I shake my head, not willing to entertain the offer. I’ve filled my follow-Howl-blindly quota. Enough for more than one person. “Why did you come find me?”
“I want you to take me with you wherever you’re going.”
“That sounds familiar. Let’s fly off into the sunset together, Howl. We’ll be a team.”
“Don’t accept an offer less than the original one proffered, Sev. Last time we talked about this, I offered to build you a tree house.” Howl’s half-real smile opens into the awful gore-toothed grin that’s spoiled all the memories I have of him. Every joke, every moment I felt comfortable or happy with him, all replaced by this . . . creature. “I guess you should keep your options open, though. How was I supposed to know Tai-ge had a heli?”
“Okay.” I stand up, dusting off my knees. “I think we can be done now.”
“It’s just as much in my interest as it is in yours to stay away from Dr. Yang at the moment, Sev.” Howl leans forward. “Him and anyone else who knows how hard it would be for me to catch SS. You’re running away, and you’ve got better transport than I do.” He twists his wrists, pulling at the tape. “Even if it isn’t exactly comfortable. I can help you, if you help me.”
My jaw tightens, the words barely squeezing out between my teeth. “You really don’t know.” I don’t know why I thought he might.
“Unfortunately, that is true about a lot of things.” Howl wrinkles his nose, as if he’s about to sneeze, twitching uncomfortably when it doesn’t come. “What particular point of ignorance did you have in mind?”
“I doubt Dr. Yang cares where either of us are. Unless you’re here to clean up last witnesses to what he did during the invasion, neither of us are much use to him.” It comes out almost like a taunt. “He wasn’t ever going to kill either of us. Not for a cure, anyway. It’s safe for you to go back to shooting Reds with your friends.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dr. Yang can’t use us to make a cure, Howl. If he could have, he wouldn’t have asked so nicely to cut you open all those years ago. He just wanted me to wake Mother up. She wouldn’t have told anyone else where to find the cure.”
Howl stares at me, and for a second it seems as if his composure will crack, his expression porcelain and hammer. “Wait . . . there’s no way—”
“It’s true.” I wipe my hands on my pants, cringing when anmicro smears in a greasy arc across the rough fabric.
It’s almost painful to watch the thoughts running rampant across Howl’s face, but after a moment they clear, leaving nothing but blank. Howl looks up at me, and I can see the calculations forming, the mask pulling down tight. “So you woke her up. You know where the cure is. That’s why you needed maps. Why you need to go to Port North.”
My hackles rise. Why did I say that? One more piece of information for Howl to play with.
Howl smiles, and it’s too white and clean. As if he has to work to bleach away the inky black lurking inside him and just took it a little too far. “Well, this will be a fun trip, then. Are you going to be able to sleep tonight, what with a gore lodging on the heli with you? I promise not to get my rabies all over you.” He shrugs a little. “I’ll try, anyway.”
I slide the door open with one hand. “You won’t be with us long enough to spread it around. You can go back to doing whatever you want with no fear of repercussions.”
Howl starts to laugh. “I want . . .” His voice cracks, and he looks down, what I think was meant to be lighthearted suddenly heavy as lead. “I want to live through this, just like everyone else.”
CHAPTER 12
WHEN I WALK OUT OF Howl’s cell, I close the door behind me but don’t get much farther. The icy sheen of calm coating my heart and mind have long since gone up in flames, but I don’t disintegrate into a pile of ash like I thought I might. Taking deep breaths doesn’t help slow my racing heart or the little burrowing spirals of disappointment digging deep into my chest.
What was I hoping for when I went in there? That despite the lies, the knife, that Howl would somehow be able to explain everything, and we could go back to being friends?
He really did say he’d build me a tree house. It was a joke. Something to lighten the idea of running away from the Mountain when we were sitting Outside, listening to the gores sing their terrible lullabies in the forest below us, trying to imagine what it would be like to survive out there. Something that seemed to be an impossible risk, a show of bravery on Howl’s part, because I still thought SS was gnawing at my brain, waiting to take control. He would have been the one who had to wake up to my empty shell, the darkness of compulsions peering out through my pupils.
