There isn’t anything to talk about that we haven’t already said. The cure can’t go to the City, or the Chairman will use it the same way he did Mantis: to control people. We still don’t know how deep Dr. Yang’s hooks were in the City. Walking back into rows of tents stamped with the City’s falcon-and-beaker seal might lead us straight back to him. But as I search for new words that will convince Tai-ge of this, June stops, her chin raised toward the treetops. She breathes in deep, then lets it out.
“What is it?” I look out into the snow-silent forest, goose bumps erupting down my arms as the shadowy trees peer back at me.
She takes another deep breath, so much air it must be filling her to the toes. When she lets it out, the air clouds above her in an icy mist.
My voice lodges in my throat. “Did you hear something?”
“Maybe.” She rubs her nose, then starts down the path.
“Is it not enough that I’m here?” Tai-ge whispers, continuing our conversation as if June hadn’t stopped.
My stomach clenches. He thought I was a traitor but came for me down in the Hole anyway. I’ve always been the one flaw in his devotion to the City. Still, Tai-ge made the choice. He chose me. It’s like the second half of a dream—the half I never let myself imagine before, when we were in the City. Tai-ge sitting next to me, planning with me, wanting to be with me, all without the barrier of stars sharp between us.
“I’m glad you’re here.” I stop and turn to meet his eyes, trying to inject the weight and importance I feel attached to those words. I know how much Tai-ge gave up to be here. His family, or what’s left of it. His convictions about life and how the world should work. He came because he trusts me, because he missed me when I was gone from the City. Because they lied about where I was, about what I was. I give him a slow smile, waiting until I know he’s truly listening. “I wouldn’t trade you for anyone, Tai-ge. Of course it’s enough.”
He nods, the side of his mouth curling to match mine. We might not agree about everything, but we’ll figure it out.
No one speaks for the rest of the walk, and the silence stretches tight across my shoulders, making me want to shrug it away. Our camp was June’s idea, a casual suggestion to put the heli down in a wide clearing shielded from the wind by a set of rocky cliffs on one side, tall trees on the other. She didn’t tell us about the Post until we’d landed. She constantly surprises me, though I don’t know why. She’s lived out here long enough to know where to find food and supplies. I guess I assumed she didn’t because I didn’t. A dangerous way to think.
It’s twilight by the time we get back to the camp, a breeze stealing the ice’s foggy breath and ruffling the shrouded hulk of the heli where it sits against the cliffs. We pass a metal column as we enter the clearing. A similar column perches at the top of the rocky outcropping towering over the heli, thick cables trailing to the ground where a metal bench sits, half covered by dirt and ice. Ruins from before the Influenza War. Though why anyone would ride a slick metal bench up a mountain, completely exposed to the frigid air, is beyond me.
Tai-ge holds the heli’s canvas cover up for June to go in first, waiting for me to follow before ducking under himself. The two of us climb up the ladder after June, waiting for her to open the hatch.
“Prison,” June says, her cool whisper sinking into the voice lock and flinging it open.
A joke, I think. Her only voiced complaint. Even I feel a little cramped in the heli cockpit after sleeping under the stars. But it isn’t safe out there. I shiver, giving one last look to the trees. Anyone could be in these mountains. And if people weren’t enough, the gores would be.
Just inside the hatch, I have to climb over June’s sleeping bag and skip to avoid landing my wet boots on Tai-ge’s sleeping bag. Still, it’s much roomier than it was before we extracted all but the pilot and copilot chairs to make space for us to sleep. We unlace our boots and throw them next to the supplies piled by the cargo bay door. Tai-ge flicks on the radio to eavesdrop on Red transmissions, and June goes to the bags of food, placing the new bag of dried pears on top of the other supplies like a crown.
The wind sneaks through the heli, rattling the cargo bay door. We chose to steal this particular aircraft, meant for troop transport, because of the extra room. We had ten Sanatorium victims with us, their heads shaved clean. As we took off, a grenade hit us from underneath, leaving long tears in the heli’s underbelly. Not an ideal place for Peishan, Lihua, and the others, since it wasn’t just the cold we were worried about coming through the long gashes in the metal. It was a relief when Cai Ayi agreed to take them on. Even Lihua, who wasn’t keen to leave June or the heli at first, seems to have settled a bit.
