How is it possible that there would be Seconds here, not a two-minute walk from Dr. Yang’s stronghold? Mother had no idea where Dr. Yang was camped. Finding out was one of her top priorities, and if she’d discovered him, she would have told me.
I think. Maybe she would have.
Maybe she did. I smashed my link to her.
Ignoring her command to stay back, I follow Mei toward the Seconds’ smoky fire until we’re just outside the ring of light, the Outside patrollers’ voices clear once we’re close. The soldier sitting closest to us, a man, is cleaning his gun. “I don’t think it’s worth it to send so many companies. Unless reclaiming the garrison is about the mines south of here…”
The garrison. The southern garrison? Dr. Yang took over a City base? I look back the way we came, wondering how far the bunker is. It was one of the biggest outposts outside the City, and if I remember correctly, it was one of the places Dr. Yang was posted before all this started.
And I was sent there less than a year ago for mandatory training.
It feels like a gift, as if the universe is handing this mission to me with a supportive pat on the shoulder. I’ll know the layout when Kasim and Mei take me into the garrison, which will give me an advantage.
Mei’s breath hisses through her teeth as she eases back a step. The soldiers continue talking, a woman adding her voice. “They’ll be here in a day or so. Hopefully, the supplies the General promised will come with them. If not, things are looking sort of frightening back at Dazhai. Unless that mission to the City works out and we get new masks.” The woman adjusts the straps of her own mask, some of the tubes unmistakably damaged.
Wait. Mother ordered them here? With more to come? And how do they know about my mission in the City?
Mei steps carefully around me, gesturing for me to follow. I resist when she pulls on my arm. “I want to listen!”
She answers by giving me a full-bodied shove, setting me off-balance and into a snow-crusted bush. Loud enough that all three heads turn in our direction.
Mei runs, prancing over roots and around underbrush as if she’s nothing more than a ghost, her feet unattached to the ground. Two gunshots thud through the shadows to slam into the tree next to me. Silenced, but just as deadly. Did Mei pull me to get me to leave or was it to put the spotlight on me? Whichever, it’s working to her advantage, because the group scatters in my direction, their footsteps heavy in the snow. Mei’s heading away from the packs, but I sprint toward them instead, unzipping Kasim’s bag the moment I get there to extract the gun he took from me.
Seconds cannot find me out here. Far away from my post and with a Menghu.
It’s hard to tell where they are. Feet thrash through the snow and dead underbrush, the three Reds calling to one another as they search. One pair of feet thuds closer and closer to where I’m hidden behind the rocks, the gun in my hand feeling like treason.
The footsteps pause on just the other side of the rocks, breath misting out into the air above me. I hold my lungs still, waiting. After a moment, the soldier walks away, muttering things about cold and old Yuan’s dirty underwear.
I slide out from the rocks and slip between trees in the opposite direction, wondering how I’m supposed to find Mei. But then a yell spikes through the air, a throaty scream that leaves the hairs on my arms standing up.
Panic unfolds inside me as I follow the scream, grunts and cries of a fistfight filtering through the muting effect of the snow. I skid to a stop at a flurry of movement ahead. It’s Mei, and she’s made of nothing but pure energy and violence as she ends the fight, her boot connecting with the Second’s temple, dropping the soldier straight to the dirty ice. Mei kicks her again in the head before turning toward me, the act of pointing Captain Bai’s knife at my chest almost more forceful than kicking the patroller down was. She stops when she sees my face, though.
“There were three—” she begins.
A dampened shot impacts the air, and I barely have time to process the blood on Mei’s side before she’s on the ground. Lurching forward, I almost barrel straight into the other Seconds as they storm the clearing. Sliding to my knees, I hold very, very still. What do I do?
One Second checks the soldier Mei downed. The other walks over to Mei. He kicks her over so she’s faceup, her eyes clenched shut.
