Чарли Андерс - The City in the Middle of the Night

The shutters open, and close again, and open again, while I hold myself still and keep my back to the brazier of the Young Father. My shoulder still hurts when I move, but I think it’s getting better.

I sleep inside my crawlspace without any regard to the state of the shutters, and maybe I’ve just been away too long to sink back into the old rhythm. If anything, now I prefer going out when everyone else sleeps. I don’t fear the Curfew Patrols, not with all my new senses, and Xiosphant looks lovelier when you can see every stone and adornment without people in the way, the interplay of ancient technology and the more recent handcrafted imitations. I can’t believe how much odd little things delight me, like a fluttering wrapper from the cakes we used to get at grammar school, or a sign for the Grand Cinema, the tiny space where they screen old hard-light dramas. Sometimes I catch the acrid scent of tannery smoke, or notice the shimmer of the air in the Cold Front, and I can’t help feeling this tawdry nostalgia.

But actual people are more complicated. After so much exposure to Argelan culture, I can’t look at random strangers here in Xiosphant without trying to guess which compartment their families traveled in, and how that lines up with their social class here.

A Curfew Patrol marches away from me, nowhere nearby, but I hear another set of footsteps that sound more furtive, stopping and starting as if someone keeps hiding. I creep over the lintels and around the smokestacks of bleached-brick buildings, getting closer to the temperate zone, until I lower myself into the street in front of Alyssa.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she says in Argelan. “We’d better get off the street. I know a place we can lie low.” I follow her down more alleys until I realize we’re circling closer to the Palace and I’m sure that I’ve trusted the wrong person again. But at the edge of the fanciest street market, Alyssa opens a trapdoor and helps me into a small space under one of the market stalls. This is the closest to the night I’ve been in a while, and my bracelet gives a faint buzz.

Alyssa shines a small torch around the tiny wooden space. “We waited out the curfew in here on my first visit to Xiosphant. Mouth was bleeding all over the place. Look, you can still see the stains.”

Her curly brown hair is longer, and she has a couple of new scars on the left side of her face, right next to her wide, protruding ear. She winces when she moves, and even her smile has thicker lines, but her laugh still sounds the same as ever. I hug her and she leans on my shoulder for a moment.

“Mouth sent me to find you. I’m not letting her out of bed until her lung sounds like a lung again. But she’s been climbing out of her skin with worry. She made me promise to keep looking for you.”

“I can’t believe Mouth is alive. I saw her take at least two bullets at the Palace.”

“Must be tough to be a masochist when your entire body is scar tissue, without a single nerve ending left.” Alyssa seems to laugh, but then she stares at me with her mouth pursed. “She was willing to die for you. She didn’t even hesitate.”

“You should have seen her face when she heard that you were alive, and then when she found out you were in a dungeon. I’ve never seen joy go dark so fast.”

“Huh.” She raises her eyes for a moment, thinking about Mouth, then looks back at me. “I suppose you’re going to just show me what her face looked like. That’s your new thing, right?”

I wince, thinking about Jeremy. All his big plans for me.

“I’m not anybody’s recording device,” I say.

“Good. The only thing that makes life tolerable is that people forget all the stupid things I say as soon as I’ve finished saying them.”

We sit in the tiny hutch under the market square for a while, and I can tell this place brings back conflicted old memories for Alyssa. She mentioned Mouth’s blood, long since dried.

I think something and say it at the same time: “You’ve always been the strongest, out of all of us.”

Alyssa half laughs, half just shakes her head. “Doesn’t feel like it, most of the time. But then I think about my ancestors, and everything they went through for me to be here, and I just find a way. That’s what this town tried to keep you from having, I guess, because they wanted you to be weak. And now look at you.”

The scent of old blood has been thickening since we closed the lid, along with a musty loam funk. Something about this earthiness reminds me of the Resourceful Couriers’ sleep nook.

“Mouth searched for ages for something to believe in, and I couldn’t give it to her,” Alyssa says. “Even this Barney guy, who used to be one of the Citizens, couldn’t. But you did. And now she wants me to join your cult, or your security detail, whichever. But… I can’t be disappointed again. I just can’t. The next disappointment is going to snap me in half.”

I want to say that I don’t need Mouth’s protection, or Alyssa’s either. But Mouth just took two bullets for me. So I say, “What will you do, if Mouth wants to stay with me, and you decide not to?”

“Don’t know. I can’t go home. I guess I could turn mercenary, see if the new Uprising wants a fighter. But I think I need a break from overthrowing governments for a while. I could work at a dive bar. The Low Road, maybe.” She makes a peevish noise with her mouth. “I really thought Bianca was going to be great. She had me convinced. How do I know it’s going to be any different if I decide to follow you?”

I watch her face close enough to see a flicker of hope, in among all the twinges. I don’t want anybody to follow me, or to believe in me. I want to sleep for another five or six turns of the shutters.

But I was sent back here to teach. So I feel the calm settle into me.

“There won’t be any safe place soon,” I say. “Good weather’s gone forever. Imagine if the next cyclone hits one of the farmwheels.”

“All the more reason to lie low,” Alyssa says. “Why should I put my faith in you now?”

I breathe deep, as if I could take time itself into my lungs and hold it there until I’m ready for the next moment to arrive.

“Don’t believe in me,” I say. “Believe in them.”

I spread my arms and unwrap my cloak to let her see, if she wants to see. Alyssa hesitates a moment, then comes forward.

I bring her down easy, remembering all my mistakes, and show her nothing but the play of snow on the wind, until I feel her relax into it. Then I bring her inside the city in the middle of the night, down through walls of ice and living matter, which resonate with all the music from below. I show her the galleries, the huge girders, strengthened by fire from the center of the world, and supported by a shared history that goes all the way back to the taming of the sky. The Gelet approach, not as some inhuman shapes that swarm out of a hostile landscape, but as friends whose tentacles extend in welcome and whose pincers open to let you see inside their hearts. I close in on one memory in particular, of when Rose held up my father’s timepiece, and how this looked to my human eyes as well as to my new senses, all the ways I knew she was keeping faith with me. I don’t try to tell a story, or share a chain of events, I just open up the feeling of being home, in a place where everybody knows your damage, and I let it seep out of me. The memories I have to share are clean and true.

When I disengage, Alyssa holds me tighter, as though she doesn’t want me to ever let go. Her eyes are so wet they look like silver.

Writing this book felt like stumbling around in total darkness, a lot of the time. I’m supremely grateful to everyone who helped me find my way. Any screwups and faults are all my responsibility, but most of what’s good about this book is due to the generosity and kindness of many others.