“If only the people here hadn’t abandoned this place. I could do with some tea. Do you think gore scat would make a good flavor?”
“Abandoned . . .” Xuan narrows his eyes at me, then looks at Tai-ge. “You didn’t land where I told you to.”
Neither of us answers. He’ll see well enough when he goes outside. Tai-ge leads Xuan toward the hatch, waiting for him to go first before climbing down after him.
“I’m sorry about earlier.” Howl’s voice snaps my attention back to him.
“You’re sorry?” I blink.
He comes closer, glancing at June and lowering his voice as if she somehow won’t hear. “I shouldn’t have brought that up. About the knife, I mean. I didn’t realize it would be like . . . prying, I guess.” His eyes run up and down my bare arms as if he’ll be able to decide which of my scars belongs to Wei, the seventeen-year-old Seph who didn’t deserve to be in that orphanage any more than I did. “I’m going to go keep an eye on them. Just to be safe.”
I nod, not quite sure how to respond, a sorry for something that seems sort of ridiculous when measured against the hole blasted through the memories we share. An apology is an apology, though. No matter what Howl is trying to say about Tai-ge for telling it when I didn’t want him to.
Things I’m trying not to think myself. So I settle for another nod. “Thanks for saying that.”
“Thanks?” A smile starts in the crinkles around his eyes as he starts down the ladder after Tai-ge and Xuan. He moves over to let June slip down the ladder next to him. I guess we’re all risking the gores at the same time.
Howl continues, “I wish I’d thought before handing it to Tai-ge in the tent. It was all . . .” The smile reaches his mouth, but it’s sort of awkward now, as if he wished he’d stopped talking.
“It was all what?” I sit forward. Ready for a punch line after the bad memories tonight.
“It was all I had left. Of you.” His eyes are a fraction too wide. An entire kaleidoscope of butterflies erupts into flight inside my stomach and up into my throat. I can almost feel my mouth drop open, as if there are words that should be in it, but it’s just butterflies, butterflies, butterflies.
Until he speaks again. “I guess it’s better that he has it. You don’t like the tree house idea anymore, so I think we’re done stabbing that particular dead gore.”
My stomach sinks, and I look down, trying to arrange all the things I wanted to say into something new, something to turn it into a joke or even into a clumsy sort of laugh. Anything to negate what I was just allowing to happen inside of me. I know what he wants, and it isn’t me. It might have been before. I think . . . I’m pretty sure it was before, at least to some degree.
The thought feels like . . . something. Like it should mean something, but I’m too afraid to look. It’s clear that I’ve said and done enough to make Howl’s end goal change. Which is good. I don’t think there’s room inside me to go back to where we were before. Because where we were before wasn’t real.
I know what he is now. And it probably isn’t something anyone should want in their life permanently.
Before I can force any words into some sort of acceptable reply, June gives a shout from below. “He’s running!”
Howl’s down the ladder before I can surge to my feet, but I’m only a breath behind once I hit the ground. Xuan and Tai-ge are already hidden by the heavy fog swirling up to lick my ankles. Howl takes off into the mist, and I can only follow, hoping he can read the ground and the trees, and find Xuan’s trail.
It’s not until we’ve passed the first row of emaciated dwellings that I spot a dark form lying in the grass. Howl skids to a stop, already on his knees by Tai-ge’s side with a hand around his wrist checking for a pulse. I crash down next to him, my hands finding Tai-ge’s hair, his forehead, and there’s blood in scattered droplets on my fingertips. Scarlet against the pale cast to his face.
A haunting cry sneaks up through the curling mist. Goose pimples on my arms prick into knives as the cry ends in a chilling cackle.
A gore’s hunting call.
“Tai-ge’s alive. But Xuan may not be for much longer. Stay here.” Howl’s off before I can respond, ghosting into the maze of houses, their wasted remains closing around him like skeletal claws.
It couldn’t have been a gore that hurt Tai-ge. Of course not. There would be more blood and less of my friend. My hands shake as I tear a length of fabric from Tai-ge’s tattered shirt and press it to the gash in his head. I look out into the mist. Where’s Xuan? We can’t lose him. Not if he’s our only chance to talk our way into Port North. June materializes out of the mist, her feet hardly touching the ground as she runs to my side.