“Let’s eat outside tonight.” I grab a bag of rice, hefting it in my hand. It should last us another week or so. After that we won’t have much more to trade if we want to keep eating. “I can’t stand sitting in here.” The forest outside might be troubling, but sitting inside feels too much like hiding. “We’ll stay close to the ladder. Then tomorrow morning we’ll get our things ready for Dazhai and let Peishan know we’ll be gone for a bit.”
Tai-ge hesitates, but June is down the ladder before he can say anything. Together, June and I gather Junis wood and build a fire, then the three of us slump in our sleeping bags around the smokeless flames, telling stories and jokes. Tai-ge even sings a Red drinking song, the departure from his straight-backed, buttoned-up state making me clap along, laughing at the rhymes. Even June smiles.
When the last flames die, leaving only char and ash in our fire ring, Tai-ge pulls me up to go back inside where it’s safe. I pause to look up at the stars. Thousands of stitches in a quilted sky. It brings to mind the story Howl told me that first night after we left the City, a ridiculous fairy tale of a star falling in love with a peasant, only to be separated forever on opposite sides of the sky.
It wasn’t only Tai-ge’s world that gave one last shuddering breath during that invasion. I lost things that day too. My eyes catch on Zhinu, the daughter of the sun. She’s alone up there in the sky. She always will be.
“What are you looking for?” Tai-ge’s hand bumps mine as we look up into the night.
I grab his hand and squeeze it. I want to believe there’s something more waiting for me at Port North than the dark empty ring surrounding Zhinu’s lonely spot in the stars. That maybe it’s a place I could belong instead of a fairy tale waiting to uncurl into yet another bad dream. But some hopes are too fragile to speak out loud, so I stand there with my hand in Tai-ge’s, the silence between us too big to fill.
CHAPTER 3
THAT NIGHT, THE DREAMS COME. Not the ones I used to have of being trapped inside my own body, paralyzed by SS. Now Cale visits me, a pile of Red corpses under her feet and her gun pointed at my head. June’s old clan—Tian, Cas, Parhat, and Liu—lying in pools of their own blood. A gore’s black eyes watch me from behind a curtain of vines, and Cale’s dead weight on my shoulders pins me to the ground when the monster charges. Mother. Her papery skin tearing under my fingers, her eyes vacant.
I wake in a sweat, fear wrapped tight around my ribs. Rolling over, I go through a calming ritual of finding June’s corn silk hair snarled across the rucksack she’s using for a pillow. Safe. Next, Tai-ge, the shadows sinking deeper into the creases in his face that I don’t remember being there before. Still alive. My breath catches at the blank space where Peishan and the kids are supposed to be, but then I remember: They’re up in the trees with Cai Ayi. Before, when we all squeezed together in the cockpit, they snuggled together in the corner, arms and hands and tear-smudged cheeks sprouting from the muddled pile of humans.
I force my eyes to close again, but I can’t stand the thought of sleep. Can’t let the dead creep into my head again. I’m so tired, though, my body won’t comply. Just as dreams start to twist my thoughts into stories, a noise scrapes my eyes back open. The whisper of metal brushing metal. Screwing my eyes shut, I wrap my fingers tight around the inhibitor spray.
I don’t hear the sound again. But that doesn’t stop me lying awake, waiting.
• • •
I must have fallen asleep, because I wake to Tai-ge at the control panel, the buzz of static in my ears. An echoing fear lances through me before I can brush it down as my brain tries to sort through the sounds that must have woken me. Voices squeezed through the tiny holes in the radio, Tai-ge whispering into the microphone . . .
I rub my eyes. Nightmares trying to claw their way into daylight. Tai-ge’s not talking to anyone over the radio. He’s listening to more reports. “Anything new?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Sleep okay?” I ask.
Tai-ge’s hands drag down his cheeks, as though pulling them off might wake him up. “Like a chicken waiting for his turn to be fried.”
“Let’s not wait any longer, then. We’ll eat, get our packs together.” I pull myself up from the sleeping bag. “Choose a landing spot far enough away from Dazhai that we’ll be able to get away before the Seconds can come find the heli. . . .”
