Now, I lose control of my breathing altogether. I pant faster, without drawing any oxygen. I feel light-headed, my limbs gone dead, and all my old memory-panic is back. I can’t stand to think of myself as having a human body, or a voice that could expel sounds that human ears could catch and ingest. I thought I’d made peace with these memories.
I’m not handling this as well as Jean hoped—and that’s when I realize: this is something the Gelet have decided to do. They’re going to keep reminding me of what it felt like to be among humans, until I can take it without breathing too fast, going numb, or throwing angry, misshapen thoughts back at them. Jean shows me a happy memory of a glacier until I stop twitching and fighting. Still, all of these memories, one after the other, crush me with so much anger, love, and fear, I still feel my skin crawl, my heart pound, a pain like lightsickness, only worse.
For the first time since they put these tendrils and all these other new organs inside me, I want to tear it all out with my bare hands.
Jean wants to understand why I can’t handle the memories that I chose to share in the first place. How can I explain, in a way that a Gelet will understand?
I share a memory with Jean of my lowest moment ever—not the part when the cops pulled me out of the Zone House and forced me up a mountainside and I knew my life was over, but later, afterward, when I soaked in a hot bath at the Illyrian Parlour. When I was safe but knew I’d never be safe again, warm but chilled inside, scrubbed but forever dirty. And the one thing that consoled me in that moment was tucking myself back inside the memory that Rose had shared, of running in the night with all the other Gelet, on our way to build something with our powerful limbs.
I keep showing Jean, over and over, how that borrowed memory saved me at my lowest point. I capture the exact moment when my despair gave way to wonder.
Jean still doesn’t get why even my happiest experiences of living with humans bring me nothing but pain. Even after everything Jean went through, she still thinks happy memories ought to cheer you up.
A while later, I’m not even surprised when another Gelet, whom I call Felice, wants to give me back another memory I shared long ago.
I’m back in the dorm, and Bianca and I are sitting and studying after she’s returned from some party or formal ball, and this one kept her away from me forever. I’m staring at my book, trying to concentrate, but then I look up at Bianca, who’s already looking at me with this tiny smile. I make some face at her, and she breaks into cackles, and then we’re both laughing.
That’s it, the whole memory. Felice teases out all of the little details, like the way Bianca’s smile starts sad and then the indentations around her mouth and eyes change shape. The surprise in Bianca’s face when I make whatever face I’m making, and then the giggle.
I tense up, but Felice is already showing me a comforting memory of snow washing across an ice field, kilometers away from anything.
I don’t know why the Gelet are trying to hurt me like this. Except, of course I know.
I find myself going to all my favorite places in the midnight city, greedy to stockpile memories for what I already realize is coming. The area where they put new organs inside me, removing part of a lung, feels sore and fatigued. Some strain, deep under the skin and bone.
I clamber down, out of my favorite hammock in the plaza, and Jean and River are both standing nearby, come to visit me. They both open their pincers, extending their tendrils to touch my chest. I brace myself for another old memory of when I was human.
Instead, though, Jean and River show me a plan. Me, as I am now—with sensitive, vulnerable tendrils on my sternum, two tentacles climbing out of my back, and indistinct shapes on my abdomen—walking the streets of Xiosphant. Using the gifts the Gelet have given me to help other humans understand. In time, recruiting other humans who can become like me, so we can create whole families of hybrids, who can also recruit.
They’re going to send me away. Send me home. Looking like this, hideous to human eyes, with no protection. I saw this coming, but I wasn’t prepared, and trying to see myself through the eyes of Xiosphanti makes me feel sick to my core. I let out a tiny gasp, which sounds monstrously loud to me after so long keeping silent.
mouth
Mouth almost went into a coma after the Gelet showed her how they had destroyed the Citizens. She wanted to. She even tried to. She made every effort to let the darkness around her suffuse her. She could not recall the walking mountain of ice, weeping its astringent blood, without hand tremors. She could never accept the Gelet visions, or whatever they were, in any case, but her mind could do almost nothing with that toxic ice, destroying a crèche full of infants, except rebel against itself.
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.”