Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  I push the bowl away, my stomach churning. “No thank you.”

  “Come with me, then.” He extends a hand to help me stand, but I get up on my own, dusting off my knees and arms, trying to ignore the damp cling of my shirt against my skin. “I’ve a story to tell you, little sister.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry. Habits are difficult to break, especially when I’ve little motivation.”

  I look over at the jab, surprised to find that ghost of a smile that seems to hover about this man’s face, as if he thinks he’s teasing me. Out in the hallway, cold soaks through my bare feet as we walk down a bleak hall. The two guards walk just behind us down the long corridor, the woman trailing a hand along the geometric lines that mark the pale, porous stone walls.

  The erhu player walks between me and the inner wall, where open doorways lead to less than inviting dark tunnels. He almost seems to glide, his hands tucked into his sleeves as we walk. “If you like my story, will you be good enough to answer a question for me at the end? I hope we can help you.”

  “You want to help me? You’ve already killed my . . .” I trail off. Not “friend.” Tai-ge wasn’t my friend. I thought he was, and the realization that he very much wasn’t still feels like vertigo.

  The erhu player’s mouth quirks. “I haven’t killed anyone, Jiang Sev. The Baohujia do what they must to keep us safe from what lurks outside our territory. We Speakers work with them to keep those inside the territory happy.”

  “You’re a Speaker?” Wasn’t that what the woman back in the village said? What June understood, anyway. Go to the island to be safe with the Speakers. They’ll protect you. “What does that mean?”

  “I speak for the people here, advocate, mediate. Help make rules. And the Baohujia make sure we’re all alive to follow those rules.”

  “They both have . . .” I look back at the two guards trailing us, brushing the spot on my chin where the mark lies. “They’re marked the way I am. Did Mother give it to me hoping it would help me sneak in here, and—”

  “My story will answer that question. Just listen. Gao Shun wants you to hear before she speaks to you.”

  “Who is Gao Shun?” We come to a set of stairs, beams of light suffusing the air with particles of dust that seem to sparkle, though the windows are too high on the wall for me to see anything but gray, cloudy skies outside. For a prison, this place isn’t what I would have expected. Compared to the dark and dank hopelessness I remember from the Hole—the underground prison in the City—this place feels almost airy. Empty, though. Echoing and distant, as if the warm touch of friendly banter and good meals have never once graced this hallway.

  “Gao Shun is the head of the Baohujia,” Erhu Player responds. “She sends thanks for the warning about contagious SS.”

  “And you? What is your name?”

  “My name is Luokai.” He pauses on the stairs, eyebrows raised. “Is that enough? Can I continue?”

  I swallow my frustration, the informal introduction rankling. No last name, but I have no idea what that means here. I grew up holding my name close, like a treasure to be shared only with those who deserved it. Before my surname became a target, anyway. At the Mountain, people seemed quite free with their names, sharing given names and surnames as if they could be interchanged. Is Luokai being rude? Familiar? Maybe Luokai is a title and he isn’t telling me anything but how far below him I am. There were enough in the City who did much the same.

  He’s been so careful to use my full name, though, so it must mean something. What if it’s like Comrade Hong—General Hong now—Forcing Tai-ge to use my full name as some sort of shield against me, a barrier to others deciding we might be friends if they heard only my given name on his lips. Worse. A nickname.

  Sevvy. My stomach twists. No one will ever call me that again. But then I straighten my shoulders, thrusting my chin up. No one will ever call me that again.

  It was an excuse. A cover. A lie.

  “There haven’t been many crossovers between our territory and yours until recent years.” Luokai looks up at the tiny slits that make windows near the ceiling, as if he can see clear to the mountains through them. “There was a war. Between this country before it was broken by SS and a country from over the ocean, a man at their head named Cameron.”

  Cameron. The word feels foreign even on his tongue, his mouth twisting it almost to sound like the City’s word for this place. Kamar. Ka-mah-re.

