“I don’t want to control you, Mei. My mother died to keep the cure away from him so he couldn’t use it. I need your help to get out of here. To get it back . . .”
I trail off as Mei fixes me with a hard stare, all former friendship pushed under a mask of cold. “I really did like you. I hope you die better than this.”
CHAPTER 59
WHEN WE LAND, HELIX AND Mei escort me from the heli to an open field. The air smells like home. Mountains and trees and smoke from hundreds of smokestacks blowing away in the mountain wind. The snow forms a hard crust on the ground under my feet.
Mountains rear up all around us, and it’s hard to tell where we could be. We pass four other helis in the field before entering a cave, other Menghu trailing behind us. I twist around to look for Tai-ge, but Helix pushes me forward with a careless shove.
Inside, we come to a telescreen, but it’s cracked, the door beyond gaping open. Some outpost of the Mountain, separate from the main parts that have been overrun by people infected by SS, I would guess. Past the entrance, the walls are a familiar sort of blue. They take me to a door.
Behind that door is Dr. Yang.
He sits at a desk, mask trailing down his face like an old man’s beard. His fingers are steepled on top of the book that was in my bag, the one Howl gave to me all those weeks ago at the Mountain, a sleeping princess stenciled on the front.
“Please.” He gestures to the chair in front of him.
I hesitate, but only for a second. My knees are hardly holding me upright. I sit.
“Mei, Helix. I’ll have you take her down to the cells when I’m through. Give us a moment?” He looks pointedly at the door.
“The cells?” Helix glances at Mei and then lowers his voice. “Sir, I don’t mean to argue, but I know of at least four in my company whose masks have stopped functioning. Shouldn’t she be taken to a lab somewhere as soon as possible?”
“Just . . . give us a moment. Your Menghu will have what they need.”
Helix’s eyes flick over to Mei, but then he nods and leads her out. Perhaps the transfer of power after General Root died in the invasion isn’t going as smoothly as I thought. I file that away.
When the door clicks shut, the doctor’s rasping breath fills the empty air, the sound like an unhealthy wheeze. A death rattle. “Jiang Sev. So nice to see you again.”
“Is it? Were you hoping to make amends for murdering my mother and trying to murder me?”
“You were the one who gave her that serum, Sev. Howl stole it from my office without asking any questions about what it would do. I fail to see how that is my fault.”
I swallow. We didn’t have another choice, or so it seemed at the time. All we knew is that it was supposed to wake her up from suspended sleep. A cure for the condition Dr. Yang put her in when she wouldn’t give him her notes on how to manufacture the cure to SS. I don’t know why I thought she’d get up and walk away after standing there on the Arch with tubes keeping her alive for eight years.
Dr. Yang opens the book, gilt glinting in the overhead lights as it falls on the outline of the sleeping woman on the front. “You know, I almost think it wasn’t worth the trouble to bring you here. I knew Gao Shun wouldn’t have made it easy, but this book is an answer in and of itself.”
“An answer to what?”
“Everything.” He closes it and looks at the binding, holding it up to the light as a First would to analyze a glass of wine. “It’s a beautiful book. With certain unfortunate parallels to your mother, no?”
It’s the story they used to tell in the City, about a princess who sold her soul for some kind of dark magic, putting herself and her whole kingdom to sleep. Kind of like the propaganda that was sung over the City speakers out at least once a year: Jiang Gui-hua, put to sleep for selling our location to Kamari spies, for killing half of the First Circle . . . But it was Dr. Yang who killed the Circle. The Chairman and the Circle itself that decided to affix an enemy title to Port North, to change the island into a lurking monster poised to gobble us down, bones and all.
The book isn’t the dark, twisted version of the story they told in the City. This version is about hope. About waiting for the day when a wronged girl will wake up and everything will go back to normal.
Mother is not the girl in that story.
Neither am I.
But still, I flinch as Dr. Yang opens the book and tears it in half down the binding, the stitching making an awful popping sound as he destroys it. The torn covers come next, Dr. Yang peeling back the endpaper, scratching his fingernails against the hard cover underneath.
