CHAPTER 42
THE GROUND SEEMS TO SLIP and slide under my feet as I walk back, pushing me toward the heli against my will. This is what happened in the Mountain, everyone telling me Howl wasn’t the person I thought he was. And he wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe it, so I chose to trust him. I didn’t know him well enough to be able to absorb or discount the information, had to hope I guessed right.
Tai-ge, however, I do know. Where all the evidence stacked up against Howl didn’t make sense to me, Xuan’s story fits exactly into Hong Tai-ge’s shape. I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t realize how much.
The owl’s image pulses through my brain, the one who cried all night at me to bury my dead as I sat under its tree, wondering which of my friends the Reds had killed. The bird that stared me down when I tried to push it out of my mind, hissed when I threw rocks, then flew at me just to make sure I was listening. I thought it was a superstition, a fear that bled out of my head to plague us while we tried to sleep. But it was right. Someone did die that night.
Dying isn’t always about pulses and lungs and blood flow. Sometimes it’s a memory, an incorrect perception that dies inside you, leaving the world less a person you love.
Tai-ge looks up when I whisper the hatch open and climb up through its craw. His eyes catch on the blank air next to me, wildly grasping at the space Xuan is supposed to occupy. He runs to the hatch, holding a hand out to help me in. “You got the cuffs open. Where’s Xuan?”
“I let him go. He’ll probably get eaten by a gore before he gets anywhere near Port North.”
“You let him . . . !” Tai-ge swears, swatting the hatch out of my hand as I start to close it, the metal banging against the floor. “Get out of the way, Sevvy, we need him. What were you thinking?”
Keeping my face calm, I use both hands to close the hatch, forcing Tai-ge away from the opening. When I turn and stand up, I look him full in the eyes, searching for the part of him that’s different. As if betrayal should show up like smoke behind his irises. But he just seems confused.
“Where is the other gun, Tai-ge?” I ask.
He pulls it from his coat, and I hold my hand out for it.
He doesn’t give it to me, looking down at its silver barrel. “Move, Sevvy. You don’t understand—”
I grab the gun from Tai-ge’s loose grip. The weapon is heavy, the metal warm where it was against his skin inside the coat. Walking to the heli’s flight control panel feels almost as if I’m floating on air, vertigo nibbling harder and harder at the sides of my vision when I get to the heli’s flight control panel of blinking lights and point it toward the navigation screen. Raise the gun.
Fire.
It isn’t as deafening as I’d like, something on the gun’s muzzle muting the sound, and it makes me even more angry, wanting it to be as loud as I am angry.
“Sevvy! What in the name of Yuan’s axe are you—” Tai-ge ducks as I shoot the control panel itself, the buttons and levers, anything that looks fragile, until one of the bullets ricochets into the ceiling with an infuriated twang. Tai-ge crashes into me, pinning my shoulders and arms to the cold metal wall while he wrestles the gun from my hands. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s empty.
The door to the storage closet flies open, and suddenly June is elbowing her way between me and Tai-ge, standing between us with her arms extended as if she’s the wall that will protect me from him.
“Go back in with Howl, June.” My voice is so steady, I can hardly tell it’s coming from my own throat. “Give us a minute.”
Tai-ge’s mouth is still open, unspoken profanities practically dripping out as he looks from me to the ruined console, hardly acknowledging June when she doesn’t move.
“I’m fine, June. Go make sure I didn’t wake Howl up. Please?”
She turns to stare up at me, her cheeks red, nose uneven where it was broken a few months ago. But then she steps down from raised portion of the floor, only looking back once before she goes back into the storage closet.
My shoulder hurts, my hand numb. I slide to the ground, not moving as the console bleats a sharp metallic protest, every system I hit attempting to beg for mercy. Tai-ge’s hands go to his hair as he turns toward the pleading cries. “Sevvy, why did you . . . What is wrong with you?”
I don’t move from the floor. “What is it I don’t understand, Tai-ge?”
