Dead Moon Rising

by Caitlin Sangster

  Tai-ge’s voice shakes as the shouts come nearer. “My mother said it wasn’t empty. And I’m guessing Sleep was the only way Dr. Yang could think of to coax the information out of her. If you know Sev at all, you know how scared she was of going back to Sleep.…”

  Howl swears. Then again, his voice breaking.

  “I’m only here because so many people are dying, Howl. People in the City, people in the camps. The things I was asked to do to my own people…” Tai-ge’s voice cuts off as the alarms go silent, leaving nothing but ringing in my ears. For a moment I think my hearing has been compromised because Howl isn’t answering, everyone stuck in time as if the world has stopped.

  “You believe in that City of yours,” he finally says. “That they want to help.”

  “I believe in myself. I disobeyed all my orders because I couldn’t leave Sevvy.…” Tai-ge stops, the old nickname sickly sweet in my ears. “I know she’ll know where it is. Her mother didn’t send her to Port North for nothing. And Dr. Yang isn’t keeping her here Asleep for nothing, either.”

  Slam. Three doors away.

  “You know the right way to use the serum?” Howl whispers.

  “I’ll find it,” Tai-ge says. “I promise you. I want her awake as much as you do.”

  “And you’re not going to take her back to the City? Not to Dr. Yang or your mother or anyone else? You want to do this her way?”

  There’s a long pause. “I’ll make sure she’s safe.”

  “That isn’t good enough.”

  “I’ll… figure something out. I won’t take her back to my mother. I promise.”

  Lies. It must be lies. Tai-ge doesn’t know how to operate without his mother’s stamp of approval. Doesn’t know how to listen to anyone who can’t obtain one.

  When Howl finally speaks, there’s something different in his voice, both too quiet and too loud. “Give her to me for a second.”

  Tai-ge steps forward, and there’s a moment of vertigo with arms under me and over me, and I don’t know which belong to who. But then Howl’s voice is in my ear, my cheek warm against his chest. “If there’s even a tiny chance that Tai-ge’s right, I can’t…” He kisses my cheek. “I love you, Sev.”

  Then he hands me back to Tai-ge, and I’m cold. “Take care of yourself. Do what I would do,” Howl says, sounding too far away. “Actually, don’t. You always take care of everyone else, and that’s what makes you good.”

  Another slam. Two doors.

  “When she wakes up, you’d better listen to her. If anyone is going to stop the fighting—”

  “I know, Howl.” Tai-ge’s breath is jagged. “I promise.”

  “I’m taking your gun. The distraction won’t last long even with it, though. Run fast.”

  Tai-ge flinches to the side, and there’s a silence inside me. My mother’s voice is crying again, as if she knows something I do not. But then the door is open, and Howl’s gone. Shots fire and boots slam into cement, shouts and confusion. He’s gone, and I’m cold, so cold.

  Running boots down the hall, the soldiers outside all following Howl. One last echo of a shot.

  Tai-ge’s chest is still for a moment as we listen. There’s nothing to hear but silence.

  CHAPTER 41 Sev

  EVERYTHING INSIDE ME IS STILL—HEART, lungs, and everything else, as if something more than SS has taken hold. My brain replays what I heard over and over: Howl running out of the room. Shouts. Gunshots. Silence. Again: Howl running. Shouts. Gunshots.

  Silence.

  Tai-ge walks slowly, my legs and arms flopping with every step because I still can’t move. I’m not sure I’d be able to even if my body weren’t trying to die. Tai-ge sets me on the gurney and zips something up over my face: a body bag that’s sticky under me, smelling of death as if I’m not its first occupant. It settles on my nose and cheeks, the air inside too hot within seconds. The gurney moves under me, one wheel squeaking.

  Then there’s the harsh crack of close-up gunfire. The gurney jerks to a stop. Shouting, swearing, bargaining. The zipper covering my face rips open. Air in my lungs, but it’s dead, like Howl might be. A blanket falls over me, the tightly woven fibers rough against my cheek. Tai-ge’s voice moves farther and farther away.

  The gurney moves. Arms pick me up and put me on a familiar pad. Fiddle with the IV until something cold floods into my veins.

