn’t tell factories and mining gear from shouts and musical instruments. Cities teemed with synesthesia. So many sounds and smells, a din of imagery, until your senses just gave up.
Omar gave the signal when they were almost under the wall, at the designated spot. Nothing happened. The Resourceful Couriers tried to get the sled as close to the cover of the wall as they could as its axles protested, and they all huddled there in the pale half light. The damn wall vibrated. They had started out with eight people, including three new recruits, but Jackie had taken one look at the Sea of Murder and run back to the relative safety of Argelo. Then Franz had acted like a fool on the boat, and had toppled and drowned. Even Mouth wanted to raise a glass to poor Franz, and to all their absent friends and family.
Everyone around Mouth started to panic they would be stranded at the foot of an ugly gray-brown wall forever. Omar did the signal again, and then again a moment later.
A passage opened a dozen meters away, a dark tunnel going under the base of the wall, propped up with rotten vines. Justin, their contact, told them to hurry inside because it was late. As if they hadn’t been waiting out here for an age and a half.
Justin had three people with him, and they all got hands on the sled, which kept getting caught on the tunnel’s grooves. Something about the way Justin’s helpers positioned themselves, once everyone was grunting and the sled motor started overheating, made Mouth suspicious. So she hung back. Halfway into the tunnel, Justin whipped out a gun, an ancient slow-repeater, and said he was taking the cargo. All of the Resourceful Couriers had their hands out—except for Mouth, who emerged from behind and raised Justin’s head into the support beam so hard it half collapsed the tunnel. After that, just a big knife fight in the dark.
You don’t get to be a Resourceful Courier without having blades stashed in every contour of your body.
The Resourceful Couriers eased the sled into a junkyard right before the tunnel collapsed behind them, on top of Justin and his crew. This was shit. They needed to find a new contact—because dried apricots, fancy fabrics, and swamp vodka don’t sell themselves, and who could understand the stupid money here. Plus when time came to leave town, they would need a new tunnel. All in all, a shit end to a shit journey. Nothing for it but to get ass-faced.
* * *
One thing Xiosphant did have plenty of was bars. Something about all that repression. They found a dive called the Low Road and traded a case of the swamp vodka for food, drink, and permission to crash in the back room after curfew. Soon everyone had gotten good and wasted.
Mouth had developed a persona that camouflaged the social awkwardness and the trapped-inside-walls feeling: loud, boastful, full of jokes. Sometimes even Mouth was fooled, after enough booze.
But Xiosphanti was a clumsy language to joke in—all those consonants, glottal stops, verb tenses, fancy pronouns. Mouth mangled every other sentence, even though people seemed entertained by the story about the bar brawl (adjacent to a hot oil cauldron) against a man twice Mouth’s size. At the same time, in the quiet part of Mouth’s brain, the memory kept replaying: Justin’s head giving way against the support beam, as Mouth’s muscles levered upward. Had Justin gotten a shot off? Sometimes Mouth thought yes, sometimes no. The only constant was the feeling of a man’s head losing solidity, the body tensing and then slackening, and a scent between urine and motor oil. The usual post-murder hangover nauseated Mouth, but meanwhile she was also full of furious loathing at the sort of person who would try to rob hardworking smugglers who had hauled garbage halfway around the world, crossing the goddamn Sea of Murder even. If Justin had appeared at the Low Road, somehow alive and unscathed, Mouth might have torn him apart. She couldn’t decide if the murder had left her queasy with guilt or just unsatisfied.
Both, maybe.
“Dude is dangling headfirst over the boiling hot oil, by his throat.” Mouth’s story had reached its crowd-pleasing climax all on its own. “And he looks up at me and says, ‘Shit, is that peanut oil? I’m allergic.’” Everybody howled with laughter and a couple people bought Mouth more gin-and-milk, along with some of the swamp vodka that the Resourceful Couriers had bartered in the first place.
The Low Road emptied out as the chimes signaled the Span of Reflection, the last bell before curfew. Mouth sat next to Alyssa, staring at the street full of suckers trying to outrun a clock. Alyssa was Mouth’s road buddy, meaning they spent every moment together, slept together, watched each other’s backs, and each knew what the other was thinking. By rights, they ought to be sick of each other.
“Are you excited to be back in Xiosphant?” Alyssa laughed at Mouth’s grimace. “I bet you’re overjoyed to be speaking a language that’s so full of qualifiers you can hardly get to the point,” she said in flawless Xiosphanti, the polite form. Her sentence specified what time it was, the tense implied (present conditional), and the genders and social statuses of both herself and Mouth. None of it sat right with Mouth, who never liked to be categorized.
Mouth snorted. “I don’t care. I won’t stay here long enough to let it bother me.”
“You’re an optimist,” Alyssa said in Argelan. “Remember how you caved in our tunnel with a man’s skull? And we lost our main contact? Might be a while before we get another gig. And to be honest…”
She didn’t finish that sentence. She almost didn’t have to. Here, under a roof for the first time in forever, she had all sorts of shadows and creases on her face that hadn’t been there before. Alyssa had curly dark hair, a strong jawline, and big firm hands that had clutched Mouth comfortingly whenever they had shared a sleeping nook. Alyssa had always seemed inexhaustibly young and capable of surprise—except now, she looked older.
“You want to quit.” Mouth shouldn’t have cared. The lineup of the Resourceful Couriers had always changed, since forever, except for Mouth and Omar. You couldn’t get attached.
“Not so much that I want to quit, more that I don’t know if I can go on.”
Mouth laughed. “If you were going to quit, you’d have been better off staying in Argelo. Your hometown. At least they know how to have fun there.”