Only, that isn’t what would have happened at all, because I didn’t have SS, and Howl knew it.
I take a deep breath, and then another, wrenching my brain back into the heli, to now and what has to come next. The bits and pieces of information that Howl so easily handed over gum together in my head, one congealed and quivering mess.
He really was the Chairman’s son, or a slightly rabid stand-in, anyway. At least that means I wasn’t so gullible as I’d thought. He and Dr. Yang managed to dupe the whole Circle—even General Hong—into believing. The things he told me when we met weren’t that far from the truth. Running intelligence and Mantis out of the City as best he could and hating every moment.
Wishing he could put a bullet in the Chairman’s head, no doubt.
It’s the last bit he said that hurts the most, an echo of what Sole told me the night I ran away. Howl is a survivor. His life will always come first. Hearing him say it out loud stings, both because I wish dying wasn’t one of the options all of us are facing, and because I know Howl chose his outcome long before he ever met me. No matter the consequences, he plans to be the last one standing.
My hand strays to my throat, wishing I could somehow rub away the red line made by his knife. If Howl really didn’t know about the cure, then the knife was the opening move in a strategy that would have landed me back at Dr. Yang’s feet.
I wrinkle my nose, wishing I could take back all of those quiet moments we had together. What was he thinking as we sat in June’s family tent, waiting to see if one of her infected clan members decided to kill us? When I told him about my nightmares, or when he took me outside and kissed me? It couldn’t all have been calculation, or he wouldn’t have tried to keep me away from Dr. Yang and Yizhi. He wouldn’t have planned an escape with me.
The heli floor jiggles under my feet as someone comes up the ladder, and Tai-ge’s head pops into view. He takes in the closed door, climbs the rest of the way in, and folds his arms tightly around me. “What’s he got for us?”
I push away, attempting a less-than-serious tone as I head for the ladder. “He’s probably going to kill us while we’re asleep.”
“I’ll leave Tai-ge out of any murder sprees if it makes you feel better!” Howl calls through the door. “I don’t know how to fly the heli.”
Tai-ge’s abashed expression would have made me laugh, except for the fact that Howl’s joke, however ridiculous it’s meant to sound, might hold more truth than lie.
• • •
“He was masquerading as Sun Yi-lai?” Tai-ge asks once we’re outside and I’ve had a chance to tell his version of things. June looks up from her spot on the ground next to the little fire, potatoes wrapped in wet leaves steaming in the coals at her feet. Tai-ge’s face pales—and then goes very, very red. “It’s true that Yi-lai hadn’t been seen much until two years ago, but that doesn’t seem possible.”
“Hasn’t been seen much?” I ask, sitting across from June.
“I was just a Red, Sevvy. The Chairman keeps to himself.” Tai-ge lowers himself next to me, grimacing at the frozen ground. His hand comes down on top of mine, and I move over a few inches to give him room, folding my arms across my lap. He hesitates, then folds his arms too, as if that wasn’t quite the reaction he expected. I blink, staring down at my hands. I wasn’t trying to push him off me; it
just didn’t occur to me that him touching me was intentional until I’d already moved. Adjusting my legs so they cross, I decide to let it go. After talking to Howl, I need my own space.
“What do you think about the maps?” Tai-ge asks. “Wherever he takes us to get an encryption key could be a trap.”
“He says it’s at Dazhai, where we’re going anyway,” I reply. “The trick is whether we can get it without him getting us tangled into something.” I touch the leather cord around my neck, pulling the four metal stars out from under my coat. Mother’s jade shard and the rusty ring dangle next to the old pin I had to wear when I lived in the City, making it easy for anyone to see who I was. Tai-ge had two, and Howl only one. When I catch Tai-ge squinting at the ring, I shove the necklace back under my shirt. “If Menghu happened upon us, they probably would take us straight back to Dr. Yang, thinking I’m the answer to all their problems. It’s a City camp. There’s no reason for them to come after me, but they used my name and description at the Post.”
