Last Star Burning

by Caitlin Sangster

  Dr. Yang lowers the gun a hair, chuckling. It still points to my chest. “I knew she went somewhere else first. I knew she wouldn’t be stupid enough not to leave a copy of everything we achieved. She trusted you. Loved you. I knew she either had told you where it was already or would, given the chance.”

  A light dawns in my mind. “You couldn’t reproduce the cure, could you? Not even with Howl right in front of you. Not even with both of us opened up on an operating table.”

  “There was never much of a chance that examining brain scans would have resulted in any helpful—”

  “She was smarter than you are. She figured it out, and you just watched. How long did it take before you realized there was no hope? That Howl’s brain would never be enough? How did you convince him to help you?”

  “Howl would have done anything to come home. He has been a very effective tool, doing everything I ask without even knowing I asked it because he believes he knows the true state of the world. That he’s smarter, faster, more moral than I am. He thinks he knows me and what I want. He thought I wanted you on that hospital table with your head cracked open, so he saved you. Convinced you that coming back here and waking your own demons was the only solution. If Howl hadn’t been so taken with you, I still could have convinced you, given time. But fear worked the fastest. It always does.” Dr. Yang’s grin speaks horrors and violence, prickling down my neck. “Intelligence doesn’t come in only one form, Jiang Sev. I got what I wanted after years and years of delicate manipulation. This all would have been so much easier if Gui-hua hadn’t chosen to come back here instead of saving the world from SS. But now things will come out right. Now I finally know where it is.”

  The words sink down to my stomach, a hard rock of cancer threading its way through my body, waiting to kill. “It wasn’t between the world and the City. It was a choice between me and you.” The door of the glass coffin is cold and unyielding against my back as I try to inch away from him, fingers grasping for something, anything. “She chose curing her daughter over starting a new world order, with you in charge. You want to use the cure just like Firsts use Mantis. To hold it over our heads and start your own slave pens. Why did you wait? Why drag me out to the Mountain? Why didn’t you just bring me here years ago?”

  “Would you have told me anything if I’d just ripped you away from Tai-ge without reason? Would you have believed back then that she wasn’t a monster without Howl to show you why the City was wrong, without Mei and her City-inflicted scars?” He smiles as he says it. “You had to want to leave yourself, to know this place was going to kill you and to make your own decisions, or Jiang Gui-hua would have seen the puppet strings and wouldn’t have told you anything.” He scowls. “She did such a good job on you. But the world is more important than one miracle.”

  He jams the gun hard against me just as my fingers find the tangle of wires that protected the City from my Mother’s return for so long. I wrench them away from the door, pulling them up from the floor in one swift motion.

  An alarm blares, and the gun in Dr. Yang’s shaking hand wavers as he looks up in surprise. Red and white lights flash all over the Center, but I don’t have time to cover my ears. I’m over the edge of the balcony, sliding from one of the long banners framing Traitor’s Arch to the ground. Above me, Dr. Yang’s swearing bleeds through the overwhelmingly loud siren coiling and striking at my eardrums. His face disappears behind the empty glass box just as something crashes into me from behind, slamming my head into the shiny marble floor, leaving nothing but darkness.

  CHAPTER 43

  I NEVER APPRECIATED THE HOLE’S name until this moment. Shadows compose the very air, soaking through my thin shirt and into my skin. Damp stones make up the floor and walls, radiating cold. I can’t have been here long, but I already feel as though the jagged remnants of my hair have begun to mold. I am blind, masked by a world that has never seen the light of the sun. Seldom even brightened by a torch or quicklight. I’m actually glad.

  If the heavy stench of decay is anything to go by, I’d rather not know what I’m sitting in.

  The dark doesn’t speak to me anymore, empty of all the nightmares. It’s so quiet down here I can hardly think, my own breaths ringing in my ears, every scrape against the stone deafening. My eyes keep trying to adjust, to make some sense out of the static deadness surrounding me. Eventually, I have to close them to stop myself from hoping, from jumping every time my brain tricks me into believing the darkness is thinning. Silence presses against my eardrums as if I’m deep underwater, the air so thick I have to remind myself to breathe.

