“Don’t try to tell me you know more about the City than I do.” His voice is quiet now, dangerous. “You are only alive because I kept them away from you. I thought you were innocent, and you weren’t. That bomb was meant to kill me, and you just stood there and waited for it, joking with me in the moments before I was supposed to die. You were going to be a martyr, just like your mother. Taking down the General’s son.”
I should have expected this. But I can’t leave him here, even if he lied to me. I can’t lose one more person. I have to make him see. “Tai-ge, I do know more about the City than you. The rebels don’t have access to helis or planes. There’s no way they could have bombed the bridge, and there’s no way I would have stood there waiting for them to kill you. This place is bombing itself to—”
“That doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“You are my only family. You are the only person I trust, in the City or Outside. You know me. And I’m telling you that I don’t want you to die. I didn’t on the bridge and I don’t now. The whole City is about to become a battlefield. I don’t want anyone to die, and you can help me stop it.”
He turns to face me, the movement so slow I wonder if the world has come to a screeching stop around us, focused on this one moment. “I would have done anything to protect you.” He slumps against the bed, burying his face in his hands. “But I can’t believe you now. Don’t make me call the Watch. Just leave.”
“But, Tai-ge—”
“Get out, Fourth.”
CHAPTER 41
MY BRAIN IS NUMB. I can’t do anything but cling to the branches outside his window, pretending that I’m in a world where Tai-ge trusts me. Loves me. That I’ll wake up and he’ll still be my friend.
The leaves around me are so tranquil. I wonder if they could be Asleep, slated for destruction like everything else in this City. All the times I’ve sat in this tree to throw slimy leftover noodles into Tai-ge’s room as a joke or just to wave and have him smile and wave back. Is this the last time I will ever see Tai-ge? Will he even live through the night? The ring cuts into my palm as I hold it too tight.
Tai-ge’s outline against the drapes has stopped throwing things and is now sitting again with his head buried in his arms, like a two-year-old waiting for his mom to come in and tell him it will be okay. It’ll be a long wait. I doubt Comrade Hong has ever comforted anyone.
There’s only one thing I have left. The haze of smoke obscuring the stars over the City glows orange and red with the beginnings of a new day. By the time I face the City Center’s red tile roof, the sun peeks up over the horizon, a spear of fire waiting to burn the night away. If the living won’t listen, it’s time to go ask the dead.
I creep past the openmouthed snarls of the lions that guard the City Center, eyes unable to avoid the portrait hanging high on the back wall. The Chairman’s blank face looks down at every person who enters here, hand on his son’s shoulder. I let my eyes fall, unwilling to wonder why it was I thought the boy appeared so much like Howl. How did he fool everyone? Even the Premier we met in the street assumed Howl was the Chairman’s son, though his face was covered at the time. The resemblance of the portrait sticks in my brain like a knife. It does seem remarkably like Howl. But it isn’t him.
Traitor’s Arch is set at the back wall across from the portrait, the white wood curving up about two stories, flanked by long red-and-black banners that run from ceiling to floor. Stairs mimic the bend of the Arch, leading up to the second-floor balcony that runs the length of the room, cutting the tall windows at every wall in half. Displays of City history and triumphs sit in glass cases on the balcony every few feet, seeming small and insignificant under the high ceiling. From every point in the room you can see her, standing in her glass case like a princess waiting to be kissed, her upright coffin the keystone of the Arch.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her face since that terrible day my eyes closed in Sleep, every other memory of her driven out by the horror of not being able to open them. In all the years she’s been here, I couldn’t even make myself look up at her. They bring all the schoolchildren through at least once a year to scare them, to give a face to the terror of SS, Kamar, and traitors all in one monstrous body. I could never force myself to take it in, stare always trained above or below her glass prison. Mind carefully blank to allow the voice explaining her many crimes to ricochet around in my skull without my noticing the words. Espionage. Intentional propagation of SS. Murder. A little demon gnawing at memories I knew were mine, to make them fit into this much more gruesome shape.