  Luokai continues, “It was the worst kind of war where men and woman forgot themselves and became even less than the beasts. War does that to all who partake, but this was a special sort of loss. Your humanity could be ripped from you rather than given up one compromise or threat at a time. Many tried to hide from the scourge, the fear of catching such a terrible sickness driving them to the highest reaches of the mountains. To islands in the sea.” He raises a hand as we get to the top of the stairs, gesturing to the stone hallway. The whole building.

  We’re on the island. On Port North. Made of stone and stairs and foreign words, with none of the warmth I dreamt of.

  I bite my lip, ramming my disappointment down, willing myself not to interrupt, not to tell him to go jump in the ocean himself because everyone knows the history of SS and the Influenza War.

  We come to a grate set into the wall, the bars set so close together, I couldn’t fit my arm through. Two Baohujia sit on the other side. They jump up at the sight of Luokai, bowing their heads respectfully as they open a door in the grate to allow us through.

  Once we’re past, Luokai continues, “The people here were safe. Even those who swam to our island, parts of the army that brought the sickness from across the seas. The scourge across the water seemed to die out, only cropping up naturally here and there among our own people, as if the war had broken a barrier of some kind in our brains.”

  Naturally occurring SS? I shudder. Did they send their sick out into the forest to die, like they did in the Mountain? But then I check myself. Whatever happened on this island, it’s better than what Yuan Zhiwei did, consistently reinfecting his own people to force them to rely on Mantis. On him.

  “By the time you from the mountains and we from the island found one another again, generations had past. We did not want war, and it seemed you did not either. Your City could not forget the guns, the bombs, the sickness that had spread at the hands of those who had come from across the sea. General Cameron was not one of the refugees who came here, though his name was a powerful tool. Calling us by his name served as a declaration of separation, as if somehow the monks and others who lived on this island during the war were corrupted by those who came from Cameron’s army seeking asylum. Those from the invading army and from the mainland who took refuge here left descendants, people who had harbored in our homes, then married into our families and worked in our fields. We were incurably different to you mountain folk. Frightening. To protect our peace and ensure no more killing would happen, the City took a hostage.”

  “The City? Took a hostage from here?” My head seems to be swimming with fatigue. We come to another stairway, the steps curved so I cannot see what’s the top. Sunlight pours over us in a liquid stream from the windows above, forcing me to squint. There are chisel marks in the stone, forming a rough assortment of bending waves that coil up the stairs, marking each one.

  “We demanded a hostage in return, so it became an exchange. A child of your ruler traded for the child of ours.”

  “A Speaker?” I ask.

  “Speakers do not have children. That sacrifice was left to head of the Baohujia. What parent could plan an attack when it is your own blood that would be spilled in the streets? And not just your own child, but cousins from the sister who was given a generation before, grandchildren after your child is grown and a father or mother themselves. We knew sickness still raged in your city, that the hills and mountains were full to the brim with violence and cross-dealing. But we were at peace. Until Jiang Gui-hua.”

&
nbsp; Fear fingers its way through my lungs, pressing hard so they refuse to inflate. This is where we find out if they have the things I came for. But if Mother was the person who brought war, how likely is it these people will help me? “She came. She brought—”

  The man looks up. “She came?” He shakes his head. “No, Jiang Sev. She was from here.”

  CHAPTER 45

  “MOTHER WAS . . . FROM HERE?” THE air seems trapped in my lungs. Mother. A Baohujia. A daughter of one of the head families here.

  Luokai nods. “She was. And your people killed her.” He points to my mark. “She must have given you that tattoo herself.”

  Tattoo? My hand creeps up to touch the skin of my cheek, as if I could feel the mark there. Ice and stone seem to bloom in my chest, burning and freezing and falling and heavy all at once. Mother was a First, married to a First. She looked like the City, had a City name . . . but that thought stalls. I’ve met all sorts of people since I’ve been outside. Including people who look and talk the way I do. Who have much more City-sounding names than I do, even though they’ve never set foot inside City walls.

