I look down. Yes. I know what she’s saying is true.
Sole grabs my shoulder, her fingers pressing hard. “How do you see this ending, Sev?”
Closing my eyes doesn’t make the truth of it go away: that if we’re going to stop the fighting, we’re going to have to stop the people who have been making us fight all along. When I open my eyes, Sole’s gaze is hard.
“If we kill them, then how am I better than they are?” I ask quietly.
“If we don’t, then how many more people will die because you don’t want to get your hands dirty? If you have the means to stop the killing but don’t, then is it them killing or is it all of us doing it together?” she asks.
“This from you? When you refused to be a Menghu anymore because you’d done enough killing?”
It’s Sole’s turn to look down. “I’m responsible for all the people sheltering here.” She waves toward the room with Xuan inside, the hall beyond where medics and patients mill back and forth. “When it was just me, I could make the decision not to fight and call it my own penance. But my choices now shape the lives of hundreds of people who trust me to keep them safe. If I choose not to defend them, they’ll die. All of them. If you refuse to look at all the holes in your plan to stop a war that’s been going on since before any of us can remember…” Sole shakes her head. “Then you’re sacrificing lives so you can feel morally superior.”
I nod, my lips pressed so hard together, I’m afraid my teeth will cut through. How many people died because I refused to tell Dr. Yang where the cure was? Aren’t my hands already dirty? It’s what mother said in my head… or really what I was saying to myself inside the prison that Suspended Sleep made of my mind. So I nod again. “We can talk about this after we have Sun Yi-lai.”
CHAPTER 51 Sev
IT’S HARD TO TELL WHAT time it is underground, but Sole told me the excursion to the Heart is supposed to leave in the early morning. I make my way to Xuan’s room to wait, the hallways dimly lit, as if they can’t find the energy to ward off the dark. It’s only been a day or more since we got here and already the artificial daylight turns my skin to gooseflesh, the stale air from the vents catching in my lungs. How did they isolate their vents from upstairs? I wonder. From Outside, where SS is in the very air, it seems. A filtration system, like the masks?
Xuan is up and waiting for me, and neither of us speak as I help him out of bed and down the hall until we’re to the air-lock doors. Five people wait for us, one of whom I was not expecting: Peishan.
I pull her away from the others. “What are you doing here? Sole said they weren’t sending inexperienced people up there.”
“They told us they needed people who know how to sneak, and I figured after sneaking here from the Post, I qualified.” Peishan blinks at me, the now familiar sourness that has replaced my friend’s open smile somehow exaggerated by the way she looks toward the door. She shifts her weight from foot to foot and runs fingers through her short hair, making it stand up in spikes around her gas mask’s straps. “Did they ask you to come too?” A little hope cuts the vinegar in her expression, as if having a friend on this excursion could make up for a lot of what’s come between us.
“I’m… I’m not supposed to go.” It’s a pathetic finish.
The last semblance of goodwill that reappeared when Peishan and I found each other evaporates from her face. Not to rancor and blame as it did when I first saw her in the City, or to annoyance and rejection from when we were at the Post. This time her shoulders sag. “Oh.”
My eyes prickle, and I touch her arm. “I want to go, but Sole says—”
Peishan pulls back. “It’s okay. They said it could save lives. That it needs to be done. That we’ve eaten enough food, and it’s time to give back a little.” She glances toward the heavy metal door where a Menghu is handing out knockout grenades and checking masks. She adjusts her mask, the straps tight enough that the plastic digs into her cheekbones. I look down when she walks over to take her share of grenades.
“I guess I’ll see you when I get back.” She turns toward the door.
Xuan steps up next to me, putting a hand on my arm. “You’re a jerk.”
“You know I want to go, Xuan.”
“I also know the cure isn’t in your head, and risking you isn’t a problem. You told Sole where the cure is?”
Nodding feels clunky, because I can see where he’s headed. I know what the right thing to do is. But all the people upstairs…
“So if you die, she can find it just as easy as you can. You want to come on this mission, then come. Sole isn’t here to stop you.” He adjusts his shoulder. “Though if I were you, I wouldn’t. It would be too hard to stand in my shadow. Heroes are born, and you whine too much to make the cut.”
“I whine too much…?”
The door hisses open, a Menghu slipping through ahead of us to check the second door. Xuan looks steadily forward, his cheek twitching under his mask. Peishan holds her grenades close, like eggs gathered from a chicken coop.
The others—a Menghu with a tiger screaming from her collar, and two people I assume to be Outsiders based on their hollow cheeks and patched-together wardrobe—lean forward, watching the first Menghu check past the door. There’s a rack next to the entrance lined with weapons, grenades, masks. It’s a sadly spare display, like the orphanage banquets at Guonian, all of us huddled inside and scaring one another in the darkness of the first night with no moon. When Peishan and I were too young for factory shifts, we’d giggle and hide with pots and pans to scare the monster when it passed over. I remember an empty stomach, but that we were happy.
Peishan looks just that small now, eclipsed by the reinforced metal door. The only thing between her and the hundreds of people infected with SS on the other side.
