Dead Moon Rising

by Caitlin Sangster

  He actually seemed grateful for the plan. A way out, he called it, a way for him to finally be free of his responsibilities and focus on what’s really important.

  The likelihood that he’s playing us is about 120 percent, of course. Which is why, once the heli has safely landed, we’ll kill the Chairman and any of his soldiers who resist. If things go badly at the City Center and we fail to appear down by the heli with the Chairman and Howl within an hour, June will sneak Yi-lai and the cure down the switchbacks to the forest below and run for Sole. Even if nothing goes to plan tonight, the cure will get to where it needs to go, and Sun Yi-lai will have a chance at a life not confined inside a box.

  I absently rub my traitor mark. It’ll be better than what I grew up with. Better than the horror show Howl survived.

  Killing all of them—the words still feel like swallowing a blade—is only a beginning to the end of fighting. Things could go very badly tonight, and getting rid of the leaders might make things worse. But Mei was right when she said people are scared. People don’t trust the leaders anymore. The Port Northian heli that’s been dropping bombs for the last few days doesn’t help. Maybe if there are people waiting for the right moment, people who will listen to me and Kasim, they will stall chaos long enough to give everyone who’s been fighting a new light to follow.

  Light. My fingers brush the window frame, and I have to squint against the blaze of torches and spotlights lighting up the City. Isn’t the doctor worried that the Port Northian heli will follow these light like a beacon? Unease twists inside me.

  It’s hard to see into the dark of the City beyond the chemical torches, but I can imagine the people we left behind looking up at the roar of our propellers, drawn to the heat and noise of their people returning, unable to resist like moths toward flame.

  I press the gun into my side, trying to find strength in its sharp angles. If we win tonight, then we’ll be able to help them. I’m not leaving the victims of SS below us to Dr. Yang for a moment longer. Not to the Mountain that so callously shoved Luokai from their midst, or to the City who manufactured SS and fed it to its own citizens. The people down there in the dark are my people, the ones cast aside without a thought the way I was. The way my mother, my sister, and my father were. If anyone deserves justice from our leaders tonight, it’s the moths who have already had their wings burned away.

  I wish I knew how to tell them. How to ask for their help tonight.

  The heli drops, blasting over the buildings in a thunder of propellers. “What are the chances that black heli didn’t see all of us congregating here?” Kasim asks as we lurch to the ground, the pilot not so skilled as Tai-ge was, apparently.

  The worry in my gut twists again, because if I can see that Dr. Yang has marked a great big target around the City for the heli to find, then everyone can. Which means something is at play here we haven’t accounted for. I unclip my safety harness and help Sun Yi-lai to do the same. He doesn’t move to help me, merely nodding his thanks and standing up to follow once June and Kasim are up. His hand finds my shoulder as if he needs a guide the way a small child would, and I put a hand on top of his and look back, giving him a reassuring pat.

  We file out with the rest of the Menghu, the soldiers ahead of us walking with a light-footed grace that tells me they’re no more comfortable inside City walls than I am. The wide road ahead is lined with torches that seem to breathe out instead of burn. Shapes move in the purple light on the other side of the torches, following our progress at a safe distance.

  When we draw nearer to the market, the smell of char hits my nose like a wave of nausea before I can pull my mask tight against my face. It has been more than two months since the invasion, but some of the buildings still seem to be smoking, brick and cement all that’s left of the factories flanking the square. The wall separating the City Center and the market square from the First Quarter hosts a line of newly dead bodies strung up like lanterns at a festival, their clothing frosted white in the cold. More Port Northians? I’d think the threat of bombs would be enough to scare the people hiding here.

  June huddles in close to me as we walk, her arm linked through mine as if she wants to anchor me against the onslaught of bad memories: The dirty looks I would get in the street. The cold indifference of the nuns. My mother, the princess in the coffin.

  At the edges of the square, the torches bend in closer, the chemical outline of the smoke traced hot against the air. My gas mask sanitizes whatever it is they’re burning, but Kasim’s nose wrinkles, and he covers his nose and mouth with his sleeve.