Tai-ge’s eyelashes flutter, his brown eyes glazed and unfocused when they open. “Sevvy?”
“Take him back, June. I’m going to help Howl.” Another howl slashes like a razor against my eardrums, freezing my hands on Tai-ge’s bloody forehead. June shoves something heavy and metal at me before pulling Tai-ge up into a sitting position. It’s a gun.
“Go!” she yells.
I stumble to my feet, momentum almost throwing me back to the ground until I find my stride and run in the direction Howl went. But there are gunshots going off in my head and Parhat’s on the ground in front of me, blood dripping down his nose. And gores are charging into a Red-filled clearing in the forest, bullets burning smoking trails in the beasts’ thick pelts. Kasim, Howl’s best friend, lying helpless on the ground, blood littering his unconscious form as they tear a man apart right over him. The real world is a blur, the scratch of dry grass against my ankles, rocks catching at my boots. I can hardly see anything in front of me, tears streaming down my face as I run. But I do run until Howl’s shape rears up in front of me in the dark.
He waits a moment for me to catch up, then sets off again. My lungs burn and I duck under branches and through scrub that’s too wet, too green even in the feathered gray of twilight. The air feels soggy and wet in my lungs, molding my insides as I choke down each breath. Howl darts between two of the weathered houses, and a shout rings out before I get around the corner. My side catches on splintered wood because I turn too sharply, almost tripping over Howl. He’s on top of Xuan, knees digging into his back. The handcuffs glint silver, shoved into the dirt over Xuan’s head.
Another of the awful baying howls shudders through the houses ahead of us. And then another off to my right. “It’s too late. I thought it would be the Kamari who killed us, landing here. But I chose the wrong moment to escape.” Xuan’s voice sends chills down my spine, dry and raspy, like dead leaves rustling. “I guess none of us win.”
“Get back to the heli!” Howl yells at me.
“You get off me. I’m going to run. I’m better off with the gores than you.” Xuan gulps. “I think. But if I have to get eaten, I won’t complain if you stay out here and get eaten too.”
My gaze drops down to Xuan’s hands, and I grope through my jacket pocket to find the key I just zipped inside it. My fingers are slippery with sweat, glancing off the other odds and ends shoved into my pockets. When the key finally comes out, another beastly wail jerks my head out toward the line of houses to the left of us. Gores hunt in packs. Come at their prey from more than one side. How long before they get here?
“What are you doing, Sev?” Howl yells. “Get out of here! I can bring him back!”
“Get off him!” I growl back. Howl doesn’t move off Xuan’s back until the key clicks into the lock, opening one side of the cuffs. Xuan shakes his hand free, swearing at me when I clap the empty bracelet over my own wrist.
“What did you do that for?”
“We need him. We need him to translate for us, or we’ll never get the cure,” I say.
Howl grabs my wrist and drags me up from the ground, barely giving Xuan time to find his feet before beginning to run. Xuan stumbles as we take off, wrenching me back, though he follows rather than waiting to be torn apart the way he threatened.
The
gores’ teeth-chattering wails are bearing down on us from two directions now, immediately behind and now off to my right, though the silence seems to crackle along my left side as we sprint. Howl pushes me and Xuan to go first, keeping up just behind us, the howls seeming only to be a few steps behind him.
The heli looms like a great beast up ahead, shadowy and vague except for where cockpit lights pierce the mist. Xuan keeps pace beside me, our arms tangling us with every stride. He groans just as I’m about to give a shout of relief. We’re only twenty feet from the ladder when I turn to look over my shoulder for Howl.
He’s there. Only twenty or so feet behind him there’s a streaking blur of shadow, the last bits of sunlight seeming to burn in its black eyes. A gore.
The ladder is only a few yards away. Only a few steps. But the sound of paws brushing over the loamy earth lopes up behind us, the loud huff of a charging predator eating away at my ears. A huge weight slams into me from behind, a dead pulse of fear blocking everything out but the press of dirt against my face when I hit the ground. Stripes of burning pain cut into my back, everything silent in the panic of finding myself pressed down into the grass with one arm trapped under me. When sound catches up to me, snarling yips pierce my eardrums, each violent bark puncturing the air. Xuan is next to me on the ground, his eyes full of something too terrible to articulate.
