The soldier shrugs, wiping blood from his cheek. He must not realize that the blood is coming from his hand and all efforts to wipe it from his face are just making it worse. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole southern garrison is here in five minutes. You two are as good as dead.”
Howl shrugs one shoulder. “So I guess it won’t matter if we just kill you now. One dead Red closer to breaking the City down.” He looks at me, waiting.
There is no way I am just going to shoot this man, but he doesn’t have to know that. I cock the gun, the loud click ominous in the quiet around us.
“Fine by me.” The soldier closes his eyes and starts to hum the City anthem. Thank you, Yuan Zhiwei. Inspiring this man to die for nothing.
I turn to look at Howl, unsure, but he is running toward me. And then there’s nothing.
CHAPTER 16
WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, all I can see is dirt. It’s brownish purple, peppered with little rocks that dig into my cheek. I slowly move my head, trying to figure out what happened. The gun is across the clearing instead of in my hand, and Howl is crouching a few yards off, arms up over his head. Why is he doing that? I wonder, my vision blurring around the edges. Oh. Because there’s another Red.
The soldier pushes June in front of him, arm wrapped around her throat, gun thrust into her messy hair. He must have heard us and dragged June away from the tent while Howl was assessing my marksmanship skills. Far enough away, the blast didn’t knock him over.
The leather of his jerkin is coated with mud, a grayish, dirt-streaked undershirt peeking through a few tears in the leather. His back is to me. Perfect.
The world swirling all around me, I drunkenly roll into a crouch, creeping toward the edge of the clearing, trying to force my eyes to focus on the heap of branches that fell when Howl threw the grenade. When I turn back toward the Red, Howl is on the ground, inching toward the two tied behind him.
“Untie them both. Now.” The growling voice sounds too loud, as though the man can’t quite hear after the explosion.
Howl makes a sudden move toward the soldiers, but the Red’s gravelly bark cuts him off short. “You do that again and she dies!”
I stagger onto my feet, ignoring a sudden need to vomit. The Red, fist full of June’s snarled hair, raises her up to her feet. “I’m going to count to three. If those ties aren’t cut . . .”
His deep voice grates against my ears, sending chills down to my toes. But he doesn’t look around to see me swing the heavy branch into the side of his head, knocking him out.
I drop the branch and try to catch June as she crumples to the ground beneath the Red. Blood streams down her face from a broken nose and a few shallow cuts on one cheek. Her green eyes are open and scared, one bruised black.
Howl grabs one arm and I take the other, and together we drag June toward the edge of the clearing. She lets her feet trail behind us, either too shocked or too injured to help.
Suddenly I wonder why we are running away from these men. They have supplies. Bandages and food. The ground pitches under my feet and I sink down, grateful to have a moment to think this through. But when I turn to ask Howl, I’m alone.
What was I doing again? I can’t remember.
My eyes burn, my eyelids suddenly very heavy. Lying down here seems like a good idea. Maybe Tai-ge will come tell me a story to chase away the bad dreams. Like the one of someone shaking me and yelling in my ears.
A light flares and my eyes spring open to find Howl’s face too close to mine. He is kneeling over me, holding something that smells terrible under my nose. “Stop!” I feebly bat his hand away. “I don’t need help. Where’s June?”
“Safe. I carried her first. Normally I would love to sit down and chat, but there is an entire garrison of Reds within a mile and I’m pretty sure you have a concussion.” He hoists me up so I’m draped across his shoulders, head and arms down on one side of his head, my legs banging against his chest on the other.
“I can walk. Put me down.” It comes out in a slur, and the world starts to spin around me again.
“This is faster than you walking, believe it or not.”
My head is right by his ear. From this angle he looks younger, the curve of his cheek soft and smooth. I’m breathing his hair, short and dark and smelling vaguely of sweat and campfire. It suits him. The thought seems to circle around in my head, jerking to a stop with each jarring step. He belongs Outside, all the starch and City pride stripped away. I like it.
