Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  “Could you please unlock these?” Xuan growls, giving the handcuffs an annoyed shake. “I’m sure you’re very nice and all, but I’d prefer to work without the extra limbs, thank you.” He finds the package he was looking for, breaking the plastic and extracting a syringe and what I recognize as a vial of sedative.

  I pull my free hand back from Howl’s shoulder. Search my jacket pockets. Then my pants pockets. I come up with three pieces of old paper, a single white bean. No key. “I must have dropped it.”

  Xuan pauses, a funny sort of grin flashing across his mouth. “If karma were instant, I’d be the prime example.” He pulls some kind of tape from the piles of supplies on the floor, lodging it in the wound in a way I don’t understand. Bandages come next, more tape, until Howl looks as though he’s more bandage than human.

  It’s easier to look at him now that the awful broken pieces of him are hidden, only the scratches on Howl’s chest and arms still visible. The gouges in his arms run from shoulder to wrist, as if Howl dragged his arms along the points of the monster’s teeth without being bitten. His tight hold around my wrist slackens as the drugs take hold, but I don’t want to let go, threading my fingers through his. Red, white, red.

  Howl, who I’ve only ever seen taking charge, running, fighting, arguing, smiling and joking . . . he’s limp, curled between me and June. Small. Broken. Unforgivably mortal.

  CHAPTER 38

  WHEN HOWL’S EYES CLOSE, XUAN moves to the slashes across his chest, moving slower now as he cleans them out. He smears ointment across the gore-torn skin, then tapes it closed. Xuan looks at me once it’s done and lets out a breath that seems to have been trapped in his lungs. “So, is this going to be permanent?” He raises our cuffed hands.

  I start checking my pockets again, but slower this time. I know the key isn’t here. And the fact that there’s no key means Xuan can’t try to run away again. At least, not without me.

  “I must have done something awful in my last life to deserve all of this.” Xuan tiredly drags a hand down the side of his face, leaving a smear of blood across his forehead. “Though I suppose being handcuffed to a pretty girl is a fun result.” He cocks his head, looking at me. “You are a bit dirty, though.”

  I look down at Howl’s still form. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I can’t do much more. Not without a full medikit.” Xuan gestures for June to pull back from Howl’s head. “I’m going to wash his arms and bandage them up. Maybe we can move him into the storage room after that? Wouldn’t want anyone to trip over the Chairman’s royal son.”

  The joking tone grates. He takes a hint from my silence and doesn’t say anything else until Howl’s blood-streaked arms are clean, bandages covering the ugly red gashes.

  Tai-ge hesitates before slipping the gun back into his coat, then kneels to help us move Howl into the storage room, leaving a soggy reddish-brown blur on the floor. I hold his head steady as we lift him up, making sure to keep it from hitting when we set him down on the cold floor. Tai-ge steps back into the doorway, watching as we pull blankets over Howl. With June crowding in next to Howl’s head, Xuan and me to either side of him, there isn’t enough room for Tai-ge in the little room. He stares down at Howl for a second, his eyes jarring to a stop on my hand on Howl’s, then turns to leave, blood a dried trickle of black down his temple.

  Once Howl’s bandage-drowned form is situated on a sleeping bag, I can’t seem to move, staring down at his ashen cheeks. Xuan stands up, pulling my wrist along with him. “You got some love too, Miss Jiang.” He points to my back. “Shall we fix you?”

  I blink, my brain blank. But then the memory of pain in my back registers. Whatever the gore did to me, I can’t feel anything now. My hand, still knit with Howls, doesn’t seem to want to let go. What if the moment I stop watching, Howl forgets to inhale?

  “Come on.” Xuan gives my wrist bound to his a tug. “Sitting here isn’t going to help anyone. But those claw marks in your back will probably turn nasty, and I don’t do nasty, no matter what promises I made when I became a medic. I’d rather let you decompose than drain anything.”

  I shudder at an image of slash marks black and festering across my spine. June sits on the other side of Howl, her eyes tracking Xuan as if she’s some kind of animal, ready to attack if he makes the wrong move.

  “I don’t mean to pull rank or anything, but I’m a medic. A Second to your Fourth.” Xuan’s voice is too calm. The one I used to use with orphans crying off the last vestiges of a compulsion. “Let me help you.”

