It’s easy to absolve the dead. To allow them to squeeze back into the dreams they spun around you like a web because there’s something pitiful and small about a body left to go cold. But regretting those bullets was just making up fairy tales, coming up with excuses for why I let Howl lie to me without tasting the deception in every word.
I wanted to believe.
It’s just like that ridiculous book he gave me, the lure of a happy ending blinding the reader to reality even when it’s rotting right in front of them. I should have let June give the book, gilded cover and all, to Cai Ayi.
“He . . .” June’s voice brings my head up. She gulps and tries again. “He said . . .”
“You knew he was here?” The words come out in a blazing rush, and June shrinks back. “How long has he been back here?”
“Just last night.” Her eyes barely make it up from the floor, connecting with mine for less than a second before dropping back down. “He said he wasn’t going to hurt you.”
“Yuan’s bloody ax!” Tai-ge bursts in, voice too loud as he paces. “They’re going to come for us. They’re going to find us and kill us. Slowly.”
June’s horror dulls to confusion. “Menghu?”
“The Menghu? What in Yuan’s name is wrong with you?” Tai-ge rants, falling to the floor beside Howl, pulling his hood back the rest of the way. “The Chairman’s son has been missing for months now. Of all the places he could crop up . . . and we come at him with a rusty medikit and inhibitor spray.”
My brain can’t quite put Tai-ge’s words together, each of them crumbling to nonsense inside my head. “You shot him.” My voice tears at the edges. “Back in the City. When we were running.” Turning back to June, I try to ignore my hands shaking. “You both shot him. I saw him on the ground. He was dead.”
“I never—!” Tai-ge swears again. “I wouldn’t have shot at a First. I would have recognized him.”
June pulls something out from under the bench screwed into the wall. A padded vest with two tears puncturing the front flaps. I’ve heard of these. Leftover from Before. Bulletproof.
“Maybe he won’t remember.” Tai-ge’s voice drips with desperation as he crouches next to Howl’s limp form, easing his head up from the floor. “If we figure out where he came from and fix him up, then the Chairman could—”
“Tai-ge!” I’m surprised by the acid corroding my voice. “Get away from him. He’s not who you think it is.” June and Tai-ge both stare at me, Tai-ge taking a second before he carefully lowers Howl’s head back to the floor. “June.” I soften my voice. “Find some rope. Tape. Anything.”
“I’m sorry . . .” June’s mouth screws shut over the words. She drops the medikit and backs toward the cockpit doors. “You two were so . . .” She won’t look at me, her eyes nailed to the floor. “I thought . . . he promised.”
“Howl lies, June. You aren’t the first to believe him.” I turn to Tai-ge, his hands wringing together until the skin is bloodless and pale. “Find whatever he’s using to communicate.” I think back to the link Howl gave me in the Mountain, hidden inside his dead brother’s gore-tooth necklace. “Jewelry, maybe? Something small.”
Tai-ge stares at me as if I’m about to commit an unpardonable crime. I pick up the medikit, blood smearing across my fingers as I open it. There’s some blue reinforced tape inside.
I pull a strip of the tape loose and take a deep breath. Start with Howl’s feet. Focus on the pull of the tape, the muddy flecks littered across Howl’s Menghu-issue boots as I bind them together. Shoelaces that look waxy and new. A frayed spot in the leather by his big toe. Anything but the memories flooding back. Of Sole, a medic who used to partner with him on bloody patrols, telling me stories of Howl killing every City-born he could find, children included. Of Howl showing me his forged City stars and promising to help me find a place I could belong.
I thought I could let myself regret the questions I didn’t get to ask. The ones that would have settled what Howl was after once and for all. My shoulder scrunches around the tender line burning down the curve of my neck where Howl held his blade.
Those questions have firm answers now. Howl came after me, and he came with a knife.
“Tai-ge?” I insert some steel into my voice, trying not to hold my breath as I wind the tape again around Howl’s ankles. “A link? Weapons?”
