“No, Howl. My guess is there wasn’t anything on the device at all. There have been no trials. No new tests. No cure.”
No cure. The words don’t seem to fit inside my head. “We all knew if Dr. Yang got his hands on a cure, he wasn’t going to just give it out. Maybe he’s got it in a syringe and is just waiting until everyone is desperate enough—”
“I’ve got people reporting to me from inside the southern garrison. That’s where he’s based right now.” Sole unfolds her legs, looking at her bare toes. “Dr. Yang put Sev to Sleep within hours of bringing her back from the island.”
The words fall like rocks in my stomach, my hands balling into fists so tight I can’t let go. Ready to punch something. “She’s Asleep?”
“Our best guess is that he’s collecting everyone he can who has been cured. There are Firsts, apparently—the Chairman included—who are all locked down in the garrison. Dr. Yang must have gone back to comparing scans and hoping he’ll be able to spot something. That’s what it has come to.”
“That isn’t going to work.” My teeth grit together so hard I can hardly say the words. “If it were a viable path, he would have taken it years ago using Firsts in the City instead of having to manipulate me and Sev into waking up Jiang Gui-hua. You know if that were a possible avenue, then we would have had a cure years ago.”
“I know he wasn’t willing to cut into anything he couldn’t replace.” Sole’s eyes creep up and she’s twitching again, her fingers making knots of her white Yizhi coat. “We have to find a solution. Here.” She gestures to the door, this underground bunker she seems to have cobbled together out of nothing. “We’ve only survived this long because we managed to secure a hall over to the deep storage facilities. Old stuff, but there’s a reserve of Mantis. Ration packs. Water. Dr. Yang meant to come back for it, but my people are passing information that things are too dangerous here, so he’s stayed away.”
“If there’s no cure, then…” I see no future, she said. Sole pulls off her mask, her face blank as she blinks through whatever thoughts are torturing her now. “It’s just a matter of time before we’re all dead.” I wait until she looks at me to continue. “SS has spread too quickly. We won’t be able to keep any kind of food production, security, anything up. Every time a soldier or a worker takes off their mask to eat, they’re at risk of exposure. It’ll be like the end of the Influenza War all over again.”
But worse. With no way to escape. No safe havens, no walled City to keep out infection because SS can jump from person to person now. All it would take is one infection, one person who doesn’t know what’s hiding inside their lungs, to bring down a whole safe area. If there isn’t enough Mantis to go around—and how could there be? With instances of infection rising exponentially every day—soon there won’t be a world to save anymore.
“More people come here every day,” Sole murmurs, her eyes crimping shut. “We’re going to run out of supplies soon.”
My skin feels tight. SS spread through the Mountain quickly, probably to most everyone who wasn’t a part of the invasion force. Teachers, cooks, children still in school. Foragers, bureaucrats. Why would anyone stay in the maze of hallways upstairs rather than escape to open space where they can run?
Sole is still talking. “We’ve had some success gassing the hallways and using masks to pass through safely, so we’ve been able to get access to medicine and equipment from the labs, but it’s getting more dangerous. When we can, we bring the people we knock out down here, and they’re always happy to find Mantis pills next to them when they wake up.” She smiles a little. “We’ve had to bar the doors, though, or we’d have a flood—way too many infected to treat. As it is, we’re running out of Mantis fast. We’re going to have to do something.”
“You’re gassing people and dragging them down here?” I squint at the gray ceiling. What can we do? If there was nothing to find at Port North, no cure stashed away somewhere for Sev to discover, then does that mean we’re out of options? I close my eyes, my head hurting. “I should probably tell you it was Luokai who had the link. Um… Seth. We used to call him Seth when he was here.”
Sole’s brow furrows. “What?”
“My brother. He’s the one who’s been writing to you. So if my messages suddenly sounded like I fell desperately in love with you, now you know why.” I try not to enjoy how her mouth hangs open, because even if Luokai turned into a transactional jerk, I know how long Sole’s been pining after him. “Unless you were hoping I’d come home and my cradle is open to robbing?”