He’s breathing hard, a look of pure anger smoldering over his features. The pages drift away from him in pathetic trails, a waterfall of dead paper. “Is it in the pages? Some kind of code?” He fixes me with a stare that sends knifepoints down my arms. Dr. Yang, murderer of eleven members of the First Circle, murderer of my mother and who knows how many others, with one attempted murder not yet complete. Mine.
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” I maintain a calm face despite the fear coursing through me.
He sweeps the book off his desk, swearing as the pages go up in a white storm of destroyed fairy tale all around him. The doctor bats them out of his way, his eyes freezing on me as he brings his hands back down to tent in front of him. “Where is it?”
“I’m sorry, did I bring you the wrong story?” I ask.
“You . . .” He stops himself, staring down at his hands until the outburst has stopped hammering away at the inside of his mouth. “You got the book from Port North, didn’t you? You must have. You didn’t have it when you woke your mother.”
I shake my head. Howl gave it to me from the Mountain library. It was like a sick joke sitting at the bottom of my pack when I left the Mountain, the promised hope of finding my own happy ending hemorrhaging in my chest. I left it with June when I went to wake up Mother.
Dr. Yang sits up straight, smoothing his salt-and-pepper hair. He’s no longer wearing a white Yizhi coat with squares at his neck to show his authority. He’s dressed in a City Outside patrol uniform, but with all the patches and numbers cut off, no markers on him anywhere to show where his allegiances lie. “It has to be here. You found something on that island—I know you did.” His voice is an intense whisper, eyes wide on his hands where they lie on the desk. “I can’t be wrong. I’m never wrong.”
The contents of Mother’s paper are safely in Sole’s care. And the device . . . the Menghu took it from Tai-ge. So if Dr. Yang is still looking for the cure, it wasn’t on the device. An extra curl of hope unfurls inside me even as my stomach sinks. Maybe what we needed was on the paper all along . . . but could it really be? A whole complicated world-saving cure on a single sheet of paper?
Dr. Yang fixed me with his flatline stare, steeped in ambition and hatred. I jerk back in my chair before I can control myself. It’s like gazing into the black eyes of a gore, nothing inside but hunger.
“I’m going to show you something, Jiang Sev.” He opens a drawer and pulls out a paper. It’s thin and creased into four sections, as if it’s been folded up in a book and forgotten until this moment. “You’ll have five minutes to tell me everything you know, or there will be consequences.” Dr. Yang settles the paper in front of me, the cramped, compact characters looking very much like my own handwriting.
“She told you to go to Port North to get this.”
My eyes try to focus on my mother’s scrawl as if I can somehow memorize it. Did Dr. Yang somehow get the paper we took pictues of, too? But after a moment I realize that it isn’t the chemical formula and diagrams I saw before.
It’s a passage from a fairy tale.
“What is that?” I ask.
“The device Hong Tai-ge found was the very same one Gui-hua used to catalog data when we were working on Howl.”
I lift my chin, concentrating on keeping my face smooth. “And? What does it have to do with my Mother’s work?”
“Our work.
” Dr. Yang gives the paper a tight-lipped grimace. “The data device was wiped about nine years ago, most likely when she left it there.”
The little flares of hope inside me roar into flame. Sole really does have everything my mother left. It doesn’t matter that I’m here, that Tai-ge handed everything we worked for straight to the monster we’ve been running from.
“This”—Dr. Yang holds up the paper—“was screwed inside the device’s casing.”
I reach out to touch the paper, the words so, so familiar. A princess asleep. The ending to the same story Dr. Yang just destroyed—only this one is the City’s version, where the princess was condemned never to wake. Mother always said that wasn’t the end of the story, that things weren’t always the way people wrote them down, but she still wouldn’t tell us what really happened to that princess. Trying to guess had been such a fun game between Aya and me. A game I could only remember with hollow remorse after they put Mother to Sleep and left her to rot over Traitor’s Arch. For the longest time I believed the only change you could make to your future was to accept it. To be happy. Maybe even make fun of it a little. Giving the princess some other fate than death was just as hopeless as pretending my own life could change course.