When I was scared, facing down monsters and hallucinations as I left the City the first time, it was Howl who stood right next to me, my personal guide through the levels of hell. He was brave and told me I could be too, so I believed it.
Don’t do what I would do, Howl said.
I don’t have to do what Howl says.
I grab Xuan’s arm before he can fall in line with the others about to step through the door and give him a sharp nod. He smiles and returns the gesture.
“Yuan’s stillborn triplets!” he swears. My hand on his arm is soft, but he curls around it as if I punched him right in the bullet holes, dropping to the floor with a melodramatic flair.
The Menghu and Outsiders turn, alarm like needles in their eyes. Peishan darts toward us, but one of the Outsiders moves quicker than she can, pulling her back. Watches him writhe on the ground, all the oxygen seeming to leave the room as they all wait to see if Xuan is compulsing—if the mission is going to fail before they even leave the air lock.
With all of them focused on Xuan, I slip over to the rack of supplies behind them, pull on a mask, and grab two of the knockout grenades. The door is cracked open, so I go through to the other side, where the Menghu who opened it for us waits. There’s a short hallway and a second reinforced door that leads to the contaminated parts of the Mountain. The last barrier between us and whatever is waiting upstairs.
“Ready to go?” The Menghu looks past me to the others gathered around Xuan by the weapon racks. “What’s going on?”
“I guess the medic is still recovering from something.” My hands want to shake, but I hold them still. “Hope he doesn’t collapse while we’re up there.”
“That’s a good thing to hope.”
He taps his fingers impatiently as Xuan lets Peishan help him up from the floor, his horrible acting back on display. “Wow. It seemed quite serious for a moment there, but I guess it was just gas.”
Peishan pats his arm awkwardly, the other Menghu and two Outsiders filing in hesitantly behind her as she leads him through the door.
“This floor should be clear, so we’ll have some time to… get used to things.” The Menghu with me looks us all over. “Seven of us?”
>
The other Menghu looks up. “I thought—”
“I was late,” I cut in, refusing to look at Peishan as her eyes narrow over the robotized voice issuing through my mask. The Menghu who started to argue nods, dismissing me once again. She doesn’t look at Peishan, either, as if the two of us are the first who will be torn down, and the loss isn’t one she’ll worry about.
The second door in the air lock swings open, showing a black hole on the other side. Sole said the power was out, so we break quicklights to cut the dark. I have to blink twice to make the shadows stop crawling onto the floor and across my boots before I can force myself to walk through.
The male Menghu leads us, whispering instructions over his shoulder. “Save your grenades for groups, not individuals who we can run from or walk past. Most people up here aren’t exactly lucid, or they would have left. That doesn’t mean they are compulsing, though.”
“Compulsions aren’t always violent, either,” I say, trying to remind myself as well.
“This strain seems to make Sephs more difficult.” One of the Outsiders this time. Scars crisscross the backs of his hands like City hash marks, so far below the City’s estimation that they’d left him outside to count them himself. “Or perhaps it’s just that everyone is more afraid.”
Peishan pauses at my side, Xuan at the other. “Why did you come through?” she whispers.
“Because I didn’t want you to have to face this alone.” I gulp the words, wishing I could say them with conviction. She looks away, her brow twisting her face into something hard.
Before she can tell me to go away, Xuan gives me a push that sends me after the others. “Gushiness later. Let’s get this done, ladies.”
* * *
The lower storage corridors give way to stairs, and then to gray hallways lined with telescreens I remember from when I was here. I stay close to the four people assigned to get us to the Heart and Dr. Yang’s office, red light leaving their faces drawn and corpse-like.
The moment we pass into nonpatrolled territory feels like stepping through a City gate from one quarter to another. My light finds trash and broken electronics littering the hallway. We have to step around a telescreen partly torn from the wall, its shattered face grinning at us from the floor.
“We’ll go past the track, then up the south stairs,” our lead Menghu whispers, the instructions passed from mouth to mouth until they find me. Goose bumps needle my skin at the thought of going through the large underground track with its glass ceiling, anyone above able to see our lights traipsing across.
When we get there, it’s worse, the quicklights fading just as a frantic scrabbling noise comes from our left. Xuan falls in next to me, Peishan just behind, my new quicklight igniting before the others can get theirs out.
The red light shakes as I hold it aloft, the two Menghu pointing their guns toward the sound. A shape steps clearly into the light, feathers and claws glinting in the red. A scrawny rooster, his comb dangling down over his beak.
We move on, up so many sets of stairs I lose count. Shuffling and scraping seems to follow us, starting and stopping as we do, breaking into a run on one occasion, though no matter how high I hold my light, it doesn’t catch anything in the darkness.
“Is it usually this unpopulated?” Peishan whispers to the two Menghu, but neither of them answer. Broken glass crunches under our boots.
I don’t recognize much until we come to a glass wall, the space on the other side stabbed through with harsh natural light. The brightness of it hurts my eyes as I take in the horror version of the Core, where I ate my meals the few days I lived here. It was also where the Menghu danced for Establishment celebrations. Now the wooden counter where they served meals is blackened to ash, and the glass lining the walls up to the Heart seems to be cracked through, crystalline shards littering the floor.