Sunrise yawns through the high windows, bathing Mother’s prison in bright pinks and oranges. I shy away from the white-painted wood of Traitor’s Arch, carved figures bowing under the weight of Mother’s display, arcing over a simple white chair. This must have been where Sister Shang died. Her name is carved at the base alongside hundreds of others who died in this chair. SHANG SUNAI.
My father’s name is here too, the edges of the characters still sharp where the tools gouged them into the wood.
Finally, I force my stare up. Of all the things Howl lied about, was my mother one of them? Did she try to kill me herself? Or was she trying to save me?
My feet are lead, the toes of my dirty boots streaking the floor with mud as they drag across the floor, dread and anticipation warring inside of me, knowing the hurt should be gone after all these years. But it isn’t.
The light falls in flaxen strands, tumbling over the waves of hair that curl down to her waist. Calm and peaceful. A certain pride emanates from her unlined brow, full lips slightly curved in a smile. White embroidery covers her black dress like mold, arms crossed over her chest to show the First mark on her hand, the single red star pinned over her heart. She’s beautiful standing up there. Asleep.
On the second-story balcony, a small platform allows you to walk around to the front of her coffin and look at her up close. To see the monster where she stands braced up inside her prison. But for me, her features burst open all the old pain, a gush of regret bringing me to my knees in the face of my tormentor, the woman I loved so much.
Now I have something with which to fend off the bitter, lost little girl inside of me. Hope. If only a drop.
I pull the syringe from my belt, steeling my heart. Whether Howl’s story was just part of the deception or actual truth, I tell myself there’s nothing left of me to hurt.
I cut through a tangle of wires that hook to an alarm up above her cage, as if she could somehow wake herself up and escape. Howl described this part to me too, just in case we couldn’t both come in. How to cut the wires and open the front panel of her coffin, which tube to clip the syringe into out of the mess of lines feeding into her back. I watch for a moment, holding my breath as the serum spills through the maze toward her veins. What if it’s just sugar water? Yet another part of an elaborate joke. Only one way to find out.
She blinks.
And then the world turns over. Her eyes—the same eyes I see in the mirror—shift into focus, warming my skin.
“Sevvy.” The croak belongs to a woman on death’s doorstep, moments from crumbling into powder. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She isn’t what I remember, lithe beauty lost in her brittle body. Her head lolls against the metal brace holding her upright like a porcelain doll, tied up for display but not for play. Her eyes fight to stay open, long eyelashes dark against her cheeks. Papery, cracked skin folds experimentally as she fights against the dead weight of her limbs, struggling to move. She makes me afraid. Not for myself, but that she might crumble and burn in the direct sunlight.
“Come on,” I say, lost in the maze of tubes and pins trapping her in the box. “Let’s get you out of there.”
Her laugh is dry and hoarse, dead leaves swirling in a gust of wind. “I’m not going anywhere, Sevvy. I doubt I have more than a few minutes to live, now that I’m awake.” Her gaze flicks over me and her mouth bows and crooks, white teeth stic
king out. It takes a minute for me to realize she is trying to smile. “You are beautiful. So beautiful.”
I shake my head, trying to banish from my mind the only other time that has been said to me. “Here”—I offer my shoulder—“lean on me and I’ll try to get you free. The Menghu are coming. I need your help to stop them. I need the cure.”
She ignores me, the smile creeping up larger as she reaches out to touch my hand and clasp my fingers. Her skin feels wafer-thin and dry, as if all that’s left of her is paper and old memories. “You escaped the City. You must have. I used to hear your voice with that Second family when they brought you up here to see me. Waiting to hear you was the only thing that kept me alive. I knew one day you would realize . . .” Her voice starts to buck and rear, as though she’s losing control. A tear slides down her cheek, and the hand in mine gains strength, clutching at me.
Gui-hua takes a breath, rattling in her lungs as she lets it out. “You know about the cure?”
I nod, her eyes scorching mine in intensity.
