Dead Moon Rising

by Caitlin Sangster

  I keep my eyes down as I talk. “Dr. Yang’s hold on the people from the Mountain might not be as strong as we thought. Dr. Yang came to power during the invasion, and there are many Menghu, my ‘assistant’ included, who don’t trust him. He isn’t giving them the cure the way he promised to. She wanted to take it to some other group that’s holed up near the southern garrison.”

  Mother’s eyebrows rise, and she sits back in her chair. I can feel her looking at me, as if she’s poised over me with a scalpel and magnifying glass, deconstructing each layer one by one.

  “She trusts me… at least a little.” The image of men falling to the ground, their blood spattering down over Mei fills my head. “We aren’t friends by any stretch. But if you let me talk to her, she might be willing to give you information. It could be a way to undermine Dr. Yang.”

  “That’s a useful start.” Mother taps a finger against her mouth, eyes thoughtful. “Perhaps I’ll send her back with you to the City.” She bends back over the reports, gesturing toward the door with an annoyed flick of her hand. “With an advisor who actually knows what he is doing to make sure you don’t destroy anything else.”

  “Wait.” My lungs stall at the annoyance wrinkling Mother’s forehead when I ignore her dismissal. “One other thing… I saw something out there. One of our soldiers tried to rape a wounded Menghu while another soldier stood by and did nothing.” I lick my lips, waiting for some kind of reaction. Anything. “That might something to bear in mind before sending any more soldiers out. Perhaps a retraining of some kind, or stricter punishments—”

  “Tai-ge.” She glances up at me, and even I can see the disgust. “Perhaps you should at least pretend to know which side you are on before you continue that sentence. At least half of Menghu forces are female. It isn’t a form of aggression I care for, but if it makes Menghu even a fraction more timid or lopsided in the way they deploy their soldiers…”

  “Half of our forces are female. And even if they weren’t, are you saying you sanction…”

  One look from her is enough to slice my argument off at the hilt. “Just go, Tai-ge. I had hopes for you, but it’s obvious to me now you’ll never amount to much of a leader. Keep your head down and try not to embarrass me.”

  My mouth won’t quite close, my tongue flailing lifelessly over arguments, incredulity, despair.… Mother’s looking back at the papers in front of her, eyebrows furrowed, as if I puffed out of existence the moment she looked away. I let my head drop in a deep nod before I back out of the tent.

  Every step feels too heavy as I walk away, unable to even process what she said. That I’m a failure and that she wants nothing to do with me. There’s something very badly wrong with me. Something broken. Because I don’t care.

  It’s the failure of not speaking, of what I’ve allowed myself to look past until now, that makes the vomit begin to rise in my throat. I’ve failed at making the City what it is supposed to be: a safe haven. I’ve failed Sevvy and the whole world of people I didn’t realize were there, just waiting to be noticed.

  But at least I can see my own failures. What is this thing war has made of my Mother?

  Unless Mother hasn’t become anything at all. What if she’s been this way all along, and I just never noticed until now?

  The two metal stars are once again in their place at my collar. They prick through the fabric into my neck when I pull them free, as if they know what I am now. I don’t deserve them, and they aren’t worthy of me.

  I won’t let the little bits of metal point my way anymore. I am not them. I will make myself into something new. Someone Captain Bai and Lieutenant Hao in the City will recognize when I set down in the market.

  Maybe even someone Sevvy would be interested in knowing again, if that’s possible.

  Mother is right that I’ll never amount to anything among the Seconds. I am a failure.

  It’s that thought that gives me the most hope of all.

  Later, when I gain admittance to the prison unaccompanied, Mei’s eyes go wide as they slip over my unmasked face. She sits up from where she was lying on the ground in her cell, crossing her feet and leaning back against the wall as she looks me up and down. “SS finally came for you?” She picks at her fingernails, turning away from me. “Fitting, I guess. Now you know what it’s like.”

  The lock is rusted and old, and I haven’t broken a lock since I got Sevvy out of the City during the invasion. But any door will open if you have the right tools.