  “You hurt Tai-ge. Are you going to bandage my back or make the cuts wider?”

  Xuan makes a face. “You and Sun Yi-lai didn’t have to come after me.”

  “I can truthfully tell you it wasn’t with your benefit in mind.”

  “Then I guess you’re going to have to trust I don’t go for the flesh-eating bacteria samples that come with every City medikit.” Xuan waits for a second as if he’s expecting a laugh and looks down at the floor when it doesn’t come. “I wasn’t trying to kill Tai-ge. You landed in the wrong place, on Kamari-controlled land. If you were trying to . . . I don’t know, make it so I couldn’t trap you somehow by landing somewhere other than where I told you to, it didn’t work. I figured arguing would just bring that knife a little closer to my throat, and that maybe there wasn’t even time to argue anymore by the time I realized where we were. If they find us out here alone . . .” He sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair. “Trusting one another doesn’t have to be this hard. I’m still alive, when I should probably have gore teeth sticking from my abdomen. I’m out here away from all the megalomaniacs playing Ping-Pong with SS bombs. The least I can do is smear anmicro on your back.”

  Something inside me unbends, remembering Howl with his wrists taped together. I want to live through this, just like everyone else. I can’t begrudge Xuan the same wish. It’s difficult to untangle my fingers from Howl’s, blood sticking our fingers together. When I reach out to touch June’s shoulder, she shivers. “Stay with him?”

  June pulls her gaze down from Xuan to look at me, weighing something. She nods, then reaches for Howl’s empty hand, holding it between her two small ones.

  “Thanks.”

  It’s a bit of a dance for Xuan and me get out of the room linked together the way we are without stepping on Howl or June or just falling over, but we manage to get back to the cockpit without any wounds. Tai-ge stands up from the captain’s chair as we come out, hand reaching for the gun on the console. Xuan puts his hands up, dragging one of mine up next to his in the air, the short chain linking our handcuffs together clinking.

  “I’m not going to hit anyone else, I promise.” Xuan smiles, but there’s no humor in the expression. “Just want to make sure your traitor friend here hasn’t been cut in two.”

  Tai-ge’s eyes coldly weigh the length of metal binding my wrist to Xuan’s. “How did you two end up like that?”

  “She really, really likes me. That’s what.” Xuan flinches when Tai-ge pulls the gun from the console, letting it weigh his hand down. “I’m sorry. We had a deal. I broke it.”

  Discomfort boils up inside me. What deal? Tai-ge didn’t mention a deal.

  “You attacked me. You promised to lead us into the city and help us—” Tai-ge starts.

  “Yes, but certain members of . . .” Xuan swallows whatever he was going to say at a black look from Tai-ge. “You’re right. Your friends were right not to trust me.” He flicks his head toward me. “I’m even more of a coward than you or anyone else thought. I’m going to patch your friend up, and I suggest you move the heli while I’m doing it. To the hills east of the Kamari city.”

  The expression shadowing Tai-ge’s face makes my stomach wriggle uncomfortably, as if I just discovered my insides are home to a nest of cockroaches.

  “If we take off again, we’re stuck.” Tai-ge rubs his forehead, flinching when his fingers get too close to the blood cutting across his temple. “Only enough fuel to ge
t off the ground one more time. And I’m assuming Howl isn’t up to walking all the way back to the City.” He meets my eyes. “Unless this is the excuse you’ve been looking for.”

  The excuse I’ve been looking for? My hand goes to my stomach, everything crawling inside. We were going to leave Howl behind. Leave him in the exact spot he’s lying right now, locked in the storage room for Reds to crack open like a nut.

  “He just saved my life, Tai-ge.” I barely have the voice to say it. “Probably yours, too, since he found you before the gores did. And you want to leave him out there for them?”

  Tai-ge can’t hold my gaze, biting his lip.

  “Well, if we can’t take off . . .” Xuan waits for a second, his head cocked toward Tai-ge. “Would you prefer to shoot me before or after I clean up Ms. Jiang’s back? And, if it’s after, would you mind putting that down?” He points to the gun. “I’m very easily distracted.”

