Last Star Burning

by Caitlin Sangster

  “You’ll end up in here at least once a week for service.” Cale points over to the soapy mounds of dishes. “Zhuanjia oversees the actual cooking, of course. They do all the technical work around here. Cooking, gardening, maintaining the transports and telescreens. Some things everyone can help with, so they just supervise. Like in the kitchen. But don’t expect service duty in the Heart or anything.”

  “The Heart?” I smile at her, but she just rolls her eyes.

  “The control rooms.” Cale points up toward the high ceiling, where all the windows and walkways poke out through the shiny rock walls of the Core. “All the defense systems, transports, telescreens, and patrol communications sync back there. Even the lights have a grid up there, so they can see where problems are and fix them. Nei-ge offices are also up in the Heart.”

  As we walk out into the Core, I catch a girl in yellow frantically gesturing toward her ear, pointing out my birthmark to her friends. Mother’s birthmark. I sigh. Different people, same reaction.

  Cale leads us across the Core, rose-colored evening light filtering in through the skylights. “Nei-ge is partly administrative, but all the leaders are elected from each of the collectives.”

  “And the other two? Jir-something?” I ask.

  Cale swats another green-coated girl on the behind as we walk by, the Menghu jumping away. When she sees it’s Cale, her face relaxes, smiling when Cale rolls her eyes toward us. “Do you mean Yizhi? They’re medics. Jiaoyang does primary education and research.”

  “How did I end up in Menghu?” I ask, trying to ignore the girls in yellow trailing behind us. “I can point a gun, but that isn’t exactly difficult.”

  “Everyone in this zoo can shoot a gun.” The new voice turns me around. “We thought Menghu would appeal to you because of your history with the City.”

  The newcomer’s grandfatherly face creases in a friendly smile. His gray-green military jacket matches the ones I’ve seen all over the Menghu dorms, but the canvas doesn’t quite fit, loosely falling from his shoulders and hanging in baggy folds down past his stomach and hips. Instead of an outline of a tiger at the collar, the rounded edges are embroidered with a simple square on each side, like the space between pieces on a weiqi board. He has dimples. Like Tai-ge.

  “General Root!” Another of those foreign-tasting names. Eye rolls gone, Cale gives a deferential bow. “I was just about to bring them up to meet you, sir.”

  General Root’s iron-gray head gives Howl a brief nod. The woman a step behind him gives Howl a nod too. Her skin is ebony dark. “Jiang Sev, welcome to the Mountain. I’m Jen Child, in charge of Menghu operations.”

  I blink, trying to keep my eyes respectfully on the floor when facing someone so important instead of peeking at the woman as she smiles at Howl. She’s beautiful, her wide-open eyes confident when they switch from Howl to me, as though she knows I have never seen someone with coloring like hers before and doesn’t care.

  Trying to cover my awkwardness, I mimic the General’s nod, but his slight pause tells me this was not the correct response. “Thank you,” I say, trying to fill the silence. “It’s nice to be out of the cross fire.”

  “Helix tells me you stumbled into more than your fair share of it,” the General says. “Get used to it, because the southern garrison is tearing the area apart looking for you.”

  “They sent the entire garrison out to find us? And failed?” Howl rubs his fingers through his hair with a cocky smile. “Makes you feel good about yourself, doesn’t it, Sev?”

  I ignore him. “And the . . . Outsiders? June’s family?”

  “June? Oh. The Wood Rat you dragged out here.” He turns to Howl. “I’m glad Helix was able to take care of that situation.”

  I feel my eyes narrowing, but General Root doesn’t give me a chance to respond, focusing his attention on Cale instead. “Take Jiang Sev to get those tests done. Dr. Yang is practically compulsing with impatience. You”—he points at Howl—“I need upstairs. Come on.”

  Howl hangs back. “I’ll finish walking through with Sev, just to be sure she’s comfortable.” He doesn’t shrink under General Root’s stern gaze. “Raj mentioned that Yizhi wanted my SS levels anyway. Might as well do it now.”

