THE WORLD IS SUPPOSED TO be a circle around me. Above the circle, there’s sky and clouds and sometimes stars, and then inside of it there’s mountains and hills and maybe some water or we’d all be thirsty. And inside those mountains and hills, there’s birds and trees and people and rocks. But instead of being up there in the circle where I belong, I’m Underneath.
It’s sure as a day’s worth of sun. I know how long it takes for people to wake up from SS, and my eyelids are stuck tight. Sun, moon, and stars’ll come up over and over like they always do, and I’ll just be down here waiting for my bones to rot.
Do bones rot? I think back to the bodies I’ve seen, but my memory feels too sticky to be sure.
“June?” Warm air brushes across my face, the sound like an erhu. I try to turn my head away from the man’s breath, but my body doesn’t much care what I want. Another voice, different from the first, says, “We’ll tell you when she wakes up, Speaker Luokai.”
“How much longer do you think? She still has a chance?”
Luokai. The man who looks like Howl but old and sad, and also evilish. He made me take off my mask. Once again, I tell my head to move, my arms to push me up from this bed, my legs to run. It’s because of him that everything inside my circle—the sky, the mountains, the whole world—is now nothing but a tiny, black cave.
“Could you give me a moment alone with her?” At least I think that’s what he says. They speak funny, like the people in my memories. He sighs as the other men go, and it seems to hover over me, condensing down by my toes, making them tingle.
“You have to wake up,” Luokai whispers. It’s almost as if I can feel the shape of him, even without eyes or a face or body or the rest of it, trapped the way I am in my brain. “I’ll never forgive myself if you don’t.
“Your friends are…” Luokai’s pause is enough to tell me what he’s got to say is either bad or a lie, maybe both. I try to jerk my hands up again, to move my head, maybe swing my foot to kick Luokai in the head. The thought stirs the tingles in my toe, and they race up from my feet into my legs and then to my stomach and chest, battling across me like ants on dead meat. Dad used to call that feeling “fishing for spears,” and he laughed when he said it, but I still don’t know why.
By the time I was old enough to ask, he was too dead to tell me.
“Howl left just this morning.” My ears open at the sound of my friend’s name. “He’s better than he was before. He’s going to help your other friend, Jiang Sev, because the helis took her. Hopefully, they’ll both be back soon.”
The helis took her? I knew Howl and Sev weren’t supposed to be here anymore. We’d all still be locked in Luokai’s prison cell of a sleeping room if I hadn’t taken off my gas mask and let him infect me. But the blood and spit and fear gummed up around those words—they took her—fill my lungs with an inch more of water. Every bit of my new family, the ones who can’t get sick so they can’t forget that they like me. Gone.
Then my toe twitches—and every inch of me freezes, more freezing than SS could ever do to me. My toe moved because I told it to.
The tingling passes my torso and sneaks into my heart. Then past my neck, all the way to my face. And suddenly I realize that moving might be a possible thing, at least a little, if I wanted to.
It’s the choice of it that lets me stay still. I could move—but I won’t, not yet.
Open your eyes. There’s a voice in my head, and it sounds like a gore, but I ignore it. Not yet, I repeat to it. I know how to stay still even if the gore inside me doesn’t.
“I’m going to take care of you, June. You’ll be safe until they get back, I promise.” Luokai must be bored. Winding down a conversation he didn’t mean to get into with a person who can’t talk back. That was the same before he breathed SS into my mouth and locked me away. People forget you’re there, get bored, and wander away when you don’t talk back. Luokai’s knees crack as he stands. Not yet. He takes three steps to the door, each swish of his robe like thunder in my ears. Not yet. A faint hush when the door begins to slide open.
Now. I roll off the table and am out the door before it can shut again.
The blanket I have clutched around me wards off the wind pushing behind me as I run—try to run, my legs shaking like new workers at a City farm. Light is like a knife in my eyes. You’re going to fall, the gore howls inside me. They’ll catch you, and you’ll be stuck here forever. Staying isn’t an option, so I make my legs move, my feet dragging sideways across the stone. Hands grab fistfuls of my blanket, so I let it go, sending one of the Baohujia off-balance, the others stumbling over him.
Which lets me run. Toward the brightest, glaring light. A window.
Luokai’s erhu voice shouts, commanding me to stop or someone to stop me, though I sort of think if he wanted either of those things to happen, he’d probably do better trying them himself. I climb up on the windowsill, no glass to keep me back. Escape sings in me like the sun about to rise from behind the mountain in the air. But then my fuzzy eyes manage to focus on the ground. Fifty feet below. Jagged rock cut into tiered paths that promise no soft landings. No reliable handholds until at least fifteen feet below the window.
Footsteps behind me, my whole body tense as a gore ready to pounce. You’ll die either way. The gore doesn’t seem very concerned about this. Die on the rocks or locked in a room by a Seph.
The thought seems to go clear in my head like good bottle glass. I can’t be trapped again. Not by someone with SS. I can still feel water closing over my head, cold as a snow angel’s bum. Dad’s fingers pressing hard into my shoulders as he held me down.
Everything around me seems to fade: just me and the drop below.
My foot skids across the stone windowsill, the rest of me following, poised over the drop like a boulder at the top of a cliff that you just want to push. JUMP, something inside me says. It’s a new voice, one that sets the gore’s hackles up inside me. JUMP, it says, taking hold of my muscles. And while I usually ignore the gore, this voice seems to know about life and the circle and things. It’s showing me the path I can run, the way out of this trap, the way to safety, never mind the drop. So I jump.