Just in time, Ray came over and refilled their cups.
“We called ourselves the Citizens,” Mouth said, slowly. “We had a whole other relationship with the road than the Resourceful Couriers have. Like, the road was where we lived, not just where we passed through on our way to someplace else. It sounds stupid when I say it like that. We believed that if we kept walking out there, we could learn to keep company with the day and the night. We always stopped in these small towns along the way, and we became something different each time. One town, we’d be traveling performers, like a theater troupe or some musicians. The next town, we’d be carpenters. Or pest controllers. We were experts at becoming whatever the local people wanted us to be, so we always earned our keep. Until the end, anyway.”
Now Alyssa had the same expression as when she listened to her old-timey actors having a stolen romance—like Mouth’s loss was the loveliest part of a heartbreaking story. Mouth tried not to hold it against her.
“One time,” Mouth said, “we walked farther than ever before, probably farther than anybody ever had. We came to the other side of the world, and we found a canyon. Wide enough to fit five Xiosphants inside. No way to cross, you couldn’t build a bridge wide enough even if you had all the heavy metals in the world. We just stood there and gawped at the other side, through all the mist, and tried to see all the way down to the bottom. And then we turned around and went back the way we came.”
“So how do we steal this thing that’s in the Palace?” Alyssa said.
“You don’t do anything,” Mouth said. “You enjoy your vacation and live off the spoils from our last job, assuming George doesn’t screw us, which I’m putting at fifty-fifty right now.”
“You really think I’m going to let you do this on your own?” Alyssa slapped the table with one fresh-manicured hand. “What kind of bitch do you think I am?”
“The kind of bitch who knows this is none of her business.”
“Shut your filthy hole. You’re my sleepmate. We always have each other’s backs. That doesn’t stop just because we’re off the road.”
Mouth looked at Alyssa. Eyes all bright and wide. Nostrils flared a little, head thrown back to expose a delicate neck and collarbone. “I’m asking you, just this once. Stay out of this. I can already tell it’s going to get ugly.”
Alyssa kept arguing, but eventually she gave up and went to check on the rest of the Couriers, who were still shacked up in the back of a furniture store while George worked out the kinks in their deal.
Mouth always met her informant in the same place, at a small table made of unvarnished banyan wood, in the spicy-yeasty cellar of an oatmeal restaurant. And always at the same time: three chimes after the red-and-blue smoke. Mouth usually arrived first and then sat alone, as motionless and slumped over as one of those black banyan trees that lined the dry gullies in the Northern Ranges.
The girl arrived late, as usual, limned with a grief that dulled her gaze and put heavy lines on a face that seemed like it was made for laughter. “Hey,” she muttered as she sat opposite Mouth. “Thanks for waiting.”
Bianca had high cheekbones, ears shaped like dewdrops, and the sleek confidence of the Xiosphanti ruling class—you could tell some of her ancestors had ridden in the New Shanghai compartment, though you could never say so in this town.
“I’ve been having one of those times when I see her face everywhere, and I just want to scream,” Bianca said.
“I’ve lost a lot of people, and I’m very familiar with the thing where the past becomes an optical illusion.” Mouth chewed every other word before she spoke it.
“How do you deal with it? How do you keep from just screaming and breaking things every time you see someone that you know is dead?”
Mouth didn’t have a good answer for that. The whole reason she was meeting with Bianca was to appease the dead, but that was none of Bianca’s concern.
Those fools had stuck the Invention in a vault inside the Palace, just two kilometers away from here, and maybe this, at last, was the reason why Mouth had elbowed her way past death so many times. So Mouth tried to come up with something to say to Bianca.
“I don’t know. Dreams intrude into reality all the time, and you can’t waste your energy getting mad at them.”
The banyan trees this table was made of had been grown from Earth seeds, spliced with DNA from local flora, and the result had been oily flesh, hard-pebbled skin, and misdirected growth.
“I’m not pissed off at dreams.” Bianca laughed and shook her head. She had to stop talking because a waiter showed up, and she was ordering swamp vodka for both of them. Mouth realized that Bianca’s Xiosphanti had gotten less formal, with fewer clumsy attempts to pin a social status on Mouth, than the first time they’d talked.
Mouth had made three short visits to the Founders’ Square, near the Palace, to try to scope out entrances and exits, and had found no obvious holes in the security. But she’d noticed something else: a gang of twitchy young people who were clearly doing the same thing she was. She’d eavesdropped enough to figure out this was the Uprising, and they were planning something serious. Some kind of political action inside the Palace, and they knew about some secret passage that led all the way in. Plus they had some way of getting past the guards outside. Since then, Mouth had attended as many political gatherings as she could.
But none of the leaders of the Uprising trusted Mouth. Except for Bianca, who ate up Mouth’s stories of visiting other places where they did everything different—including Argelo, the City that Never Sleeps.
The swamp vodka arrived.
“Your friend gave her life for the Uprising, right? So you’re honoring her memory the best you can.” Mouth forced herself to drink, even though the fumes made her sick to her stomach.
Bianca shook her head. “Sophie wasn’t part of the Uprising. Neither was I, back then. We were just kids, playing at being revolutionaries. We never would have overthrown a coffee table. But then Sophie… she took the blame for a few food dollars that I borrowed.” She choked down some swamp vodka and hissed in her throat. “The ludicrous part is, if they had found that money in my pocket instead of hers, they probably would have let me off with a warning. They took one look at her and decided she ought to die.”
“They were trying to send a message,” Mouth said.
“They were being operated by the machinery of the state. They weren’t trying to do anything, really.”
A single electric torch lit the cellar behind Bianca’s head, casting shadows that gave her two black eyes and a long mouth.
“Most people die for stupid reasons. The most anyone can hope for is to make some noise before that happens.” Mouth forced herself to gulp more swamp vodka, to encourage Bianca to keep drinking.
“I never even got to tell Sophie how much she meant to me,” Bianca said. “I didn’t even realize myself, until she was gone. Nobody else ever saw the side of her that I got to see, when we were alone together. She had these amazing insights. I couldn’t wait to see what she would become. The whole world would have learned to admire her. If only—”
Bianca spat out a little blood from chewing her own tongue, but she still didn’t let the tears out, like she hadn’t earned them.
Mouth didn’t get why Bianca had to join these rebels when she was probably destined for a leadership position inside Xiosphant’s government anyhow, if she just kept her head down, and then she could change things from the inside. But Bianca kept saying she didn’t want to be co-opted, to become part of the problem, and she couldn’t play it safe after what they did to her friend.