The City in the Middle of the Night

by Charlie Jane Anders

The story takes place in the far future, on a tidally locked planet called "January". Humans live in the twilight zone, between the boiling heat of the sun-facing side and the frozen wasteland of the night side. Local inhabitants are mostly divided between two diametrically opposite urban locations: Xiosphant, an authoritarian city where citizens' actions are tightly controlled and any deviation is severely punished, and Argelo, a wild anarchy run by competing criminal gangs. On the fringe, traveling between the cities, are groups like the Citizens, who take the road as their home.

The plot alternates between two principal characters. Sophie, from Xiosphant, has both a position in an elite university and a crush on Bianca, her colleague but also a political reactionary. This ultimately gets Sophie expelled from the city and thrown into the freezing wilderness when she takes the blame for a theft committed by Bianca. There, she is rescued by the "crocodiles", who are not instinctive and dangerous predators, but an intelligent native species, present long before the humans, which communicates telepathically. Sophie learns to communicate with them, and, with their aid, covertly returns to Xiosphant, with the understanding that she will continue coming back to visit them. The second main protagonist is Mouth, a former Citizen disturbed by the group's violent destruction on the road, as she attempts to build a new life as a trader. The two story arcs rapidly coalesce, with the connection being initially catalysed by Bianca looking for help with her political plans. This rapidly evolves into a series of dangerous travels that take the characters across the planet, from Xiosphant and Argelo to the unknown wilderness.