  My name. Mother gave it to me. A funny, Outside-sounding name, because she was an Outsider.

  But how could Mother have been some kind of political hostage? And if she was, how is it that no one in the City knew, given that we were supposed to be at war with Kamar?

  Then another thought hits me. When Mother told me to find the family, I thought she meant lost grandparents or aunts or uncles who had escaped the City. I never once imagined that I could have had family who were born here.

  What was it that Luokai said about the families of the hostages? That sacrifice was left to head of the Baohujia.

  The head of the Baohujia. Gao Shun.

  What if . . . ? No. I bar the doors surrounding that question, not ready to ask yet. I want to hold the hope inside me before real answers can dash me to pieces.

  My hand strays to the mark again, as if I should be able to feel it poking out from my skin. “What does this mean?”

  “Everyone is supposed to serve with the Baohujia when they turn sixteen.” Luokai touches his own chin, blank of a mark. “Most of us, anyway. Being marked is an honor. At eighteen, we can leave the Baohujia if we choose. It’s a mark of truly belonging to . . . what did you call our island?”

  Belonging? My cheek feels hot, my cool fingers brushing against it. “Port North?”

  “Yes, that’s it. People who have Baohujia’s mark are true members of the community. They love this place enough to give up some of themselves to Port North.” Luokai shakes his, head smiling over the words.

  “Why is calling this place Port North funny?” I ask.

  “I think it’s a literal translation. What we call our island made to fit your mouth. It only could have come from someone who had lived both places.”

  Literal translation? I wonder if that’s why June didn’t recognize it when I first told her where Mother told us to go. June has been gone so long she only understands some of what is going on, much less a name my Mother made up.

  I wonder how Dr. Yang knew?

  The swirls of stone decorating the wall grow larger, and I realize they’re waves of water, dotted with ships and little figures peering down at the churning eddies. “Are there others from the City here?” I ask. “What happened to them when Mother was put to sleep?”

  “A new hostage was sent every ten years. And there was talk of retribution at first. But Speakers spoke for the hostages who had been brought here. They’d lived here most of their lives. They had married. Had children and grandchildren. They were more ours than the City they left behind. To punish them for the crimes of the place they were born would be to punish our own daughters and sons.”

  “And they’re still here?” I ask.

  “Yes. Though I don’t know how you would tell them from the others of us here. They belong to us now.”

  “And people from here are still in the City?” I bite my lip. Among the Firsts, perhaps?

  Luokai doesn’t quite look at me when he answers, his lips pressing together tightly, an expression that once again brings a spark of recognition. “That I do not know.”

  “Why didn’t Port North attack the City?” I ask. “The City killed their hostage.”

  “We are not a warlike people, Jiang Sev.” Luokai sighs, his breathing perfectly even as we ascend, though mine is beginning to cut short, protesting each step. “Not in mind or in tools. Your City has planes and bombs and guns that would overtake us a thousand times. We can hide, but moving against the mountains was as impossible then as it is now.”

  A landing comes into view ahead, the sculpted whirls washing up the wall to twine around a figure carved into the rock. It’s a woman, her lantern raised against a crashing storm of stone waves, the light from the windows catching in drips and pools in her robes and in the swirls of her hair. The carving has been worn smooth from hands touching the wheels of water at her feet, her long skirts and the wild streams of hair twirling around her, but her eyes are calm and piercing as she looks down at me.

  “She protects us from the sea. Or she did, before.” Luokai’s voice jerks my attention back to him, his eyes pointed up at the stone woman. Down the hall are full-length windows cut into the outside wall, the source of the gusty winds whistling through this place. A stone bannister blocks any risk of falling over by accident.

  And on the other side of the bannister . . . My heart stutters. All I can see is gray. Gray sky and gray water all around us, stabbed through with towering rocks, their bases gnawed away under the water’s careless bite. The sea never seems to end, reaching long past the horizon as if I’m in some other world. My body tingles as if I’m already falling into the void so many stories below us, the white-tinged waves undulating toward us as if they can reach up and grab me.

