A smile curls uncomfortably at my mouth, both because he’s right and so very wrong. “I never said that, and you know it.”
“You did. It took getting hit in the head first, but you said it.” Howl grins, but he looks down, breaking eye contact. “Sorry. I probably shouldn’t tease you, considering . . . everything.”
The pit in my stomach deepens, swirling around like a vat of tar. I can’t help but answer, though. “You know I like jokes better than moping. Moping doesn’t help anyone.” It’s good to say it out loud. Then maybe everything will go away and I can go back to . . .
I close my eyes. Go back to what? Unless June and Howl came up with a brilliant escape plan while I was gone, there isn’t much we can do.
“That’s the real reason I came running after you with those maps, you know.” Howl yawns, leaning back against the wall with an uncomfortable grunt. “Got addicted to perkiness and couldn’t find it anywhere. Menghu are so serious all the time. Firsts, too.” He points toward a clay-looking pot sitting in the corner opposite June. “There’s a pot over there to use if you need it. You know, if that look of consternation is more than wishing I would be quiet.” He looks at the pot, brow furrowed. “At least I think it’s for peeing in. If not, whoever comes in here next is in for a surprise.”
I give a theatrical sniff. “Well, wouldn’t you know it? You fouled the only water left on this whole island.”
“That’ll show them.” He nods to the tray of food by the door. “Seriously, though, is that something to drink over there?”
“If you can get up to pee in a pot, you can get your own water.” But then I pull myself up from the ground and walk over to the tray. “Would you like weak tea or something stronger?” I gesture to the pot.
Howl laughs, then grimaces, putting his good hand to his shoulder. “No more urine jokes. My poor, gore-bitten side can’t take it.”
Dragging the tray over, I pour a cup of tea and hand it to him, watching as he drinks before pouring my own. It isn’t until the liquid hits my tongue that I realize how dry my mouth is, like a wet sponge left to bake in the sun.
“You want to tell me what happened with Gao Shun?” he asks quietly.
I finish my sip and carefully set the cup down. “She figured out that I’m cured. And that she might be able to use Mother’s papers to get the invasion to stop. So she isn’t going to hand them over to us.”
He nods slowly. “Good. We came up with an epic escape plan that would be a shame to waste. It involves stealing your mother’s stuff and then miraculously teleporting back to Sole.”
“You can teleport, too? Why didn’t you tell me?” I smile a little. “Let’s . . . eat. And then we can plan.”
He nods again, waiting until I pick up one of the spoons and take a bite before extracting his own bite of rice with only one hand, grimacing at the movement. “So with Gao Shun. You must have seen—”
“Can we . . . not?” I cut him off. “Just for a minute?” I want to think of anything other than my statue for an aunt, of what might happen to us next. We need to plan, but I need a moment to regroup. “Tell me a story.”
“A story?” Howl absently touches the bandage at his shoulder, rubbing the edges between his fingers. “About what?”
I pour us both some more tea. “Tell me something I don’t know about you. Tell me what your life was like before my mother pushed everything out of balance.”
Howl doesn’t say anything for a moment, looking down into the cup I set next to him. When he finally does, the words are careful. “I think your mother was trying to push things back into some kind of balance for me.”
“What do you mean?”
Howl picks up his bowl, attempting to carve out another bite of rice, but scattering about half of the little grains before they get to his mouth, and he sets the spoon down, pressing his lips together. I try to take his spoon to help, but he bats my hand away before continuing what he was saying. The awkwardness of his silence feels personal, as if there are a million things he could say, but none of them would be comfortable because I’m the one listening.
It rankles. But I don’t want to pry any more than he accidentally did about the knife back on the heli, so I breathe deeply, preparing myself for a discussion of stone hallways and cliffs—to the island and how we might get off it—but he speaks before I can.
