Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

Bianca leaned in close enough that Mouth could see the redness in her eyes, and the insomnia lines. Bianca looked almost as prematurely aged as Alyssa. “I should have expected you’d be here, after that creature showed up in my house. I want you to know that I destroyed your stupid poetry book the first chance I got.”

Mouth didn’t even know what book Bianca was talking about at first, and then she remembered about the Invention. She tried to shrug, but that was not happening with this bullet wound. She also couldn’t scrounge enough air to say anything about that “creature” being the only one who ever really loved Bianca. Or the fact that Bianca had been happy to use Sophie’s unique connection to January’s natives to play her geopolitical games. Mouth had summoned endless quantities of air back when she’d been saying whatever Bianca wanted to hear, but now every breath came with a sharp pain in her chest, like her lung had gotten wrapped in barbed wire.

Alyssa rolled her eyes when Mouth fell on her hands and knees in the dungeon, and the guards shackled her to another chain. “Well, you did say you would be back.” The guards locked the door behind them.

Mouth still couldn’t breathe. They had cleaned her bullet wounds and applied some sealant, but one of them felt like it still had shrapnel. She made an asthmatic rattle instead of words.

Alyssa looked around to make sure the guards had left, and then pulled the file out of her sleeve and sawed through her chain, which was close to breaking. “This file is worthless,” she said. “What happened to the good one we used to have? The one with the specially hardened iron surface? I know you had it last.”

Mouth couldn’t get enough breath to answer, but also honestly wasn’t sure. The good file had been in that cloth bag, back in Argelo, maybe.

“You lose everything.” Alyssa rubbed the file faster. “I can’t leave a single thing with you. Literally anything I put in your hands, it’s just… gone.” One last frenzy of tugging, and her chain snapped.

Halfway to the commode, Alyssa paused and looked at Mouth, who was on the floor, hugging her knees and trying to breathe. “You only just let me down, again .”

Mouth tried to gasp that she was sorry. She had broken in here to rescue Alyssa in the first place. She had never wanted to leave Alyssa behind in the night.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t just let you stay here. Even half a reason. I’m so tired of your garbage.”

Mouth managed to squeeze out, “You have no… other friends. Everyone else… is dead.”

“Good point. Hold still, asshole.” Mouth passed out while Alyssa was filing.

A rhythmic series of slaps across her cheek made her upper bullet wound throb, and she realized her ankle was no longer chained. Mouth lurched to her feet, swaying.

“We don’t have long,” Alyssa said. “When they realize we’re gone, they’re going to notice the mess you made of that toilet. Nice subtle work, by the way.”

Alyssa hoisted Mouth over her shoulder and helped her stumble through the slippery tunnel that smelled like generations of diarrhea. Mouth breathed into Alyssa’s ear, barely managing to croak, “Can we,” and some time later, “start over?”

No response to that, except that much later, when Mouth had collapsed on a bed in a tiny flop that Alyssa had rented over a tannery in the Warrens, and Alyssa was poking a tiny syringe into Mouth’s lung, she heard Alyssa say, in Argelan: “There’s no starting over. There’s only starting again.”

Mouth tossed her head.

“So, you’re Sophie’s bodyguard now?”

Mouth tossed her head again. “Need to find her.” She could breathe a little better now.

“Ugh. That girl. Beginning to think you’re each other’s jinxes. Well, okay.” She sighed. “I haven’t thrown my life away for a lost cause in a little while. Tell me about it when you can talk.”

“Okay.” Mouth passed out again.

When Mouth regained consciousness in a filthy room darkened by shutters, she half expected Alyssa to be gone. But Alyssa sat at the tiny cork table, dismantling the shackle on her own ankle, and that was the most beautiful surprise of all. Mouth attempted to smile up at Alyssa, who smiled back and reached to take her hand. Mouth squeezed Alyssa’s palm, like some talisman promising safety, redemption, or maybe just not dying alone.

Mouth took a deep, miraculous breath. “When I thought you were dead, I was planning one hell of a wake. I was going to get so drunk I’d never see straight again.”

Alyssa snorted. “I never got a chance to drink to you being dead either. Your wake was going to be incredible: those gross cakes you always liked, fancy high-end liquor, plus maybe some little kids who could sing and pretend to be sad.”

“Your wake would have been way better than that,” Mouth said. “I was going to set a few dozen firebombs all over town, in honor of your career as a child arsonist. Heaps of food. Including those disgusting cactus-pork crisps. Liters of swamp vodka. The whole town would have passed out.”

“Fuck off. Your wake would have been the best wake in the history of wakes.” Alyssa poked Mouth’s leg. “Flowers and parades and flamethrowers, and I would have given a whole speech about how you were too dumb to live, but too fuck-faced to die of stab wounds or gunshots, like everyone else.”

As she spoke, Alyssa leaned forward and put one arm around Mouth’s uninjured shoulder and leaned on her chest, with care. Mouth heard a sigh of almost unbearable tenderness.

“Your wake would have ended with a thousand more people dead,” Mouth said.

“Pffft. Your wake would have been an extinction-level event.” Alyssa moved closer, until all of Mouth’s uninjured parts were swathed in arms and legs. “But now I guess we’ll just have to drink to being alive, like boring people.”

They fell asleep tangled in each other, like old times.

I see my face everywhere: a terrible likeness printed with streaky ink on the Palace’s ancient printing press, but still me. Bianca gives a speech in the Founders’ Square, standing in the same spot where her predecessor as vice regent announced a reduction in med-creds and triggered a riot. “We’ve been invaded by something evil that followed us out of the night,” Bianca says. Behind her, the prince looks pale and lightsick. “Some creature that we’ve never seen before has learned to imitate human form. It may look like a beautiful woman, but don’t let it get close, because its slightest touch will end your life.” Around me, the crowd shrills. I pull my hood tighter, hiding my face. I can’t help remembering when I was swept up by this same mob, and imagining what they’ll do if they find me this time.

Then I close my eyes, and let the feelings take hold of me, before I remind myself that I’m not trapped now. I’m strong, and I can climb any surface, and I can sense danger approaching before it even sees me.

I keep thinking that if I could have just showed Bianca that one memory of drinking tea, when we were too young to understand anything, things would have turned out differently. The teapot was like a harmless sun, radiating heat without the assault of light, and we clustered around it, gossiping and making up stories about what we were going to do when we got free.

As I leave the Square, my cloak snags on the rusted metal of an old stairway rail, revealing the shape of my body for one eyeblink. I’m not sure if anyone saw, but I duck into an alley piled with old linens and climb one wall, gripping with the ends of my tentacles. Around the next corner, I scale an eave and hide on a crumbling sill covered with laser-carved angels while people walk underneath me.