“You know”—my voice jars with each long stride—“you aren’t bad-looking.” The clouds are pressing harder against my eyes and mouth, but from the inside.
“Thank you. I’m strong, too. And very, very funny.” He’s whispering now and things have gone darker and a few degrees cooler, as if we’ve walked into the shade.
My head keeps fuzzing in and out, like the scream of heli propellers as they pass overhead, the cadence twisting uncomfortably. Howl’s head presses into my stomach as if it is supposed to fit there, and suddenly I am very aware of his arm around my leg, holding me balanced across his shoulders.
Heat floods my cheeks in the moment of clarity. I grasp for something to say that will distract him. “Tai-ge used to take care of me too. “
Howl doesn’t answer for a minute. Then he squeezes my arm and says, “I’m glad someone did.”
The black around us deepens until he stops, a bright lantern pushed up against the wall ahead of us searing into my eyes.
“Can we put that light out?” I ask, squinting. “I think it’s burning my brain.”
The muscles in his back and shoulders bend and flex underneath me, and suddenly I’m sitting on the ground next to another person huddled against the wall. Her eyes follow me cautiously as I scoot up closer to her, but she doesn’t move away. “June?” My voice sounds tinny in my ears, and my head starts to hurt. “How did you get here?”
She glances over at Howl, hands rubbing back and forth over her arms. He bends down, handing me a leaf that leaks a syrupy sap onto my fingers. The sudden, sharp smell wafting up from the leaf burns up through my nose, sharpening my vision for a moment.
“Keep breathing. It’ll clear your head.” Howl’s back is to us, blocking the worst part of the lamplight, though even the dim ring around him is sending slivers of pain through my head. “Talk to me.” His voice is too quiet, as though the earplugs didn’t quite do their job earlier. “Tell me about Tai-ge. If you can string whole sentences together, then hopefully it’ll mean you aren’t broken.”
The pain pounding in my head starts to clear all the cottony fuzz from my brain, and I can feel my cheeks heat. “You keep bringing him up. Did you know Tai-ge?”
“Of course I did.” Howl brushes his fingers along the wall, following a depression in the stone that looks too regular to be natural.
An uncomfortable feeling joins the ache in my head, trying to imagine Tai-ge and Howl together. Talking. I can’t think of anything else to say, avoiding Howl’s glance when he raises an eyebrow at me.
He pulls out Tai-ge’s dull knife and traces along the depression in the rock wall, shavings of plaster showering down. When the line is big enough, he squeezes his fingers between the stones, and a section of the wall crumbles away. Inside is a black metal box sitting under a thick layer of dirt and broken plaster. He pulls out the box and pries it open, a water skin with about two inches of gelatinous liquid falling out.
The water skin goes to June, who just looks at it in her hands like it’s something disgusting.
“It’s Choke,” Howl tells her. “A nutritional supplement.”
“What is this place?” I ask. “How did you know . . . ?”
“We are right on the Menghu patrol circuit,” Howl says as he rifles through the box, fanning the cloud of dirt that follows. “This is one of their emergency caches. I stumbled over one of their signs as I was carting June out of there.”
“Menghu?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word before. It sounds like an old
language. One of the dead ones from before the Liberation standardized things.
“The army from the Mountain. Rebels. They have safe havens set up all through here just in case Reds catch them out in the open.” Howl dumps the contents of the box onto the dirt floor. “Reds haven’t found this one yet, or they would have taken the supplies.”
Looking around me, I realize that we must be underground. Light from the entrance doesn’t penetrate to where we are sitting, rocks fitted together like a puzzle forming the walls and ceiling. The cave continues past us, but the light doesn’t reveal much. The air is cool and dry, smelling of dirt and stale sweat.
“You just . . . stumbled across something marking the cave?” I ask.
“I learned some of the signs when I was with them. I was lucky to have found it when we needed it so badly, though.”
Very, very lucky.
