Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  “Humanness?” Howl looks up. “I wouldn’t call compulsions particularly human.”

  “I disagree.” Luokai’s voice curls up in a smile. “If humans’ first inclination were to love and trust, then there would be no war, no starving, no infected. No kidnappings. No slaves. SS doesn’t create violence or greed in its victims. It merely removes all the barriers we impose on ourselves. It’s people listening to their basest instincts who harm others.” He sighs. “No, we rise above the fact that we are human and control ourselves. We ignore the fact that others are human too, and choose to love them anyway.”

  He looks at me, catching me with my eyes open. I pinch them back shut, trying not to think. Trying not to agree with his words because it hurts. My whole life I’ve been attempting to do exactly what he is saying. I thought it was my sickness or traitor blood in my veins that made me selfish, made me want to think of myself, when I should be treating people like equals. Like people, not as though they were objects standing between me and the things I want.

  It makes me think of Sole, trying to recompense for her crimes by sewing up wounds just like the ones she inflicted for so many years. Of Howl recounting what my mother said about enemies looking like friends if you are close enough to see. It is not anyone’s first inclination to do that. We fight, we are defensive, we assume. We kill.

  I might as well have. I left Howl to die instead of me.

  But I can’t let it go. “You don’t know what happened between me and Howl. It’s not just a matter of being imperfect, something you can wave away and hope everyone tries to do better tomorrow. He might have been killed because of me. And me because of him.”

  Howl’s swivel to see me awake was almost comically abrupt. Luokai cocks one eyebrow, unsurprised. “On purpose? You tried to kill each other? Guns? Knives? Poison?”

  I pull my head up from the floor and sit with my hands in my lap, thinking of the scar at my throat made by Howl’s knife when I found him in the heli cargo bay. It was a mistake. An awful, horrendous, horrible sort of mistake, one that makes me question Howl’s judgment. But it wasn’t on purpose.

  Luokai catches my expression, turning it over and over in his mind as though he can discern my thoughts, a picture painted across my eyes and mouth. “Trust is a choice, Jiang Sev. Love is a choice. Choices you should be happy to have . . .” He blinks. Takes a deep breath. Tries again. “No matter which choice you make, it’s . . .” His voice squeezes to silence, cutting off midsentence.

  Luokai’s mouth screws down tight, and he takes a deep breath through his nose, the way he did when we were looking out over the underground market, as if he can send all his thoughts flying. He slowly raises a hand, his fingers flexed. His eyes open, but it’s almost as if he’s looking straight through me. He lowers his hand to the frayed yellow hem of his tunic and pulls out a thread. The concentration bouncing between him and the fiber pulses burns. The hairs on my arms stand up as he takes another thread, carefully placing it on the ground. He does it over and over again, each thread adding to a precisely arranged pile.

  “Luokai?” Howl’s voice crimps over the word as Luokai pulls each string, his unraveling hem boasting more and more available threads each time he takes one from the dusky yellow fabric.

  He can’t hear us, the compulsion’s grip on his mind blocking out everything but the design. Horror punches through me, pushing me to move between him and Howl, to keep June safe from this uncontrolled compulsion, only to feel as if I’ve stepped over a cliff into thin air when I remember she isn’t here.

  The swirls grow to form a design, interlocking circles covering the stone floor in front of him. Luokai’s hands are graceful, each movement part of a ritual, a dance. He’s in another world, at peace with compulsions, allowing them to take place instead of being controlled by them. The measured movements look like harmony and tranquility personified.

  The breaths scrunched down tight behind my throat slowly relax and flow. After a few minutes, Luokai stops, his eyes refocusing. He stares at his hands and then they drop, as if his marionette strings have been cut.

  “What you need,” Luokai whispers, as if our conversation hadn’t broken, “is to stop trying to decide who people are. Look at what they are doing. It is actions that make a person, not the ideas you choose to attach to them.”

  When I look over at Howl, he’s looking back, a self-conscious expression quirked at the corners of his mouth, as if I overheard something he wasn’t ready to share. “I didn’t know you were awake,” he says.

