WE DON’T GET ANYWHERE NEAR the Mountain’s eastern entrance before Menghu find us. The dirt on their clothes and faces is familiar, but the cocky arrogance that all my Menghu days carried seems to have siphoned away, leaving nothing but bare-toothed desperation.
“Howl?” one asks, his weapon only a finger away from being drawn. He looks around at the group. “Sole said to keep a lookout for you.”
“She’s still alive.” A knot in my chest slips free. “Thank Yuan.”
“I don’t think Yuan had much to do with it.” The other Menghu looks at me askance, adjusting her mask as if living in the City left me with a smell strong enough to filter through. Or perhaps she’s heard of my reputation from before I left. “Who’s this with you?”
“Friends.” I stand with Song Jie, the man and his little girl a step behind us.
The fact that they aren’t shooting first gives me enough hope to follow them to the disguised entrance, though I keep my eyes open. Our guides aren’t Menghu I recognize, even if they know my face. All of them are armed, and at least one is an experienced knife fighter, based on the way he holds himself and his scars. What has Sole been doing down here?
We move through three levels of barricades, then into a hallway that’s been cut down the middle so half is partitioned into tiny rooms. The air buzzes with electricity, and the hairs on my neck stand on end.
More people come to escort us, not all of them wearing Menghu green. Song Jie hovers close beside me, his eyes moving from the guns to take in the uniforms, the cement walls, and the little cubicle blocks. “What is this?” he asks.
“I don’t know. They’re all still alive, though, and that’s promising.” It means food. Water. Maybe even Mantis, like Sole was hoping for when she stayed here to help the people Dr. Yang left behind, the people taken down by the contagious strain of SS he created. A hope that thins when our guides leave their masks firmly in place. One of the Menghu who brought us in whisks a temporary door open into one of the little cubicles, heavy machinery staring out at us from inside like a promise of torture.
Levels machines. I look over at the man gripping his daughter’s hand. After so many days under the sky, the ceiling feels low, the air stale as if it’s been filtered over and over.
“Howl?” A jolt of adrenaline floods through me at the sound of my name combined with the figure rocketing in my direction from the far end of the hall, her face weighed down by a mask. “Is it really you?”
Song Jie darts behind me as I fall instinctively into a defensive stance, but when I catch sight of the girl’s eyes—ice blue and staring without a single blink—I’m running toward her before I can think. Menghu start yelling behind me, hands grabbing at my clothes until Sole shouts them down.
Sole wraps her arms tight around me, a grunt of pain escaping my throat when her mask’s filters bump my still-healing collarbone. “How did you get here?” When she pulls back to look at me, she holds eye contact, something I haven’t seen from Sole in years. A tear pools at the corner of her eye, streaking down to gum up the edge of her mask. “Your messages were weird, and then you stopped answering, and I was so worried—”
“Well, here I am.” I return the hug, the feel of someone I know and love like a balm for months of burns. Even my breaths come easier because Sole knows who I am. She knows where I came from.
She understands.
I let go of her, surprised when she meets my eyes again. “They took Sev. I need you to tell me where.”
Sole’s eyebrows scrunch as she looks over our bedraggled group, and Song Jie almost seems to shrink in response, as if an exit within running distance would be comforting. I know Sole doesn’t mean anything by it, but it does look as if she’s smelling something particularly pungent—which is probably fair, given how long it’s been since we’ve bathed. “Let’s get everyone through first. We have to test for infection. Contagion.”
“I can’t stay. Those last messages I sent you weren’t the cure, right? They took Sev because she must have found the real one—”
Hand on my arm, Sole stops me. “The anti–Suspended Sleep serum? Those weren’t the last messages you sent, were they?”
My thoughts flash back to Luokai, wondering what he’s been saying under the disguise of my name. “It’s a long story. But yes, they were.” I glance toward Song Jie and the others, nodding for them to follow the Menghu into the cubicles. “But before I tell you any of it, I need your help. I’ve got a little bit of a situation on my hands.”
“They have bombs that they want to use to get rid of everyone up in the mountains? And you led them here?” We pass an air lock to get to Sole’s room, and she forces me to stand just outside her door while she fits me with a battered sling, claiming the light’s better in the hall. When it’s on properly, I let my arm rest and release a sigh of relief I hadn’t realized was clenched inside me.
“The pilot and the woman in charge of their operation didn’t know where Song Jie and I were headed. They won’t be able to follow us here. Without coordinates for camps or the City, the most they could do is fly randomly and hope they find something to bomb, and I don’t think there’s fuel enough for that.” I hope I’m right.
