Dead Moon Rising

by Caitlin Sangster

  “Is it stuck?” I call.

  He sets down his load, looking up into the sliver of blue sky. An almost escape, too narrow for us to slip through.

  “Do you know how the hangar doors work?” I set the long box on the heli ramp, Reifa giving me a narrow look before picking it up herself to take inside. “Tell me what to do, Song Jie. I’ll get the doors open if you just tell me how to get up there.”

  Song Jie takes a shaky breath, and then another, ducking out of the heli to look up again at the narrow strip of blue sky burning the darkness of the hangar into light. “We might have a chance if…” He looks back at me, barely pausing long enough to say, “Come with me!” before running toward the control room.

  “I was part of the team that maintained this facility,” he calls back to me when we hit the stairs. “The doors were camouflaged under dirt and scrub, but we haven’t been able to get out here safely since the City started coming after the island. It’s been eight years since any of this has been maintained—eight years of dirt, wind, and rain…”

  He skids to a stop at the control panels, pressing buttons until a three-dimensional image appears in front of him, showing the doors partially opened. There’s a red dot sending up a warning flare near the door’s hinges. “Looks like we’ve got some kind of blockage. I don’t know what could be so big the door wouldn’t crush it, so there must be more than one obstruction.”

  “How do I get up there?” I ask.

  Song Jie grabs something from under the desk, then bolts toward the stairs. “You only have one arm, and no idea how to fix anything.”

  “I have two arms. Didn’t you not see me carrying boxes like a champion… box carrier?”

  The lights flicker overhead as he skids to a stop and presses his hand against a silver stripe marking the wall at the top of the stairs. Just like the doors back at the island, a click I can feel through the stone floor releases a pocket door, the chunk of rock sliding back. It moves slow, Song Jie pacing back and forth in front of it, hand scrubbing through his dirty hair as he waits for it to give him enough room to pass. He turns back to me, holding up the thing he grabbed from the desk. “I’ve got a radio link that connects to the controls here—tell me if another light pops up once I’ve got the obstruction cleared. You’ll have to input the command for it to open again.”

  “How long will you have to get down here before it crushes you?”

  “Maybe five minutes?” He’s already far enough away that I only catch the echoes of his voice.

  “Song Jie!” I start after him, but stop after only a few steps. He’s right that I wouldn’t know what to do up there, so I go back to the hologram, examining the characters flickering at the bottom. They’re almost the same as the ones I’ve been using my whole life, but there are odd twists here and there, characters that are squished together or slightly malformed from what I know, though from context I can generally understand. Thumbing through them, I find the manual override for the door, though it’s grayed out because of the obstruction. The radio is pretty easy to find too, a little icon that is blinking yellow as if to say it’s connected.

  One of the character sets says something about external surveillance, so I press it, gratified when a video feed pops up on the screen mounted underneath the desk’s heavy glass top.

  There’s a camera showing a sliver of the open door in the ceiling, a draft of air visibly ruffling rocks and dirt from its edge to fall into the cave below. At the very corner of the camera, there’s a hint of movement. Fiddling until I get the cameras to change, I find an image of Song Jie outside on the roof staring down a tree trunk tipped at an awkward angle. He runs to a rise in the rock where the hinged edge of the door rests, pulling open a door to work on something inside.

  The image of the partially open doors remains stationary, the single red light continuing to beat a warning. There’s no sound from the video, but I can see the swear words erupting from Song Jie’s lips, his face grainy and hard. Shuffling through all the different camera vantage points to see if I can be helpful, all I find is dirt, scrubby grass, and trees, not a single sign of hostile—

  Wait. I shuffle back one camera set. Was it only grass waving in the breeze? The shadows twist in a way that seems out of sync with the plant life up there, but it’s difficult to see because the sun is shining directly into the camera.

  There it is again. Movement. A shadow larger than any dead dandelion stalk can cast. Then an outline, the sun’s strength on the camera lens turning whoever it is into something spindly and alien.

