“THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME, Sev,” Howl whispers. “I thought it was just that I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep from drowning, but not even Sole thinks I’m worth anything alive anymore.” The admonition takes the last breath out of him. “I came here hoping to be with you. Hoping we could escape, that I could make you happy. But when you wake up, I’ll be the same as I’ve always been. Me plus whatever it is that’s wrong in my brain that made me such a good Menghu.”
His arms fold around me, his voice against my neck. “Only a few weeks ago, you thought I was going to chase you to your death.” His voice whittles down to nothing, a whisper I almost can’t hear. “You jumped, just like Chang-e.”
You didn’t want gold and jewels. You wanted to live. It’s not the same thing. I want to say it. I command my mouth to move, but it doesn’t. I want him to kiss me. No, I want to wake up so I can kiss him and tell him he’s wrong. The plastic edge of the syringe digs into my arm. What will Howl do if I die from that serum, with him the one who put it in me?
“Things are going to get worse,” Howl whispers. “With no cure and not enough Mantis out there, I’ll have to be… whatever it is I am. Could you live with someone like me, who will defend you? Who will want you to defend me too?” He turns so his breath dusts across my nose, warm enough I can feel him close. “Is it wrong to defend yourself if it means someone else might die?”
It’s the same question I’ve asked myself over and over, wondering how that day in the tower at Port North—Tai-ge dragging me up the stairs, taking the device from my shaking fingers—would have gone differently if I’d only had a gun. I don’t know all the answers! I want to yell. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong.
“I’m scared that when you wake up, you’ll jump again. That you’ll fall the way Chang-e did, and then—”
SLAM. The door’s rusty hinges scream, and the metal echo splinters inside my ears. Howl is off the bed, and all I can hear is the vicious sound of flesh hitting flesh, the grunts and muffled swearing of a fight.
A breeze from the hall beads across my skin. The bed jerks to the side, and my foot falls over the edge. There’s a squeal of rubber on cement: shoes on the floor.
And then a horrible, deadly silence.
But then Howl speaks. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” Loathing. Self-righteous. Indignant.
My gut clenches. Tai-ge?
“If you think for a second I’m going to let you lay a hand on—” Tai-ge’s voice makes my insides crawl, as if he still thinks I’m a little doll he wants to sit on his bed.
“Last I checked, it was you she was trying to run away from, Tai-ge. You’re the one who called in the Menghu who made her Sleep.” Howl’s footsteps creak closer to the bed. “Put down the gun. We both know you don’t have the balls to shoot me.”
Gun? Every inch of me screams to get up.
“I didn’t realize balls and trigger fingers were linked for Menghu. I know at least one who’d be happy to shoot you. You’ll have to tell her she doesn’t have the right body parts to pull it off.” Footsteps retreat to the opposite corner of the room. When Tai-ge speaks again, his voice is strained. “I didn’t know Dr. Yang was tuned into my link. I called for Reds. My mother promised Sevvy would be safe. Which is more than the promise of a murderer.”
Howl’s voice is right over me as if he’s all that’s between me and Tai-ge. “Your mother promised Sev would be safe? What makes you think coming here is going to end up differently than what happened at Port North? The Reds are doing exactly what Dr. Yang says.”
“Not Mother.” Tai-ge clears his throat. “And I came alone this time.”
Howl’s hands on the bed next to me press hard into the mattress. “You know a Menghu who’d be glad to shoot me…?”
“They got me in the door, but I’m not going to let them have Sevvy. They just want to cut her up.”
“The ones Sole sent. Does she know you’re with them?”
“I don’t know.” There’s some shuffling, Tai-ge’s voice inching closer. “There are helis here, and I’m going to fly her out. What was your plan exactly?”
Howl’s weight leaves the mattress. “I’ve got the serum to wake her up.” The tube in my arm shifts, and all the sickness inside me wells up, waiting. Mother cries. “Why don’t we ask her who she’d rather go with.”