The floor creaks behind me as Tai-ge finally moves, extracting a pack from under the bench bolted to the metal. He undoes the top clasps and loses his grip on the muddy canvas, accidentally upending it to let Howl’s things scatter across the floor. Tai-ge stares down at the mess of compressed crackers, water purifiers, and clothing, taking several deep breaths before kneeling to spread the things out into straight lines, flinching every time he touches something, as if each contact is leaving some kind of mark on his skin. Mostly there are long tubes of paper that roll free from Howl’s things. They go every which way across the heli’s uneven floor, getting caught under the benches and in the far corner, one wobbling right up to the lip of the corrugated tear in our heli’s belly.
My arms and hands tingle, and I look away, focusing on Howl’s sleeves, the frayed edge to the cuff of his coat. Pull the bulky jacket back from his wrists to press his palms together, trying to decide if I should tape over the long-sleeved shirt underneath or pull it back too. I don’t want to touch his skin, don’t want to look at his hands and remember the last time he touched my cheek or slipped an arm around my waist. The lines on his knuckles and palms are scrubbed over with grime, but his clothes somehow smell like spicy Mountain soap instead of dirt and campfire. There’s a single red star at his collar, as if he’s gone back to pretending his bloodline goes straight to Yuan Zhiwei.
His fingers start to twitch.
“I don’t see anything he could communicate with in here.” Tai-ge’s voice is quiet behind me. “There’s a gun. Some ammunition. And over by you there’s the knife he . . . the knife.”
“The one he almost cut me open with?” I kick the weapon back toward Tai-ge and tape over the sleeves, unwinding the tape as fast as it will go, then over the exposed skin at his wrists. “Get rid of it. The gun too.” Nervous energy crawls down from my chest to my stomach, as Howl’s eyelids begin to flutter, an army of ants looking for a good place to tunnel through. The inhibitor spray doesn’t knock people out for long. It gives you enough time to run.
This time, I can’t run.
Howl’s eyelids scrunch down as if he knows pain is coming, but it hasn’t quite settled yet. I wind the tape faster and faster, trying to win the race before Howl can open his eyes. One eye cracks, and then the other, deep brown irises glazed as they try to focus on my face. “Sev?”
I throw his hands away from me, off the floor and running before he can say anything else. When I get to the cockpit, I pull the door shut behind me, air squeezing out of my lungs in rapid-fire bursts I can’t control. Cracking the door back open, I call to Tai-ge, “Just . . . push him out the hole in the floor and we’ll take off. We don’t need to tell Peishan we’re leaving. We have to get to . . . where we’re going.” I can’t even say the name Dazhai out loud now, because then Howl would know where to follow us.
Why did he follow us?
“Sevvy.” Tai-ge’s voice is only inches away, on the other side of the door.
“Please, Tai-ge.”
He sighs, the sound tinny and shallow. “If we let him go, he could ID our heli. And we talked enough about Dazhai that I’m guessing he knows we’re headed there. Maybe he was hoping to stow away. Get back to where he belongs.”
“Howl is not the Chairman’s son.”
Nothing from the other side of the door. Then, “Okay. That doesn’t change the fact that he found us and we don’t know how. Or why. If he’s in contact with Firsts or Seconds or anyone else. If he does have some way to communicate, he could radio in the moment we take off. Tell them we’re coming. We wouldn’t even make it past the outer guard.”
Fear trills thro
ugh me. How did Howl find us? I know why Howl is here. The ticket that he thinks gets him out of jail slipped from his pocket and ran back to the City by herself, then destroyed the only other chance he had at avoiding Dr. Yang’s scalpel. Wasn’t that what he said right before Sole told me who he really was, that waking Mother up was my only way out of being cut open?
He was wrong. Dr. Yang could never have found the cure in our brains or blood. He was just manipulating both of us, trying to get us to run back to the City to wake Mother up so she’d tell me where she’d hidden her papers. Howl probably doesn’t know that, though. So here we are again, Howl wanting to go home, and determined to take me with him as a human shield.
