Howl scratches at his face, several days of beard lining his chin. I think it looks nice, but from all the scratching, I’m pretty sure he’s missing the First-grade electric razor he abandoned with his pack. “Not just SS levels? What other tests do you need?”
“Encephalitis lethargica levels first, of course, but we also need to do immunizations, blood typing, a basic physical . . . nothing too exciting.” Raj consults a clipboard, checking something off. “Howl, your last tests were updated three years ago. We’ll just need levels from you.”
Howl quirks his head to the side, eyes narrowed. “Are all the other tests new? I don’t remember having my blood drawn before.”
“No. This is standard procedure. There might be special requests from Dr. Yang, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
Raising my hand to get Raj’s attention, I cut in. “Whether it’s standard or not, you try to draw my blood right now, all you’re going to get is dirt. Can we clean up first? I smell like I haven’t taken a bath in more than a month. Because I haven’t.”
Raj blinks. “I suppose that can be arranged. I’ll take you down to the Outside showers. You’ve taken Mantis within the last ten hours, Sev?”
Dr. Yang didn’t leave anything out. I nod.
• • •
The Outside shower turns out to be one booth, one hose tangled on the floor, no soap, and no door. Next to the shower there’s a sink and a squat toilet. From the state of the floor, I’d be surprised if soap of any kind has ever touched the place.
Howl pulls the pack from his shoulders and grabs one of the towels Raj gave us from my arms. “I’ll keep watch for you if you do it for me.” He snags the towel on a rusted hinge that must have held a door once upon a time, pulling it across the entrance and covering his eyes with one hand. “Won’t look, I promise.”
Even with that convincing promise, I can’t properly enjoy the lukewarm water pouring down over my hair and back. Howl might keep his eyes covered, but the room opens to a hallway.
The time Outside has left me with dirt sunken into my skin, lining all of my joints, and embedded under my cracked nails. It might take weeks to get it all off. Years. Bars and bars of soap, if they have it here. I sigh as I turn off the water. The rusty stain on my pinkie under the ring looks diseased, as if the old metal is causing my finger to rot. I take off the ring and scrub at my tarnished finger. Tai-ge’s face swims up through my thoughts, but I don’t put the band back on. My past is dead. It has no place here.
Raj walks in just as Howl steps into the booth. “Is everything fitting all right?”
My uniform is too big. I’m pretty sure someone owned it before it came to me, maybe several someones. The loose-fitting pants brush the floor even when I’m standing on my toes, the green canvas fabric frayed at the hem and hip pockets. The black T-shirt has a hole in one sleeve, but I can’t argue with clean. The ring goes into my pocket. “It’s fine.”
Raj’s eyes dart toward the shower as Howl starts to hum. “This is your schedule and access card.” He hands me a small white envelope. “That’s so you can eat before we insert your ID chip.”
The card sports a picture on the top left side: me with a healthy coating of dirt and leaves, looking slightly cross-eyed. Great. I take solace in the fact that Howl’s card makes him look like he might be drunk.
“I’ll just . . . wait.” Raj glances at the shower again, water flowing out from under the towel. “I’ll get you to the correct wing for your collective.”
Howl’s head appears above the towel, muddy trails of water weeping down his face. “Don’t bother, Raj. I’ll show her. Where are you headed, Sev?”
I unfold the papers from the envelope, trying not to blush at Howl’s nonchalance about being naked two feet away from us. Even with the towel. “Menghu. Like Helix? Aren’t they military?”
“Yes.” Howl sticks his head back under the water, washing away the last of the mud. The shower key squeaks as he turns the water off. “Good luck with them. They’re all very . . . enthusiastic.”
Raj doesn’t quite smile. “There are five collectives,” he supplies in answer to my unspoken question. “I’m part of Nei-ge. Administration and leadership. And . . .” He glances up as if there should be something to look at in here besides dirty tile. “. . . late for a meeting. I’ll just take Sev up to get her testing done so I can set you two loose.”
“Can we talk to Dr. Yang about that? Sev is afraid of needles.”
