“If you were going to threaten me with a currency fraud investigation…” George panted. “Why did you have to break my leg?”
You could hear in Dash’s voice that he was flipping his hands. “I don’t know. Nostalgia, mostly. Or maybe homesickness. Plus, pain drives the message home.” His footsteps moved away, then stopped. “Oh, one more thing. I heard you had a visit from a mutual friend.”
“She—ahhh. Wanted my help. I didn’t.”
“Next time you meet an enemy of the state, tell me. Of course, Alyssa’s been handled. We built her a special dungeon under the Palace. So romantic, just like those storybooks I used to love. Okay, see you, George.”
Alyssa had never seemed so free as the last time Mouth had seen her, and now she was in some ironically “romantic” dungeon. Mouth found herself desperately wishing she was still able to inflict harm.
Mouth and Sophie waited until they were sure Dash was gone, then rushed out and tried to help set George’s broken leg. “Just go,” he hissed. “I’ll be fine. Clean break. Go. Never come back.”
So they took their money, including the food dollars with the haunting eyes, and left. Now, with Mouth’s big hat and Sophie’s hood, they both looked fully ridiculous.
“We have to rescue Bianca,” Sophie said when they got out on the street. “It’s obvious they’re holding her prisoner in the Palace. Using her as a figurehead while Dash and his goons run everything.”
“Keep your voice down.” Words that Mouth never expected to say to Sophie. “I don’t know what’s going on, and neither do you. But now we know where Alyssa is. I learned the hard way, breaking into that Palace is impossible, but I bet anything this new dungeon is a different matter. They probably built it adjacent to the sewers.”
Sophie stared at Mouth, maybe thinking that Mouth would rescue Alyssa and let Bianca rot, for selfish reasons. There was a nugget of truth to this.
“Just let me talk to Alyssa first,” Mouth said. “We need more information. Please just hang tight for now.”
Sophie started to argue, then just shrugged and said, “Okay. Go see your friend. I’ll be fine.”
“You’re not going to try and see Bianca?”
“No, of course not. Go do what you have to do.”
So Mouth left Sophie hiding in an air vent on a redbrick tower, and hoped for the best.
SOPHIE
Bianca has learned this way of flexing her wrist joint when she listens, and her eyes draw closer as her nose wrinkles. She perches on a wooden chaise with gold leaf, with a crimson gown hanging off one shoulder, and a tiny glass of some fluky green spirit sitting on a side table next to her. Dash is here, talking to her about the delays in finishing the new Palace roof, and she’s giving him an exasperated look.
“This is important. We need a stronger roof, before the next cyclone comes over the Young Father and just rips everything apart,” she says.
Seeing Bianca again, my heart gets pulled off-kilter. All of my old feelings rise up out of the past, as though her smile and her voice have the power to bend light, restructure time, make everything new.
“This is not what I thought I’d be spending my time doing here, in the Clockwork City,” Dash says in Argelan.
“What did you think you’d be doing, Dash?” Bianca laughs. “Just eating fancy cakes all the time? Doing elaborate dances, and scattering petals everywhere? I’m dying to know.”
He shakes his head. “I used to find your sarcasm so intoxicating. I actually thought about marrying you, did you know that? I pictured you and me marching through Founders’ Square, wearing the most resplendent silks and lace, and getting the High Magistrate to officiate the biggest wedding this town ever saw.”
“We executed the High Magistrate, remember? It was a whole occasion.”
This Palace probably is impossible to sneak into, just as Mouth said—unless you have your own tentacles, with cilia that grip harder than any mechanical clamps. I managed to keep them hidden under my cloak, even as they helped me scale the wall overlooking the quiet rear plaza, adjacent to the market stalls. I could sense the Palace guards moving underneath me, hear their chatter. Any moment, they were going to look up and see me, and I would die. I had to stop and melt into the wall a few times until I felt calm again. But I had no choice. I needed to see her. Now I’m clinging to the ledge outside her window.
“I’m not the marrying type,” Bianca is saying to Dash. “But we did have fun, didn’t we? We make a good team, and we’re just getting started.”
Dash comes over to the window to look out over the city, and I scoot out of the way just in time. “This town always sounded so adorable when that fussy old tutor was teaching me Xiosphanti. All the elaborate phrasings, and the way every moment in time seemed to have its own special name. But the real Xiosphant turned out to be just a sad gray husk.”
I don’t need to see Bianca’s face to know she bristles at that. “You’ll learn to love this town the way I do. And maybe then you’ll understand how to get what you want without shouting and hitting people.”
“Sure. Maybe.” Dash turns away and heads for the door to Bianca’s gilt-edged chamber. “But for now, I have to go browbeat more tradespeople. I wish we could just throw another party.”
“We’ll party when we have a reason to celebrate.”
“That’s a barbaric notion. Parties are only fun if they’re unreasonable. See you later.”
They kiss for several endless heartbeats, and then Dash walks out, shutting the door behind him.
I only came here to learn more information, as Mouth suggested, and now I’ve learned quite a bit. So I should leave, quietly as I came, slip away and plan my next move. But she’s so close to me, and I never thought I’d get another chance to speak to her again, and her flowery scent reaches me from all the way across the room. Maybe now that I can communicate in a whole new way, everything can be different between us.
I’m next to Bianca before she even knows I’m there.
Bianca looks up and lets out a gasp. Her face turns to clay and she coughs, spits, and starts to cry. The liqueur glass falls and lands intact. She gasps for breath, with a hyperactive twist to her mouth and red borders around her eyes. Bianca and I are both stiff, made of brittle wire, until she reaches out and pulls me into a hug. I pull her head onto my shoulder, careful to keep my tendrils away, and she weeps on my neck.
Neither of us talks for a long time, and I’m flooded with an emotion that I can’t even name. I told myself I was finished with Bianca, but this feeling clamps onto me with sharp teeth, sunk deep.
Then I break the silence, for once. “I thought you were dead. I thought you died out there in the night, or else when you tried to invade here. But you won. You won. I can’t even imagine.”
“We were so lucky,” she says between sobs. “I can’t believe you’re alive too. I didn’t want that to be our last conversation. Here you are, back from the dead one more time, but this time I have even more things that I never got to say. I couldn’t believe you just walked away and left us there, lost in the middle of the ice fields.”
“I asked you to come with me.”
Bianca doesn’t seem to hear me. “You promised to trust me and stick with me, forever. And then you left me to die in the wilderness. But I didn’t die. We made it home. We won.”
I mourned Bianca so hard in the midnight city, I forgot how alive she really was. Now I step back and look at her. The multilayered hairstyle, jewelry, and shimmering turquoise powder around her eyelids can’t distract from the radiance of her eyes. She could conquer anything.