Sole sighs, the paper pasted to her doorway crackling as she leans against it. It’s red, with handwritten characters that make up a Guonian poem: Spring brings hope; the land becomes warm. The beginning of peace; the people become cheerful. Peace is coming. “We can put the man you brought with you in quarantine even if his SS levels are normal. Then we can go out and collect the other two. Get rid of the weapons somehow.”
I blink, immediately banishing the thoughts that occurred to me first: If we had control of the heli, bombs could be the exact kind of leverage we need to get Sev out. Dr. Yang couldn’t refuse us once he’s seen the explosions that thing could make of his army. But Sole’s right. That kind of firepower would only complicate the situation.
“Did you know that Guonian is tomorrow? I can’t see any sort of future.” Sole looks up at me, her eyes wide. “At least you’re here. We’re inside, hiding from that old monster story like we’re supposed to be.”
I bite my lip, looking away from the decorations, because this wasn’t supposed to be how I spent this night. There are real monsters waiting to pounce outside, and red paper on Sole’s door isn’t going to scare them away. “Tell me what you know about Sev. Why did they capture her, too? Dr. Yang took the device with the cure. He shouldn’t have needed her anymore.”
Sole opens the door to her room and sheds her shoes just inside, waiting until I follow suit and sink onto the sleeping pad pushed up against one wall. Her quarters are obviously converted storage space: rough gray cement walls, an elevated lab station with vials and chemicals, a sink, and an exam table that barely fits against the far wall. A beat-up wooden desk. A single blanket on her sleeping pad. It feels cramped and gray, like bad-tasting medicine.
“He needs her for the same reason he always has.”
“The same… You mean the data on the device? Dr. Yang needs her to help decode—”
“There was no more than the notes you sent me. It was just the anti–Suspended Sleep serum, though I don’t know how effective it is considering it killed Jiang Gui-hua when Jiang Sev gave it to her.” Sole glances toward her lab table, test tubes set out, their contents waiting for her. “We’ve made some, though we haven’t had the chance to test it.”
“Didn’t Jiang Gui-hua die because she’d been under for so long?”
Sole shrugs. “That’s one possibility.”
My mind rewinds what she’s saying, trying to figure out what she means. “The notes… Sev’s not cooperating, then? She’s supposed to be helping to develop the cure, but—”
“No, Howl. My guess is there wasn’t anything on the device at all. There have been no trials. No new tests. No cure.”
No cure. The words don’t seem to fit inside my head. “We all knew if Dr. Yang got his hands on a cure, he wasn’t going to just give it out. Maybe he’s got it in a syringe and is just waiting until everyone is desperate enough—”
“I’ve got people reporting to me from inside the southern garrison. That’s where he’s based right now.” Sole unfolds her legs, looking at her bare toes. “Dr. Yang put Sev to Sleep within hours of bringing her back from the island.”
The words fall like rocks in my stomach, my hands balling into fists so tight I can’t let go. Ready to punch something. “She’s Asleep?”
“Our best guess is that he’s collecting everyone he can who has been cured. There are Firsts, apparently—the Chairman included—who are all locked down in the garrison. Dr. Yang must have gone back to comparing scans and hoping he’ll be able to spot something. That’s what it has come to.”
“That isn’t going to work.” My teeth grit together so hard I can hardly say the words. “If it were a viable path, he would have taken it years ago using Firsts in the City instead of having to manipulate me and Sev into waking up Jiang Gui-hua. You know if that were a possible avenue, then we would have had a cure years ago.”
“I know he wasn’t willing to cut into anything he couldn’t replace.” Sole’s eyes creep up and she’s twitching again, her fingers making knots of her white Yizhi coat. “We have to find a solution. Here.” She gestures to the door, this underground bunker she seems to have cobbled together out of nothing. “We’ve only survived this long because we managed to secure a hall over to the deep storage facilities. Old stuff, but there’s a reserve of Mantis. Ration packs. Water. Dr. Yang meant to come back for it, but my people are passing information that things are too dangerous here, so he’s stayed away.”
“If there’s no cure, then…” I see no future, she said. Sole pulls off her mask, her face blank as she blinks through whatever thoughts are torturing her now. “It’s just a matter of time before we’re all dead.” I wait until she looks at me to continue. “SS has spread too quickly. We won’t be able to keep any kind of food production, security, anything up. Every time a soldier or a worker takes off their mask to eat, they’re at risk of exposure. It’ll be like the end of the Influenza War all over again.”
But worse. With no way to escape. No safe havens, no walled City to keep out infection because SS can jump from person to person now. All it would take is one infection, one person who doesn’t know what’s hiding inside their lungs, to bring down a whole safe area. If there isn’t enough Mantis to go around—and how could there be? With instances of infection rising exponentially every day—soon there won’t be a world to save anymore.
