I hadn’t ever had a compulsion until the night we ran. The story fits so many things together so that they finally make sense. I didn’t start hallucinating until the weeks following my sister’s death. Perhaps getting rid of Aya gave the Circle the idea to get rid of me, too, using my poor, sad little life as one last experiment to force the disease Mother had purged from my system on me. When they realized Thirds saw Aya as yet another proof of my family’s corruption, I became a tool. The last Jiang to go out in a flame of compulsions and insanity, the last of the sleeping princess’s family to be punished for her crimes. An ache springs up inside of me, filtering through my chest all the way down to my toes.
I want to believe this nonsense.
I want to believe that I’m free. That the black ugliness waiting under my skin is just my imagination. That we can run.
My breath catches on something even deeper, more painful. If she did cure me, does that make the monster who lives above Traitor’s Arch the mother I loved after all? A refugee from the City because they wouldn’t let her help me? My hand finds the jade strung around my neck, the sharp edges pressing into my skin. It would mean she loved me and died for it. Worse. Spent the last eight years imprisoned in her own body, unable to die because of it. All for me.
Something clicks in my head, another puzzle piece landing. “I started having hallucinations again when we got here. They aren’t nearly as bad, but . . . Dr. Yang is doing the same thing to me that they were in the City, isn’t he?”
Howl nods curtly. “Dr. Yang didn’t tell me they were going to continue the tests. It has something to do with figuring out what part of your brain changed, what your mother did to cure you.”
“But the levels tests, the pills they’re giving me . . . It isn’t enough.” That’s why I ended up immobile in the levels machine, a bone saw lying next to me with my name on it. That’s what Dr. Yang was asking the council to do that night. “They need to dig deeper. All those tests they were asking for, the people trying to drag me into the hospital . . .” It wasn’t until this moment that the horrifying truth occurs to me. “Wait, you knew?”
He shakes his head, his tone a plea. “Dr. Yang promised not to hurt you. He told me scans would be enough, that he’d be able to just look at your brain and see what had been changed and how. I wanted to believe him. I knew the pills Dr. Yang gave us when we left the City weren’t Mantis, but I didn’t realize what they were doing to you at first.” He blinks as though trying to banish something in his thoughts. “You were so scared. Convinced that something was wrong with you. That day, with the dead soldiers . . . I started giving you the real Mantis, the stuff meant to go back to the Mountain. Then when we got here . . . I can’t tell you how many arguments I had with Dr. Yang. How many times I followed you to make sure you were okay.”
“But you knew the whole time I didn’t have SS. That I didn’t have to worry every single day my mind was slipping, that I wasn’t going to wake up one morning and kill you?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me, Sev.”
I open my mouth, the beginnings of anger curdling across my tongue, but then swallow it down. He’s right. I wouldn’t have believed him. Not after so many years of believing it was only a little green pill between me and compulsion’s tight grip.
“Don’t they suspect that you had something to do with me disappearing from the operating table?” I ask, but Howl won’t meet my eyes. There’s something more that he isn’t saying.
“I’m not the likeliest person to be hiding you. For a lot of reasons.”
Howl lets go of me as I start to squirm away from him. I need space. To think. “What do you mean? You’re my only friend here who isn’t currently in quarantine. Of course it would be you hiding me—”
“We have another problem,” Howl interrupts, looking up toward the path. “When you disappeared, Nei-ge voted to invade the City. Root says with this new strain of SS, we don’t have a choice. No cure, and even the Mantis stockpiled here would never be enough if SS starts spreading from person to person.”
I can’t take in all this new information. I wish I could slow it down, make it stop.
“They are going to announce the invasion at Establishment and head out within a few days.” Howl’s voice sounds broken. “They’re sending Menghu into the City.”
