When I finally stumble into the river’s smooth-rolling current, I sit, mindlessly running a stone along the sharpened edges of my metal stars. Unprotected and Outside. Howl still has the knife that Tai-ge gave to me, my only weapon stolen even before we left the City walls. My stars will have to do as a defense, the edges honed until they can cut. A brief image of me attempting to stab a gore with my tiny pin flashes before my eyes. I shake my head to clear it. What else can I do?
Food finds its way to my lips when I remember that I am supposed to eat, though the first time I look in Sole’s borrowed pack for sustenance, my hands find the book Howl gave me instead. The one with the sleeping princess on the front, and the promise of a happy ending. I can’t even touch it, staring down at the glint of gilt on the front cover until I can force my fingers to zip the pack closed.
What would a happy ending mean to Howl, anyway? Happy the way Zhinu and Niulang were? Separated by a wall of stars in the sky, seeing each other behind the sun’s back with help from a world’s worth of confused birds? Or perhaps just a life—any life—would be happy for him as long as his lungs still move air in and out of his body and his heart still beats, regardless of who around him has gone silent.
Every day the sun watches my slow progress along the river, and every night the moonlight is the same, stolen from where it should belong. I find myself looking over my shoulder as I walk, expecting Howl’s white smile and Kasim’s boisterous laugh to emerge from the trees at any moment, the two of them ready to drag me back to the tubes and knives. Why haven’t they caught up with me yet?
Finally, a shadow blocks the sun rising over my lonely hammock. The flap that protects me from rain, insects, and my nightmares is stenciled with a human outline. It wrenches back to let in the full blaze of pink morning sun. A crane startles from branches above us at the quick movement, wings stainless white against the patchwork sky. The person’s face is obscured by the black curls of a gas mask, but I recognize the green Menghu jacket buttoned up to her throat.
She doesn’t cut me down immediately, head cocked as though she’s not quite sure what kind of butterfly she’s found in this strange cocoon.
I’m glad it’s over. No more running, no more pretending. I don’t have to think anymore. I don’t have to breathe.
I reach my hands out, wrists together so the Menghu can tie them. “What took you so long?”
She tears the gas mask from her face, letting loose a cascade of blond curls. “What did they do to you, Sev?”
June.
PART IV
CHAPTER 39
WE WALK IN SILENCE. SHE always was good at silence. I don’t ask her where she got her uniform, and she doesn’t ask me where Howl is. Her presence brings me back to the forest, aware of time passing for the first time in days.
“Where are you headed?” June’s question sounds like cold iron, inhuman and airless through the gas mask. “Or are you just going . . . away?”
“The City.” I have to warn Tai-ge about the invasion. Even if the rest of that place almost deserves the Menghu, I can’t let him be killed. And there are others that I can’t justify leaving for the Menghu to piece together in bracelets. My roommate, Peishan, locked away in the Sanatorium. Sister Shang. I can’t let them be shot down just because of where they are standing, like my father was.
And Mother. It feels like checking rat traps back in the orphanage. Dreading what I’d find, but knowing that leaving the dead creatures would just draw more rodents . . . I have to look. I have to know once and for all why she left me. And the only way to find out is to ask her. The syringe in my pocket feels like another limb, a part of me. The kiss to cure her awake.
She could be the end to SS and this stupid war. The end of people dying and forcing other people to die for them . . .
“You can go back to the City?” June interrupts my thoughts. “The Reds weren’t after you, they were after—?”
Howl. I cut her off before she can finish the question. “Things have changed.”
“The Menghu aren’t following you, though.”
I stop, letting the statement sink in. “They must be.”
She arches an eyebrow at me, glancing behind us into the woods. I blush at what she isn’t saying. If they were after me, I would already be back at the Mountain with my throat slit. Running away from the Menghu shouldn’t be as easy as falling down a mountainside. I’m their cure. They wouldn’t just let me walk away, would they? Maybe they just moved their focus onto Howl instead. That thought gives me a twinge of guilt, even after everything he’s done, but I stamp it down, smothering it under all the lies he told me.
