Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  The sound isn’t the threatening slicker of boots on ice, though, or the heavy, metallic sound of a gun being pulled from its holster. It’s a note, high and lilting. The tone slides to another note and another, the haunting melody echoing inside of me as it slips ghostlike through the trees.

  The hollow tune grows louder as I approach the Post’s entrance, a tree with a platform lower than the rest. Loss grins at me from above.

  “What’ll you give me to let you up?” he calls.

  “Is June up there?” I shout.

  He gives the bundled-up rope ladder a kick and I have to jump aside to keep from being hit. “Most girls will at least offer me a kiss.”

  “Most girls who come would probably promise a kiss, then stick a knife in you when they got close enough.” I start up the ladder, trying not to think about how high the platform is. The ropes bend and twist as I climb, make my stomach ball up inside me.

  When I get to the last splintery rung, Loss extends a hand, helping me up onto the platform. “Should I turn you upside down to look for knives, then? I try to avoid offending longtime customers.”

  “I’m in a hurry. And since when do I count as a longtime customer?” I put my hands on my hips, trying to stop them from shaking.

  “Not you. June’s been coming through here for the better part of five years. Wouldn’t want to scare her off.”

  “She’s here?” I ask, trying not to sound desperate. Desperation is probably the first signal for roughers to take everything you have. I don’t want to inspire any scavenging. Or kissing. Either one.

  “Not that I know of, though I just started my watch.” Loss glances toward the rope bridge that leads to the next platform over. “She could be up there now. It’s been so good to see her smiling and . . . normalish. Never would have pegged little June as a mother hen, but the way she is with Lihua and the others warms this old rougher’s heart.”

  “We have to leave now, and . . .” The music starts again, cutting me off short as it falls down through the trees around us like tears. “What is that?”

  “Strangers.” Loss points up to where a pair of bare feet hang over the edge of a platform. “I don’t like it, them drawing attention to us with that racket. Your little ones are a bit keener, though. Wouldn’t be surprised if they were shirking their cleaning duties to listen.”

  If June’s anywhere, it would be with the kids. Winding my courage tight like a spring, I walk toward the precarious bridge that leads to the next platform over.

  “If you’re leaving, Cai Ayi’ll be asking about a down payment on permanent boarding.” Loss calls after me. He smiles when I turn back to him. “In case you don’t come back? If June isn’t negotiating for you . . .” His voice trails off when he notices my shaking hands. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. We’re fine.”

  He looks at me, unblinking, as if he can peel away the layers of words and find truth somewhere at its core. “If you say so. Things can be rough out there if you aren’t used to it.” Loss closes the distance between us, a concerned look furrowing his brow when I flinch away from him. He puts one of his oversize hands on my shoulder, the weight pulling me crooked. “I can help you with Cai Ayi. Go on up. I’ll find someone to cover the ladder.”

  I grab hold of the rope that makes the bridge to the next platform, staring at my hands as I slide along instead of down at the ground. It’s not a real bridge, just two ropes, one for your hands and one for your feet. Easy to cut down if people Cai Ayi doesn’t like make it past the roughers watching the ground.

  Once I’m across, I climb the rickety ladder that leads up to where the music sings out, boards embedded in the trunk so the tree’s growth bows and slumps over each rung like a stomach bulging over a belt. At the top, I find Lihua and Peishan, sitting with their legs pulled up to their chins, eyes wide on a man with a two-stringed instrument, a bow strung through them.

  He’s dark-haired and olive-skinned like City-folk so far as I can see, but the wide sleeves of his tunic cover his hands, so I can’t check for City hash marks.

  Lihua twirls her fingers along with the tune he’s playing, as if she wishes she could dance but doesn’t quite have the courage. Two other men stand on either side of the stranger with the instrument. One has skin as cracked as old leather and a dusting of gray hair around the back of his head. The other is much younger, his eyes a surprising green when they find mine. Both go back to watching the musician when it’s obvious I’m not armed.

