I catch myself rubbing the gore-tooth necklace between my fingers. The smooth surface is stained ivory and no longer sharp, as though it has been many years since it was taken from the gore’s mouth. As my fingers explore the wider base, they stop at a small ridge I didn’t notice before.
Restlessly walking back to the door, I hold the tooth tight in my hand, as if squeezing it might somehow get me out of here. A masked Yizhi squeezes by me to shift a tube in Cale’s arm, connecting it to a bag of clear fluids hanging up above the bed.
I remember what it felt like to be Asleep. The terror of not being able to move, not even twitch. Voices all around you saying that you might as well be dead. That you could be already. I tried to tell them. I tried to reach for the doctor, to shake some sense into the hand that was constantly feeling for my pulse. But nothing worked, nothing moved. My body was a prison.
I shrug the feeling off, looking back at the tooth. I almost drop it in surprise. It’s glowing.
I can barely tell in the brightly lit room, but there is definitely a light inside of the thing. When I pull along the ridge at the top, a line appears and the tooth comes apart in two pieces, something falling out and rattling on the floor.
The medic by Cale’s bed looks around for the source of the sound, but I bend down to pick up the fallen object before she sees, pretending to stretch. It’s black, about the size of my thumbnail. I hold it in my fist, flinching when the back of my hand begins to glow.
Slipping into the bathroom attached to the room, I turn the light off and sit on the edge of the low sink with my fist balled around the object. The entire back of my hand glows orange, black characters spelled out in the faint light. It says, Where are you? I can’t find you.
I unclench my hand and the characters disappear. When I clench it again, a set of character radicals appears along the side of my hand, a purple circle of light pulsing below my pinkie knuckle, as if it is asking me to write my own message. Cale mentioned Zhuanjia was experimenting with some new communication device. I press one radical and it appears in the space below, a small box blinking for me to write out the rest of the strokes for my desired character. I type the words In Yizhi with Mei and Cale slowly, not used to putting characters together this way.
Leave. Now, he responds.
I flip the light back on and return to the room, now empty of medics. Mei jerks awake as I walk by, expression hard as her eyes follow me. The guard sitting outside looks up when I open the door. Her hand is on her gun.
I go back into the bathroom and bring up the set of radicals, writing out, Not an option.
The reply comes almost instantly. I’m coming.
Fitting the thing back into the tooth, I make myself go out of the bathroom, switching places with Mei as she jumps up from the bench, hands restlessly touching everything on the walls, the equipment crammed into the room, then ducking down behind Cale’s bed.
“Mei?”
Something rips. Suddenly, she’s up, eyes wide with something I can’t identify. Fear? Her chest is heaving and her hands are hidden behind her back. “Mei? What are you doing?”
If I didn’t know better, I would think . . .
She runs at me, a long piece of wire stretched between her hands, and it’s around my neck before I can yell. The force of her running knocks me over the edge of the bench and onto the floor, Mei straddling my stomach. I manage to get a hand under the wire before she pulls it tight, but she’s much stronger than I am, and the wire is starting to cut across my palm, my windpipe, air choking out of me as she pulls. Her breaths come in shuddering gasps, face twisted with panic.
Three gas-masked Yizhi burst into the room. Two pull her off me, trying to contain her flailing limbs as she kicks and hits. Mei catches the third medic in the stomach with her foot, knocking a long syringe out of her hand. I roll over onto my side and grab it, flinging the wire away from me. The two holding Mei manage to get her facedown on the floor, one holding her arms, the other her legs. I jab the syringe into her exposed hip. She immediately goes limp.
“What in the name of Yuan’s bloody ax is going on?” I yell. The nurses don’t answer, impassive behind those masks. “She isn’t infected! How could she—”
Something jabs the side of my own leg, and everything goes gray, spinning into black.
CHAPTER 32
I WAKE TO AN ENDLESS white blur. My arms and legs won’t move at all, heavy, as if I’ve been buried alive and the earth is pressing down against me. For a moment, my mind panics, racing through all the memories I have of being Asleep, trapped inside my body but awake, listening. Helpless.
