Howl crouches down, fingertips tracing the edges of the paw print closest to him. It’s larger than his hand. “So what do you think? Believe in gores now?”
I look over toward him, intending to say something flippant, but my eyes catch on the rock face behind him and words won’t come. Scratches gouge deep into the stone just under the ledge where we slept, at least ten feet off the ground. They were not there last night when we climbed up.
Howl turns to see what I’m staring at, and half laughs, though there’s no humor in the sound as his eyes jerk over the scarred rock.
“Will it follow us? Are we prey now?” I’m proud of how steady my voice is. Almost as if this should be normal. We’re outside the walls. Of course creatures would be hunting us in the night.
“I don’t think so. Guess we’ll see. If anything large and toothy bites my head off, just run, okay?” Howl passes me some hard crackers and water, pulls on his pack, and starts downhill.
“Wait a second!” I call, more to myself than to him, trying not to think of what happened when I was late with Mantis down in the wine cellar.
He stops and watches me pull the pills from the bottom of my pack, tapping his foot as I push two into my mouth and follow them with water, the soft casings sticking in my throat as they go down. Before zipping the pocket shut, I pull out the entire bag of Mantis packets and silently count them.
“What’s the matter?” Howl asks, glancing back at the claw-scored rock behind me and shuffling a few steps farther down the hill. “We’ve got enough Mantis.”
“For how long?” I ask. “A few weeks at the most.”
Howl sort of shrugs, turning away from me in a sharp huff of breath that steams up around his face as he starts down the hill.
“I’d like an answer to that particular question.” I skip a few steps forward, the terror of those glass bottle shards in my mouth still raw.
Howl turns back, head cocked to the side as if he is trying to tease threads of truth from whatever fabric Dr. Yang has woven for him to pull over my eyes. “The City isn’t the only place we can get Mantis. You’ll be fine until we get to the mountain.”
“Get where?”
“I’ll show you where we’re headed the next time I climb up to get my bearings. We should be able to . . . well, Dr. Yang says walking should only take a few weeks if we’re accounting for . . .” He gestures vaguely to my midsection, and my ribs give an answering twinge as if they know he’s pointing out their bloody, broken faults. “A month if we run into trouble. We’ve got more than enough Mantis to last that long.”
“A month?” I curl around my broken center, attempting to make a joke out of my chagrin, when he raises an eyebrow at me. “We’ve only been out less than a day and there are already gores trying to eat us. So unless you have something more exciting for them to eat hidden in that pack of yours, I’d have to say I’m less than confident in our chances at survival.”
“Gores only hang out where there are lots of people to pick off.”
I point at myself. “I wouldn’t say I’m ripe, but I’d put myself in the low-hanging, easy-to-pick category.”
Howl stops, surprised into smiling again. “We’ll be fine. I think.”
“Very reassuring.” I bite my lip, not wanting to think about the howls from last night. “Even if we do manage to avoid gores and Reds and whoever else might be creeping around out here, what happens when we get to this mountain place, which is somehow not the same as Kamar? Will we be safe there?”
“We’ll be fine,” Howl says again, turning back down the hill without meeting my eyes.
“Will all your limbs still be attached by the time we arrive, or will I have eaten you by then?”
“I’m not going to let you hurt me, even if you do go all Seph-headed. Scars are about as sexy as the Chairman’s dirty bathwater.”
I think for a second, following his slow meander through the trees, avoiding patches of icy mud. “Is that what you call him too? Even the Chairman’s son has to use his title?”
Howl glances at me over his shoulder as he walks, his voice quiet. “Can you imagine calling him anything else?”
I lick my lips, trying to think what to say, images of my own father hazy and shadowed at the back of my mind. He may have been distant, even more so now because I can’t think of him without his last moments crowding in to replace everything else. I shut my eyes, trying to replace the terrible images with memories of his arms around me, of the games we played and the special smile he had for Aya and me. However shadowy those memories have become, at least I know he loved me. An odd sort of hollowness replaces the quick rearrangement of thoughts in my head to keep the curtain draped over my past.
