A flash of guilt singes my chest. “Please, Tai-ge. He’s a risk. And hasn’t been exactly helpful so far.”
“Well, you did lock him in a storage closet.” Tai-ge goes back to the buttons and lights flashing over the maps. The space between us feels empty, like a cramped and starving belly, but with no clear way to put something into it to take away the pain. He doesn’t look up again, staring at his instruments. “You aren’t . . . doing what we did before with Howl, are you? Going outside to plan?”
“No . . . June just wants me to come . . .” I breath deep, the air whisking in from outside pricking oddly in my nostrils. “What do you want me to say, Tai-ge? You know everything I do.”
He frowns. “Then you’ll explain to the others. About how we got out? Smooth things over so Howl and June won’t push you into keeping that door locked?”
I can’t quite articulate the anger that jabs inside me. I never had to argue with Tai-ge before we left the City. Just by principle of our ranking marks, it was obvious who had the answers. But now, since escaping the City, I wonder if Tai-ge would have even let me argue with him back then if I’d wanted to. In every discussion we have—even the subjects he has no experience with, like the existence of gores—he needs the evidence to pistol-whip him across the jaw before he grudgingly accepts that my thoughts could possibly have merit. About Firsts and Seconds, about SS having a cure, or even about Howl being the person I knew him to be rather than the one Tai-ge recognized. He’s let me lead up until now, let me make decisions without expecting me to fall in line with what he thought, but I know, deep down, he expects I’ll eventually come around.
“Xuan is going to have to do some more talking before we let him out of there, Tai-ge,” I say. “It isn’t Howl or June twisting my arm. It was my decision to lock him away.”
“And I’ll have to do the same before you let me hear what we’re going to do next?”
“Tai-ge . . .” I can almost hear my teeth grinding together, and have to force myself to stop before they break. “We’re just scouting, okay? Trust goes both ways. Please let me go look at what they’ve found, and stay away from Xuan so we don’t . . . I don’t know, find you with your head bashed in.”
“Right.” He rubs his neck, then stretches his arms out until his shoulders crack. Then he finally looks up from the console, meeting my eyes. “Okay. I can do that.”
Something inside me relaxes a fraction. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Howl and June are both on the ground outside, waiting until my feet hit the damp earth before leading me out into the wisps of gray and wet. Rain mists down from overhead, a salty aftertaste in the air that leaves my tongue curling my mouth. Wind whips my hair so the ends stab at my eyes and cheeks. The glare of sun penetrating the storm clouds seems to be coming from a few hours above the horizon, making it late afternoon. Buildings sulk just beyond the curve of the hill where we landed, looming like skeletons in the mist. Their outsides are bleached and spindly versions of what a home should be, their insides dark.
June stops under a tree just outside the clutches of the ghostly buildings and points to the ground, a pile of what looks unmistakably like excrement at her feet.
“Are we . . . skipping latrines this trip?” I ask.
“Gores,” Howl supplies. He looks around, pointing to another spot just farther into the abandoned settlement where a tree hunches over the old buildings like an old crone. “A whole hutch of them, I’d guess.”
The hairs rise on my arms, memories of black eyes eclipsing my vision. We haven’t seen so much as a hair from a gore’s tail since we flew out of the burning City. “Is that why there aren’t any people here?”
June shakes her head, a violent jerk that dispels my visions of a gore feast.
“This place was evacuated, by the looks of it.” Howl rubs the back of his neck with his hand, then pulls the collar of his coat up to his chin, shoulders hunched against the wind.
I try to look through the mist, wind agitating the gray air into what looks like a torrent that masks the empty buildings beyond. “How did you know to land here, June? Is this where they took your mother from?”
She touches the trunk of the tree, fingers tracing the rough lines of its bark as if she knows it better than the lines of her hands.
Howl leans forward. “Did they take lots of people all at once or sneak in and pick people off . . . ?”
June shakes her head, pointing to the village. “They took all of them.”