  My body, exactly where it was only an hour ago, eternally at rest. Once again, the only thing moving is the quiet plink, plink, plink of fluid dripping.

  * * *

  When the Chairman comes to visit a few days later, his voice is dry and shriveled. A hopeless wheeze of a chuckle that might actually be tears. “I can’t save him.” His chair squeaks as he leans to one side or another. “Can’t save Howl.”

  The momentary spike of interest goes away as fast as it came. I’ve already heard Dr. Yang crow over how Howl was wounded and now he’s safely locked up where he can do no more harm.

  Go away, I think. I don’t need to hear your useless mourning. If you cared anything for Howl, he wouldn’t be in a cell. If you cared anything for anyone but yourself, we’d all have been cured a long time ago.

  “I am a broken man, Jiang Sev.” The Chairman clears his throat. “Dr. Yang has taken everything from me. I knew Menghu were going to break the City walls down all those weeks ago. Take our Mantis stores. They were already inside the City, already spreading SS. He told me they were coming. That he could save me, save my son.”

  My interest pricks again.

  “My real son,” he amends. “He brought me a picture of my boy, grown. With his eyes closed, lying in a box.…”

  The picture.

  The picture. When Tai-ge, Howl, and I overheard the Chairman and Dr. Yang talking at Dazhai camp, Dr. Yang said it was a picture keeping the Chairman in check.

  Letting the Menghu in to storm his own people. Giving them food and the farms. All of it has been about his son? Thousands displaced, infected, killed, enslaved. This whole war has been about one boy?

  Voice choking, the Chairman grips the side of my bed, his fingers trembling against the sheets next to my arm. His voice is husky and raw. “Dr. Yang brought me the picture and vial of medicine—said I’d be able to wake little Yi-lai up, save him from your mother’s fate—if only I did what he told me to do. And now I give you that same option. Help me. You can save yourself from your mother’s fate if you do what I tell you to do.” Something clinks against the side of the bed, glass on metal.

  Help him what? I’m lying here mostly dead with nothing to offer. I know where the cure is, but he doesn’t know that. What game is he playing?

  The Chairman takes a deep breath, the sickly air brushing over me turning to a hot stream as if he’s leaning forward to look at my face. “Is it ironic to be giving this to you now? What I would have given to have this serum six months ago. To wake your mother up, to take back the cure trapped inside her head. You’re like her, you know. I know you’ll help me.”

  The anger seething deep inside me seems to cool a degree, Mother’s face as it was before I fell Asleep at eight appearing in my mind. The Chairman isn’t the only person who has been willing to wage war over a single life that was important to him. Mother wouldn’t give up the cure because of me. I wouldn’t give the cure to Dr. Yang mainly because of June and Lihua. But they’re just the faces I know, two of thousands in the same position: needing the cure but with nothing to offer in exchange.

  The chair squeaks again, and the damp brush of unfiltered breath is replaced by stale air. The hospital gown flips up at my side, and he pushes something cold against my bare skin, then presses something over it. Medical tape. The tubes at my elbow twitch as an awful coldness seeps into my arm. Panic wells inside me at the medicine in my veins that I know will kill me.

  “There’s a dosing schedule. I’ve just given you the first measure. A medic will come for you soon to administer the rest. Now, listen carefully because this is an exchange. If you don’t hold up
your part, I will find you and kill you and everyone else you love.”

  My skin chills at how calmly he says it, as if he’s talking about the weather.

  “Two Outsiders tried to break you out of here a few days ago. Howl was with them and the General’s son. One Outsider was caught by Dr. Yang’s men, the other by soldiers loyal to me. Dr. Yang doesn’t know of his betrayal, and the Menghu has agreed to take you and my medic back to the Mountain in exchange for our silence.”

  The Chairman settles back into his chair with a creak and popping of knees. “There’s some group holding out at the Mountain, though who knows how long they’ll last.”

  A group holding out at the Mountain? Sole?

  His chair squeaks, his voice close to my ear. “The Mountain is where Dr. Yang was strongest, the only place he’d have the technology to preserve my son. You are going to go, you are going to find him, and you are going to bring him to me. I’ve taped a link to your side. The moment you find him, send me a picture. We’ll plan from there.”

