Seeing Bianca again, my heart gets pulled off-kilter. All of my old feelings rise up out of the past, as though her smile and her voice have the power to bend light, restructure time, make everything new.
“This is not what I thought I’d be spending my time doing here, in the Clockwork City,” Dash says in Argelan.
“What did you think you’d be doing, Dash?” Bianca laughs. “Just eating fancy cakes all the time? Doing elaborate dances, and scattering petals everywhere? I’m dying to know.”
He shakes his head. “I used to find your sarcasm so intoxicating. I actually thought about marrying you, did you know that? I pictured you and me marching through Founders’ Square, wearing the most resplendent silks and lace, and getting the High Magistrate to officiate the biggest wedding this town ever saw.”
“We executed the High Magistrate, remember? It was a whole occasion.”
This Palace probably is impossible to sneak into, just as Mouth said—unless you have your own tentacles, with cilia that grip harder than any mechanical clamps. I managed to keep them hidden under my cloak, even as they helped me scale the wall overlooking the quiet rear plaza, adjacent to the market stalls. I could sense the Palace guards moving underneath me, hear their chatter. Any moment, they were going to look up and see me, and I would die. I had to stop and melt into the wall a few times until I felt calm again. But I had no choice. I needed to see her. Now I’m clinging to the ledge outside her window.
“I’m not the marrying type,” Bianca is saying to Dash. “But we did have fun, didn’t we? We make a good team, and we’re just getting started.”
Dash comes over to the window to look out over the city, and I scoot out of the way just in time. “This town always sounded so adorable when that fussy old tutor was teaching me Xiosphanti. All the elaborate phrasings, and the way every moment in time seemed to have its own special name. But the real Xiosphant turned out to be just a sad gray husk.”
I don’t need to see Bianca’s face to know she bristles at that. “You’ll learn to love this town the way I do. And maybe then you’ll understand how to get what you want without shouting and hitting people.”
“Sure. Maybe.” Dash turns away and heads for the door to Bianca’s gilt-edged chamber. “But for now, I have to go browbeat more tradespeople. I wish we could just throw another party.”
“We’ll party when we have a reason to celebrate.”
“That’s a barbaric notion. Parties are only fun if they’re unreasonable. See you later.”
They kiss for several endless heartbeats, and then Dash walks out, shutting the door behind him.
I only came here to learn more information, as Mouth suggested, and now I’ve learned quite a bit. So I should leave, quietly as I came, slip away and plan my next move. But she’s so close to me, and I never thought I’d get another chance to speak to her again, and her flowery scent reaches me from all the way across the room. Maybe now that I can communicate in a whole new way, everything can be different between us.
I’m next to Bianca before she even knows I’m there.
* * *
Bianca looks up and lets out a gasp. Her face turns to clay and she coughs, spits, and starts to cry. The liqueur glass falls and lands intact. She gasps for breath, with a hyperactive twist to her mouth and red borders around her eyes. Bianca and I are both stiff, made of brittle wire, until she reaches out and pulls me into a hug. I pull her head onto my shoulder, careful to keep my tendrils away, and she weeps on my neck.
Neither of us talks for a long time, and I’m flooded with an emotion that I can’t even name. I told myself I was finished with Bianca, but this feeling clamps onto me with sharp teeth, sunk deep.
Then I break the silence, for once. “I thought you were dead. I thought you died out there in the night, or else when you tried to invade here. But you won. You won. I can’t even imagine.”
“We were so lucky,” she says between sobs. “I can’t believe you’re alive too. I didn’t want that to be our last conversation. Here you are, back from the dead one more time, but this time I have even more things that I never got to say. I couldn’t believe you just walked away and left us there, lost in the middle of the ice fields.”
“I asked you to come with me.”
Bianca doesn’t seem to hear me. “You promised to trust me and stick with me, forever. And then you left me to die in the wilderness. But I didn’t die. We made it home. We won.”
I mourned Bianca so hard in the midnight city, I forgot how alive she really was. Now I step back and look at her. The multilayered hairstyle, jewelry, and shimmering turquoise powder around her eyelids can’t distract from the radiance of her eyes. She could conquer anything.
“We came over the side of the Old Mountain, and here was Xiosphant, just wide open.” She pours herself another green drink. “We only had one transport left, remember, and just two dozen soldiers. But this city never saw us coming. I knew they would never expect anyone to invade from the night, and those blockheads assumed that people would only attack the city when their shutters were open, because they’d gotten so used to thinking of their sleep cycle as natural. The Curfew Patrols were pathetic. By the time everyone opened their shutters, we were inside the Palace, and we had captured the prince. We killed the vice regent, and all the Privy Council, everybody, and then we were in charge.”
She uses the most informal syntax, as if we were cousins by marriage, not vice regent and outlaw. And something inside me, underneath my spread of tendrils, opens up at the sound of Bianca’s voice: like clear water flowing down the side of one of those marble fountains, in just the right amount of partial sunlight, back in Argelo. I almost don’t care that she’s telling me about murdering so many people.
This is the tallest room I’ve ever been in, with walls a good four or five meters high, and a vibrant painting of the Xiosphanti crest, Gelet and tigers embracing, on the ceiling.
Her drink scathes her throat, and she coughs, and then smiles at me, so I feel myself flush. “Back at the Gymnasium, I always wished I could be more like you. You used to talk about how you had clawed your way out of the dark side of town, and meanwhile I was just swept along by other people’s expectations. You were just so real, Sophie, as if you couldn’t help being yourself. Maybe this whole time, I’ve been trying to find the person that I can’t help being.”
The burnt-orange aroma of her liqueur overcomes my new senses, and I’m overaware of a hum in the room, something grinding against itself. I can’t get rid of the dumb fantasy that I’ve somehow scored one more chance with Bianca, that I can still fix things between us.
“But so, you won,” I say. “And you were in charge. Right? And you had all these reforms, I remember you talked about them so often, all these reforms you wanted to make.”
She sighs and covers her face with one hand. “We tried. We really did. But you can’t just change one part of the system without upsetting the rest of it. The farmwheels turn on a strict schedule that synchronizes perfectly with the shutters going up and down, and the water pumps are optimized for the farmwheels, but also for everybody washing at certain times. The sewage is optimized for peak times as well. And so on. You start tinkering, and the whole city falls apart, and then everybody starves.”
I don’t know what to say. Everything she’s saying about the system, we were taught in school, until we all knew it by heart. But she’s acting as if she just discovered it for the first time.
“Oh, it’s one thing to read about it.” She laughs and rolls her eyes at my expression. “But I didn’t really get it until I tried to make adjustments. Plus meanwhile, I have just a small number of Argelan fighters left who are loyal to Dash and me. Mostly, I have to rely on the Palace guards, and they’re only behind me so long as I have the prince in a safe place. I’ve been hand-picking my own people, smart Xiosphanti, to take key jobs. But I still have to rely on the old bureaucrats and administrators to implement my decisions, and they fight me every step of the way.”
When we first became friends, and Bianca used to pull the forgotten history books out of the back of the library at the Gymnasium, this act of revealing a different past seemed to me a magical power. But now I keep wondering if there were books she chose to leave on the shelf, which talked about all the crimes of saviors, like the Hydroponic Garden Massacre. Maybe if she had read deeper, things would be different now.