I glance back at him sharply. Afraid of needles? Any infected in the City has had enough needles jammed into them not to care anymore. Look at someone funny and suddenly your Mantis dose needs to go up. Immediately. But I don’t say anything.
Covering my eyes, I toss the last dry towel into the shower. Raj picks up the clean uniform meant for Howl from the top of my dirt-encrusted pack and hands it over. The pack seemed cleaner than the floor.
“I can ask, if you want.” Raj’s voice is uncertain. “I know General Root and Dr. Yang were both very interested in her levels, though.”
Howl walks out of the shower fully dressed, rubbing the water from his hair. “Last I checked, SS isn’t contagious. She isn’t going to infect anyone by walking too close.”
“No, but . . .” Raj trails off as we walk out the door, leaving him alone in the Outside showers.
CHAPTER 20
I HAND THE ENVELOPE TO Howl and he steers me down another blue hallway that ends with a heavy metal door. He pushes a button in the wall and the door slides open to reveal a tiny, mirrored room. Shiny silver buttons line up by the door, numbered one to eight. Howl pushes number five, the heavy metal door closing slowly. As soon as the door shuts, my stomach drops and I have to slap my hand against the wall for balance. The floor is moving.
“It’s an elevator, Sev. Don’t you remember elevators from the First Quarter?” Howl asks.
I shake my head. Fuzzy pictures of wood-paneled rooms just like this one flick through my mind, but I must have blocked out this gut-wrenching sensation. I do, however, remember walking up nine flights of stairs to get to my station at the cannery every day.
The door slips back open and my breath catches in my throat. The room beyond is big enough to feel like we’re going back Outside, large enough that I’d have to yell to talk to someone on the other side, and ceilings so high I can’t actually see them from inside the elevator. Shiny stone walls make a perfect circle around the perimeter, a stairway across the room hugging the bald rock, leading up to balconies and hallways. Windows and openings pepper the walls above us, the highest almost too far to see. When I take in more of the room, I realize there are actually four staircases dividing the large, circular space into quarters. Bright circles of light decorate the white and blue tiled floor. Stepping out of the elevator, my eyes follow the shafts of light up to an impossibly high ceiling in the stone.
“This is the Core.” Howl smiles, looking around.
It’s as though we’re standing deep in a dead volcano’s belly, its slack mouth above us turned into skylights. The stairways and window and balconies make me feel as though I’ve stumbled into an ant nest, the rock above me tunneled through to make way for the bustle of people living underground.
Howl points up toward a large panel of glass set into the stone wall, far above the reaches of the stairways, the glass surface too full of reflected sunlight to see through. “That floor is all greenhouses. They’re up high, where the windows can go all the way Outside.” He smiles again, as though he’s missed seeing this place. “If we ever end up stuck down in here at least we’d have enough to eat. As long as you don’t mind being a vegetarian. There are chickens in here somewhere, but they only let us eat the eggs.”
“Where’s the marketplace?” I ask, thinking of the City’s bustling center with comrades trading fabric and canned goods. Everything here is so clean and polished, as if no one has their own place to make a mess.
Howl shakes his head. “No official trade. Everything’s issu
ed by Nei-ge according to need. Clothing, food, shoes and socks, paper and ink, everything. Everyone really is equal here.”
In the very center of the Core, steps sink down into a circular amphitheater. A large skylight creates a beam of light that falls in a hard circle across the entire sunken portion of the floor, more than ten times longer across than I am tall. The bright light bounces off a gold seal set into the red stone: a large star, with four smaller ones lined up next to it.
“It’s left over from Before. Secret military base of some kind, I think. At least I’m guessing from all of the telescreens and the tech and how well it’s defended and hidden. We didn’t have anything so extensive up in the City, except maybe here and there in First laboratories.” Howl nods toward the symbol. “Whatever country was stationed here must have crumbled just like everyone else when SS came through. Places like this were safe from the bombs, so the people inside survived while people Outside turned into monsters.”