Everything inside me goes still. My panic that SS could spread like lice in an orphanage at any time, discovering the truth about my mother’s supposed crimes, hearing that the Mountain wants to cut me open—everything bows to a vision of Helix pressing a gun between Tai-ge’s eyes, Peishan lying cold in the Sanatorium, Sister Shang weeping in front of the orphanage while it burns . . . “If the Menghu go into the City, it would be a massacre.”
Invading wouldn’t be about Mantis for any of the Menghu. It would be about killing every City-born in sight, about trophies, about revenge for everything the Mountain has had to go through in order to survive.
“Howl, what do we do? Tai-ge, your family . . . They’ll die.”
Howl’s laugh is unnerving, with a hopeless edge I didn’t expect. “There’s nothing we can do to save my family. There never was.”
“A cure would stop the invasion. It would stop this whole stupid war.” The realization that I might have grown up Fourth for nothing boils inside me, but I close my eyes, trying to think of the cure, of what Mother must have been fighting for.
She was trying to save me, not kill me. Mother wasn’t fighting for the Mountain or Kamar. She left to finish her SS experiment here so that she could cure me. If what Howl is saying is true, then she was fighting to cure everyone.
Am I brave enough to let Dr. Yang have the cure so that her work doesn’t come undone? To walk back into the Mountain and close my eyes forever so that the SS nightmare can finally be over?
If I do, does that make me like her? If what Howl says is true, she gave up everything to save me. Could I give up everything to save the world—to save the Mountain, the City, the people like June running free in between—from SS?
If it would have saved Aya, I would have done it without hesitation. If it would keep June safe now, I’d do it. And Howl . . . I look at him. He lied to me; he’s been lying to me since the day we met . . . but I’d still do it to keep Howl from ever feeling SS’s monster claws in his brain.
When I open my mouth, Howl stops me. “You don’t have to die to stop this. We can’t rediscover the cure, just the two of us. But I know someone who can.”
“What do you mean?” My head hangs as if it’s already severed, already being dissected and labeled. But Howl’s words bring me back up, hope flaring through me like alcohol under a match.
“We need your mother. We need to wake Jiang Gui-hua up.”
CHAPTER 34
ESTABLISHMENT DAWNS WITH NEW FALLEN snow. I can’t see it or taste it, cloistered in Sole’s room the way I’ve been for days, but the air feels different. Patrols are all coming in for the festivities tonight, wet with the sky’s melted offering.
Sole bars the door as passing field medics stop to say hello. Excitement buzzes through the halls, conversations humming constantly outside the door. Even hidden beneath the wig and a long white Yizhi uniform, I feel exposed, as if whoever was slated to cut me open will notice the line of my skull or the width between my eyes and recognize me.
When Sole has to leave for Establishment games, she locks me in. “My ID chip will open this door, but no one else can just walk in. Don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
“You’re kidding, right? I’m not dumb enough to let anyone in here.”
Sole’s head ticks sideways and she blinks four times in a row before answering. “Yes. It was meant to be a joke. Here, Howl told me to give you this.”
She holds out a book, and I recognize the sleeping princess on the front. Sleeping Beauty, but with a happy ending. I take it, and Sole wipes her hand on her tunic three times, as if trying to destroy some unseen germ colony deposited on her hand from something so old and dirt
y.
The whole time I’ve been stuck in Sole’s room, she’s been kind. Kind but odd. Staring at the wall for long periods of time, never making eye contact. Laughing when we haven’t even been talking. But it’s less unnerving than it was at first.
The only thing that bothers me anymore is the way she looks at the gore tooth strung between the four stars and my mother’s jade around my neck. I had to hide it away in my pocket. Every time her eyes touched my neck, it felt like she wanted to take a bite out of me.
Sole gave me her medic pack, full of food, water purifiers, medicine, a hammock. A padded jacket with rough fur lining the hood. A huge brown blotch stains the left side, but I don’t care to ask where it came from. The hours left to wait seem to be stretching out as I pace, hundreds of times longer than they should be. If only I had someone to play weiqi with.
