Dead Moon Rising

by Caitlin Sangster

  “Whatever happened to Tai-ge?” she asks. “How many nights did we sit up talking about him? That boy would have broken his own arm to make you happy.”

  The question hits me right in the stomach. I close my eyes, flickers of nausea winking in and out clear to my throat. Of course she’s going to ask about Tai-ge. We used to stay up late talking about him. About how it was hopeless but how much I wished… wishes that were hollow and shallow and senseless. I didn’t understand who he was or who I was either. I lick my lips, trying to find an answer that won’t require hours of explanation. “He did once. Break his arm, I mean. After the explosion at the Aihu Bridge.” She laughs a little at this response, but waits for more. More I don’t want to give. “He might have been willing to break an arm for me, but he would have broken every bone in his body for his mother. And she doesn’t like me much.”

  “Would have?” Peishan looks back at me. “Are you saying Tai-ge’s…” She frowns, not wanting to speak the word out loud.

  “No, he’s not dead. I don’t think. He might be now, I guess.” She frowns over the casual way I say it.

  “Are you… okay?”

  “I will be. Once we find BW12. And the Chairman’s real son.” I haven’t told Peishan about Howl. His was one of the murders she laid at my feet when I first found her in the Sanatorium. The reality of who Howl is and what’s happening to him now seems like too much to explain. But the inadequacy of how I explain away Tai-ge makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. “Things just didn’t work out.”

  We enter a new hall, an unblemished coating of dust covering the floor and BW12 on the wall in blocky letters. A curl of anxiety tightens inside me as we stop and look at the doors. There aren’t any lights to show a generator humming down here. No footprints to mark visitors. Dr. Yang’s been gone two months. What if that light on the grid was a malfunction? Or worse, a fluke: a generator that kicked on to keep a gigantic fish freezer from defrosting or something.

  Three more days. It’s like a City-wide announcement, ringing between my ears. Three more days until they kill Howl.

  It’s an offshoot hallway, two doorways on one side, three on the other, one making a dead end. Windows cut into each door, labels underneath each that I can’t even understand. One says INSURANCE CLAIMS with a span of five years from Before under it, the next with the same label, only a later span of years. When I shine my light through the windows, all I see is filing cabinets.

  I try the door. It doesn’t budge. “Help me, would you?”

  Peishan’s eyebrows go up. “Help you…?”

  I take a running start, slamming my shoulder into the door. It shudders under the impact but remains solidly shut, leaving me with a dull pain down my arm to add to all the aches and pains from our excursion upstairs yesterday. Peishan tries next, then kicks it with her full weight, and the door slams open.

  A billow of dust clouds out at the violence, but my mask filters it out. Peishan follows as I lead the way into the room, perfectly square and divided by three rows of filing cabinets.

  My hands begin twitching as if I’ll be able to find the Chairman’s Yuan-cursed son if I just keep moving. Or maybe if I wish hard enough the filing cabinets will melt and lighting will strike and suddenly Sun Yi-lai will rise up through the floor in a glass coffin like my mother’s. I go out to check the hallway again, making sure I didn’t read it wrong. The numbers are there in black and white. “Is there any way I’m remembering the number wrong?” I ask.

  “What happens if we don’t find him?” Peishan walks back inside the room, running her light along the walls for anything we missed. There’s nothing to miss, though. Four walls and filing cabinets.

  “Um, the Chairman will try to kill everyone down here.” I blink at Peishan’s alarmed expression. “He probably won’t be able to. There’s a reason the City never came head-on at the Mountain, but it would make it a lot harder to get food in here. I was just hoping that if I found his son, he’d help me get to the City. That’s where the cure is.”

  “And if we don’t find the cure, then you die. Right?” Peishan’s biting her lip when I look at her. “That’s why Sole was so anxious to get you here. Why she marched you straight to my room, so you’d see Lihua and agree to let her experiment on you.”