As I struggle against my lifeless arms and legs, my lungs start to contract, giving me less and less air. Is this how I’m going die? Gasping for air in my brain while my lungs refuse to listen?
But my eyes are open. I can look around me, even catch a glimpse of my nose. I can’t be Asleep. No one falls Asleep twice. A calm settles over me as the thought sinks in. My fingers start to twitch and my toes tingle. My neck seems to have strength and I lift my head up. I’m not lost. My body is here, strapped to a pink mat, my necklace pulling at my throat. The numb heaviness weighing my body down must be the last of some kind of sedation wearing off.
The whiteness around me is familiar, the nylon cords coiled around my arms and legs something I’ve faced before, but I can’t place it. A light over my face comes on and a soothing female voice purrs, “Please hold your position. Two minutes, twenty seconds remaining.” I’m in the levels machine again.
A door slams as I twist against the restraints. The tube starts to hum, vibrations throbbing through me. The end of the tube pops open and my mat moves out, inch by inch, until my muscles clench with impatience. When my head finally emerges, it’s Sole who is standing over me.
She’s rattled, fingers shaking as she fumbles with the restraints. There’s a shiny silver table pushed up next to the tube, bright lights focused in hard circles on the reflective surface, pooling at the end around a drain. A tray of sharp-looking instruments is arranged next to it, a clear mask sitting on top, connected to a tall silver canister by a long tube.
Sole’s hand shoots forward, an offer to help me sit up. I take it, shivering as the cool, sterile air floods through the paper hospital gown that seems to be all I’m wearing. My feet are unsteady when they hit the floor, and I have to lean against Sole to stay up. She still hasn’t said anything.
“What is going on?” I ask, fear thrilling through me as we move toward the metal table, my eyes catching on a particularly lethal-looking scalpel. Was it Sole all along? From that first frozen smile to now, leading me toward an operating table?
She doesn’t stop at the table, dragging me toward the door. “No questions right now. Just move.”
The door opens to a loud siren echoing around an empty office, the telescreen flashing red and black with the word FIRE racing up and down the room.
“Should we be running?” I ask.
She keeps dragging and pushing me along toward the door that takes us out into the main Yizhi hallway. “Howl set off the fire alarm upstairs so I could get you out. If you try to run right now, you’ll just fall over. They pumped enough tranq into you to drop someone twice your weight.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have much time before they figure out the fire upstairs is just a bunch of smoke and the cameras all go back online.”
We hobble down the blue-and-white-checkered halls, the drone of the alarm pounding against my eardrums until they must be bleeding. We finally come to a long, unfamiliar hallway dotted with heavy wooden doors every few feet. Sole pushes through the first door on our right.
A simple room, single bed neatly made with blankets patched in blues and greens. Sole deposits me on the quilts, moving back to the door. “I need to report to my station. If I leave now, I might be able to convince Root that I had to come up from level one. Stay here. Hide in the shower if anyone tries to come in.” With that, she runs, dark hair streaming
behind her.
I push through the only other door in the room, pulling the communicator out of my gore-tooth necklace. Light tile and glass shower doors shine in the lights, too clean to belong here in the Mountain. Flipping the light off, I squeeze my hand around the communicator. The characters glowing on the back of my hand are unhelpful.
It simply says, Wait for me.
CHAPTER 33
WORSE THAN BEING CHASED. WORSE than hiding.
Waiting.
Sweat pours down my forehead from underneath a chin-length wig, though the cold air mists with my every breath. I adjust my borrowed tool belt, too tight over the brown Zhuanjia uniform Sole procured for me. Howl said it was too risky to go down to Sole’s rooms, and he had to show me something out here in order to make our escape work, but if this takes much longer, I might have to start pretending to fix something in order to fool the cameras trained on this solar panel maintenance platform. That would bring unwelcome attention even faster.
