My foot catches on the ground, and I stumble forward. A month of walking, maybe. If I find this Islander group and we make good time. Manage to find food along the way and don’t get completely lost. Six hundred miles in a heli could be twice as long on the ground, accounting for mountains and rivers. Gorges and cliffs. Soldiers and gores.
Sev’s a prisoner somewhere. I need to be there now.
Hefting the rucksack, I look back at Luokai. “There’s a lot riding on me finding her and the cure.”
“Yes.”
“Not just your sanity. Not just June’s. If Dr. Yang has the cure, he’s going to come root out the last person hiding here. He’ll take control of everything.”
Luokai nods. “I wish it were not so.”
I point to the bridge. “Is this the best you can do? Doesn’t this place have helis, soldiers, food reserves… You know the way to the mountains, but you’re sending me alone?”
Frowning a little, Luokai takes a step closer to me. “There’s not much I can do, Howl. I have to take care of June until you return.”
June. Her name on his lips makes my blood begin to simmer again, as if he weren’t the one who turned her Seph. I turn back to face the bridge, afraid if I look at Luokai anymore I’ll hit him. It’s been a long time since I’ve fought someone just to make myself feel better. Doesn’t seem smart at the moment, especially going after an infected person who a) won’t remember that aiming for a snapped collarbone is fighting dirty, and b) might eat the broken pieces if he wins.
So instead of hitting Luokai, I start walking. There’s wind skimming my ears, the crash of water below me, bits and pieces of broken stone that skid under my feet across the white of the bridge. A long shadow from the statue that stands at the bridge’s head stretches over me, Luokai’s hidden inside it, the two of them darkening my path across.
He doesn’t speak again, not enough left between us even for a good-bye. There’s a hole in my chest where I’ve kept my brother all these years, hoping he was out here. That one member of my family hadn’t melted away, unable to survive the heat of a life at war like the rest. But now I know the truth, and I don’t look back.
I find new tracks from the bridge easy enough, a small group that passed through within the last few hours, one with a shaved heel that sticks out like strawberries in winter. It gets more complicated as I creep through the structures lined up beyond the beach, their stone walls scorched and the ground saturated by many, many booted footprints. It’s not long before I have to take cover inside one of the little stone houses, a heli buzzing overhead. The bite in my shoulder throbs.
Sheltering under the eaves, I pull out the bottle of medicine Luokai left in the rucksack. Twice a day, he said, so I put one white pill in my mouth, hoping it kills pain and gore diseases. My collarbone isn’t grating painfully the way it was when I first woke up with Sev, but it still hurts.
Once the heli is gone, I manage to find prints from the shaved heel again and follow it into the trees. The tracks aren’t too hard to follow in the tall grass, and I’m beginning to wonder how helpful traveling with this group could be if they’re leaving such obvious trails for Reds to find, when a voice stops me cold.
“This way. Looks like there are five, maybe. Four?”
Creeping into the shelter of a tree trunk, I listen for a moment before I move closer. Not that it matters. The two men ahead of me are making so much noise themselves, there’s little chance they’d hear me even if I were kicking my way through the dead grass like a little kid. When I’m close enough to see the City’s falcon and beaker emblazoned across their backs, I let myself lag behind, listening for evidence of more soldiers. No other tracks mar the ground this way, so they must have been scouting and happened upon the same Islander tracks I’ve been following. The next time the two Reds pause, I get a good look at their guns, a nauseous revulsion swirling with an awful kind of longing inside me. If I had a weapon, all this would be so much easier.
A gun.
The little girl I killed skips across my thoughts, the memory of her cracked and torn at the edges from years of trying to repress it. I haven’t shot a gun since…
I jam a different image in front of that bloody little girl: Sev, tied up in Dr. Yang’s lab. If these two Reds are trying to shoot up the Islanders who are supposed to get me back to Sev, then I have to take this situation in hand. I made mistakes before, yes. But if I let my past dictate what I can and can’t do, Sev will be sitting right next to that little girl in the dark recesses of my mind, peering at me whenever I close my eyes. This is an emergency.
