Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet—servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness—but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.

Her mind kept offering up more and more details of what they had shown her, as if Mouth couldn’t process it all at once. No way to shut off the thoughts, even when she slept.

Sophie had not been present when Mouth had received the story of the nightfire. She had stayed away on purpose. But she came to Mouth’s bedchamber much later, crouched under the hammock so she was just a voice drifting from the bottom of the room. Mouth sometimes lunged, to pull her closer or to push her away, but she was never within reach. Sophie spoke haltingly, because she had never loved talking even when she’d had no other way.

“The nature of the Gelet’s consciousness is such that, I mean, you have to understand, the past is all one.” Sophie stammered far below Mouth’s bed. “To the Gelet, the decision to spare Xiosphant from destruction is as fresh as when they chose to wipe out the Citizens, even though they took place so many generations apart. For the Gelet, they both happened at the same time. I think they evolved this way because they live in never-ending darkness, with frozen winds that obliterate all sound and erase all writing. They worked for hundreds of generations to stabilize their climate by engineering special flora, and, to them, that work also just happened.”

Mouth never responded to anything Sophie said, other than with her arms and legs.

“Humans couldn’t have survived on this planet without all the work the Gelet had done before we got here,” Sophie said. “We wouldn’t have lasted more than a generation or two before the storms would have wiped us out. The farmwheels in Xiosphant, the fisheries and orchards of Argelo, they wouldn’t even have existed. Everything we keep fighting over.”

Sophie grew tired of speaking, as Mouth had known she would. If she climbed up and tried to use her new body parts to send ideas or memories straight to Mouth’s hind brain, Mouth was scared she might hurt Sophie involuntarily, even with her pacifist hands. But Sophie never came near. Mouth just heard Sophie breathing, over the scrape of the stone engines.

Mouth had her own personal memory of the blue swarm, the bones that broke apart when she tried to gather them up, the flames too close to her face. This was her own experience, and now that she’d worked so hard to reconstruct it for Barney and then Sophie, she couldn’t push it back into the hole where she’d kept it for so long. But she also couldn’t get rid of the memory of the great spout of ice, drizzling deadly slush as it traveled. Both things made her want to shut down.

“I eavesdropped when you met with Bianca, back when you wanted to trick her into helping you steal your poetry book,” Sophie said from the darkness below. “I remember you said, ‘The truth should hurt. Truth should knock you on your butt. Lies make it easy to stand.’”

Mouth broke her silence at last. “You paid more attention to me than I paid to myself.”

“The Gelet have been giving me back my own memories, which is the first cruel thing they’ve ever done to me. But you sounded impressive. I actually wanted to believe you.”

“I was just repeating things I heard somewhere,” Mouth said. “Things the Citizens used to say, things I overheard in political meetings. I combined them, changed them around.”

“That’s all anyone ever does,” Sophie said. “People never say anything new.”

Sophie fell silent again, but she wouldn’t leave Mouth alone. Like Mouth had taken some bad pills, and Sophie had to hold vigil while she rode them out. Mouth tried a couple times to say that Sophie owed her nothing, but Sophie just stayed, on the floor, breathing quietly.

“I want to show you something,” Sophie said after a long time. “I think it’ll be easier coming from me than from one of the Gelet.”

Mouth understood what Sophie meant by “show,” and she began to protest, to protect her face and neck with upthrust elbows.

But Sophie shushed Mouth and made soothing noises, and touched her rain-scarred neck with one palm. Sophie’s face caught the one shaft of light coming into the chamber from some distant furnace, and her round features looked more composed than Mouth had ever seen. Maybe they’d changed places at some point: Mouth was the scared kid now. Sophie kissed between Mouth’s eyes, which gave out more of their seemingly endless supply of tears.

“Don’t worry,” Sophie said. “I can take you down gently.”

Mouth nodded at last. “Okay. Do it.” Sophie’s face jostled, and Mouth realized that this was her own body shaking. She made herself go slack.

Sophie leaned closer, until her chest was touching Mouth’s, and then her wriggling little tongues snaked out. Mouth stiffened again at the last moment, but she felt the light touch of a few dozen surfaces, almost like moistened fingers, making contact with less pressure than the Gelet had used. Sophie shushed Mouth again. Her face was so close that she had three eyes, and you could feel her breathing almost like it was your own.

When Mouth closed her eyes, she could see something taking shape, an image or something, but it felt like an afterimage, a half impression. The picture kept pulsing in and out, and Mouth found herself concentrating, straining to see it more clearly.

“There you go,” Sophie said. “Just let it take you.”

Mouth leaned back in the hammock to let Sophie put more weight onto her. She felt Sophie’s knees around her waist, Sophie’s body resting against hers, and Sophie’s face on her face. Then she went into Sophie’s vision, and all these sensations vanished.

Sophie wasn’t showing Mouth a memory, the way Mouth had expected. She had braced herself for another glimpse into the terrible features of history or, worse, some slice of their shared past from Sophie’s perspective. Instead, they were flying, Sophie and Mouth, floating above the clouds that had been the upper limit of the world for Mouth’s entire life. Mouth looked at Sophie, who was gliding with a placid focus in her eyes, like she did this every day. Sophie gazed upward, and Mouth followed her line of sight to see the blackness of the sky overhead, dotted with tiny lights. A rounded mirror splashed them with reflected light, and Mouth realized this was the moon.

How are we doing this? Mouth tried to ask Sophie, but there was no air up here.

Sophie’s voice came, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t a memory, not really. Some of it is. The Gelet have memories of being in flying machines that they’ve shared with me. But this is also just my imagination, mixing with the real sensations. Think of it as a fantasy.”

Mouth could see the sweep of the ground, passing underneath, in between the thick ropes of clouds. The ground was pitch dark, because they were over the night, and the clouds wouldn’t let even a drop of moonlight through. Mouth wasn’t sure how they could see down there, but this made dream sense rather than regular sense. They passed over the curve of the world, and Mouth saw a burning light on the horizon. She tried to turn and fly in the opposite direction, because the sunlight would shrivel her to cinders, but Sophie kept driving forward. “Nothing can hurt us,” she whispered.

In the dream, Sophie gave Mouth a tiny smile, like they were two fliers moving independent of each other, and then they came into more light than Mouth had ever seen. Even through the clouds, she could see the arid ground sizzling, the very dirt being scoured by hot winds. How Sophie had gotten this image, Mouth couldn’t guess, since Gelet would never be able to withstand full daylight, in a flying machine or otherwise. Then Mouth looked down and saw crystal formations, gleaming and pulsing: another city.