“No, wait!” The bed jerks to the side, and the tube in my arm goes slack. All I can hear is fabric tearing, skin and bones and muscle hitting the floor.
Does Tai-ge know the medicine will kill me? Or is he just trying to get rid of Howl? I hope for the former so hard it makes the insides of my head warp, sucking in as if I’m holding my breath. Could Tai-ge fix something for once instead of screwing it up?
If Howl will listen.
Which it sounds like he is not. The bed lurches under me again, Howl letting out a muffled grunt that turns into a gasp from Tai-ge and then his voice, strained from the floor. “Get off. It killed Jiang Gui-hua because—”
“She was old.” Howl’s voice draws close again, and his arms fold under me, moving me to the side of the bed. “She was Asleep for eight years, and they didn’t know how to take care of her.”
No. He sets me on a hard, flat surface, the cushioning thin enough I can feel the metal bars beneath it. A gurney. No. The tubes twitch again, pulling against the tape on my arm as Howl picks up the syringe. NO.
Tai-ge coughs, his voice strained and coming from the floor. “There’s a specific way it needs to be given. In doses.” The words stretch tight from the floor as the tube in my arm flexes. “Please, Howl. She was my best friend. If you kill her now, that’ll be the end of our hope to cure SS.”
The tube in my arm relaxes a hair.
Howl’s voice is rough. “There is no cure.”
A blare of sound shatters the air, my ears screaming. Everything inside me wills my hands to move, to cover my ears, to get my body away from the awful shrieking. An alarm.
The gurney jerks underneath me, my body lurching to the side and my brain lurching with it because I don’t know who is moving me or where we’re going. Out in the hall, the sirens blare even louder.
Suddenly, the gurney gives a violent spasm under me, and then I’m somehow on the floor in a mass of pain, my arm and side pressed to the cold, hard cement, my IV pulling at my skin. The floor rumbles underneath me, a noise even louder than the sirens pounding through my head. Was that a bomb?
“What was that?” Tai-ge yells over the sirens.
Howl is coughing, but his hands find me, checking my arms and legs and ribs for breaks. His voice is tight. “I… stole some bombs from someone, and I probably should have realized they’d notice. They were supposed to be headed for the camps. Help me get the gurney right.” His arms inch under me and lift me from the cold floor, my shoulder and hip aching from where they hit. But it’s hard to concentrate on that. Bombers. That Howl led here.
“What do you mean, they were supposed to go to the camps?” Tai-ge demands.
Howl’s heartbeat is a deep drumbeat against my ear, racing too fast, his breaths too shallow. “Get away from me. Away from Sev. You’re all dead anyway without a cure.” He adjusts his hold on me, one arm shuddering under my weight.
“Mei was right about you.” The black in Tai-ge’s voice sends cold shivers up and down my body. “You’d kill anyone if it meant—”
“You can tell me you’ve never hurt anyone before, Tai-ge? Intentionally? Unintentionally?” Howl’s moving, his voice rock hard, but I can hear the cracks.
Boots sound against cement, and my head lolls to the side as Howl starts walking. Hair slides across my face, itching on my forehead and tangling in my eyelashes as shouts echo closer, until suddenly a door shuts and everything is a little quieter. I think back to what I remember of the hall outside my door, my last look at the world before Dr. Yang put me under. We must be in one of the other labs.
A radio crackles just outside the door. Howl crouches next to me, his muted swear a breath of hot air in my ear.
“Do you know your way around the garrison?” Tai-ge asks, and I feel Howl nod, his whole body moving with it. His arm supporting my legs is shaking now, my weight too much for him. His shoulder, I remember. The gore bit his shoulder. “There are probably soldiers down both halls on this side of the bunker. If we get out through Dr. Yang’s living quarters, there’s a helipad outside—”
My head lurches back. “Take her,” Howl says urgently. “Take her.”