  “That’s the long and short of it.” I let out a long breath, the air catching in my mask the way worry is curdling in my stomach. Heaving myself onto one of the filing cabinets, I brush dust away in a big arc around me, the fuzzy feel of it sending squirms of disgust down my spine. No Sun Yi-lai means no leverage to get help from the Chairman. No way to reach the City at all within the three-day deadline.

  No way to save Howl.

  An explosion of movement catches me off guard, sending me careening off the metal cabinets to escape, visions of monsters made from dust and darkness or a toothless old SS victim happy to have found meat after so many years of living off paper and ink. It’s Peishan, though. She backs up and slams her shoulder into the cabinets on the far wall again, her eyes glassy.

  My whole body goes cold. “Peishan?” I whisper as her hand slides off the cabinet, scraping blood from her palm, but she just goes back to pushing. “Peishan, are you okay?” She can’t have SS. She had her mask on every second we were outside the air lock—

  She grunts, the metal screeching against the floor. “How about you help me.”

  The filing cabinet she’s pushing didn’t slide out into the aisle between cabinets. It pushed into the one next to it, fitting inside. I run to her side and put my hands next to hers, the two of us pushing together. When the cabinet folds another inch, she gives a cry of triumph, the metal cabinets folding up inside one another to leave a blank space of wall.

  Not blank. There’s a metal door flush with the wall.

  “How did you know to do that?” I ask, staring up at the wall, not sure what to feel. Excitement, dread. Awe.

  “The first one was already folded back a little.” She presses a hand to the metal door, and it swings back easily. The lock must have shorted out when the power went down, I guess. Peishan licks her lips and looks back at me. “Think there are more filing cabinets behind there?”

  Hope unfolds inside me, tentative because I know the slightest bit of doubt will turn it to ash. But when I hold my light up into the room, the red leaks through the darkness to touch…

  A box of glass.

  The link to the Menghu guards buzzes at my side, a message spelling across my hand. Everything okay?

  I type back quick, my hands shaking. I think we’re going to need some help. Come fast.

  Because inside the glass box, there’s a boy.

  CHAPTER 57 Sev

  SOLE GOES TO WORK WITHOUT question the moment Menghu wheel Sun Yi-lai and his box into one of the few empty spaces in the allotted hospital space: Xuan’s room. His vitals are written across the side in blocky characters that blink angrily when Sole instructs the Menghu to disconnect him. He looks like a doll the way my mother did, propped up and waiting for someone to take him down to play. Only, his skin hasn’t turned to paper, his muscles firm instead of wasted to nothing.

  He’s alive. Healthy, as much as a boy who has been locked in a box for who knows how long can be. I shove Xuan over a few inches to sit on his bed, unable to stop staring as Sole works on him, snapping at her team of medics to do things this way and that, the boy’s eyes closed. Not a boy. He’s older than me. Howl’s age, or a little older.

  He’s asleep the way I was. A weiqi stone so dangerous, Dr. Yang hid him away from the board.

  He looks like Howl, a little.

  He looks like a piece in my game of weiqi. One I’m not sure where to move next. Though the thought immediately sends spirals of shame from my head to my toes. People aren’t pieces to be played.

  Sole looks up as a Menghu comes in, the girl walking straight to her to whisper something in her ear. Fingers tangled in a mess of tubing over Sun Yi-lai’s chest, Sole barely glances at me before go
ing back to what she was doing. “They need you at the outer barricade.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not leaving until you tell me you can wake him up.” My hand goes to my pocket where I stowed the link. I have the Chairman’s son. Alive. He’ll want him back as soon as possible, which means a heli sent out in this direction, which means—

  “A girl named June. You know her, right?” Sole kneels next to the box, her fingers pinching at the boy’s skin. “She’s coming up to the inner doors right now with… with Seth. Luokai. Whatever he calls himself now.”

  I freeze. “What?”

  “They’re both here. Keep them away from me, okay?” Her eye twitches, and suddenly I wonder if she’s not kneeling to get closer to Sun Yi-lai and the mess of tubes keeping him alive. She’s hiding.