A Zhuanjia ducks out of the metal door, face hidden beneath a billed hat. The small tube of inhibitor spray Sole gave me is supposed to stop an attacker for a few minutes, which would give me a chance to run, but where to? He walks toward me, head down, inspecting the walkway, so I can’t see his face.
Pressing myself up against the wall, the inhibitor spray feels slippery in my palm. It fits in my hand perfectly, small enough that no one would know it was there until their eyes started burning, but that won’t do much if I drop it.
The Zhuanjia draws closer, shielding his face against the sun, only seconds from noticing me. Do I spray him, then push him over the side? No, the fall would kill him. Leave him here for someone to find?
Just as I’m about to do . . . something, the young man looks at me, and I realize he isn’t shielding his face from the sun. He’s shielding brown eyes I’d know anywhere from the cameras. Howl.
I sigh in relief, the tube going back in my pocket as I follow his lead, trailing behind him along the narrow ledge cut into the side of the mountain that leads around to the base of the earth-colored solar panels. He slides between two of the panels, off the path.
“Are you okay?” he asks when I follow him in. It seems like a stupid question, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
“They didn’t saw anything off.” Just remembering the table all set up to cut me open gives me the shivers. “What is going on? Why did they suddenly decide to steal my kidneys? And Mei . . .”
“Not your kidneys.” Howl takes his hat off, twisting it between his hands. “I thought they’d do more tests, not that they’d just try to . . .” He rubs his forehead.
“There must be other people here with SS, Howl. I’m not that annoying, am I? My hallucinations can’t be that special.” Trying to stay lighthearted is all that is keeping me from dissolving into tears. I can feel them, white hot behind my eyes.
“Others with SS, it’s true. Three more this week. You were a test, in the hospital room across from Cale. Mei was the control subject. The mine you brought back is carrying a new strain of SS, one that transfers from person to person instead of having to contract it from a bomb. Kasim is showing all the signs of post-Sleep behavior and never even went through the sleeping stage. . . .” He points to the pocket of my Zhuanjia uniform, where a bit of red fabric is sticking out. “What is that?”
I can’t answer for a moment, my breath catching in my throat. SS, contagious. SS infecting people without even making them fall Asleep first. The entire Mountain could be a slaughterhouse in minutes. The whole world will be trying to slice off their own fingers within months. There’s no way they have enough Mantis stockpiled to keep everyone lucid. “What are they going to do? What are we going to do?”
He leans over and pulls the red fabric from my pocket. “What is this? Where did you get it? Did Sole give it to you?” His fingers pull at the pieces. “It could be bugged. Don’t say anything.”
“No, it’s just . . .” I’m still reeling, mind blank. “I made it for you.” It’s a red flower, tied out of an old piece of ribbon I found in Sole’s room. The long hours of staring at the wall before Howl could meet me were too much.
He holds it up, the ends of panic replaced by surprise, looking from the folds of rose-colored ribbon to me.
“Sole told me that you make good-luck charms for . . . for people about to go out on patrol or . . . or something dangerous. . . .” I stumble over the words. She’d stumbled over them too, presenting them to me like some sort of offering during the long wait in her room, as if she was trying to show me that the people who had almost cut me to pieces had good sides to them too.
Howl’s face softens. “For Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Husbands and wives.” His mouth is starting to curve into a grin. “So they’re with you when you go. And to make sure everyone knows you’ve been spoken for.”
“Right.” My cheeks heat up and my hands twist into my shirt of their own volition. I made it with butterflies in my stomach, nervous that he would just laugh at me. But it’s too late to worry; the flower is in his hand, so I might as well see it through. My hands reach out like they belong to someone else, settling on his shoulders. “But if you are asking me to marry you, then my answer is no. I’m only sixteen.”
He laughs and leans forward, closing the gap between us, his hands pressing into my waist and back. “Thank you. I’ve never wanted something like this. Not until now.” Howl’s head is heavy on my shoulder, holding on tight.
I hug him back, surprised by his reaction. “I hope that is a good thing.”
Howl pulls away, pressing his lips together. “I need to tell you something. Something that I should have told you the moment I dragged you off the street in the City.”
