I HATE THE FEEL OF the gun against my side under my coat, the metal pressing into my side as June stops just off the main road. She stills, scanning the area—and gives an annoyed frown when I almost stumble over my own feet behind her.
A hinge creaks in the darkness just behind us. I look back, but June is off into the street, my hand held tight in hers, pulling me into a fast walk that slams my boots loudly into the cobblestones. She shoots me a glare but doesn’t slow our pace.
We pass over the lower bridge from the Third to the Second Quarter, picking through debris as we go. Food wrappers that seem to have come from one of the factories. A mess of shattered glass littering the bridge, Bricks, bits of fabric and clothing. A chunk of hair, lying in the middle of the street like a dead rat.
None of that compares to the flutters of movement following us from the high windows in surrounding buildings, the whisper of laughter that slicks through my hair as we squeeze into an alleyway between two Red family compounds. The roof tiles overhead seem to be ragged, broken in some places. As June and I emerge from the alleyway, we spy movement ahead, a man’s silhouette black against the darkening sky above us.
We run.
Past Tai-ge’s old neighborhood, where a barricade of furniture and razor wire now blocks several streets. The gap in the barricade where a guard should have been standing looks barren and bereft. Lonely, now that whoever was meant to watch it has left.
Where are all the people? Even if SS sent people scurrying for cover, it was only Firsts and lucky Seconds who were airlifted out before the Menghu invasion. That leaves thousands of Seconds and Thirds, all of whom seem to be made from shadows. They couldn’t have gotten past the chemical torches without masks, so they must be out here somewhere.
I point June along the streets, following when she abruptly diverts from the path I meant to take, steering us in another direction until whatever threat she sensed is gone. I feel blind, as if threats I should be able to see are breathing down on us every moment and my eyes are somehow glued shut.
Just as we catch sight of the gate leading to the First Quarter, June spins back, slamming me into an alley wall.
Bricks dig into my spine through my borrowed coat. June’s slight form presses against me, so still it seems she’s even stopped her heart. Everything seems too quiet, every inch of me quivering, because the only thing worse than running or ducking bullets is waiting for the shots to start.
A young man slips into view, the torn remnants of a factory uniform wrapped tightly around him. He walks straight toward us, his eyes wide, as if he’s forgotten how to blink. “We’re supposed to be headed for the People’s Gate into the City Center. Come on.”
June tenses, her hand slipping inside my coat to touch the gun. I put a steadying hand on top of hers.
The young man watches us with a sideways tilt to his head, one hand tapping a rhythm onto his arm. “Didn’t you see the signals? An hour after dark.”
Fear trills through me, leaving my skin pebbled from my neck down. “Right. We’re coming.”
He nods, still not blinking. Then shambles on.
What is going on?
June tugs my sleeve, the two of us slipping through the gate to the First Quarter together, the moon’s icy glow guiding our way. Every moment we’re exposed in the open street makes my heart pound, and I tense for an attacker that I’m sure is waiting ahead, just out of sight. But no one comes.
Why is no one coming? And what are they doing instead?
We take Renewal Road up the Steppe, walking through the old neighborhood I remember in ghostly outlines as if I’d only seen it in a dream. Now the street seems to have cracked, the tiles stolen from the roofs of the old First homes, the gates sitting crooked on their hinges and obscenities scrawled on their stone walls.
When we finally turn onto my old street, I see it as I did the last time I was here: The house empty as a body after death. Father on his knees in the courtyard, snow curling around him in a gray-tinged shroud. Mother, gone.
After ducking under a bent lamp and almost tripping over a downed line of paper lanterns, we finally come to the house that used to be mine. It’s hard to look at it, to face the crooked lines of my childhood that all lead back to this place. Sick with Sleep in my old room, Mother’s crying voice, my sister Aya by my side, Father arguing with the doctors. The scene is swollen in my mind like a tick left to feed. Engorged with the blood of my memories.
Wrenching my shoulders straight, I force myself to look my past straight on. To take in the house beyond the front gate, door painted red, a pair of cranes carved on either side of the frame.
It’s just a house.
June slips a hand into mine, looking up and down the street as if she wants to pull me one way or another but isn’t sure which direction is right. “This is it?” she asks quietly.
“It’s not quite what I remember,” I whisper. The gate to the outer part of the compound hangs limply on its hinges. I walk up the steps, fingers running along the geometric lines that frame the entrance. A gold-and-red card is pasted to the door for New Year. BLESSINGS, it says, positioned upside down to welcome any stray blessings into the house. It’s peeling and faded, from last year.