  Just as I’m about to click the radio, Song Jie’s voice crackles through and the highlighted obstruction turns from red to green. “We’re clear. Any other lights pop up?”

  “Get out of there!” I hiss into the hologram, not even sure where the microphone is.

  “What?”

  The manual override icon turns green. Another shape slinks across the camera, then another. “Yuan’s dirty bastard of a…” I hit the override to force the hangar doors open, then run for the stairwell, tinny pings of gunfire crackling over the radio.

  CHAPTER 17 Howl

  MY SHOULDER AND CHEST ACHE as I dart through the open door disguised in a cleft of rock on the roof. Reifa’s gun feels like lead, pulling my good arm down as if it’s going to destroy the last piece of me that works. I haven’t shot at anyone in years. Not since I got to the City. My time before that was a frenzy almost, where it seemed like the whole world was armed and searching for me.

  It wasn’t. It sort of was.

  All these years I’ve kept my finger off the trigger, even when June’s Seph-bitten family tried to hold us hostage, when Helix came after us with a gun. When I thought Tai-ge was going to shoot me or Sev or maybe even that stupid medic he brought with us. Keeping my finger off the trigger was a safeguard. As if discharging a weapon one more time would make my two years of hiding from the things I did before slide off me like a coat, leaving me with nothing in this world but a gun in one hand and hatred in my heart.

  The little girl and her doll. She wasn’t the last I killed.

  Song Jie’s a crouched form on the far end of the rocky hillside, sheltering behind a rock as bullets thud into his cover. Based on the video feed, soldiers will be coming up from the lower side of the hill at the west end, right before it shears off into a rocky cliff.

  When I get close enough to see the first Red, my finger on the trigger won’t move for a moment. He’s taking a second to reset, checking his cover and the soldiers behind him.

  I don’t want to go back to my old idea of the world, that there were only friends and enemies and nothing in between, because I know there are good people fighting for their lives from under the Mountain, scavenging Outside, even inside the City, all of them just trying to stay alive.

  Good people who will still try to kill me if I’m the body standing between them and a safe life for their family. Good people who will hand over these helis and the weapons inside them to Dr. Yang, believing that safety is what he’s offering instead of slavery.

  The soldier takes aim at Song Jie.

  My bullet hits the Red first.

  The second Red falls just as quickly once I’ve accounted for the wind. The third ducks down, trying to figure out where the bullets came from. Song Jie darts toward me, the hangar’s roof making a slow arc that will block the stairs in a minute. Another Red pulls himself up to join the one still alive on the grassy slope, but Song Jie’s almost across, almost safe. When he gets to my spot by the door, Song Jie slides onto his knees, pulling out the gun he took from some soldier below, and begins firing wildly toward the rocks where the two soldiers are sheltered.

  “Stop.” I pull his arm down, the gun firing into the ground at Song Jie’s feet as he jerks away from me, twisting to point the weapon again toward the Reds. “Stop.” I can’t hear myself speak, the sound from the explosion, the gunfire, all of it leaving my ears empty, and there’s little chance Song Jie can hear me either, but he unders
tands when I pull the gun away from him and push him back through the door to the stairs. His face seems to be nothing but veins and fury, as if everything bad in the world was sitting right outside and finally he can do something about it.

  Like me, Before. Seeking to right the world one dead Red at a time.

  It’s only a momentary lapse. Song Jie swears at me one more time before running down the stairs to the holograms and video feeds. Tucking Song Jie’s stolen gun next to Reifa’s in my waistband makes me feel part machine. I check the damage we did. Two dead men sprawled across the rocks, the other two still taking cover. Two killed by me, the others spared from Song Jie’s wild shots. My breaths come in too deep and heavy as I follow Song Jie’s sprint down the stairs. We get to the heli staircase just as Reifa goes to the controls to pull it up. She gives us a grudging nod before letting us in. Song Jie first, then me, blood-spattered and cold.

  But alive. And on my way to making sure Sev is alive.

