Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  A sigh bubbles up out of me, tangling with the wind rushing past us in cold currents. “Howl doesn’t want me. He just wants the cure.”

  CHAPTER 41

  I PINCH MY MOUTH SHUT over the words, forcing them to sound like the truth. Howl just wants the cure. I can’t face any other explanation right now. Anything else and everything will start to break.

  “Is that right.” Xuan widens his eyes, propping his chin up on his fist as if he’s entranced. “Tell me everything.”

  “It’s kind of a long story. . . .”

  “Which I don’t particularly want to hear.” He puts up a hand to stop me. “Your story already doesn’t make sense.”

  “This is how you solve my problems? Not letting me tell the story?”

  “What do you have to do with the cure, Ms. Jiang? If it’s not a ridiculous, made-up story to force the City to continue listening to the Chairman, it’s hidden in Kamar somewhere, right? Why would Howl need you?”

  “Because my mother—”

  “Blah, blah, blah, be quiet. I hate to be the one to say this, but you are sort of annoying. And I’m not just saying that because of these.” Xuan shakes the handcuff, making my hand jerk to the side. “Last I checked, Yi-lai—Howl—was suffering from acute gore attack, resulting from an overactive sense of protectiveness.” Xuan’s stiff, emotionless tone is one hundred percent medic, the ridiculous diagnosis hammered out from behind a straight face. “There are set procedures in dealing with annoying people, and saving an annoying person from a gore when a gore could just take care of the problem for you is not one of them.”

  I can hear the smile in his voice, and it makes me want to slap him. But instead, I go back to the ground, focusing on one thing I can do. My fingers look thick and clumsy threading through the clumps of dry grass. In the hours since Howl attempted to fight the gore off with Tai-ge’s knife, I’ve thought of all the things Xuan is implying—minus being annoying; I’m not annoying—but it hurts too much to let any of those thoughts solidify. After tying Howl up and yelling at him and accusing him . . . after leaving him at the Mountain. After telling June and Tai-ge to shoot him. After he threw down the knife and told me to kill him myself . . . It’s too much.

  And if he does still want me . . . I bite my lip, not sure where my thoughts are supposed to go after that. Too scared to look.

  The key. It has to be here somewhere.

  “I told you. I am good at love problems.” Xuan leans back, looking up into the sun. “I’ll tell you how to fix it on one condition.”

  A gasp rips out of me as I accidentally wrap my fingers around a prickly plant, the barbs sinking deep into my fingers. “We don’t have time for this. It’s too late to fix things with Howl.” If I say it enough times, maybe my brain will stop trying to convince me otherwise.

  One thing I do know, though: Tai-ge’s right that we can’t let Howl be the reason we give up and let Dr. Yang get the cure. The thought is an awful wrinkle inside me, an answer that feels wrong.

  Xuan continues, “And that condition is you have to call me ‘doctor.’ Or, if you really want to, you can call me ‘doc.’ Doc Xuan. Doc Chen.” He clears his throat. “Love Doc. Any of those is acceptable.”

  My fingers brush something metal, and I jump, losing hold of it for a second. I take a deep breath, closing my hand tight over the tiny key, carefully sitting back to look at Xuan. “Are you finished?”

  “Are you finished, Doc?” he corrects.

  I will my temper to cool before I end up ramming the key up Xuan’s nose. “So, back to where this conversation started. If I could unlock these handcuffs, is there a chance we could get medicine from the staging area?”

  He sits up straight. “You found the key. Where is it?” He pulls my handcuffed arm toward him, suddenly flexing muscles I didn’t know were there.

  I pull the gun out and point it at the sky, waiting.

  He lets me go, wrinkling his nose. “You can’t go into that camp. And I can’t help you, Jiang Sev. Even if walking in and taking what we wanted were easy, I wouldn’t be able to make any promises. I don’t know what kind of junk is in those wounds.”

  “Is it possible that having Howl—the Chairman’s son, right?—in your debt might be a better bargaining chip than dancing for the dead General’s son?”