June just shrugs, handing me a handful of dried apricot slices, the flesh feeling gummy under my fingertips. “Eat that. You look like you’ve missed a few meals.”
I hold the apricots in my fist, squeezing them between my fingers. June sighs and pries my hand open, taking one of the orange fruits to hold in front of my nose. “Eat it.”
The taste burns, my tongue curling up in protest, but I still swallow. It slides down my throat and settles in my stomach like a rock.
June’s mask stays attached to her face, a green hood covering her bright hair. Rumors about contagious SS must have spread like a fire through the Outsiders, though she won’t tell me how. June isn’t the helpless little girl I thought she was. She’s smarter than me, better off than I ever was.
When we settle down for the night, she pulls an envelope out of her pocket, rattling it as she holds it out to me. Two green pills fall out of the paper into my palm. I shake my head, tears stinging behind my eyes.
“I don’t need it anymore.” If I did, then I would still have a mother and Howl might have actually loved me. I would have a home instead of wandering around out here, an outcast. “I wish I did.”
• • •
Trekking back to the City blurs into one long day of heavy feet plodding mercilessly forward and one long night of terrible nightmares, each one featuring Niulang transforming into one of the qilin monsters he attended and tearing after Zhinu through the forest with his teeth bared.
When we get close to the City, June and I use the ditches to get past the farms, playing dead whenever patrols wander by. June swaps her green coat for a leather jerkin stamped with the City seal. I find one as well, the ditches populated with many uncomplaining donors. Remembering the dead man stamped with my boot prints from the first day Outside leaves me wiping dead smell from my shoulders and arms, and I keep catching myself holding my breath to keep the death from going inside me.
The inlet leading to the Sanatorium sewers is on the cliff side of the City. It isn’t that hard to slip past the guards, because they’re all concentrated in front of the City’s main gates, the few Seconds who notice us just nodding as we walk toward the thin path that curves around the back side of the mountain.
My stomach churns as I size up the single, icy board running out to the sewer outlet, a simple hole in the side of the cliff. There’s a chain bolted to the cliff wall above the board to aid the unfortunate Third who was required to unblock the sewer pipe. From here, the wind pushes up on my arms and face as if I’m a bird getting ready to take off over the terraced rice paddies, each strip of water reflecting the blue sky like a mirror from hundreds of feet down. Beyond that, mountains pop up from the ground, laden with robes of green as far as I can see. The City wall zigzags far above my head, gray stone following the lines of the mountain in a disorganized-looking sprawl, a square-shaped turret almost directly over us.
I swallow the dizzying height down, curling my fingers around the chain. I don’t have time to be scared. I don’t even have time to look down. Failure to get in means Tai-ge will die.
June grabs my hands before I can take a step, shaking her head. I try to smile to reassure her, but my face has forgotten how. “Don’t wait for me. A war is about to start.”
Her eyes don’t waver, a faint blush staining her cheeks as she pulls again. “Don’t leave me.” The first
words between us in days. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Taking care of me when, only a few weeks ago, I thought I was taking care of her. I couldn’t save Aya, and now my new little sister is trying to save me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that there is no such thing as safe. Not Outside or In. But I nod. “Come. But this could be as messy as a gore’s dinner party.”
Inch by inch, June right behind me, we make our way to the outlet, a coating of brownish slime staining the rock underneath the opening. My heart sinks when we get close enough to see the ice-plastered grate covering the sewer, bars set so closely together I can’t even get my arm through. But, on the far side, two of them are cut.
I bite my lip. Does that mean Menghu are already here? Is Helix already inside, waiting for the right moment to open the City’s main gates?
Even with the cut bars, squeezing through leaves my ribs feeling bent. Dirty water pools around me, soaking my pants to the knees, the stench of rotting garbage curling in my nose. But the filth down here doesn’t scare me so much as what must be waiting for us up in the Sanatorium.