Opening the door, I brace myself, waiting to feel Aya’s ghostly presence, to hear Mother’s voice singing in her office, or Father’s reading to me, but the moon’s light leaks in through the windows, turning it to a place of ghosts that don’t belong to me. The house is a dead thing, musty and rotted and uncaring of who or what steps inside.
There’s a table heavy with family portraits sitting in the entryway, but the paintings are of men and women I’ve never seen, someone else’s family, someone else’s memories. June steps up next to me, looking them over. “You know them?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I couldn’t bear to see my own family anyway.”
“You have to remember the good things.” June’s brow knots. “People… do the best they can.”
Surprised, I look down at her. “You think?”
She shrugs. “The nice ones.”
A board creaks in the next room, and June darts behind the table, pulling me down while I’m still looking in the direction it came from. We hold our breath while the creaks meander from one room to the next and, finally, toward us.
June’s hand is around the gun’s handle. She pulls it from my coat with her other finger to her lips. My muscles seem wound so tight it’s a wonder they haven’t torn. The footsteps draw near, June ready with the weapon, when a slippered foot appears just in my line of sight.
I put a hand on June’s, pushing the gun down.
A second slipper appears, the woman wearing it wandering past us with slow, shuffling steps. Her breath rattles in her chest as if she’s full of autumn leaves instead of a heart, lungs, and blood, and when her eyes turn toward us, they’re milked over in white.
“Who’s there?” she rasps, her eyes roving over exactly where we’re crouched and missing us. “One of Lieutenant Hao’s little runts? I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not leaving my home.”
On her crumpled hand, there are three white lines almost lost between the wrinkles.
“I’ve served here since I was a girl, and I won’t let it go, no matter what you say about helis and supply lines and the General’s Seph-bloodied son. I’ll stay here and starve before I go down to the square.”
The woman’s hand fumbles along the top of the table, swiping toward us and upsetting two of the picture frames instead, sending one to the floor in a shatter of glass. “Yuan’s ugly mistress!” she swears, takes another rasping breath.
June squeezes my shoulder, edging us away from the woman’s groping hands as she tries to right the picture that didn’t fall. We slip away from the table, and I lead her toward my old room, the floor thick with dust. The room itself is empty of anything that made it mine, the windows covered with a set of red curtains I would have hated as a child.
“Know her?” June whispers, looking back down the hall.
“No. If she cleaned the house when I was little…” I sigh, ashamed. “No, I don’t know her.” I kneel and pry up the floorboard with my fingernails.
Her secrets were now hidden in a place no one else could reach. That was the hint inside Mother’s device. My stomach clenches, and I’m suddenly terrified that I was wrong, that it was a jump, that it was ridiculous.…
In the hole, under a coating of dust, there’s a book.
A sleeping princess graces the cover, her form embossed so it sticks out from the dusty paper. It’s too light in my hands, and when I open the book, instead of pages and words, there’s a secret. The cover is glued around a box, and inside the box is a frail clutch of papers black with my mother’s spiky hand. I look through them quickly, finding measurements. Diagrams. Howl’s name. Dates. My name. Encephalitis lethargica. And next to it, a table that has been rewritten in perfect, clear characters with ingredients, amounts, directions I can’t even begin to understand.
A hot flame ignites in my chest, warding off the moon’s dead light. The only thing I understand is that this is what I came for. It’s the cure.
June’s hand snakes forward, plucking out a thicker sheet of paper, Mother’s scrawl splashed across the back. “I love you both, so, so much,” it says. June turns it over to find a painting of two little girls, their arms tight around each other.
Me and my sister, Aya.
Tears spill down my cheeks. Mother thought it would be both of us who found the cure. Maybe she thought we’d find it with Father’s help, within a year even.
She sent me all the way to Port North, to her family and back again, somehow knowing that her secrets would never be safe in hands other than ours. A master of weiqi, more than I ever could have hoped to be, and finally here I am with the winning piece in my hand.
“Your sister?” June’s voice is small.
“Yes.”
She thinks for a moment, her lips pursed.
I give her hand a squeeze. “I’m glad I have more than one sister now.”
Ducking her head, June hands the paper back, but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear there was a smile on her face.
I tuck the papers back inside the box but slip the painting into my coat pocket. Then I hand the box to June. She regards it with narrowed eyes before taking it and looking up at me, her eyebrows raised.
“Yes. That’s it. The cure.”
Her fingers press into the box’s cover, her knuckles turning white. She hands me the gun, then stuffs the box down her shirt and buttons her coat over it clear up to her chin.
I find my feet, putting a hand out to help June up, though she ignores it to push off the floor herself. Taking one last look at the room, I turn toward the door. It’s finally time to leave this place behind.