“I mean . . . Jiang Gui-hua cared whether or not I died. You heard Luokai earlier. My parents changed his name just so people at the Mountain would leave him alone. At least, so people couldn’t peg him as a purged City-born just from an introduction.”
We sit there, silence like a weight on us, a rock waiting to crush us both into the stone floor. There are five thousand things I want to say all at once. That I want to know about his life, even though my brain screams to stay on my side of the wall we’ve built to separate us. That I can see he hurts, and that I want to fix it. That somehow I’ll be able to listen to all the things that came before and somehow rearrange them for him the way he did for me all those months back when Mother was a rotting corpse lodged in my brain and there was nothing I could do but gag over and over.
“Why you?” I don’t like walls. None of the ones I’ve ever had in my life have been good. The other side was always radically different from what I thought, and I’d rather know the truth about Howl than make one up. “Why did my mother choose you to be the one who got cured?”
Howl contemplates another half-filled spoonful of rice and actually gets it into his mouth without too many losses. Chewing slowly, he waits until he’s swallowed before answering, and even then, every word is made from molasses. “I’ve got all the wrong marks. For the City and the Mountain.” A grimace of a smile creases one cheek and he looks up from his rice bowl to meet my eyes. “Do you remember the way Mei looked at me when she first saw my First mark?”
I nod, remembering how the Menghu-in-training had gone cold. It didn’t matter that Howl had left the City, that he was fighting for her side so far as she knew. The mark itself was reason enough for Mei to hate him. Howl sets his spoon down and touches the single line scored into his limp hand, as if it means more somehow than a brand he had to take on in order to look the part of the Chairman’s son. He shakes his head, picking the spoon back up. “The Mountain is full of defectors from the City, but unless you brought something with you, either a history of being repressed, or a lot of resources to make up for doing the oppressing . . . My parents escaped the City, but they were still marked. I was marked too, even though I didn’t have the scars. Dr. Yang chose me because there wasn’t anyone to say no. No one would have missed me much if it didn’t work.”
She’s the only one like me. He said it when we first met, when he thought I couldn’t hear him. I thought it was because we’d both been cured, but maybe that’s not where it ends.
“What was it like to grow up in the Mountain?” I ask. “What were the good things? The things you wanted to go back to?”
Howl’s brow furrows. “I remember playing Hawk Catches the Chicks with other kids in Jiaoyang. Playing jianzi with my teacher’s featherball in the dark with Kasim until we broke something. We were always together, laughing through lessons about the City, pretending to take on the Chairman ourselves and bringing back food and Mantis for everyone like heroes. Teasing Helix. You saw the Mountain. It was my home. I loved it.”
I wait for a second, wondering what more there could be, hiding behind Howl’s eyes clouded with memories. The City was mine, too. Even though they didn’t want me.
As if he’s reading my mind, Howl shrugs again, something painful creasing his forehead. “I was . . . angry. And lonely. I didn’t have anyone who was mine. Who wanted to take care of me no matter what happened. No matter who I was or where I’d come from.” He looks up at me again. “Then she told me that even if I ended up with SS, I wouldn’t be sent away like my brother was. That I could be a part of her family. I couldn’t admit it at the time, but I wanted what she was offering. A lot.”
“She said . . .” I close my eyes, my mind blank. “She wanted you to come live with us? Why didn’t you?”
“The only person who wanted me was an enemy, even if she did claim to be helping us.” He frowns. “And to this day I am still ashamed that I told her as much. That her scars made her a monster, and I didn’t want anything to do with her or her family. She just told me to think about it. That she would be there for me when I wanted it.” He finally meets my eyes, the dark brown clear as the day I met him. “They did infection trials. I remember her watching me from the other side of the glass, smiling at me. Making silly faces so I’d laugh.”
I remember the faces she’d make when Father wasn’t looking.
“But when it was all done, when I was still SS-free . . .” He looks down again. “She disappeared. She left without even saying good-bye. Presented me with this idea that I could be something other than the leftovers of old City trash . . . then slipped away during the night with it in her pocket.”