Odd, because I never thought a traitor Fourth would have reason to feel sorry for the Chairman’s son.
• • •
The rest of the week is all steep slopes and fancy footwork to avoid falling into the sea of twisty trees and boulders below us. Howl does take me up a tree to show me where we’re going, though the wildly waving branches are almost enough to keep me on the ground. The answer to where we’re headed isn’t as complete as I’d like, because he just points to a mountain in the distance, blue in the mist. It seems like a part of another world, too far for anyone to make it on foot, too exposed and open, as if the whole world should be divided into sections and walled in as mine has been up until now.
After a few days of walking, Howl points out a funny-looking tree dwarfed by the bent back and gnarled limbs of the elderly canopy above us. “Oh, good. I was worried we were too late in the year to get the last of these.”
I look back the way we came, glad for the chance to rest my aching ribs. I hope for a glimpse of the City’s gray walls, but the trees are too tall; nothing to see but pine needles and a corroded metal tube big enough to walk through. It almost looks like the carcass of a heli-plane, but different. Older. Shot out of the sky, and now half-buried in the exposed dirt like a gravestone for Before.
Howl shakes the little tree’s branches behind me, looking for something. I walk over toward the tube, scuffing my feet in the dirt. My toes uncover two scorched pieces of plastic and a small ring inside, rusted red from exposure. Maybe the only possession left of whoever flew the craft. The band fits over my pinkie finger, like the ring Tai-ge wears, the City seal circling his finger like a shackle.
What if the only thing they find of me is my four stars, corroded to dust?
They sit in my pocket, heavy and sharp.
“Here.” Howl interrupts my thoughts, holding something out to me as he walks over. “There’s a whole orchard down this hill.” He stops, brows furrowed as I lace my hands behind my back, eyes glued to the fruit he is trying to hand to me.
“Do you . . . not like apples?” he asks.
I take a step back, not wanting to touch the fruit accidentally. Raw fruit is poison, one of the reasons the cannery that I spent so many hours sweating in is so important to the City. Ingesting something before the canning process . . . I gasp as Howl casually sinks his teeth into the fruit.
“Howl!” I reach toward him, not sure what to do.
He dodges me, dark eyebrows puckering together. “What?” The word comes out muddy, obstructed by the chunk of apple in his mouth. “I’m sure there are other trees. We’ll find something you like.”
“Spit it out! Quick, before the juice gets too far into your system!”
“What are you talking about?” Howl swallows, holding the apple protectively against his chest. “It’s an apple!”
Years of heavy gloves and eyewear, now here I am trying to figure out how to wrest a raw apple away from Howl with my bare hands, as if I don’t know how dangerous it is. “It’s poison! Why do you think we have so many canneries in the City?”
Howl’s abashed expression would have had me in fits of laughter if the situation weren’t so dire, but instead he’s the one who starts laughing. “Poison? Fruit isn’t poisonous.” He shakes his head. “You actually b
elieve all that junk the propaganda department puts out? I guess people don’t try to escape if they think that all the food out here is going to kill them.”
“Why would anyone want to escape?” I look down self-consciously. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
He pulls a branch down, picking another of the hard green fruits to hold out to me. “Here. Try one.”
Everything I know screams against me even touching the thing. I had to take a chemical shower once from contamination back at the cannery. My glove cracked and I ended up in the hospital, an acidic tang wafting up from the pulp threatening to eat away my palm. Death by uncooked peaches.
I shake my head. “You’ve been living on a hill with someone to prepare all your meals since the day you were born. You couldn’t know the first thing about what is safe to eat out here.”
Howl smiles through another mouthful of apple and shrugs, tucking the second apple into his pocket. “When I don’t die, and you are convinced, I’ll have this waiting for you.”