  “You okay, my little niangao?” Xuan prods my arm. “Isn’t June that girl—”

  “The one you helped turn into an orphan. Yes. You call me that again and I’ll shoot your other side.”

  I slide off the bed and run up to the surface level and through the two inner barricades to meet June, tears like fire in my eyes. June. Alive. June safe.

  June here.

  I was supposed to make the world a better place for June. Find the cure, bring it back to her. But the idea that I can is the worst kind of bravado, even if I didn’t know it when I made her those promises back at Port North. I’ll have to tell her that Howl is going under the Arch. That we have a way to the cure, but it’ll turn all guns on us. That I’m supposed to assassinate three well-guarded people but don’t know how—and that it might not help anything anyway. I was okay at weiqi, able to keep from disgracing myself, but this game seems to break all the rules I thought—

  I stop just inside the barrier, hands raking through my hair. The Menghu guarding the inner barricade drops a hand casually to his weapon, watching me from the side of his eye.

  Stones. June. The two together seem to close a circuit in my brain.

  I know what the Chairman wants: his son.

  I know what Dr. Yang wants: me. He wouldn’t be shouting all over the radios about having a gun to Howl’s head if this weren’t a play to get me to come to him.

  I know where the cure is: under the floorboards in my old house.

  I know where Howl will be. Under the Arch. Surrounded by Firsts and Seconds evacuated from Dazhai. Menghu flown in from the southern garrison. And whatever comes in between, the people who only follow because they need food and Mantis.

  A picture of June’s weiqi game back when she, Tai-ge, and I were sitting under the heli, planning how to steal a map encryption key that would lead us to Port North. Too many people playing. All in each other’s way, she said. We can do whatever we want.

  When June’s snarled curls, her scratched jade eyes, appear on the other side of the barricade, I can’t help but run, throwing my arms around her. To my surprise, her arms clutch at my back, holding me close, her face crushed into my chest.

  We fall to the ground, laughing, crying, and everything in between, no words enough to encompass what being alive and together again feels like.

  * * *

  Later, as we sit in quarantine sharing bowls of soup, I can hardly look at June’s companion. Luokai is a horrible reminder and a motivation rolled into one, because I’d forgotten how much he looks like Howl. A battered, shaved version who has forgotten how to smile.

  “Sole?” he asks quietly. “Is she here?”

  I press my lips together. “If she wants to talk to you, she’ll come down.”

  A humorless smile quirks at the side of his mouth, and he gives me a restrained bow from where he’s seated.

  June’s so quiet, so still I can feel her heart beating against my skin like a little mouse held in the palm of my hand. “Howl?” she asks.

  Luokai looks up again from his soup, setting his spoon carefully into his bowl.

  My stomach clenches, my lungs contracting. “June, I need your help.”

  She listens as she always does. Howl under the Arch. A black heli, Luokai’s eyes narrowing at its mention. Menghu and Reds together in the same space. People infected with SS trapped inside City walls, the Chairman waiting for word of his son.

  “I’m going to tell him we found Sun Yi-lai and that we have conditions upon returning him.” I stand as Peishan and Lihua rocket through the door, masks tight over their noses, crashing into June and bowling her over. Luokai blinks at the ruckus, inching back as if to give June some room, but it’s with the shadow of a smile. Once they’ve quieted down, I continue. “If Dr. Yang is following traditions around the Arch, there will be a big denunciation before they…” I look at Lihua, pressing my lips together. “Could we finish this reunion at dinner?”

  Peishan, who perked up at the mention of the Arch, nods, herding Lihua back out of the room, though she complains the whole way. “I made a walking stick, June!” she yells over her shoulder as Peishan hands her off to Menghu outside. “One of the Menghu helped me carve it, and he says it’s like magic and will keep bad guys away and…”

  June’s smile is so big it hurts, and I don’t want to quash it down, but we don’t have time to be happy just yet.