The words seem to fall forever, lost somehow in the dim gray tinting everything around me. Tinting the whole world. “You think she left you on purpose? That she never meant . . . but you said—”
“I thought she lied about wanting to take me with her.” Howl sets the cup down, staring at the wall instead of looking back at me. I want to touch him again, to somehow comfort him over things that have long been cried out. “It made me hate the City even more. They killed my parents. Labeled me. It made me think that maybe having a City scar really did turn you into something that wasn’t human anymore. Willing to do anything so long as you got the outcome you wanted.” He stares at the single mark on his hand, an angry red scab splitting the line in half. “Maybe that much is true.”
Now it’s my turn to look down.
“I didn’t know she went back for you. That the Chairman took her before she could come back for me. That Dr. Yang took her,” he corrects himself. “Not until I was playing the Chairman’s son, and he took me to the City Center. She was propped up in her box, her eyes shut, all those tubes feeding into her. And all I could feel was . . .” His voice catches. “All those years of hating the City, of hating her . . . and she was there on the Arch the whole time. Worse than dead. She said something to me after I told her that I didn’t want to live with a City monster. That when you look close-up, most enemies look like people too.”
My heart seems to twinge with each beat, and I feel cold, hugging my knees to my chest.
“I wouldn’t look. Not in all my years as a Menghu. I didn’t care.” He looks down at his hands, clenching the uninjured one into a fist. “But I saw her up there . . . saw you bowing for the Reds and laughing at yourself even as your knees bent . . . and suddenly I could see so much more than stars on collars. There were men and women in that City who were nothing but evil, murdering, lying gore bastards, but it wasn’t their stars that made them that way. There were good people too. People who were kind, who just wanted to be safe, to be happy. To laugh. There was this little old Third who made me tea every morning. She wanted nothing more than for me to find a nice First to bring home for dinner. And a Second on one of my committees who could make me laugh for no reason at all. And the Chairman . . .” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “The Chairman was the worst part. He was kind to me. Distant, but he’d bring me honey in my tea when I had a cold, and asked about how I liked working on this committee or taking a class from some First he’d worked with before. He cared.”
June shifts in the corner, rolling so I see a smidgen of one closed eye, her long eyelashes a smudge of golden brown against her cheek. She’s so relaxed and calm, as if all her cares in the world disappeared the moment her eyes closed. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?” I whisper.
“No matter how right you think you are, no matter what you think is at stake, when you fight, there’s someone who deserves to live who . . . won’t. But if you don’t fight, then you’re the one who falls. At least, I used to believe that.” Howl’s voice whittles down to a whisper, as if he can’t quite say it out loud. Silence spools between us, filling up all the space, the air. His hand snakes into my vision, touching my hand where it rests in my lap, his fingers soft.
My chest and lungs contract as I stare at his hand on mine, my mind flashing through things I don’t want to see. Howl kneeling on the ground, a gun to his head. Helix smiling as he told me Howl wanted me dead. The awful blankness on his face when I locked him in the heli storage closet.
The fury as we argued in the cave, the way my knife thunked on the ground between us and he walked away.
My voice cracks as I speak, not sure I know the right things to say, his fingers warm against mine. “I know it doesn’t make up for anything that happened before, but you aren’t alone anymore, Howl. I don’t care about your marks. Neither does June.”
“Don’t you?” He waits until I look up. “You don’t care that I spent a good six years of my life hunting Reds in the forest? That I’ve killed people? Probably people you know?”
And there it is, underneath. I almost killed you.
I almost killed him, too. Both of us, only a hair away from letting the other fall. Of not looking, hoping it didn’t happen, but walking away anyway.