  “The dead General . . .” Xuan scrubs his shaggy hair back, looking up at the sky. “It’s the new General I’m worried about. If I’m not mistaken, the Chairman should be worried, too.”

  “What about the new General? What does she have to do with your deal with Tai-ge?”

  “I was promised a wave good-bye in exchange for a low-profile entry into Kamar.”

  “But you tried to run.”

  “It’s hard to hold up the terms of a deal when you’re pretty sure all of it is about to get blown to pieces.”

  I narrow my eyes, waiting for him to look up at me, but he doesn’t. “You haven’t been yelling to Tai-ge about mistreatment.”

  “When the vipers know where you sleep, Ms. Jiang, you don’t yell.”

  “Tai-ge’s a viper? He’s been on your side this whole time. You wanted to defect, and he flew you to the ocean.”

  Xuan presses his lips together. “That would be a marvelous story, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, he’s not the only viper who knows the location of the heli. And my superiors have a history of not keeping promises.”

  If there are promises Reds are supposed to be keeping, then Tai-ge . . . My stomach knots. “So you are a plant. Getting us in to Port North . . . why?”

  “Not all the vipers agree about who has the right of things and what will happen after we invade, Miss Jiang.”

  “You aren’t just trying to run because of where we landed, then. You’re worried your wave good-bye isn’t going to happen. That Tai-ge”—the knots in my stomach come alive, hissing like snakes—“or whoever is in charge in the camps is going to hold on to you instead of letting you escape.”

  Xuan nods. “And, unless you can promise something better, I’m afraid I can’t share much more than that. Technically, I’m probably already Arch fodder, so if you don’t mind . . .” He makes a grab for the key.

  I whisk it out of reach and hold up the gun, hating the way my finger looks so close to the trigger. “I’ll make you a deal. We need to get Howl medicine. If you won’t help me, I’ll swallow the key. And maybe shoot you in the head. Or somewhere worse.”

  “I take it back about Howl being the gore-ish one. You are officially much creepier.” Rubbing a hand through his uneven hair, Xuan rolls his eyes. “You might as well drop that thing, because if you were going to use it, you already would have. I’m willing to pretend for a second that I can’t just take the key away from you. What do you have to offer me other than . . . not shooting me in the head?”

  I let the gun sag down to the ground. “I’ll make sure they forget you existed. You get us medicine, get us onto that island—”

  “Sneaking into Kamar while they’re evacuating was never a great idea.” Xuan holds up his dirt-smudged hand and points at the two white lines marking him a Second. “If Tai-ge, Howl, and I all show up with mangled hands, they’ll know exactly what we are. I honestly considered cutting off my hand.” He looks down at his arm with a shiver, the chain linking us together bright in the sun. “But even with June swearing we were all trying to escape the City, they’ll kill us.”

  “Why?”

  Xuan sighs. “That staging area? It’s a worker processing unit. We send troops in, take anyone who looks healthy, and then send them south to work on our farms. What do you think happened to the people in these houses?”

  “The City just . . . takes people?” My stomach churns, sick bubbling up inside of me, the empty houses seeming to stare at my back. “Those people in the other town June and I walked through—”

  “The island has some kind of weapon that shakes helis out of the sky. There are settlements across the areas where the weapons reach—one on each of the three
highest points of the island, we think. Those places are safe. But places like this . . .” He gestures around us. “We’re out of the weapon’s reach.”

  The bleached wood and stone of the settlement are even more ominous now.

  “And it’s not just here. They didn’t realize what was happening at first. I was in one of the first groups to come here when the Chairman started expanding City farms. The people came out to meet us when we landed. We put them in cages. All strictly secret. Hardly anyone knows where Kamar is or what it’s like. Or that it isn’t made up of light-haired, light-eyed people who want to kill all of us. It’s just a place. A nicer place than the City, if I’m not mistaken. Fewer weapons, more places to hide, if you’re lucky enough to get onto the island.”

