“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” HELIX STANDS with his forehead pressed to the cell’s glass wall, his eyes glazed from alcohol. Odd because when I knew him, Helix wasn’t one to drink anything that could compromise his judgment. Impaired vision could be the difference between surviving or not when you live by the bullets in your gun.
My eyes blur as I try to concentrate on Helix’s outline. Energy seems to be eating me from the inside at what I’ve done. I’ve closed the last door. The one between me and escape.
I made Sev jump.
Helix’s hand slaps against the glass, a loud crack that makes me shudder. “You know what Dr. Yang is doing, don’t you? Why he wouldn’t take the cure from Jiang Sev? Why he isn’t cutting you open now?” Helix slaps the glass again, his head going with it so he recoils with a pained snarl.
“Everything he’s ever told you was a lie.” My voice croaks, stripped of any veneer. Raw, real, and honest. It feels good. “If there was a cure inside me, why didn’t he cut it out a year ago? Five years ago?” I stand slowly, walking over to the glass until Helix is just there on the other side. “There aren’t very many choices, and all of them are about power. If you think Dr. Yang has the answers, then you follow. If you think he just needs one more ingredient, one more weapon, one more hostage, and it will mean being free, you obey.”
Helix’s glazed eyes water as he stares at me, his mask pressed awkwardly against the glass.
“Dr. Yang is never going to set you free, Helix. There aren’t enough ties between him and the Menghu. You and the other captains are doing what he wants until he gives you the cure. Why would he give it to you?” I look over the smudged glass, eyes finally focusing on Helix’s battered gas mask. “This situation we’re in now, with SS spreading, with fighting worse than it has ever been? It’s your fault for still believing Dr. Yang when he has let you down over and over again.” I shake my head and turn away from him. “Sev says there is a cure. It’s not in my head or hers. Dr. Yang definitely doesn’t have it. How long are you going to keep running for a man who doesn’t care if you live or die?”
Helix slams the window with his open hand again, rebounding away, glassy-eyed. “How did you manage to blow up the whole eastern side of the garrison? That’s tech we need, Howl. You used to be a Menghu. Loyal. On our side.” He chokes on the words as if he doesn’t believe them. Helix never was much of a liar.
This isn’t my fight anymore. My stone has been placed on the weiqi board, and there’s no moving it now. It’s the things that I can’t fix, can’t change that feel like regrets now. Sev was so quiet, so angry. As if I’d taken back all my apologies and laughed in her face. Does Sev want anything to do with me now that she’s seen what I’m made from, past and present?
Does taking those bombs to save Reds or giving myself up make up for any of it? Or am I condemned because stealing those bombs just provoked Song Jie and Reifa to follow me here instead?
I don’t know if taking lives and giving them is something you can balance like weights on a scale. I don’t know if there are answers at all. Only that I did what I came to do. Sev is out. The world will continue. I just won’t be in it.
“You are nothing,” Helix snarls. “Less than nothing. So selfish you want to take us all with you when you die. Just the way you always were.” He gets up close to the glass. “You are going to die, and I don’t care how it happens. Scalpel. Bullet. Whatever. I just want to watch.”
I look back over my shoulder, waiting until he meets my gaze. “I do have one thing that might help you. If you see a heli that doesn’t belong to the City—a black one?” Helix’s eyes focus on me for a second, and I wait a second before continuing to make sure he’s listening. “Whatever orders Dr. Yang gives you, find a way to bring it down. You think the blast here was bad? It’s going to come for you and every other person alive in these mountains. Drop it out of the sky, or there won’t be a war anymore because there will be no one left to fight it.”
They’re not my people, but they’re still people. I can see myself in Song Jie. Thinking if he can just show Reifa what he’s capable of, she’ll change her mind about him. I regret Reifa’s sadness, her mourning for a son she’ll never see again.
I don’t want them to die, but I don’t want hundreds, maybe thousands, to die here in the mountains, killed for no other reason but revenge.
Gein was kind of a gore hole, so whatever.
I lie back on my cot and close my eyes. Shut out the too-bright light, Helix’s voice as he continues to yell through the smudged glass. This is what the world has always been. It’s blood and death and tears and wishing things were different. I guess that’s why Sev needed me. Not just to talk her into letting go of the past so she could look forward. She sees the world as if it’s a gore that’s going to turn into a butterfly if only she talks to it long enough. I’m the one who twists it to the ground while she casts her spell, because gores don’t dream of butterflies. They dream of meat and blood.
The cot feels plasticky and uncomfortable, a sad place to let my body rest when I’ve spent so long pretending I could run forever. But, for the first time, it’s my choice. I’m choosing my own end. Not Dr. Yang. Not the Chairman or that Seph-cursed gore that tried to bite me in two. I chose this.
I close my eyes and wait.