June bolts up from her sleeping bag, almost like a bird diving for safety in the face of a predator. She grabs from our pile of potatoes, has the hatch open, and is down the ladder before I can finish my sentence. I glance back at Tai-ge, his mouth hanging open. He still isn’t used to June.
“Shall we continue this conversation outside?” I ask, pulling the sleeping bag down and extracting my legs.
He nods. “Yeah. Let me find Dazhai on the downloaded maps and plot a course first. I’ll be down in a sec. Throw a potato on the fire for me, would you?”
“Yes, sir.” I give him a mock salute and am gratified when it teases an almost-smile from my friend instead of festering at the back of his expression like an unwelcome memory. He’s going to be okay. All of this is going to be okay.
June glances up from kicking at the ashes of our fire ring when I come down, the Junis residue catching in the morning breeze adding a burned tinge to the air. I help her arrange wood from what we gathered the night before into something that might catch fire, though I suspect my presence is being tolerated rather than actually helping. By the time we have flames leaping between us, Tai-ge slides down the ladder. He rubs his eyes as he walks toward us, stomach audibly rumbling.
“Find what we need?” I ask.
“I think so.” He fiddles with the zip to his coat before looking back up. “I still feel like we’re doing this the hard way.”
June stands up, a potato in each hand. “Leftover rice up in the heli,” she informs me.
I blink at her, waiting for her to continue, but instead she turns around to start poking at the edge of the fire. Though I’m still not adept at interpreting June’s lack of words, I think that might have been a request for me to get the leftover rice.
As I pull myself through the hatch, a dull thud sounds from deep inside the heli, the sound of metal on glass making my skin crawl. Rodents? Rats lived in the walls back at the orphanage. They would come out at night, looking for bits of contraband food smuggled up to the rooms. I hate rats. More than spiders or mosquitoes or . . .
How could rats have found their way up the heli ladder?
I hear another thud, something moving around in the aircraft’s bulbous stomach, just behind the cargo bay’s barricaded doors—where I heard the sound last night. And then, quiet. I close my eyes, trying to rein in my imagination. Maybe rats can get up here. Really large . . . person-size rats.
Did Loss and Ze-ming follow us? Or could it be Menghu, tiger snarls on their faces to match the slavering insignia on their collars? Wood Rats, ready to strip the heli down? Dr. Yang, planning to slit our throats before we realize he’s here? Gores tearing through the broken metal? Or, worst of all, swarms and swarms of infected, crying for help beneath us, just waiting to break our bones and bite our fingers off one by one . . . I shake my head, trying to end the images, each more preposterous than the last.
June, too tired to climb up through the metal tears below like she usually does, pushed all the boxes away from the cargo bay doors before we went to sleep yesterday to check that nothing had snuck in. She’s inspected the empty space every day we’ve been out here, the threat of stowaways or hijackers much more likely this close to the Post. We’ve been so careful. There couldn’t be anyone back there. It must just be rats.
I reach for the chain that hooks over the handle to keep the door shut just to prove my fears wrong. As my hand touches the chain, something falls on the other side of the door, metal clattering as it hits. Accompanied by a hushed exclamation involving Yuan Zhiwei’s underclothing.
City rats? Who can swear.
I jerk back from the door, almost falling over as my foot catches in the folds of Tai-ge’s sleeping bag. Trying to be quiet, I slide through the hatch and back down the ladder, one hand clamped tight over my mouth. Tai-ge stands up when I get to the bottom, alarm twisting his eyebrows in a knot. June is nowhere to be seen, her leaf-wrapped potatoes left to cook at the base of our fire.
“Are you okay?” Tai-ge asks, looking me over as if there should be blood. “What’s wrong?”
I put a finger to my lips to shush him. “Did June climb up into the cargo bay?” I whisper, hoping against hope that it was her I heard.
Tai-ge shakes his head. “Why are we whispering?”
“There’s someone up there.”
His hand slips down to his side where a gun would normally hang, and he looks a little lost when there’s nothing to grab. We don’t have any more ammunition, so the guns are stashed up in the cockpit. “June ran off into the forest to . . .” Tai-ge stops. “Actually, I don’t know why she ran off into the forest. June doesn’t usually talk to me directly. How many people?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. One? Probably?”
