Shatter the Suns

by Caitlin Sangster

  Like me.

  I set the painting down on the floor, trails of red dripped over my sister’s face and trickling around my neck. Now that my hands are empty, though, all I can see is my brand, bloody and red. “I’m surprised you kept this. You don’t consider any of us to be family anymore, do you?”

  “You’re . . . just like . . . You’re supposed to be below.” Her eyes seem to devour me, taking in my cuts and scrapes, the bruises and lacerations at my neck, the star burned into my hand. This woman, who I was convinced was just a blur of shadow, a voice whispering doubts into my ear, now looks as lost as she made me feel when we spoke earlier.

  I hold her gaze, my jaw molded from metal, my words unmoving. “Give me the device Mother left here. I need it.”

  “How can you be doing this to us?” she whispers.

  “Dr. Yang isn’t going to negotiate for something he can just take.” I can’t help but glance out the window, the ant-like crawl of soldiers below hidden by the house’s balcony. The sound of propellers spikes through the ceiling, and I can’t help but duck. “I thought you were protected here.”

  “We were supposed to be.” Gao Shun points to the control panel behind her. She blinks as the sound of propellers draws nearing, spinning to face a smoky picture that appears on a screen, a heli’s double propellers purring across. She swivels the picture with the controls, then presses a button, a high-pitched tone issuing from above us. I cover my ears as the ground trembles under me, eyes wide on the screen as the heli’s propellers break apart, the aircraft erupting in flames as it careens offscreen.

  Every breath Gao Shun takes seems to break her ribs, pain a heavy filter that colors her face. “I won’t let you destroy this one too. This place isn’t yours to break.” Gao Shun tries to brush the hair from her eyes, her shoulder-length hair standing out at odd angles as her hands shakily push it back from her face. “I should have listened when you warned me.”

  “Warned you?” I start forward, and she tenses, her arms up. “I have not destroyed anything. I haven’t been outside my cell except to climb up here. . . .”

  Gao Shun points out the window, the swarm of helis as they drop one by one onto strips wide enough for their propellers. “You told me your friend was here to destroy the towers. Now that we’re down to one, and I’m supposed to believe it’s just happenstance that brings you here?” She gropes at her side, and my stomach twists when I see a gun’s shiny handle sticking like shrapnel from her coat. A tear streaks down her cheek. “I can see your mother inside you. Down to the charred bits that were all she had left of a heart.”

  “Tai-ge is dead, isn’t he?”

  “You’d kill a Red spy when an invasion looms just over the hill?” She looks out into the blank sky. “If he isn’t dead by now, then we’re all doomed. The other one must have helped him escape. The First?”

  “Do you mean Howl? He can hardly walk.”

  Gao Shun shakes her head. “So it was you who let him out, then. I can’t make myself believe there are traitors here.”

  “Tai-ge’s . . . here somewhere?” Fear prickles down my arms. “If he’s alive . . .” I look out at to the blank spot where I saw the dish fall. “Listen to me. Tai-ge wants that device. If you kept him here somehow and he got out . . .”

  The words dry up from my mouth as she draws the gun. “Even if you kill me, Baohujia will be up here in a minute. You’ll never get out.”

  “I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here to beg, Gao Shun. Dr. Yang is going to take everything you have. They’ll infect this place and force you to kneel for the cure.” My heart pounds, desperately wanting her to belive me. “I can help you. If you give me the device, I’ll bring the cure here. I’ll make sure the Reds stealing your people don’t have access to it until they stop.”

  A tear spills out from Gao Shun’s eye, marking her face with a single line. “You sound just the way she did.”

  “If they find a way to get in here, they’ll take everything you have, Gao Shun. I want to save this place. I want to save the people in farm camps, the people who’ve been left to die because they can’t control themselves anymore. I want to stop the people who have been hurting you.” My heart cracks as I say it, thinking of the boy below, a smile untempered on his face. “And this is the only way. Please let me have the device.”

  The gun shivers in Gao Shun’s hand. “They wouldn’t negotiate when I told them I had it.”

