The women who had shot him ran away, guns raised. Mouth was going to shrug this off, but Alyssa spotted the four-winged horse on the man’s lapel and said, “We have to kill those ladies.” But as soon as they had brought down the two shooters, who wore the Brilliant crest on their jackets, gunshots came from a second-story window. The bullets tore into the two Brilliant corpses as Mouth and Alyssa hunched behind a trash cart. At last Alyssa tagged the second-story shooter and he fell next to the first dead man with the Perfectionist badge.
Mouth’s pager lit up at the same time as Alyssa’s. Mouth fumbled in one of her pockets for the four-winged-horse badge, which she hardly bothered to wear.
They headed for the Perfectionist HQ. When they were a block away, the sky changed again, and Mouth felt something splash on her face. A droplet of liquid fire. Her skin sizzled, with a sensation like a scalpel cut. Another drop fell, then another, and before Mouth and Alyssa could finish remarking on the first rainfall in ages, this caustic liquid was descending in a constant barrage. People ran for shelter, chemical burns on their faces and hands.
Inside the Perfectionist building, with its dark-stained wood walls and nightclub decor, someone was explaining that this toxic rain had happened a couple other times lately. Scientists said a whole ocean of magma flowed across part of the day, bothering nobody—until recently, when the temperature had increased slightly. Some of the magma had evaporated, and seeded the atmosphere with alkali deposits. The beauty of nature.
Sasha was handing out rifles from a crate. “You took your sweet time getting here.”
“What are we even fighting about?” Mouth asked.
Sasha looked at Mouth with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Alyssa kicked Mouth’s ankle.
“Blame those assholes, the Superbosses. They made us look weak. And then we had to make a deal with the Alva Family to stay afloat. The peace in Argelo was all about people owing each other favors, an ecosystem. But it was always fragile, and everybody got something. The Jamersons are killing the Absolutists, and the Unifiers are slaughtering the Mandrakes.”
At first, Mouth didn’t recognize the emotion on the faces of all the Perfectionists: relief. Everyone was relieved to be fighting at last. No more making nice, they could finally kill (almost) everyone who ever got on their nerves.
The rain was too dense to see through. The pavement smoked.
“Fuck the Unifiers!” A woman shoved a burly man onto the pavement, not caring that the rain spattered her face. The man pulled a machete and swung it at the woman, with skinless hands. She splashed his face with rainwater using her bare hands, then sucker-punched him.
Across the street, two men ran past. They held a sheet of metal over their own heads, which would fall unless they both held it up. They kept slashing at each other with knives in their free hands.
Alyssa was talking to one woman in the corner of the space, who had fresh rain burns on her cheek and a gun clutched in both hands. Her name was Janice, and she was an economist who had gone to Perfectionist schools and now lived in Perfectionist housing in the nice part of the dusk, where all her neighbors were Perfectionists too. She spent most of her time trying to solve the problem of hyperinflation when she wasn’t trying to kill everyone in sight. “I need to get back out there,” she snarled, “I don’t need rest, I need justice. I’ll rest after justice is done.”
“Mouth. Got a job for you.” Sasha came over, rifle under one arm. “We need to take over the central food depository. People ought to see we’re protecting the food supply, so they’ll respect our authority. Plus everyone will need to kiss our asses unless they want to starve. Only trouble is, these dickfaces with bolo guns are guarding it. And we can’t risk damaging the food.”
“Shouldn’t we just wait until the rain stops?” Mouth already knew that was the wrong thing to say.
“Who says the rain is going to stop?” Sasha said.
Mouth was about to argue further, but Alyssa grabbed her arm with both hands and pulled her aside. “We promised to fight for these people. We owe them.” She stared at Mouth with a quirk in her left eye. “This is what I keep telling you. I need you to be here for me now, not stuck in the past with dead people who never even cared about you.”
Mouth took a rifle from Sasha, then turned back to Alyssa. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. “I ought to honor my promises, or nobody will put up with me, right?” Alyssa smiled and tossed her head, then wished Mouth luck.
Afterward, Mouth didn’t like to think about what came next. You wrap yourself in layers of padding and packing tape, like a parcel, and run through the burning rain as if you could dodge the droplets. Each step kicks up sprays that make you gag. Everything looks gray, almost translucent, and it reminds you of the night vision and its smudgy view of a bloodbath. At last you reach the depository, where the guards sit on the floor and lean against the wall, staring out the window, and you throw a rain-soaked axe into the face of the first one to stand up. The next guard shoots and misses, then shreds your protective layers with a knife. You fall outside, where he headbutts you into a hot puddle. And so on.
Then your only orders are to hold the depository, so you sit with your fellow Perfectionists, plus the people you just killed. Nobody is going to relieve you until the rain stops, and the rain goes on so long you witness the dead bodies decomposing in real time, until someone has enough and flings them outside. The rainfall speeds the process of breaking them down, but it still seems to take forever. At least you’re in a food warehouse, so there’s plenty to eat.
SOPHIE
A flash illuminates the raindrops outside, turning them into slivers of tinted glass strung between statues caught in distorted poses.
I’ve memorized every tile on the wall of this Khartoum restaurant, and seen every loop of the fancy wall projections that are supposed to simulate a virtual souq. We’ve almost exhausted their stores of kisra, aseedaa, and kajaik, and Bianca keeps threatening to make a break for it using a drink tray as a rain-shield. Even with the fancy screens that filter the light into gentle waves, I still have a clear view of the street outside, where a group of men and women slash each other with long blunt knives. Their family emblems have tarnished to the point where people no longer have clear targets. At least half their guns are too old to work under this corrosive downpour, from the shouts I’ve overheard. I wish with all my heart that I’d been at Ahmad and Katrina’s place when the rain started, or even Mouth and Alyssa’s.
This view reminds me of the Glacier Fools, and I have to shut my eyes. I keep wondering if any of the Gelet died in that disaster, and whether they think I led them into an ambush on purpose.
“I don’t know how you can stand to look out that window,” Bianca says from the bar, where she’s nursing some sweet liquor. She’s still wearing her scoop-necked dress covered with the pearly scales of some rare breed of pheasant that lives past the swamps to the south.
We had come to this restaurant to reconnect, just the two of us, before the next party and the next one after that. But we’ve been trapped in here for ages, and we haven’t talked much. The restaurant staff are all hiding in the back.
Bianca comes toward me. Some wild creature that’s been trapped inside me for a long time wants to touch her. To spin around and use my momentum to pull her into my orbit, then clasp my arm around her. I remember how I held her on the Sea of Murder, when death seemed so close that I could say anything. The storm battered us, wrecked our sense of balance, until I thought the skiff would shatter under our feet. That’s become my happiest memory.