“What reasons could Yi-lai—sorry, I mean Howl—have to take us to a City camp?” Tai-ge interjects. “The whole upset here is that his City ties aren’t genuine, right?”
“Apparently, the report was pretty specific. That we were there, looking for maps. Maybe they wanted to take back the heli or—”
June flicks a bit of charred wood at the side of Tai-ge’s head then looks at me, ignoring him when he looks around to see what hit him.
I hide a smile, the wood probably as close to an accusation as June is willing to make. “Howl said they might have been looking for Tai-ge. But they asked for me, too, and why mention maps specifically? It still bothers me not knowing how they knew we were there.” Reaching out to touch one of the leaf-wrapped potatoes, I hiss when it singes my fingers. “I mean, Cai Ayi was just as upset as I was to find Reds barking up her trees, so it doesn’t seem like she or the roughers would have reported us. Peishan, maybe? She didn’t have any way to communicate.”
Tai-ge shrugs, rubbing his temple where the wood hit, still trying to figure out what struck him. “We just don’t know enough. Our plan to sneak into Dazhai was risky at best, but with Howl telling us we need to go . . .” He shakes his head. “There are too many players, and we don’t even know where half the pieces are.”
June blinks, hand going to her pocket. She pulls two bags out, dumping the first next to her knee. A pile of dark stones. The other bag she tosses to me, and I don’t quite catch it, spilling white stones on the ground and across my lap. “You want to play weiqi?” I ask.
She draws a grid on the ground with the tip of her finger, a beginner’s board only nine by nine squares. She places her stones across the joined points between squares without waiting for me to play, until there’s an impenetrable black wall blocking off one side of the board. Then she takes one white stone and places it in the middle. “Too many people playing.” She looks up at me.
“You mean we don’t really know who is playing,” Tai-ge interjects.
“Reds, Menghu. Howl.” She waves at the board. “All packed together in one space. They’re all in one another’s way.” She points to the unoccupied half of the board. “Dr. Yang wants Port North and the papers. Menghu want Sev. Firsts want the cure back. Reds want their city, more Mantis. Howl wants—”
“To be safe,” I say. “He wants to live.”
June nods. “Their pieces are messy. It might be a trap. So don’t have just one plan. If we can advance”—she puts more white pieces along the blank side of the board, barring off territory—“we advance. If it goes bad, we run. Move in a different direction. There are only three of us, and we know more about all of them than they know about the others. They’ll just trip over one another.”
The point of weiqi is to occupy territory, not fill it square after square with stones. It’s like a real battle: Placing one soldier every square mile over a grid wouldn’t do much to help you win. The point is to block your opponent off from large chunks of the board, placing your stones so they create fortresses of space that may as well be inaccessible to the other player. It’s true that Dr. Yang is holding his plans close. No one knew he couldn’t come up with a cure using the resources he had, that he needed Mother’s data. No one in the limited pool of people we’ve talked to seem to even know where Port North is or what that means. The Reds are just trying to regroup, so far as radio chatter tells. But it’s impossible to know what the Menghu are doing. If Dr. Yang has control over all of them, if he’s still telling them he needs me to create a cure . . . if he’s taken them all to Port North and they’re killing the occupants one by one until they hand over Mother’s papers. Howl might know, but Howl lies. Howl doesn’t care who dies, so long as his head remains attached to his shoulders.
Our plan was to go to Dazhai. Howl is telling us to go to Dazhai. His maps might be fake. But they also might be real. I rub a hand across my forehead, the skin feeling hot.
Tai-ge looks at me. “Sev?”
“We should . . . do what we planned. Go to Dazhai. We’ll look for the key, but we’ll look for maps, too, just in case what he’s got is a false trail. We just need to be flexible.”
Tai-ge and June both nod in agreement.
“So, our original plan, but with extra ideas for if Menghu appear at the heli door when we land?” Tai-ge asks. “We set down before dawn, somewhere close enough to hike in, but far enough they won’t jump right onto us. Abandon the heli because there’s not much chance lookouts will miss us landing.” He looks at me. “We’ll . . . mine any information we can from Howl, including where the encryption key is and what it looks like. Sneak into the camp, leaving June outside, of course.”