Goose pimples on my arms prick like needles as she takes a step toward the houses, staring blank-eyed at the ghosts of what she used to know hovering out there in the mist.
Something moves in the long grass behind me. I spin to look, almost expecting a gore’s throaty song to cut through the heavy pall, but there’s nothing there. I rub my arms. “Should we go extract a direction out of Xuan and head out? With the language problem, though . . .”
“We probably have a little bit of breathing room before anyone notices we’re here. In this kind of cover, even if someone saw us come down, it would be hard to pinpoint where exactly.” Howl takes a deep breath, eyes scrunched against the wind. “We should probably not leave the heli until we’re sure where we’re headed, though. Not unless you want to come out looking like that.” Howl gestures helplessly at the wind-battered buildings. “Especially with gores hunting in the area. And not knowing about where we’ll find people, or where the water starts.”
The ocean. Is that what is in this salty air? So much water it weighs down the wind and drinks up the sun? Every gust feels like a whip against my cheeks, tearing at my hair and pushing against me, as if this storm wants to herd us into the empty-eyed settlement.
“We don’t have great visibility, but we should be able to see if anyone tries to come at us,” Howl continues. “Safer than trying to hike closer and hope the gores eat Xuan first. We can take a look around to see what we’re walking into, get a good night’s rest, and make an early start tomorrow.”
“We have how many days before the helis come? Five?”
Howl nods. “Five days until they leave from Dazhai. What they plan to do when they get here . . . I don’t know. Xuan seems to think the island is impermeable.” He looks back toward the skeleton houses. “Not sure why. You know anything about it, June?”
June shakes her head, taking another step toward the ghost village, nothing inside it but mist and memories, and suddenly I can see scorch marks on the walls, the last remembrances of a fight years dead. Will someone come for us in the night? Whoever it is the City wouldn’t tell the Red General’s son, the Chairman’s son, about?
Here we are in a place where City words and scars are enough for a bullet in the head. I touch my traitor brand, the star lopsided as if it means to melt off my hand. “Let’s go back inside before the gores come out.”
“Gores don’t hunt till after dark.” June peers up into the sky, her hair a tempest of gold. She reaches out to touch my sleeve. “Come?”
An extra thread of uneasiness laces through the discomfort already belted around me. June, who has never once had something nice to say about my ability to stay quiet, would rather have me along to scout than be alone in this place?
I take a deep breath, the briny air stinging in my throat as I nod. I can appreciate not wanting to walk through the blasted remains of something that used to be mine alone. Grateful that she chose me. She needs a sister, not a scout.
June points to Howl and jabs her chin toward the heli. He waits for me to nod before heading back toward the ladder, flickers of light seeping out through the hatch into the blustery air. The worry I once had about Howl hurting Tai-ge vanished. Howl doesn’t have a reason to. I’ve realized he’s not so much a monstrous gore. Maybe a surgeon instead, planning which bits need to be cut in order to get him to his end goal.
Still, I don’t feel the need to look back as we walk away. And that by itself is enough for me to blow out the candle lighting my thoughts.
CHAPTER 33
JUNE LEADS US INTO A bank of trees that huddle together against the wind beyond the abandoned dwellings, blocking its harsh bursts. As we walk, something crunches under my boot. I pause, expecting to find a bone half submerged in the mud under my boot. It would fit this murky place.
But when I stoop to look at the pieces, I find the shattered bits of a rice bowl. June turns to see what’s stopped me, her nose wrinkling as I pick up one of the shards. A faded pattern of flowers is stenciled along the rim, fragmented characters in measured strokes just below.
Long life. Prosperity.
I set the shard back next to its fellows in the mud.
June watches, her eyes narrowed on the orphaned fragments of pottery in their bed of muck, but then she turns back to the trees, gesturing for me to follow. The trees seem almost purposely planted, a windbreak for the village that used to be here, but left long enough that the trees had children and grandchildren of their own. We follow along the line, staying on the village side of the trees until the wind begins to calm, mollified when the sun begins to burn through the veil of mist overhead.