Howl piles the few water skins and some dried fruit and crackers from the supplies back into the box and comes over to sit by me. Leaning in close, he whispers, “She hasn’t spoken yet. I’m not sure what happened, but she’s been awake since we dragged her away from the tent, so she should be okay. Even the eye.”
June’s eye does look pretty fantastic. What was only bluish purple before has now darkened to almost black, her entire eye encircled. She looks back calmly and whispers, “I’m not dead. I can hear you.”
Howl smiles. “Good.”
June tilts her head and touches her bloody nose, grimacing. “You don’t know how to fix this, do you?”
“I can.” Both June and Howl look at me, surprised.
“I grew up with orphans as likely to eat their spoons as their morning rice if Mantis wasn’t working. The nuns didn’t get too excited about anything unless bones were sticking out, so we learned to take care of one another.”
June’s eyes well up as I remold her nose back to how it is supposed to be, but she holds still. When I’m finished, she resumes staring at the wall. I was expecting a gasp at least. Most kids would have screamed their way through the whole thing.
“Don’t touch it for a while, okay? Noses heal fast, but it won’t be the same.”
She just nods. Like it’s happened before. Or maybe she’s never looked in a mirror to know what “the same” would be. Her hands rub her arms for warmth, the Choke lying forgotten in her lap.
Howl holds another water skin full of the white jelly out toward me. I wrinkle my nose as I take it, but have no intention of gagging the slimy concoction down. My experiences with Choke have been less than appetizing.
Poking at it through the plastic, I look up at Howl. “So.” I wait until he looks at me. “Grenades?”
“Not a real one.” He shrugs at my black expression. “I know. We could have saved ourselves some trouble running from the Wood Rats if I’d brought it out earlier.”
June looks up, scowling.
“Sorry. I mean . . . I didn’t want to attract attention.”
I roll my eyes, though he isn’t looking at me anymore. “So you do it with hundreds of Seconds watching from upriver?”
“If they’ve gotten as far as our camp, they already know we’re here. When they find my pack, they’ll know who we are. We didn’t really have time to think of a better way to get June out of there alive.”
“How about the gun? Did we leave it out in the clearing?” The Red must have kicked it away from me after he knocked me down.
Howl pulls the weapon from his jacket and slides it across the dirt floor to rest near my open hand. I have no desire to touch the cool metal.
Howl’s voice is wry, laughing at himself. “I can’t shoot the stupid thing anyway,”
June’s eyes rest lightly on the gun, but when she notices me watching her, she returns to staring a hole in the wall.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I had it,” Howl says. “I didn’t know what to expect from you. Whether you had a knife up your sleeve like everyone else. Which you did, actually.” He reaches into his coat pocket, touching what I can only assume is Tai-ge’s knife. “Telling you was on the to-do list for today, after our chat last night.” Howl’s hand goes back into his jacket, fishing around in the inside pockets before coming up with another grenade. He sets it between us, the silvery pattern glinting in the lantern’s dim cast. “This is all that’s left. No more surprises.”
“Right.” June doesn’t look up when I answer, her eyes suspiciously far from the gun. “No more surprises.”
• • •
We huddle against the stone walls, waiting like cornered rats. Howl and I take turns keeping watch, but visions of soldiers stumbling into our cave keep the circles under our eyes even when we’re off duty.
June draws a square on the floor, dividing it into smaller and smaller pieces until she has a grid in front of her. Digging into her bag of belongings, she pulls out two handfuls of pebbles and deposits them on the ground, one pile dark, one light. She inches the lantern a little closer and looks up at me.
“Weiqi?” I ask.
A nod.
“Sure, I’ll play.” I scoot closer to the board, relieved to have something to distract me from jumping at every noise that filters back into our hideaway. Weiqi is one of my favorite games, the one thing Mother left me that I’m not ashamed of. I love the weight of the stones in my hands, the way their smooth surfaces feel against my skin. My mother, Aya, and I would study at the board, and she’d show us where the holes were, how to attack, when to give up. Aya and I played often. But even though she was much better than I was, able to see patterns where I could not, I still relished the thoughtfulness of the game.