Sole’s nose wrinkles, her mouth still open.
“Didn’t think so.” I smile, giving her shoulder a pat. “I have to go. I’ve been to the garrison with the Chairman—remember when I sent all those plans over for an attack? I don’t know if General Root ever actually tried—”
“No.” Sole’s cheek twitches as she slips a hand into her pocket, her eyes glazed. “You… you can’t go anywhere. We can’t give up.”
“I’m not giving up; I’m going after Sev.”
She pulls out her link and stares at it against her palm, looking so closely I’m afraid she’ll nose it right off her hand. “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”
“Why wouldn’t you believe that I want to help Sev?”
“Howl…” Her lips press together hard, her eyes blinking too fast. “You’ve come a long way. When you first got back from the City, I couldn’t believe how much you’d changed. But we both know what you do when things get sticky for you.”
I stand up. “What?”
She startles back, her hand clenched around the link, flickers of light playing across the back of her hand. “You show up here in one piece… mostly, anyway.” Her eyes touch my still-healing collarbone, marks from the stitches still scabby and red. “And Sev’s right where we all worried she was going to end up: Dr. Yang’s lab. All that talk about saving her before, running after her—”
“You think I did that?” It’s plain from her face that she does. “Sole, I’m not the one who handed her over. I couldn’t…” I don’t know what to say. Sole is… technically right. She would have been right five years ago. But there’s no time to convince her that things have changed.
She sighs. “I have a team set up to go in after Sev tomorrow. Kasim. Another Menghu you might not know named Mei. In any case, there’s a Red company moving between us and the garrison from Dazhai. You wouldn’t have gotten far even if you were telling the truth about wanting to go.” She reaches up from where she’s sitting on her sleeping pad to touch my arm. “You know I can’t let you run away again, though, don’t you, Howl?” Sole’s dead skeleton impression of a voice again. “I’m not a research scientist, but there are Firsts who ended up here, people who will be able to at least try—” A tear streaks her cheek as she swallows down what she means to say. “We need the cure, and that means we need as much information as we can get. The Firsts here are guessing Dr. Yang is too worried he’ll mess up to do anything. That’s why he hasn’t opened any of you up. But with them here to study you and Sev, we could stand a chance—”
“You know that isn’t going to work!” I jerk my arm away from her, taking a step toward the door. “You’re going to hand me over to some Firsts—?”
“Is that the only thing you can think of? Yourself?” She swallows, her fingers pulling at one another as if she can’t sit still. “There are children out there, Howl. Fathers and mothers, families who are dying. Families who are killing one another. It’s either try or give up, and it isn’t in me to let all the people here die, even if our chances aren’t wonderful.” Sole’s eyes are so sad. “I love you. You know that, Howl. I don’t want to do this. But maybe it’s a good thing. An opportunity to make up for… everything.”
“So you just get to play nurse, while I have to die to make up for the things we both did?” Sole looks taken aback, but I just shake my head in disgust. “You got a second chance to change. Where’s mine?”
I wrench the door open,
rocketing into the hall, but they’re waiting outside. Menghu, their ragged arms open and ready for me.
CHAPTER 31 June
THE SHOCK OF COLD TEARS through me, water churning like a foaming mouth as it attempts to swallow me down, but my float keeps my head above water. I get one last look at Luokai as the water pulls me downstream, the pole in his hands jabbing toward me as if he can save me.
Dad’s instructions ring like gunfire in my head, but they’re in my voice now, the gore cringing in the back of my head after SS took his words and twisted me around them: Keep your feet pointed downstream. Float, don’t fight. Backside up so it doesn’t catch on anything. Chin tilted down so you can see. I angle for the shore, the current swishing me close to one of the slick boulders. I catch hold of it with my foot and end up pinned against the rock by the current, the stone surface so smooth it’s only the icicles and frost that give me handholds to get up on top of it. Behind me I hear a gut-churning crack that makes me twice as glad to be off the boat, but I can’t turn around to see if it’s broken on a rock or overturned.