  I bite my lip. “Do you wish I hadn’t been listening?”

  He glances at Luokai, but then looks back at me as if he’s made some sort of decision. “I wish you’d heard me saying those things to you, not to him.”

  Electricity seems to spark through my chest, but it’s swirled together with indecision, with the fact that Luokai is sitting here watching us.

  Luokai looks up at the ceiling, discomfort twitching across his expression. “I’d really rather not be a part of this conversation.”

  “I’d really rather you weren’t too.” Howl sort of laughs. “Could you give us a minute?”

  The nervous energy sparking through me flares as Luokai gives a slow nod, then rises from the floor, leaning down to pick up the erhu case. I’m not sure I have answers to the questions I’m afraid Howl will ask me.

  “You’re both awake, so I’d like to move you to a safer place. And then go get the device your mother left.” Luokai’s eyes weigh on me for a moment before switching to Howl. “I’ll go find someone to carry you.”

  “If anyone tries to carry me, I’ll kill them.” Howl’s head jerks back toward me, his eyes wide. “Figuratively. Without any actual violence.” He presses his lips together when I raise an eyebrow at him, then looks up at his brother. “I’m glad to have finally found you after all these years . . . but it’s hard.”

  “I understand. I, too, am guilty of many such moments. Just talking about the Mountain still makes me angry, when I should have long ago let go of what happened.” Luokai runs a hand along the case’s long neck once, twice. Then opens it and takes the instrument out.

  The stone underneath me begins to hum, a loud crack echoing through the window and shaking the stone floor. Howl and I look up at the ceiling as a cloud of dust mists down over us, like a stone-made smattering of snow.

  “Are the helis here already? You said something about things shaking.” Part of it is concern that makes me ask. Part to forestall the moment when I’m in here alone with Howl, because everything is too close to see clearly. I know that what he says is true. I do care about him. A lot. Maybe even love him. But that thought in and of itself is terrifying, even without all the extra baggage weighing us down like cement up to our necks.

  “She’s . . . at the top . . . the central tower.” Luokai’s every sentence trails off as if he can’t remember that he’s speaking, the endings not so important as the beginnings. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks, fingering the erhu’s long neck.

  But then he looks at Howl. Raises the instrument.

  Swings it directly at Howl’s head.

  CHAPTER 55

  I DART BETWEEN HOWL AND his brother, the blow landing on my upraised arms with a hollow thunk. Luokai pulls the instrument back toward himself, fingers grappling with the slippery wood. “Gao Shun,” he croaks. “At the top.” Luokai’s glassy eyes stream tears, hardly able to focus on me. “Your aunt . . .”

  He drops the erhu and grabs both of my shoulders, pulling me so close his breath is in my nose, filming my cheeks. His fingers squeeze until I’m afraid I’ll hear bones break. Something in his eyes fights, and his lips purse as one word wheezes out from his throat.

  “Run.”

  “Help!” I yell, hoping the guards are listening outside. Luokai’s fingers clutch harder and harder as I try to wriggle out from between his hands. Stamping down on one of his feet with my bare heel loosens his grip for a split second, enough for me to take a step away. But
his grasping fingers follow me, streaking up toward my face. I duck, kicking him in the knee. No one comes to the door to let us out, to pull Luokai back.

  Luokai stumbles back long enough for me to crash down next to Howl, sliding under his uninjured arm to help him up.

  “My shoulder . . . ,” Howl gasps, his weight too heavy for me to carry up from the ground. He falls to the side, a tear slinking down his cheek, the two of us trapped as Luokai’s alien gaze settles on us. He begins crawling toward us, light from the window hesitant and gauzy where it creeps through the window to settle across Luokai’s shoulders like mold. Another ripple of shakes erupts underneath us, the sound of an explosion tearing through my ears from outside.

  Luokai inches closer, unhurried as he reaches for Howl’s foot.

  Howl kicks at his brother, catching him under the jaw. Luokai’s head jerks back, and Howl and I scuttle along the wall, trying to get away. It isn’t a large room, and Luokai only pauses long enough to find his feet and flick his tongue out to lick at the blood trickling down his chin.