The vegetation grows thicker before I see signs of habitation again—only they’re not the sorts of signs that inspire hope. We step over the rusted remains of an I-beam, our feet finding scatterings of brick and tile mired deep in the ground as if they’d grown up from the earth itself. A shape in the trees ahead turns into the starved outline of what looks like it was a building long ago, nothing left but metal ribs and spine exposed to the elements.
A flutter of movement in the foliage to our left sends a cascade of nervousness down my spine, but June only gives the waving branches a casual glance. It’s not until we’ve walked on that I see a creature there I’ve never seen or heard of before, thick pelt heavy and brown and an ungainly, heavy head. It watches us pass, then goes back to grazing.
June points toward a line forming a belt across the tree trunks ahead. A fence, sharpened posts pointed toward us. It’s not new-looking exactly, but the posts are scored wood. Much more recent than the ruins, or the wood would have rotted and gone long ago.
We slip under the fence, sunlight hardly a flicker of warmth against my back as light begins to filter through from ahead, space between the trees giving hints at something beyond. June stops as we get to the end of the trees, reaching one hand out to a nearby trunk, as if to steady herself. I steel myself to look as I step up next to her, only to have my breath stolen.
We’re standing at the top of a hill. And beyond that hill there’s . . . nothing. A vast rolling mass of gray nothing. Water. An ocean. The weight of it pins me to the ground, every inch of me feeling the rush of waves below us as they churn up the rocky beach, foaming fingers reaching up the stretch of pebbles toward us.
If eternity has a face, this is it.
I crouch to the ground, breathing the salted air, fear and wonder a complicated snarl in my chest. June ducks behind a large rock sprouting from the unstable sea of pebbles underfoot. She points down the beach.
There are boats bobbing along with the waves, ribbed cloth structures sticking up from each one, like a bat’s wings. Beyond them, a shadowy hulk leers at us from out in the water, like a fortress suspended out on the waves. Three craggy points mark its top, and when the wind blows a column of mist past, I get a fleeting view of carved stone and sun on glass windows.
“Is that . . .” I try to catch my breath, but I’m full of salty air, full to exploding.
June edges back from the rock and up the beach into the trees, walking much more softly now. Following, I angle back the way we came, but she doesn’t follow, staring at the wind-stripped trees, the trunks bald where they face the ocean. Her eyes are full of something I can’t understand. Seawater instead of the hard, scratched jade I’m used to. And then she starts walking. Parallel to the tree-formed windbreak, toward the shadowy mass of rock and the bat-winged boats worshipping it below.
“June!” I whisper it as loud as I can, picking up the pace behind her, but she dodges and weaves through the trees, and it’s all I can do to keep her snarled hair in sight, her curls a golden smudge against the blasted gray-green of this forest. The colors of this place are all wrong.
She hops over plants and around rocks until we come to a path. Slows to a jog when fences crop up, and the path turns into something that almost looks like a dirt road. And then to a walk when the first dwelling comes into view.
“June, we can’t . . .” She waves me to silence, letting me catch up.
I touch her shoulder, knowing it won’t be enough to stop her if she doesn’t want to. “But we don’t know . . .”
She shakes back her curls and walks forward, every step measured and confident. “I know.”
Emotions collide in me. Worry and fear. Excitement and anticipation. And a shadow of surprise tinged with uncertainty. June knew where to set down the heli. She seems to know this road. And she isn’t going to stop.
What will it mean if this road spills into a village where the children know June’s name? Where she has real family, not the adopted Seph clan she was a part of when we found her? What if in all these weeks of looking for where we belonged, she finds a place already hollowed out for her, but there’s no space for me? June is as good as my sister now. Neither of us had a place, so we made a new one together.
I keep pace, willing my steps not to slow. It isn’t just June who might find something that fits here. Saying out loud what I hope for is too frightening, as if by voicing it, the universe will realize I want something and take it away. Will I find people here who read with my mother’s same cadence? People wearing her eyes and mouth, who can look into my face and see something other than the secrets mother hid in my brain, or the scar on my hand?