“The Circle already had the cure to SS. I’m a fool.” She stops, coughs racking her lungs. “They told me to stop my research. SS cases started to crop up in the City, and I wanted to solve it, didn’t want to try to hide it from the Seconds and Thirds like they told us to. I didn’t realize Firsts were the ones infecting children and families. The Circle told me it was a waste of time after all these years to search for a cure at all, that my talents were needed elsewhere. When I kept going. . . . That’s when you fell Asleep. It was a warning. To make me stop.
“But with your eyes closed, your heartbeat so faint . . .” She stops again, and this time it’s emotion, not her dusty vocal cords, taking control of the words. “How could I stop looking for the cure?”
Warmth blooms inside of me, tears washing her face to a blur. Is Howl’s story true, then? She didn’t pump my veins full of SS as a last insult to our family before she defected, only to find the Watch waiting to drag her to the Arch. Mother came back, knowing she would probably get caught to save me. She didn’t make a cure for Outsiders. Not for the Mountain. It was for me. The years of stinging hurt rear up inside of me, rebelling. But I push them back. Was Gui-hua Jiang, the traitor, the child-killer, really just trying to protect her daughter? Her fingers closing around my wrist feel like they are meant to be an embrace, but she’s cold, her fragile grip breaking as she sags farther down.
Mother’s eyes focus on the leather thong around my neck, and her trembling hand jerks toward the shard of jade glowing red in the morning light.
“Dr. Yang.” Something like fear flowers in her clear black eyes and she tries to lift her head. “You know him, or you couldn’t have that. He took it. . . .” Her hands twitch against the restraints I am trying to unfasten. “Listen to me.” Her voice gains strength, sickly vibrato thinning to a murmur. “You need to leave now. Run. North. Port North. To the family.”
“I don’t understand.” I take the hand that is grasping toward me, holding it tight.
“He must be here. He knows he needs me to reproduce the cure. He never could quite put things together.”
The intensity in her expression is lethal, her whole face caving, burning to feed her last reserves of energy into me. “He took me to the Mountain. But when we succeeded, he wouldn’t let me leave. Dr. Yang didn’t want peace; he wanted power, to use the cure to control. I hid the formula from him and ran. Hid until I could get back to you. The family . . .” She trails off, eyes wandering as though she’s lost the thread of what she was saying.
“When I got back here, Dr. Yang had gone before the Circle to say that I had formulated a cure and was going to use it to overthrow them. They arrested me. But not because they wanted the cure. The Circle already had a cure.” Her voice fades, despair trickling down her face in wet trails. “They wouldn’t give it to anyone but their own. If you go to the family—”
“Mother! What family? What are you talking about?” The last restraints open, and she sinks down to the floor, head on my shoulder as I try to support her weight. The trailing tubes pulling at her are starting to show red feedback. You have to live! I want to shout at her. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do! If I can just get her out of here, we can go to . . . My mind stops. Go where? No one is going to help us.
“Your father . . . We escaped. . . . We tried to escape. But Dr. Yang was waiting for us when we came for you and your sister.” She looks down at her body, shudders flickering through her like an earthquake. “They threatened Dr. Yang. Told him not speak of a cure to anyone, then put me to Sleep. Left me to rot.”
Her words are becoming twisted with tremors, almost impossible to decipher one from the next. “Go. Port North. Find them. Don’t tell him. Don’t tell Yang He-ping. . . .”
“I don’t understand!”
Her mouth curves into the smile that I remember. “I love you, little rose. Now run.”
Her shakes quiet, and her hand’s white-knuckled grip on mine goes slack. “Mother?” I ask, my voice tiny and insignificant, dwarfed by the huge room, by the blood pooling underneath us on the floor and all over my hands. Her beautiful black eyes dim and stare out above me, unseeing. Empty, as though I can see the space where her life used to be and is no longer.
Alone. Again. With no answers. Just an ache in my chest, my heart beating faster and faster as if it wants to follow her wherever she went.
Cold metal sears an icy ring at the nape of my neck, and the quiet calm of Dr. Yang’s voice scrapes against my nerves like a razor blade.
“Thank you, Jiang Sev. That was just what I needed.”
CHAPTER 42
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” The cylinder jabs harder into my neck as I try to inch away.
