He points to the side door, low on the wall next to him. Cracking it open, he squints into the sliver of sunlight pouring in. “Hide under the trailer until you’re sure it’s clear and then make for the ditch over there. There’s some tree cover, and they’re all up at the front right now.”
“We’re leaving? What about Dr. Yang?” I ask.
“It’s that or let the Seconds drag us back to the City. We’re lucky we’ve lasted in the back of the trailer this long, actually.”
I look through the cracked door to be sure the men are out of sight, then slide out and under the rusted metal frame. The ground is frozen, scrubby tufts of dead grass needle-sharp under my hands.
Howl pushes the packs under the trailer before squeezing after me, sandwiching them between us. When Dr. Yang’s worn dress shoes lead the Seconds back toward the truck, I crawl toward the opposite side of the trailer to peek out. The army checkpoint must be over by the door where Dr. Yang is starting to swear. This side is completely clear, a few spindly trees marking a ditch that runs along the road about ten paces off. Beyond that, all I see are misty clouds that shroud our mountain range through most of the winter.
Outside. Where Sephs run wild and fantastical gores eat the dead. Even looking out at the unwalled horizon feels exposed and risky, as if creatures of either the human or animal variety lie waiting to eat me alive.
Is it better than death to be stuck Outside? I blink, almost expecting a hallucination to follow a thought so dark, but nothing comes. I won’t betray my City or Tai-ge, no matter what Dr. Yang and Howl want from me.
But I would rather be alive than dead.
Wiping my sweaty palms on my shirt, I grab my pack’s frame. I know running for it is a better idea than waiting for the truck to drive away and leave us exposed, but my hands shake at the thought of leaving cover for the open ground between us and that ditch. Nothing to shield me from the Red checkpoint but a trailer and an old doctor pulling nails from a box one by one.
But even worse, leaving this last bit of civilization for . . . Outside. With Kamari soldiers bent on finishing the invasion they started so many years ago and Wood Rats gnawing on the remains they leave behind.
I clench my jaw and roll out from underneath the trailer into a crouch. As I slither through the dead grass toward the ditch, Dr. Yang’s curses and banging equipment cover the noisy crackle of grass under my hands and knees.
When I get to the trench, I slide over the edge and fall onto something soft. The bank sinks into the ground much deeper than I expected, about seven or eight feet down and three or four wide. Howl’s pack slips over the edge, narrowly missing my head. He follows, landing in a crouch beside me.
He grabs his pack and starts to walk, picking his way through the rocks and exposed roots. I bend to grab my things, but lurch backward the moment I set eyes on the ground. The “something” I landed on is actually a someone.
Bloated lips and cheeks distort the face in a gruesome mockery of a person who once lived and breathed. I stumble off the body, clapping both hands over my mouth to keep the gasping retch boiling in my throat from bursting out.
Howl doubles back when he realizes I’m not following. My pack lies next to the dead man, touching his muddy jacket and shirt, which have been ripped open by my boots. Broken and decaying flesh spill out from the jagged tears. Three ribs jut out of his side, writhing with insects. A dark brownish red stains the ground all around the corpse.
Howl grabs the metal frame of my pack and shoves me in front of him, herding me away from the body. Tripping over each step, I run.
When Howl catches up with me, he puts a finger to his lips, pointing up. I know they might hear us, but I can’t make myself move any more slowly away from the body. I point back to make sure he saw it, wondering how he can be so calm. He just shrugs and whispers, “It doesn’t matter. We have to get away from here.”
The smell will never wash off my boots. Or hands. I can feel it sinking into me, burrowing under my skin and drilling into my bones. I can’t let myself think about the man on the ground. How my feet dug into him. His ribs breaking like twigs under my feet.
We walk until darkness begins to fall in waves around us. Every ten yards or more we find another body, sometimes more than one. I can’t look at them, giving each as wide a berth as the ditch will allow.
Howl touches my arm, pointing to the stunted, bowed trees lining both sides of our trench. “I’m going to climb up and take a look around,” he whispers, fumbling to unfasten the pack’s clasps across his chest and hips. “You okay?”