  “If you give it to me, they’ll follow me. They’ll leave you alone, at least for a while,” I whisper. Like June told Cai Ayi at the Post, only I don’t know how to negotiate, don’t know how to show her I mean it.

  Her shoulders sag as if she’s exhausted.

  “The man who told the helis to come here is the one who broke the treaty between Port North and the City. He’s the one who killed Mother.”

  The blackness of Gao Shun’s irises seems almost deep enough to fall through, as if any hope she’s had has been replaced with despair. She lurches forward, and I tense, waiting to feel the sting of a bullet. But the gun clatters to the ground and she grabs for my hands, squeezing them hard between hers.

  Pieces of pottery and broken bits of furniture skitter across the floor as she pulls me over to a wide bookcase set into the wall. She throws her weight against its solid frame. “Help me,” she grunts.

  Together, we push until an inch of empty space blinks out at us from behind it, a passage to the caves below. The bookcase is so heavy, my muscles burn from pushing, the sharp edges of the wood cutting into my shoulder until there’s enough room for us to slip through.

  “You’ll need a way out of here.” She says it with a whisper as she pulls something from her coat, a cheery gold fire igniting between her palms. Almost like a quicklight, but brighter. A steep stairway swirls straight down below us, the walls set with windows along one side, the other solid rock.

  My chest burns with a sudden flare of hope. “You’ll give me the device?”

  “We’ll keep you below until the worst of it’s over.” Gao Shun continues with a nod, “They can’t come down into the caves . . . or if they manage to, we can take the boats. Spread out. We’ll sneak you to the hangar on the mainland.” She stops to look at me, and the flames in my chest curl down at the skepticism in her eyes. “Trusting you seems far-fetched at best. But you are right about the soldiers coming out of those helis. They will take everything they can.” Her thick brows scrunch together, her mouth following suit. “I want to believe you because I don’t see hope in any other direction.”

  She turns back to the stairs, taking them two at a time. I follow, all of my bruises and cuts and soreness protesting at once, none so loud as the family-shaped hole in my chest. This isn’t the moment to wonder about a woman who kept my portrait on the wall for eight years and to try and find the heart inside her.

  There will be time for that later. There will be time after I’ve found Sole. After the cure is in my hand. “You have helis that can take me back to the mountains?”

  “We have two. Though one of them is damaged, and there aren’t many who can fly . . .” She sucks on her bottom lip, slowing a step.” I don’t know the state of the quarantined areas, but I think both of our pilots fell sick after going up into the mountains with Luokai.” She says something I don’t understand in Port Northian, but if I were to guess, it wasn’t something polite.

  Murky echoes climb up toward us from below, the sounds of feet crunching on stone. The first Baohujia to come into view falls into an aggresive stance, his gun leveled on Gao Shun, though it drops immediately when he recognizes her. Unintelligable words pour from his mouth as about fifteen Baohujia rush past us up the stairs, hardly breaking stride.

  More footsteps echo from below.

  Gao Shun paws at my arm, pulling something small and black from her coat. She holds it out to me without breaking eye contact with the man as he continues to speak, sounding frantic. “Take it, Jiang Sev.”

  The thing is some kind of elect
rical device, the metal still warm from being inside her coat, the screen dark. “This is the device my mother left?”

  She frantically pushes me until my hips slam into the window alcove. “Get up there,” Gao Shun orders, waiting until I’ve obeyed to climb up next to me. “Whoever has been breaking our towers is coming for the last one.”

  The shattered glass slides under my feet as I huddle against the alcove wall, the open drop straight down to the shattered island buildings below rattling through me. Shouts echo up the stairs, but I can’t see much hunched in the alcove, Gao Shun pressing me against the wall. Baohujia soldiers take up defensive positions, aiming their weapons down the stairwell.

  And then suddenly there’s a flood of soldiers from below. I don’t see uniforms, insignia, anything but a blur of shadow and gunmetal gray, the blasts from their weapons shattering my ears.

  “What is happening?” I scream, pulling at her iron-band grip around my middle, shots screaming past us.

  Gao Shun grunts as something slams into her with a meaty thunk, twisting her sideways away from me. She falls out of the alcove, onto her knees on the stairs below.