I glance over at June, her snarl of golden curls bright. No amount of mud or dirt can hide her Outsider features. The word makes me smile a little. Outsiders. All of us are Outsiders now, including the Chairman, at least until they figure out how to frighten away all the Sephs spreading SS inside City walls.
“After an hour or so, June sets off a distraction.” Tai-ge points to the heli, the growth regulators he bought from Cai Ayi inside just waiting to be ignited. “We run away with maps, or the key, whichever we find, and head toward Port North on foot.”
I sit forward, looking at June. “You really think we can dance around whatever Howl flies us into? Menghu with their guns drawn? The bloody-handed Chairman himself looking for his son? Can we plan for all of those without letting Howl know, so he can’t trap us somehow?”
June’s teeth show in her smile, plucking white stones from the ground and cradling them in her hand as she looks the makeshift board over. “We can do anything.”
CHAPTER 13
I TAKE TAI-GE INTO THE storage closet, and Howl only hedges a moment before agreeing to share what he knows about Dazhai with my friend, though I can feel his eyes on my back the whole way to the hatch. Outside, I walk until their voices are only a prickly whisper, busying myself stacking extra Junis branches to keep the fire going. June heads into the heli and comes back again after a moment, holding one of the two wintermelons we got from Cai Ayi, the weight knocking each step she takes sideways.
“Even one of those things is bigger than you.” I smile at her, trying to drown out the cadence of Howl speaking, the words and expressions all sanded away just to leave the shape of his voice. “A whole gore could fit inside it. Wait, is that what you’re cooking? Gore?”
June’s smile is almost jovial, showing teeth and everything. “We can’t carry these with us when we leave. So I’m going to make some real food.”
“I remember what Outsider food tastes like from when we first met you, thank you very much. I think I’ll pass.”
June mimes throwing the wintermelon at me, but it’s so heavy it just falls to the ground with a thud. She thuds down next to it and pulls out her knife. “You don’t know what real food tastes like. Wood Rat special.”
“I’ve never tried rat.” I give her a delicate bow, reveling in each word from June’s mouth as
if it’s a gift. She’s opening up, blossoming into someone with opinions and stories, even if she doesn’t always share out loud. “We City-folk only eat canned applesauce and small children.”
“That’s because you can’t cook.” She points to the Junis I piled. “Build the fire up.”
By the time June has soupy vegetables bubbling inside the wintermelon rind, Tai-ge finally climbs down the ladder. “What have we got?” I ask, stretching my legs out next to the low flames, the fire’s warmth sinking through my outer layers.
“About what I expected.” He settles next to me, sniffing experimentally. “What is that? It smells wonderful.” The rich smell of fresh vegetables and meat from our dried rations makes my mouth water so much it hurts. June doesn’t acknowledge Tai-ge’s compliment, concentrating on stirring the soup. Tai-ge shrugs, turning back to me. “Howl says only four members of the Circle survived, and they’re all at Dazhai.”
“Only four survived?” I frown. “Didn’t most of the Firsts evacuate right when the invasion started?”
Tai-ge shrugs. “According to Howl, the rest of the First Quarter is there, like we thought. Aside from that, most of the eastern and northern garrisons are camped there, along with the Mantis stockpiles airlifted out of the City and enough food to feed the whole army for a few months. There should be more than one encryption key, but Howl says they’re keeping a close eye on the maps and keys in the Second tents. He managed to lift the ones he brought to us because of his First mark and because the Chairman can afford to be careless inside his own tent.” Tai-ge holds out bowls and spoons he brought from above to June, who takes them. “Howl says we won’t get anywhere close. Not without him. We need his status.”
“That’s not an option.” When a bowl thrusts itself into my vision, I look up to find June standing over me. I take it, relishing the steam as it warms my face. “Thanks, June.”
Tai-ge watches as June dishes up another bowl and brings it to him. “What if he’s right, Sev? What if we need First marks to get close?”
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