  “Stay behind me!” Howl rasps, swearing as his hand skids out from under him when it comes down on the bag Luokai brought to us in the pack. The bag with the book inside.

  I dart between Howl’s crumpled form and Luokai just as he charges at us, snagging the bag. Swinging it by its straps, I smash the book into Luokai’s temple, slamming his assault off-kilter. “The pack’s by the door, Howl. See if there’s anything useful. His last compulsion only lasted a few minutes.”

  “You know compulsions aren’t consistent.”

  “What other choice do we have? We can’t open the door. It’s either wait it out or let him do . . . whatever it is he’s trying to do.” Another echoing boom shudders through the stone, almost knocking me off my feet, but I stay upright between Luokai and Howl as the erhu player reaches for his instrument.

  I don’t know what Howl is doing; his presence just a flutter of movement, and the sound of a zip that means he’s gotten to the pack. I can’t look away from Luokai, his unblinking stare leveled on me as he crawls closer, the scratch of the erhu’s wood against stone as he drags it toward me creeping up my spine. The cold, no-longer-in-control stare sends chills of dread through my core.

  He throws the erhu at me, rushes at me as I dodge, the instrument splintering on the wall as it hits. Hardly noticing as I swing the bag into the side of his head again, Luokai crouches low and darts underneath my next swing, his shoulder slamming into my ribs and taking me to the floor. My shoulder hits, slivers of pain slicing through my arm and side, Luokai’s heavy weight on top of me. His long fingers, so graceful during their last compulsion, contort as they clutch at my arm, fighting to bring his bared teeth down on my skin.

  Before he can bite, something flies through the air to crash into the side of his head, and he recoils with a yelp.

  His nails gouge long scratches into my skin as I slam my knee into his ribs, and his grip loosens enough for me to roll away. Howl’s sitting over the pack, his whole body curved around his shoulder as he tears through the contents, looking for something else to throw. Heart thumping, I stagger up from the ground and snatch the pack away from him. Holding it up like a shield, I charge at Luokai before he can get up, tripping over whatever it was Howl threw at him before. The stagger launches me forward into Luokai, and using the pack, I slam his body into the wall, his head thunking hollowly against the stone. Glassy-eyed, Luokai lunges, landing full on top of me and the pack, a bloody stream of saliva dribbling from his cracked-open mouth onto my collarbone. Something spasms through the erhu player, or whatever is left of the man inside this hungry shell, and I clench my eyes shut, bracing myself for the moment his teeth clamp down on my neck.

  Instead, his skull hits my shoulder, a ripple of pain shaking me to the bone, his dead weight crushing my lungs flat. I can’t breathe, the smell of fear and sweat and dirt from the pack clogging every attempted gasp.

  But then, he doesn’t move. Silent and still, his blood dripping in warm beads onto my skin.

  My arms shaking, I push Luokai and the pack off me, scrambling back from his limp form until my spine hits the wall. Howl hunches over his brother, Tai-ge’s electric razor sitting on the floor next to him. Howl’s face is gray, red marking the bandage at his shoulder and chest.

  He doesn’t speak for a moment, the two of us just staring at each other. I take a full breath, and then another, my head feeling so light I’m afraid it will detach. “We need his hand to unlock the door,” I whisper.

  Howl nods, but he doesn’t move for a second, his hand an anchor, keeping me grounded. “I don’t think I can drag him. He’s not going to stay out for long.”

  I swallow, then go up on my knees. For some reason, standing seems impossible, as if crawling will somehow be stealthier, won’t alert the erhu player that anything in the room is alive, that he needs to come back and tear us to shreds. I force myself to get up, to go to his limp form, and take hold of his arms. Drag him to the door. Shove his palm against the silver strip.

  The door clicks and slides open, the hallway outside bare. Has SS has already put the guards who were out there to sleep somewhere? Or perhaps sent them on more frightening sorts of errands?

  Howl uses the pack to push himself onto his feet, swaying until he leans up against the wall. I drag Luokai back into the farthest corner of the room, then grab the pack and slip the straps over my shoulders. The two of us stand there staring down at Howl’s brother.