  My arm stings as the medicine enters my veins drip by drip.

  “And I’m sorry, but you can’t go after Howl. I’ve heard what they say about the two of you from General Hong.”

  From General Hong? What would she know about me or Howl, either one of us? Mei and Helix or Kasim would know a thing or two, but General Hong?

  But then I remember Tai-ge’s arms around me, and if my teeth could have ground together, they would have.

  “I know you’ll want to get him out. Dr. Yang knows it too, and he’ll try to use it against you once you’re gone. But you can’t come back unless you’ve got my son.” The Chairman pauses, thickness entering his voice again. “You’re the only hope I have in this world. The only hope little Yi-lai has. If you could have had even a moment with your mother, I know you would have taken it. Please, give me this.” His voice is too quiet, crumbling at the edges as if he can’t quite believe that he is asking for my help. That he has to ask for anything at all. “With my son secure, I can tell the Seconds to fight Dr. Yang. I’ll let you be a part of the First Circle, let you change the quarter system or hand the cure to every sorry Third in this whole mountain range. I’m ready to let things change, so long as I get my son back. You send me the picture proving you’ve found him, and I’ll get the both of you to safety. If you don’t find him… if you don’t contact me within two days of leaving, you know the consequences. I’ll start with the Mountain holdouts. We’ll clean the whole place out.”

  The door’s hinges screech, and he’s gone, leaving me alone with the darkness inside my head, a circle of cold metal pressed hard into my ribs under the medical tape. Feeling as though I’m surrounded, but I don’t know by what.

  CHAPTER 42 Tai-ge

  WHEN I WAKE UP, I’M alone.

  It’s shadowy and dark inside this place, the ceiling close in a way that feels familiar. There’s a low murmur of voices outside, footsteps walking by. It’s as if I’ve been transplanted back into another era of my life, but I can’t identify when. What happened to the Menghu who found me in the labs? To Howl? To Sevvy, lying so limp in the Menghu’s arms as they dragged her away from me?

  I sit up in one jolt, muscles sore. My hands brush the rough fabric that makes up my sheets, and I try to remember from where I know this bed, this tent. It isn’t that hard to place it. I just don’t want it to be true.

  I’m at Dazhai.

  My stomach twists. Was everything I lived over the last month a product of my overstimulated brain? Was it all only a nightmare? I practically fall from the cot in my anxiety, bumbling into the box pushed up next to it as some kind of nightstand, knocking something to the ground with a rattle. I lunge for the tent flap—I have to see if the world rewound back to my time sitting alone in my tent at Dazhai, waiting for my mother to acknowledge my existence—but I don’t make it that far. My eyes find the thing I knocked onto the floor before I can even take two steps.

  I bend down to pick up the little paper cup lying on its side, two green pills spilled onto the ground next to it, now coated in dirt.

  Mantis.

  It’s hard to let myself breathe even as I notice the smell of mud. Of garlic and ginger. Musty linens and sweat. The world has been so sterile for so long, strained of everything so I could hardly taste that I was alive. I clench my eyes shut and reach up to touch my face. It almost feels as if it belongs to a stranger, naked of the plastic tubes that kept me safe for so long.

  Everything that happened at the City—working with Captain Bai, Mei sleeping in my room, Sevvy’s cold, dead skin—it’s not part of a nightmare. This is the nightmare.

  I put a hand to my throat, contaminated air choking as it goes down. Just as contaminated as what’s inside me, because I’m the one who’s different now.

  * * *

  Mother doesn’t wait three weeks to call me in. This time she doesn’t start with reassurances.

  “What is wrong with you?” Her jaw clenches, twitching her mask up and down as I stand in front of her collapsible desk like a felon pleading for mercy. That’s the only register of emotion, though. She leans forward with a pen to enter some information, as if she weren’t the one who called me here and I was interrupting. “Dr. Yang was practically giddy when he handed you over, Asleep, and now the Chairman has forced me to pull out everyone within ten miles of the garrison. Not to mention these… these bombings.” She finally looks up at me, her eyes disappointed. “That was our chance to get the cure, and you just destroyed it.”