I’ve always been a good shot. Enough that the snipers wanted me, though Mother and Father thought flying more suited to our family station. Enough to land a shot in a gore’s eye from fifteen meters, even if the thing did collapse on Howl afterward. I breathe through my stance, set my knees at shoulder width. Extend my arms and line the sight up with my eye. But it’s red stars I see instead of a target.
The one hulking over Mei opens his mouth. “You chose the wrong fire to kick over, little girl.” His hands go to his belt buckle, pulling it undone. I don’t grasp what’s happening—not the slow way he looks Mei up and down, letting his undone belt hang free, and not the look of resignation on the other soldier’s face or the way he looks away—until the soldier straddles Mei.
Understanding strikes me like an ax to the throat. Before his hands can touch her, my finger squeezes, and there’s a bullet in his head.
Mei moves the same time I do, burying Captain Bai’s knife in the soldier’s throat, but he’s already limp and falling forward onto her, his arms dead weights that trap her against the snow, his head a bloody mess.
The second soldier’s weapon startles up at my shot, but not fast enough that he can dodge when my next bullet finds his shoulder, the one after puncturing his foot. Mei pushes the bloody Second off her, her eyes wide and teeth bared. Before I can move, she’s on the second man, finishing what I did not with her knife.
Captain Bai’s knife.
I let my weapon sag toward the ground as he falls, the soldier’s last breaths streaming out of him in an icy cloud. The night around us is leaden and dull, the noise of branches and wind, of fire crackling and human voices extinguished.
After a breath of silence, I holster my firearm and walk over to Mei where she’s scrunched on the ground next to the second soldier. I kneel beside her, and she flinches away, not looking at me. The first soldier Mei accosted—the one I saw her kick in the head—groans and shifts to the side, but I know enough about blackout injuries to know if the Second isn’t opening her eyes yet, it’s a bad sign.
“Back to camp.” Mei’s voice seems squeezed through something very small, both hands covering her side, her blood looking sticky and black in the shadows. “Kasim…”
“Let me look first. You’ve already lost blood.…” I take a shaky breath and pull back her coat, carefully peeling her shirt up from her skin. It all seems to be happening to me rather than by my own will.
Did I just kill my own comrade?
The wound is a black hole low on her abdomen. If the Second—I just killed a Second—had aimed another inch to the side, it would have missed her entirely. Wadding up her coat and holding it against the wound isn’t going to help much, but it’s all I know how to do. “Is Kasim a medic?”
Mei’s eyes are glazed, but she shakes her head. “I think I’m okay.”
“You have a bullet hole in your side.”
“I’m fine.” She hunches around the coat, holding it in place against the wound with both hands.
I stand up, everything inside me cold as I wait for her to uncurl from her pained crouch, my confidence in how fine Mei is waning every second she stays there on the ground. How fine could she be? Shot by that… rapist. When I offer Mei a hand up, she bats it away with a hiss and stands on her own, favoring her ribs.
“Does that… Is that something that happens often? Outside patrollers…” I can’t say it. I couldn’t even complete the thought in my head, shame at men I thought of as comrades suffocating me.
“I’ve seen the results. More than once. I wouldn’t have let him—he never would have…”
Mei’s almost as shaken as I am. Because no matter what she wants to bel
ieve, it did almost happen. If Mei hadn’t taken that knife…
I can’t believe that kind of response to a downed enemy. This has to be an aberration. One sick man who has been living Outside for too long. But then the other Second’s face appears in my mind, turning away to let it happen.
The only thing for it is to tell Mother the moment I get back. Find out how common this sort of behavior is and train it out of our soldiers. Swallowing the plan of action down leaves me with acid in my throat, everything inside me is snarled together in a knot that even I can’t untangle, because killing that soldier… watching Mei kill the others and then walking away from it with her as if it is the two of us who are comrades…
My jaw aches from clenching my teeth. I can’t take back killing that Second, but I can’t find anything other than shock inside me. Not an ounce of regret. What does that make me?