  I go up on my knees, inching away from him. “You came here. You stole people. . . .”

  “I didn’t steal people. I did physicals. Designations for types of labor the people we took were best suited to. No point in kidnapping someone to do your hard labor if they’re diseased. Or sending them to a mine if they’re too tall, or to a field if they’re too old.”

  “And June’s mom? You were the one who took her?”

  Xuan scrunches his eyes closed for a second. “Probably. I must have been, if June remembers me.”

  My arm linked to his seems to be tingling, as if I’ve been sitting here talking to him for too long and now whatever’s wrong with him will seep into me. He’s processed so many slaves, helped kidnap so many people he doesn’t even remember? “I hate that I’m talking to you. That I have to ask for your help now.”

  “I didn’t . . .” His eyes lower, mouth pinched shut. “I didn’t want to do it. You know how things are in the City. You obey, or you end up with SS. Or an execution sentence. It’s not just because of SS and the masks that I want to leave. . . .” Xuan puts a hand to his forehead, the tendons and muscles standing out. “I was glad when they started fighting back. It was so hard to just walk in and . . .” He takes a moment before continuing. “We started taking people right around the same time your mother went to sleep. It probably took another year after that before they got those heli-killers running, before their fighting force got organized enough to do anything but cry as we pulled people out from under them—most of the people the City processes now are fighters—they call themselves Baohujia. The family of protectors. They’re the only ones out where the City can get to them without having to risk their own forces, patrolling the settlements and protecting them against soldiers who come on foot to get around the heli problem. Kamar’s version of Seconds.”

  My whole body goes cold, all the little strings of hope I’d braided together crusting over with ice. The family. Find the family.

  A family of people who protect the island, the settlements . . . would protect the cure, if they had it. My breath catches in my throat, a sob I have to choke down. Could it be that Mother didn’t mean my family or hers? Not blood, not people who will see my face and know I belong to them.

  Before I can even say anything, I know I’m right. This must have been what she meant. She wanted me to find the protectors of Port North. And those same protectors are going to find our heli and kill us before we can come up with a plan to get to the cure, if Xuan is to be believed. All because of the things Xuan and the other Reds have done.

  Howl was wrong. It doesn’t matter who I am, and there’s no one here waiting for me.

  I don’t know if I should scream or point my gun at Xuan and pull the trigger. I can’t do either because the world isn’t made up of rights and wrongs anymore. Every right seems to have the wrong motivation, and every wrong a thousand justifications, and who’s to say which is right or wrong anyway? It depends on who is talking. I know exactly how it feels to be told what to do, the Arch singing a death song behind me to combat every rebellious thought. And even without that, Howl is dying. The world could die if SS spreads far enough. I bite my lip, willing it not to quiver. Instruct my spine to straighten. Look Xuan straight in the eye. “How long will it take us to get to the staging area?”

  “We?” Xuan’s head gives an exaggerated shake. “I’m not getting caught with you anywhere, Ms. Jiang. And I’m not good at gauging distances. Probably two days on foot? How would we survive the gores?”

  Two days. There are already helis on the ground, Reds forming up to push past the island’s defenses. Past the family. The Baohujia. I ignore the ripples of regret. Mother was City through and through. It was silly of me to hope. And it’s time to move past my silly assumptions about the world.

  There have been too many. I don’t think my heart can assume anything else or it will shatter completely.

  I grit my teeth and sit forward. “June’s not your best way in, Xuan. I am. I know people inside Kamar. You know my mother was a spy for them.” Lies. I hate the way the words taste, but I have to say them anyway or Xuan won’t listen to me. “The Baohujia knows I’m coming.”

  Maybe. Probably not. But it’s possible, even if it isn’t blood linking me to them, they’ll know what Mother wanted to do with her notes. “Mother told me to find them. If you get medicine for Howl, I’ll make sure you get in. With all your limbs attached and everything.” I give his scarred hand a meaningful look.

  Xuan’s eyes narrow. “How am I supposed to believe that? You didn’t even know where Kamar was.”