June must have those same hopes, wondering about the people who might be waiting for her. Who might see her and welcome her in because they are the same. She looks over her shoulder to see what is slowing me down, giving an annoyed sort of jerk with her chin to keep up, as if nothing between us has changed by coming here. As if nothing could.
I smile. And keep up.
When we get to the house, it’s almost shocking how normal it looks. Not the materials or the shape of it—the roof is heavily sloped against the wind, and the walls and chimney are made from some kind of rock I’ve never seen before, one laid right on top of the other. Not like anything from the City or the Mountain, Cai Ayi’s Post, but it looks like a place people live. Permanent. A home.
Smoke issues from the chimney and there are boxes set into the ground to either side of the steps that lead to a red-painted front door. They look so similar to the Third Quarter garden boxes that I almost feel as if I should don gloves and rifle through the empty dirt looking for peppers.
A chimney, garden boxes, and a boy on the front steps. He looks up as we pass, ruddy round cheeks, a shock of hair splintered down his forehead, a chunk of wood in one hand and a thin knife in the other. The boy raises the knife-heavy hand, and I flinch before he speaks, expecting an alarm, a call to arms. Instead he waves, yelling one long, drawn-out syllable that reveals two missing front teeth but absolutely no meaning I can discern.
June raises a hand in return and keeps walking. Something inside me threatens to burst, salt wet in my eyes as we pass him.
He’s not afraid.
June notices my tears and rolls her eyes, but then she slips her arm through mine as we continue down the dirt path. There are more houses, each low to the ground, leaving a whole world’s worth of sky overhead. One has a cluster of silvered old men chatting together over tiny cups of tea just outside the front door. A woman walks by with a young child tethered to her back. They raise a hand to us as we walk, and June raises her hand back. Another woman, perched on a droopy fence, calls out to us. June gives her a sharp nod, and the woman’s slack lips twist into a smile.
“What did she . . . ,” I whisper once we’re past, pulled along by a cacophony of voices ahead. “Did you understand her
?”
June’s mouth is buttoned shut, the edges turned down. But she puts one of her hands up and measures with her thumb and forefinger, a knuckle’s worth of understanding. We pass a pen housing scruffy-furred animals, their heads down in the scrappy grass. Three old women sit in front of the gate, their wrinkly fingers sliding tiles in some kind of game back and forth. It’s like the Mountain all over again, a riot of color where I’m used to a monochromatic selection of people. Olive skin and sunburned pink and warm brown. Snowy hair and ebony, sunlight and polished oak.
The farther we walk, the closer the buildings are together until the road turns to a street cobbled over in stones. A murmur sinks through the gaps in buildings, the washed-over sound of hundreds of voices smashed to make one soft roar. It makes me think there must be some sort of gathering nearby, the noise breaking through the weeks of solitude and silence I’ve endured. Memories of infected claw their way across my brain, the last time I was with lots of people. Being dragged across the Mountain Core, my boots squeaking against the stone floor, Yizhi doctor fingers digging into my arms and Cale’s pale stare stabbing even deeper. Large group meetings in the City market square back before I left it all behind for Howl’s stories, the speakers crying out over the crowd for us to look hard at our neighbors, as traitors could be anywhere.
What if the reason I didn’t belong before was because this place was supposed to be my home?
June pulls me toward the noise, her steps hurried until we spill out into a street packed with people. A smile finds my lips as the people press in around me, booths lining the road with sellers yelling about how fresh their fish is, how dry their rice, how thin their china.
At least that’s what I assume. I can’t understand a single word. A man thrusts a whole fish in my direction, the dead creature’s eyes fixing me in a ghastly stare, the salt-and-tepid-water smell humid in my nose. The stream of words splashing out from the man’s mouth as he tries to offer me a trade feels so familiar, as if all the words belong to the same page torn from my dictionary.
Shatter the Suns Page 23