“You don’t understand how important Xuan was—”
“Because he was supposed to help you find a way to disable their towers.” Tai-ge doesn’t move, his face too surprised, too shocked to emit any sound. “Xuan’s seen them working, seen Port North take helis out of the sky. You told her everything. About the cure. What Mother said about Port North.” Every word comes out as a growl. “You and Xuan were the best plan she could come up with, the best chance General Hong had of getting helis to the island before Dr. Yang gets Menghu on the ground. If you disabled the towers, she could fly right in, take the cure before they get even close.” I swallow, and it feels like gulping down a knife blade, every inch a searing pain. Why didn’t I see that when the first General Hong fell, there were only so many candidates who could take his place? “I’m not going to let your mother take the cure.”
Tai-ge shakes his head, holding a hand out to me as he steps closer. “Sevvy, I think you need to calm down. . . .”
“You’ve been talking to her this whole time. You told her about me being cured, that we were on to something, going after Port North.”
He steps back and slumps into the chair. “Sevvy . . .”
“My whole life you’ve been nodding along when people called me a traitor. As if it’s in my blood to go against everything I’d been taught. To want to hurt the people I loved. But what is a traitor, really?” I fold my arms tight against my chest, as if it might hold all the pieces inside me threatening to blast apart together. “Someone who goes against everything they are, against what they believe? Someone willing to abandon their friends so they’ll win? Tai-ge, you got out of that camp because the new General—your mother—escorted you out.”
Tai-ge’s eyebrows furrow down, making one thick line. “It was Seconds who found me in that camp. Of course they took me to her when they realized who I was.”
“She gave you new maps, a new key, and told you to leave me and June on the ground where we wouldn’t bother you anymore.” I look him over, trying to decide where he was hiding it. Whether he meant to come back for me at all. “Is it better than the Chairman’s? Maybe it isn’t such an offensive purple color?”
His hand twitches toward his jacket pocket, but he shakes his head. “I wasn’t going to leave you there, Sevvy. She wanted me to, but I would never . . .” He swallows hard, gesturing up to the heli. “She gave us an opportunity, Sevvy. How else were we supposed to get to the cure before Dr. Yang? With the Chairman selling everything we had to those monsters? I had to tell her what he was doing—”
“You’ve been talking to her a lot longer than that. Yuan’s bloated head, I am so stupid. How else would Howl have heard reports about where we were? How else would those Reds have been able to walk up to the Post and ask for us by name? You were so angry when June showed us where we were on the map that day because you gave the Reds bad coordinates.”
His mouth opens, but nothing comes out for a moment before it closes again, the hard-set lines I’ve become accustomed to since his father died settling over his features. “We needed help, Sevvy. We knew the cure was a real thing, and people were dying. . . . The moment we had a plan I thought would work, I stopped talking to her.”
“For the whole twenty-four hours until we went into Dazhai, Tai-ge? Now you’re a full-blown traitor just like me. What makes it okay for you to say the Chairman needs to be taken down? Your dad dying? I never got that option when he killed my father.”
“Stop. Talking.” Tai-ge’s face contorts, his accustomed calm unable to keep its grip. He sinks down into the pilot chair, his shoulders sagging. “My mother is not a tr
aitor. She is trying to mitigate damage the Chairman is doing to our people, Sevvy. It isn’t just those Menghu he let run through Dazhai with guns. He let the Menghu into the City. He had my father killed. Had Firsts airlift all the Mantis along with more than half the City’s gas masks and turn them all over to Dr. Yang, according to Mother. She didn’t know he’d arranged with Dr. Yang to open the walls in the first place. With all of us so used to bowing to First marks . . .” Tai-ge scrubs a hand through his hair, as if even now he can’t bear to say anything negative out loud about Firsts. “Mother’s doing her best to keep Dr. Yang away from our resources. Most of the helis are out on the farms; most of the food in these Mountains is out where Seconds are in control. She doesn’t want to exchange the Chairman for someone new who favors Outsiders over City people . . . and isn’t that why we’re out here? To stop him?” He sighs, looking at me as if I must understand now that he’s been speaking for a minute or so, like I’d accept any words, any explanation, so long as it came from his mouth. “This is how we keep the Menghu from exterminating us.”
“You think the Reds are going to follow a general who goes against the Chairman?” I spit the words at him like acid, wishing they were.
“It’s not easy to be at war, Sevvy,” Tai-ge spits right back. “Would you rather she watched them all die? She’s going to save the City. That means . . . this.” He gestures to the heli, to the two of us and the island beyond. “It means doing things you wouldn’t—things you shouldn’t—do, because it means it’s the difference between annihilation of everything in this world that is good and not.”
