Mouth almost said, You know, you’ll just end up killing the working stiffs if you attack the Palace. The guards, the cleaning staff, the drudges. You’ll never even touch the people in power. Instead, she poured Bianca more swamp vodka and said, “You need to stay angry, and remember why you’re fighting. Hold on to that fire, because you owe it to your friend. Trust me, you can’t leave these debts unpaid, or it’ll ruin you over time.”
As Mouth spoke, she was thinking of the fire that had consumed the Citizens’ remains, and the debt that she had carried ever since. Bianca was nodding, heavily, and Mouth made herself smile.
SOPHIE
The last few times I visited Rose at the summit of the Old Mother, I’ve been empty-handed, because it took me some time to figure out how to get copper. This time, I’m weighed down. To add to the chunks I bought in the temperate zone, I stripped some old wiring that I scrounged in an alley near the Illyrian Parlour, and found a few more bits in a scrapyard, plus one of our clients made me a present of a pendant that has some copper in it. The extra load adds to the strain on my already-stiff arms with every steep rise. I keep taking breaks, and thinking about Bianca’s heartsick expression.
When I reach the plateau, I sit and wait, staring outward, and I try to make sense of all this mess. No human being has ever shared their thoughts with me the way Rose has. I know more about what it feels like to watch hunters drag my friend into the searing twilight than I’ll ever know about most human experiences, and every time I think about that image I feel something lower than shame. Even with all the other anxieties that overturn my thoughts, the image of a crocodile being dragged away for an obscene feast, bound and bleeding, keeps coming back.
I hear a crunch, and a massive shape rises out of the dark. I nearly lose my balance on the slice of rock where I’m perching, even though I’ve been waiting for Rose. The wind ruffles her fur, and her front legs crinkle as she plants her wide, clawed feet. She shields herself from the meager daylight with her tentacles, and crouches near me, greeting me in the crocodile fashion. Her round mouth seems to smile.
“Hi,” I say, over the sorrowful wind. “It’s good to see you. I hope you’ve been safe out there. I hope all your friends are holding up. Things in Xiosphant have been … intense. Everyone is so freaked out they almost can’t think straight.”
I’m ashamed of my tiny amount of copper, which Rose clutches in one tentacle before tucking it under her woolly carapace. We used to have tons of the stuff, because the Mothership had steered a lot of ore-rich asteroids down to us. People used copper to decorate everything, but all the treasure meteors are exhausted and our mines are empty. Scientists believe that a lot of the most valuable metals on this planet are concentrated on the day side, where we can’t mine or even investigate.
So to make up for this sad bundle, I reach into my satchel and pull out the timepiece my father gave me when I was a child, to help me pay attention. I had this tiny clock in my jeans pocket when they banished me to this place, and the fine metalwork survived somehow. You can still make out the care that somebody put into every angel, every flower, and the way the fine gears turn.
“This is important to my people,” I say. “This is how we know what to do, or what everyone else is doing right now. If you could read this, and you knew enough about me, you could use this to know where I am, all the time.” I try to show Rose how to wind it, and which dial points to day or night, the different times and settings. She seems to pay attention, or at least to understand I’m making a fuss about this object. When I place the timepiece into her tentacle, she tries to give it back. I press it into her grasp and let go.
“A present. For you.”
Rose accepts the clock, placing it next to the copper. Then she beckons with her open pincer, and I only hesitate for a moment. I push my face and neck into the fulcrum, where slick warm fingers brush my face—
—We live in a great city, far from here, under the crust of the night. Cliffs of ice, deep fissures, towering structures of stone and metal, and wheels turning far beneath us, fueled by underground rivers, and furnaces hotter than the touch of the sun. At the heart of our city, tiny creatures who look like us hang in a mesh of warm, dark threads, helpless and spindly. They cry out, their tentacles and pincers still too tiny to communicate properly, but we can feel their distress, and our blood runs thin. They stay inside that web because their slender bodies haven’t finished developing, and when an adult places some bright roots among the threads holding them, the babies absorb this nourishment right away. The roots shrivel as the web swells with nourishment. But these infants still cry out. Their pincers open and close, and the message is clear: I’m cold. It hurts. I’m scared. No matter what we do, these children aren’t growing the way they’re supposed to. Their soft unshelled bodies hang, weaker and weaker, as they struggle to take in any nutrition.
We don’t understand the cause of the sickness for a long time. But then we discover: a poison rain, falling on the ice sheets far above, gives off scents that make us almost lose consciousness if we even approach. Some caustic liquid that was trapped long ago, somewhere in the hottest part of the day, has been released into a cloud, because the sky has gone out of balance. Even the slightest touch burns the cilia off your tentacles, and it turns the air too noxious too breathe. This poison seeps down into the soil, until it reaches the protective threads around our children, tainting them. We feel sorrow, trapped in our deepest cores like a memory too painful to share, when we travel back down into the depths of the city and see their toothless mouths open and close, their unshaped tentacles reaching out for nothing. This sickness taints a whole generation of our children, and there will be nobody to give our most cherished memories to before we die—
—When Rose releases me, I reel, and topple in the direction of the night before I recover. My face is wet, even apart from the residue from her tendrils. I fall on my back, looking up at the dark clouds.
I babble something. “Those babies. I’m sorry. I wish … I don’t know what I can do. How can I help? What is there? I’m so sorry. I would do anything—”
Rose just lowers her head again, like she’s encouraging me to climb up on her back and ride. We stand there, on the line between one world and the other. I hear thunder a long way off, on the other side of endless ice fields, but never see any lightning. I wonder how long that toxic rainfall has been blighting the crocodiles’ nurseries, and what caused it. There was a sliver of an idea buried in Rose’s shared memory: the atmosphere was in balance for a long time, the day and night in perfect arrangement, but now the sky itself has gone wrong.
I’m too cold to stay up here any longer, even with Hernan’s warm padded jacket, and I hear the chimes sound the Span of Reflection. I touch the end of one tentacle, gently, then pick my way back down the mountainside.
* * *
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about toxic rain falling on a city thousands of kilometers away, across an endless field of ice and storms. I can’t banish that image, but I also can’t make my mind encompass it.
So I find myself drifting back to my other obsession.
I need to make sure Bianca’s okay, after I’ve seen so many other people flying out of their skins. I’m not even sure how many times the shutters have gone up since the riot, but at last I dredge up the courage to go check on her again.
When I walk near the Gymnasium, I feel myself freeze up again. But this time I’m expecting it, and so I take Jeremy’s advice: I’m patient with myself. I stay in a safe alcove, protected by shadows, until the worst passes. Then I find another hiding place and watch Bianca, chatting with the other students, striding away from campus. I see her stroll past Matthew and a couple other old members of the Progressive Students, and they barely acknowledge each other. Good. The police are probably still watching that whole group, including her, and right now they’re ready to shoot anyone who makes them the slightest bit nervous.
I almost try again to talk to Bianca, but there are always too many people around. Instead, I just walk a safe distance behind her as she strides downtown. Bianca doesn’t look at the Plaza, the Market, or the row of clothing stores along the Grand Boulevard. She just keeps her head down, and doesn’t even change her posture when she passes through the cold front. Colored smoke fills the sky, and the bakery switches from wake-up pastries to after-work treats. Watching Bianca from a safe distance, I feel so homesick, in the middle of my chest and the prow of my back.