Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

“I don’t know,” Mouth said. “He was dead a moment later. Because he was looking up at the sky in the middle of the Sea of Murder, instead of paying attention.”

Bianca laughed, which made Mouth like her again.

Mouth searched for ages before she found their boat, and then they had to clean a swan’s nest out of the intakes while Mouth steered the sled gingerly onto the deck. But at last they chuffed across the Sea of Murder. Alyssa steered them along treacherous currents, between two deadly extremes.

Mouth helped Yulya, Kendrick, and Reynold to hoist Omar’s remains and heave them overboard, making a pitifully tiny splash in the cold water. “We’ll drink to his memory in Argelo,” said Kendrick, who was sort of in charge now. “For now, we all stay watchful.”

They were closer to the night than the day, so they could just make out the ice shelf where the sea froze. But if you squinted at the horizon to your right, you could see where the water hit daylight and boiled, creating a wall of steam so high you couldn’t see the top.

I can’t stop throwing up. This boat is just a crumbling wooden platform built on top of a rusted metal frame, with an ancient polymer sac on its underside, which battery-operated pumps inflate, making a stuttering gasp that sounds more and more feeble. We secured the sled on the deck via a dozen attachment points, and there’s a silty blue platform for the “crew” to stand on, including a panel with the knobs that Alyssa uses to operate the rudder. The deck tilts in one direction and then the other, until I’m sure a giant squid has us in its grip. Seawater sprays up and burns all the places where the horseflies tore me open, and I can’t keep my damn stomach inside. I lean over the unfirm guardrail and spray into the water, with only Yulya’s grip keeping me from tumbling over the side.

I’m going to die, long before we can cross this ocean. I’ve never been so sick in my life, and the laughter of the Resourceful Couriers doesn’t make things any better.

“Ice! Watch out! Ice!” Reynold shouts. Total darkness, almost dead ahead, swallows up the water and the sky. Frozen chunks drift past, bobbing with a rhythm that makes me sick once more.

“I’m trying! I’m trying!” Alyssa wrenches at the controls. “Watching Omar steer this boat is one thing, but steering it myself is—ugh—something else. Grab ahold.”

Just as Alyssa says that, we lurch so hard I fall on top of Yulya, and Bianca slides across the deck so fast she almost falls overboard before I grab her. A scraping sound, loud enough to feel in your teeth, fills the boat as we rub against a blade of ice. Some of the hull plating snags on the ice for a moment, then we’re free. I touch my bracelet and think of Rose.

“Keep it steady,” someone shouts.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Alyssa growls.

No more ice, and the sky lightens enough to see ahead. The other horizon glows once again, sending flashes along the water that hurt my eyes. Jets of bright vapor rise up from where the ocean is always boiling.

Bianca and I both try to scan the horizon for danger, but everything looks equally terrifying. My stomach has subsided and I have a moment of awe at the impetuousness of this ocean, which tosses waves in our path and tries to shake us off. I can’t help thinking of the Sea of Murder as a beautiful giant beast that needs nobody and obeys nothing.

Bianca still isn’t talking to me, and I’m trying not to look at her. But she must have seen the starvation in my eyes, because she comes and stands beside me against the rail as the sea goes calm for once.

“I don’t know how you expect me to deal with you being alive,” she mutters. The pale mist turns her spectral. “After I threw away everything to avenge your death. You’ve been living at some gracious coffeehouse, and meanwhile I’ve just been falling apart, piece by piece.”

The deck plummets without warning, and we both cling to the railing.

I breathe spray and blink salt out of my eyes, and Bianca is blurrier than ever. My longing feels so intense it’s more like raw panic. This could be our last moment alive, and I feel nauseous, and I don’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wanted to spare you, I didn’t want to hurt you.” I have to talk much too loud just to be heard over this wind. “I thought, I don’t know, I thought you deserved to be free, and live your life, and you would have so many other people who cared about you, and you would just forget about me eventually.”

The ocean erupts with gray foam. I think I glimpse dark shapes far beneath the surface, but they’re gone before I can be sure.

The wind surges, but over the boat’s terrible creaking I hear Bianca’s voice. “How could you think I would just move on and find new friends, after what they did to you? How could you even think that? When they took you, they tore a hole in my—”

A wave strikes almost hard enough to flip the boat over and sprays both of us with freezing water. Drenched and gripping the railing with raised knuckles, Bianca still stares at me, tears mixing with the seawater on her face. Every inch of me is soaked, and I’m sure the next wave will snatch me into the depths.

The wind subsides again, by some mercy. For a moment, I have a clear view of the shadowed icebergs on one side, the geysers on the other, and the moon and stars above.

“You’re the most alive person I ever met,” I say, eyes burning, chest closing up. “I was sure you would find a way to keep going. I knew you were going to amaze everybody, with or without me.”

Everything else on the ship holds steady for a moment, but Bianca still clutches the rail and sways with the echoes of turbulence. “Maybe if you’d trusted me, I wouldn’t have been so stupid. But I trusted the wrong person.” She glances at Mouth, who’s too far away to hear us. “And now a lot of good people are dead, and my heart is just this rotten pile. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me sooner? Why couldn’t you come back to me—”

She breaks into sobs and lets go of the railing to hug herself as her shoulders rise and fall. The Resourceful Couriers are busy watching the ocean, so nobody sees me put my arm around Bianca. She stares at me, like she still can’t look at me without reliving my execution and everything that followed.

Then Bianca puts her face on my neck and sobs so hard it feels like she’ll shake herself to pieces. My grip is strong enough to hold her up, and to encompass her crying jag.

“Storm!” Kendrick shouts. “Storm coming!”

I hear the typhoon, without seeing. The roaring starts low and hoarse, then gets louder and shriller. The shrieking feels as though it’s inside my own head.

The Resourceful Couriers rush to cover the sled and the precious cargo as much as possible with their last tarpaulins. Everyone secures themselves to the deck with ropes and chains, and Bianca and I imitate them. I try to wrap my bracelet with some loose twine, though I don’t know if it’s prone to water damage. Alyssa stays put, trying to keep the ship on course.

Bianca has tied a thick rope around her waist, but the rope snaps and she careens down the wet planks, toward the rail. Her mouth is open, but I can’t hear her.

Part of me gets lost in the memory of tumbling down the Old Mother, but then the part that stays hyperfocused in a crisis takes over. I grab her just in time, and hold on to her with all my strength. I still have a chain slung around my belt, lashed to one of the deck’s attachment points.

“I am not letting you fall,” I say, though Bianca probably can’t hear. Her face is pale, her eyes wide and nostrils flared. “I am never letting go, ever again,” I say louder, in her ear, over the screaming wind.