I shrug, not sure how to answer.
“How are your ribs doing? They hurting?”
My ribs have been complaining the whole way, even though more doses of Da’ard have made it possible for me to move without wanting to extract my ribs and leave them behind. There isn’t much more we can do about it. “I’ll survive.”
Howl props the pack up against the dirt wall, running his fingers over the crumbly surface before he starts to climb. Watching him scale the eight-foot wall leaves me a little unsettled. How is it that a boy slated for laboratories and test tubes can climb like that? Most of the Firsts I came in contact with were much more inclined to watch than do.
Pausing at the top, Howl peers over the lip before hoisting himself up. I can hear him crawling through the scrub, each dry leaf crumbling under his boots sending alarm signals down the mountain.
His head pops back over the edge. “I don’t see anyone, and we’re in a good spot to make a break for better cover, but we’ll have to be quick. Hand up your pack.”
I slide the bulky frame up the wall until he can reach the pack to pull it over the edge. After I hand off the second pack, I climb before he can come back, throbbing ribs screaming each time I reach up. I force myself to keep climbing, pulling myself higher and higher until Howl’s hand reaches out to grasp mine and haul me out of the ditch. Out of breath, I curl up on the ground around the pain, breathing in and out slowly.
Howl drags our bags into the scraggly cover and waits, as if he’s not quite sure what to do. Finally, he kneels next to me and leans over, whispering, “I know it must hurt, but we’ve got to get off the road. Can I carry you?”
I roll over and raise myself to a crawl, going a few feet into the weeds next to the ditch before Howl lifts me to a hunching walk across the road. But as soon as we leave the road’s clean slice into the mountainside, the hill is steep, and my feet slide with each step. Howl straps his pack on and drags mine behind him, half propping me up with his other arm until we come to a flatter portion of ground.
“So, what’s the plan, Howl?” I finally ask, attempting to stand up straight. My whole side seems stuffed to capacity with jagged edges and points, a firestorm of pain that leaks out through my skin in a cold sweat.
“Get farther away from the road. Find a place to camp tonight near the river. Dr. Yang got us past most of the farms below the City, but there’s still a ways to go before we’re off City patrol circuits.” He looks at the glowing horizon, the sun already halfway gone. “I think we’ve got about an hour until full dark. Let’s see how far we can go.”
“Go . . . where? We lost our guide. What about Dr. Yang?” I voice the question both of us must have been thinking.
“Dr. Yang can take care of himself.” Howl starts to walk again.
“Yes, but can we?”
Howl holds a branch back to let me pass. “He knows where we got off and will be in contact with help as soon as possible. I can’t think that our trail will be difficult to follow for Reds or Outsiders. It will just be a matter of who finds us first.”
I shiver at his words, pain blocking my capacity to ask for more. What kind of help could Dr. Yang bring?
The mud on the ground is crusted with ice, footprints of men and women long gone still preserved in sharp ridges that crunch under my feet. Scrubby trees give us a little cover until we make it to where the true forest starts. Before we descend into the trees, I lo
ok up at the terraced rice paddies beneath the City, hundreds of sinuously curving steps cut into the mountainside. My last look at home.
A white-water rush of river flows down between us and the farms, and we stay low until the trees twist and curve over us like ancient umbrellas, some wide enough that it would take four or five people holding hands to completely encircle. Even the closely cultivated orchards in the People’s Garden look like malnourished children compared to these giants.
When the last touches of sunset are smothered by night, Howl drops his pack under a tree that twists around itself like a girl’s long braid, the naked branches spreading out over the wide spot in the river. The dead man’s touch still itches away at me, sending me over to the water, the current much slower here than up by the farm. I pull off my boots and set them in the rocks at the edge, where the water can run over them but won’t wash them away. Stepping in leaves me gasping for breath, the freezing water stealing the last bits of heat still left inside me.
