Dad. We’d almost capsized on our way down south, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. That I’d fall in and drown. It was almost like a compulsion. We’d traveled on boats so many times before, and I hadn’t drowned once. But this time he couldn’t stop worrying, so he wanted to teach me what to do if I fell into the water.
SS takes your worry and does awful things with it.
The second my dad became a gore that day, I knew. But I wasn’t fast enough to escape.
It isn’t until I shrug out of my jacket and wrench my shoes from my feet that Luokai notices something has changed. I pull the second pole from its tether and jam it into the rocks, forcing the boat to veer toward the frozen shore. Looping the boots’ ties together, I twist them around my coat and heave them toward the trees. The weight of my boots carries the bundle skittering over the ice, catching on a rock on the shore. Next, I throw the pack, but it doesn’t quite make it onto the ice, the river sucking it greedily underneath. My stomach clenches tight.
Luokai uses his pole to push us back from the ice. “What are you doing?” he yells over the rumble of rushing water. “Help me! Bring the pole over here!”
Air bites through my sweater, twisting knots in my hair. My knees wobble, but I climb up on the bench and crouch, looking into the swirling water. The boat lurches, and I can feel Luokai panicking as he tries to divide his focus between me and keeping the boat back from the rocks.
The water slurps at the boat just below my feet.
That’s where you were supposed to stay. It’s the gore voice. It’s what Dad turned into, even if he didn’t ever want to. Even though I know he wouldn’t say the stuff the gore says to me. Dad didn’t want me to die, didn’t want me to hurt. I know he loved me every second. How do you love someone back when they can’t always remember they aren’t a gore, and sometimes the gore is hungry? You would have been safe underneath the water. If you jump now, you’d be safe just like I wanted you to be.
I pull the float around my neck so the waist will cushion my head, the two legs tight under my arms and around my chest, the one that’s still open to add air twisted shut in my fist. Feetfirst, downstream. Even without the pack, the Post’s trader caves are close, and I can start a fire. Go to the treehouses tomorrow. Cai Ayi’ll have news. She has my kids. She might even know what happened to Sev and Howl.
Looking down at the water squeezes my lungs tight.
I can still feel my dad’s hands on my shoulders, fingers bruising as they shove me down, water filling my lungs. Jump. The gore sneers. We both know you were supposed to drown that day. If he’d really loved you, he would have been able to stop himself. If Sev and Howl really loved you, they would have found a way to take you with them.
But then the words spark, not the gore anymore but SS catching onto my thoughts and setting them aflame.
JUMP, it says.
I don’t want to anymore. My boots slide toward the edge, and even as I shake, I put one leg over the rail.
“June!”
JUMP. The boat gives a violent rock to one side just as my other leg drags after the first, the water swirling and crying for me to come in. JUMP. I clench my eyes shut, screaming for my body to stop, but then there’s nothing but the silence of being airborne. Of falling. And then water surrounds me and drags me down, down, down.
CHAPTER 29 Sev
A DOOR OPENS, THE HINGES creaking with age. The sound sticks in my ears as if I could somehow catch hold of it, use it to reenter my body. Pull myself back on like a set of gloves so I can see who is breathing so quietly in my room.
Something drags across a hard floor. A chair, perhaps, legs screeching as they slide across the cement. The person settles next to me instead of by the far wall as they usually do. The creak of wooden joints adjusting, a sigh of relief at sitting down.
Shouldn’t you be sending orders to Dazhai? Dr. Yang asked that day, the first time I noticed my strange visitor. And suddenly, I know exactly who it must be.
“I liked your mother very much, Jiang Sev.” The same voice I’ve heard puncture the most secluded and secret places I hid in the City, whether I wanted it there or not. It was always going to be his voice.
Chairman Sun.
“We were good friends, even after we both married, had children.” He pauses. “It was terrible the day she realized that the bombs falling from the sky were supposed to come from Kamar. She believed it along with everyone else, that her own family had reneged on our treaty, not even troubling themselves to extract her first. She was heartbroken. It broke my heart to watch her. That I couldn’t tell her the truth.”