  “Mother died before she could tell me how to get here. But she’s the one who formulated the cure. She’s the one who left it here with them, and she’s the one who used her last words to tell me to come get it. My mother wouldn’t have sent me to Kamar just to be shot down. They know I’m coming for the cure.” It sounds so perfect, but there isn’t any hope left in me to think it could be true. “Maybe that’s why whoever it is who sent you is watching us. Because they know I have a better chance than anyone else to get it.” I smooth my hair back behind my ear, the shorn ends still feeling wrong. “And you don’t have a choice here. It’s believe me or get killed by the Kamaris when they come, because if you don’t help me, I’m not going to do any advocating for you.” I point south. “Or you could go back to that camp and find yourself a nice tent. Stay with the Reds and hope they have a mask for you.”

  I’m just as bad as Howl. Bending the truth to get what I want. Putting Xuan’s life on the line, even as I promise to save him. But it comes down to this: I don’t have it in me to leave Howl here to die. And if there’s no real hope that we can sneak onto the island, then doing what I can to preserve Howl’s life is the only thing I can do.

  Two days to get to the staging area. That’s two there, two back. We’ll think of another way while Xuan is gone. A way to get in with the soldiers, maybe even to go after Dr. Yang himself after he gets what he came for. It doesn’t matter who I take the cure from, so long as it ends up in my pocket and not a Menghu’s.

  Xuan bites his lip, staring at me through the strings of hair trailing down his forehead. He leans forward, and all my muscles tense, my fist balling around the key. But it’s a nod, not an attack. “Okay.” He says it slowly, as if he isn’t sure what he’s saying is true, the idea too foreign to compute. “I’ll help. If you agree to a few things first.”

  A trill of hope rises in my chest. “I’m not calling you Doc.”

  “I need supplies. A way to get past gores that doesn’t involve huge weapons.” He gives me a smile. “I’m not much of a shot. And I’ve seen too much to believe guns would be a sure bet against them even if I were.”

  “There are hammocks in the heli. I’ll leave one out for you, and you can use it to sleep up in a tree where the gores can’t get you.” I open my hand, the key on my palm. Not sure if this is right, if I can really trust him, but he leans forward and takes it before I can think any more, unlocking his side of the handcuffs. When the scratched silver falls free from his wrist, it hits the dirt with a thud, weighing my hand to the ground.

  “I can trust you to come back with medicine?” I ask. “In return for getting you into Port North?�
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  Xuan smiles, a dark, bleak sort of expression that twists my stomach. He rubs his wrist where the handcuff chafed against his skin. “Sure you can.”

  “Xuan.” I look him in the eyes, pleading full in my voice. I don’t have another choice. Not if I want Howl to live. “Please give me a reason to trust you.”

  He shrugs. “I’m done with SS. I’m ready to weather this out in a bunker, eating fresh food and playing weiqi. If you’re lying, I’m dead anyway. It’s just a matter of whose bullet finds me first. You just had better be here when I get back. I wouldn’t worry about Reds getting to that island before we do either, not unless they walk in on foot, and then the Baohujia would pick them off one by one as they cross the bridge. There’s no way to get in unless Kamar wants you there.” He glances back in the direction of the heli. “Or at least it won’t be on my head if they do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Xuan pulls himself up from the ground, offering me a hand up. “I said there were things—things, plural—I need you to agree to in order for me to help. And the second one is this: When I get back, Hong Tai-ge had better be somewhere else. He doesn’t come into Kamar with us, and as of today, as far as he is concerned, I’m dead. It’s the only way you’re going to be able to keep up your side of the bargain.” He stands up from the ground, brushing off his knees. “And, friendly, unsolicited advice: Unless you’re planning to hand over the entire island and the cure along with it to the City, I’d suggest that once you get him out of the heli, you lock the doors and don’t let him back in.”

  Fear is an ice shard inside me, a knife. “Why?”

  Xuan flexes his newly freed hand. Then he looks at me. Smiles. And tells me.