  “Peishan?” I don’t have time to care about the way she rolls her eyes when I kneel down next to her, and try not to push Lihua away when she leans against me. There’s a panic in my blood, an energy that tells me if I stop moving, I’ll die. Or maybe everyone else will. “Have you seen June?”

  “Nope. Going to be quiet so we can listen?” Her whisper is sharp. It’s hard to believe we used to share a room, staying up late to gossip about the nuns or for her to make up stories about me kissing Tai-ge to see if she could make me blush. (Only to be countered by me making up stories about her kissing the red-nosed foreman at the cannery. It wasn’t always enough to get her to stop, but usually a good sexy description of his perpetually running nose was enough for her to throw a blanket over her head.) Things have changed, though. No more stories about Tai-ge’s lips, though she’s seen them much closer now than she ever did in the City. According to Peishan, everything—the Menghu invasion, contagious SS, and the fact that she’s stuck up in these trees Outside with no walls to hide behind—is my fault.

  I keep my voice calm. “We have to leave. I need you to make sure Lihua gets . . .” I glance over at her, not wanting to say anything about Mantis out loud. Not where one of the roughers or Cai Ayi might overhear. No infected allowed in these trees. “You have enough for a few weeks, right?”

  “You’re leaving?” Peishan’s head whips around, but it only takes a split second before the surprise and fear harden into a frown. “Of course you are. Don’t worry. It’s not like you were doing much to take care of us anyway.”

  “Don’t . . .” I look down at Lihua, her chin now tipped up to look at us instead of the man with the instrument, a wary expression on her four-year-old face. “We’ll be back soon. Hopefully with more answers. And . . . more medicine.” I can’t tell her about the potential cure. I have to make sure it’s real first.

  “Fine.” Peishan turns back to the music, pulling Lihua away from me and into her lap.

  Irritation bubbles up inside me. I know Peishan has been through worse than I have. Just walking through the Sanatorium where they put all the patients Firsts were experimenting on made me want to scream. She was there for months. But Tai-ge and I were the ones who flew her out of the City, the ones who brought her here, where no one’s allowed to have a gun. It’s just easier to lay the blame at my feet. The City always did. I guess I’d hoped Peishan would be able to see through that.

  I was wrong.

  The music stops. I open my eyes to see the musician twisted around, looking at me.

  “You feel this.” He points to his chest, the words sounding clipped at odd angles and then sewn back together. His face is impossible to put an age to, creases decorating the edges of his charcoal-dark eyes. A face young enough to be born in my same decade, but only just.

  I get up from my crouch by Peishan, walking back toward the ladder, my mind already threading through the trees, looking for a single golden glimmer. Worried I’ll find something else instead. “Sorry. It’s beautiful, but I have to go.”

  “The erhu digs deep inside you. It tells a story that connects with who you are.” The musician swings his legs up from the edge of the platform and tucks his bow into a notch at the top of the instrument, where the strings are connected to carved knobs. His dark yellow tunic flows loose from shoulder to hip as he stands and loops the erhu’s strap over his chest so the tall neck sticks out over his shoulder. The other two men tense as he moves toward me, their hands flat against their sides as if
they’re waiting for something important to happen.

  Nothing does, though. He cocks his head to one side, waiting for me to answer his question. I shrug, not really wanting to find the words, thinking of the way the notes seemed to fill the hollow spaces inside me and carve them out at once.

  “We are seekers, you and I.” He reaches back to touch the erhu’s neck. “Perhaps she called you to me because we seek the same thing.”

  I try a smile, setting my hands on the ladder’s first rung. “At the moment I’m seeking a girl named June. Blond hair? Very quiet.”

  He shakes his head. “I seek a young man. About your age. It’s the only place left he could be, here in your mountains.”

  “You’re not from the mountains?” I turn back toward him, my heart twisting in my chest. “Have you heard of a place called—”

  “Jiang Sev!” Cai Ayi’s voice cuts me off, coming from above us. I look up to see her portly form scuttling down a ladder above me. “You need to leave.”