  “If Dr. Yang is going to execute Howl the way they used to under the Arch, it’ll be a big gathering with speeches and yelling and throwing things, anyone who is important there to watch. It’s not enough to just get Howl or the cure. We need people to listen to us. They’ll all be there, together, scared, and unless we can persuade them to follow us instead of breaking into little groups, it’ll turn into anarchy.”

  June nods, her forehead wrinkled. “So many people in the City at once.”

  “Yes, that’s what I was thinking. Lots of confusion about who goes where. Lots of helis flying in right now to evacuate the camps, and all the people on them hate one another. I don’t want the Chairman to get his hands on his son before we get something out of him, so we can’t have him send a heli for us.” I pinch at my fingers, sucking on my bottom lip. “Kasim—one of the Menghu who was working at the garrison—maybe he could get us onto a heli going to the City.”

  June’s face scrunches as she thinks, an expression so familiar that I don’t know how I’d forgotten it. I can’t believe she’s here. As if she’s a ghost, a memory, a hallucination. Even as I watch, she brushes a snarl from her face, and her hand freezes in her hair, her whole body going tight. Her other hand jerks to the side, knocking her porridge to the ground.

  “June? June!” I kneel down, pulling her hand out of her hair as she tries to yank it out. Peishan holds her down on the other side. June’s lungs are moving too fast, breaths blowing in and out of her like a stormy gale. I don’t let go until her shoulders relax.

  I try to help her up, try to hold her, but she brushes me off, glancing at Luokai. He gives her a small smile and closes her eyes, calming the breaths racking her chest until they smooth into something deep and calm.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, the idea of compulsions lurking inside my friend when she’s spent so many years running from them burning like acid inside me. “Oh, June, I’m so sorry.” How did I not notice that the soldiers down here didn’t give her Mantis?

  She inhales again, her shoulders upright. “Send the picture. You said the Chairman wanted a picture.”

  The way she sits so straight… It reminds me of Luokai and his compulsions. Of accepting them. Living through them. Letting them pass, not a storm inside you so much as one overhead, not worth paying attention to as it rails against the roof.

  June reaches out to touch my hand, her eyes soft. Her hand on my arm feels like strength, as if for the first time since we’ve met, I feel like she’s solidly here. Not on her toes, ready to run.

  “Tell me what he says once he’s seen his son and find out about Kasim’s heli.” June pulls Luokai’s bowl in front of her and takes a bite. He smiles and allows it. “Then we plan.”

  * * *

  I try to hold on to the image of June’s strength, her control, as
I speak to the woman in charge of quarantines, asking her to give June and Luokai Mantis. But it disappears as I head up the stairs. We’ve used most of today hunting for Sun Yi-lai, which makes it only two days and a few hours until they put an ax to Howl’s throat.

  When I get to Xuan’s room, it’s clustered full of medics with Sun Yi-lai’s body inert at their center, like bees serving their queen. The Chairman’s son merits a bed now, only a normal number of tubes feeding into him rather than the horror-show glass box that seems to be yanked right out of a scary movie from Before. His eyes are still closed, though. It feels like the first stage of panic, churning inside my chest. Did Sole start giving him the anti–Suspended Sleep serum yet?

  The medics part for me, letting me pull out the link and hover it over his face, the purple light brushing his angled features, to take a picture. I round Xuan’s bed, tucking his blankets around his sleeping form before jumping up next to him to send the photo, and with it, my message to the Chairman: If you want him, there are some things I’m going to need first.

  Xuan’s eyes flicker open at my weight next to him on the bed, and he groans, turning onto his side. “Go away.”

  “You don’t like being tucked in?” I watch to make sure the message went through, holding the link tight in my fist, willing the Chairman to answer immediately. Preferably offering the world and then some to get his son back. He did as much for Dr. Yang. “Where’s Sole?”

  Xuan opens his eyes all the way, looking over his shoulder to glower at me. “You are the one vertical with your eyes open. Think through the logic of asking me of all people that question. And while you’re realizing how silly you are, would you please tell all of these ridiculous excuses for medics to get out of here?” He pulls the blanket up over his head, muffling the rest of his words. “There’s a thing called bedside manner!”