He pauses. “She came when the last exchange died. Couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I didn’t really understand how difficult that must have been for her, how she cried at first. Not until I had to give Yi-lai to the island.”
A treaty between our city and Port North. Leaders sent their children to be raised by their enemies. It kept bombs from falling on either place, until the City began bombing itself to keep its citizens in check and blamed it on Port North. Until Jiang Gui-hua, my mother, found a cure to SS, the cancer that kept people beholden to the Chairman and his Mantis stores.
The Chairman sighs, his breath itching when it brushes my cheek. He’s not wearing a gas mask because he was cured long before Mother came along.
“Sending my boy away was like killing something inside of me.” The Chairman sighs. “I was so angry. My wife got sick soon after Kamar took him, and without her little boy…” He trails off. “I knew that if I had children, one would go to the island, but I didn’t truly understand what I was giving up until it was too late. My little Yi-lai was so happy and smart.… He was talking long before the other children his age, you know. Asked to wear stars before he even knew what they meant. The perfect patriot.” Another pause. “Duty is much heavier than you could ever imagine.”
My mind screams at me to sit up, to run from the man who commanded the kidnapping of so many. Who dropped bombs on his own people to force them to stay smashed beneath his thumb. Who hid in his castle at the top of our City, hatching ways to pull the noose tighter around us. The man who ordered SS injected in my veins and sent my mother running to find a cure. My hands want to clench, to rise up and grab hold of him. But they lie next to me, dead.
“When we found out Jiang Gui-hua was trying to save us from SS, we tried to reason with her first. Threats came next. Your sudden contraction of the disease—oh, that was an unfortunate necessity. But then Gui-hua disappeared, and I knew she’d gone back to the island. So it was only fair that my Yi-lai should come home too. But when I demanded my son’s return, Kamar wouldn’t give him to me. You see, Kamar hadn’t spent their years building walls or medicines or aircraft or guns. They built farms. Factories. They trusted that diplomats would keep them safe. And without their hostage, they didn’t believe that we would leave them alone.
“So when Gui-hua came back, I put her up on the Arch,” he continues. “Told Kamar that if they didn’t produce my son, I would take every single one of their farms, every son I could lay hands on, every daughter walking free. Still, they refused to let my Yi-lai come home.”
And he’d made good on those threats. Stealing every Port Northian he could find, using them to make the City flourish. To pick our pears, harvest our rice, and mine our metal. To provide nightmares for our children and bodies to string up on our walls. But he’d gotten Yi-lai back.
Sort of. He’d gotten Howl. Did he realize the difference?
“Dr. Yang was the one pulling the strings.” The Chairman sighs. “If only I’d realized… He was assigned to a farm outside the City as a punishment after he tried to interfere with the Circle, saying he knew a better way to do things. That must have been how he got involved with the Mountain in the first place. How he got Gui-hua to go there. He had the oddest ideas about who needed power and how to keep it. Didn’t listen to instruction. But sending him away meant no one was watching him closely. In charge of all the Seco
nd medics in the southern garrison, with access to the City, access to Outside… He even asked for his First marks to be removed, to serve the City like the nuns, putting the good of the City before his own status. He came to me saying he’d found my son, that Kamar had told the truth about sending him back to us, only he’d been kidnapped by our true enemies at the Mountain. He extracted Yi-lai, brought him home… but I knew the moment I saw Howl that he wasn’t my son.”
He stops, silence lost in the drip of liquids and the slow rush of cold as the Chairman breathes on me. “I… wanted my son. I wanted a son,” he whispers. “I watched him, made sure he couldn’t hurt anyone or have any information that would undermine the City. I think I even loved him.”
My heart hurts. He knew Howl was a spy, but let him stay? Because he was lonely?