Inside the Core, there are people lying in the beams of light. Some with bones sticking out at odd angles, their clothes torn and bloody. Some with ribs that move up and down with life. Others walk back and forth on silent feet, their hands dragging across the scored glass walls.
We stay back from the windows, the Menghu in charge pointing us up a back stairway. I jolt to a stop when a face pops up in the window next to me, a girl with long dark hair and wide eyes. Her eyes bore into me, her fingers pressing hard into the glass.
Xuan’s next to me, his voice low. “Keep walking, Fourth.”
Fourth? It’s enough to shake me loose from the girl’s eerie stare. No one’s called me that since… well, the last time I saw Xuan. Peishan pushes forward a step to walk alongside me, our arms brushing as if she can’t stand to feel alone, even if she has to cozy up to me. The closeness doesn’t relax the tight knot twisting my insides, but serves as an anchor. I wish I could reach out and grab her hand like we did when we were little, keeping each other safe from nuns and compulsing orphans, mean Red teachers and grumpy soldiers. But I don’t.
As we walk, I duck under a bouquet of wires spilling like intestines from the wall where the telescreen has been torn free. The paint on the walls is scored deep, debris coating the floor so every step is a careful negotiation to avoid shattered glass and bent metal rims from lighting fixtures. I’ve only been to the Heart a few times. All I remember was lots of glass, lots of stairs, and lots of people looking at me askance because I wasn’t supposed to be there.
“We’ve got followers. Move quick,” the lead Menghu instructs. We come to a turn in the corridor, and the second Menghu lags behind, waiting until all of us are safely past to pull one of his grenades free. He throws it, running after us before I even hear the ping of metal on cement and the flower of sound that follows.
We come to a room with a domed ceiling and arched doors dotting the circular walls. Between them, there used to be shelves and shelves of books. My feet drag as I look around at what used to be a library, the last remnant of my mother and what she brought to this place: Knowledge. Beauty. Stories.
It’s all gone now. The books. Even most of the shelves are missing, broken into slivers on the floor, a few nailed across one of the hallways as if to form a barricade.
This is where Howl brought me, his face soft as he watched me drink in the sight. Howl, who told me that, here in the Mountain, the misbehaving princess put to Sleep woke up at the end of the story. That she lived happily ever after.
I was so full of hope and longing then. So, so stupid.
But I can feel it still in me as I look across to the hallway that leads to Dr. Yang’s office door. There won’t be any people rotting away forever in my story. No lovers imprisoned on opposite ends of the sky. No one jumping out of a window to escape the man she loves.
“Sev?” Peishan’s hand tugs at my arm.
I let her pull me forward, ignoring Xuan’s eye roll, which seems mostly a cover for the way he’s holding his arm stiff at his side, his stride off-balance. He’s in pain, sweat streaming down his neck.
Howl believes he’s dead. Jump, he said.
Jump.
I won’t. Howl’s a part of my story I refuse to give up.
CHAPTER 52 Sev
OUR GROUP SPLITS IN TWO: Peishan, Xuan, one Outsider, and the lead Menghu staying with me to head toward Dr. Yang’s office and the medicine we hope is there. The other three break off toward the Heart’s control center to check for blips on the power grid. It isn’t long before footsteps echo up the hall after us and one of the Outsiders uses a grenade to stop whoever’s following. Then another when we hear voices ahead. Another when a sort of howling comes ricocheting up the whitewashed hallway, sinking into the torn-up carpet.
By the time we get to Dr. Yang’s office, we only have five grenades left among us, a deficit that gouges holes in my middle as I try to comprehend walking back the way we came. The office door itself is metal, flanked by telescreens that are all broken but one. The Menghu pulls something from her pack, linking some wires into the unbroken telescreen that link to a handheld one from below. “This is a
bit of luck. If it still works, I can give it some power, then…”
But nothing happens, not with the screen, not with the hall or the ceiling, and certainly not with the door. It stays exactly where it’s meant to: between us and Dr. Yang’s things.
Swearing, the Menghu looks over to the Outsider. “You’ve got the other thing?”
“If we use it, we won’t be able to close the door.” The Outsider pulls his pack from his shoulder, unbuckling the top. “And it’ll be loud, so we’ll draw attention.”
“There might be a way to close off the door. Depends on what kind of extra security he had in there.” The Menghu transfers her focus to me and Peishan. She’s not wearing a bone bracelet, which lets me look at her in the eyes without flinching, even if it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have bones. When I was here before, I saw bracelets, necklaces, even an anklet—Menghu wearing their list of kills with pride. “We’ll just have to do this quick.”
Perhaps with Sole in charge, that kind of pride isn’t appreciated.
“You two are in charge of keeping anyone drawn by the noise away from us. Keep as many grenades back as possible, since we have to get back out of here somehow.” There’s a strained quality to the Menghu’s voice as she checks Peishan’s grenades, a sort of unraveling that collapses in my lungs. She’s not sure we are going to get out.
Peishan stands steady, looking one way down the hall with her three grenades cradled against her. I keep the last two close, squaring myself as I stare down the hall in the other direction, Xuan standing between us.
Dead Moon Rising Page 31