  The General gives him a small nod, then walks with Jen Child toward the mirrored elevator doors. Cale immediately steers us down a white hallway that smells of disinfectant, then through a set of double doors marked LAB. The girl sitting behind the front desk smooths long bangs out of her eyes and stands, tucking her open white coat around her. “Jiang Sev? And Howl, of course. I’m Siyu.”

  I lean over to Howl and whisper, “This is ridiculous. Do they do telepathy injections around here or something?”

  “The telescreen let me know you were coming.” Siyu smiles. “The system knows which tests you need, and I already have your ID chips ready.” She nods to Cale. “I’ll take them from here. Follow me, please.”

  Cale shrugs and shoulders her way back through the double doors, every step a little too hard, as though she’s trying to stomp a hole in the floor.

  “I already have an ID chip, thanks,” Howl says when she’s gone. “And Sev already talked to Dr. Yang about sticking with the card for now. She had a nasty infection out in the forest, and Yang thought she needed some extra time to heal before implanting the chip so her immune system doesn’t overload.”

  I glance at Howl, confused. Why doesn’t he want me to get a chip? But Howl is the only one I know here, the only person I have a reason to trust, so I play along. “I . . . don’t want to spend my first month here in bed.” Glancing at the double doors, still swinging from where Cale went through, I add, “My roommates don’t seem like the types that would give me a sponge bath.”

  Siyu smiles over her shoulder at us. “I doubt implanting the chip would have that dramatic of an effect, but I can postpone the order, if you’d like. And Howl, your chip was deactivated when you went undercover. We have to extract it and give you a new one.”

  Howl shrugs. “I’ll get it done when Sev comes back in. They won’t starve me or anything.” He pulls out the temporary ID card to show her, grimacing over the picture. “Though they might tell me I need to stop stealing Da’ard.”

  Siyu smiles tolerantly. “The thing we are most interested in is your encephalitis lethargica levels, in any case. Not invasive in the least.”

  We walk into a high-ceilinged room, the white floor shiny and reflective. Dim lights surround a long white tube on a raised platform in the center of the space. Siyu presses her thumb to a pad by the door and a square of light with two flashing circles labeled RESEARCH and PROCEDURE pop up on the blank wall. She taps RESEARCH and thumbs through different circles that appear.

  I’m too distracted by the tube to pay much attention to her. One end is closed off, wires trailing down from the circular wall inside the machine. A pink pad sits under the blinding white lights inside, crisscrossed by what look like nylon ropes. Restraints.

  A picture of a brain pulls up on the bright square. Siyu points and a light appears, following her finger. “Levels test gauge swelling. When you are infected with encephalitis lethargica, your frontal lobe swells.” The circle of light following her finger tightens, and the picture magnifies, focusing on something that looks like a snake circling the center of the brain. “Which interferes with the way it interacts with the basal ganglia. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that determines personality, controls inhibitions and self-control. Emotions. Here,” she says, highlighting a piece of the snake, “is the part of your brain that regulates sleep. SS causes lesions in this area, hence the sleeping stage of SS. Those lesions also cause the other . . . problems that come after you wake up.”

  Problems. That’s a nice way of putting it. The emotions that aren’t being correctly regulated flare out into something terrible, a psychotic break from reality. Fear causes men to turn on their own wives and children; anger drives the incendiary to mass murder in the street. Pain can whisper deep i
nside an infected’s brain, forcing them to cut off whatever hurts. I once saw a little orphan, no more than four or five years old, begin chasing her friends around the orphanage cafeteria with a steak knife, and it was no game.

  That little girl meant to kill.

  That’s what Mantis is for. Regulating those reactions. Tricking infected brains into skipping their moments of psychosis. Except for . . . “Do you have cases in the Mountain that don’t respond to Mantis?”

  Siyu blinks, and I think it’s her version of being surprised. “What do you mean?”

  I look to Howl for confirmation. “It is becoming more and more common. Mantis doesn’t stop compulsions for everyone anymore.” I spent enough time worrying about it back in the City. No more Mantis meant a cell in the Sanatorium, isolation. A death sentence would be better than SS with no medicine. Not to mention the fact that anyone in the orphanage—in the whole City—could go off at any minute, explosives waiting to blow up without warning.