But only a few steps later, Howl’s hands begin to shake. He gropes at his pack, barely getting one of the pockets open before falling to his knees and then onto his face.
“Howl?” My head spins as I try to pull him onto his back, the bulky pack too heavy to move off him. Unclipping it and pushing it off Howl’s back, I finally mange to roll him over.
His eyes are white, rolled back into his head, and his skin is chalky and pale.
Why did you eat that stupid apple? I yell inside my head. What now? A finger sweep? Rescue breaths? Heart pounding, I try to remember what to do in an emergency from back at the factory, but the only thing coming to mind is a stupid song the nuns used to sing to us about Yuan Zhiwei’s unbreakable ax.
With shaking hands, I turn him onto his side, bending close to put an ear next to his mouth. He’s breathing. I lean forward again to check his pulse, but stop short when I notice white powder all over my hands. I run a hand across Howl’s cheek, and the powder smears under my fingers.
“Sev!” The whisper has me on my feet and ready to run, heart hammering against my ribs. Howl’s eyes open, a wicked smile cracking across his face.
“Sev, the apple! It’s killing me! Save me.”
“You . . .” I back away as he sits up and brushes the dirt from his shirt. “You dirty Seph! What is wrong with you? You scared me to death!”
Howl wipes the powder from his face, wrinkling his nose as it sticks to his hands. “You’d better watch your language around me, young lady.”
“I just about had a heart attack! I thought you were dead! I thought . . .”
“That you’d never be able to speak to me again? The tragic fate of a handsome First you just couldn’t save . . .”
The impish smile spreads even wider, and I have to concentrate very hard to keep from slapping the expression from his face. “Come on,” he says. “I’m funny. You can admit it.”
He’s so pleased with himself, it’s hard to stay angry. And I can’t stop myself from laughing as he tries to wipe the powder out of his hair. Unsuccessfully. “It’s stuck in your eyelashes. What is that stuff?”
“Water purifier.” He unzips the top pocket of his pack to get at his water skin. Pouring a little water over his hands, he scrubs at his face and hair, the water turning it purple. “Lychee flavored. Disgusting.”
“Wasting water purifier just to scare me?”
He rubs the water from his cheeks, shrugging. “I was going for a laugh rather than terror. You haven’t spent much time laughing since I met you. I’m trying to help.”
I laugh again, but underneath a scary sort of opening suddenly brings itself to light. I thought the exact same thing about Tai-ge back in the City, and did everything I could to fix it. It’s what friends do. Is Howl my friend?
I watch as he packs away his water skin and gathers the rest of his things together, a single hash mark on his hand flashing at me like a warning light. Am I friends with the Chairman’s son? A week ago I would have laughed at the thought, but Howl isn’t what I expected. Not snobby or self-important. He hasn’t looked at my brand even once.
Howl finally notices my absent stare in his direction. He smiles.
I smile back.
It feels safe, as if Howl is the boy from his story about the stars, ready to sing away the monsters lurking in this forest, in my past. Or tease and joke them away, anyway. He doesn’t seem like the singing type.
But, as I follow him out of our campsite, an uncomfortable thought wiggles to the surface of my brain. Howl is most certainly not dead, if a little sticky. If the City lied about raw fruit, what else isn’t true about the reality I thought was mine?
CHAPTER 10
HOWL CONTINUES TO STAY VERY much alive, but I don’t give in to the fruit. Even if hard crackers have begun to feel like cement piling up in my stomach, biting into an apple feels like some sort of disloyalty to the City. To Tai-ge.
Walking is a slow affair, with rests for me to concentrate on something other than my ribs attempting to poke holes out my abdomen. Howl can’t keep still when we’re stopped, sometimes pulling up plants with barky-looking roots to eat boiled with dinner, something I do allow, though it makes me look twice at that single line scarred into his hand, wondering how the Chairman’s son knows tubers from onions from bloodsucking leeches. He must have been preparing to leave for a long time, figuring out how to survive Outside so he’d be ready.