Mother could trounce both of us, even with only one eye on the board. I only ever beat her once. I crowed about it, refusing to play her again for weeks because I knew I wouldn’t win a second time. We never did play again, because she disappeared.
June pushes the lighter pebbles toward me, carefully arranging her darker ones in a pile and setting one on the makeshift board. Smoothing her hair behind her ears, she doesn’t look up from the piece, waiting for me to make my move.
I place a pebble on the board, watching her more than the game.
June keeps her attention on the stones, rolling a pebble in her fingers across her lips as she thinks, each piece placed in quick, confident movements. Like Aya as she surveyed her kingdom of stones. About five minutes in, June’s mouth curls into a tiny, tight-lipped smile. She looks up and whispers, “Trapped.”
“What?” I look down to the long lines I’ve been making with my pieces to capture territory and realize she’s right. I’m trapped. She pulls all the trapped pieces off the dirt squares, arranging them in a tidy row.
Now I am focused. This little girl can’t beat me.
But within three moves, I’m trapped again. Two more and the game is over. Howl looks over from his post near the door, whistling in appreciation. “Wow. I didn’t know you could lose weiqi that quickly. Remind me not to have you plan any military operations for me.”
“No one believes weiqi has anything to do with battle theory anymore. Besides, I was distracted by your loud mouth-breathing.”
It isn’t true, though. The reason I spent many an hour staring Tai-ge down across a weiqi board was because he was studying ancient war theory. General Hong was convinced the game teaches you how to think correctly. Different battles going on all over the board, drawing in your enemy and trapping them. Blatant attacks. Feints and tricks. Defending territory. It’s all there.
I stand up to stretch, my head brushing the ceiling. “You try, Howl. She’s brutal.”
His pieces pile up in front of June even faster than mine did. “I concede, General June.” Howl gives her an elaborate bow from his seat on the floor.
“My turn again.” I shove him aside and watch carefully as she sets the first piece on the lines. Eyes narrowed, I watch the light pebbles grow from lines to circles, but I can see where she is going this time. Howl cheers when I capture three of her pieces, but June just grows
more and more relaxed, shooting me an impish little smile as she corners five of mine.
We are so absorbed in the game that the footsteps from outside don’t register at first. Howl gives a melodramatic groan as more of my pieces slide toward June. “Were you a Hong in a past life? How did you . . .”
“It’s coming from over here.” A female voice. Close.
We all drop to the floor, pebbles scattering.
Howl creeps closer to the bend in the rock that shields us from the door, gun in his hand. June stays frozen on the ground next to me, the overwhelming feeling that our pieces are about to be taken flooding the cave.
The footsteps crunch closer, careful and slow. The snaps of branches under boots sound like bones cracking. “I don’t see anything. Just a bunch of scrub and rocks.”
The voice slinks around me, teasing goose bumps out of the skin on my arms. I’m lying so still that my muscles clench until I feel as though my body is trying to morph into something else. Breathing feels too noisy, but I’m running out of air. It seems as if the edges of my brain are crinkling and expanding.
I startle as a rock hits the inside wall, kicked by those worn boots from outside. Howl creeps closer to the door, crouched and ready.
Silence.
The soldier doesn’t come in. Doesn’t call for reinforcements. Doesn’t leave us a bloody mess in the dust. Her heavy tread fades back into the cold whispers of the forest. Howl inches back toward us. “Gone,” he murmurs.
June’s eyes are wide as she pulls herself up from the ground, leaning against the cold stone in a heap. “You’re loud,” she informs Howl.
“Sorry. I get a little excited about weiqi. I used to play with my father. The whole family would get involved, rooting for one of us.” Howl slides in next to us, our energy spent. “Didn’t realize the sound would carry so far.”
“Somehow I can’t imagine the Chairman playing.” Shock still splinters my voice into a barbed mess. “Wouldn’t everyone lose to him on purpose?” Maybe weiqi is the one bright spot in their family.
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