  A shot rings out. A gunshot, the sound piercing my eardrums. My feet freeze to the platform’s planks, and I’m afraid to look down. Afraid a bullet just found me and that I’ll see my own life streaming down my front in red.

  Instead, the musician scuttles to the edge of the platform to look over. Lihua grabs me around the hips, Peishan only a step behind her as if she can somehow hide behind me when we don’t know which direction the shot came from.

  There’s another shot as Cai Ayi jumps down onto the platform, her bulk making the wooden beams bounce. She levels a finger with my jaw. “They must have seen you come up. Not an hour ago, they came with a description of you and that Red. I knew I should have told June to keep you on the ground. Reds start burning trees before I’ve had time to answer their questions. They knew you well enough to ID you by describing that.” She points to the patch of dark skin curling out from behind my ear, hidden beneath the fringes of hair that are too short now to pull back into a braid.

  My hand slides up over the mark, my cheek cold. I’m afraid to touch it, to even acknowledge what she’s saying.

  Loss climbs onto the platform behind me. “Ze-ming’s on the ground, Cai Ayi! We need Rash, Eriz, and Yi-ran now, and they’re all two levels up. . . .”

  Cai Ayi grabs hold of my arm and thrusts me toward the ladder. “Just go, honey. Before they kill all my boys. They probably won’t shoot you if you come easy.”

  I stumble toward the wide boards, my heart feeling as if it’s already given up. Peishan gathers Lihua against her, watching. “You want her to go down there?” she asks, a new vulnerability to her voice.

  A low whistle jerks my attention up, and I catch a glint of gold up against the leaves. It’s June peering down at me, two levels up and across a rope excuse for a bridge.

  Elbowing Cai Ayi in the gut, I push past her to the ladder she just came down, scrambling up the fat rungs, Loss and Cai Ayi both only a breath behind me, swearing enough to make the evergreen needles wilt. The ground, at least thirty feet below, feels as if it’s calling to me as I pull myself up, kicking at Cai Ayi’s hands when they grab at my ankles.

  Up to the next platform and then the next, I close my eyes and force myself out onto the bridge.

  “Just shake her off! They can collect her body!” Cai Ayi cries, and the two lines jerk wildly under my feet and hands, all signs of Loss’s goodwill from before vanished.

  Only another two feet. One. And June’s hand is around my wrist, wrenching me off the ropes and cutting them behind me.

  I curl up on the boards, but only until another gunshot erupts in the still air. June’s hand on my wrist helps me up from the self-protective crouch to look back at Cai Ayi and Loss on the other side.

  “Tell them we escaped,” June calls. “To follow the zip.”

  “June, my roughers, my business!” Cai Ayi snarls.

  “You keep our kids safe. We’ll lead them off. Tell them where we’re headed.”

  Cai Ayi’s mouth is a lemon and vinegar in the same glass. But she nods. “Get out of here.”

  June pulls me back without answering, only dropping my hand when we get to the ladder at the other end of this platform, snow speckled here and there as if no one has come up this high in a long time. So high the boards seem to sway under our feet, and the needles bite at us as if they’re hungry. Even June goes slowly on this last ladder, only looking back once to check that I’m following.

  The rungs are gray and cracked, and when we finally get to the platform above, I can hardly bring myself to stand. The ground below seems to chant for me to fall. Our tree sticks up above the others, a lookout tower over a flat plain of softly swaying needles. I try to imagine that the treetops skimming and rolling beneath the loose boards are solid ground just a few feet below us, but the argument feels stale in my head.

  A cable is tethered to the tree trunk above us, the length of it diving deep into the trees in the heli’s direction. Ten or more short lengths of rope hang from the line, clipped to the platform to keep them from slipping. June pulls two free, handing one to me before slashing through the others with her knife.

  “Jump.” She makes sure I have a good grip on the rope. “Don’t think.”