When I don’t answer, Howl’s eyes narrow a fraction, his hand on mine, so still it’s as if he’s afraid I’m only seconds from exploding and that moving even a centimeter will pull the pressure switch. I can’t look away from his eyes, brown and familiar and so deep I’m drowning and I can’t—
“Sev, I’m just going to say this and hope you’re listening. Bad timing . . . but we might not have that much time left, and I don’t want to die quiet.” He speaks slowly, every word hanging in the air between us. I sit still as death, everything inside me a blank slate, as if there should be new answers to the questions I’ve been asking myself for the last couple of months.
“What I did when I first met you was stupid.” His hand circles my wrist, and I feel as if I’m made from lead, so heavy I can’t move, and I’m not even sure I want to. “I was naive to think I could ever go back to the Mountain. I wanted to be with the people I thought I understood, to belong. As if after they tried to hunt me down, I’d be able to step right back into the ranks and salute with the rest of them. Be a part of the army that would finally liberate Yuan Zhiwei’s lab rats. I wanted to pretend that somehow you would be okay. But then at one of our meetings, Dr. Yang just said it. That one of us was going to have to die. I’d been lying and trying to convince you to stay and hoping and . . . there it was. The truth.”
A tear pricks in my eye, like needles under my skin. I was there. Outside the door, listening. Howl agreed with Dr. Yang. It was that conversation I remembered when Sole told me who Howl really was, words from his own mouth confirming what she said. It was those words that made me run.
Howl leans forward, staring into my eyes as if he can’t blink. Or he won’t. “Back in the City, I thought I was capable of trading your life for mine.” He swallows, speaking more quickly now. “But it only took a few days before I knew I just . . . couldn’t. I wouldn’t, no matter how much I wanted to go home. And then I got to know you, and it wasn’t even a matter of not wanting to kill anyone else so much as it was that the thought of you dying wasn’t something I could live through. Then Dr. Yang said that one of us dying was the only way and . . . I couldn’t pretend it would somehow be okay any longer.” His fingers brush up my arm, and I’m not sure what to do. My insides burn with indecision, Howl’s hand touching me so softly. Hands that have been slapped down, hands my mother touched. Hands that won’t fire a gun anymore for some reason, that pushed me out of the way when the gores came.
Hands that have killed people.
“You know, out there in the forest, I couldn’t stop thinking that you were all that was left of Jiang Gui-hua.” He leans closer, whispering as if what he’s saying is a secret between us. Or maybe he’s just trying not to wake June, bundled in a blanket on the
other side of him. “Of someone good who was trying to help everyone, not just herself. I was afraid you were all the things that made her weak, that made her fall. But I’m not sure that what she did was fall, now. She kept the cure safe. She died for it. For you.”
I can’t think, everything inside me gummed up, Howl’s voice stuck in the gears.
“I want to be more like her. Like you. When you found out Dr. Yang wanted to cut you open, the first thing that occurred to you was to give yourself up. Because if giving up your life meant saving everyone else from SS, you were willing.”
Is this what I want? His hand moves from my arm to my shoulder, and then across my collarbone until he’s touching my neck, tracing the line just under my jaw. My ribs warm over, my heart pounding so hard it hurts, as if the next beat will break through my ribs.
“When Dr. Yang handed me a gun on my way out of the City, it felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. That the moment I used it, all I’d ever see again were uniforms instead of the people inside them.” He pauses as if he wants me to say something, but I don’t know what I should say. “I heard what you said back in the heli. While I was . . . whatever it was that gore bite did to me.”
That I don’t want Howl to die.
I don’t.
It’s not even just that. I’m sorry for what happened between us. It’s not all mine to be sorry for. But I wish . . . There are so many things to wish for, and no one to grant them.
The wanting I’ve been trying to tamp down uncurls, burning up inside my chest, flooding out to my fingertips and down my spine.
“And, though it seems like sort of a baseline thing to not actively wish someone would die, I feel like maybe that’s progress.” He so close I can feel the brush of his every breath touching my cheeks. I look up to find him staring at me. “Is letting a gore bite me enough to prove I like you a little bit?”
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