Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The boat shakes almost onto one side, and she almost slips away, but I tighten my hold.

“I’m here,” I say. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’m going to keep holding on for as long as I have arms. You’re safe in my love.”

I keep saying these things as the winds wrench the ship one way, and then the other. A million jets of water knock us flat on the deck and try to wash us off the ship altogether.

“I will never again let you out of my sight,” I say as the front of the skiff draws upward, like a foot kicking a ball. “I’ll guard you while you sleep.” The hull makes a cracking sound and the motors sputter. “I’ve got you. You’re safe in my love.”

The storm falls away, and we can hear and see again. The sea and sky shimmer—blues and greens and reds that leave afterimages even when I close my eyes—because we’ve drifted too close to the day. The wall of steam soars ahead of us: taller than mountains, wider than cities. I can’t look at the white churn without squinting, and my face feels burnt. Alyssa isn’t sure she can steer, with all this damage to the undercarriage, but she fights with the controls until we turn away from the cauldron. The engine sputters. I’m startled to be alive. I was sure that “love” would be the final word I ever spoke.

I don’t know if Bianca heard anything I said, and I’m scared to look at her face. I hear her disentangle herself from the railing while I keep my eyes on the simmering ocean and the dark clouds congregating over the waves in the distance. Bianca moves closer, and then her hand reaches out and touches mine. I turn to face her.

The pure white light of day, filtered through steam, bathes Bianca’s face. Her eyes are all pupil, opaque with tears, and her hair looks electric. She smiles at me, still weeping softly, and takes several gusts of warm sea air in through her mouth. Her hand remains on top of mine as we veer back into the middle of the ocean and the air turns damp and chilly once more.

The pirates sounded their horn just as the skiff got back on course, tearing through the air like a bison’s attack cry. Fucking pirates. They approached in three tiny fishing boats, with barbed hooks made of rusted iron attached to the gunk-smeared prows. Seven or eight scrawny people to a boat, some of them holding rifles or harpoon guns. Their floating jack-knives could outmaneuver the skiff even without storm damage, and they moved in a pincer formation that they must have practiced.

“We’re gonna be surrounded,” Reynold said. “Are you guys seeing this?”

“We see it,” Kendrick grunted.

“Those attachments on the front are sharp enough to rip a giant chunk out of our hull,” Alyssa said. “If they get us with one of those, we’ve got a long swim ahead.”

Mouth raised her own rifle and tried taking a shot at the main ship, the one in the center, but her aim was for shit with these unruly waves. She couldn’t stop remembering how Alyssa had accused her of caring more about ghosts than the people around her. There had to be some way Mouth could prove that she had everyone’s back, just like always.

These pirates were just stupid fishing people who’d overfished their shore, so they’d turned to other ways of surviving. The Couriers’ skiff must have been the first vessel to cross their path in ages, and Mouth pictured them rushing to bolt these corroded abominations onto their sturdiest trawlers.

“So what do we do? Maybe if we surrender they’ll just take a cut of our cargo and let us go,” Reynold said.

Alyssa shook her head. “They’ll take everything. Ships don’t come along often enough to make it worth just collecting a tariff.” She looked at the three boats, bobbing in and out of view, and seemed to reach a decision. “Everybody hold your junk, and if you need to scream, do it in your own head.”

Alyssa gave a little smile, like someone hatching a prank, and wrenched the controls so the skiff swerved toward the ice. The ship listed so far it seemed about to flip over, and the railing seemed about to buckle under Mouth’s weight. Then they flattened out again and sailed into near darkness, with just a tiny glow to orient them.

A dense mist rose from the freezing water and turned everyone into an outline, like a reflection in a plate-glass window. You couldn’t see the ice crags in the skiff’s feeble lights until they were dead ahead. Alyssa kept jerking the rudder to and fro, and the boat quaked.

The sound of a thousand men grinding their teeth came from beneath. “We’re going to need a new hull,” said Yulya.

“The hull will make it,” Kendrick said. “Remember how carefully Omar maintained that undercarriage? We can handle this.”

“If we can just keep it level, we can slip past them,” Alyssa muttered.

The claws of ice kept scraping against the skiff’s hull, and someone on deck was moaning. These two sounds, together, became much more unnerving than either on its own. Mouth caught sight of Sophie clutching at something on her wrist, like a talisman.

A shape loomed in front of the skiff, and Mouth shouted before she even recognized one of the tricked-out fishing vessels. Besides the lance bolted onto the front, the other major modification they’d made to the ship was a skull, painted in phosphorescent green, on its hull, with unevenly shaped eye sockets. Seven people stood on the other ship’s deck, two of them holding range weapons, and they looked just as startled to have found their prey here.

Alyssa veered to try to avoid the pirate ship as the man standing closest to the prow raised a rifle. Mouth already had her own rifle out and hit the man before he could get off a shot. He toppled into the ice water. One of the surviving pirates on the boat fired another rifle, but missed.

The pirate boat still raced right toward the Resourceful Couriers, with its metal thorn aimed at the weakest part of the skiff’s hull.

“We’re super screwed this time,” Yulya said.

“This was such a bad idea,” Reynold hissed.

The cockeyed skull came close enough that you could count its teeth. Then it stopped and flipped sideways, like the skull’s owner had decided to take a rest. They must have hit one of those icebergs dead on. The skull’s smile looked whimsical, philosophical, accepting an unjust fate with a chuckle.

“We got them,” Alyssa whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

“Shit. We’re in the water! We’re sinking. It’s too cold to swim. I can’t feel my—somebody help. Please, somebody. Please help.”

Everybody looked at Kendrick, who shrugged.

“Even if I wanted to help those bastards,” said Alyssa, “I don’t think we can.”

The screams of drowning pirates fell away, leaving nothing but the crunch of ice against the hull, and Kendrick’s low curses as the skiff became less and less seaworthy.

“I can’t believe this is going to work,” said Reynold. “Just a little farther, and we can come around behind them and make for the Argelan shore. No fuss.”

Mouth didn’t see the second pirate boat until it was too late, and her warning shout came right before she felt something break irreparably under her feet.

Shouts and cheers came from the other ship, and its crew rushed forward, guns and long knives already raised.

Mouth kept thinking about her conversation with Alyssa, in the middle of fighting hand-to-hand with eight half-starved pirates. You care more about ghosts than the people around you. Maybe Mouth did feel bad for leading Bianca on, or the way her scheme had gotten the other Couriers stuck in the middle of a citywide freakout. Or maybe that guilt was just a poultice over the much deeper wound of failing to rescue the Invention, and knowing the Citizens would be forgotten when Mouth died (soon, most likely).