My cuts and bruises start to disappear, the days slipping by like sand through my spread fingers, mesmerizing and uniform. The cold doesn’t bite the way it did up high on the mountain, but it lurks in the open sky and the shorter days, waiting to bare its teeth. Before many days have passed, every tree we walk by starts to look the same, every burr caught in my hair just another task for our chats around the fire at night as Howl tells me stories about other constellations, other worlds, everything except his own life back in the City.
It must be hard for him, too—leaving. I can see traces of something trapped beneath the easy smile that splits his face in two as we walk away from his home and mine. But questions don’t go over well. Whatever it is that made him run—that made him help me—stays cloaked, hidden by his mask of smiles, jokes, and stories.
And it isn’t so hard to understand. I have my own pain to hide, each step away from the City feeling like a betrayal of something sacred, of the things I knew and loved. I keep track of the days religiously, marking off one week, then two, trying to measure Howl’s estimate of walking to this mountain place in a month against our progress toward the blue peak in the distance. It distracts me from wondering what Tai-ge is thinking, doing. The ring I found makes an ugly rust stain on my pinkie, but I leave it there, scratching an ugly circle on the corroded surface, like the City seal.
It feels like a link to him, as if I can toy with it the way he did with his, turning it around and around and imagining he is doing the same. Every day the metal looks rustier, grainer, scraping against my skin. Is that what Tai-ge thinks of me, now that I’m gone? Has his mother managed to convince him I’m as awful and ugly as this old, rusted ring? A sad substitution for the real thing. Never a friend, much less a . . . whatever it was that my traitor brand made impossible.
Going back, even to explain, could be death for both of us. I have to look forward.
Unfortunately, forward is an unchanging view of the back of Howl’s head.
The land levels out around us, the river swelling to a huge glassy sheet. We stay close to the water, following the curve of the mountain range south. When the clouds thin, the rounded tops appear, hulking beasts painted over with a child’s watercolor set in grays and greens. Once, Howl points out the ghostly silhouette of a building clinging to a bald mountainside, sharply peaked roof gold against gray. A forgotten temple of some god who died along with the rest of this land.
The bag of Mantis feels too light every time I take it out, as if the pills are slipping out behind me in a trail leading back to the City. In anothe
r week or more, we’ll be . . . somewhere, though I don’t let myself think more than that. Is it the same “somewhere” my mother went after she tried to kill me?
But I’ll be alive. Not attempting to swallow clods of dirt whole, or carving my initials in Howl’s skin. Is that enough? That I’ve finally earned my four stars, but I’ll be alive to wear them?
The trees, the nighttime fires made from Junis (a wood that hardly smokes), the river, Howl’s long-legged pace, waking up with frost in my hair—it all hardens into a shield against the knot of homesickness and regret twisted up inside my chest. I feel as though I’m part of a machine: walk, sleep, eat, forget.
Until early one morning, Howl stops.
I peer around him into the trees, and my breath catches in my throat. We’ve found people. A pile of them.
Howl nudges the closest man over with a muddy boot, separating him from the pile. The body resists, frozen and fighting to remain a haphazard part of the heap. The man’s eyes are glazed over with frost, City seal etched out in his brown leather jerkin beneath all the dried blood.
Memories of boots crunching through bones and rotted flesh dance through my mind, so I decide to sit and watch Howl search the dead men’s packs for useful items. At least until my stomach calms down.
As he rummages, the body separate from the rest watches me. The index fingers on both his hands end in blackened stumps, his mouth a frozen crevasse, gaping open in a grimace of ice and blood. Would you have killed me too? he asks. Just like your mother. Killing everyone else to make sure you live. You don’t even know why it’s a choice between you and me.
My eyes lock with the dead man’s, horror-struck as they film over with black foam. Are you here to kill me too? The inky black trails trickle toward his mouth, death grimace twisting into a sneer. Quit acting like a poor, abandoned child. It’s in your blood. Kill me.
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