Every inch of me rebels as Tai-ge grabs hold of me, the buttons of his uniform pressing into my ribs through the thin hospital gown. Shouts start in earnest, and I hear my name among the words. We have to get out of here now, and I can’t so much as take a step.
A door slams up the hall. Then another, a little closer. They’re checking all the rooms.
Howl’s voice, a few feet away: “If we could just get back to the gurney… There’s a way onto the helipad, you said? After that, you march right back to whatever soggy rice terrace you crawled out of, understand?”
“You can’t take her. There was a cure at Port North.”
Another door slams. This one closer. “No, there wasn’t.”
“There was. I took it. Then the Menghu took it from me.” Tai-ge’s arms hug me closer. “My best guess is that she knows something—that it’s hidden or coded in a way that only Sev will understand.”
Slam. They’re coming closer.
“Why would Dr. Yang put her to Sleep, then? Sole told me the device was empty.” The doubt in Howl’s voice feels tangible, angry, and disgusted all in one. I want to reach out and touch him, make him look me in the eye and give him hope. There is a cure. And I know where it is. I know where it is!
Tai-ge’s voice shakes as the shouts come nearer. “My mother said it wasn’t empty. And I’m guessing Sleep was the only way Dr. Yang could think of to coax the information out of her. If you know Sev at all, you know how scared she was of going back to Sleep.…”
Howl swears. Then again, his voice breaking.
“I’m only here because so many people are dying, Howl. People in the City, people in the camps. The things I was asked to do to my own people…” Tai-ge’s voice cuts off as the alarms go silent, leaving nothing but ringing in my ears. For a moment I think my hearing has been compromised because Howl isn’t answering, everyone stuck in time as if the world has stopped.
“You believe in that City of yours,” he finally says. “That they want to help.”
“I believe in myself. I disobeyed all my orders because I couldn’t leave Sevvy.…” Tai-ge stops, the old nickname sickly sweet in my ears. “I know she’ll know where it is. Her mother didn’t send her to Port North for nothing. And Dr. Yang isn’t keeping her here Asleep for nothing, either.”
Slam. Three doors away.
“You know the right way to use the serum?” Howl whispers.
“I’ll find it,” Tai-ge says. “I promise you. I want her awake as much as you do.”
“And you’re not going to take her back to the City? Not to Dr. Yang or your mother or anyone else? You want to do this her way?”
There’s a long pause. “I’ll make sure she’s safe.”
“That isn’t good enough.”
“I’ll… figure something out. I won’t take her back to my mother. I promise.”
Lies. It must be lies. Tai-ge doesn’t know how to operate without his mother’s stamp of approval. Doesn’t know how to listen to anyone who can’t obtain one.
When Howl finally speaks, there’s something different in his voice, both too quiet and too loud. “Give her to me for a second.”
Tai-ge steps forward, and there’s a moment of vertigo with arms under me and over me, and I don’t know which belong to who. But then Howl’s voice is in my ear, my cheek warm against his chest. “If there’s even a tiny chance that Tai-ge’s right, I can’t…” He kisses my cheek. “I love you, Sev.”
Then he hands me back to Tai-ge, and I’m cold. “Take care of yourself. Do what I would do,” Howl says, sounding too far away. “Actually, don’t. You always take care of everyone else, and that’s what makes you good.”
Another slam. Two doors.
“When she wakes up, you’d better listen to her. If anyone is going to stop the fighting—”
“I know, Howl.” Tai-ge’s breath is jagged. “I promise.”
“I’m taking your gun. The distraction won’t last long even with it, though. Run fast.”
Tai-ge flinches to the side, and there’s a silence inside me. My mother’s voice is crying again, as if she knows something I do not. But then the door is open, and Howl’s gone. Shots fire and boots slam into cement, shouts and confusion. He’s gone, and I’m cold, so cold.
Running boots down the hall, the soldiers outside all following Howl. One last echo of a shot.
Tai-ge’s chest is still for a moment as we listen. There’s nothing to hear but silence.