  The acrid stink of propellant sticks to my hands, like memories I’d rather forget.

  I did not want to kill those men.

  I didn’t kill them to save myself or out of revenge. I did it to save Song Jie. Sev would probably have said no one should’ve been shooting at all, but Sev doesn’t know everything.

  My mind goes back to when Reds took June and we knocked over their tent to get her back, Sev politely asking one of the Reds to sit still while she tied him up, but I blink the image away. She fought Luokai off when he was trying to tear me to pieces, stood between June and Tai-ge’s medic right alongside me when I told him if he didn’t stay away from her he’d be practicing nosedives off the back of the heli from ten thousand feet.

  She hasn’t had to deal with one of those split-second decisions between dying and killing someone else. I don’t want her to ever have to.

  I sit down and strap in, pulling the guns from my waistband to push them away where they won’t be touching my skin. Almost glad that this time I can feel the weight of death, because maybe that means it isn’t a part of me anymore.

  The heli jerks into the air before I even realize the propellers are running. Tai-ge’s heli roared, but this one is a snake, barely a hiss coming in through the windows. Gein jumps up from the controls even though we’re in the air, the aircraft bobbing up and down in an unconvincing hover. He and Reifa grab four of the long, thin boxes I helped load onto the heli and take them into a side compartment just off the cockpit. Leaving Reifa in the compartment, Gein dashes empty-handed to the controls and takes us up so quickly, my head slams into the metal wall, pushing me hard against the seat, a sudden pressure in my ears.

  Gein yells something from the pilot’s chair, pointing frantically to the ground below, the heli jogging side to side as if it’s about to collapse. I claw my way out of the seat to the cockpit window, peering down below us. Something seems to dislodge from the bottom of the heli, tiny specks falling lifelessly to the ground below.

  One moment, the yawning hangar doors are below us, Reds dotting the hillsides all around. The next, there’s fire billowing out from the hangar’s open jaws. Rock and dirt and trees and who knows what else seem to collapse down into the hole we were just standing in, the whole Seph-bitten hillside turning from a military base to a cloud of ash and smoke.

  It’s the sound of the explosion unfolding that’s the worst. The sound is so heavy it’s almost silence.

  I look away, my heart rapping hard against my chest as I crouch by the window. I’ve heard the stories about the weapons from Before. We don’t have bombs like that anymore. Not the kinds that blow up whole hangars, whole cities like they did during the Influenza War.

  But I don’t have to look through the cloud of smoke to know. Everything below us, the hangar, the hill, the helis. The Reds Song Jie wanted to shoot. They’re all gone.

  CHAPTER 18 Sev

  NO DAYLIGHT. NO NIGHT. NO sleep or waking. Just endless rustlings and squeaks as medics walk through the room, pressure and pain when they inserted the feeding tube into my nose. More with the catheter and the other tubes that promise no one will have to do more than check the equipment spidering out from me to keep me clean. The air has been turned to stone. Every inch of me covered by the cold, suffocating weight that pins me to the bed. Every breath is only a sip of oxygen while my lungs dry up.

  Alone. Except for the person with no mask and a beast inside them who slips into my room and sits at my bedside when no one else is here.

  Time stops moving. The darkness rustles, full of whispers and specters. Only Mother notices I’m here. Or maybe it’s the princess trapped under a spell of Sleep. It’s hard to tell.

  Sometimes it’s just memories of her, her voice saying she’s sorry, but she’s speaking from the pages of a book. The book burns, pages charring to ash one word at a time. The princess’s voice growls out from a throat left to rot for eight years, only to tell me she’s going to die.

  To go to the family.

  I found my family. Where I came from. I found the cure. I know where to go. The papers are under our old floorboards back in the City, in the box where my sister and I used to hide our secrets.

  But I can’t move.

  Then, after days, weeks, years, the princess stops her repetitive chimes and starts talking to me.

  I know hallucinations come to people who are Asleep. They came to me the last time I went under, and they came calling in the years after I woke up. But here, trapped in the dark, it’s hard to remember what is real, what is memory, and what is dream.