I grit my teeth and kneel on the riverbank, determined not to leave any trace of the dead man from the ditch on me. Submerging my hands and splashing water on my face isn’t enough, so I start scrubbing with sand from the bank. Howl’s hand appears in front of my face, holding a bar of soap. He crouches next to me in the water, cupping his hands to splash water through his hair and across his face.
I scour my hands, wishing I were brave enough to go after my hair. The dead stench will never come out, will follow me everywhere I go. The cake of soap is thin enough that after one use, it’s almost gone. I set it next to me in the rocks.
“Never seen a dead body before?” Howl’s voice echoes loudly against the quiet that blankets the forest.
“I have,” I reply, rubbing my hands. They are red with the violent cleaning and cold.
“Not like that,” Howl says, taking the soap. He hands me a shirt to dry my hands on. One of his.
Drying my face keeps me from answering for a moment. “I’ve never been up to my ankles in it before, no. Who do you think he was? Who any of them were?”
“They shoot anyone who comes up the road without stars. They could have been infected. Fighters. People trying to escape?”
People trying to escape what?
“It’s too hard to carry the bodies up the mountain, so they just burn the ditches every few weeks.”
Lighting a fire seems stupid so close to the road, so we pull out our sleeping bags and eat crusty bread and dried meat from inside them. We agree the quicklights should be for emergencies, so we let the inky darkness fall, watching the sky turn black through the swaying branches. I’ve never slept outside before, and the noises and the wind play against my nerves like an erhu out of tune.
A long chortling wail echoes through the trees, needling through my skin. Howl and I sit up at the same time and look at each other. His smile cuts through the dark as he says, “What do you think? Gores, or imitations to flush us out?”
“Gores?” Gores are just a fairy tale. Supposedly, during the times Before, the people who lived here used dogs genetically engineered with some sort of hyena DNA on their police and army forces, the animals so large they could bite a man in two. According to the Outside patrollers, they stand taller than Howl’s lanky six feet and, now that they’re feral, the creatures are set on killing any human they come in contact with. I can still remember an Outside patroller marking the wall to show one of my classes how tall the last gore he’d had to fight was, showing us scars all up and down his side from the creature’s teeth. Only the next patroller to come to the class scoffed at the story, sure the last gore he saw was at least three feet taller—all soldier stories spun to give Third children nightmares. “I’m sure there are lots of animals out here, but aren’t gores a little . . . exaggerated?”
Howl doesn’t say anything for a second, eyes in the trees around us. “I don’t think so.”
Another cackling laugh slips through the frigid air as we gather our belongings, images of monsters I didn’t think could exist prickling the back of my mind. Another wail, closer this time. My ankles and calves protest as we start downhill again, throbbing in time with the crackling pain radiating out from my ribs. Howl stops abruptly, pointing to a nest of boulders jutting up into the tree canopy like a giant’s dead hand clawing to escape the ground.
“There’s a ledge big enough for both of us.” Howl nods to the farthest boulder. “Up for a climb? Nothing will be able to reach us if we sleep up there.”
Another animal scream splits the air, creeping down my spine in a cemetery of goose bumps. I nod.
Howl climbs up first, taking each pack as I hand it to him, then helping me. It’s an easier climb than the ditch, but the rock feels too smooth against my hands, as though we’ll slide from our perch the moment we close our eyes.
We spread out our sleeping bags, setting up our packs as pillows, but it isn’t very comfortable. Not that it could be with Howl’s back brushing mine. For a strange moment, I’m almost glad to be worried about falling off and being eaten by whatever is making those terrible baying cries, because it means I don’t have to feel awkward about sleeping with a boy right next to me.
Another of the haunting cackles rips through the air as I huddle in my sleeping bag. It becomes a game, like watching lightning strike and counting the seconds until thunder breaks. Every cry is closer, and I find myself counting breaths as I wait for the next call to echo around us. Finally, I pull the hood of the sleeping bag over my head, trying to block them out.
Howl rolls over. “Can’t sleep?”
“Really? Sleep?” I ask, my teeth chattering.