  With that, she shoves her foot into the loop at the bottom of her rope, and hops off the platform, the pulley buzzing against the cable as her golden hair disappears into the trees. The rope she left for me is heavy in my palm, the rough fibers stinging new scrapes and splinters I received in the rush to get up here. I force myself to breathe out, letting go of all the air trapped inside me. I step into the loop, experimentally tugging at the cable over my head, waves of nausea and fear teasing my heart into a canter. The pulley starts to slip down the cable as soon as I put weight on it, and I dance back.

  Another gunshot rings out, closer now, as if the Reds have made it up onto the Post’s lower platforms. I close my eyes, lock my fingers around the rope, and jump. My stomach drops straight to the forest floor a hundred or more feet below. The pulley whirs above me as I start to fall faster, branches swatting at me as I slide.

  My eyes pop open as I start to rise again, the rope scooping up and connecting to a massive tree trunk looming ahead of me. I wait for impact, imagining the rough bark slamming into my head and shoulders, but I slow to a stop before hitting, then slide back the way I came. The pulley screeches a complaint as my weight slows my momentum and stops me once again, sending me back down the rope until I come to a full stop. Stranded in midair.

  A whistle trills through the air, and I catch a glimpse of gold hair on the far side of a tree trunk off to my left, the cable coming within a few feet of its gnarled branches. There’s a rope almost within reach hanging from the closest branch. I shift my weight toward it and just manage to grab hold. From there, my heart fluttering like the last twitches of a dying butterfly, I transfer to the new rope and swing until I can latch on to one of the main branches and crawl into the crutch of the old tree. There are boards embedded in the trunk, just like the Post’s awful ladders.

  June stands at the bottom, her face upturned and impatient. She starts to walk away from the tree before I even hit the ground. Her feet hardly snap a twig, though a startled bird does streak up through the trees as she stalks by. She only turns once to check that I’m following, pausing to whisper so quietly I’m almost sure I misheard, “Good job not screaming.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN WE GET BACK TO the path that leads to the heli, we take it at a run. Every step sucks at my feet, as if the ground is trying to open and swallow me down into this trap. How would Reds have known to come asking for us here, and what could they want? There’s no reason to go after the little Fourth traitor anymore, not with the City burning.

  First Howl, then Reds. It can’t be a coincidence. But why would Howl be working with anyone from the City?

  I put a hand to my cheek as I run, the skin cold where my birthmark peeks out from under my ear. Cai Ayi pointed to it as if it were proof of something inherently
wrong. My mother had the same mark. It linked us together, made us both into traitors, as if a spot of pigmentation on our skin could dictate our hearts.

  I slow down to a jerky walk as the path steepens, my chest aching with cold. June is just a glimmer in the foliage ahead. Every sound, every birdsong, every flutter of pine needles has me on my toes, looking for the glint of gunmetal in the shadows. I alternate running and walking, only letting my lungs slow me down when they start choking off any chance of breath. It isn’t until I get to the outcropping of rocks that protect the heli from sight that I realize June isn’t in front of me anymore.

  I trip, falling to my knees and trying very hard not to swear. “June?” I whisper. “June?” Louder this time. “We have to take off. Now!”

  A ripple in the branches catches my eye, and from behind one of the rocks, June’s face appears, half of it now hidden beneath the curls of a gas mask. “Go,” she rasps.

  “I’m not going anywhere without you. Come on.” I pull myself up from the ground and start toward the heli again, stopping when she doesn’t follow. “Why did you run away?”

  She picks something up from the ground. Her rucksack, the old straps worn down to threads.

  “Please, June. What did we do? I can’t . . .” I take a step closer, surprised when she skitters away, maintaining the distance between us.

  “No! Don’t run away.” I put my hands up, as if showing her I don’t have any weapons will convince her not to go. “I can’t do this by myself, June. Please.”

  June’s eyebrows quirk at that, watching silently as I stumble through the icy rocks toward her.

  “Were you worried about Menghu coming after us?” I ask, eyes caught on the awful rubber tubes of her gas mask. “Is it because you want to stay at the Post? If those Reds go away, I suppose it might be safer. You’d take better care of Lihua and the others than Cai Ayi ever could. But I . . . please don’t leave me, June. I need you.”