  A voice filters through the awful noise of bullets and yells and screams and echoes. My name. “Sevvy?”

  Everything seems to slow into a molasses crawl. A figure vaults up into the alcove, his features not matching the Baohujia robes draped across his frame, bruises marking his face. A face I would know anywhere.

  Tai-ge.

  There’s a silver sphere in his hands. I’ve seen one like it before. In Howl’s hands, back when June was beaten up by some Reds, stashed in their tent . . .

  The rush of soldiers who came with Tai-ge are falling back, the Baohujia above us on the stairs marking each of them with calm precision. I don’t know how they know who to shoot, because they’re all wrapped in the same Baohujia robes, only the direction of their guns to point to their loyalties. I reach for the flashbang grenade as if I can somehow stop Tai-ge from throwing it, but it’s already in two pieces in the air before I can slam my fist into his arm. Tai-ge pulls me hard against his side, one arm wrapped tight around my skull over my ears, jamming my face against him. “Close your eyes!” he yells.

  When the grenade detonates, the sound shakes me straight to my core. My legs collapse under my weight as something pointed jabs into my ribs. Before I can process falling—or the ringing in my ears, or the Baohujia man who stumbles toward the alcove from the stairs above, then crashes through the last of the glass—Tai-ge is up, pulling something away from his face and ears before grabbing my arm and wrenching me up from where I fell.

  Tai-ge swears when I try to dig in my heels, grappling for a hold on his loose robes, but I’m no match. Whatever the sound and light did to me leaves me flailing and off-balance, unable to judge where the stairs are and how to walk. Baohujia are strewn across the stairwell, their eyes open in horror, blinking painfully after the flash, echoes of the grenade’s concussive blast still pounding away inside my head. Whatever it was Tai-ge did to protect my eyes and ears wasn’t quite enough, my balance teetering drunkenly from side to side as I fight him to a stop, his only choices to let go or to fall down the stairs on top of me.

  “Why are you up here?” he yells. He must be yelling, but it still feels like a tiny whisper in my head, dampened as if he’s screaming into a pillow. “Did they give you the cure?” He sticks a hand into my coat and feels each of my pockets.

  “You stay away from me!” I can’t keep myself from shouting, wildly searching for the place where my aunt fell, only to find that she’s rolled down to just before the stairway curves out of sight. Is she dead? It doesn’t look like anyone is still standing, not even the people who were shooting from Tai-ge’s side. “How did you do this? Who from the Baohujia would have helped you?” All of them are wearing robes, the ones below me bloody and shredded on their owners’ backs.

  “Mother told me there were Baohujia who were sick of fighting. She made sure they found me.” Tai-ge’s eyes follow my unintentional glance toward Gao Shun, and he drops me, haring back down the stairs as if me looking toward my aunt was some kind of tell. Even as I internally scream at my feet to run, to do something other than stand here waiting for Tai-ge to come back, my legs don’t listen, crumpling to the floor as my brain tries to recover from the grenade. There’s a Baohujia girl collapsed next to me on the stairs. Tugging her shoulders straight, I attempt to help her sit up, but she flops back down, boneless and staring blankly.

  I gape down at her, my insides awful and cold, as if I’m the one who is dead. The device my aunt gave to me is lying just inside the windowsill, as if when the blast hit me, I let go of everything, assuming it was the end. Pulling myself up from the stairs isn’t as hard as attempting to pick the device up, my fingers sliding over it twice before I can convince them to bend around the black metal. I have to hide it. Have to make sure Tai-ge doesn’t find it. . . .

  “It’s not in her pockets. Wait . . .” Tai-ge’s back behind me, hands on my shoulders. No, snaking down my arms until he finds the device clutched between my fingers. He pries it loose and tucks it into his pocket. “Maybe this is something. Even if it isn’t, the soldiers can do a better search when they get here. Come on. We have to disable the tower before Kamar gets anyone else to stop us.”

  “Us? Do not touch me. Don’t . . .” Everything in my head feels underwater and slow. I try to twist away from him, but I can’t shake Tai-ge off as he drags me up the stairs. I jab my hand toward his pocket, meaning to take back the device, but nothing is working the way it should.

