Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

I can’t come up with a memory that’s not of me watching Bianca from a distance. My heart is shaking itself to pieces and my tendrils tear at my skin with the effort of maintaining contact. I fumble for a happy memory and—

—Bianca is lying next to me on her bed, in our dorm room, whispering in my ear, and her breath makes my skin so sensitive that I would evaporate if she even touched me and then her body touches mine just for a moment and I feel a shiver and I’ve never even let myself want anything with the part of me that rejoices in desiring—

—Now, here, in the Palace, Bianca pulls away from me, just as I’ve realized how dangerous that last memory was, the feelings I’ve never even confessed to myself.

Bianca makes a noise between a roar and a howl, and throws me so hard I land halfway across the room.

“You forced yourself into my mind and you… Standing here with those grubby oily worms coming out of your body, thinking those disgusting thoughts about me. I can’t even stand to look at you. They didn’t turn you into a monster, you were always a monster. How did I not know this?”

Bianca’s words have a thicket of sharp edges, and I’m still paralyzed, thinking about that desire that I never even let into myself. Bianca spits at me that I’m perverted, revolting, a creep.

All the blood is rushing to my head and I’m drowning, but there must be something I can say right now. I didn’t stalk her—and my love isn’t selfish—and I’m scared I overwhelmed her with too many memories at once. I try to blurt an explanation. “I just wanted to save—”

My shoulder is on fire. The pain spreads to my left arm and my left side. A man in a bright green breastplate has come in the door and fired an antique pulse maser at me. The wound mostly cauterized on contact, but blood still dribbles out of my shoulder. I scream.

Bianca yells at her man not to kill me, they need me alive. I pull away as she shouts at the guards pouring into the room not to shoot, for fuck’s sake. I reach the balcony, where I’d plotted an easy parabola—flipping onto the railing and then up to the roof. But I’ve lost flesh, and I’m losing blood. I try to climb, but I slip on my own mess, and I fall instead. My tentacles only just save me, catching on the Palace wall, as I drop to the balcony one floor down.

Mouth climbed down into the sewer and made her foul way under the Founders’ Square and the market stalls, to the pristine clay pipe that she was pretty sure led into the dungeon’s latrine. The pipe itself was too narrow, so she set about weakening the mortar around one of the big new stones at the base of the dungeon wall. Whoever built this new dungeon had done a poor job with the masonry, probably because Dash had broken their arms for not working fast enough. The big granite block wobbled as the mortar crumbled under pressure from the scraper in Mouth’s belt, but she still needed several lifetimes to loosen the block and pull it out of the way. Then she could climb up through the commode itself, which stunk just as much as she’d expected. She pushed aside the rotting wooden boards over the commode.

The single-room dungeon had one prisoner: Alyssa wore a chain attached to a shackle around her ankle, with the other end bolted to the wall. She looked so much older Mouth didn’t recognize her at first. Her skin clung to an emaciated face, and she bent almost double. Her eyes focused on Mouth with effort.

“You look like hot puke,” Mouth whispered. “Hold still.”

She found a file inside her tool belt and started sawing through the chain on Alyssa’s ankle.

“Make up your mind,” Alyssa hissed. “You ditch me, then you come back.”

“Shut up and let me work.”

“Can’t wait to hear your latest rationalization.” Alyssa sounded like mossy rock being dragged over rotten wood. “Not that I don’t bear some of the blame for this shitfest. I believed in Bianca—like, really believed. I spent a lot of time encouraging her to step up, after you vanished on us. Become the brilliant leader that she was meant to be. I think I may have miscalculated. Pretty much as soon as we finished murdering the entire government, I was suddenly ‘not reliable.’ I mean, fuck. I’m the most reliable person there is.”

“Shhh,” Mouth said. “You’ll have plenty of time to explain how this is really my fault after we get out of here.”

Alyssa shook her head. “You’re just going to ditch me again.”

“No, I’m not.” Mouth was about halfway through the chain, and she’d only had to switch hands three times. Both hands were raw and throbbing.

That was when the alarms started ringing. Not from the dungeon, from the Palace above. Mouth cursed. Sophie.

“I have to go,” Mouth said. “I’ll leave you the file. The commode leads to a stone I removed, then the sewers.”

“You literally said a moment ago that you wouldn’t abandon me.”

Mouth paused with one foot in the toilet, and sighed.

“I have a duty. I’m Sophie’s bodyguard, and she’s an idiot. She’s also the future of humanity, sort of. Keep working on your chain.”

Mouth had wasted too much time already. The alarms blared, and boots crashed on the pavement above. She swung back down into the sewer, trying to guess which pipe led to the fancy toilets. She picked one that looked likely, and took a hammer to the fixtures until she had made an opening. At least the alarms and shouts drowned out the racket of her clumsy swings.

“She’s not even human anymore,” Bianca said. “She got into my chamber and attacked me with some kind of psychic powers. It was horrible. We need to capture her alive if we can.”

Mouth couldn’t get over how good the inside of the Palace smelled: like fresh-cut pine, even over the sewage she tracked onto the floor (which was made of a stone so soft and warm Mouth wanted to lie down on it for a while). The Inner Council Chamber had gleaming walls of something that looked like glass but wasn’t, and the furniture was a mixture of handcrafted high-end wood and machine-fabbed steel and plastic. Beautiful ancient devices, some of them dating back to the Mothership, covered every surface.

Most of the clamor rang out from upstairs, but shouts came from the outer hallway surrounding this level. “She’s down here!” Mouth ran toward the voices.

Sophie cowered under her big cloak, hiding between two pillars, with guards closing in on her. She held her shoulder in one hand, like they’d winged her already. Just as Mouth made eye contact with Sophie, all the guards spotted Mouth.

Mouth gestured for Sophie to stay put, then ran for the nearest window, making as much commotion as she could, sliding across the polished floor. The first two rifle shots missed, but the third went through her shoulder, turning her right arm into a useless decoration. The fourth hit her left leg. She hoped this distraction had helped Sophie to escape, however unlikely that might be.

As Mouth started to bleed out on the fancy carpet, she remembered when the Resourceful Couriers had tried to get into the rug import business, working with this one community of weavers who had a workshop in the Pit back in Argelo, using techniques they claimed to have brought all the way from Earth. The Couriers had hauled a pile of their wares all the way to Xiosphant, only to find they were cheap rugs that someone had dyed just well enough to fool a group of rubes. At least now Mouth’s blood was soaking into what appeared to be a genuine antique, which meant she would have some revenge, even in death. Nothing would ever get blood out of this carpet.

“Oh, for—” Bianca was standing over her, wearing an off-the-shoulder crimson gown. “Mouth. I should have known.” She turned to the nearest guard. “Get her cleaned and patched up. Then put her in the dungeon. I want to know everything she can tell us about this monstrosity.”