A bubble of surprise swells up inside me, bursting with a sharp pop. June speaks the way I do. When she speaks, that is.
It was better if I said nothing. How dangerous would it be for a Wood Rat trying to hide in our mountains with all the wrong words stuck in her mouth? Is that why June doesn’t speak unless she has to?
“Can you talk for us? Can you speak their language?” I ask, hope rising inside me. If June can interpret, if she knows more about this place than we realized, we won’t need to dance around Xuan. And, realistically, if what Xuan has hinted about Kamar not caring much for City-born coming down from the mountains is true, June would be a better advocate than he could hope to be.
June looks down at her hands, brow twisted over the question as though there isn’t a right answer. She closes her eyes a few seconds too long to be a blink, then flicks them back open, her green-stone eyes hard. “Maybe,” she finally whispers.
“We need to settle on a landing spot.” Howl clears his throat, looking over the notations to where Xuan told us to land. South of the settlements, to the west of the staging area. Right within the reach of everyone we’d like to stay away from. “Xuan said we need to get to the island. But he also said if we land too close to the settlements or the island itself, we’ll be shot down.”
I catch Tai-ge nodding along with what he says. “Do you know something about that?” I ask.
Tai-ge shakes his head. “No, I’m just listening.”
I feel as if I’ve swallowed a hunk of lead. I keep trying to trust but only get more reasons to doubt. “We need to find a spot that looks neutral,” I say. “Only, Xuan won’t tell us more than what he has already.”
Howl nods, picking up almost before I can finish. “If we find a spot with enough cover to hide the heli, we can scout our own information so we don’t have to rely on him.” He glances back toward the storage closet before nudging me. “Unless your telepathy kicked in and is telling you to do what the creepy medic says.”
“No, my telepathy doesn’t work unless both of my feet are on the ground and I’m not worried about people shooting me while I’m asleep.”
“He isn’t creepy,” Tai-ge interjects. “And what’s the point of having him here if we don’t follow his advice . . . ?”
Howl’s mouth quirks in a smile, ignoring Tai-ge. “Well, that’s useless. Wouldn’t you need telepathy most when you’re worried about dying?”
“I use my powers for the soft and gentle things of the world,” I retort. “Where cook stashed the good cookies. That sort of thing.” My hand hovers over a hilly space above the settlement, blank of any notation. “What about here? It doesn’t look so different from the south. No huge mountains or big signs that say, death to all who come this way.”
“The City doesn’t put up signs, usually. But maybe they’re more polite in Port North.” Howl leans over to look at the spot I’m pointing to, and suddenly he’s too close. I inch away to keep from touching him, my stomach clenching.
“Did you hear what I said?” Tai-ge pulls back from the map, going up on knees so he’s a head taller than the rest of us. June shrinks back an inch at the annoyance in his tone. “Xuan knows the area. He knows where people are, he knows where neutral territory is, and he’ll be able to get us down safely. Where did he say to land?”
“He . . . didn’t give us specifics.” I hate the way the lie slides so easily from my lips as I tilt forward to touch the map. My hands slide over the area southwest of the settlements where Xuan told us to go, then creep up to the north side of the populated area, the spot Howl and I were talking about. It’s blank of anything but a cluster of three hills we could hide behind. Howl gives a miniscule nod. June sits back as if the decision has been made. I look up at Tai-ge. “Xuan just told us to stay north of the settlement.” I point to the three hills. “What about here? Looks like it’s within hiking distance of the settlements and far enough from the Reds that they wouldn’t be able to swarm us.”
“If that’s what Xuan said, then that sounds fine.” Tai-ge eyes the northern area. “We’re not supposed to fly over the settled areas or the island, right?” He waits for me to nod. “So we’ll come at it from the other side. What else do we know about fortifications? Walls? Guards? Do they have an army, whoever they are?” Tai-ge transfers his gaze to Howl. “Helis or guns? Mantis?”
“He won’t tell us,” Howl replies. “Not yet.” He sits back from the map, returning Tai-ge’s stare with a smile. “Torture doesn’t provide reliable intelligence, for the most part, or I’d press him a little harder.”