But my life did change course. My destiny is shaped by me, even if others try to force me to take a certain path. I’ll always have a choice.
“She made sure you were the one to get the message about where it was. Perhaps it’s worded so only you will understand.” Dr. Yang watches me, every movement too calm, too smooth, as if he’s sitting in the eye of a storm, the back end ready to unleash. “So tell me, Jiang Sev, what am I missing? Where is the cure?”
There’s one sentence, one word in particular I don’t remember from the many times Mother told me the story of the sleeping princess. At the very end, instead of finishing with the curse, it adds a line: “Her secrets were now hidden in a place no one else could reach.”
Secrets like Mother, Aya, and I stole when we used to play spy, listening in on conversations, using hand signals like the one Dr. Yang used to make me listen to him that awful day he pulled me off the street in the City.
Hand signals she probably learned in Port North. From her family. Mother always said secrets were no fun if you didn’t share. The very memory of her smile as she said it is enough to make my jaw clench. She was the one with secrets, not me.
Except . . . I had one secret from Mother. Me and Aya together. “It’s just a story, Dr. Yang.”
“Is it?” He transfers his gaze from the paper to me.
Aya and I would sometimes write secret notes—and we had a secret place to hide them, even from Mother. Once we even hid a whole batch of sweet bean buns from her, wanting to keep them all to ourselves. When she asked where they were, we told her it was a place she couldn’t reach.
My heart starts to pound.
What if the secret place of two giggling girls wasn’t so secret from our mother after all?
“Are you willing to bet your life on this being a worthless piece of paper?” Dr. Yang licks his lips.
I look the doctor straight in his muddy brown eyes. “Whatever it is you think I know, I don’t.” I don’t waver, each word woven from steel and dreams, wistful and hard, unbreakable. “I wish I could tell you. Since you let SS out to eat everyone brain-first, even you having the cure would be better than letting everyone die this way. How are the Menghu going to feel now that you don’t have a cure for them? Or the Firsts who know it was you involved in developing contagious SS?” I reach out to take the paper, but he pulls it away, folding it into his pocket. “There’s no miracle end to this story, Dr. Yang, no brilliant solution for you to present to the people following you. Maybe Mother was just a little bit too far gone in the end to know what she was doing.”
She wasn’t. I can feel it, more true than anything I’ve ever known. The cure isn’t in those pictures we sent to Sole. It isn’t on the device. The cure is in the one place no one was supposed to know about besides Aya and me. A place out of reach, where only I can find it.
Dr. Yang stands, his fingers twitching together in an agitated pattern. “She wouldn’t have told you to go to Port North and talk to the Baohujia if she hadn’t wanted you to find her device.”
I shake my head. “She told me to find family. My family. You don’t think that maybe she just wanted me to be safe from you?” She sent me there to find them. So they’d help me. So it wouldn’t just be me against Dr. Yang and the Chairman and the entire mountainside of no-man’s-land.
Dr. Yang swears, every word a hot needle in my calm as he sits back down. “No. You know what this means. There’s no other explanation.”
I shake my head, hope flaring even brighter. “Not all of us are as smart as you, Dr. Yang.”
“Every day more masks break, Jiang Sev. Every second you keep it back, people are dying. Killing one another because they can’t help it. If you won’t tell me what you see in this paper, it will be you killing them. I can save them with the cure, Jiang Sev. I’ve spent my whole life trying to save people.”
“No.” I shake my head, thinking back to Mei, let loose in the Mountain, spreading SS to everyone. Of Dr. Root, dead. Of General Hong, sliced to pieces by slivers of jade. Of my mother, slowly turning to dust. “You’ve been trying to turn the world into a place where everyone thinks you have all the answers.” I remember the conversation I overheard between him and the Chairman. “Where no one can tell you to sit in a corner and ignore you. I can’t help you, Dr. Yang, even if I wanted to. You put yourself in this corner. That paper is nothing more than a bit of trash.”