  You know, Tai-ge didn’t have much respect for you, the princess lectures. He watched every step you took after the two of you stole the heli, waiting to catch you when you fell. It was never a question of whether you would. Never a thought to wonder if he was the one who’d stepped over the cliff. Her voice seems to undulate back and forth, as if she’s speaking to me through a long tube. Through time. It makes the little bit of me still here, the curled-up girl in the furthest corner of my mind, look up. Howl trusts you to do your part. Your father was that way.

  “Father?” I ask. I hardly remember my father.

  He would always look at the way I did things and start to laugh, as if I were from some other planet. I suppose I was. But then he’d say, “I’ll try it. Maybe your way is better.” Sometimes I’d watch him and follow. We tried to meet at the center.

  Meet at the center. Fight on the same team. Though it didn’t start out as a fight. “What happened to Howl?” I ask, as if she exists outside me, a ghost that can look at the world and report back. “I left him at Port North. He couldn’t climb with me to get the cure from Gao Shun.”

  The cure wasn’t there.

  “I know. But we thought it was there. All of us did. Did Howl survive? Is he here? Is he dead?” And then the quieter thought: “Howl wouldn’t have been hurt if it hadn’t been for me. He wouldn’t have been on the island at all.”

  Silence. But then her voice speaks, the lovely bell tones I remember before, not the paper-thin scratch of a woman almost dead or the harsh sobs of a mother in mourning. Her voice soothes the enflamed darkness of my mind. He followed you. He’s the one who climbed into the heli and the one who chose to step between you and that gore, knowing it might be the end of his life. You can’t take his decisions and decide they belong to you any more than he can tell you what to think and feel. Both of you made your own choices, and those choices brought you here. Because you want to help June. Lihua. All the others Dr. Yang has hurt or will hurt in the future.

  “I killed you. I didn’t want to, but I did.”

  Dr. Yang killed me, my little rose. He killed me the moment he put Sleep into my veins. It was never you.

  “I’m afraid.” The admission chokes inside me. I don’t want to be trapped, to be Asleep. To know that Howl could be Asleep the way I am somewhere in this building and there’s nothing I can do to help him.

  I’m afraid I won’t ever wake up. The medicine that was supposed to wake Mother up killed he
r instead. And even if I do wake up, what then? What if Tai-ge was right about me? I’m just a Fourth. What do I know about cures or escaping or any of that? I’ve had help every step of the way so far, and now I’m alone.

  “What if I fail?” I whisper it in the back of my brain, the admission feeling almost like a failure itself. “What if it comes down to me facing Dr. Yang with a gun and I can’t pull the trigger?”

  Her voice seems to sigh, the sound a brush of cool air inside me. We share faults between the two of us. Being able to kill is not always strength, Sevvy, but the reverse can also be a weakness. Allowing others a chance to right their wrongs, or even to explain themselves, is a quality I wish everyone possessed… but I still wonder what it is I should have done, knowing now how Dr. Yang planned to hurt you and the rest of the family. If I had decided to end him, I’d be alive. So would your father, your sister. It would have been my burden instead of yours.

  A hallucination. I know this is a hallucination. Does that mean something deep inside me blames Mother for where I’m lying now? It would be a lie to say I didn’t wish Dr. Yang had been taken care of long before I was born. But I know that isn’t fair. “You weren’t a killer. You were a doctor. A savior.”

  I thought of myself that way, but it was my failing that killed your father. Your sister. So many others at Port North and Outside. She sighs. I know you’re scared. I know you want to fix it all. But nobody can fix everything. You’ll do what’s right. You’ll do more than you think you can. You’ll have to be what I couldn’t. Everything is going to be all right, because you have never once settled for less than that.

  “Haven’t I?” I settled for being Tai-ge’s slightly embarrassing friend. For canning jars and limp cabbage dinners, a star burned into my hand when I’d done nothing to deserve it.