“I remember them saying that,” Mouth said. “I’ve tried to stop overthinking things ever since.”
Barney left the sheep dangling from the ceiling in his small kitchen area and came to sit down next to Mouth. He kneaded his dishtowel into the shape of a thorn and placed it on the table between them.
“Part of me was relieved when you told me how the Citizens ended.” Barney winced. “All of their teachings were about standing between these two extremes, and then coming out stronger and with more clarity. When the Citizens never came back to Argelo, and I realized something must have happened, I thought maybe they’d finally given in to the delirium. And I was glad they all just died instead. I know that sounds awful.”
Mouth nodded. “They didn’t betray the teachings.” Then she decided to ask the most important thing. “The crocodiles. They showed me a… an experience. A vision. I don’t know. They had some kind of flower that they were growing in the lava vents, that opened in the heart of the mountain. And I have this vague memory of seeing those flowers when I was little.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Barney said. “We went to Mount Abacus all the time. It was one of our sacred places. I usually stayed below and cooked for everybody.”
“You don’t know anything about it at all?”
“I don’t know anything about anything,” Barney said. “You want to know what I’ve learned? That I don’t know anything. Time passes, even when you can’t see it, and people keep grudges too long and die too soon. I’m just an old fart who makes sheep into meatloaf.”
After that, Barney wouldn’t answer any more questions, and kept insisting that Mouth should take off for a while because she was scaring away customers. “You stay here any longer, I’m going to make you wash dishes.” Mouth’s legs had gone numb from sitting too long, but she beat some life back into them.
Sophie stayed at Alyssa and Mouth’s place long enough to become a fixture on their bed, sprawled out, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, and not moving except to eat or wash. Then she was gone, all at once. Alyssa and Mouth were still left with the problem of organizing some kind of memorial for Reynold. Nobody could reach Yulya or Kendrick, not even Ahmad. And Reynold didn’t seem to have any other family or friends left in Argelo. So in the end, they held a tiny wake with just Ahmad, Katrina, and Sophie, where everyone except Ahmad swigged from the same flask of swamp vodka.
Afterward, Alyssa and Mouth wandered alone, under a weird-looking sky. The perpetual cloud cover had gotten a shade darker, and instead of the usual even sheets of off-white the clouds had started folding in on themselves. In the middle of the vortex, Mouth thought she saw a pair of beetle eyes, fixed on her personally. Mouth shuddered. “Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, that’s what I love about Argelo,” Alyssa said without looking around. “Something’s always wrong. That’s what gives the city its special pungency.” She pulled the collar of her jacket up around her head and hunched over, in the classic stay-away posture of a hardened Argelan.
They kept walking until they ended up in the Snake District. The light bounced off all the stucco walls and packed-mud rooftops and gave Mouth a kernel of pain behind the center of her forehead. The heat made everything smell rotten. But Alyssa was in a mood after the wake, and she had steered them toward the neighborhood where she’d grown up, more or less on purpose.
“You’re not the only one who’s reconnected with their heritage lately.” Alyssa gazed at a lane between two tall buildings, so narrow you couldn’t walk with arms outstretched. Weeds had come up through the cracks between flagstones, mostly those claw-leafed stalks that covered the rocks out past the Southern Wastes. Native to this planet, unlike a lot of the other greenery that ran wild around here.
“I never thought about Argelo much, except as a place to drop off stuff and pick up other stuff, and maybe spend some of our pay on swamp vodka and blue-jean dancers,” Alyssa said. “It’s only now that I’ve been stuck here that I’m realizing just how much of Argelo is inside me.”
They were walking through the places Alyssa played when she was little, the places her mother and uncles all worked. She kept pointing out where the Chancers, her old crew, had stolen something or tricked somebody. “One time Natalie didn’t look in the right place for the insignia and she accidentally robbed a guy with the Unifier crest. We had to stay underground for what felt like our whole lives. Oooh, there’s my favorite building that we were paid to set on fire. Don’t worry, nobody was inside at the time. You can still see the scorchmarks. Beautiful stripe shapes.”
Some of the Chancers had gone south and settled in some dirt-pit, making booze to sell in the city. “I guess I wasn’t prepared for nostalgia to kick me in the face the way it did. I guess that’s why I wanted to go back into the old gangster life.”
Alyssa needed to hear something, but Mouth was coming up empty. Mouth used to know how to respond to things, she had a whole catalog, but now even situations that ought to be familiar left her fumbling in her mind.
Mouth kept picturing snow washing over the faces of the corpses in the night, Reynold and the others, covering them but also distorting their features as they turned solid. The cold and sensory deprivation of full night had torn away some of Mouth’s armor, and then something about experiencing life in an utterly different physical shape, and feeling all the foreign emotions, had poked decent-sized holes in her sense of self. But most of all, the image of delicate blossoms in the heart of a mountain felt like a message from death itself.
Mouth said, “Sometimes I wish I had died at the same time as the other nomads. I don’t know why I deserved to survive.”
“Oh, daylight and ashes. Who cares why you survived? It’s probably because you’re so annoying that even death couldn’t stand to put up with you,” Alyssa said.
“I think me surviving was the worst thing that could have happened, because I’ve only kept a cruel mockery of the Citizens alive in my head.”
By now they had gotten back toward the nicer part of the town, where you could hear drums and laughter, and smell the scent of fish pies still crisp from the oven. Plus someone frying stale bread, an Argelan custom, meant to commemorate some citywide moment of confession and reconciliation, a long time ago, that nobody could agree on the details of now.
“I really hoped getting you in touch with that professor would help you to figure out your past, and then you would come back to me,” Alyssa said. “But I feel like I’m having to watch my own back, with a bullet wound still healing in my side.”
The dead flowers in the core of the mountain seemed different each time Mouth remembered, but she always thought of sickness, corruption, in the heart of the Citizens’ holiest place. An enemy of life.
“This is not the Mouth I chose as my sleepmate and road buddy. Remember when we met? You stood out from the rest of the Resourceful Couriers like a daisy in a field of shit. Afraid of nothing, foul-mouthed, full of contempt for everyone’s rules. You punched more people than you spoke to. You lied to more people than you let touch you. That’s the Mouth I want back.”
Mouth tried to take Alyssa’s words inside her, as if they were blueprints for something Mouth could build from scraps. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
They kept walking down the winding streets, ducking out of the way of hand-carts and a couple of small lorries. They argued about music and games and whether they were better combined, while Mouth tried to avoid looking up. Until a man fell dead at their feet.