I crouch, touching the damp ground next to one of the Islander boot prints, trying to decide how fast they were moving and how long ago it was they passed. But, as I lean closer, everything in front of me blurs. My mind seems too heavy, sliding this way and that, threatening to tip me over onto the cold ground.
One of the Reds looks back, his hands idly touching the gun as he scans the trees around me. I dig my fingers into the grass, command every muscle of mine to freeze, to become a blade of grass, a bit of bark, but my lungs turn slick and wet, refusing air.
He takes a step in my direction, craning his neck as if his mind can sense something amiss, but his eyes can’t see it. I can’t spare a thought for shoddy training practices in the City, though. My body is trying to slip apart into bloody pieces right here, to do this man’s job for him.
Breathe. In. Out. But the air won’t come, and my eyes go gray, blocking out the trees, the grass, even the Red and his gun. What is happening to me? A voice inside me screams. Panic, every soldier’s most familiar enemy.
A mouthful of air finally slides into my lungs, and the world around me snaps back into focus. The Red has already turned away and is following his partner into the trees.
What was that? I creep up from the ground, gauging my balance, my body, and what it is or isn’t capable of at the moment. Take a step. I can walk, but fuzziness still lurks at the edges of my vision. Whatever it was, I don’t have the luxury of time to be sick right now. I need to find these Islanders now. Before the Reds do.
Legs shaking, I follow the Islander trail a little farther, looking for a good spot to break away so I can get around the Reds, when my eyes find another broken path through the grass. A gore trail.
It crosses the line of broken grass stems left by the Islanders, then continues into the trees in a different direction, but there’s something funny about it, some of the grass bent in places a gore wouldn’t have touched.…
A slow smile pulls at my mouth. I switch to following the gore track, nose almost to the ground until I find it. A footprint, the heel worn on one side. I start moving faster, and the fuzziness swirling at the edges of my vision turns to darkness. Overtaxed, I tell myself. First time up in weeks; it’s no wonder I’m a little shaky. I take off down the trail, dull panic unfolding inside me as every step gets harder.
By the time I find the Islander camp, twilight makes it hard to see—at least I think it’s twilight blurring the two tents ahead into one brownish smudge. Based on the way my legs are shaking, I’ve maybe got an hour before I go from impaired to unconscious. I prop myself against a rock shielded by a bush and blink until my eyes clear enough to case the campsite. I don’t recognize any markings on either tent. No numbers, no City mark, no hammocks.
Also, no lookouts.
I scrub my good hand through my hair. This is the group Luokai seemed to think will get me to the mountains safely? They might have done a good misdirect back there, hiding their trail in the gore track, but whatever advantage it would have given them has been destroyed by this campsite. There’s a fire. With smoke.
Making a mistake like that in the mountains would be asking for a knife between your ribs. Here with Reds prowling, looking for people to take away in their helis? I shake my head, wishing it would stop spinning. I can’t risk my life, Sev’s, June, the cure, on the chance that no one else has noticed these idiots are here. I can, however, take any supplies
they have to offer. Namely food, water purifiers, a hammock. Maps, maybe.
A weapon.
Two men emerge from one of the tents, the first with many years of good food evident on all parts of him. He stops at the edge of the fire to prod at the steaming packets nestled at the base. The second man is closer to my age, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond the camp. His eyes stop on the bush blocking me, but he turns away, not experienced enough to know that when you have a gut feeling you’re being watched, you either find the person watching you or run. Two others come out, but I don’t stop to watch them. There were tracks for four. That means no one is in the tents.
I slide my weight from behind the cover of brush, circling around until the Islanders are hidden by canvas walls. Out of sight, I crawl to the back side of the tent they’ve just emptied.
Stay out of the tent. Maybe if I wish it hard enough, some god of nature will hear me and keep them distracted. Keep poking at that fire and planning for whatever it is you’re doing out here.