A clear window appears in the terrified frenzy controlling my brain. You aren’t dead. Do something. My trapped arm has a lump pressing into it.
The gun.
A whining yelp rips through the air, raising goose bumps all over my body, but the weight lessens for a moment. I take the opening, throwing myself over, bringing the gun up, my finger groping for the trigger.
It isn’t a gore on top of me. It’s Howl, his back to me, wide frame dwarfed underneath the monster towering over us. Long yellow teeth frame the mouth gaping open above us, black tongue arching as the creature screams, a reek of long-rotted meat enveloping me. Blood drips down its muzzle and lower jaw.
Before it can bite, I bring my arm around Howl and pull the trigger, the explosion of sound seeming to crack my skull, the gun kicking my hand back with a violent jolt. The bullet catches the gore in its high, hyena-like cheekbone, but glances off. Lurching back, the gore swipes at its eye and muzzle with a gargantuan paw. Howl lunges forward as it recoils, one of his hands jamming up under the beast’s jaw. The gore squeals, then pounces on Howl.
The sound of more gunfire hardly penetrates through the blood rushing through my ears. I have to get to Howl, my whole body crying out as the world starts to turn over, flashes of movement blurring everything in front of me to slashing strokes of color. Xuan’s dead weight pulls me down to the ground in a pathetic crawl, tugging at my tethered arm as I fight to reach Howl, trapped in the gore’s embrace.
Another shot splinters from the heli’s direction. The gore goes eerily still, turning its black gaze on me, one of its eyes a red, chunky mess oozing down its cheek. I freeze, hypnotized by the intense one-eyed stare. When the gore’s snarl-wrinkled snout relaxes, it falls, the whole of its powerful shoulders and destroyed head slamming down directly onto Howl’s limp form.
CHAPTER 37
HANDS GRASP MY SHOULDERS, FORCING me to look up. It’s June, her eyes hidden under a worried scowl. Half a second of inspection later, she gives a jerky nod and rushes over to Howl and the dead gore on top of him. Another baying cry rips through the air over us. More gores are coming.
The pull from Xuan’s handcuff suddenly changes direction as he charges after June. My hands ball into fists, ready to pull our shackled hands behind him, jump on his back, or raise my gun and shoot until he stops trying to attack. But instead of lashing out at June, he tugs at the gore’s hulking shoulders, attempting to pull the creature’s dead weight off Howl. Tai-ge appears next to me, moving with an almost drunken slowness, our hands twisting deep into the mottled brown-and-black fur to help move the monster.
I can hardly look when the gore finally rolls off Howl. It seems impossible that he could still be alive under the dark wash of red thick across his skin. He doesn’t move, staring blankly at us.
June kneels, tugging at one of his shoulders, but Xuan pulls her back. “We can’t pick him up.” His voice is eerily calm. “If his back or neck is injured—”
“Then he’s dead anyway.” June doesn’t let him finish, another gore’s awful cry echoing out from the trees as if to punctuate the sentence.
Together we lift him, June at his feet, Tai-ge and Xuan at his shoulders and torso, with me bracing Howl’s neck, walking backward to get him to the heli. One of his shoulders is a bloody mess, a jagged hint of his collarbone stabbing up through his skin. Howl stares up at me as we rush him toward the heli ladder, eyes seeming almost black against his ashen skin.
When we get to the ladder, it looks impossibly tall, a climb I hardly even thought about five minutes ago suddenly an insurmountable barrier. Movement in the mist flickers out from the odd scrubby trees, twisting fear through my chest. We don’t have time to figure out how to get Howl up into the heli.
A shudder runs through Howl and he blinks, finally tearing his eyes away from my face. He jerks one foot away from June, and she sets the other on the ground, Tai-ge and Xuan lowering the rest of him to the grass. The handcuffs pull as I try to help him sit upright.
“We have to get you inside,” I say. We’re so close, I can’t see anything but Howl’s blanched skin, feeling his whole frame shake as if it’s my muscles shuddering out of control. But he nods.