  She’s dead. Just like that. A few minutes with the woman who blighted my existence for eight years and she’s exonerated. Allowed to be my mother again. Then gone forever. Half a smile tugs sadly at my mouth, her last words a temptation to forget all of my years alone. I wish I could be her little rose. But, instead, I am the one who woke her up. Whether I can piece Mother back into my life or not, I am the true betrayer. I gave Dr. Yang the key my mother died to protect. Port North and the family. Our family? Is my name so painfully foreign because Mother isn’t from the City at all? That doesn’t make sense.

  I can only hope it means as much to Dr. Yang as it does to me. Nothing. He’s right, the world is more important than one miracle. But my life isn’t standing in the way of curing the world of SS. If he’s the one who controls it, somehow I doubt he’ll use it to cure anyone but those who will bow to him.

  The Watch didn’t chase Dr. Yang, didn’t even blink when I screamed my head off that he was escaping. Shrieking that she’s dead, that they didn’t understand. They just saw Jiang’s cage open with her fugitive daughter running in the other direction and came to their own conclusions.

  Which, strictly speaking, were correct.

  My future is blank. All I have to hope for now is that June will realize I’m not coming back. Maybe she can get Peishan and the others out of the old City before the Menghu descend like a killing frost.

  Something inside me wants to replay the situation with not just me, but the way I thought it was going to happen back when I was still in the Mountain. If Howl had meant to come here with me to wake her up, would my mother’s secrets now be in Dr. Yang’s hands? Or would I? Would “Port North” and “the family” have been enough to keep us going, enough to keep the merciless survivor buried down deep inside of him?

  I close my eyes, trying to stop the line of thought, to bat down the tiny flame of regret flickering inside of me. I’ll never know. I can’t. Howl is a road that can never be walked. The fact that he was willing to lead me to my death, joking and teasing the whole way . . . My head rings in the silence, the blackness pressing in on me, every breath wringing my lungs as I try to extinguish the betrayal tearing at my insides. Someone who can do that . . . Sole was right. Howl is not anything close to the caring and warm person I thought I knew. He’s just like Helix. Cold inside. A killer. His mask is just more cunningly carved, an art honed over years and years of fooling those around him. Of surviving.

  If we had come here together, I would probably be lying right next to Mother, eyes closed forever.

  I sit trapped inside my thoughts for hours. Days. Years, for all I know, before I hear sounds. Shouts bleeding through the thick walls, muted by my cell door. Running footsteps. Screams growing louder and louder until it’s right outside. Three or four men yell to each other over the top of an inhuman screech, flailing limbs thumping against the heavy wood of my cell door. Each blow shivers against my ear, pressed against the wood, drinking in the sound. Tumblers fall as a key breaks the lock, and the whole fight spills over right on top of me.

  A boot connects with my chin, and my head hits the ground, ringing with the impact. A soldier’s heel grinds my open palm into the stone floor before I can roll away to the edge of the tiny cell, banging my arm against the rough stone wall. Curling up in the corner, I wrap my head and neck in my arms, half protecting myself, half blocking out the unearthly screams as a man i
s thrown into the cell, kicking and wrestling as though his life depends on it.

  “Give them back!” he screams. “I need them back! My eyes! What about my eyes?” The Watchmen slam the door, vibrations reverberating through my bruised jaw. The prisoner is at the door, fists pummeling the wood until his bones must be broken.

  A Watchman’s heavy breaths mist through barred window, the yellow flare of a quicklight blindingly sharp after the unrelieved dark. “All yours, Fourth, since you made him what he is,” he yells over Seph’s screams. “Better hope he stays self-destructive, because neither of you are going anywhere.”

  His meaning catches at my lungs like pneumonia, my breaths coming quickly but never making it into my system. So it isn’t even going to be the execution block. Unless this guy has nice compulsions. Like brushing other people’s teeth. Or chewing gum.