Monsters. “You don’t think . . . Helix?” I stumble over the words, wanting it to be true. At least then I could understand. If shooting at June was a compulsion . . .
“Is infected? No.” Howl scratches at his scruffy chin, watching my face, but doesn’t elaborate.
We walk toward the drop in the floor, weaving through streams of people flowing into the room from large glass doors. Smells of steamed bread and cooking vegetables waft through the air, reminding me that the only things in my stomach for the past month have been dried, stale, or dirty from being dug out of the ground. People accumulate under a large opening in the stone, wooden beams forming a triangle around a counter, workers passing out plates of food. Groups of men and women sit down on the amphitheater steps, eating and talking.
Something strikes an odd chord. Color. In the City, this would have been a sea of black or gray hair, and varying degrees of olive skin, but here in the Mountain I see olive and pink and brown, and hair that burns gold, white, gray, red, and black. And . . . I like it. I thought it would be hard after a lifetime of fighting invisible Kamar, of propaganda and classes on how to detect genetic deficiency. But these people look like . . . people. As though they belong together. Like I could belong too.
A few of the sitters are staring back. One is even pointing. A ripple goes through the crowd around us until twenty people or more are all unabashedly staring in our direction. The stirrings of hope inside me dim a few watts. Maybe there’s more to belonging here than just walking in.
“Friendly bunch, aren’t they?” I remark.
Howl steps between me and the crowd of uncomfortable stares. “Let’s go find your room.”
I nod, skin crawling as hundreds of eyes follow us as we walk out.
The halls leading up to Menghu dormitories sport the same calming blue as below, but a telescreen runs the length of every hall. Back in the City, telescreens were for Firsts. And only the lucky ones.
There are three beds in my room, two of them stacked in a bunk and made up with blue sheets, a white blanket neatly folded at the end. The last bed is just a bare mattress, jacked up on stilts above a chest of drawers.
When I walk in, a girl jumps up from one of the beds. She’s tall. Almost as tall as Howl, with dirty-blond hair tied back into a ratty ponytail. Her face is heart-shaped and would be pretty if not for the murderous glare that immediately focuses on Howl. “You aren’t allowed in here. Men sleep on the other side of the dormitories.”
Howl holds up my room assignment. “Argue with Root. It says right here that I’m supposed to be your new roommate.”
“Get out!” Rosebud mouth pinched into a frown, the girl jabs a finger into his chest, making the bones laced into a bracelet around her wrist clack against one another. They aren’t carved into beads or anything, just bones. I rub my wrist as if the bones are touching me instead of the girl, the last bits of some dead thing up against my skin.
I think she means to push Howl right out of the room, but he doesn’t move, trying very hard not to laugh instead.
Before I can intercede, a soft giggle has me spinning around to see another girl sitting on the other bed. She looks about my age, brown hair cut in a close outline around her face. Her light brown eyes are cutely pretty over a flat nose.
Both girls are caked with dirt.
I clear my throat. “I think he means I’m your new roommate.”
Howl’s lips purse in confusion, “No, I don’t mean that at all. I’d be a terrible babysitter if I let you stay here by yourself, Sev. Don’t you remember? I’m responsible for you until they decide you aren’t dangerous.” He turns to the blonde, a snarl still wrinkling her nose. “Which she is, actually. So I’m planning to stay.”
“Sev?” The blonde flicks a muddy strand of hair out of her face, eyes now focused on me. They’re blue. “You’re Jiang Sev.”
Unease splashes over me like a bucket of ice water. Before I can answer, she spins back to Howl. “That would make you . . .”
“Howl,” he says, nodding. “I’m not surprised you’ve heard of me. Most people have.”
She shrugs. “No. I was going to say—”
“—that your name is?”
She blinks at him, not even remotely charmed. “Cale. And my roommate is Mei. Menghu, Fourth Company.”
She smoothes her long coat down over her hips, a twin to the one Helix was wearing, dirt and all. Same tiger and number four, except the embroidery on hers is red. Mei jumps up to stand at her shoulder, which is as far as she comes. “She wants you to tell us how amazing we are. She spent years training to be a scout. And now she’s training me.”