“More people come here every day,” Sole murmurs, her eyes crimping shut. “We’re going to run out of supplies soon.”
My skin feels tight. SS spread through the Mountain quickly, probably to most everyone who wasn’t a part of the invasion force. Teachers, cooks, children still in school. Foragers, bureaucrats. Why would anyone stay in the maze of hallways upstairs rather than escape to open space where they can run?
Sole is still talking. “We’ve had some success gassing the hallways and using masks to pass through safely, so we’ve been able to get access to medicine and equipment from the labs, but it’s getting more dangerous. When we can, we bring the people we knock out down here, and they’re always happy to find Mantis pills next to them when they wake up.” She smiles a little. “We’ve had to bar the doors, though, or we’d have a flood—way too many infected to treat. As it is, we’re running out of Mantis fast. We’re going to have to do something.”
“You’re gassing people and dragging them down here?” I squint at the gray ceiling. What can we do? If there was nothing to find at Port North, no cure stashed away somewhere for Sev to discover, then does that mean we’re out of options? I close my eyes, my head hurting. “I should probably tell you it was Luokai who had the link. Um… Seth. We used to call him Seth when he was here.”
Sole’s brow furrows. “What?”
“My brother. He’s the one who’s been writing to you. So if my messages suddenly sounded like I fell desperately in love with you, now you know why.” I try not to enjoy how her mouth hangs open, because even if Luokai turned into a transactional jerk, I know how long Sole’s been pining after him. “Unless you were hoping I’d come home and my cradle is open to robbing?”
Sole’s nose wrinkles, her mouth still open.
“Didn’t think so.” I smile, giving her shoulder a pat. “I have to go. I’ve been to the garrison with the Chairman—remember when I sent all those plans over for an attack? I don’t know if General Root ever actually tried—”
“No.” Sole’s cheek twitches as she slips a hand into her pocket, her eyes glazed. “You… you can’t go anywhere. We can’t give up.”
“I’m not giving up; I’m going after Sev.”
She pulls out her link and stares at it against her palm, looking so closely I’m afraid she’ll nose it right off her hand. “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”
“Why wouldn’t you believe that I want to help Sev?”
“Howl…” Her lips press together hard, her eyes blinking too fast. “You’ve come a long way. When you first got back from the City, I couldn’t believe how much you’d changed. But we both know what you do when things get sticky for you.”
I stand up. “What?”
She startles back, her hand clenched around the link, flickers of light playing across the back of her hand. “You show up here in one piece… mostly, anyway.” Her eyes touch my still-healing collarbone, marks from the stitches still scabby and red. “And Sev’s right where we all worried she was going to end up: Dr. Yang’s lab. All that talk about saving her before, running after her—”
“You think I did that?” It’s plain from her face that she does. “Sole, I’m not the one who handed her over. I couldn’t…” I don’t know what to say. Sole is… technically right. She would have been right five years ago. But there’s no time to convince her that things have changed.
She sighs. “I have a team set up to go in after Sev tomorrow. Kasim. Another Menghu you might not know named Mei. In any case, there’s a Red company moving between us and the garrison from Dazhai. You wouldn’t have gotten far even if you were telling the truth about wanting to go.” She reaches up from where she’s sitting on her sleeping pad to touch my arm. “You know I can’t let you run away again, though, don’t you, Howl?” Sole’s dead skeleton impression of a voice again. “I’m not a research scientist, but there are Firsts who ended up here, people who will be able to at least try—” A tear streaks her cheek as she swallows down what she means to say. “We need the cure, and that means we need as much information as we can get. The Firsts here are guessing Dr. Yang is too worried he’ll mess up to do anything. That’s why he hasn’t opened any of you up. But with them here to study you and Sev, we could stand a chance—”
“You know that isn’t going to work!” I jerk my arm away from her, taking a step toward the door. “You’re going to hand me over to some Firsts—?”
“Is that the only thing you can think of? Yourself?” She swallows, her fingers pulling at one another as if she can’t sit still. “There are children out there, Howl. Fathers and mothers, families who are dying. Families who are killing one another. It’s either try or give up, and it isn’t in me to let all the people here die, even if our chances aren’t wonderful.” Sole’s eyes are so sad. “I love you. You know that, Howl. I don’t want to do this. But maybe it’s a good thing. An opportunity to make up for… everything.”
“So you just get to play nurse, while I have to die to make up for the things we both did?” Sole looks taken aback, but I just shake my head in disgust. “You got a second chance to change. Where’s mine?”
I wrench the door open, rocketing into the hall, but they’re waiting outside. Menghu, their ragged arms open and ready for me.