  The Seph continues pounding on the door as the quicklight fades, then spins to look at me. “Scream.” His voice’s ragged ends barely come together for the word to make sense. “Scream! Now!”

  When I don’t respond, he lunges at me, and the demanded scream rips out of me like a barbed hook out of a fish’s mouth. He crashes down on to the floor next to me, scuffling against the stones as his hands search for me. I brace myself, the muscles in my arms aching, frozen with tension as if they’ll never move again. Waiting.

  But nothing happens. I can’t see him, but his breath touches my eyelashes, washing over my face and down my neck, everything still. My skin crawls. He must be inches from me, just waiting for infection to order him to strike. Tears tickle my nose and cheeks, but I can’t brush them away, can’t even force my lungs to inflate, afraid any noise at all will trigger the time bomb lying beside me.

  His hand grazes my elbow, fingers trailing up toward my shoulder, following my collarbone to rest in the hollow at the base of my neck. Trapped. And it is in this moment that I realize how badly I want to live. I don’t want to die down here in the Hole’s inky depths. I want to live so much that it burns, the blank shell slated for destruction forgotten in my silent fight to survive.

  “You okay, Sevvy? Did they hurt you?” I jerk away from the whisper, hitting my head against the wall. His voice must be tearing his throat to rags after all that screaming, but it’s calm. Sane. The hand on my collarbone slips up under my chin, to my cheek. “I think they’re gone.”

  Tai-ge’s voice. Anxiety thick in his deep tones when I don’t answer. I can’t. I curl forward, gasping for air as I wrap my arms around him, the sobs finally shaking out of me. His arms pull me in tight, my head tucked under his chin, the slow rise and fall of his chest the only thing I understand.

  “What are you doing down here? How did you find me? Why did you find me?” The questions trip over themselves to get out of my mouth.

  “They told everyone when they caught you. I think they might have had a parade if rebels hadn’t started popping out of every nook and cranny in the Third Quarter.”

  I sit up in alarm. “It’s happening. What is the Watch doing? Are Thirds being evacuated?”

  Tai-ge’s voice goes quiet, anger seeping out from the cracks. “I was there. I watched them pour out of the Sanatorium and start ripping into the factories. The dead are everywhere. People just slumped all over each other, shot down before they could even run. And instead of helping, I came down here. But there were no heli-planes. No chemical bombs.”

  “I told you they didn’t have planes.” My nightmares of Menghu loose in the City would have been bleak enough without the exhausted hopelessness in his voice, confirming that even my bleakest of dreams wasn’t enough. I can just imagine the Menghu calling to one another, keeping score as whole families crumple at their feet. More bracelets to make.

  “All the people I am supposed to protect, dying by the hundreds. And I’m down here making sure you are all right.” My heart twinges in my chest, pressure building in my throat at the condemnation clouding over me like a poisonous gas. “I had to come save the traitor. . . .”

  I reach out toward him, grabbing his wrist so hard that his bones crack. “Listen to me, Tai-ge.” He doesn’t pull away, waiting for the defense he refused to hear earlier. “I did not kill anyone. It was all a setup. Dr. Yang convinced me that if I left—”

  “Wait, Dr. Yang? Yang He-ping?”

  “You know him too?” The confirmation bites at me.

  We are quiet for a few minutes, Tai-ge’s hands groping for something in his pocket. A quicklight. After so long in the cell, even that small light seems blinding. The yellow glow hollows out his eyes, changing my friend into a tattered ghost. “Yang He-ping is one of the lower Firsts. He has done a lot of spy work with the rebels. It was Dr. Yang who warned my father the rebels were moving. We didn’t think they could get in.”

  “It was Dr. Yang who argued to send Menghu into the City. Of course he told you they wouldn’t be able to get in. He’s the one who killed half of the First Circle all those years ago. He’s the one who should have been molding over Traitor’s Arch. The deaths, this invasion, it’s all because my mother found the cure to SS.”