  Mei jerks up from the ground as I begin to pick the lock, her brows knit together. “What is this, Tai-ge?”

  The lock clicks, and the door swings open. I hold out a link. “I want everyone to not die, including you. Will you help me?”

  The world has become a string of impossiblities. The City full of infected. Outsiders prevailing, my mother a monster. And me, the General’s son, working with a Menghu.

  Mei’s eyes narrow, but then that smile of hers, the one that first pricked at my sensibilities all those weeks ago at Dazhai, takes her wide mouth. She holds out her hand, and I place the link in it.

  CHAPTER 43 Sev

  “DON’T MOVE, OKAY?” IT’S A man’s voice, murmuring through the corroded filter of a mask. His hands on my arm pause, and then there’s a soft laugh. Someone came in twice between the Chairman first injecting me with the serum and now to give me additional doses, but this is the first time he’s spoken. “It’s funny because you can’t move. Pity you can’t laugh, either, Sev. I know how much you like my jokes.”

  The ice in my veins turns to fire as he inserts something into the catheter, the sensation flaming up through my arm, down my spine, blazing across my brain, then flickering in an ashy smolder to my fingertips. I can’t gasp, can’t twitch away from the pain or punch the man in the nose.

  My left hand twitches, my fingers moving centimeter by painful centimeter. It startles me enough to make me stop, wondering how I did it. How to do it again. When I twitch my finger a second time, it’s a triumph, but not enough. Not enough to hit the medic as he adjusts my head, then pulls off the itchy tape securing the tube inside my nose in one burning swipe. The tube gives a jerk as he begins to extract it, every inch it moves as he pulls it out seeming to leave a burning line of acid in its wake, like a slug leaving a trail of mucus as it burrows out through my nose.

  “This shouldn’t hurt,” the medic muses, the progress stalling for a moment, as if he’s looking me over. “But then, I’ve never had to have someone pull a tube out of my nose. It’ll be better than the other one coming out. And much better than those scratches on your back.” He gives a little giggle. “You were so upset when I figured they were from your stars and not from the gore. Much less cool.” He keeps pulling on the tubes, talking to himself as if he can’t quite help it. “Faux gore wounds. You know, that could be a good way to make friends around here, if those creepy Outsider soldiers would just think it through. Trip, scratch yourself up, blame it on a gore, and suddenly you’re a hero.”

  Faux gore wounds?

  There’s only one person I know capable of being so insensitive and ridiculous all at once. Not to mention there are only a few people who know why I have cuts all up and down my back: Tai-ge, who is most definitely not here. Howl, who is locked up. June, who is still at Port North. That leaves Xuan, the annoying medic who also happened to save Howl’s life after the gore bit him.

  Xuan isn’t supposed to be here. My throat seems to want to expel the tube faster than he can pull, all of my muscles clenched and ready to vomit. His fingers pause as the end of the feeding tube pulls free, leaking something wet and warm down my cheek. I silently vow to stick a hose up Xuan’s nose and then jerk it out again the moment my hands can move, to show him exactly how much it doesn’t hurt.

  “I can see you’re already regaining control.…” He touches my fingers and then presses them into my palm, though I don’t know what he’s looking for. “Yes. I can’t give you the last dose for another fifteen minutes, so don’t
get upset if you can’t do more than flop. That’s actually a good thing, because right now it would be best for you to look dead.” A light cloth settles over my face. Then arms lift me up from the table and plop me on a gurney, stopping to rearrange my feet so they’re straight and my arms so they’re crossed over my chest.

  The gurney jerks underneath me, then begins to roll. My neck muscles tense and then release, tense… and then my eyelids crack open. A combination of the assault of light and movement makes nausea bloom in my stomach, forcing me to clench my eyes shut again. Inching my head over to the side, I try again, and this time, even filtered through the cloth, the light still hurts, but it is bearable.

  “Here’s the plan,” Xuan’s voice rasps as the gurney stills under me, the light flashing to darkness for a split second as he walks by. “The Chairman told me I can have a free pass out of this place if I can get you out too.”

  Xuan was out. What is he doing here?