I lean against the door, hand clenched over my mouth. What if it isn’t just Howl? Everyone in the Mountain thought we were the only cure to SS. Me and Howl. Are there more Menghu crawling in now, while we’re distracted? “Okay. We can’t leave him here. We need to move right now, though.”
“We’re not ready to move. We’re already on risky ground hoping to abandon the heli at Dazhai before Seconds can get to us. We need time to scout where their lookouts are, to stash our packs and to make sure we have a way out. If we fly now, in broad daylight and without our supplies ready to go—”
Swallow. Deep breath. “Just . . . move us to somewhere in the middle, so Howl won’t know where we are. We’ll make sure he didn’t tell anyone about us, take anything that could be a link to the Menghu, and leave him far away from any of the camps. Then we’d be safe to go to Dazhai.”
Tai-ge’s silence feels too loud. When he finally speaks, the sound makes me flinch. “Okay. Give me a second. I’ll make sure he can’t move. Check through his things again to see if I can find a communication device, and then we’ll be off.”
I nod, a jerky movement that feels unnatural. Tai-ge can’t even see me, so I don’t know why I’m doing it, but there’s no way I’m going back into the cargo bay. No way I’m even speaking again, because Howl is in there and speaking where he’ll be able to hear me feels untenable.
I turn to the controls, wishing I knew which buttons to push to get us started, so the moment Tai-ge walks in here we can take off. Once we’re high enough, I’ll . . . send June back to roll Howl out through the hole in the cargo bay floor when Tai-ge can’t protest. Or something.
June. I blink, looking around the empty cockpit and my eyes catch on the door, still gawping open like a starving fish from when I climbed in. It isn’t just June I’m missing, though. It takes a few seconds before the uncluttered space next to the hatch registers, spots of rough carpeting showing through where all there used to be was mess.
June’s sleeping bag and rucksack are gone.
CHAPTER 5
I SLIDE DOWN THE HELI ladder and stare out at the trees. “June!” I try to yell, but the sound comes out in a gasp. “June, where are you?”
The forest stares back at me, snowy white and needled green.
Tai-ge hops down next to me. “I thought we were taking off.”
I breathe in deep, willing the forest to tell me which way to go, marking each leaf, each needle drooping down from the pines. June ran away from me once. From us. Me and Howl. There were Reds after us, and maybe she thought she could get away faster by herself.
But she wanted us to find her then. Now, I’m not so sure.
June’s best at running, hiding. Making herself small where the danger won’t think to pick her out. If Howl appearing seemed like a danger flag to her, maybe she thinks her chances are better with the trees.
“Sevvy.” Tai-ge kneels next to me. “Maybe this is a good thing.”
“A good . . .” I can’t even choke the words out. “June took her stuff. She ran. We have to get out of here. And that thing in the cargo bay. . .” I can’t force my mind back up there. The place I thought of as home is suddenly nothing but a broken lock with monsters peering out through the cracks.
“If we take him back to Dazhai, the Chairman will come out to welcome us himself. He’ll have to listen to us. About the cure . . . about all of it. Sevvy, they’ve been looking for Sun Yi-lai for months. We’d be heroes.”
“Sun . . .” I close my eyes, anger boiling deep inside me. “Tai-ge, I don’t know how many more times I can say this before I break something. Howl isn’t even from the City.”
Tai-ge waits for a moment, as if there should be more. When nothing comes, he shakes his head, that steely set to his jaw that I’ve only recently come to notice flavoring every word. “I know you’ve been through a lot over the last months, Sevvy, but you’re wrong about this. Whoever you think he is . . . I knew Sun Yi-lai back when we were in the City. I mean, as much as you can know any of the Chairman’s family when you’re outside the Circle. No one even knew his wife was dead until they put up the monument.” Tai-ge scratches a hand through his hair. “I’ve talked to the Chairman’s son before. More than once.” He glances back up the ladder. “And that’s him. He’s tied up in our storage closet, and I’m officially a traitor. Unless we can convince him to go back . . .”