  His head is shaking before the sentence even hits the air, anger yellow and sickly in the quicklight. “Stop lying to me. I don’t want to hear it. Why did I come down here?” He stands up and peers out the small window in our cell door. “Why do I still want to protect you when I know you are using me?”

  Tai-ge tenses when I touch his shoulder. “Because deep down you know the things the City says about me aren’t true. You know I could never have set that bomb, and you know I’m right about the planes. You are the only person who believed in me, who thought my life was worth more than the price of an execution. And it’s still true.” I let my hand drop. He isn’t responding. He doesn’t believe it anymore. I can feel the emptiness yawning under me, my resurrected hope sinking back down. “I left because you mattered more to me than my life. And I came back for the same reason. I would never lie to you.”

  Tai-ge holds up the quicklight, softening the grasp of night around us. “Do you really believe your mother had a cure to SS?”

  “I’m living proof.”

  CHAPTER 44

  TAI-GE’S ACCEPTANCE BRINGS THE WHOLE story pouring out, a torrential downpour of pent-up information and feelings. Except for one thing. I can’t bring myself to tell him about Howl beyond the bare bones of our working together. The humiliation and hurt are still too raw to touch.

  At the end of the story, Tai-ge pulls another quicklight from his boot, smoothing the tube back and forth over the hem of his coat. “And Dr. Yang? Our spy?”

  “He’s had a foot in both City and Mountain since before my mother died, playing one off of the other. Just think, Tai-ge. Firsts set a contagious form of SS loose Outside. Dr. Yang was ready for it the moment it hit the Mountain. He must have been involved in formulating it and setting it free. The Mountain decided to invade the City specifically because of it. Not enough Mantis to go around. If Dr. Yang has his way, contagious SS is probably spreading through the Menghu, and it will infect everyone in the City not killed in the fighting. So what do we have left?”

  “Lots of extremely impulsive people? With weapons?”

  “SS everywhere. People getting hurt. Looting and cruelty. If Dr. Yang comes in with the cure, it’ll be like Yuan Zhiwei all over again. Except instead of Mantis, he’s offering real freedom from SS, not just a stopgap. Who wouldn’t go run straight to him? Dr. Yang will be a king, a god who fixed our broken world. Just like Yuan Zhiwei.”

  The truth of the statement stares up at me as if it were sitting there all along but I was too blind to see it. Dr. Yang never needed my brain. Not mine or Howl’s. If he really thought he could reproduce the cure, then Howl would never have gotten away the first time. I would never have seen anything of the Mountain but the sterile white of Yizhi. All the threatening from Yizhi and Helix and Cale trying to drag me down . . . They might have believed Dr. Yang needed to cut me open, but in reality it was all just to scare me i
nto coming back here and waking up my mother. He was manipulating Howl, manipulating me, manipulating both the City and the Mountain. He didn’t need my brain—he needed Mother to tell him where to find the work they had already done.

  “There are Firsts in the City who have been cured. Dr. Yang could have used any of them if rediscovering the cure were as simple as analyzing a cured brain. He needed me. Not because mother cured me, but because she would only tell me where she hid their work. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone else.” I rub my eyes, which ache from lack of sleep. “He must have suspected that Howl had second thoughts about throwing me under the knives, so he used him. Must have started feeding him information about my mother, hoping he would pass it on. Practically handed him the serum to wake Mother up. Then, for the final touch, he shoved a scalpel in my face to make me run back here.”

  Tai-ge shakes his head. “Sevvy, you can’t know . . .”

  A laugh starts to bubble up inside of me, but there’s no humor in the broken sound. “I should have put it together the night after I escaped.” I jump up, unable to sit still. But pacing back and forth in the tiny cell just makes it worse. “The Menghu would have picked me up before I even made it down the rope. The whole Mountain should have been on lockdown the moment Dr. Yang noticed his antidote for Suspended Sleep was missing. I was too upset to think much about it at the time, but Dr. Yang must have done something to stop them from coming after me. He let me go so I could get here. To her.”