  “I don’t think resistance to Mantis is possible.” Siyu turns back toward the display on the wall as if that were the end of it, as if I had hallucinated Peishan’s sudden compulsion just like I’d hallucinated the monster at the bridge that night. That cold, condescending smile is still pasted on her face as she launches back into her lecture. “Back during the Great Wars, they didn’t know what it was. SS is related to the immune system, so it follows other sicknesses. One of the first outbreaks recorded was just after a serious flu pandemic that claimed the lives of thousands. The victims and survivors were well documented, but scientists didn’t connect all the SS infections that followed. It wasn’t until the Influenza War—the last Great War—that experts began to catch on. Deep sleep, psychosis . . . It trailed after the flu like a shadow. We don’t know who first harnessed a flu virus specifically engineered to cause and exacerbate SS, but we do know that the first bombs were used in Asia, part of an invasion that went terribly wrong. Whole cities fell to SS, armies immobile, every other citizen pulling out their own eyeballs or doing it for their neighbors. . . . We’re just lucky they never figured out how to make it communicable.”

  I shiver. If SS were contagious, we’d all be dead, torn to pieces by the end of the first day.

  Siyu shakes her head. “Unfortunately, almost all the research from that time has been destroyed, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Things have stabilized enough over the last few years for us to start looking for better answers than Mantis. We know they manufactured a flu virus that targeted these areas of the brain to cause psychosis and compulsions, and that it has something to do with dopamine levels in the brain, but not how it works or why.”

  I whistle. “So basically you are telling us you have no idea what you are doing.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “Not altogether. But we don’t have the resources to manufacture Mantis, and smuggling it out of the City or stealing the ingredients from the convoys coming up from City farms is becoming more and more problematic. A cure is our best option.”

  A cure? I have to keep myself from scoffing. For all that Firsts claim to be looking for a cure back in the City, it’s been more than a hundred years since the invasion that brought SS here. “If there were a cure, wouldn’t Firsts have found it by now? They still say they’re doing research, but I always sort of assumed they’d given up. Maybe they’ve started looking again, now that Mantis isn’t controlling everyone so well up there. But even if a cure were possible, why are you testing both of us? Howl isn’t infected.”

  Siyu glances at Howl. “We keep everybody on file, especially after time Outside, so we can catch infection early if possible. It progresses a little differently in every person, so by bringing in more test subjects, we have a better chance of isolating the actual cause and effect.” She turns her flat gaze on me. “Can you imagine success? A fresh start.” She gestures to the tube. “Shall we?”

  A true liberation, not just from SS, but from Mantis too. Firsts wouldn’t have all the winning cards anymore. If Thirds knew about this, a place capable of curing the real threat—SS—who would stay in the City?

  “Fine,” I say. “Take pictures of my brain. Save the world.”

  CHAPTER 22

  AS WE WALK OUT OF the lab, I start to ask Howl whether it’s a requirement to have a personality that resembles cardboard in order to become a member of Yizhi when he stops dead in the hall. A Menghu is standing in our way, arms out like he’s going to challenge Howl to a gun duel. “Howl? When did you get back?”

  “Kasim!” Howl barrels into him, and they both end up on the floor, wrestling like a pair of kids, shouts of laughter echoing up the hall.

  At first glance, I’m pretty sure Howl doesn’t have a chance. Two of Howl could fit inside this Menghu, his barrel-shaped chest framed by arms larger around than my legs, but Howl holds his own, latching an arm around his tree trunk of a neck and squeezing. They act like brothers, wrestling around and teasing each other as if they grew up making faces at each other across the dinner table.

  I like the look of Kasim, unreserved smile splitting the Menghu’s face as he yells for mercy. And Howl seems his age for the first time since I’ve met him, the stress of the City, of Outside, peeling away like an onion. He laughs like he means it.

  I like it. Howl happy.

  Kasim feels the scrutiny and spins around, ready to pull me into the wrestling match. I skip back out of reach, cheeks flushing.

  “Who is this?” he asks with a wide smile. “Bring a trophy home to show off?”

