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.
SOPHIE
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.
I don’t know what happened to that teapot. My old memories haven’t gotten any clearer thanks to my gift, and I only remember what I remember. So the teapot only lives in that one moment, and a few others. Maybe we broke it, maybe it got lost, maybe it’s still in a cupboard at the Gymnasium somewhere. In my recollection, it had green cornflowers painted on it, and a thin crack where the lid connected.
I take refuge in the very hottest part of town. Corroded corrugated aluminum, hot to the touch, right next to my face. I huddle there, sweating and suffocating, during the twelfth bell, the recessional chimes, and, at last, the shutters-up warning. My shoulder still burns, and I worry it’s infected. I’ve been so stupid. The Gelet are counting on my help, but I can’t stop throwing away my life for Bianca. It’s all I ever do.
Mouth probably died at the Palace. Even now that Bianca is lost to me, the idea of Mouth being dead cuts deeper than I could have expected. I remember her story of the blue wings, and the way the Gelet recoiled when I conveyed it to them. I should have helped Mouth find another name, one that didn’t remind her constantly of bones and lost chances.
My love for Bianca feels like a feature of the landscape that recedes farther into the distance the longer I stare. I wonder how much she’s sleeping now that she’s home, and whether she dreams of me.
I need to leave my hiding place to find some food, and that’s when I spot the symbol. Painted in yellow on the peeling stucco wall of an empty shoe factory, the glyph twists in on itself, with the shape of wings and one long tooth. I stare awhile before I remember where I saw it before: on some of the books in Hernan’s study, at the Illyrian Parlour. I hesitate one moment longer, and then push open the tiny door.
Jeremy crouches in a wide-armed chair next to a coffee urn in the style of Old Zagreb, with a cloudy ancient copy of a Mayhew tract in both hands. Cyrus the marmot stretches out on one arm of the chair, grumbling. Jeremy looks up and smiles at me. “You made it. I saw your picture all over town, so I tried to leave a message that only you would understand. I’m so glad you’re here.”
He gives me food, and clean water, and a place to sit, and then he sets about tending my shoulder.
* * *
Jeremy talks twice as fast as before, now that we’re a long way from the Parlour. And meanwhile, Cyrus seems even more languid than ever, though he cozies up to Jeremy the same way he used to with Hernan. Jeremy says Hernan kept the Parlour open for a while, and things seemed to quiet down after I left. But some time later, there was another crackdown on anti-Circadianist elements, and Hernan had to close shop after all. This all happened ages ago. I keep being shocked by how much time passed while I was away. It’s already 4 Silence after Crimson, according to the calendar on the wall. Hernan ended up on the run, and eventually died of an infection that spread to his blood.
Besides Cyrus and the samovar, Jeremy has saved a few other things from the Parlour. He digs in a wooden crate until he pulls out a scrap of wax paper: my mother’s painting of me standing near some barley stalks. “Hernan told me to give you this, if I ever saw you again.” I stare at the tiny figure, whose face is turned away, and the light, from somewhere out of the frame, that limns her cheek and the tips of the newly harvested crops. I count every brushstroke, as if I could see my mother’s hand if I concentrate hard enough. And then I roll it, tenderly, and tuck it inside a pouch in my cloak.
Then I sit with Jeremy, and he tells me about the new Uprising: he and his friends are working to unseat our new vice regent and her foreign allies. This dusty storage room, scorching even with the shutters closed, is one of his hideouts.
“All of that training Hernan gave us.” Jeremy shakes his head. “Turns out it’s quite helpful for politics. I know how to fire people up, by doing more or less the opposite of what you and I used to do.”
I start to try to explain about Bianca, how I still believe she never wanted to hurt anyone, even now, and Jeremy hushes me.
“I don’t need you to tell me anything,” he says. “I want you to show me.”
I just stare. His face, lit by a single beam from an old handheld light, looks like a landscape of arid gullies. Cyrus is peering up at me too; maybe he recognizes me, or wonders what’s going on.
“You want me to…” I whisper.