“I’m not…” Mei lists to the side and grabs hold of my arm to balance herself. “You knew Sun Howl, right?”
Knew? Howl’s name in the past tense. I wish I didn’t like the sound of that, wish I didn’t care. “What about him?”
“He killed Menghu.”
“When he was pretending to be the Chairman’s son?” I wait for the justification. The comfort she’s trying to give, though it grinds the betrayal I’ve just performed deeper instead.
“No.” She finally looks at me, her steps dragging along behind us, leaving a clear trail to anyone who might follow. “He killed Menghu under his command. Soldiers who trusted him.”
Not comfort, then. Condemnation? The black hole that opened up inside me the moment I first saw City uniforms seems to deepen, the darkness inside impenetrable.
“I only met him after he came back with Jiang Sev.” Mei gasps as her foot slides, her hand pressing hard against her side. “He left the Mountain long before I got there, but my captain would talk about him. About what it meant to be a team that could rely on each other. Howl was on his own side, and sometimes it meant he came after the other Menghu too. He was a monster. If he’s the only Menghu you knew before me… I just wanted to say that I’m not like him, even if we do wear the same colors.”
The connections she’s drawing between me and Howl cuts the muscles in my legs, making me want to collapse there in this spirit-starved forest. “Are you saying you think I’m like Howl?” I can hardly say the words, my throat closing around them. “Shooting my own soldier to help you makes me even more reprehensible than you thought before?”
Mei hardly seems to breathe as we walk. “I was trying to say I never expected a Red to shoot someone for me. Not someone who knew Howl first and learned to hate the rest of us because of him.” She looks at me again, and there’s no way to pick apart the emotions twisting her features, even if I did have the tools. “I might not have needed your help, Tai-ge, but I appreciate it. You know what it means to be on a team, even if we don’t see things—anything—the same way. I guess it means that just because you’re a Red doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Just misled in every way.”
I’d like to think any honorable soldier would have done the same as I did. I can see Howl in that soldier’s outline, standing over Mei with his belt undone. Our objectives align at the moment, Sevvy said when she told me he was coming to Port North with us, shivering through her denial that he’d ever touched her. He can help us. She was frightened of just how well he could help us, and what would happen once he was done.
Mei’s steps drag longer and longer until I wrap an arm under her shoulders, steadying her the rest of the way to where our camp was. She swears at me once or twice but lets me take some of her weight until we get to the ashes of our fire. I help her settle on the ground, then turn back for the packs.
What am I? Someone who kills? Yes. I’ve just done that.
A traitor to my own side? There are many who would look at what I just did and say yes.
A traitor to my own family? Mother would think so.
A traitor to Sevvy? That question again, the one I can’t find a fair answer for. She made her choices, and I made mine. Mine were the right ones, of course. But it doesn’t change the fact that the girl who has been my best friend for most of my life is sitting in a Menghu prison.
We were supposed to be more than friends. But she made it impossible. Or I did. She didn’t even want it at the end because of… me, I think. I still don’t understand what happened, and it bothers me, Sevvy dismissing me as if I were the cause of all the problems in the world. Because Howl taught her to believe that Reds were the problem, I guess.
Funny. I spent our entire friendship wishing I could fix her into something acceptable. Something to be proud of. But I’m the one who is wandering around Outside, lost.
The packs are just where we left them, the Seconds’ fire a red glow in the distance. I return to the bodies. Captain Bai’s knife stands straight up like an exclamation point where it’s buried in the Second’s chest. I pull the blade free and wipe it on the man’s coat, his blood a sickly black in the moonlight. Second blood on a Second knife. The blood of a rapist.
Is this just another failure? As I stare down at the blade, I can’t help but think that Captain Bai would have preferred his knife in this man’s chest rather than accept what he was about to do.
Well, Captain Bai might have preferred it, but suddenly I don’t know what he would have done. And that bothers me.