“Having Howl there helped. But it made me all the more consumed with finding my real son.” The Chairman stops, the sheet at my side twitching as if he’s fiddling with the starchy fabric. “Dr. Yang is going to kill Howl when they find him, you know. He’s crossed too many lines, made too many important people angry on both sides. It would be appropriate, no? To use a traitor to all sides in an attempt to bring everyone at war together?”
The quiet anger in my head shatters, the pieces burning all around me. Dr. Yang is going to kill Howl? Everything inside me writhes, begging my arms to move, my eyes to open. Howl has almost died too many times because of me. I can’t… I won’t let Dr. Yang hurt him.
But then I go back over the Chairman’s words. When they find him. So, Howl isn’t here? Mother sighs in relief in the back of my head.
“I’ll be back to see you. I think you and I may be able to help each other.”
Help each other how? Why would I ever help you? I want to scream. And though I know internal screams don’t do much to hold people’s attention, I’m infuriated when the chair scrapes the floor. The door squeaks. And then… silence.
He’s left me with no way to answer back. I didn’t believe there was a way for me to be less heard back when I lived in the City. I didn’t realize how low you could sink.
CHAPTER 30 Howl
WE DON’T GET ANYWHERE NEAR the Mountain’s eastern entrance before Menghu find us. The dirt on their clothes and faces is familiar, but the cocky arrogance that all my Menghu days carried seems to have siphoned away, leaving nothing but bare-toothed desperation.
“Howl?” one asks, his weapon only a finger away from being drawn. He looks around at the group. “Sole said to keep a lookout for you.”
“She’s still alive.” A knot in my chest slips free. “Thank Yuan.”
“I don’t think Yuan had much to do with it.” The other Menghu looks at me askance, adjusting her mask as if living in the City left me with a smell strong enough to filter through. Or perhaps she’s heard of my reputation from before I left. “Who’s this with you?”
“Friends.” I stand with Song Jie, the man and his little girl a step behind us.
The fact that they aren’t shooting first gives me enough hope to follow them to the disguised entrance, though I keep my eyes open. Our guides aren’t Menghu I recognize, even if they know my face. All of them are armed, and at least one is an experienced knife fighter, based on the way he holds himself and his scars. What has Sole been doing down here?
We move through three levels of barricades, then into a hallway that’s been cut down the middle so half is partitioned into tiny rooms. The air buzzes with electricity, and the hairs on my neck stand on end.
More people come to escort us, not all of them wearing Menghu green. Song Jie hovers close beside me, his eyes moving from the guns to take in the uniforms, the cement walls, and the little cubicle blocks. “What is this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. They’re all still alive, though, and that’s promising.” It means food. Water. Maybe even Mantis, like Sole was hoping for when she stayed here to help the people Dr. Yang left behind, the people taken down by the contagious strain of SS he created. A hope that thins when our guides leave their masks firmly in place. One of the Menghu who brought us in whisks a temporary door open into one of the little cubicles, heavy machinery staring out at us from inside like a promise of torture.
Levels machines. I look over at the man gripping his daughter’s hand. After so many days under the sky, the ceiling feels low, the air stale as if it’s been filtered over and over.
“Howl?” A jolt of adrenaline floods through me at the sound of my name combined with the figure rocketing in my direction from the far end of the hall, her face weighed down by a mask. “Is it really you?”
Song Jie darts behind me as I fall instinctively into a defensive stance, but when I catch sight of the girl’s eyes—ice blue and staring without a single blink—I’m running toward her before I can think. Menghu start yelling behind me, hands grabbing at my clothes until Sole shouts them down.
Sole wraps her arms tight around me, a grunt of pain escaping my throat when her mask’s filters bump my still-healing collarbone. “How did you get here?” When she pulls back to look at me, she holds eye contact, something I haven’t seen from Sole in years. A tear pools at the corner of her eye, streaking down to gum up the edge of her mask. “Your messages were weird, and then you stopped answering, and I was so worried—”
“Well, here I am.” I return the hug, the feel of someone I know and love like a balm for months of burns. Even my breaths come easier because Sole knows who I am. She knows where I came from.