The three of us around Howl go still. I can only imagine my face is woven into a horrified sort of surprise, though June looks vaguely interested. The angry set to Tai-ge’s jaw could cut metal. “Xuan is not a prisoner. He came to help of his own free will, and—”
“Whoa.” Howl puts his hands up. “Calm down. I was just kidding.”
“Just kidding?” Tai-ge’s thick eyebrows both go high on his forehead, and suddenly I’m glad I left the gun June took from the camp in the snow before we took off. “You already locked him in the same place we kept you—”
“No one is torturing anyone.” I put a hand up when Howl starts to argue. “I know you were joking, Howl, just . . . keep your sense of humor to yourself. Tai-ge, let’s choose some coordinates. June . . .” She’s curled up again, her face hidden underneath her arms. My heart misses a beat. “Are you okay?”
She nods without moving her arms. At least I think that’s what she’s doing based on the way her arms jog up and down. Howl puts a hand on her shoulder and she peeks through her fingers. “What’s up, June?”
She breathes deep, then she pushes herself up from the floor, her face pink at the cheeks. Her eyes flick up to rest on Tai-ge, a movement so small I almost don’t catch it. “I’m fine.”
I slide over to put an arm around her. For a second I think she’ll pull away, but then she lets her head hang back down. She’s so small. So hard on the outside. But that doesn’t mean she’s hard on the inside. Coming back here . . . coming back with the very person who chased her away . . . I swallow hard, holding her close with one arm, and with the other, I point to a clear spot on the map. “There.”
June leans forward, her fingers weaving in between the lines to keep from disrupting the trails of light. She points to a spot just behind the triangle of hills I picked, near the ocean. “No, here,” she whispers.
“Should we go that close to the water? We don’t know if they have boats, or how so much water will behave . . .” Howl trails off as June shakes her head, pointing again to the spot, a curve between two hills just before the knife’s-edge drop into the water.
“It’s safe there. Everyone’s gone.” June pushes away from me to stand up, then goes back to her spot on the other side of the cabin.
My eyes hurt, staring at the stiff lines of her shoulders, as if she’s buckling under whatever it is she remembers about this place.
Tai-ge touches the spot, his mouth knit tight as if he’s going to argue, but then he just looks up at me. “We have the maps that show where we are now? And the space between?”
“Yes. I’ll help you.” Howl bundles up the maps and the key and takes them over to the controls. After dropping them next to the captain’s chair, he goes to June and whispers something in her ear. She rolls over to push him away, but there’s a trace of a smile at her mouth before he goes back to the maps and Tai-ge.
June watches me cross the cabin, sitting up when I settle in next to her. She leans toward me to rest her head lightly on my shoulder. All of the tension swimming through the cabin seems to have drained. If things could be okay with June, then at least one corner of the world isn’t smashed to bits.
“We’re so close, June,” I whisper, worried saying it too loud will somehow curse us. The moment I begin to hope, the heli propellers will jam or Dr. Yang will materialize in the cargo bay with a bullet for each of us. “If we find my mother’s papers, it could be the end of Ma
ntis. The end of . . . at least some of the fighting.”
“No.” June picks up her mask from the ground, holding it up next to her face. “It would be the end of this. The end of fear.”
CHAPTER 31
IT’S HOURS BEFORE THE MAIN propellers reengage, jostling me from my uncomfortable sleep curled up next to June on the heli floor. Tai-ge is sitting up straight in the captain’s chair, eyes darting from the heli’s representation of our position and the map’s glitter. Howl perches on the copilot’s chair, looking into the bland coating of cloud outside the windows, uniform and gray.
Tai-ge’s talking, and I catch a hint of a smile on his face. “. . . but my dad couldn’t tell anyone the entire supply of sorghum was confiscated from the Third barracks out in Nanchang, because he was afraid they’d refuse to distill it in the factories.”
Howl laughs, the sound choking off as we descend a degree or two, and his hand slips down to press his stomach. “Are we going down?”