  It’s hard not to keep my breaths shallow even though SS is already inside of me. Hard not to see the way she’s looking at my naked face. The day Menghu invaded the City, I pretended I’d caught the disease to get to Sev where she was being kept in the Hole, a prison. Mother and Father had both looked stricken the moment I first pretended to compulse. Stricken, then angry, then very, very quiet, as if they were quite sure SS victims no longer could comprehend basic language. They’d never believed Sev could understand anything they said.

  It was Mother who sent me to the Hole, then. To a cell far underground where I couldn’t embarrass her. I’d known that was what would happen, and suddenly it bothers me. That I expected to be banished for breathing the wrong air.

  “I knew the cure was there.” I say it quietly. “I had an in. It was a risk, but—”

  “You were a distraction, Tai-ge! You were supposed to stay up in the City sending reports about City forces getting the Mantis supply under control. You were supposed to keep Menghu attention on you while I addressed the real problem at the southern garrison.” She closes her eyes, attempting to smooth the wrinkles from her forehead with the palms of her hands. “I knew we’d have to go after that device and your little traitor friend the moment you briefed me on the situation. The mission was under way, Tai-ge! You set off all the alarms right before we meant to go in. That bombing could have been the perfect distraction! The universe was bending for us, Tai-ge, and you made it break!”

  I stand, transferring weight from one foot to the other. It seems obvious now. Obvious that Mother didn’t expect me to succeed or do much of anything at all. My assignment to the City wasn’t a show of trust, a means for me to make up for the wrongs I’ve done. It was to get me out of the way, same as sending me to the Hole. I touch my naked cheek, my skin cold.

  Mother sent me on a humanitarian mission, so she called it. Armed with poison gas instead of Mantis and food. The thoughts inside me feel like the worst failure of all, but I can’t stop them from breaking holes through my every thought. Mother was going to have me kill hundreds of people. As a diversion.

  There’s an odd feeling brewing in my chest. A sort of heat laced through with acid.

  “Dr. Yang gave me your ‘assistant.’ The one who managed to persuade you to leave your post and took you to the garrison. They found her outside the lab doors, waiting to take whatever it was she wanted you to break out of that place.” Mother stands from her desk. “If there’s anything you can gi
ve me to help her interrogation, now’s the time to say it.”

  My hands are cold, my spine hot, and all the spaces between are a war between the two making me feel ill. Dr. Yang handed Mei over? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a punishment quite so awful—being given to the enemy. I raise my chin an inch, but I still know not to meet Mother’s eyes. “She’s infected. Unhappy with Dr. Yang. She and…” I lick my lips, Kasim’s name trapped inside my mouth. Do I want to give him away?

  Lieutenant Hao back in the City had a sort of treaty with the Menghu who were abandoned in the City. Captain Bai doesn’t like the way things are being handled.

  The Seconds in the camps are scared.

  I’m scared. I don’t see how Mother means to continue forward. Not without capitulating or substantial loss. If there’s no future for Reds, then there’s no future for me. There’s no future for me here anyway. Not from the moment I disobeyed Mother’s orders.

  Because that’s what I was doing. What I’ve been doing this whole time. Disobeying orders.

  “She’s unhappy with Dr. Yang and… what?” Mother’s voice crackles with impatience.

  I swallow. I’ve never been a part of interrogations, but I’ve seen the results. “Mei—the Menghu—she might be willing to talk without any extra motivation.”

  Mother’s brows fall. “We both know you have a problem with making the wrong kinds of friends, but if you are trying to protect a Menghu—”

  “No!” I’m glad Mother is concentrating on the reports instead of my face. Glad for the shame I’m supposed to be feeling right now, which lets me keep my eyes lowered. I don’t feel shame. I don’t feel anything but anger.

  That’s what it is. This awfulness swirling in my chest, consuming me from the inside. Anger that gives way to something frightening and new inside me.

  Mother isn’t going to listen to me. She isn’t going to let me out of her sight, maybe not ever again. But even if my hands are tied to Mothers’, my life wrapped up in our dead City, that doesn’t mean I have to give up.