The Hong family, still twisting and manipulating. What was it they used to say in the City? That General Hong practically was a First, even if he had two stars weighing down his collar. Isn’t that part of the reason Firsts tried to pin that bomb on me, back when Tai-ge and I were flailing in the Aihu River at the beginning of all this? Howl said Firsts might have been targeting Tai-ge. Trying to warn the General to take a step back. Some Reds follow the General first. But based on what we saw in that camp, I could almost see the divide between Reds who are still loyal and the ones who aren’t sure the Chairman is a good face for the City anymore.
“She’s negotiating with Menghu when they just shot up her camp?” I ask. “That’s a compromise you’re okay with?”
“Until we get the cure? Yes. But not after. Not even Dr. Yang meant for the Menghu to kill anyone at Dazhai. It was a mistake.” Tai-ge looks down. “Menghu were up on the paddies to make sure no one was sneaking food out of Dazhai. And in the heli-field, loading up everything they could carry to send toward Menghu camps. They only started shooting because of June. That whole massacre shouldn’t have happened.” He looks over the radio, poking at the now-silent knobs and dials. “We’ll get the cure, and then there won’t be any mistakes. There won’t be any Outsiders stealing our food or our masks, killing our soldiers just because they can.” The rust in his voice makes me pull away, as if something in Tai-ge has changed.
Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe I just never saw this deep before.
“You’re the one who started this, Sevvy,” Tai-ge continues. “If Dr. Yang gets the cure, there won’t be any hope of getting away from him. Not for the City, for any of the Seconds or Firsts or Thirds or anyone else.” He points to me. “But with us on the ground, with Xuan helping us—”
“Did Xuan even want to help?” I cut in. “He’s just as scared of you as he was of the Menghu.”
“What does it matter what any of us want, Sevvy? This could be the end of the City, of us and everything we know. If Dr. Yang has the cure, he can decide all of us are farm slaves and we won’t be able to argue. But if we can take out Kamar’s towers—”
“Mother called it Port North, Tai-ge. Kamar is what the City calls the place where they’ve been kidnapping and killing the people for the last eight years.” I put a hand over my mouth, so angry I can’t even find words to put into understandable sentences. I lick my lips, the dry skin cracking under my tongue. “If we let your mother get the cure, then nothing is going to change. I’ll still be a traitor. They will shoot June, and instead of saving Lihua, they’ll just create a hundred more reasons to experiment on little kids. You’re letting helis invade Port North without thinking about all the people who will die because of it.”
“They’re not our people, Sevvy! They’ve been holding the cure back—”
I stand up from my spot on the ground and walk over to the packs. “You’re trying to save yourself, Tai-ge. What about the rest of us?”
Every word Tai-ge says blisters. “What were you planning to do with your mother’s notes anyway? We have one medic—who I brought, by the way—one heli-pilot, one half-dead impostor, one Outsider, and one . . .” He gestures helplessly. “You. Whatever you are. Even if your mother made ten thousand doses of the cure with your name written across them, how would it help anything? Even if we had a way to give them out, it would only stop the people out there killing one another accidentally through compulsions—not those who want to kill, like the Menghu.”
I shake my head, pulling his pack from the pile and tying a hammock to the top of it. “The only way to stop everyone from fighting over the cure is to have people outside the City and Mountain develop it. Everyone will have to stop fighting.” It sounds naive, idiotic even, now that I’ve said it out loud, but I can’t stop now. “They’ll have to kill the ranking systems and the slave labor in order to deal with us. Either that or face living with a mask, hoping SS doesn’t get in. People will come to us. Howl says—”
“Whatever Howl says is going to take you straight back to the Mountain and all the Menghu you’re so scared of.” Tai-ge’s hand is on the pack, jerking it away from me, but when I turn to face him, his expression softens. “Menghu have done nothing but hurt us and the people we love. If we get the cure, I can protect you. We’ll be safe.”
“I haven’t been a part of the City’s ‘we’ since I was eight.” I walk to the hatch, dropping the pack next to it on the metal floor. “For me, it won’t matter if it’s Dr. Yang or your mother who gets the cure. They won’t give it to people like me, or June, or the families they dragged away from that skeleton village to work until their fingers froze.” I jam the lever that controls the hatch, and it slides open, the wafts of brackish air tangling in my hair. “They’ll give it to the people who keep them in power.”