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I watch my breath mist out in front of me, two, three, four, five . . .
His hand finds my shoulder through the sleeping bag, pulling me over onto my back. He points up toward the sky, through the waving tree branches. “Do you see that star?” Howl asks. “The bright one?”
Following his finger, dark spreads out over us like eternity. The few stars we could see through smog and light in the City are nothing compared to the thousands of pinpricks letting light in through the shell of the night sky. “That one?” I ask, my hand pointing up with his. Another moaning call screams through the air, and I curl back into the sleeping bag, clenching my eyes shut.
Howl’s arm slips under me, pulling me closer. Normally, it would be too close, but the gore’s wail pierces every inch of my skin, as if the creature has already found us and taken a bite of me. Howl’s presence feels like a shield, a distraction.
“That bright star,” he says, “that’s Zhinu. She’s the daughter of the sun.” I open my eyes again, trying to concentrate on what he is saying. “All the other stars paled in comparison, doomed to serve the most beautiful of their number. At the crook of one brilliant finger, they would bring her flowers from Feiyu”—he points to another bright point in the sky—“or travel even farther to bring her a wisp of breeze from He Wu.”
His breath mists out over both of us, freezing on the scrubby moss growing out from the rock above us. “But she wasn’t content with all of her suitors and servants. She was bored of everything, from the moon’s idle gossip to her father’s angry blustering against peasants who had stopped worshipping him. Now, disobedient peasants sound interesting, Zhinu thought. So she jumped from the heavens down to earth and landed in the middle of a flock of qilin.”
“What are qilin?” I interject, looking over at him.
Howl purses his lips, thinking. “I don’t know. My mother used to tell me this story, and her grandmother used to tell it to her, and her grandmother before that, so some of the details are a little hazy. Qilin are supposed to be good, I think, but dangerous. Something from a story that couldn’t really exist, with beautiful black-and-white hair that trails down to the ground and long fangs for ripping meat.”
My thoughts immediately go back to the baying that creeps closer every minute, but Howl’s rhythmic cadence draws my attention back to him.
>
“Zhinu was terrified. She tried to jump back to her place in the stars, but one of the qilin caught the train of her dress between his teeth, determined to eat the beautiful creature. Just as he was about to nibble on her little toe, a beautiful voice sang out over the forest and brought the beast up short. The whole flock ran toward the voice.
“The daughter of the sun followed, curious to know what kind of animal could calm such terrible beasts. But it wasn’t an animal, it was a peasant man, handsome, and with a voice sweet enough to rival the cosmic symphony. The moment they set eyes on each other, they fell in love, and were married that day. His name was Niulang.”
“Niulang and Zhinu lived happily together for three years before her father, the sun, found her. As punishment for running away and marrying a peasant, he set her in the sky so far from earth that she could only weep tears of sorrow and memory. Niulang killed one of his precious qilin and followed her, hidden under its skin.” Howl points up to the sky again, another star twinkling above us as if in response. “But the disguise didn’t fool the sun. He built a wall between Zhinu and Niulang, so he would never be able to find her. So they could never be together.”
A thick belt of stars winds between the two lovers, the glittering divide millions strong. “So they just look at each other, across the wall?” I ask, my eyes feeling heavy.
I can hear the smile in his voice. “She spends her time weaving her tears into clouds, to protect the earth from the sun’s anger. And in return, when the sun’s face is turned elsewhere, all the birds fly together into the sky to make a bridge across the wall so Zhinu and Niulang can be together.”
My eyes close, baying cries forgotten within the quiet safety of Howl’s voice. He settles in next to me, reassuring calm folding over me like a warm blanket.
CHAPTER 9
DAWN FILTERING THROUGH THE TREES surprises me. I feel as though my eyelids just closed, and they resist as the sun’s cold rays of light nudge them back open. Howl sits up next to me, dark circles under his eyes marking the sleepless night. When I slide to the ground, I freeze, staring at the ground. Heavily clawed paw prints are dug into the frozen dirt from here to the trees.
Last Star Burning Page 8
