Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The three of them stayed huddled like that for a long time, until a noise shook them so much they nearly cracked their heads together. Professor Martindale was waking up, groaning, with an almighty headache.

I can’t even move in this ball gown. If I lift my arms more than halfway, I feel the seams strain. Even though red taffeta, tulle, lace, and ribbons have nothing in common with the gloved hands of Xiosphanti police, I still have a suffocating threat reaction to these restraints. But I close my eyes, and give myself patience, like Jeremy taught me. And then I breathe, and smile, because Bianca’s looking at me, beaming, and clapping her hands. “People will lose their minds when they see you.”

Bianca can’t stop giggling and twirling in her dress, making her skirt billow. Bianca wears another kind of fragrant oil, with hints of cinnamon and marigold, and her face glows, thanks to the bright lines around her eyes and the faint contours accentuating her perfect face bones.

My starfruit bracelet looks out of place with all the sparkle strung from my neck and arms, but I draped a flowery wristlet over it. I feel the gentle pressure on my wrist all the time, even when I sleep—reminding me that I owe the Gelet much more than just my life. I need to try again soon to find a way past that shantytown, into the night.

“So how do we even know when this party is starting?” I ask Bianca, who’s studying the golden invitation she scored at Punch Face.

“There’s this one angel fountain on the edge of the fancy residential area,” Bianca says. “The party starts the next time it starts flowing, and you can predict when that’ll happen if you know about the water levels in the city’s reserve pumps. It’s like a game, sort of.”

Bianca leads me past the Pit, and we get on a train inside a pneumatic tube, which rushes us to the southernmost part of town, facing away from Xiosphant. Soon we’re in a vast granite courtyard, ringed with a spiked iron fence, facing a ten-garreted mansion made of bricks so white they sting my eyes. We introduce ourselves to a man in a dark purple suit, who checks some list for our names.

I can’t stop staring at the layers of crimson satin across Bianca’s shoulders, and the delicacy of her every tiny movement. Back when we were roommates, at the Gymnasium, she would start to move like flowing water, and her voice would grow more cultured and precise, right before she went out to one of her galas or banquets. I always sat on my bed-shelf, watched the petals on her dress refract the light as she swayed, and fantasized about going as her escort, only so I could admire this other version of Bianca in her proper setting, among all the lights, perfumed candles, and soaring waltzes. Now, here we are.

But that thought just makes me wish that we could go back to our dorm after this party, to cradle our teacups and talk about books we’ve read, brand-new ideas we’ve discovered, things that nobody but us realizes are wrong.

The man in purple leads us to a giant space, full of marble floors that reflect the overhead light in bold streaks, walls made of some dark wood I don’t know the name for, and billowing drapes of velvet. All the men are wearing collages of different-colored fabric strips that create an effect like a million shards of tinted glass, while the women wear costumes that make the red gown I’m wearing look plain: feathers, glowing threads, tight corsets, shimmering strands of beads. Someone hands me a drink, and it has the same effect on my taste buds as all these colors on my eyes. I realize the room is divided into three groups, and each group wears the same insignia, as jewelry or a badge, to mark which family they belong to.

I stand, frozen, as everyone studies us. I’d much rather be on the edge of the night, receiving the Gelet visions and learning about all the spaces beyond the narrow road, than be stuck trying to impress these people.

But the next thing I know, Bianca has a small crowd around her, and she’s telling them how she got here, in a melodramatic style, like something from a storybook. Everyone here in Argelo grew up reading glossy romances about palace intrigue in Xiosphant, Ahmad told us, and she plays to this sentiment. “They killed all of my friends and hunted me in the street,” Bianca says. “I fled from my home with only what I could carry, and we faced every kind of death on the Sea of Murder.” Nobody can look away from her eyes. Her crimson gown exposes a teardrop of skin on the small of her back, above where the pleats grow out of her waist like petals, and every time she moves, the entire room forgets to breathe.

To distract myself from my nerves, I study a giant silver-relief frieze along one wall that depicts one of the great stories of “Anchor-Banter,” which seems to involve people riding on top of old-fashioned crawling machines and fighting with sticks that light up. And then in the middle of all the scenes of machine-jousting and voyages across the steppes, two silvery people intertwine, half naked, like lovers or maybe like wrestlers. I can’t tell if they’re men or women, or one of each.

Men and women in purple costumes walk past, offering piles of food and more goblets of expensive liquor, and I can’t help taking some. The most beautiful man I have ever seen strides up to me just as my mouth is full of food, and I chew as fast as I can while he asks my name and says that Xiosphant must be a desolate waste, with its two brightest lights gone.

I’m still chewing, and the man keeps asking questions. This food is delicious but takes an entire lifetime to reduce to something I can swallow. And after I swallow the food, I still can only stare at this gorgeous person, with his wide face, limpid brown eyes, and square jaw.

“Forgive my rudeness. My name is Dash.” He gestures around. “This is my house.”

Bianca notices that I’m stuck, and comes to my side. “I’m Bianca. Thank you for your hospitality. This is the coolest party I’ve ever been to.”

“Well, you are the best thing that could possibly have happened to my party.” Dash kisses her hand, like a prince in one of those Argelan storybooks.

“You’ll have to forgive Sophie,” Bianca says, with a stage wave. “She’s been through a lot. It’s a terrible story. She was wrongly accused of a crime and torn away from the rest of us by the Xiosphanti police, who paraded her through the street and humiliated her in front of the whole town. And then they drove her to the mountainside and tried to force her to climb the steep slope, into the night. She nearly died! She was cast out of society and had to hide from everybody. It was really something.”

I stare at Bianca, and though the food is gone, I still have trouble swallowing.

Afterward, when we step off the train near the Pit, Bianca can’t stop laughing and flouncing in her dress. “That was the biggest rush of my entire life. I forgot how good it feels to sweep into a giant room full of immaculate people, and just dominate all of their attention. This is what I was made for. I haven’t been this happy since…”

Bianca stops, because she notices an expression on my face that she’s never seen before, not even when she said the Gelet were my pets. The entire wall of superheated vapor on the Sea of Murder, with all of its dazzling spray and choking steam, is bursting inside me.

“What’s wrong? Are you angry at me? What did I—”

“ Don’t ever do that again, ” I spit. She starts to ask, and I cut her off. “Don’t turn my personal… my real-life suffering into a cute story to entertain those people.”

Bianca starts to explain, to justify herself, and I give her a look that makes her stop talking.