  Tai-ge looks down at the weapon, then back at us. He sets it carefully on the console, keeping his back to the window. He’s so careful about it, I wonder what it is outside that he doesn’t want to look at. The dead gore? Hard proof that Tai-ge once again didn’t listen, that the world is a bit larger than he realized.

  “If you please, Ms. Jiang?” Xuan beckons to the floor.

  The back of my shirt hangs in tatters, slashed open to leave the front ballooning around me in an uncomfortably breezy way. Xuan has me lie on my stomach, feet stretched toward Howl’s door, my head cradled across one arm, the arm linked to the medic awkwardly pulled up behind me as he crouches next to me. Pain splashes down my back as Xuan sprays the cuts out with another of the waterskins.

  “You’re lucky. These aren’t from the gore.” Xuan’s voice is muffled, as though he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek as he works.

  I grit my teeth through the sting, skin crawling as his fingers trace the arc of the cuts across my bare back. “What else would they be from?”

  Tai-ge’s voice makes me look up. “Howl. He knocked you down.” He twists back and forth in the captain’s chair, now studiously avoiding looking at me as well as the window. “The gore was going for you, Sevvy, and he . . .” Tai-ge shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like those things. Never. I don’t even know how I held my hand steady to shoot it.”

  “It came after me?” Everything inside me is stone. Heavy, cold, impenetrable, as if I couldn’t absorb information even if I drilled it in. My thoughts won’t seem to focus, flitting from Tai-ge’s paled expression to the slashes of pain on my back to Howl lying limp in the storage closet.

  Sole said if it ever came to a decision between my life and Howl’s, he’d choose himself.

  So why is he lying half-dead in the storage closet right now when I’m out here with barely a scratch?

  The ointment feels like ice, goose bumps prickling all the way up my neck and down my spine as Xuan slathers it across my skin, then sets cool lengths of bandage across the cuts and tapes them down.

  “I don’t know how Howl jumping on you would have slashed up your back,” Xuan muses as he pats the last of the tape down onto my skin. “Unless he’s wearing a studded bracelet or something. These cuts look like they came from a blade.” He tugs at the edge of my destroyed shirt. “Not to mention this fantastic alteration to your shirt.”

  I could put on a dirty shirt from my pack, I suppose, but with my hand linked to Xuan’s, I’m not sure how I would get it on. He pulls me up from the floor, a bandage crinkling the skin on my back, and I try to ignore the way my tattered shirt hangs around me. I turn toward the storage closet, the door open only a sliver. All I can see is one tiny wedge of June, curled around Howl’s head and whispering in his ear, though his eyes are closed.

  “It isn’t going to be enough.” Xuan’s voice is too quiet, the cuffs clanking between us as he whispers. Information meant only for me. “Not with gore teeth.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t gore teeth.” I crane my neck around trying to look at the bandage on my back and end up going in a circle with the handcuffs looped all around me.

  Xuan shakes his head. “I mean your pal in there. Sun Yi-lai.”

  “His name is Howl.”

  “Sure. Howl. If only I had a throne to sit on, I’d think up a cute nickname too. Whoever he is, that shoulder wound is bad enough without the right supplies, but with gores . . . They’ll eat anything. Humans, animals, even things that have died from sickness or poison. There’s no telling what is in those wounds.” Xuan pulls against the handcuff, twirling me around so I’m not caught between my own hands, but it’s gentle. “When I was stationed in the camp south of here, they’d use poisoned lures to try to get gore numbers down, and it didn’t work so well. They would just eat the bait, the chemicals would stay in their mouths and in their systems . . . I’ve seen more than one soldier walk away from a dead gore with not much more than a scratch, then die from exposure to whatever was caught in its teeth.”

  “What do we need to do, then?” I whisper. “Is Howl going to . . .” I don’t want to say the word. Out loud, it might come true.

  When the sentence doesn’t end, Xuan shrugs. “It might have been a healthy gore. But if not, your medikit doesn’t have the stuff to treat it. Flesh-eating bacteria and all.”

  Fear swirls in my chest, Howl’s face swimming in my sea of consciousness, chalky white. My thoughts seem hot and cold at once, everything tasting of tears.

  It’s going to come down to one of you. That’s what Dr. Yang said to Howl, the most damning thing of all that happened between us. He said that he knew it. That he knew what was waiting for me when we got to the Mountain. If I weren’t there for Howl to hide behind, Dr. Yang would’ve killed him. I was a buffer. His way to get back home.