I kick his pack through the hatch, waiting until I hear it thunk on the ground below before turning back to Tai-ge. “Now get out.”
Tai-ge’s mouth hangs open, staring at the gaping open hatch. “Sevvy—”
“No. I’m not going to explain this to you anymore. I shouldn’t have to, and it’s too dangerous to try. Get out.”
“I tried to do it your way.” Tai-ge’s voice is quiet. “I got the growth regulators to get us out of Dazhai. I snuck into a Red camp with you. Stole from them.” Tai-ge rises slowly to his feet, his fists clenched. “I wanted it to work, but it just . . . hasn’t. I love you, Sevvy—”
“No, Tai-ge, I really don’t think you do. And I’m done with this conversation.” I raise the gun, my hands shaking. It’s empty of bullets, but pointing it at someone I’ve wasted so much time on shudders through me like a sickness. “Get ou—”
The sound of shattering glass slices through my sentence, and suddenly the cockpit window behind Tai-ge’s head fills my vision, cracks spreading like grasping fingers across the paned windows. Shards of glass scatter across the floor in a glittering assault, a gaping hole just in front of the pilot’s chair.
Tai-ge crashes into me just as something flies through the hole, bouncing across the metal floor until it clatters to a stop right at our feet.
“Let go of me!” I scream, but I’m caught in the snare of Tai-ge’s arms, Tai-ge trying to stay between me and it, even as I try to kick the device out through the hatch. The grenade falls into two perfect halves, the pieces beginning to spin with a high-pitched scream.
White gas p
ours from the two spinning halves even as I worm my way out from the tentacled snarl of Tai-ge’s arms. Eyes stinging, suddenly all I can feel is cold metal against my cheek, pressing against my shoulders and stomach, the smell of burning.
And then, nothing.
PART III
CHAPTER 43
SHOUTS CLUNK ABOUT INSIDE MY skull as if my brain has been replaced with a set of weiqi stones. Hands touch my arms and hands, my neck, my hair. My eyelids feel as if they’ve been fused together, petrified, leaving me only a stone version of the girl I thought I was.
Pain pierces the inside of my arm. Then my neck, fiery trails of pain burning merrily down the length of my body until the screams trapped inside my stone mouth are worse than the agony.
The voices recede, pokes and prods replaced by the metal groan of a hinge. I try to slow my breathing, to open my eyes, but my body doesn’t listen. Memories of Sleep slink in through the cracks, oily and black, as I try again to move and none of my muscles respond. Panic buzzes at the back of my mouth, foaming down into my chest and stomach, and I strain to force something, anything to obey. A finger. A toe, even. Anything that will let me be alive, that will prove I’m not trapped inside my own body again.
When my eyelids finally crack, a scream of triumph tears up through my throat but catches, hot and stinging, in my mouth. Black. Black all around me, the room so close I can feel my breath rebounding back into my face from a ceiling only inches from my nose, the walls brushing my arms even as they hug my sides.
A coffin, like they used to bury people in.
My chest presses against the lid of the box when I breathe. Letting my eyes flutter shut, I try to convince my panicking lungs to slow. If I don’t touch anything, I can pretend it’s just dark. A moonless night. Safe, even if the air around me feels warm and sick, as though it has already been stripped of oxygen.
I shift uncomfortably, trying to concentrate on what I heard instead of the close air. The shouting was like those men I met at the Post. The man with his erhu and the two friends muttering to themselves in gibberish. But as much as I try to hold on to the image of the Post, the song, try to remember the words the men said, the walls seem to push in on me. Tears tickle down my cheeks, and I can’t even wipe them away. Just as my body begins to shake, a small square directly over my face pulls back. My hands knock against the top of the box, as if I could somehow contort myself up through the hole and crawl out, but the space is so tight I can’t bend my arms up toward it. A waft of cold air hits my nose and snakes down into my lungs as I greedily inhale, the brackish aftertaste hardly noticeable after the stale air inside the box. Something blocks the light streaming in, and then there’s a pair of deep brown eyes peering curiously at me.
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