  The library sits up the hill, a blasted remnant of marble, tile, and jade, the black walls bowed in defeat. I can almost hear the flap of pages on the icy wind, the books so long imprisoned inside its walls now flying free.

  A swell of people push past us into one of the side alleys, so we go around, walking alongside the main road a block down. Buildings to either side of the alley twinkle with lights, shadows dancing across the windows. A banner hangs from a balcony above us, a Menghu tiger inked into the faded fabric. In its mouth is a stylized City star, blood leaking down both sides of the tiger’s mouth. Sun Yi-lai’s brow furrows as he looks up at it, his feet slowing. June grabs his arm and pulls him past it.

  “Are all the Menghu here in the City?” I whisper to Kasim. “I know they evacuated most of Dazhai to come back here. How can anyone expect Reds and Menghu to exist in the same space?”

  Kasim’s eyes catch on the banner as we walk under it, a wry smile curling the sides of his unmasked mouth. “I don’t know.” He looks up again at the buildings. “Wherever the City-folk are, at least Dr. Yang was smart enough to put them far enough away Menghu can’t see them.”

  The alleyway doesn’t run straight, bringing us closer and closer to the line of torches. The closer we come, the slower Kasim seems to breathe, until every breath rasps in his throat. He grabs my arm, walking us faster. “This is as good an opportunity as any,” he whispers. We only make it within twenty feet of the torches before Kasim falls to his knees, though I’m not sure if his distress is manufactured or real. Sun Yi-lai stops, crouching next to the bulky Menghu. Others from the steady stream of Menghu break from the torrent to loosen his collar and drag him back from the chemical stink.

  If anyone notices June and me slipping between torches into the shadows beyond, they don’t try to follow.

  CHAPTER 60 Sev

  I HATE THE FEEL OF the gun against my side under my coat, the metal pressing into my side as June stops just off the main road. She stills, scanning the area—and gives an annoyed frown when I almost stumble over my own feet behind her.

  A hinge creaks in the darkness just behind us. I look back, but June is off into the street, my hand held tight in hers, pulling me into a fast walk that slams my boots loudly into the cobblestones. She shoots me a glare but doesn’t slow our pace.

  We pass over the lower bridge from the Third to the Second Quarter, picking through debris as we go. Food wrappers that seem to have come from one of the factories. A mess of shattered glass littering the bridge, Bricks, bits of fabric and clothing. A chunk of hair, lying in the middle of the street like a dead rat.

  None of that compares to the flutters of movement following us from the high windows in surrounding buildings, the whisper of laughter that slicks through my hair as we squeeze into an alleyway between two Red family compounds. The roof tiles overhead seem to be ragged, broken in some places. As June and I emerge from the alleyway, we spy movement ahead, a man’s silhouette black against the darkening sky above us.

  We run.

  Past Tai-ge’s old neighborhood, where a barricade of furniture and razor wire now blocks several streets. The gap in the barricade where a guard should have been standing looks barren and bereft. Lonely, now that whoever was meant to watch it has left.

  Where are all the people? Even if SS sent people scurrying for cover, it was only Firsts and lucky Seconds who were airlifted out before the Menghu invasion. That le
aves thousands of Seconds and Thirds, all of whom seem to be made from shadows. They couldn’t have gotten past the chemical torches without masks, so they must be out here somewhere.

  I point June along the streets, following when she abruptly diverts from the path I meant to take, steering us in another direction until whatever threat she sensed is gone. I feel blind, as if threats I should be able to see are breathing down on us every moment and my eyes are somehow glued shut.

  Just as we catch sight of the gate leading to the First Quarter, June spins back, slamming me into an alley wall.

  Bricks dig into my spine through my borrowed coat. June’s slight form presses against me, so still it seems she’s even stopped her heart. Everything seems too quiet, every inch of me quivering, because the only thing worse than running or ducking bullets is waiting for the shots to start.