  “She followed me in, and I haven’t been able to get rid of her.” Howl grins at me, standing a good six inches shorter than Kasim. “But she’s nice enough when you get used to her. Kasim, meet Sev.”

  Kasim’s eyes widen. “Wow. You always did shoot high, Howl. She’s way prettier than you are, even with your sexy beard. And she’s famous, to boot.” He leans in close and whispers, “He’s giving you the royal treatment, I take it? Tours of the Heart? Strawberry shortcake?”

  “I’ve yet to see a single strawberry, Kasim. You want to show me where they are?” He gives me an appraising look, making my cheeks grow hot again. That is not what I meant.

  We start again toward the Core, and I listen to them catching up, Howl asking questions about everything from old friends to the food, groaning when Kasim tells him that meat is still something you have to go and kill for yourself.

  “And good luck finding it,” Kasim adds. “The gores have started cornering patrols, because there isn’t much out there anymore. Those things are out of control.”

  “We didn’t have any problems.” Howl looks just a little too pleased with himself. He catches me rolling my eyes and grins. “They probably couldn’t smell us under all that dirt. See, Sev? There are benefits to being filthy.”

  “Benefits every Menghu seems to be exploiting to the fullest extent possible,” I say under my breath. There was a smear of dirt on the white floor where Kasim hit the ground.

  Just as we get to the outer ring of the hospital, a girl wearing Yizhi’s long white coat pushes through a doorway in front of us with her head down. She charges straight into me, losing her grip on the black canvas bag slung over one shoulder, sending it to the floor with a clatter.

  Rubbing her arm, she brushes long dark brown hair out of her face to go after the things that exploded from her bag when it fell, each grab a staccato burst of cold energy. Scissors, bandages, syringes. I crouch down to help, picking up a roll of gauze before it can escape down a heating vent. Blue eyes meet mine as I hold the gauze out to her, and suddenly I’m frozen, bitten by the blank intensity of her stare. She blinks and reaches for the gauze, shoving it into her bag with the rest of the things that fell when she walked into me.

  Spell broken, I avert my eyes in embarrassment, both for tripping her and for the weird moment. “Sorry I bumped you.” My voice cracks in the effort not to laugh at myself. “I must have been listening a little too closely.”

  A teeth-baring excuse for a
smile plasters itself across her face, skeletal and unwilling. “I’m Sole. And it’s okay. We all hang on Howl’s every word, don’t we?” The bared teeth turn on him for a moment. “You must be our new celebrity. Jiang Sev?”

  She brushes by me, edging past Howl and Kasim as if accidentally touching either of them would infect her with some terrible disease. Howl’s eyes follow her as she walks down the hallway, gaining speed until she’s running and out of sight, the pinging sound of her shoes against the metal floor echoing back to us. He scrubs a hand through his hair, looking lost.

  Kasim rolls his eyes and reaches out to squeeze my shoulder. “Sole is kind of a freak. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “You know her, Howl?” I ask. Her empty stare is tattooed on the backs of my eyelids. “Should she be carrying around syringes and scalpels? I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.”

  Howl nods with a wry smile. “I knew her before, though. . . .”

  Kasim doesn’t give Howl a chance to finish, laughing over the top of whatever he started to say. His hand stays on my shoulder and I have to keep myself from shrugging it off. Howl catches my uncomfortable look and raises his eyebrows suggestively.

  Not noticing the exchange, Kasim keeps explaining, “Sole is practically a legend around here. She used to be a crack shot. One of the best Menghu. Her parents both got it Outside. Chemical bomb, you know? Just like that, her whole family is gone.” He snaps his fingers, looking down the hallway after her. “She used to live in the shooting range when she wasn’t out in the forest, blasting the life out of Yuan Zhiwei. Then one day she cracked.” He pauses dramatically, tapping one of his temples with his index finger.

  “Sole came home from patrol, stayed in bed for about a week, and hasn’t touched a gun since. She still goes out. Patches people up.” Kasim hikes up his brown canvas pant leg, stroking the long white scar that runs up his calf as if it’s a treasure. “She fixed me up just a few months ago. Probably would have bled out if she hadn’t been with us. But I don’t know how she goes to sleep at night. Chicken or something, am I right?”