  But it was only hours after the doctor reminded him one of us had to die that Howl asked if I was game to leave. If I was brave enough to find my own way Outside, away from the rules and the expectations and the danger. To go live in a tree house, high enough that gores and Sephs would never find us. If I’d walk away—escape—so we could be on our own team.

  He wanted to survive. Wanted me to survive too, if he could swing it.

  I’m not going to let him die. He doesn’t deserve it. The thought surprises me, as if it’s been hiding deep inside me behind all the bluster and anger. All I can see when I close my eyes is his outline between me and a jagged circle of fangs. The gore came after me, not him. He could have run. Could have stayed back, gotten to safety once the gore was occupied. But he didn’t. He took my spot inside the gore’s jaws.

  All I can see is Howl, the survivor, who may have just killed himself saving me.

  I walk into the little room and shoo June out, bending Xuan in half so we both fit next to Howl. Xuan grumbles a bit, but it isn’t long until sleep drags his eyelids down, lengthening his breaths into an annoying snore. Howl doesn’t wake when I sit up, his skin too hot under my fingers as I search his pockets. I find a gore tooth, the same one he gave me back in the Mountain. The one his brother hollowed out and put on a necklace, that Sole couldn’t keep her eyes off. The communication link is inside.

  Purple light stings my eyes as I write out the message to Sole explaining what happened. When I’m done, I lie down, squashed between Howl’s bandages and Xuan’s snores, the link clutched in my fist. Waiting for the slight vibration that will mean Sole can help me. That she’ll know some way to fix this.

  “Howl.” My whisper is rough and worn. “You can’t . . . you can’t survive June and Tai-ge shooting you, only to be taken out by little scratches like these.” I stare straight ahead, cringing every time Xuan exhales in my face. I can’t force myself to turn over, can’t look at Howl, his chalky pallor, his bandages already showing blotches of red. My eyes burn, tears salty and wet on my cheeks.

  I take a ragged breath, his side scorching hot against my back “Just please don’t die,” I whisper. “I don’t want you to die.”

  CHAPTER 39

  NO DREAMS O
F GORES’ YELLOW teeth tonight. No Parhat, Liu, or Tian, their faces black with blood, or Helix and his long spidery fingers as he grasps at his gun. No Cale with her hair a halo of fire, no infected billowing from the Third Quarter like a cloud of smoke.

  Instead I dream of Howl and me siting on a rock under the endless night sky. He tells me the story of Zhinu the star and her husband, Niulang, the two of them trapped in their separate parts of the sky. We walk up to the strawberry beds in the Mountain greenhouses . . . and then he has a knife at my throat. And he’s tied up in the storage closet. And then looking down at me from under the owl tree, anger and despair a toxic cocktail that lines his face. “I don’t even know why I came after you.”

  I stop him in the dream. We sit. I listen without trying to argue. He listens too. We write a truce together in the dirt, the whole truth in exchange for my traitor star and his Menghu coat. And a promise to get rid of all the lychee water purifiers and to eat green apples every day and live in his stupid tree house. But just as we reach out to shake hands, Howl crumbles into sand, and then I’m awake, Howl’s broken body thrashing beside me.

  Xuan sits up, grabbing hold of Howl to keep him still, calling for water. For bandages and medicine. For things I don’t understand, the whole world foggy around me as if it will all just blank out in a moment because I’m so, so tired. June hands me the only waterskin left after Xuan used the others to spray out wounds yesterday. She keeps her eyes on Xuan as he checks the bandages, asks me to help prop Howl up so he doesn’t choke as we pour liquid down his throat.

  Tai-ge is as silent as yesterday, though his eyes follow me as I help Xuan check the bleeding on his arms and chest. Heat begins to burn in my cheeks as I hold the new swaths of gauze in place for Xuan to tape, the last bits we have, finishing as quickly as possible to get my hands away from his bare skin.

  Xuan bites his lip as he peels the thick bandaging from Howl’s shoulder, avoiding my eyes when he asks for help again in dressing it. Answer enough to the question I can’t bear to ask. How long before chemicals eat away Howl’s skin, tear into his bones and poison his blood? I can see nothing in Xuan’s face, no future.