“More important than the fact that the Mountain is probably already boiling over with loose infected?” I look down the slope, my mind teetering on the rocky edge below us, wondering how far down it goes. “Should we just make a break for it right now?”
Howl’s fingers brush my chin back toward him. “Dr. Yang suspected something odd was going on, so Kasim and Cale have been quarantined since the moment they took their masks off. They can’t do anything else until they figure out how long this new contagion lasts. The Mountain isn’t going to turn into a slaughterhouse unless someone else steps on a mine and doesn’t tell anyone.”
The medics all knew and they did nothing. They wore their masks, breathing filtered air while Mei poisoned herself sitting in Cale’s room. “How will they know when it stops being contagious? Is Dr. Yang just going to keep sending people into Cale’s room to see if they start having compulsions?” The bite of anger in my voice isn’t meant for Howl, but he shrinks back a little.
“You were the one they were testing in that room. Mei was there to make sure it was contagious to normal people.”
“I’m already infected. Are they trying to see if being exposed again makes me worse? If I become contagious too? Or if Mantis will stop working like it has in the City?”
Howl scrunches his eyes closed, hands tightening on my shoulders. I want to brush them away because it’s starting to hurt, his fingers digging into me. “They wanted to see if it would affect you because you aren’t infected. You’ve been cured.”
“Cured?” I pull away from him. That doesn’t make sense. With a cure, there would be no war. No Mountain, no City. We wouldn’t have to fight for Mantis anymore. “You haven’t been messing around with Da’ard, have you? There is no cure. If there were, they would have found it a long time ago.”
Howl is already shaking his head. “No. The Mountain doesn’t have the cure. And to the best of our knowledge, the City doesn’t have it either. The cure is what your mother was working on when she came here with Dr. Yang. And she succeeded. With you.”
He rubs his cheek, uncomfortable for some reason, but the rest comes out in a rush. “That is why those primary kids have been staring at you since the day you walked in here. Not just the primary kids. Anyone who saw that birthmark. You are hope.
The end of SS. The cure.”
It’s my turn to shake my head. “That’s impossible. It doesn’t even make sense. Why would the City have put my mother in Suspended Sleep for creating a cure?”
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. But that is why she left you. Not to save the Mountain, and not to give Mantis to Outsiders or to win any wars. It was because the City put you to Sleep and wouldn’t let her help you. The moment she and Dr. Yang had something she thought would work, she ran straight back to your bedside.”
“The City . . . Why would they have put me to sleep? SS wasn’t even supposed to be there before Mother brought it back.” Everything seems to burn red around me, Howl’s face blurring. The City gave me SS? But why? The City told me my mother hated me enough to inject me herself. . . . I can’t even finish the thought, General Hong’s deep voice enumerating my mother’s many crimes in my head. The City did it. The City did it? And she left only to figure out how to fix me?
Dr. Yang told me they used SS as a punishment, as a warning for people venturing across the line of First rule. That I wasn’t the first SS case at all, just one in a long string of warnings of what it meant to defy Firsts. If she was like Howl, questioning what the Firsts were doing . . .
No, it isn’t possible. I remember her coming back, the press of a needle in my arm and her voice . . . but that was after I was Asleep, wasn’t it? I knew she’d come back, I knew she’d given me something. Did I somehow make up memories to go along with the stories General Hong told? Pinching and pulling the nightmares until they fit? “What about my hallucinations? And remember the first night we met, when I tried to kill myself? That wasn’t an act to make you feel sorry for me.”
“And it scared me halfway back to Liberation days.” His smile falls crooked. I want to reach out and smooth it out, to put it back the way it’s supposed to be. “Those hallucinations were side effects of the pills you were taking. Firsts have been working nonstop to re-infect you, to see if they can beat the cure. The medicine they were having you take instead of Mantis can cause patients to demonstrate SS symptoms, and they were experimenting with it to see if they could get better results. The orphanage accidentally gave you a little too much that day, so the hallucinations turned into a full-blown compulsion.”
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