EXPLOSIONS DON’T SPEAK IN A particular language. They’re a universal understanding that erases the need for words. It only takes a fraction of a second, and it changes your whole world.
It isn’t a fire-and-shrapnel explosion, thank Yuan, but a wash of hot air and an ear-killing boom that knocks me off center. The heli rocks to the side, the force of the blast knocking Telan to the ground, his light skittering across the floor. Even with my eyes and ears covered and the heli to block the worst of it, I’m still surprised to find myself all in one piece. Gein, underneath me, looks blankly up at the heli propellers shaking overhead, his eyes unfocused. Ducking out from the heli’s protection, I kick the light Gein was holding toward the tunnel we came from. Dragging the pilot out from behind the heli’s bulk takes almost all my strength, and the pain tearing through my shoulder makes my arm feel like it’s going to fall off. Gein’s limp, but I can feel his pulse racing.
What do I need to get out of this? A pilot, for sure. Every step seems unbalanced, as if the floor is waving this way and that underneath me. Definitely the work of a flash-bang grenade. Whoever is out there must know what’s in here: lots of combustibles. They’re not going to use bullets unless they’re sure of what they’re shooting.
As I drag Gein toward the wall where I saw the door, I trip over a set of legs. Falling to my knees, I find long braids and slack, old-person skin—and a pulse. Reifa. She’s alive.
Her gun is lying just next to her on the floor. Picking it up it feels wrong, as if taking her weapon means I’m taking her life. And worse, as if touching the weapon will bring back everything inside me that might be crooked. But I take it anyway, thrusting it into my waistband, where it pokes into my ribs. If not to use, then at least no one else will be able to use it on me.
In another life I would have left Reifa where she lay. In this one, I help her sit as Gein wobbles up from the ground, holding his head. Grabbing Gein and supporting Reifa, I shuffle both unbalanced Port Northians to the wall where I saw the window. Just as my fingers find the cracked wood door, a metal-on-stone clunk echoes throughout the hangar, telling me we have seconds before we’re either dead or stunned. The doorknob won’t turn, but it does splinter with my first kick, then cave with the next. We fall through the opening in a muddle of limbs and terror just as a second detonation roars by in a hot rush of air.
Pain in my chest turns everything white, the set of stairs inside the doorway a blurry impression of sharp edges. Gein gives a yelp, and Reifa buries her head into my bad shoulder, but we’re shielded from the worst of it. “Follow me!” I yell, but I can’t hear even my own words. The two Port Northians don’t need the direction because they follow me up the stairs, Gein pausing to retch about halfway up. At the top there’s the glass window I saw from outside. Controls decorate the wall and the long desk that’s built in directly beneath the window, but they’re all dead, not a flicker of light to be seen.
There has to be another way out of here. The helis didn’t squeeze in through that tunnel. I just have to find where. Once I know where the exit is, I can shatter the window and pick off the assailants from up here with Reifa’s gun, then get out before the rest of their group gets inside. Provided I don’t run out of bullets before I run out of assailants. I don’t know how many bullets are in her magazine, and I don’t want to stop just now to check.
Swearing, I push one of the chairs toward the stairwell, wondering how long we’ll last trapped up here. Maybe the desks can be moved and we can barricade ourselves in, but that would only extend our lives by minutes at best.
Gein and Reifa huddle against the wall on the top step, and I have to drop my chair to pull them out of the way, but somehow they pitch me over instead. My brain seems to blank out, nothing but the sure knowledge that we have less than a minute before whoever it is out there finds us up here and that Song Jie—that little Seph-eater—is probably hiding behind one of the grenade-wielding grunts down there.
Song Jie hated Reifa and the others. I could see it in the line of his shoulders every time he had to bow and cook and carry. Did he plan this, letting the Reds corner us in here where we wouldn’t be able to find him? I believed him when he told me I was the murderer. Anger churns inside me. He was right to be afraid of me.
But that thought turns my chest to ice.
Afraid like the little girl I shot, her parents already dead bodies lying broken in the tent right in front of her. Afraid like Sev when we were in the cave, waiting for me to kill her, too.
I am not a murderer. But if I can’t fight, then I might as well lie down here on the stairs with my hands over my head. Kind of the way I am right now, stuck between Reifa and Gein. If I can’t fight, I’m choosing to die.
I don’t want to die. Is it a choice between those two with nothing in between? Murderer or gore meat?
The door below cracks open, a yellow quicklight zinging through the air to hit the wall, then land at my feet. I don’t see the soldier until he’s right on top of us, yellow light hitting the stars pinned to his uniform and glinting down the barrel of the gun pointed at my chest. He says something, but I can’t hear his words over the ringing in my ears. Hands above my head, I feel the gun I took from Reifa pressed into my ribs.