The book could be good company for the last hours I have to wait, but I’m still not sure I can bring myself to open it.
I reorganize my things in the borrowed pack one last time before settling down on the bed to look at the peaceful sleep of the princess on the book’s cover. The long hours of silence have been painful. Thinking hurts too much. About being cured, about my mother and why she really left. There are so many pieces still missing, but for the first time, the raw edges of hurt where she lives in my chest aren’t nauseating pains of betrayal. It’s just a sad story that I don’t know the ending to yet. What if, just like Howl said, Sleeping Beauty really does wake up? What if she isn’t really the villain after all? And if she isn’t, who is?
It hurts. Every thought of her still leaves me feeling broken and alone. But now I can ask her myself. I can have the truth from her lips.
I check for the syringe that Howl pressed into my hand before we parted. It’s the same syringe I remember seeing in Dr. Yang’s office, mounted on a plaque like some great award. Howl told me that Dr. Yang was a member of the research team my mother headed, studying the effects of SS. But he discovered this instead: Suspended Sleep. Similar to the first stages of SS, induced by a simple injection, but controllable. This syringe is full of the only thing that can wake the subject up.
He gave up everything, his First status, his family, to follow Mother here, thinking that his breakthrough might be a step toward the cure. Instead, the First Circle used his discovery to put mother to Sleep.
Maybe he regrets it now. Making the poison that closed her eyes forever.
Breaking out tonight is still the best plan we can come up with. With most people inside celebrating Establishment, there won’t be as many patrols or guards out. Howl will put in an appearance at the festivities tonight so no one will go looking for him until morning.
I put the book down, not sure I can handle the hope that a happy ending would open up inside of me. Stories are just stories, however much we want to believe them.
Sole’s room is small, a bed and a desk packed into the tiny room. Piles of paperwork black with spidery handwriting spill over the scarred wooden surface of the desk, a few loose leafs on the floor and under the chair. I turn one over and it’s an inky monster, black teeth bared in a snarl. Next to the beast, a little girl cowers, hiding her head under her arms.
Pushing the sketch away from me, I notice a drawer that is cracked open, a set of eyes staring out from the gap. I pull the drawer open and four people look up at me from the blacks and grays of a framed watercolor. A family of four, mischievous grins matching across all of their faces. The mother has Sole’s clear blue eyes, the color scratched in long after the original paint dried, her hand intertwined with that of the man standing next to her. The young man seated in front of them looks a little too straight-backed for the grin on his face, probably elbowing the younger girl sitting next to him. She would be just like Sole except for the unmistakable joy in her face.
I don’t notice another person in the room until a hand comes down across their faces, grabbing the portrait away from me. Sole holds the picture to her chest, eyebrows drawn low. “What do you think you are doing?”
“I-I-I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”
The anger on Sole’s face drains at my downcast eyes, leaving the contrite apology hovering between us. She sighs, running her fingers along the wooden frame. “You can look if you want.”
She takes a long look at them, nose close to the glass, before holding it back out toward me, pointing to the young man. “He taught me to shoot a gun. Chan.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes. They were all . . . They all died together. About ten years ago. In the forest. The Reds . . .” She shivers as though trying to shake the memory loose. “It’s still difficult to talk about. They were trying to steal food from one of the convoys going to the City.”
“I’m so sorry.” It’s uncomfortable to watch her, raw grief quaking through her.
“When it first happened, I was so angry.” She glances at me. “I’m sure they’ve told you. The moment I was old enough, I joined the Menghu. I was the worst of them. Completely out of control. Took out every Red I came across. Signed up for every mission. I hardly ate or slept, I was so busy taking revenge for what the City did to my family.”
I hand the picture back to her, Kasim’s words coming back to me. One of the best . . . She sees the question in my face before I can hide it away, too personal to ask.
“You want to know why I stopped.” She pulls a stray hair behind her ear with a trembling hand. “Why I shake and can’t look anyone in the eye.”