There’s a series of boulders making the water calm, so ice forms a path that meets the river’s edge. I leap from my rock’s broad back to the next one closest to the shore and steady myself before placing my bare foot on the next. One more step, but this one is sneaky, the ice slicking out from under my foot, and I can feel the memory of water closing over my head even though it’s only my feet that slide into the water before I manage to catch my fall.
My wind curls around my arms, slipping down to my fingers, holding my hand until I reach the shore. I breathe her in, safe with her so close. She doesn’t make me feel warm, chilling me straight through, same as when she first appeared after Mom died. Or disappeared. Whatever happened to her. The wind stayed, as if this circle above isn’t just for people with heartbeats and shoes and stomachs to fill, but that people Underneath leave a little behind if they don’t want to go.
That’s why my wind has always taken care of me. Pushed me in the right direction. Poked me before someone came, brought me the scent of gore or Wood Rat or Red or Menghu so I’d know to run when they came close. Found the right places to hide. And now her chill makes me remember: Keeping still will freeze me just as the water would have. So I grit my teeth, get up, and start running.
The gore grumbles inside me, but I don’t care. I’m alive. I jumped into the water, and I’m breathing. I won, fair and square.
Finding my boots and coat isn’t too hard because I’m good at remembering, but seeing the boat across the foaming water caught on its side between two rocks isn’t something I want to remember. Luokai’s pole stabs up from the water like a stick of incense lit for the dead. I cram my feet into my shoes and start walking even though they feel like blubber and jelly.
The closest of the caves that the Post traders stay in—the ones who bring bigger things up from the coast by boat—is maybe half an hour’s walk if I go straight there. Dangerous, considering how many scavengers hide near the Post, but wet all over the way I am and without any supplies, I can’t do too much hiding. Inside, there’ll be dry wood, firestarter. Maybe even food.
My whole body is so far past shivers that it’s numbly attempting to give up by the time I find the cave’s mouth dribbling light out like oil into the snow. Sliding along the rock, I peek in at the two men sitting inside, their faces painted over in orange-and-red light from a fire, my eyes blurry with cold. It’s already warmer standing outside the cave, and I stall for a moment, wondering if I can last until after they fall asleep. The sky’s naked of clouds, the air made from nothing but ice, my clothes frozen against me. My wind sits next to me, quietly waiting. Two men who might kill me for my shoes, or the cold, which will kill me for no reason at all?
I step inside, my hands hurting down to the bone when I extend them toward the fire. The two men look up, one with a wooly hat and gas mask, his hand sneaking to the small of his back for a weapon. The second man has no mask, no coat, and a mouth that hangs open as if he means to eat by letting things fly directly in.
Luokai.
The masked man stands, gobbling my attention. He’s large enough to be one of those frozen boulders in the river.
“June?” he rasps through the mask.
“You’re alive?” Luokai says at the same time, rising from his place by the fire, still shivering and wet. He smiles, pulling his mouth all wide and funny. He’s glad to see me.
And, I’ll admit, I’m glad he’s not a dead body, blue and swollen in the river.
The boulder man stands with his hands out where I can see them as all the Post traders do, but it still takes me a moment to recognize him with half of his face covered. His eyes, once I’m looking, are familiar, though. Merry and surprised wrapped up in one. It’s Loss, one of Cai Ayi’s roughers.
“How did you get back here?” he asks, casually inserting himself between me and Luokai, blocking the Islander’s attempt to come toward me. “You ran off with that City traitor and the Red, now you’re a human ice cube… and you know this guy?” He lowers his voice and jerks his head to the side, toward Luokai. “Everything okay?”
Loss shrinks down a size when I nod that everything is okay, as if his hackles are falling. It feels like the right thing to say even if I’m not sure it’s true. Luokai doesn’t try to push past the rougher, returning to shiver by the fire instead, the apples of his cheeks ruddy with cold and his robes still dripping.