“Yes. We might want to wake up the girls. We’ll be going down the rest of the way in a minute, I think. Got to see what things look like on the other side of these clouds.”
“I’ll go over once I’m sure. Neither of them got enough sleep last night. You’re probably ready to get some real sleep too, yeah? After being in prison?”
Tai-ge nods. “That was not the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had. It all feels kind of surreal. Being there, and now being out here. I’m so tired.”
Howl spins in his chair, letting his feet trail along the floor. “Once we’re down, you’ll have to tell me if it’s true that General Hong convinced the Chairman to eat that red pepper jelly . . .”
“. . . and ended up having to make a formal apology?” Tai-ge actually snorts, a laugh wringing out of him. “He was mortified. At least until our front door closed, and then he couldn’t stop laughing.” The smile slips a little, and he looks back at the controls. “I keep thinking that he’s still down there somewhere. That when this is all done, I’ll be able to find him and my mother and . . . everything will be all right. But he’s . . . not.”
I inch closer to June’s warmth, my ears perked. This is more than Tai-ge’s said to me about it. He’s so quiet, as if displaying some sort of emotional vulnerability will just show the best place to stab. Not difficult to imagine why, unfortunately. His mother alone would have taken any advantage he gave her and used it weigh down the chains that bound him to her. It’s odd to see him confiding in Howl after the tense interchange earlier, the two of them swapping stories as if they’re drinking tea and throwing insults from the General’s table as they oversee the City Watch roll call.
“That’s why we’re up here, right?” Howl says, his voice so soft I almost miss it. “To try to keep anyone else’s dad from dying?”
I clench my eyes shut, dismay wrinkling my brow. Tai-ge’s smile is precious, and Howl—confession extractor extraordinaire—is the one who brought it out, however briefly. I wonder if it’s hard for Howl to stop, or if he’s actively trying to twist Tai-ge into a new shape. It bears watching.
I untangle myself from June and stand, though she hardly seems to notice, rolling over and pulling my sleeping bag over her head. Howl swivels in his chair at our movement, and his eyes follow me absently as I cross over to the storage closet to check on Xuan. I swallow down my annoyance at his attention and open the closet to find the medic curled against the wall asleep. Shutting the door instead of waking him up for our descent feels a little too delicious, as if all the nastiness he’s caused will somehow be compensated for if he throws up during our steep descent.
Outside the cockpit windows, the heli seems suspended in a fluff of cotton, nothing but fog above and below us. The floor seems to pull at me, jostling my stomach as the craft begins to slow. June sits up, her frazzled hair making her look about three times more surprised at the sensation than she probably is in reality. Howl stays in his seat, but his white-knuckled grip on the chair reveals his discomfort. Tai-ge is the only one of us who doesn’t seem to mind the drop.
“There’s something odd . . .” Tai-ge jams a finger into the sea of buttons, cutting off the electronic voice suggesting he turn on the heli’s main propellers. “I was hoping we could glide down, like our other landings. But the wind . . . I’ve never seen wind like this.”
I grab hold of the console as the craft gives a gut-wrenching lurch to one side. Tai-ge swears, negating the heli’s repeated entreaties that he turn the propellers on another two times until the air begins to toss us from side to side. The sigh of relief that streams out of me when he finally makes the command that allows the propellers to roar to life might have been a little embarrassing if I didn’t hear a similar one coming from Howl’s direction.
Going back to June, the two of us brace ourselves against the wall. My stomach gives a sickening slosh. The heli staggers as we fall, slows, then falls again with an awful lurch over and over. Just as it feels as though we’re diving headfirst into the ground, the craft crashes into something hard, the force of it slamming my head into the metal wall.
Tai-ge hisses a string of particularly creative expletives, presses another button, and the propellers slow to silence. Hands covering her ears, June only waits about three seconds after the propellers have given their last sputtering complaint before she’s up from the floor. She goes to the hatch, wrenches at the controls to open it, hopping impatiently from one foot to the other while it unlocks. When it’s still only half-open, she crouches down to peer through the hole, gives a deep sniff that turns into a cough, and jumps out.