Parhat’s wild eyes; Mei’s bared teeth. My sister with her ax. The Sanatorium is full of men and women who are infected. I’ve had nightmares about ending up in the Sanatorium since the moment they set the first stone, since the first instance of infection trumping Mantis.
I don’t have to worry about Mantis not working for me anymore. I just have to get through the Sanatorium without being eaten. I remind myself that the infected aren’t monsters, they’re victims, and if I want to save my friends from the true monsters of this world—the City and the Menghu alike—I have to push forward.
My quicklight breaks, catching the slow ripples of water around me in an eerie glow. The water trough narrows as we walk along, cement walls closing in around us as the roar of rushing water down the channel finds my ears. There should be a cement wall, about fifty feet high, with sewage rushing over the side up ahead—the City’s insurance that Outsiders won’t sneak in this way, and City dwellers won’t use it to sneak out.
By the time we get to the wall, the sound of rushing water fills me up, echoing off the cold cement until it feels like the dirty water is inside of me, all around me, that there’s no reason I should still be able to breathe. Water careens over the side from above, leaving only a foot-wide section of cement clear of falling water. I slip on my gloves and pull out the rope and the two sets of metal disks that Sole stole for me when I ran from Howl. Part of the plan that wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t raided Zhuanjia storerooms for me, getting the materials Howl was supposed to bring when we escaped. Two attach to my boots, one strapped to each hand. The disks are magnetic, bonding with the iron reinforcement through the cement, sticking like glue with every move upward. I skate up the wall, concentrating on the dark above me to avoid thinking about what will happen if I fall, if I move too far to the side and the roaring water grabs me from my delicate perch to go crashing into the sewage channel.
Howl’s voice whispers in my mind, The sewers will take us straight up into the Sanatorium. There are no connections to the old City underground, but they will get us past the walls. My shoulders hunch up around my ears, and I stop for a moment to shake his warm touch from my head. I need to concentrate. It only takes a few more lung-wrenching minutes to pull myself up over the top, and I give myself a second to choke down breaths of sewage-infused air before turning the magnets off in the disks and carefully dropping them back down for June. The red of my quicklight flickers over her spider-like crawl up toward me, much faster and more sure of herself than I was.
After June scales the wall, we continue down the narrow walkway next to the channel until the next screaming fall of water. This one, however, has a ladder ascending into the darkness above us, the rungs slippery with muck. As I climb, my quicklight begins to wane, so I break another at the top to reveal a cavernous cement room, the water coming from a break in the wall across from us but confined to its channel running the length of the space. Ladders crawl up the blank faces of the room, and drains dot the floor every few yards, the cement shiny and damp.
We climb the ladder on the far wall, coming to a high-ceilinged hallway. The area is still unlit and unrelieved cement, but there are doors cut into the deep gray walls every ten feet. The first door I come to has three hand-size windows across the top. My footsteps draw a scuffling sound from inside, and reflective retinas peer out at me from the cell. “I’m not gone yet,” a voice scratches out, wobbling like an unbalanced top. “Not yet.”
The voice repeats itself over and over, rising into a scream that follows me all the way down the hall, past door after door of other frightened eyes blinking after my quicklight.
Flickering light ahead means people. Firsts?
June drags me into the inky blur of an alcove, grabbing my quicklight and stuffing it under her heavy leather jerkin. The deep murmur of voices penetrates my hood.
“. . . entire floor locked down. At least until the Watch comes back from Outside. They’ve spent the last two weeks pasted to the City gates like graffiti. Our security here cannot be set back in priority. One exposure . . .”
A voice interrupts, rasping through the mesh of a gas mask. “We understand the importance of what you are doing, but the Watch is spread thin at the moment. We’ve lost three farms already. My soldiers . . .”
The first man cuts back in, “This ridiculous experiment is ravaging the Wood Rats as we speak. We have no way to stop it! We can’t set foot Outside without risking exposure! We can’t even tell who is infected because the Sleep stage can’t be regulated anymore. A single night’s rest could be the first stages, or even less, and we have no way of knowing who is infected and who isn’t. Dr. Yang couldn’t have known. . . .”