The soldier Mei knocked out, the one I thought might live, looks as though she tried to crawl back toward the fire and collapsed. Instead of checking for a pulse, I walk to the fire and stamp out the last hints my comrades were here.
Acceptable losses in exchange for the cure.
It doesn’t feel that way at all. But I’m not sure what it feels like instead.
CHAPTER 33 Howl
THERE IS NO CURE.
The thought is bleak and true as the rough lines of cement under my hands, behind my back where it’s pressed against the wall, my bare feet extended before me. Who takes a man’s shoes? Sole does, because she knows me.
What does it mean that she knows me and still all she sees are lies?
I shrink down, my good hand knotted around my arm as I hold it close to my chest, willing the pain to stop. But it won’t. It can’t. Because it’s inside me. The world is breaking down around us, hope a match that burned my fingers. When Sole looks at me, she sees someone too twisted to save. Worth more cut up for microscope slides.
I was different when I came back from the City, she said. But not different enough. An opportunity to make up for… everything. As if the only thing that could redeem me from my past is if I lay down and let her bring the scalpel.
I was defending my home when I still lived by my gun. My friends. My family.
But the truth of it is there, right underneath. Myself. I was defending myself at the expense of anyone who came too near. Isn’t that what I did to Song Jie? Sev is my family now. I want her to live. So I used Song Jie and his creepy heli to get here, then got him thrown in prison.
I shift, trying not to think it, but it’s there. It’s real. Every step I’ve taken was for me. I tried to kill Song Jie with the knife. I thought about using those bombs on Dr. Yang. I want to run away now, to take the one last whisper of hope for survival away from Sole, and she doesn’t expect anything more of me.
The cells are suitably gloomy to go along with the fact that the world is going to end. If this enclave under the Mountain is unsustainable, whatever it is Dr. Yang is attempting to accomplish—no matter how many lies he tells about the cure—will be unsustainable too. The Mountain, the City, everything in between—they’re all going to flicker out like a quicklight that’s been spent.
But we can survive. Me and Sev.
Is that ironic? I can never remember which is ironic and which is just people pretending to be smart by saying something is ironic when it isn’t. Regardless, it’s kind of funny: Jiang Sev and Sun Howl—the two sorry saps doomed from the moment Jiang Gui-hua sucked SS from our brai
ns—we’re the ones who could live. At least it would be funny if I weren’t locked in a storage room converted into a cell, waiting for Sole and any research medics she has here to take chunks out of my brain one spoonful at a time.
I never was very good at waiting.
I trace the lines of the door with my fingers. The garrison’s within a day’s hike, but I don’t know how many hours are left before Kasim and Mei break in to get Sev. I’ll have to move faster than humanly possible to get to the garrison on time, and then somehow infiltrate the place without having done any recon. No backup. No gun even, unless Reifa hasn’t found the ones stashed in the heli.
First things first: Get out of my cell.
I’ll need some of that anti–Suspended Sleep serum, so the second thing will be to break into Sole’s room. It wasn’t locked when we went in before. And the way she talked about testing the formula makes me think it’s there in her things.
Third, get out of the Mountain.
Fourth… The solution is so obvious and so wrong it hurts my head, like looking straight into a halogen light after being safe in the dark under the stars.
But there’s no help for it. All these people are going to die anyway. The thought is lead in my chest, but I push off the feeling. When you live in a world of people hurting one another, you have to take care of your own self. Your own family. The ones who want you alive, anyway.
I kick the cell door, satisfied when it gives a metal boom. Storage rooms aren’t meant to withstand violence, and Sole’s little safe haven seems to be built on separating, quarantining, restraining rather than real imprisonment.
Using my feet, I drum at the door until the metal thumps echo up the hall and my bare feet begin to ache. Everyone down here is on Mantis, so Sole led me to believe. In this sea of people grateful they can finally rest, it isn’t difficult to attract attention.
A guard’s feet come tapping up the hall. “Everything okay in there?”
Frantic isn’t so hard to fake. “I need help!”
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