The propellers probably notified every person living within miles that we’ve arrived, but there’s not much we can do about that now.
I stand with my toes peeking out over the open hatch, gusts of wind blowing up through the hole in quick stabs and flurries that seem to be reaching for me, attempting to drag me out as I peer out after June. Every breath sits heavy in my lungs, as if I’m gulping water rather than air.
“I’ll help June scout things out.” Howl unbuckles his seat restraint, then stands up and stretches. He looks in on Xuan, a trickle of swear words leaking out before he can shut the door again. “You didn’t wake him up?” Howl raises an eyebrow.
I shrug. “He looked so comfortable.”
“Remind me never to get on your bad side.” He bends to recover his discarded jacket, pausing for a moment to look back at me, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes, as if he didn’t mean to say it and only now realizes how ridiculous it sounds. As if what’s passed between us is some kind of inside joke rather than a few cuts short of death.
For some reason, I find myself wanting to laugh along with him, a reaction that makes my stomach clench . . . but then settle in confusion. Howl has always been able to make me laugh, and it isn’t as if laughing will fundamentally change our positions here. He knows that, and so do I. Maybe making Tai-ge smile wasn’t part of a grand plan either. It’s just . . . Howl. And the fact that his personality hasn’t been swapped out for a scarier one isn’t so jarring as it was at first.
What did I ever do to make you think I was okay with Yizhi taking you?
My shoulders tense. I haven’t let myself think about what he said yesterday under the owl’s tree. And just that one unfinished thought is hard to push aside. If it really had all been manipulation and lies, he would have marched me straight to Dr. Yang’s laboratory and strapped me to the operating table himself. But he tried to get us out, tried to find another way. I’ll never know what he would have done if I’d stayed. I do think he meant for us both to survive, if he could finagle it. We both probably would have, since Dr. Yang didn’t want to kill me after all.
That doesn’t absolve Howl of anything, though. He knew what was going to happen to me, no matter what he decided to do about it later. And nothing can change the fact that Helix—who I saw kill four people in less than a minute—shivered whenever Howl looked at him for too long.
Howl walks over, pulling his c
oat on one arm at time. “You coming out?” He glances from Tai-ge—still fiddling with his instruments and staring at the map—to the storage closet, considering. He lowers his voice. “One of us should stay until we’ve figured out what exactly is going on. If they try something . . .”
“I’ll stay. I want to try talking to Tai-ge again, anyway. See if he can clear some things up.” I look at Tai-ge, the traces of my friend’s dimples lined into his cheeks as he fixes something on the control panel. Maybe he really believes he and Xuan are skilled enough to have walked out of the camp without being challenged. If I can help him see why everything looks so suspicious, maybe he’ll be able to help us deal with Xuan.
I take a step back from the opening, keeping my eyes on the open hatch so I don’t have to acknowledge Howl waiting for me to answer. Perhaps in another world, another lifetime where SS hadn’t turned the land between City and Mountain to killing fields, things between us could have been different. There wouldn’t have been any blood, any guns, any brands or bad dreams.
But even as the thought materializes, I shoot it down. Whatever that world would be like, we don’t live there and there’s no point in wishing we did. Howl’s made his choices, I’ve made mine, and I’m not sure how far this easiness will last past getting the cure. The stones have already been placed, and Howl likes his heart beating, just the way I do. If we’re at cross-purposes after this, I know what to expect.
“Well.” Howl zips his coat, and I can still feel his eyes on me, waiting for something. “If June and I don’t come back before dark, maybe consider sending someone out to look for the pieces? Oh, hang on a second.” My thoughts clatter to a stop as Howl reaches inside the coat and pulls out a gun. And then a second. I can’t help but recall the last time this happened, out in the forest. Howl bristling with weapons when I thought all we had was a dull knife.
I touch my pocket, feeling for the knife. Once again, it isn’t there.
Shatter the Suns Page 21