“Are you important enough to get a ration of soap? I think Sev is going to start purposely spreading skin diseases if we don’t find some soon.” Howl raises his eyebrows at me.
“You’re a fighter?” Cale’s fingers brush the tiger on her collar as she looks me up and down. “I thought ‘Jiang’ was a dirty word in the City. If I were a Red, I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near the army.”
“How do you know who I am?” I press my lips together before the less-polite questions brewing in my throat can come out. If she can slaughter four people in under a minute like Helix, I can stick to polite for now.
Mei answers, full lips framing a very wide mouth. “Your mother, of course. Jiang Gui-hua is a legend. She stood up to the City. Tried to open the walls so Outsiders could have Mantis.”
“That isn’t exactly the story they tell in the City.” I walk out without waiting for a reply.
Footsteps behind me mean Howl is following. After a minute, I turn and wait for him. “Where are we supposed to be going?” The telescreen on the wall flashes a crude pink smiling face, as if it can sense how annoyed I am and is trying to calm me down.
“Right now? How about in here.” He grabs my hand and drags me through a doorway. A dusty bunk bed covered by a pile of threadbare quilts is the room’s main occupant. Howl pulls a chair down from a stack in the corner, sliding it over to me. “You’re upset.”
“I’m fine. Let’s go get lunch; I’m starving,” I say.
“Look, Sev.” Howl unfolds another chair and sinks down into it with a sigh. “I didn’t tell you about your mother’s connection to the Mountain.”
I pull my eyes up from the floor. For some reason I thought walking in here would be new. That fitting in would be easy. Just another refugee. But she was here first. “I didn’t ask. I was afraid of what you would say.”
Howl glances down at the chair I have yet to occupy. “Do you really hate her that much?” Something in his voice makes me sit down and look at him. There’s a razor edge hidden under there somewhere, something rattled. “She wasn’t the monster they paint her to be in the City. And . . . she’s your mother. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
I can’t meet his eyes. It does matter. But some things matter more. “She was my mother. But she chose something else.”
“Well, she isn’t going to go away. She’s a hero to these people. She even gave you a . . . a Mou
ntain name. Her ties must run back before you were even born.”
Then all the accusations against her must be true. Asleep for betraying the City. She chose the Mountain over me. Named me for these people, then left me behind, sick from a disease she gave me.
Howl’s hand settles on my knee. “Look at me, Sev. We’re still on the same team. On our own side. Walking in here didn’t change anything. But give this place a chance. I’ll walk right back out with you if you decide that you can’t stay.”
“You want to go live Outside? Smelly tent, rocks in our sleeping bags, and a Seph to keep you company? And best of all, no soap.” I shake his hand with mock severity. Like I can pick up and leave when I’ve got SS waiting just on the other side of my skin. “I’m in. Wood Rats until we die.”
“I’ll cook if you clean. We’ll build a tree house.”
The banter twists the anger out of me. “I wasn’t lying about being hungry,” I say. “Can we get something to eat before I turn into a crabby old lady?”
Mock horror splashes across his face. “Let’s run.”
CHAPTER 21
“NEI-GE, JIAOYANG, ZHUANJIA, YIZHI. AND Menghu you already know about,” Cale informs me in a bored voice, watching as I take a bite of apple. The names of the collectives all sound as if they’re words I should know but have forgotten, each with an ancient sort of twang. “This is the kitchen, if you haven’t figured that out.” She shoots a look at Howl that clearly implies how unexcited she is to be babysitting me. That, if more babysitting is required, the consequences will be bloody.
“Right, I could just show her . . .” Howl trails off at Cale’s glare.
“That isn’t what Zhuanjia asked for. They said I was supposed to give her a tour. I’m giving her a tour.”
The kitchen ceiling is high, one end a counter that opens into the Core, where plates are being handed off to people waiting in line. I take another bite of apple and set my empty plate down next to a sink, dodging a group of brown-clothed workers cutting vegetables into bite-size pieces.
Last Star Burning Page 17
