Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The rest of the conversation was just logistics: signal, pickup, delivery, and, most important, payment. Nobody in Argelo could ever agree on what time it was, so Carlos and Maria’s crew, the Superbosses, used tiny wireless devices that could receive up to a dozen preprogrammed signals. Complex electronics were getting harder and harder to come by as everything ran out, but someone had figured out a way to manufacture a ton of these gadgets.

After the meeting, Mouth waited until they’d walked several streets away, then said: “You fucking kidding me? That’s our new job?”

“It’s a good opportunity.”

“After everything we’ve been through, we’re going to be working for gun-running bottom-feeder gangsters.”

“You owe me,” Alyssa said. “I stuck my neck out for you so far I could barely see my own body.” They got lost while arguing. Here at the edge of morning, all the ugly streets looked the same, and they all swallowed their own tails. Even the shadows were no help.

“Listen,” Mouth said as they retraced their steps. “This isn’t like smuggling out there, on the road. It’s not open spaces, where storms and local fauna are your biggest worry, except on the water. Here, it’s enclosed, it’s all firefights in tight spaces. This city is one big killzone.”

“That’s what everyone loves about you,” Alyssa said. “Your sunny personality.”

“Don’t call me that. The sun has killed too many friends of mine.”

They ended up at a bar at the top of Archer’s Hill. From up here, the Knife seemed always to be in midswing, about to stab the Pit’s black heart. You could still see where they’d torn up a ton of the old alleys to make a grand thoroughfare back during one of the People’s Congress eras, and then more recently the Nine Families had torn down an entire neighborhood to build a few of their mansions, leaving a nest of streets that led nowhere.

“You know that I will do this if you ask me to,” Mouth said after the third overpriced swamp vodka. “Even if I didn’t owe you, you’re family. But it’s a bad idea.”

“We have to do something,” Alyssa said. “You’re starting to scare me. You get weird when you have too much time on your hands, and you’re not built for honest work.” She paused and drank enough to destroy the lining of her throat. In between coughs, she blinked tipsily at Mouth. “You really think of me as family?”

Mouth leaned across the table, almost knocking over the half-empty bottle, and caught Alyssa in a hug so encompassing, it was like one of those streets that folded in on itself. As she relaxed into the hug, Mouth whispered, “You’re my only family.”

Mouth refused to sleep while they were watching for the Superbosses’ signal, and then when at last the tiny black gadget spat out a single glyph, Alyssa all of a sudden needed to make a pit stop on their way to the pickup.

And now Mouth wished she’d slept when she had the chance, because she kept hallucinating out of the corner of one eye. Someone was selling roast pheasant on the street corner, with smoke permeating the scaly flesh and the webs between all of its legs. Alyssa bought one for each of them, and the hot juices felt like a corpse reviver.

The “pit stop” took them far from the pickup location, which was that same building on the edge of daylight. Mouth got more and more confused, following Alyssa into the guts of Argelo, and then farther into a row of muslin and silk warehouses. Alyssa knocked on a blank stone wall and said, “It’s me,” and the whole wall swung aside.

Inside the stone building, a bunch of men and women perched on expensive mahogany furniture, holding new-looking single-shot rifles with slide-loading action. Mouth recognized the flying-horse insignia of the Perfectionists, one of the nine ruling “families” here in Argelo.

“I got the signal,” Alyssa said to the man nearest the door, a wall of muscle with long dark hair, a neat beard and mustache, and a tailored black one-piece. “We’re supposed to move the stuff into position.”

“The pickup location you told us?” the guy said.

Alyssa nodded.

“Great,” said another large man with no beard, sitting closer to the bar area on a five-legged stool. Nobody bothered to introduce themselves to Mouth. “Do it just like we talked about. When you get their route, follow it as long as you can, and then make a detour on the dogfish lane. End up at the maiden’s fountain, and we’ll collect your cargo. Meantime, we’ll deal with the social climbers.”

Alyssa nodded again, then turned to go.

This time, Mouth didn’t even wait until they had gotten a block away. “You’ve seriously lost your shit.”

“Too late to discuss now. You going to back my play or what?”

Mouth didn’t answer.

“This is Argelo,” Alyssa said. “This is how you move up here. I grew up in this town, you didn’t.”

Alyssa had started out in the boiling-hot Snake District, with her mother and uncles, and became the leader of her own gang of kids. Petty theft and arson for hire, mostly, but a few other hustles. Alyssa had thought they would stick together forever, but all the other members of the Chancers had decided to graduate to the big leagues. By then, Alyssa’s family had all died of skin cancer, and that was when she’d decided to try smuggling.

“Look at it this way,” Alyssa added. “You’ll be doing your part to keep the fabric of society intact. And those are good people to have a relationship with.”

“As you know, social cohesion and making friends are my two primary concerns,” Mouth said.

At the cracked wooden building, Carlos handed them a banyan-wood crate that was smaller than the gun crates, but still a good square meter, and almost too heavy for the two of them to carry alone. “We don’t need to know what’s in here, I guess,” Mouth said. “But we do need to know if anything will happen if we drop it or bring it too close to an open flame.”

“Let’s just say the contents are delicate,” Carlos said. “I would handle with extreme care.” He handed Alyssa a map, which had as many words as lines, then wished them luck.

“See you soon,” Alyssa said. Then they were off.

“Please tell me we at least have a way to make this box less conspicuous,” Mouth said. It was already making inroads into her shoulder. “I don’t much care, but we did tell them we were professionals.”

“Way ahead of you.” Alyssa steered the box down a steep slope and an outdoor staircase to a tiny cul-de-sac below street level. There, Alyssa pulled some potted plants aside and revealed blue delivery smocks and sticky labels from the grocery store nearby. Mouth followed her lead and helped her put stickers all over the box. A moment later, they were two grocers carrying a box of potatoes and carrots.

“Okay, I have to admit, you did good.”

“Damn right,” Alyssa said.

Now all they had to do was make this heavy, “delicate” box look like root vegetables. Mouth tried to square it against her chest, but Alyssa still had to hoist her end over her shoulder to keep it level, and they were both gasping after a few of these up-and-down streets.

“Makes me hungry for some fried carrots,” Mouth said.

“Shut up,” Alyssa grunted.

Gunshots seemed to come from every direction, thanks to the bunk acoustics. Mouth was pretty sure they were getting closer to the fighting. She flinched, but even before Alyssa said anything, they both knew they just had to keep walking.

“Hang on,” Alyssa said. “I gotta check the map.”

“Really?”

They laid the cube down, straining not to drop it, and Alyssa pulled out the map that Carlos had given her. “Oh, man. I think we already took a wrong turn.”