If you stay out, I won’t have to kill any of you.
The tent base doesn’t connect to the walls, so sneaking in is easier than boiling noodles over a fire. Packs sit just inside, a long knife that looks as if it has seen a century of wear sitting on the ground next to them, but the edge is sharp.
A glance inside the first pack gives me a little more hope, familiar shapes of dried fruits and vegetables as well as something that looks like protein rations packed together inside. Just as I persuade my shaking fingers to clench around one of the straps, footsteps swish through the grass outside toward the tent door.
Sweat from my hand slips between my fingers as I grip the knife.
The flap opens, light streaming directly into my eyes. The shape in the doorway could only belong to the wary young man, the moment of shock at finding a stranger where a stranger shouldn’t be, freezing him in place. It’s the breath between finding the world is much more dangerous than you thought and a scream. An old friend of mine.
I drop the pack and dart toward the young man, but every movement oozes as if I’m stuck in mud, squelching through every moment in slow motion. The long knife feels like confidence in my hand as it catches on something, tearing like material instead of flesh. But I can’t see—I can’t see?—anything but what’s directly in front of me.
And what is directly in front of me? Nothing. My knees are in the dirt when I should be on my feet. Time seems to have skipped over me, because the young man is already outside, calling for help.
The ground feels too dusty and dry when it hits my cheek, though I can’t remember the time between kneeling and falling. My brain doesn’t blank out, though, letting me feel every moment as four people crowd around me, the knife I’d held coming to rest on my neck.
CHAPTER 6 June
THE WORLD IS SUPPOSED TO be a circle around me. Above the circle, there’s sky and clouds and sometimes stars, and then inside of it there’s mountains and hills and maybe some water or we’d all be thirsty. And inside those mountains and hills, there’s birds and trees and people and rocks. But instead of being up there in the circle where I belong, I’m Underneath.
It’s sure as a day’s worth of sun. I know how long it takes for people to wake up from SS, and my eyelids are stuck tight. Sun, moon, and stars’ll come up over and over like they always do, and I’ll just be down here waiting for my bones to rot.
Do bones rot? I think back to the bodies I’ve seen, but my memory feels too sticky to be sure.
“June?” Warm air brushes across my face, the sound like an erhu. I try to turn my head away from the man’s breath, but my body doesn’t much care what I want. Another voice, different from the first, says, “We’ll tell you when she wakes up, Speaker Luokai.”
“How much longer do you think? She still has a chance?”
Luokai. The man who looks like Howl but old and sad, and also evilish. He made me take off my mask. Once again, I tell my head to move, my arms to push me up from this bed, my legs to run. It’s because of him that everything inside my circle—the sky, the mountains, the whole world—is now nothing but a tiny, black cave.
“Could you give me a moment alone with her?” At least I think that’s what he says. They speak funny, like the people in my memories. He sighs as the other men go, and it seems to hover over me, condensing down by my toes, making them tingle.
“You have to wake up,” Luokai whispers. It’s almost as if I can feel the shape of him, even without eyes or a face or body or the rest of it, trapped the way I am in my brain. “I’ll never forgive myself if you don’t.
“Your friends are…” Luokai’s pause is enough to tell me what he’s got to say is either bad or a lie, maybe both. I try to jerk my hands up again, to move my head, maybe swing my foot to kick Luokai in the head. The thought stirs the tingles in my toe, and they race up from my feet into my legs and then to my stomach and chest, battling across me like ants on dead meat. Dad used to call that feeling “fishing for spears,” and he laughed when he said it, but I still don’t know why.
By the time I was old enough to ask, he was too dead to tell me.
“Howl left just this morning.” My ears open at the sound of my friend’s name. “He’s better than he was before. He’s going to help your other friend, Jiang Sev, because the helis took her. Hopefully, they’ll both be back soon.”