“Did they hear you?”
“I . . . don’t think so.” It’s almost more disconcerting to see Tai-ge turn his calculating gaze toward the heli’s torn undersides than it is to see the longing in his eyes as he listens to Reds talk back and forth on the radio. We used to do tutoring sessions when his family was still in charge of brainwashing me back into City graces, but it was all history and ideology. I don’t like to think of Tai-ge as someone who knows how to mark a target.
“You make some noise up front with the door.” Tai-ge jumps up. “I’ll come in from underneath and take them by surprise.”
“You’re not trained for one-on-one fighting, are you? You were supposed to have some cushy job behind a desk.”
“I’ll be just fine, Sev. Even I had to work my way through normal combat training. ‘Believe you can conquer, and the world will bend.’ ”
“Is that a quote from Chairman Sun’s book of sayings . . . ?”
Tai-ge ducks under the heli instead of answering. I hop on the ladder’s bottom rung, watching until he’s ready to climb up into the tears in the heli’s belly before scrambling through the hatch. He doesn’t seem flustered or worried that someone has invaded the closest thing we have to a home. I feel violated, as though something sacred is broken.
Once inside, I’m so distracted by the sound of my own heartbeat thumping in my chest that I don’t notice the chain lock hanging limp against the cargo bay door until my hand is on the knob. Did June leave it loose last night? As I push the door open, it yanks out from under my hand, sending me stumbling into the cargo bay. Arms grab hold of me as I fall, pinning my arms to my sides.
The prick of a knife lights a line of fire under my chin. “Don’t move. Don’t yell.” The voice is male. Whispering, but calm. “Wait until your friend gets up here.”
That voice. Like the sting of alcohol on a cut as my brain tries to tell me I recognize it. Someone I heard speak in a dream, now come to life. I pull against him, curve around the arm pressing into my ribs so I can bite him, stomp on his feet, elbow his stomach. Anything to get away or warn Tai-ge. But jerking my head to the side only brings the knife closer, my breath drawing out in a gasp as the blad
e digs against my windpipe. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see scarring against the tan of my attacker’s hand. A First mark.
It can’t be. My brain refuses to process it. . . I try to cry out a warning, but before I can make a sound, Tai-ge’s head pops up through the jagged metal hole. When he spots me, the color drains from his face.
“Sevvy!” He scrambles up, eyes wide. “Let her go. You can have whatever you want. Just leave her alone.”
“Everyone. Calm. Down.” I can feel the man’s heartbeat through his coat, pumping fast. A metallic thud echoes through the room, and the man’s arms loosen. I push out of the circle of his grip, half running, half falling toward Tai-ge. He grabs me, and I spin around in time to see June hit my attacker again, the medikit sounding hollow as it strikes his head.
But the man still doesn’t fall, hood shadowing his face as he stumbles forward, barely catching himself on unsteady feet. Just in time to catch a full blast of my inhibitor spray to his face. The knife falls to the ground, hood pulling back an inch or two as the rest of him goes down.
Which is when I start to scream. Because all the disbelief and horror attempting to shield me from the truth fall away. Of course I know his voice.
It’s Howl.
CHAPTER 4
DEAD. HOWL WAS SUPPOSED TO be dead.
And dead people can’t hurt you.
“What is he doing here? How did he find us?” I grip my head, trying to control the chaos of my thoughts. My stomach fills with bile as I try to look anywhere but the slow rise and fall of his chest. June still holds the medikit outstretched in her hand as if she can’t quite believe what she’s done. Her mouth is open, trying to find words, and there’s a tear on her cheek.
I crouch on the floor next to him, betrayal a smoky haze that curls around my throat.
Howl can’t be alive. When I last saw him, he was twitching on a hangar floor, Tai-ge’s and June’s bullets in his chest, infected streaming across the floor, explosions, fire . . . Even after everything that happened between us, after running away from the Mountain in the middle of the night to get away from him and Dr. Yang’s knives . . . some small part of me hoped I’d been wrong. That Howl had followed me so he could explain.
Shatter the Suns Page 2