I explode up from the floor, kick the soldier’s gun hand to the side. Grab hold of his wrist and slam his elbow into the wall, breaking his arm. His gun clatters to the floor as I pull Reifa’s weapon from my waistband and point it at his head. The soldier crumples a little, holding himself together as he clutches his broken arm to his chest. He says something, the sound filtering in and out of my damaged ears, but his eyes meet mine and hold. I didn’t shoot you, he seems to say. I didn’t want to kill you.
My finger on the trigger presses hard without actually pulling it, the two of us staring at each other, two people on opposite sides, but for what? I doubt he wants to be here any more than I do, and it’s my life against his. My life and Reifa’s and Gein’s. Is that an even trade?
Before I can press the button on this man’s existence, a gunmetal crack fills the tiny stairwell. The man jerks forward, blood blooming across his chest in a violent spray. He falls forward, bullet wounds dark and wet in his back.
Below him on the stairs stands Song Jie, a gun in his hands. Where did he get a gun?
My hearing is still full of nothing but bullet holes, Song Jie’s lips moving extra slow as if it’s supposed to help. He lowers the gun, his steps exaggerated and deliberate. The same way you to talk to a feral dog with its hackles raised, ready to shoot if it goes for your throat.
Pointing purposefully toward the other Islanders behind me, he waits until I lower Reifa’s gun before he brushes past me to enter the control room.
Reifa falls in next to Song Jie as he wrenches at the dead controls. Gein hasn’t moved from his spot in the stairwell, hands clapped down tight over his ears. Song Jie points to a cubby by the control panel, gesturing for me to take off the door. Torn between the stairwell and its inefficient guard (Gein’s not about to stop anyone from coming up here unless they’re sympathetic criers) and knowing we need to get out of here, I don’t follow his frantic pointing. My gut’s all turned around, not wanting to trust Song Jie or any of these court calligraphers with my life. But Song Jie shot the man who was thinking about shooting me. Song Jie’s whole body shakes as he pulls at the controls, blood splatters across his chest and face to match the ones on me.
It’s that image—one of a man who has never killed before facing the atrociousness of what he’s done—that makes me move. I stick the gun in my waistband and go to the control box, taking the long knife Reifa holds out—the same one I almost used on Song Jie—to leverage it open. It releases with a screech, the metal locking mechanism rusted to almost nothing. Song Jie elbows me out of the way, connecting wires and flipping switches inside until the whole room lights up. The floor seems to hum.
Not pausing to breathe, Song Jie goes back to the control panel, frantically pressing and pulling things, the multitude of lights blinking on and off again under his fingers, making him squint. Above us, rock seems to groan, and the hum in the room turns to what feels like an earthquake, knocking me to the ground. Light pierces the darkness outside the window, pure and blinding, like staring straight into the sun.
Song Jie grabs Reifa’s arm, then darts for the door, dragging the old woman behind him. My hearing is going from high-pitched tone to a sort of hazy remembrance of what sound is supposed to be like; Song Jie’s voice barely penetrating. “… I don’t know how long before they’ll get through the block I set up in the outer tunnel. Everyone who made it in is dead, but we don’t have much time!”
He pauses to prod Gein with his foot—not hard, but enough to nudge him from his stupor, allowing me to pull the pilot up from the ground and lead him back down the stairs. Song Jie leads all of us to the cutout room where I saw the outlines of supplies. Gein stumbles along after us, staring blank-eyed at the tidy rows of boxes until Song Jie gives him a push toward them. He points to a pile of long, hard plastic boxes, sending Reifa and Song Jie each scrambling to extract one, then carrying them toward the heli. “Help us!” Song Jie calls back, only an outline of the words scratching through my ears. “We have to get out.”
I pick up one of the long boxes, heavier than I would have guessed from its size. The beam of light above us widens as the roof slowly folds up. The sun highlights bodies on the ground: four City jerkins… and a set of Baohujia robes. It’s Telan, facedown and motionless, a pool of red blood underneath him.
Opening the hangar door will allow us to lift off, but it will also give Reds a way in. I don’t understand exactly what is going on, but it’s obvious they knew to follow us here. We need to get off the ground now.
I glance up as the hangar door makes a world-cleaving, metal-on-stone grumble, the opening to the sky stuck at less than twenty feet wide. Reifa and Song Jie both pause, Song Jie’s sweat-streaked face blank. He says something in Port Northian that punches the way only the very best of swear words can.
“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.