He swears again. “I’ll give you a month.”
“I thought I only had five minutes.” Dr. Yang pulls a vial from his desk and holds it up to the light. “Do you know what this is?”
I keep my hands in my lap, danger prickling across my skin. It’s just a glass vial, clear so I can see his fingers bulging and distorted by the glass on the other side. “Unless it’s going to manipulate my brain into some sort of instant genius, I don’t think it will help anything.”
“Your mother was Asleep for eight years.” He sits forward, tapping the glass vial with one finger. “I did that. With this.”
“I’ve already fallen Asleep and woken up, thank you.”
“This isn’t SS, Jiang Sev. This is something wholly different. Something I created. Suspended Sleep isn’t the same disease. It’s a medically induced coma that mimics the symptoms of the first stage of SS.”
My blood seems to freeze in my veins, a flash of the paralysis swamping my brain, the terror so much worse than being trapped in the box at Port North, worse than gores or Menghu could ever be. Darkness, with no way to move my arms, my legs, no way to even blink . . .
“You can’t do that.”
“The fate of the people I am responsible for rests on finding the cure. All those people you think you are fighting for? They follow me. Because I can help them. I am a doctor. I created this cure, and your mother stole it.”
“That is not—!”
“Whoever it is you think you are helping, you are killing them right now. The people in these mountains need a real leader. One who will give them the things they deserve, not hoard it all for themselves.”
The doctor walks around the desk, fiddling with the vial. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to. Do you really want to go back to Sleep? Because you’re afraid I might not cure your friends?”
“If I could fall Asleep again, I would have already.” Words start pouring from my mouth as if talking is going to negate what comes next. “I’ve been exposed enough, haven’t I?” He doesn’t even look at me, walking past me to open the door. He murmurs something to Helix, who stands just outside.
After a few moments of murmuring, of feet walking away and the awful quiet of no one being here but me and Dr. Yang, Helix returns, handing something that crackles with plastic to the doctor. Dr. Yang lets the door swing closed and goes to lean against t
he desk directly in front of me.
There’s a syringe in his hand, still wrapped in plastic. Glassy, sterile, with a needle in a separate package inside.
“A month Asleep, Jiang Sev.” He says it matter-of-factly, as if it’s a prescription, a blessing rather than a threat. “I’m interested to see if that will be enough to loosen your tongue.”
“You say you want to save people? How many of them will die if you put me out for a month?”
He takes a step toward me, mouth pursed in a thoughtful frown. “You are making this choice, not me. Their deaths will be on your head.”
“It killed her when I woke her up.” I hate the frailty in my voice. What if he’s right? What if holding it back kills more than I could possibly save? Who will die because I’m sitting here with my lips sewn shut?
I grit my teeth. The same people who will die if I open them. The people Dr. Yang cares about have Mantis. No one else will see a single drop of the cure.
If I give him the cure, June will die a Seph like her father. Maybe even totally wiped clean with nothing but sickness left inside her brain, like Parhat. Lihua will get thrown from the highest tree branch of Cai Ayi’s Post.
If I tell Dr. Yang where the cure is, he’ll use it as the new currency of his regime, and none of the people I love will have anything to trade for it. This has to be a bluff, because if I’m his one last link to finding the cure, he isn’t going to stab me in the heart. He’s just trying to scare me.
I can’t help the note of pleading that threads through my voice as he fiddles with the syringe. “Killing me isn’t going to get what you want.”
When he finally looks at me, my skin goes cold. “Shall we find out?”
CHAPTER 60
MY EARS RING AS HELIX drags me down the hallway after Dr. Yang, the empty syringe gripped in the doctor’s hand. The compound is silent, an echo of what it’s supposed to sound like, deadened by the high-pitched peal in my head. Gray walls and cement floor, numbers in chipped red paint that mark the number of rooms as we pass, counting down until I’m dead. Seven, six, five . . .
Shatter the Suns Page 44