  Light assaults my eyes as Tai-ge pushes me through the hole behind the bookcase. I stumble to the floor, but he just climbs out over me. He pulls something out from under his stolen tunic and runs to the corner of blinking screens and buttons where Gao Shun controlled the frequency weapon. He yells into his hand—is Tai-ge holding some kind of link?—about weapons and coordinates and extraction before picking up a broken piece of wood and swinging it straight into the dark screen.

  “What is wrong with you?” The words finally leak from my mouth as I push myself up from the floor, shreds of broken pottery stuck to my cheek.

  “This is the right thing to do, Sevvy.” He clicks the communicator in his hand—a radio, I realize, as a voice comes through crackling confirmations. “Right for you. For the City. Everyone.”

  “No.” I can’t make my tongue work, wanting to scream all the things I’ve said before. All the things he listened to, then dismissed. Tai-ge swings again, this time decapitating a lever and denting the console, bits of plastic skittering across the ground toward me. I rise up onto my knees, my hands scrabbling for something to fight with, something that will pry Mother’s device from his pocket before the Reds come. “What do you think is going to happen to me when the Reds come? What will happen to June once they have the cure? To Lihua? Remember her?”

  Tai-ge turns back to look at me, adjusting the wooden plank between his hands. “I’m your link to them, Sevvy. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll say the things you’ve been telling me all along.”

  “Your mother believes this, Tai-ge.” I try to hold up the traitor star burned into my hand and almost end up flat on the ground. “This scar is all I am inside those walls. I don’t want to live in a world where someone else has to speak for me. I want to speak for myself!”

  Tai-ge’s eyes dart up as pottery shards grind under boots behind me. My fingers find a long tooth of clay, the edge freshly shattered and sharp. Turning to face the person who walked in makes the room swirl around me, my feet unable to balance when I attempt to stand upright.

  It’s a man in a Menghu coat, the one I remember from Dazhai wearing Cale’s old mask with sharp teeth painted across the filters. The Menghu’s tiger snarls up from this man’s collar, hungry for blood.

  Tai-ge swears. “Don’t touch her!” he yells at the Menghu. “Don’t come a step closer . . . !”

  The ceramic shard in my hand cuts into my fingers be
cause I’m gripping it too tight. Menghu. I know what Menghu can do to me. They’ll do it and not care. Tai-ge slides in behind me as if he means to hold me up. Or perhaps shelter behind me.

  “Don’t touch her?” the Menghu’s voice rasps through the filters of his gorish mask as he looks us over. “Didn’t you just call for help? Looks like you need it.”

  “I called my people for help!”

  “Isn’t that what we are now?”

  I stab the shard point-first toward his neck, but the Menghu’s eyes smile as he bats it out of my hands as easily as swatting a fly. As a second Menghu comes through the door, Tai-ge swings his chunk of wood at the first. The Menghu ducks, slamming the handle of his gun into Tai-ge’s arm and then his leg, dropping him to the floor before lifting me onto his own shoulders, just the way Howl did all those months ago. My arms and legs shake, but the effects of the grenade are wearing off. I contort backward to kick at the Menghu’s side, and when that doesn’t work, at the Menghu standing behind him, my heel catching his mask.

  But it does no good. The Menghu walks to the balcony, gripping me tight, as if he means to launch me over the edge.

  Howl’s waiting for me in a bombed-out hall of stone. June is in a cell underneath this rock somewhere. Lihua is back at the Post counting pills until the day she’s sold to some scavenger clan.

  My aunt. My own blood lies on the stairs just out of reach.

  This can’t be my end.

  Twisting, I manage to sink my teeth deep into the Menghu’s neck, just inside his collar where the tiger snarls. The taste of copper and iron and poisoned humanity bursts across my tongue. He drops me, and I manage to land on my feet, trying not to gag. Pushing away from the sharp sting of his swearing, I pull the clasp of his mask at the back of his head, attempting to wrench the device away from his face, to turn him back from gore to human. Humans I can fight.

  “I want to talk to your superior!” Tai-ge’s is a voice used to being obeyed. But now he just sounds like a tantruming child. “Give me your radio. Mother promised—”