Slowly, painfully, he rolls onto his knees, his bloody, broken shoulder slumping to one side. I pull his good arm over my shoulder, groaning at his weight as we walk to the ladder. Xuan helps from the other side, carefully pulling here and there without touching the broken clavicle, or Howl’s arm dangling painfully down. June snakes up the ladder past us, stationing herself at the top, where she can pull at Howl from above. The gallop of Howl’s heart raps out through his side, the beat too fast, too hard. He attempts to link one arm through the first rung and use it to leverage himself up, and Tai-ge lodges himself beneath Howl, half climbing, half carrying him up from the ladder as June pulls from above.
Feeling useless, I try to stay out of the way to allow the two of them to get him the rest of the way into the heli. The world feels too close, Tai-ge’s boots in my face when he climbs above me, Xuan and the handcuff pulling at my wrist as we bend and crawl all over each other trying to get inside. When my head clears the hatch, all I can see are Howl’s boots lying on the stained carpet.
“Shut the hatch,” Xuan orders once we’re in, crouching next to Howl’s side. “And someone get me towels. Something clean to stop him bleeding. And water. And where’s your medikit?”
The length of chain between the cuffs pulls as he leans over the jagged edges of the wound. Howl thrashes away, his breaths coming in a hyperventilated frenzy as he tries to put space between himself and Xuan. June hovers protectively over his bloody shoulder, her fists clenched.
“You stay away from him!” I shove myself between Xuan and Howl. Tai-ge stands next to me, medikit in one hand, gun in his other, the barrel pointed at Xuan’s chest.
“Move.” Xuan’s voice is cold, shattering my panic into a thousand fizzing pieces. But when he tugs on the handcuff to encourage me to obey him, it’s gentle. “You want him to live, then get out of my way. I’m a medic, remember?”
“That just means you know what will kill us fastest. It wasn’t a gore that knocked out Tai-ge.”
Tai-ge holds the medikit out to me, keeping the gun trained on Xuan’s chest. “He attacked me and ran. I didn’t even hear the gores until after June came.”
I grab the medikit, but I can hardly look at the gash in Howl’s shoulder, the gouges cutting through his shirt and across his chest. Blood soaks into the carpet from his arms and hands, like a sponge being squeezed out. One of Howl’s hands twitches toward mine, fingers curling around my wrist, his knuckles banging again
st the medikit’s metal case. I could help people at the orphanage. Clean up cuts and bruises. I’ve set broken bones. But this . . .
Xuan’s finger jabs toward the long gash in Howl’s shoulder, the bone peeking up through the open flesh. “If we don’t get him taped shut, he’s going to bleed to death.”
Howl moans, the first sound he’s made. His grip around my wrist is getting tighter by the moment. “If you hurt him . . .” I close my eyes and move to the side, letting Xuan pull the medikit away from me. He barks at June to get him a waterskin and something clean to stanch the bleeding, ignoring June’s features twisted over in fear and anger as she goes. His hands pick through the different bandages and packages in the medikit, my stomach squirming when he comes up with a short blade. After everything Howl’s fought in his life, is he going to die with a Red’s hands inside of him?
Xuan rejects a blanket, a dirty towel, and June’s mussed sleeping bag, finally accepting two clean shirts June stole from Tai-ge’s pack as suitable. He presses one against the gash that tears through Howl’s shoulder and back, then hands the other shirt to me to stanch the blood trickling from the cuts running the length of Howl’s arm. Taking the rejected sleeping bag, June drapes it over Howl’s legs, rearing back when he kicks it off, jostling himself onto his side. Xuan firmly pushes him back to the floor.
“Would you try to keep him still, Blondie?” Xuan nods to June. She freezes, a stone-faced expression flashing across her features, but it only lasts for a second before she’s kneeling by Howl’s head. Xuan twists all the air out of the waterskin, then keeps twisting until it bulges with pressure. He pulls back the now-bloodied shirt, jabs a hole in the bottom of the waterskin with the blade, then sprays the hard stream of water into Howl’s blood-black wounds. Howl flinches away from the strong bursts of water, June trying to hold his head still. I sit down next to her, my free hand on his unmarked shoulder to try to keep the rest of him from moving, the other following Xuan around as he ransacks the medikit, spreading the white-packaged medical supplies all over the floor around him.
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