She abruptly turns away from me, walks back toward the bathroom, leaving the picture on the table. When she comes back, there’s a box in her arms, rattling with each step. It drops to the floor at my feet with a clatter.
“I started taking things from the people I killed. Little things, so I could keep track. For my parents, for my brother.”
Sole, too? “You mean like the bracelets they all wear?”
“I think I was the first to keep score.” Sole’s voice is dead. “Though I never took fingers.”
I back up a step, my legs hitting her bed. Sole has always seemed like she didn’t fit in somehow, as if she was rebelling against something here, so when it was Sole who hid me in her tub, I didn’t question it. Suddenly, that seems like a gross misjudgment.
She points to the box, sending a chill down my spine. Is she even worse than the rest, with a box of severed ears or bloody feet in her bathroom? When I don’t bend down to look inside, Sole pulls the lid away herself, thrusting her hands down inside.
A doll. One that I’ve seen before.
The City mass-manufactures the same doll for all the kids. I had one when I was little. I remember her braided yarn hair and her red uniform. Did Sole kill children, too? I feel myself shrinking farther and farther down against the bed, wondering if I jumped off the operating table just to land in the butcher shop.
Her eyes eat at the doll, voice evaporating from her lips so I scarcely catch the words. “About six years ago, on patrol, we found a set of Reds outside the City. A man and a woman. We shot them before they could even blink, heads blown open all over their gear. The tent was ripped to shreds, but then a little girl rolled out and started to run. That’s when I realized that they weren’t Reds, they were just a family trying to escape the City. But my partner shot her before she ran five steps.”
“She cried while she died. I held her, but she was scared of me. I made it worse. They could have been my family. Running away from the Reds and their guns, the Firsts and their experiments. All dead.” Tears trail down Sole’s face, and she holds the doll to her chest as if it’s a real child. I lean over to look in the box, full of odds and ends. Books, rocks, rings and necklaces. “I keep them now to remember what I’ve done. I switched over to Yizhi, but no matter how many lives I save, I can’t give any of these back. I can’t give back the lives I’ve taken.
“The Menghu can’t remember that people out there, even City-born, are people. That they have families, pare
nts, brothers and sisters, kids. That they all deserve a chance to live, to grow old with the ones they love. I can’t keep taking away from them what some stupid Red took from me. The Menghu think it is a game, a tally.” Her voice starts to shake with emotion. Anger. “It’s worse than SS. They choose to be monstrous.”
“Why do you stay here, then?” I ask.
“I have to make up for what I’ve done. Even if it means saving the monsters who are making it worse. They are people too, even if they’ve forgotten.”
The sentence sticks in my head, and I remember the Red I refused to kill back in the forest. “We need to do something. To stop this.”
Sole looks tired, lifting her gaze to hold mine for the first time since she grabbed the painting from my hands. “I am. Getting you out of here . . .” She gestures to the door. “That is all I can do.”
Her eyes jump between me and the door, and for a second I think she might run away—run from her past. But when she speaks, it is for me. Needle sharp. “But before you go out there, before you put your life in Howl’s hands, you need to know something about him.
“My partner . . .” Her voice breaks, the jagged fragments slicing through her composure. “My partner, the one who shot the little girl? That was Howl.”
CHAPTER 35
SHE KEEPS TALKING, BUT THE words rush past me as though she’s speaking some dead language, meaningless. Noise. Sick panic seeps up into my lungs and throat and the words erupt out of me. “City-born Howl? My Howl?” I can feel frenzied laughter rising in my throat. “That isn’t possible. Wouldn’t he have still been in the City when it happened?”
She’s shaking her head, and for one bright moment, I believe she means a different person. But then her ragged whisper snakes into my ears, the poison slowly killing all hope. “Howl isn’t City-born. He’s not even a refugee. I grew up with Howl. Our parents were friends, killed by the same attack. He was just as bad as I was. We were partners, destroying the City one comrade at a time.”
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