  “Are you all right?” Luokai pauses, cocking his head.

  “There’s just so much . . .” I shake my head, and I almost feel dizzy, as by looking down at those waves so far down below me, the stone has begun to roll under my feet. I point to the woman carved into the wall. “How does she protect you? Doesn’t stone sink when you throw it in the water?”

  “Stone does well enough when heli-planes crash into it.” Luokai shrugs. “They’re more worrisome than water these days.”

  Forcing myself to keep walking, I find shelter in looking at the woman on the wall, anything to pretend those gaping windows to the sea aren’t pulling at me, waiting to swallow me down. The stone woman finds something solid inside me, something calm. Her halo of hair and her calm eyes remind me of Mother, who stood tall and proud even frozen in Sleep, a hostage in her own body.

  Hostage. If the City and Port North each extracted a hostage from the other every ten years . . . There is one boy I can think of who was missing, and no one seemed to know why.

  Sun Yi-lai.

  I grab hold of Luokai’s sleeve, pulling him to a stop. “The Chairman’s son. He was the exchange. He was here.”

  Luokai nods. “Yes. He came to us when he was about two years old.”

  “That’s why no one knew where he was. He’s been here since before the treaty broke.” I bite my lip, doing the math in my head. “But . . . my friend Howl. He was pretending to be the Chairman’s son. That’s how he got into the City to spy. If the real Sun Yi-lai was supposed to be here, then wouldn’t the Chairman have known Howl didn’t belong to him?”

  Luokai’s eyes narrow at Howl’s name, and he continues down the hall with an extra kick in his step as if he’s just realized he’s late for a self-criticism session. “That is a question I’d also like the answer to. Sun Yi-lai hasn’t been here for many many years. By the time we got word of Jiang Gui-hua’s Sleep, he’d already left.”

  “Where did he go? Is he alive?”

  Luokai stops in the hall, nothing around us but stone and strips of silver marking the wall. “No one knows. At first we thought he’d been kidnapped, taken back to the City. But t
hen your Chairman demanded that he be produced. That if we wanted to keep helis and soldiers far from our cities, we would give him back his son. We had nothing to give him.” Luokai’s eyes close, old memories heavy on his shoulders. “Speakers still go up into the mountains looking for any sign of him. Something we’ve yet to find.”

  Could it be that each child stolen from the settlements is the Chairman’s price, a price exacted a hundred times over for whatever happened to his son? That doesn’t make sense either, though, because if it were some kind of revenge, the kidnappings would have stopped once Howl came to him. The Chairman got his son back.

  But the Chairman didn’t stop.

  Maybe once you have a justification to start taking, it’s hard to find a reason to pull your hand back out of the jar.

  My feet drag to a stop when Luokai stops in front of another silver strip, much like the ones down in the cells. “Was that the end of your story?” I ask. “You said you wanted to ask me a question.”

  He’s already halfway to touching the silver strip, but stops, looking back at me. “All of this started when Jiang Gui-hua hid her things here. What was so important it was worth a war to your mother? What was worth dying for?”

  My forehead puckers. If Luokai really doesn’t know what was in Mother’s papers, what are the chances he’ll hand them over if I tell him? With a contagious strain of SS headed this way, giving away the cure wouldn’t be a good choice.

  Meeting his eyes isn’t difficult. Maybe it would have been a few months ago, but now I know the value of secrets. “You said the head of the Baohujia wanted to talk to me?” A tremor runs through me. The head of the Baohujia. Family.

  Luokai nods.

  “Well, then I’ll tell her all about it. Is she in there?” I point to the door.

  “No.” Luokai presses his hand to the silver strip. “This is my room. It’s only my brother inside.”

  The door swishes open, the room inside dark, a sleeping figure swaddled in blankets on a pallet on the left-hand wall all I can see. “Why are you bringing me to your . . .” My words dry up when a light set high on the wall begins to glow, illuminating a floppy head of hair and a shoulder swathed over in bandages.