Dr. Yang? The name echoes out behind them, the last word I catch from the exchange before their voices disappear into the dripping gray prison. I pull my boots off and pad after them in my wet socks, but I can’t pick apart the hollow echoes bouncing off the cement walls. Frustration bubbles through me as I lean against the wall, stuffing my boots into the pack. Is Dr. Yang involved on this end too? Is that how he knew about the contagious strain of SS?
And did Firsts release it into the wild as an experiment? As though they could just document the effects and file it away, never expecting it to affect them? That’s the same kind of hubris that got the world into this mess in the first place. Some of the resolve I felt back at the Mountain resurges in my chest, warmth burning holes through the lead cocoon protecting me from my feelings.
Tai-ge will know. The Hongs will be able to do something, whatever is going on. The thought is a bright point in the darkness. Taking a deep breath, I turn to go back to June.
But my head jerks back, crashing into one of the metal doors.
A cackling laugh stabs through me as I fumble to detach the hand tangled in my braid. I can’t see anything, the assault snaking out from the small window leading into the cell behind me. Sputtering hoots of laughter die down, smothered as the prisoner pulls again, shoving the end of my long braid into his mouth.
I wrench away from the cell door, the hair at the nape of my neck tearing at my skin, but the prisoner is stronger. He lets me pull just far enough away to smash me back into the door with a crack. The contact resounds through my head like a bell tolling, sick dread flooding through me as another hand reaches out from the holes in the door, fingers digging into my chin from behind.
My fingers find my star pin, leather cord cutting against my throat as I tear them from the necklace. Using the stars’ sharpened metal edges, I saw through my braid, the star pin’s points glancing across the hand clutching at my face. The arms recoil back into the cell with a howl, my severed braid snaking after them.
The irregular ends of hair scratch at my eyes and mouth as I run, my hands too busy keeping hold of the stars, feeling for my mother’s jade and the rusted ring on the leather cord to brush them away. My whole body convulses with fear and r
evulsion, slimy fingers crawling across my skin in ghostly memory of the Seph’s touch.
I grab June’s hand and we sprint down the hallway, wetness clinging to us like a diseased haze. She doesn’t question it, but pulls me to a stop when we get to the first stairwell, the severed remains of my hair a harsh revelation under the bare bulb.
I lean back against the wall, pulling my hair away from her, trying to let my gasping breaths calm. The white-knuckle grip I have on my stars refuses to unfold, as though my fingers are permanently bonded to them. My palm throbs as the metal stabs into my palm, a dribble of blood squeezing out of my fist to drip on the floor.
Cocking her head, June twines a finger around a lock of hair, ending jaggedly at my cheekbone. The shadow of distress in her face is enough to get me talking again. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I tie the broken leather cord back around my neck, stars and jade bloody red next to the ring. “The Menghu could be waiting right outside the City. We have to go.”
The gray cement wall boasts a large red number four centered above the flight of stairs. At the top of the staircase, we come to clean, rose-colored tile, utilitarian and boring. Each hall seems like an endless string of doors, with red handles marked ALARM set into the walls every hundred feet or so.
Offices. Each inhabited by a ruthless monster, every case of SS blood on their hands. How do Firsts work in here, so close to their victims? Do they worry that someday their charges will get out? My hand trails across the glass door protecting an alarm handle in the wall. I suppose the moment anything unusual happens, everyone runs.
The first person we see has his face buried in a pile of papers, a single red star glinting in the harsh lights as he walks up the hall toward us. I duck through a doorway, June slipping in under my arm, before he looks up.
The room is a small office, gagged by loose papers overflowing from the small metal desk and gray filing cabinets that line the walls. June stays by the cracked-open door, eyes on the man as he passes. I slide into the chair at the desk, interest caught as the miniature telescreen set into the wall blinks white and blue. A file pulls up in response to my sitting down, the words MEDICAL TRAINING black against the screen. A group of pictures pops up underneath.
Last Star Burning Page 28
