The first time I tried to understand this story, I had thought “Anchor-Banter” referred to the apprentice gardener, and the prince’s destructive love for her. I didn’t even get the thing about the tailor. Alyssa’s explanation helped a lot, though the whole thing still seemed incongruously mystical.
Still, Alyssa says when you identify your Anchor-Banter, you have two choices: You can figure out why this person is connected to you. Or you can join forces with them, and cause trouble for everyone else.
According to Mouth, every pile in this scrapyard tells a different story about Argelo. She points out a wire-mesh bundle of filthy, corroded old Founders’ Celebration rattles, from a brief period when Argelo tried to mass-produce cheap junk to send to Xiosphant in exchange for food or technology. On the other side, a heap of busted shell casings and shattered bayonets, from the last great war with Xiosphant (either the fifth or the sixth, depending on how you reckoned). She gestures at a wall of garbage that includes: melted plastic farm implements from when the Argelan People’s Congress launched an “Everyone Farms” campaign; tarnished badges from political parties and families that nobody even remembers; rust-eaten prospector gear from the heyday of treasure meteorites; packages for various fad cures for lightsickness, fungal infections, and delirium; and rotted placards depicting the great exodus from Xiosphant to Argelo.
I wrap a cloth around my mouth and nose to protect against the fumes from some combination of rotting plastic and battery acid.
“Well, you said you wanted to talk someplace where nobody could hear us,” Mouth says, gesturing around at the brightly colored piles.
“Yeah, I did. I need your help, and I don’t trust anybody in this blighted city anymore.”
Ever since Bianca showed me her invasion fleet, I’ve been dizzy, as if the sheer weight of my rage has sprung my inner ear. I feel like wrecking this whole city with my bare hands. Every time my anger runs out of fuel, I fall into mourning, as if my feelings for Bianca have gone sour forever. Part of me still can’t believe that Bianca has changed, but another buried part has seen this happening for a long time. I keep thinking back to everything that’s happened since we left home. The look on Bianca’s face after we survived the Sea of Murder, the way she insisted on seeing the Gelet as my servants, the frenzy with which she threw herself into high society. Even the things she said in the storeroom, when we first slept here. She’s been planning to use me, almost since we left home.
Mouth is looking at me, and I realize I haven’t spoken for a while. “I need you to help me disappear for a while,” I say. I start to tell Mouth what Bianca’s planning, and it turns out she already knows most of it, except for my part.
“I’ll do what I can, but you should know that I can’t fight.” Mouth looks down. “My hands won’t cooperate, no matter what I try, ever since the rainstorm. Wasn’t like I chose to become a pacifist or anything, just that my body decided on its own.”
Mouth somehow looks even worse than she did after the Glacier Fools. She has fresh burn scars on her neck from that scorching rain, and a cut on her cheek that looks infected. She hasn’t been able to keep shaving the sides of her head, and the hair came back uneven.
“I don’t need you to fight anybody. Just help me get out of town, find a place to lie low until everyone gives up on this invasion foolishness. Preferably, someplace where I can go into the night without passing through slums full of people with harpoon guns.”
Mouth perks up, because here is a challenge that she’s comfortable with. She starts spinning out extraction plans, disguises, camouflages, and places I could hide, including a hidden distillery that some of Alyssa’s old friends are running, forty kilometers south of here.
“I already promised to help Bianca,” Mouth says. “But I guess I can help both of you.”
“The Gelet, when I went into the night, they trusted me with something precious,” I say. “Not just their shared past, like what they tried to share with you, but even more than that, a… a kinship. They chose me to be their friend here in the twilight, and I’ve failed them over and over, in so many ways. But no matter how I try to make Bianca understand, she still just thinks I have some kind of power that she can use to get what she wants.”
I squint at all the bright colors, eaten away by rust or mold. We’re surrounded by the detritus of other people’s bold visions for the future. I keep gagging on the stench of outgassing polymers.
“You learned to overcome the worst fear and communicate across the great divide, and you’ve overturned everything we thought we understood about this world,” Mouth says, chewing her knuckles. “So of course someone was bound to try and weaponize you. I’m just sorry it was Bianca.”
When my mother died, I was just on the cusp of thinking of myself as a separate person, with independent opinions, and I had a hard time separating her death from my own life. I kept thinking I must have done something wrong, or she must have rejected me, and I imagined her final moments over and over: her skin seared away, her final thoughts worrying about the well-being of strangers. Bianca was the first person who ever soothed my derelict heart after that, so of course I threw all of my love at her.
Hernan said my mother would be proud of me. I wonder if it’s true, and what she would say if she saw me now. I’ve taken to wearing the CoolSuit, or even a light cotton sari over a blouse and pants, whenever I go outside without Bianca. At some point, I stopped thinking of this as a disguise, and started just taking comfort in anything that makes me easier in my skin.
Mouth comes back and says, “It’s all arranged. Alyssa’s on her way to help us. She just had to make a pit stop on her own, to take care of something first.”
I start to thank her for the risk she’s taking, but just then Alyssa shows up—with Bianca.
“That was your pit stop?” Mouth throws her hands over her head. “You went to fetch her?”
“We pledged our loyalty to the Perfectionists, and I take that seriously, not to mention all the promises we just made to Bianca. I wasn’t about to sneak around behind her back.” Alyssa shrugs. “Plus, I actually think Bianca would make an amazing leader. She kept the Resourceful Couriers from melting down after Omar died, and she’s been playing the Argelan game better than most people who were born here.”
“Thanks.” Bianca nods at Alyssa. “I’d be lucky to have someone like you on my team.”
Mouth looks at the two of them with her arms still raised, a comical statue.
“Don’t worry: Dash and the others don’t know about your little betrayal, and I hope we can keep it that way,” Bianca says to Mouth. “I can’t believe that right after you promised to help me, you went behind my back and tried to sabotage the mission. Actually, I can believe it, because it’s bloody typical. Everything I know about lies and manipulation, I learned from you.”
“Both you and Sophie asked for my help, and I couldn’t choose between you. But my promise to you still stands.”
“Don’t blame Mouth,” I whisper. “This was my idea.”
“Were you even going to say goodbye to me this time?” Bianca comes over to me, shivering in her crimson party dress. “Or were you just going to disappear again, and leave me wondering if you were alive or dead?”
I’d made up my mind that I would never see Bianca again, so she appears like a sliver of lost time. I feel the old yearning to comfort her, to sustain her with my near silence, but then I remember how she laughed as she told me that it was too late to stop her plans, and then the sight of a thorn mask halfway on her face. The cavities in the rough metal vehicles with their fresh uneven coats of paint, large enough to hold the most destructive weapons humanity still has. The casual way she said, Do you think we would have stayed friends?