“I guess I just value actual breathing people, who are alive now, more than the writings of people who are already dead.”
“You were the one who wanted to help me steal the Invention—anyway, it’s over. I failed. I’ll never get another shot. And I couldn’t have saved Bianca’s friends. They were doomed before I met them.”
“Maybe the part that worries me is where you care about ghosts more than the people who are right in front of you,” said Alyssa, who sat close enough for the scent of sweat and hair oil to reach Mouth. “You know, with Omar gone, we depend on each other to survive more than ever.”
“I’m here,” Mouth grunted. “I’m not carrying any ghosts. And now that we’re out of that city, I feel more alive than in ages. Walls and other people’s rules fuck me up.”
Mouth needed half her concentration to drive the sled, and the other half to avoid falling into despair. She kept thinking that if she only had the Invention, she could have said the right words over Omar’s corpse, a proper goodbye to one of the few decent people she’d ever known. The Invention would’ve helped her to cope, to understand what she had lost when she was a child, and all the loss since then. But instead, the loss of the Citizens felt like an old wound gone septic.
But Mouth tried to put on a good face for Alyssa, who’d risked her neck waiting for her at the Low Road after the others had gone. They’d been sleepmates for five and a half round trips now, and there was something about your sleep patterns syncing with another person’s that felt like intimacy. Mouth wasn’t sure how to say any of this out loud.
“Do you remember any of it?” Alyssa said a while later. By now, the marshes were a stained-glass mirror spread before them.
“Any of what?” Mouth was grappling with the control for the mudguards.
“Any of that poetry. The poems you were so desperate to get your hands on.”
“I guess. More just the rhythm than any actual words. Snatches.”
Mouth tried to reconstruct one of the verses in her head, and her heart beat so fast she thought she might die. She had a sudden memory of Yolanda leading all of them in one of the songs of gratitude, and had to gasp out loud. That ball of barbed wire was back inside her chest.
“Could you recite some of the poetry now? For me?”
Mouth looked around. None of the other Couriers could hear. Sophie and Bianca were all the way behind the sled, having some fancy student drama.
The marshes swallowed their wheels. The mudguards barely helped. Everyone on foot sank up to their knees. The air smelled like rotten fish and sewage, the marshwater glinted with daylight, and the horseflies swarmed, ready to carry off a piece of you in their mandibles.
“Yeah. Right here. Why not.” This felt like a test, of whether Mouth trusted Alyssa, or whether these poems had been worth so much scheming.
Mouth could only stall for so long.
The Citizens’ poetry was written in the old language, Noölang. The one Mouth remembered best was about an old peach tree growing by some fluke, out in the wild meadows between the towns of Untaz and Wurtaz. Every time the travelers passed, they had fresh peaches, big and purple as life, with juicy strands inside them. Until a small town sprang up around the tree. The townspeople tried to plant an orchard and harvest the fruit according to their own schedules, and make peach bread to sell to other towns.
The next time the travelers passed, the soil was dead, there was no fruit, and the town was gone.
Mouth thought of Yolanda, the Priors, everybody, and felt like throwing up.
“Come on,” Alyssa said. “Speak up. I want to hear. Please.”
Mouth recited, louder and with more oratory, like when they used to do one of their “theater troupe” things, long ago:
Alyssa was nodding. “That was beautiful. You have a lovely voice when you’re not threatening to kill everyone in sight.”
“I should kill people sooner and skip the threats, then. My voice would be fresher.”
Alyssa laughed at that.
“The Citizens.” Mouth hesitated. “They were supposed to give me a name. I was… I was at the age. We had a whole rite of passage. You got your real name around the time your body changed, along with the story of who you were. ‘Mouth’ is just a temporary name, for a person who hasn’t earned one yet.”
“I always wondered why you were called that.” Alyssa shook her head, swatting away horseflies. “So what happened? They all died before they could name you?”
“No.” Mouth wove the steering wheel back and forth. “They kept delaying, until I was almost too old. They said, over and over, that I wasn’t ready. Some test, I don’t know what, I never passed. And then, yeah, eventually they all died.”
Mouth had never talked to anyone about any of this. And talking about it now made her feel much worse—guilty for talking to an outsider, but also heartsick. Nothing Mouth could say might do justice to the reality of the Citizens, or just how completely Mouth had failed them, both then and now. She was out here, on the road, with one horizon blazing and the other drowning everything in its emptiness, and she felt as though the Elementals were watching her. Counting her failures.
A horsefly took a chunk out of Mouth’s hand. They came in swarms, tearing your skin, until you bled all over. Little bastards. Nearby, Reynold waved a bat around, making a splattering noise whenever it connected with two or three at a swing.
“Ugh.” Mouth drove faster through the last of the swamp, so horseflies exploded against the sled’s front window, coating it with their glutinous bodies.
They reached the rocky strip, covered with pebbles, that separated the marshlands from the Sea of Murder. Mouth climbed out of the sled and searched for the hidden skiff. There ought to be a bunch of landmarks, like this one inlet and a thumb-shaped rock, but brand-new thistles (another invasive species) waved their candy-colored heads everywhere and camouflaged the shoreline. You could memorize landscapes all you wanted, but everything was like that peach tree: here one time, gone the next.
Bianca stared out at the Sea of Murder. “It’s just so gorgeous,” she said. “I’ve seen pictures but… this is breathtaking.”
Mouth followed her eyeline, and had to gasp after all. You spent all your time on the Sea of Murder trying not to end up one of the corpses who drift down to the bottom to be eaten by the giant squids that lurked inside the hulks of old warships. But the water smelled crisp and salty, especially nice after the swamp gas. Moonlight spangled the waves—and that was the other thing. You could see the moon. Stars, too. Something about convection, or the air currents, peeled away the clouds that kept an off-white haze overhead everywhere else. The sky turned a dark creamy blue, and you could make out a handful of craters in the shape of a footprint on the moon. Bianca was probably seeing stars with her own eyes for the first time.