She understands.
I let go of her, surprised when she meets my eyes again. “They took Sev. I need you to tell me where.”
Sole’s eyebrows scrunch as she looks over our bedraggled group, and Song Jie almost seems to shrink in response, as if an exit within running distance would be comforting. I know Sole doesn’t mean anything by it, but it does look as if she’s smelling something particularly pungent—which is probably fair, given how long it’s been since we’ve bathed. “Let’s get everyone through first. We have to test for infection. Contagion.”
“I can’t stay. Those last messages I sent you weren’t the cure, right? They took Sev because she must have found the real one—”
Hand on my arm, Sole stops me. “The anti–Suspended Sleep serum? Those weren’t the last messages you sent, were they?”
My thoughts flash back to Luokai, wondering what he’s been saying under the disguise of my name. “It’s a long story. But yes, they were.” I glance toward Song Jie and the others, nodding for them to follow the Menghu into the cubicles. “But before I tell you any of it, I need your help. I’ve got a little bit of a situation on my hands.”
* * *
“They have bombs that they want to use to get rid of everyone up in the mountains? And you led them here?” We pass an air lock to get to Sole’s room, and she forces me to stand just outside her door while she fits me with a battered sling, claiming the light’s better in the hall. When it’s on properly, I let my arm rest and release a sigh of relief I hadn’t realized was clenched inside me.
“The pilot and the woman in charge of their operation didn’t know where Song Jie and I were headed. They won’t be able to follow us here. Without coordinates for camps or the City, the most they could do is fly randomly and hope they find something to bomb, and I don’t think there’s fuel enough for that.” I hope I’m right.
Sole sighs, the paper pasted to her doorway crackling as she leans against it. It’s red, with handwritten characters that make up a Guonian poem: Spring brings hope; the land becomes warm. The beginning of peace; the people become cheerful. Peace is coming. “We can put the man you brought with you in quarantine even if his SS levels are normal. Then we can go out and collect the other two. Get rid of the weapons somehow.”
I blink, immediately banishing the thoughts that occurred to me first: If we had control of the heli, bombs could be the exact kind of leverage we need to get Sev out. Dr. Yang couldn’t refuse us once he’s seen the explosions that thing could mak
e of his army. But Sole’s right. That kind of firepower would only complicate the situation.
“Did you know that Guonian is tomorrow? I can’t see any sort of future.” Sole looks up at me, her eyes wide. “At least you’re here. We’re inside, hiding from that old monster story like we’re supposed to be.”
I bite my lip, looking away from the decorations, because this wasn’t supposed to be how I spent this night. There are real monsters waiting to pounce outside, and red paper on Sole’s door isn’t going to scare them away. “Tell me what you know about Sev. Why did they capture her, too? Dr. Yang took the device with the cure. He shouldn’t have needed her anymore.”
Sole opens the door to her room and sheds her shoes just inside, waiting until I follow suit and sink onto the sleeping pad pushed up against one wall. Her quarters are obviously converted storage space: rough gray cement walls, an elevated lab station with vials and chemicals, a sink, and an exam table that barely fits against the far wall. A beat-up wooden desk. A single blanket on her sleeping pad. It feels cramped and gray, like bad-tasting medicine.
“He needs her for the same reason he always has.”
“The same… You mean the data on the device? Dr. Yang needs her to help decode—”
“There was no more than the notes you sent me. It was just the anti–Suspended Sleep serum, though I don’t know how effective it is considering it killed Jiang Gui-hua when Jiang Sev gave it to her.” Sole glances toward her lab table, test tubes set out, their contents waiting for her. “We’ve made some, though we haven’t had the chance to test it.”
“Didn’t Jiang Gui-hua die because she’d been under for so long?”
Sole shrugs. “That’s one possibility.”
My mind rewinds what she’s saying, trying to figure out what she means. “The notes… Sev’s not cooperating, then? She’s supposed to be helping to develop the cure, but—”
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