“I thought…,” Luokai starts. “I tried…” He glances at Loss, and I can see him choosing his words, using mountain ones instead of island ones. Suddenly, I realize that he’s been using Port Northian on me the whole time, and I’ve understood. “I didn’t realize what was happening until you were already in the water, June. I didn’t get to you in time.”
I look at my hands, fingers white and blue with cold, drips of water melting down from my sleeves. He thinks it was a compulsion that sent me into the water. I suppose it was, technically. Luokai knows enough not to say it out loud, but Loss, all buckled into his gas mask, must know about contagious SS by now and what our two naked faces mean.
“How did you get out of the water?” Luokai inches toward me again, keeping a careful eye on Loss. “How did you get here? How did you know—”
“Yeah, if you know this kid at all, you know you’re talking to yourself, stranger.” Loss cuts him off, not looking away from me. “Come on now, June. Get over here by the fire. You’re like shaved ice in a fur coat.”
I lower myself next to the flames, moving over when Loss settles in next to me to preserve an arm’s reach between us. Loss hands me a bowl—some softened beans and rice mixed together to make a sort of mush. The smell by itself seems to growl in my stomach, all of me curving toward the food until I can get some into my mouth. But before I do, I point at Loss, gesturing for him to take out the weapon he has stashed in his waistband.
He laughs and pulls a knife out, setting it down at my feet. “You haven’t changed. Except you look fed.” Loss glances over at Luokai, who has now picked up another of the bowls. “I was restocking the cave and checking our markers down here, or I wouldn’t have heard your friend shouting for help. Got down there just in time to pull him out of the water. Said he’d lost someone overboard, but I didn’t know he meant you.”
The worry inside me doesn’t unknot the way I expect it to when I pull Loss’s knife closer, out of his reach. My wind seems to hover close, prickling me all over the way she does when something’s wrong. “My kids?” I ask.
Luokai’s spine goes straight at the sound of my voice, his eyes widening. Loss tenses at the quick movement, but then when it goes no further, he turns back to the fire, staring into the coals. “Your kids, June? You’re only a few years older than some of them. Younger than little Peishan.”
I wait for him to look at me, but he doesn’t. “They’re fine. All of them are fine.” He takes a drink from his waterskin. “You thirsty?”
I don’t like the way he isn’
t looking at me. He gave me the knife, but he hasn’t filled a bowl for himself. He just stirs the rice over and over.
“I’ll take you up to the Post to see your little friends tomorrow.” Loss says it so calm and low, as if he pulls people out of the river every day. “After we go pull your boat out—it’s stuck pretty tight, so we should be fine to wait until morning to go after your things.” He glances toward Luokai as if to ask if I want the Speaker involved.
I don’t answer the unspoken question, though, my ears stuck on what he said out loud. The boat would be quite a find in these parts, especially left unguarded the way it is. Easy scavenging. Most people aren’t stupid enough to leave something unguarded this far upstream.
Loss nods as if I’ve given him an answer, something wrinkling inside me at the offer made and accepted with no mention of pay. Luokai’s still wet, but this fire is hours old. How long has Loss been here? If he was stocking the cave and fixing cairns, he couldn’t have been in here making rice.
He’s still not eating.
SS doesn’t make you into a bad person. I loved my dad, even if Parhat, Cas, and Tian were worse than stepping in fresh scat. I was loyal, I stole for him, hid for him, fed him, kept him safe. I loved him, and he loved me even when he tried to kill me. I still love him and miss him, but I also hate that I feel that way, because he wasn’t safe. Luokai’s the same. I mean, I don’t love him or anything, but all the nice things in the world wouldn’t make him safe either.
Loss, though… I know every word he says, every gesture, belongs to him.
Being uninfected isn’t a reason to trust someone. It just means Loss can choose the bad things instead of SS forcing him into them. I set my bowl down next to me, letting my stomach grumble, not sure how to stop Luokai as he takes bite after bite.
CHAPTER 32 Tai-ge
“DON’T SAY A WORD, TAI-GE,” Mei whispers as we stare at the flickering campfire and the soldiers sitting around it.
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