“We’re all Xiosphanti now,” people always say, as if those seven cities dissolved into one people the moment we stepped onto this planet. Even Bianca would never talk about her roots when she and I whispered together after curfew.
Hernan proudly mentions his family came from Zagreb, which is an even more shocking confession, given what the history books say. He doesn’t flinch, or cavil, or act embarrassed by his own rudeness. He just comes out and says it, often right before he lectures me and the other servers about the beautiful way that everything was done in Old Zagreb at its peak.
He doesn’t talk so much about what came later.
But still, Hernan is afraid of something, or perhaps just waiting for tragedy to arrive. This place can’t last, we all know that—but he knows it more than we do.
“Do you know why your mother used to come here?” Hernan asks me, without looking up from Cyrus.
“Yes,” I say, without thinking about it.
“You do? Oh good. Please do tell me. I always wondered.”
“Oh, uh, well,” I say. “She was always so frazzled. My mom, you know, she was a bank for one of the farmwheels. And it was her job to fix everybody else’s messes, all the time. And then she would come home, and my father…” I stop, and pull the conversation back from what was about to be a bad place. “So she came here, to be at peace. That’s what I thought, anyway.”
“Your mother was a very talented artist who never had a chance to share her art with anyone,” Hernan says, “which you’ll find is true of many of our clients here. But she also believed in assimilation and being a good Xiosphanti, and she spent her life keeping all these wheels turning. I think on some level she disapproved of the Parlour, with all our decadence, but we were the only ones who could give her what she needed. Whatever that was. As I said, I still don’t know.”
“What kind of art?” I say, in a whisper that’s not my usual whisper. I don’t want to ruin whatever is happening here, this moment that Cyrus and I have catalyzed.
Hernan just gestures at one of the paintings cluttering the walclass="underline" a little girl, standing in front of a pile of barley fresh from the farmwheel. The girl is a smudge of light brown, set off by green-and-white highlights on her chemise and ankle-skirt, and the stalks of barley are a rusty blond.
My mother painted my picture, and I never saw her do it.
I stare for a long time, until the image resolves into brushstrokes, but I can’t turn it into a scene whatever I do. It’s just a girl, and some barley, and no context. The harder I try to imagine the whole moment and place my mother in it, the more powerful the sense of absence becomes, until absence is the meaning of the picture. I hear stuttering breaths from my own mouth, like an echo of Cyrus’s purr; I suckle my own lower lip.
When I get my voice back, I say: “She couldn’t have disapproved of this place too much. She brought me here with her.”
“True,” Hernan says, just cradling Cyrus now. “Or maybe she just thought you would need this place eventually, even more than she did.”
mouth
Alyssa and Mouth met for drinks at the Low Road, right after Mouth had come back from yet another one of those political meetings where everyone kept quoting from ancient thinkers like Mayhew and Grantham. (“Sleep when you’re sleepy, play when you want,” and “People are most imprisoned by the walls they help to build.”)
“What are you even playing at?” Alyssa demanded, once she caught the stench of another dank factory basement on Mouth’s clothes. “Why are you getting sucked into politics anyway? You always told me politics is for settlers.”
“Politics is a bloody waste of time,” Mouth snorted. “This isn’t about politics.”
Alyssa knew Mouth too well, that was the problem. She was the one who held tight during all of Mouth’s bad dreams, nursed Mouth through her bouts of lightsickness, and cried on Mouth’s shoulder when the road started to eat at her soul. Mouth had shown Alyssa how to catch those little weasels under the crust of the road, which you could live off if you had to, and Alyssa had trained Mouth to shoot a gun. Alyssa even taught Mouth some of the songs from her bat mitzvah, and the stories from the Torah, some of which were about nomads. By now, Alyssa knew all of Mouth’s tells.
“This is about what I said before, that you and I might be getting too old to be smugglers.” Alyssa sipped and made a face. “Now you’re trying to prove something by hanging out with Granthamites who are barely old enough to wank. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, love. You’re not even that much older than me. And anyway, I didn’t mean ‘old’ in terms of physical decay. I meant that I’m burning out. I have dreams about the road, and they all end with my bones in a hole. Even if we had a tunnel and a supplier, we might still be stuck here.”
Mouth sighed and guzzled gin-and-milk. This goddamn local drink tasted like cat butter that had gone bad. To be fair, even fresh cat butter tasted as if it had gone bad. Who exactly was going to trade bauxite for cat butter? Mouth understood enough of that “calendar” to know George had been stringing them along for thirty turns of the shutters.
“I’m working on something.”
“Uh-huh.” Alyssa stared at Mouth. “So you’re scamming these kids? Or what?”
Mouth looked around, like government spies could be hiding behind the ugly placard outside, which commemorated the victims of the great cattle stampede long ago, during the Seventh Age of Luck.
“I need to get inside the Palace.” Mouth gave up on trying to keep a secret from Alyssa. “There’s something in there that I need. They probably don’t even know they have it. It’s worthless to almost anybody, but it’s priceless to me. Remember how I vanished after our meeting with George the Bank? I was scoping out the entrances and exits, and there’s no way I can get inside the Palace on my own. The guards have guards.”
“So, you need a thief. Someone who knows all about breaking into places like that.” Alyssa had always loved stories of palace thieves, the whole time Mouth had known her. Something about the glamour, the disguises, or the inevitable seduction of some handsome count just did it for her. Mouth had seen Alyssa kill three people with a single knife, but she still melted when she listened to one of her old audios of long-dead actors playing out some sexy burglary. Alyssa’s hometown had no palace, no prince, no councilors. All the Argelan kids grew up with dramas and stories about the fine houses here in Xiosphant, until it became a fairytale of gold leaf, mahogany, and velvet, with trumpets and swooning any time anyone entered a room. You only fantasize about princes when you’ve never seen one.
“No thieves,” Mouth just grunted. “They don’t have a lot of thievery in the fancy part of town, after what they did to the last one they caught. Anyway, I don’t have time to recruit a debonair master of disguise, just to steal one item out of a giant vault.”
“What exactly is it?”
Mouth hesitated. “It’s… all that’s left of my culture. The people who raised me.”
“The nomads?” Alyssa perked up, because she’d always wanted to know more about Mouth’s childhood.
Mouth was going to need a lot more gin-and-milk if they were going to talk about this. She had long since turned her upbringing into a handful of cute anecdotes about “the nomads who raised me,” which she’d crafted with great care, to avoid straying into painful territory. But Alyssa was giving her that look, the one she had whenever Mouth had lightsickness and was trying to cover. And maybe Mouth owed Alyssa more than just a rehearsed story.