  “I have to assume you know more about the Mountain and whoever it is we’re supposed to meet outside. I need you to really try with your dead impression since we’re leaving via the burn pile where they take the bodies.”

  I’m supposed to go in a pile of corpses? None of this plan sounds like it could work, most especially the part where I end up with my hair on fire.

  A smaller voice inside me says something even more painfully pathetic, ducking under anything that could be called rational. Dr. Yang has Howl. The Chairman said he is going to kill him.

  If there’s some ridiculously small chance of Xuan sliding me out through the burn door, what’s the harm in adding one extra body? I force my fingers to curl into a fist, then open them again.

  “See,” Xuan whispers, touching the back of my hand through the cloth. “That’s exactly what we don’t want. Think dead girl. After the last four weeks, it can’t be that hard.”

  Four weeks? It felt like three lifetimes glued together. I stretch my fingers, then flop my arm over the side of the gurney, trying to pull off the sheet draped over my body.

  “I’m so sorry! Yuan’s ten illegitimate children!” Xuan coughs through his mask’s filters, and suddenly turns the gurney to the right, jerking my limp body to one side. His words aren’t angled toward me anymore, as if there’s someone else here. “I must have tripped. Thank you for helping me stabilize this thing, I think the wheel’s broken. They needed this one in lab two, and I’m afraid the Firsts will cut my rations if I’m late again, so if you’ll excuse me…”

  We turn another corner, and then the gurney speeds up, Xuan’s shoes slapping hard against a cement floor. We turn again and then stop, the sound of a door closing blocking out the echoes from the hall. The sheet pulls completely off my body, Xuan’s breaths coming fast. “Think you’re funny? You want us both to die?” he demands. “I’m trying to help you.”

  I open my hand again, attempting to flop it across my stomach, up to where his hands must be on the gurney, but don’t quite make it. My tongue feels like an entire limp fish shoved into my mouth, every breath whistling around it. But I force it to move. My lips, my teeth. “Why?” I try to ask.

  Xuan swears again, then walks around the gurney. My hand limply searching, I find his wrist as he picks up the tube snaking into my vein. Adds another jolt of medicine, but this one isn’t frozen or burning—it feels like sunlight, warming me over.

  I open my eyes. The light is dim, and Xuan is a mess of rubber tubing lurking over me, an oversize mosquito about to suck me dry. “Why?” I ask again, my tongue still feeling oversize despite the final dose of serum, but he understands me this time. “Why are you even here?”

  “Your slurring is pretty cute.” He looks away, toward the door, I think, and then back to me. “Remember when your friend Howl-not-the-Chairman’s-son got all gore-bitten and we set up a deal where I snuck into a very dangerous Second camp to get him medicine and you were going to tell Hong Tai-ge I was dead and to stop looking for me?” He takes a long breath, replenishing his lungs. “Long story short: I got caught.”

  I did ask him to get medicine for Howl after the gore mauled him. I wasn’t sure he was going to do it, though.

  Xuan sighs. “Had to pretend I was separated from invasion forces. And now I need a body to get me out of here away from Chairmans and Seconds and Outsiders and everyone else. You are that body, so you are going to stop moving now.”

  “If bodies go out so easily, why didn’t you just submit your own?” My mouth. It’s working. My throat feels crinkled and dry, every word painful.

  He doesn’t shake off my hand clasped around his wrist, looking down at it. “Because I can see that you’re important. And having important friends means you live. There was no way I was going to get into Kamar after all those helis blew over it. And even if they’re all holed up underground, I’m guessing Second marks are as good as a death sentence on the island now.” He looks down to the two hash mark scars between his forefinger and thumb.

  I nod slowly, relishing the movement. Luokai told me as much himself.

  “And then I heard about your little debut back here as a POW. That Dr. Yang went after you in particular. So I came back and whispered to all the right guards until the Chairman heard he had a Second on his side.” Xuan straightens his collar, touching the tubes of his gas mask as if to reassure himself it’s still there. “A very skilled one, if I do say so myself.”