“Getting what I need to finish this whole mess. She was so selfish, your mother. I didn’t realize she had hidden our work until I had already destroyed the First Circle—or rather, everyone who knew how to perform the cure procedure.”
“You are the one who murdered all those Firsts? And let them blame her?” The tears in my voice are just beginning to wet the conflict raging inside of me. Sorrow for a whole life lived hating my mother, anger that I couldn’t do anything to save her, just like she couldn’t do anything to save me. Angry to be alone again. Holding her close against my chest, I squeeze my eyes closed, tears dripping down my cheeks. It’s hard to concentrate on what Dr. Yang is saying, my brain screaming at me to do something when all I can do is hold her wasted body closer.
She’s dead. And the man who did it is about to kill me, too.
“Firsts use Mantis to control their labor force, even bombing their own City to keep up the appearance of being at war. To keep the infections spreading. They could have given the cure to everyone, but they saved it for themselves. Killing them was justice.” I can feel him shifting closer. “The whole Third Quarter might as well be a slave camp. And no one can complain. Not while my First compatriots control Mantis.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
“It has everything to do with all of us. Firsts control the City with SS, with Mantis. More than the City. Fourths out on the farms, convicted because they see that something is wrong.” His voice is grim, but respectful. Envious. “Thirds shelter behind Firsts and Seconds like a protective shield. Believing they are comrades, each quarter performing their appointed duty. But it’s all a lie. Parents down in the Third Quarter bring their compulsing children to doctors who deal out sugar pills so First medical experiments can continue in the Sanatorium. Third workers don’t know that the heli-planes dropping SS bombs on their families take off from Second airfields. Even if they do suspect, how can they fight? It has to stop.”
“Then why is there a gun to my back? Why did my mother have to die?” I scan the empty building, grasping at wisps of insubstantial, ill-conceived plans to escape. “Let’s help the Thirds.”
“Only a select few of the Firsts know about the cure, the highest in their ranks, who doled the cure out as a rew
ard, a sign of authority. The Circle. When a young, upstart First started to make headway on discovering their secret, they did everything they could to stop her. Gui-hua wanted to save the world, but she couldn’t see that she was putting her faith in the wrong people.” He turns me around to face him, not batting an eye at my mother’s lifeless face. “Who is there to trust here or anywhere? The people who hand SS to their own children? Or the Menghu, who kill indiscriminately, convinced that every light needs to be snuffed out but their own? No one could be trusted with the cure but us—Gui-hua and me. But when we finally put all the pieces together, she stole the whole experiment, all the data. Handed it straight to the Firsts. I had to do something.”
“You put her to Sleep.” The syringe Howl took from Dr. Yang’s office takes on new meaning. A triumph. A trophy. The anger building inside me threatens to tear through my skin, biting through the confusion of sorrow and regret. “You let her decay up here for ten years because she didn’t want to work with you?”
“They didn’t know it was me who put her to Sleep. The medics knew it wasn’t the same as a normal SS infection the moment they saw her. They went through the whole ceremony of the Chairman pretending to inject her for the cameras.” He starts to laugh. “And they didn’t know how to wake her up. She was the signature on the devastation I left when I destroyed their access to the cure. All of the scientists who knew, all of the records. Nothing left but a group of old men who remember what used to be. Still, they work with me almost every day with no idea that they could be next ones to die. That they put the wrong person to Sleep.” Dr. Yang’s smile is so triumphantly ugly, worming its way through his doctor’s calm. Finally, he can boast. “The scientists here are untrained. Unimaginative. Able to create terrible pain in the name of science, to control with fear, but not much more. They were completely unprepared to reinvent the medical miracle Yuan Zhiwei’s discovered. When the armies came with SS, he saw the opportunity to set up this empire and became the little king of a little kingdom, the promise of a cure keeping the slaves hard at work while the cure itself kept him and his own safe as the rest of the world fell to pieces. Gui-hua was the First Circle’s only hope to rediscover the key, the cure, if only they could get her awake. I only wish I’d been there when the Chairman found her.”
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