“We came over the side of the Old Mountain, and here was Xiosphant, just wide open.” She pours herself another green drink. “We only had one transport left, remember, and just two dozen soldiers. But this city never saw us coming. I knew they would never expect anyone to invade from the night, and those blockheads assumed that people would only attack the city when their shutters were open, because they’d gotten so used to thinking of their sleep cycle as natural. The Curfew Patrols were pathetic. By the time everyone opened their shutters, we were inside the Palace, and we had captured the prince. We killed the vice regent, and all the Privy Council, everybody, and then we were in charge.”
She uses the most informal syntax, as if we were cousins by marriage, not vice regent and outlaw. And something inside me, underneath my spread of tendrils, opens up at the sound of Bianca’s voice: like clear water flowing down the side of one of those marble fountains, in just the right amount of partial sunlight, back in Argelo. I almost don’t care that she’s telling me about murdering so many people.
This is the tallest room I’ve ever been in, with walls a good four or five meters high, and a vibrant painting of the Xiosphanti crest, Gelet and tigers embracing, on the ceiling.
Her drink scathes her throat, and she coughs, and then smiles at me, so I feel myself flush. “Back at the Gymnasium, I always wished I could be more like you. You used to talk about how you had clawed your way out of the dark side of town, and meanwhile I was just swept along by other people’s expectations. You were just so real, Sophie, as if you couldn’t help being yourself. Maybe this whole time, I’ve been trying to find the person that I can’t help being.”
The burnt-orange aroma of her liqueur overcomes my new senses, and I’m overaware of a hum in the room, something grinding against itself. I can’t get rid of the dumb fantasy that I’ve somehow scored one more chance with Bianca, that I can still fix things between us.
“But so, you won,” I say. “And you were in charge. Right? And you had all these reforms, I remember you talked about them so often, all these reforms you wanted to make.”
She sighs and covers her face with one hand. “We tried. We really did. But you can’t just change one part of the system without upsetting the rest of it. The farmwheels turn on a strict schedule that synchronizes perfectly with the shutters going up and down, and the water pumps are optimized for the farmwheels, but also for everybody washing at certain times. The sewage is optimized for peak times as well. And so on. You start tinkering, and the whole city falls apart, and then everybody starves.”
I don’t know what to say. Everything she’s saying about the system, we were taught in school, until we all knew it by heart. But she’s acting as if she just discovered it for the first time.
“Oh, it’s one thing to read about it.” She laughs and rolls her eyes at my expression. “But I didn’t really get it until I tried to make adjustments. Plus meanwhile, I have just a small number of Argelan fighters left who are loyal to Dash and me. Mostly, I have to rely on the Palace guards, and they’re only behind me so long as I have the prince in a safe place. I’ve been hand-picking my own people, smart Xiosphanti, to take key jobs. But I still have to rely on the old bureaucrats and administrators to implement my decisions, and they fight me every step of the way.”
When we first became friends, and Bianca used to pull the forgotten history books out of the back of the library at the Gymnasium, this act of revealing a different past seemed to me a magical power. But now I keep wondering if there were books she chose to leave on the shelf, which talked about all the crimes of saviors, like the Hydroponic Garden Massacre. Maybe if she had read deeper, things would be different now.
Bianca sighs. “Then after that freak cyclone, everyone was scared, and frightened people always crave stability. Sophie, I really need someone I can count on here, and I still wish that could be you.”
I look out from her balcony, at a view of Xiosphant I’ve never seen. The town looks so clean, all of the beige and crimson rooftops catching the dusk rays. You can’t even see the tiny patch of cyclone damage, let alone any other blemishes. A glow comes from the top of the Young Father and casts a curtain of illumination over the warm side of town, and then as I turn my head to the left the light dissipates, until darkness lands at the feet of the Old Mother.
“I can’t believe you didn’t actually change anything.” I can see the market and the big shops on the Boulevard, and the housing towers dotting the skyline. “You were going to make everything better. All of these people trapped in cycles, the same thing over and over, everyone yearning for freedom. You were going to fix it.”
“Give me time. A generation from now, you’ll see the change. We’re going to reopen trade with Argelo, and people will be exposed to new ideas, new ways of living.”
I look away from the balcony and check Bianca out again: the rigid posture, the fidgeting ankles, the tight jaw. She’s trapped herself here in this Palace, and underneath her brash surface she’s terrified, more than when we almost drowned on the Sea of Murder. She got everything she thought she wanted, and now she’s barely holding on.
All I want to do is rescue Bianca one last time, save her from herself, as if all her mistakes—her crimes—are just another handful of food dollars that I can take on myself. The ache grows inside me until it feels too big to contain, and I want to carry her away from here.
But we’re past that now. There’s only one thing I have left to offer her.
“I need someone to count on, and I wish that could be you,” she says again. “I don’t know how you survived, and I want to hear all about it. But you came back to me, and now you can help me make all of this right. I’ve always imagined doing all of this with you by my side.”
“I’ve been living in the midnight city.” I choose my words carefully. “Everything I told you before was true. I came back here because I have something incredible to show to all the people, and you’re the one I always wanted to share everything with. What you said just now, about how you couldn’t change the system even once you were in charge, I can help you fix that. I have a way to change everything. And you and I could finally understand each other, and stop hurting each other all the time. We could be real.”
As I say those things, I feel as though I’m shaping a possible future in my mind, and inviting Bianca to shape it with me. The holiest act. I can almost see it becoming real, and maybe coming here was worth the risk after all.
“So that hive of ice monsters gave you a new political theory? Or some kind of organizational tool? I’m intrigued.”
Bianca keeps looking over her shoulder at the door, as if expecting Dash to come back. Or Nai, if Nai is somehow still alive. I stay close to the balcony, because if either of those people show up, I’ll swing out the window and up onto the roof in an instant.
I can’t help drawing my cloak tighter, to disguise the shape of my body from her. “I need to know. What scares you so much about the idea that the Gelet could be people? You wanted to use them in your invasion, so why couldn’t you accept them as equals?”
She ticks on her fingers. “Because if they’re people, then what does that make us? Invaders? Is our struggle here even meaningful, if we’re just squabbling on the margins of their history? Because I’ve eaten crocodile meat, at some of those feasts I used to go to. Because I didn’t want to lose the Sophie I knew—you know, the sweet, passionate girl who always lit up my world—and it scared me to think of you becoming something I couldn’t even understand.”