  Blinking, I try to keep my eyes open, everything going fuzzy for a moment. I let go of his wrist, and he holds a hand out to me, as if he wants to help me sit up. I stare for a moment, then attempt to move my hand to meet his.

  It’s clumsy. It makes me feel motion sick. But it works. My vision blackens at the edges, my head practically floating off my shoulders as I sit up. There’s an uncharacteristic knot in Xuan’s brow, barely peeking out between strands of shaggy hair. And a strap snaking under his lab coat at his shoulder. A gun holster.

  “The Chairman promised most of the army that going to Kamar would bring back a cure. Then those other soldiers from Outside said it was you and Howl we needed to fix SS. They brought you back, grabbed Howl when he came in after you. And yet both of you are still here in one piece. No cutting, no execution yet, and also no cure. I’m not the only one who has noticed. You have something they want.”

  “I know where the cure is, just like I told you before. You didn’t believe me. You’re going for fairy tales now, Xuan?”

  “It’s only a matter of time before I get SS, Sev. If there’s a fairy tale with a grain of truth?” He looks down. “There’s already… There are people out in the forest now.…”

  “Your girlfriend. The one with E. coli who ran away when she got SS. You’re hoping she survived.”

  He adjusts his mask filters, nodding slowly.

  “I need Howl.”

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. He’s got an ax hanging around his throat, even if Dr. Yang hasn’t set a date yet. Which…” Xuan gives an awkward shrug. “I didn’t really like the guy, but it seems sort of sad after I taped him up so well. He’s in the infected holding cells, and there’s no way we’re getting in there.”

  I press my lips together, press until I realize I’m biting down on them, that there’s a taste of copper in my mouth. The infected holding cells.

  I could let the Chairman and a cocky medic make all my decisions for me, but I won’t. I’m done letting anyone else tell me what to do based on what they want. I’m done being a stone in someone else’s fingers.

  “They have to get rid of the dead on both sides, don’t they?” I ask quietly.

  “Yes, but that side is a high-security—”

  I grab the sheet from the floor, then swing my feet back up onto the gurney and lie down, relishing every time my muscles do what I tell them to. There’s still a lag when I want to move, a lisp with every word, but I’m a person again. Not a corpse that hasn’t forgotten how to breathe.

  Pulling the sheet over me like a blanket, I look up at him. “That’s where
we’re going. The infected side of the cells, then out through the morgue.” I flip the sheet up over my head. “Howl can pretend to be dead too.”

  “I don’t have access to that side, Sev. Come to think of it, I don’t even have access on this side. The only reason I’ve been able to walk through here is because the Chairman—”

  “Stand up straight. Look like you know what you’re doing. Flip your access badge over so it’s harder to see.” I close my eyes, the fabric heavy against my eyelashes. Howl got us into the First ring of tents back in the camp where the key was. What was it he said to get us through? That we had new information on SS? “I have a way to get in.”

  Xuan doesn’t say anything, his fingers drumming against the gurney’s metal frame.

  Pulling the sheet from my face, I look up at Xuan, smiling as prettily as I can manage. “If you take me anywhere else, I’ll show this whole place what SS looks like when it gets really bad. Outside-style. They’ll shoot you too, probably. I’ll burn your ticket out of here quicker than you can run.”

  My smile widens when the gurney starts to move, and I pull the sheet back up to cover my face. “We’ll need to find a mask.”

  CHAPTER 44 Sev

  “WHAT IS GOING ON? WHERE did this come from?” a nasal female voice rasps through a gas mask’s filters. “There’s a strict protocol.…”

  “I’m sorry, I just got transferred here from the northern camp, but this is the contaminated side, right? Where they’re studying SS?”

  “Is that a dead inmate from the other side of the cell block? Why is it wearing a mask? We’re very low on resources, and this should have been reissued to an active-duty soldier the moment… he? She?” A hand plucks at the sheet as if the speaker wants to peer in at me, the mask plastered to my face, clutching my every shallow breath. It tastes as if whoever had it before me did not care to brush their teeth. “You need to go through the labs at the end of the north wing and make sure they know this mask is functional.”