I shake my head, the movement growing larger as he keeps talking until I’m practically wagging my head trying to get Tai-ge to stop. What he’s saying isn’t possible. Not about Howl or about trying to contact the Chairman. It’s as if Howl’s lies somehow seeped into my friend, into the world all around me, one inky handprint that stained everything close enough to rub against me. “I told you about him before, Tai-ge.” I told him some of it. Just that he helped me out of the City. Took me to the Mountain. Not that he lied about being a First or that he . . .
That he kissed me. That we were going to run off into the forest and pretend the world didn’t exist. He made me like him. Love him, even, if that’s possible in less than two months’ time. My stomach churns, bile rising in my throat until I bend over, sure my stomach is going to expel everything I’ve ever eaten.
“Maybe this is some kind of misunderstanding.” Tai-ge squeezes my arm, as if he thinks when I calm down, I’ll see reason and believe him instead of my own eyes. “If it was him who took you out of the City, he must have gotten involved in something too big for him to understand. . . . It’s hard to believe a First would go traitor, but it is possible.”
I flick Tai-ge’s hand away from me and stand. Hard to believe a First would go traitor? Does he even remember who he’s talking to? I force down a bitter laugh. If that’s what Howl was—a traitor First—I’d probably still be sitting next to him in the Core, eating from the Mountain’s cafeteria, happily traitorous myself.
Tai-ge’s voice is soft, the opening line in a negotiation. “You know, he was probably just scared. We surprised him, and—”
“No, Tai-ge. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t surprised. And if I were you, I’d worry a lot more about how long we have before his friends get here than having your name carved into Traitor’s Arch.” I start walking, lines of pain starting at my eyes and etching through my head.
“Where are you going?” Tai-ge calls after me.
“I’m going to find June so we can get out of here.” Not even Howl and his finger-bone-bracelet-wearing friends can make me take off without her. “Maybe she ran to the Post for help. Lock everything down. Seal off the cargo bay doors if you can. It might just be Howl, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
“If there could be more, then how does you going off into the trees alone make sense, Sevvy?”
I turn back to Tai-ge in disbelief and tamp down a spark of annoyance. “I’m not leaving without June.”
I line my thoughts into tidy rows as I walk, attempting to give them some kind of meaning. Howl lived through the invasion. He came after me. We’ve been so careful, even though it seemed almost silly, because the Mountain no longer needs my skull, and the City is probably too preoccupied with not dying to care much about where we are. Kicking a pinecone out of my path, I bite back a swear word when my boot catches in the crusty ice and I land sideways on my ankle and fall onto the hard-packed snow. Sitting
there with icy wetness seeping through my pants, an even darker thought occurs to me.
Dr. Yang might not tell anyone about the cure and Port North. He was so preoccupied with telling me how smart he is, how successful . . . It wouldn’t be easy to cast himself the hero of a story where he put the person who cured SS to sleep so he could steal her research but then lost it instead—not unless the story ends with him having found the papers again. Dr. Yang isn’t impatient. He spent eight years feeding the Mountain lies about needing me and Howl to reconstitute the cure, as if it would be his own special discovery, all while leading me closer and closer to his web until he could bite. He may have an idea about where the papers are now, but I can’t see him sharing that information, not until Mother’s test tubes are in his sweaty hands.
If Howl is working for Dr. Yang . . . what if he’s here to wipe the slate clean? Get rid of the only other people who know what he is and what he’s after? The only other people who could potentially take the cure out of his hands once and for all.
The line of pain at my throat where Howl’s knife slid against my skin twinges.
I grit my teeth, dodging through the trees toward the Post, watching my footing so I don’t end up rolling headfirst down a slope. It doesn’t matter what Howl wants, because we’re going to find a lonely, snow-covered mountain and leave him there so he can’t creep back into my life ever again. All I need is June and we can take off. Slip right through Dr. Yang’s fingers and find the cure first.
But the snow-laden trees are silent all around me. Not a hint of gold in all the white.
• • •
When I draw near to the Post’s ladder, a foreign sound cuts through the frigid air, and I stutter to a stop, holding my breath, waiting to see if it’s some kind of attack.
Shatter the Suns Page 3