  A young man slips into view, the torn remnants of a factory uniform wrapped tightly around him. He walks straight toward us, his eyes wide, as if he’s forgotten how to blink. “We’re supposed to be headed for the People’s Gate into the City Center. Come on.”

  June tenses, her hand slipping inside my coat to touch the gun. I put a steadying hand on top of hers.

  The young man watches us with a sideways tilt to his head, one hand tapping a rhythm onto his arm. “Didn’t you see the signals? An hour after dark.”

  Fear trills through me, leaving my skin pebbled from my neck down. “Right. We’re coming.”

  He nods, still not blinking. Then shambles on.

  What is going on?

  June tugs my sleeve, the two of us slipping through the gate to the First Quarter together, the moon’s icy glow guiding our way. Every moment we’re exposed in the open street makes my heart pound, and I tense for an attacker that I’m sure is waiting ahead, just out of sight. But no one comes.

  Why is no one coming? And what are they doing instead?

  * * *

  We take Renewal Road up the Steppe, walking through the old neighborhood I remember in ghostly outlines as if I’d only seen it in a dream. Now the street seems to have cracked, the tiles stolen from the roofs of the old First homes, the gates sitting crooked on their hinges and obscenities scrawled on their stone walls.

  When we finally turn onto my old street, I see it as I did the last time I was here: The house empty as a body after death. Father on his knees in the courtyard, snow curling around him in a gray-tinged shroud. Mother, gone.

  After ducking under a bent lamp and almost tripping over a downed line of paper lanterns, we finally come to the house that used to be mine. It’s hard to look at it, to face the crooked lines of my childhood that all lead back to this place. Sick with Sleep in my old room, Mother’s crying voice, my sister Aya by my side, Father arguing with the doctors. The scene is swollen in my mind like a tick left to feed. Engorged with the blood of my memories.

  Wrenching my shoulders straight, I force myself to look my past straight on. To take in the house beyond the front gate, door painted red, a pair of cranes carved on either side of the frame.

  It’s just a house.

  June slips a hand into mine, looking up and down the street as if she wants to pull me one way or another but isn’t sure which direction is right. “This is it?” she asks quietly.

  “It’s not quite what I remember,” I whisper. The gate to the outer part of the compound hangs limply on its hinges. I walk up the steps, fingers running along the geometric lines that frame the entrance. A gold-and-red card is pasted to the door for New Year. BLESSINGS, it says, positioned upside down to welcome any stray blessings into the house. It’s peeling and faded, from last year.

  Opening the door, I brace myself, waiting to feel Aya’s ghostly presence, to hear Mother’s voice singing in her office, or Father’s reading to me, but the moon’s light leaks in through the windows, turning it to a place of ghosts that don’t belong to me. The house is a dead thing, musty and rotted and uncaring of who or what steps inside.

  There’s a table heavy with family portraits sitting in the entryway, but the paintings are of men and women I’ve never seen, someone else’s family, someone else’s memories. June steps up next to me, looking them over. “You know them?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I couldn’t bear to see my own family anyway.”

  “You have to remember the good things.” June’s brow knots. “People… do the best they can.”

  Surprised, I look down at her. “You think?”

  She shrugs. “The nice ones.”

  A board creaks in the next room, and June darts behind the table, pulling me down while I’m still looking in the direction it came from. We hold our breath while the creaks meander from one room to the next and, finally, toward us.

  June’s hand is around the gun’s handle. She pulls it from my coat with her other finger to her lips. My muscles seem wound so tight it’s a wonder they haven’t torn. The footsteps draw near, June ready with the weapon, when a slippered foot appears just in my line of sight.

  I put a hand on June’s, pushing the gun down.

  A second slipper appears, the woman wearing it wandering past us with slow, shuffling steps. Her breath rattles in her chest as if she’s full of autumn leaves instead of a heart, lungs, and blood, and when her eyes turn toward us, they’re milked over in white.