The helis took her? I knew Howl and Sev weren’t supposed to be here anymore. We’d all still be locked in Luokai’s prison cell of a sleeping room if I hadn’t taken off my gas mask and let him infect me. But the blood and spit and fear gummed up around those words—they took her—fill my lungs with an inch more of water. Every bit of my new family, the ones who can’t get sick so they can’t forget that they like me. Gone.
Then my toe twitches—and every inch of me freezes, more freezing than SS could ever do to me. My toe moved because I told it to.
The tingling passes my torso and sneaks into my heart. Then past my neck, all the way to my face. And suddenly I realize that moving might be a possible thing, at least a little, if I wanted to.
It’s the choice of it that lets me stay still. I could move—but I won’t, not yet.
Open your eyes. There’s a voice in my head, and it sounds like a gore, but I ignore it. Not yet, I repeat to it. I know how to stay still even if the gore inside me doesn’t.
“I’m going to take care of you, June. You’ll be safe until they get back, I promise.” Luokai must be bored. Winding down a conversation he didn’t mean to get into with a person who can’t talk back. That was the same before he breathed SS into my mouth and locked me away. People forget you’re there, get bored, and wander away when you don’t talk back. Luokai’s knees crack as he stands. Not yet. He takes three steps to the door, each swish of his robe like thunder in my ears. Not yet. A faint hush when the door begins to slide open.
Now. I roll off the table and am out the door before it can shut again.
The blanket I have clutched around me wards off the wind pushing behind me as I run—try to run, my legs shaking like new workers at a City farm. Light is like a knife in my eyes. You’re going to fall, the gore howls inside me. They’ll catch you, and you’ll be stuck here forever. Staying isn’t an option, so I make my legs move, my feet dragging sideways across the stone. Hands grab fistfuls of my blanket, so I let it go, sending one of the Baohujia off-balance, the others stumbling over him.
Which lets me run. Toward the brightest, glaring light. A window.
Luokai’s erhu voice shouts, commanding me to stop or someone to stop me, though I sort of think if he wanted either of those things to happen, he’d probably do better trying them himself. I climb up on the windowsill, no glass to keep me back. Escape sings in me like the sun about to rise from behind the mountain in the air. But then my fuzzy eyes manage to focus on the ground. Fifty feet below. Jagged rock cut into tiered paths that promise no soft landings. No reliable handholds until at least fifteen feet below the window.
Footsteps behind me, my whole body tense as a gore ready to pounce. You’ll die either way. The gore doesn’t seem very concerned about this. Die on the rocks or locked in a room by a Seph.
The thought seems to go clear in my head like good bottle glass. I can’t be trapped again. Not by someone with SS. I can still feel water closing over my head, cold as a snow angel’s bum. Dad’s fingers pressing hard into my shoulders as he held me down.
Everything around me seems to fade: just me and the drop below.
My foot skids across the stone windowsill, the rest of me following, poised over the drop like a boulder at the top of a cliff that you just want to push. JUMP, something inside me says. It’s a new voice, one that sets the gore’s hackles up inside me. JUMP, it says, taking hold of my muscles. And while I usually ignore the gore, this voice seems to know about life and the circle and things. It’s showing me the path I can run, the way out of this trap, the way to safety, never mind the drop. So I jump.
CHAPTER 7 Tai-ge
WATCHING CAPTAIN BAI’S FACE GO blank—his opinion of me sinking with every word that comes out of my mouth—is almost physically painful. He agrees to take me on a tour of the perimeter instead of briefing me on Mother’s specific plans. Despite the urgency of the situation. Despite direct orders.
Every time he begins on that subject, I interrupt, trying not to acknowledge Mei listening intently at my elbow. The buildings feel so close together in the Third Quarter, clustering like comrades at the end of a factory shift. It makes it difficult to see the physical boundary of the area Captain Bai has cleared—torches set in concrete-filled buckets that form a line between us and the infected—until we’re right on it, the smoky blast from the torches an instant change from clear air to poison.
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