Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

“I’ll be back soon,” Sasha says, still hesitating.

But everyone just looks at Sasha until he opens the hatch, bows his head, and goes into the outer chamber with his team, then seals the inner hatch behind them.

“Everybody keep your eyes open for more wildlife,” Dash says.

While we’re stopped and our engines silenced, the sounds of the night come through. This close to midnight, the wind makes a keening sound, but our exterior visibility is a series of illusions.

Bianca kept saying she had lost everything, right before she showed me this machine for the first time, and maybe this is her way of getting it all back. The social status, the brilliant future, the luxury of idealism in a comfortable chair among friends, all the things she had when I first knew her. I miss that life too, maybe even more than she does and in a deeper cavity of my psyche, but the increasingly thick air of this icebound assault vehicle (sweat and farts and gun residue and engine coolant and terror) is leaving me surer and surer that this whole enterprise says something indelible about her.

My bracelet thrums harder, and I adjust it under my sleeve, trying to send a response, like, I’m here. I’m sorry about before. I’m here now. I’m sorry for bringing these intruders to you.

The voices of Sasha and the engineers come over the radio.

“Why is this taking so long?”

“Give us a moment, Sasha. Inspecting the damage.”

“I saw something move.”

“There are snowdrifts. Motion is pretty much constant out here.”

“No, really. I saw—”

“Just keep working. I want to see their faces when I come back in one piece.”

“Did you hear that?”

“It’s so cold my ears are frozen shut.”

“Just keep working.”

“Watch out, there’s a—”

And then a high shriek, and no sound but the wind again for a while.

“Nikki. Shit. Nikki. Did you even see what got—”

“Stop asking if I see things.”

“Nikki’s just gone.”

“We’re seriously all going to die here.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Okay, I think I sealed the damage. Let’s get back inside before—”

And then more screams, which grow louder and more indistinct, a chorus. Then they cease, and we’re left with just the wind again.

“Let’s go,” Dash says to Marcus. “Start the engines.”

Everybody looks at Dash for a moment. The radio stays silent. So Marcus takes a deep breath through his upper teeth, eyes stretched open, and then we roll forward. As soon as we’re moving again, I feel someone pulling my wrist once more.

The engine seems to hold up, and we tear through the night as if the ghosts of Sasha and the dead engineers are chasing us. The scream of our hastily repaired drive chamber sounds higher and more ravenous than the wind. We catch up to the other vehicles in our fleet, and even pass them, racing forward until our engines protest.

“Gotta slow down,” Marcus says. Dash tosses his head.

My bracelet thrums, as if in warning, but before I can make sense of it, I feel a sickening twist, as if the world has come apart underneath us. For one stomach-dropping moment, I think we’ve fallen into a sinkhole. But no—a splintering, shattering sound comes from two kilometers behind us, and the rear topographic scans show the ice shelf breaking apart. The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below, and all the other vehicles are caught in the middle of it.

At first, they thought some seismic event had torn through the ice. Or maybe some submerged mine left over from one of those ancient wars, a final revenge from some dead sailor. They bickered and debated, even as the road rose up vertical in front of them. Sweated, spat, pleaded, prayed, boasted, grandstanded. The grav-assist treads pawed at the unsteady fragments of tundra, groping in vain for some purchase. But the mist cleared, and Alyssa spotted the cause of the eruption: one tentacle, covered with iridescent feathers and tipped with a leaf-shaped barb the size of a tenement, had burst upward from the frozen ocean, filling the space like a new monument. One of the giant squids that lurked at the bottom of the Sea of Murder had detected food on the surface, and decided to go hunting.

Alyssa unsnapped her harness, while all the Perfectionists in the number-seven transport wasted time bemoaning their fate, and pushed through the passenger compartment until she reached the cockpit. She leaned over an older Perfectionist loyalist named Winston, who sat in the pilot’s seat, and unfastened his safety harness for him. “You better let me drive,” she said. Winston hesitated, and she added: “Do you want to live, or do you want to feel good about yourself in your final moments? One of us here knows the Sea of Murder, and it’s not you.”

Winston slid out of his chair, and Alyssa climbed in, securing herself inside. Mouth came and stood next to her, mostly to watch what promised to be an excellent show.

The fleshy protrusion rose thirty meters over their heads, its tip swaying as if searching for prey. Then it curled, whip-fast, and ensnared two vehicles in a single fluid motion, dragging them back through its hole in the ice.

“Bloody hell,” Winston breathed. “Those poor people.”

“Pretty quick death. Better than most.” Alyssa kept her eyes fixed on the topographic scans, looking for any tiny fluctuations or perturbations in the ice, while easing the ATV forward at a tantalizing speed. They crawled ahead until they reached one of the darkest blue spots, and then Alyssa spun them almost 90 degrees and sped up, so the terrain streaked past for a moment. Then she pulled back on the throttle again, and they were back to baby steps.

“Shouldn’t we be just making a break for it, while that monster is distracted?” Jimmy, another senior Perfectionist, muscled his way forward. He was the enormous man with the spiral scar across his hairless scalp, who had searched Mouth and Bianca at the White Mansion. “Why are we playing games instead of just getting the fuck out of here?”

The other five vehicles were following Jimmy’s idea, barreling at top speed away from the jagged patch of exposed ocean, toward the waiting Command Vehicle. But the ice ripped open in the space between the rumbler and two of the troop transports, propelling massive chunks at their armored sides. The tip of the squid’s tentacle pulled one of the transports down into the ocean, twirling with the measured elegance of a coffee server at the Illyrian Parlour. Then another.

“That’s why,” Alyssa said. “Any other questions?”

Jimmy’s brow furrowed, so that the sharp end of his scar pointed at one glowering eye, while Alyssa executed a three-point turn, and then coasted the vehicle across a thin sheet of permafrost that seemed to tremble as they passed over it.

“I don’t trust either of you smugglers,” Jimmy was saying to Mouth in a chatty tone, like he was discussing an unsatisfying meal. Jimmy was so tall and wide he had to hunch over inside the troop transport, and his arms kept bumping against the sides. “We should have left you behind in Argelo.”

“I wish you had,” Mouth said.

Some of the leaders of this expedition, like Nai and Sasha, had wanted to ditch Mouth and Alyssa, or even put them to death for the stunt they tried to pull with Sophie. But Bianca was still convinced that their smuggling experience would be invaluable when (if) this expedition reached the walls of Xiosphant. Mouth still felt bound by the promise she’d made to Bianca at the White Mansion, even though this invasion seemed like a worse and worse idea. At least Mouth had managed to spend some time answering Professor Martindale’s countless annoying questions before they left, so whatever happened to her, the memory of the Citizens could be preserved.