  “Who’s there?” she rasps, her eyes roving over exactly where we’re crouched and missing us. “One of Lieutenant Hao’s little runts? I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not leaving my home.”

  On her crumpled hand, there are three white lines almost lost between the wrinkles.

  “I’ve served here since I was a girl, and I won’t let it go, no matter what you say about helis and supply lines and the General’s Seph-bloodied son. I’ll stay here and starve before I go down to the square.”

  The woman’s hand fumbles along the top of the table, swiping toward us and upsetting two of the picture frames instead, sending one to the floor in a shatter of glass. “Yuan’s ugly mistress!” she swears, takes another rasping breath.

  June squeezes my shoulder, edging us away from the woman’s groping hands as she tries to right the picture that didn’t fall. We slip away from the table, and I lead her toward my old room, the floor thick with dust. The room itself is empty of anything that made it mine, the windows covered with a set of red curtains I would have hated as a child.

  “Know her?” June whispers, looking back down the hall.

  “No. If she cleaned the house when I was little…” I sigh, ashamed. “No, I don’t know her.” I kneel and pry up the floorboard with my fingernails.

  Her secrets were now hidden in a place no one else could reach. That was the hint inside Mother’s device. My stomach clenches, and I’m suddenly terrified that I was wrong, that it was a jump, that it was ridiculous.…

  In the hole, under a coating of dust, there’s a book.

  A sleeping princess graces the cover, her form embossed so it sticks out from the dusty paper. It’s too light in my hands, and when I open the book, instead of pages and words, there’s a secret. The cover is glued around a box, and inside the box is a frail clutch of papers black with my mother’s spiky hand. I look through them quickly, finding measurements. Diagrams. Howl’s name. Dates. My name. Encephalitis lethargica. And next to it, a table that has been rewritten in perfect, clear characters with ingredients, amounts, directions I can’t even begin to understand.

  A hot flame ignites in my chest, warding off the moon’s dead light. The only thing I understand is that this is what I came for. It’s the cure.

  June’s hand snakes forward, plucking out a thicker sheet of paper, Mother’s scrawl splashed across the back. “I love you both, so, so much,” it says. June turns it over to find a painting of two little girls, their arms tight around each other.

  Me and my sister, Aya.

  Tears spill down my cheeks. Mother thought it would be both of us who found the cure. Maybe she thought we’d find it with Father’s he
lp, within a year even.

  She sent me all the way to Port North, to her family and back again, somehow knowing that her secrets would never be safe in hands other than ours. A master of weiqi, more than I ever could have hoped to be, and finally here I am with the winning piece in my hand.

  “Your sister?” June’s voice is small.

  “Yes.”

  She thinks for a moment, her lips pursed.

  I give her hand a squeeze. “I’m glad I have more than one sister now.”

  Ducking her head, June hands the paper back, but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear there was a smile on her face.

  I tuck the papers back inside the box but slip the painting into my coat pocket. Then I hand the box to June. She regards it with narrowed eyes before taking it and looking up at me, her eyebrows raised.

  “Yes. That’s it. The cure.”

  Her fingers press into the box’s cover, her knuckles turning white. She hands me the gun, then stuffs the box down her shirt and buttons her coat over it clear up to her chin.

  I find my feet, putting a hand out to help June up, though she ignores it to push off the floor herself. Taking one last look at the room, I turn toward the door. It’s finally time to leave this place behind.

  CHAPTER 61 Sev

  THE OLD WOMAN HAS TUCKED herself into a cot in the room just off the main door, muttering to herself. I take extra care when I shut the front door behind us. June and I part ways when we come to the torch line, her scurrying through and heading back toward the gate, me running along the perimeter in the other direction toward the City Center.

  That is, until I find a section of torches that have been hacked from their concrete blocks, the torch heads bleeding oil and chemicals on the cobblestones instead of burning. I slow to a stop, bending down to pick up the closest decapitated head, dropping it with a clatter when the metal burns my fingers. Still hot.