  “I’m sorry,” Howl says to Luokai’s unconscious form. “But I’m alive. Both Sev and I are, so you don’t need to worry.”

  “We’ll be back,” I add. “Soon.”

  Luokai groans.

  Pulling Howl’s arm over my shoulder, I stagger under his weight when his knees buckle. Luokai rolls over, his eyes open wide and darting across the smooth stone walls until he turns around to level his flat gaze on us. “So hungry,” he mumbles, a broken tooth dribbling out of his mouth as he slides over onto his knees, getting ready to spring.

  I drop the pack and lug Howl through the door, his feet tripping over mine as we stumble out into the hall. Ducking out from under Howl’s arm, I pull at the door, stuck in its slot under the silver panel. It won’t budge.

  Luokai is crawling now, limping toward us with the slithering grace of a gore. The bag with the book inside hits my hip as I wheel to face him. I wait until Luokai gets to the doorway, going up on his knees and reaching for the wall to pull himself onto his feet. Before he puts his hand to the stone, I swing the book-heavy bag sideways into the doorjamb, the weight of the book veering around the corner, slamming Luokai’s hand against the silver strip on his side of the wall.

  Hope like an inky poison in my veins, the two of us stare at each other, time itself paused.

  The door snicks shut just as I pull the bag free and clutch it to my chest.

  Not waiting to see if Luokai can remember how to open the door while in the grips of a compulsion, I run to Howl where he’s huddled on the floor, pull him up, and drag his shuffling steps down the hall. The floor shudders under our feet, stone powder dusting down from the ceiling, a terrible promise that even Port North cannot stand against Reds forever.

  CHAPTER 56

  HOWL DOESN’T SPEAK AS WE hobble along, his good arm draped across my shoulder, the other cradled in his makeshift sling. Neither of us speaks until we’re down the hall and out of sight, a frustrated, inhuman scream issuing from the prison cell like an aftertaste in the air. But the door doesn’t open again.

  I pause for a moment to loop June’s bag across my body so I won’t drop it by accident. Of all the things we end up with, it would be the gold-embossed lines of the ridiculous book inside, the princess’s impossible happy ending mocking us from between its tightly closed pages. The book and . . . “The gore tooth! Howl, do you still have the link to Sole?”

  Howl looks down, his bare skin prickled in the cold air. We can both see the necklace is gone. “That little gore hole.
” He glances back the way we came. But when he looks back there’s a shadow of a smile on his face.

  “Why would he take it?”

  “I told him who was on the other end. He and Sole used to be a thing. A big thing.” Howl groans when I start walking again, forcing his feet to follow. “There isn’t much help she could give us now, anyway. She has what was on that paper. That’s what matters most.”

  “The central tower is where he said Gao Shun is.”

  Howl nods. “Then I guess we go up.”

  We go up a flight of stairs and then rest, Howl on his knees on the stone floor. Everything seems quiet, as if we’re in a tomb instead of a city that is supposed to be full of people. The floor doesn’t shake anymore while we wait for Howl to catch his breath, the dark seeming to reach out to us from the blank doorways marking the long hall. Once Howl is ready to continue, we walk and walk, up more stairs, down more hallways until Howl’s weight is bending me over sideways, one of his feet dragging.

  I grit my teeth, muscles screaming and my bones aching, wondering if he’ll collapse first or if I will. Will we ever find another person? A glowing arrow with the words GAO SHUN THIS WAY pointing us upward? Luokai said she was at the very top of this place, but not all stairways are going to lead there. And with the stones shaking as if bombs are falling, will Port North fall on our heads before we even come close?

  The ground shivers under my feet even as I think about bombs, and something overhead fractures, the terrifying crack-crack-crack of stone caving in. Howl stumbles, and I fall under his weight just as a shower of stone chips rains down over our heads. Ceiling and stair groan as if Port North is giving up, ready to fall into the ocean and feed us to the fish that live at the bottom rather than face the onslaught of bombs raining down from above. Chunks of stone crash to the floor just ahead of us, the solid rock over our heads feeling as if it’s shifting forward.