MY HEAD SWIMS, MOLD-LACED DIRT filling my nose every time I try to breathe. Rough hands haul me up from the ground, the knife sharp against my throat.
Four Islanders crowd around me in the tent like kids on their first encounter with a dead body. Words fly back and forth, all of them passing straight through my ears without making an impression—Port Northian, I hope. The alternative—that I’m so sick I can’t understand speech—is too horrifying to contemplate.
The man who took the knife isn’t one of the two I saw before. He wears Baohujia robes like armor, making a barrier between me and an old woman, the fourth of the group. The other two—the portly one and the thin one I attacked—hang back, watching.
When the Baohujia pulls my bag from my shoulder, he doesn’t seem to notice pain hissing out from between my teeth, and tears open the pockets one by one. He takes out the bottle of pills Luokai gave me, squinting down at them for a moment before handing them to the old woman.
Next, he searches my person. This is when I should jump up, kick the soldier in the head, grab one of their packs, and run, but instead my body sways from side to side, my arms like rubber snakes.
The Baohujia’s hands stop when they get to my wrists. He turns to the old woman, speaking softly. She raises her eyebrows, fixing me with a curious stare. The momentary reprieve doesn’t last long, though, because the Islander hands the old woman the knife, then pulls a thin, plasticky cord from one of the packs. He uses it to tie my hands and feet, wrapping it tight enough that my fingers immediately begin to swell.
They’re not going to kill me. The thought registers too slowly. Why aren’t they killing me?
Once the Baohujia is finished tying me, the old woman raps out a set of what sounds like orders that result in the Baohujia and the overeater exiting the tent, leaving her alone with me and the young man I attacked. When they’re gone, she settles on the ground directly in front of me, carefully arranging the knife I was holding minutes ago in plain sight on her lap. The young man stays by the door, his breaths still coming too quickly, his hands clenched around the long slash I made in his coat.
Alarm beats in my chest, my brain ticking off a list of considerations. Wrists bound. Ankles tied, though the Baohujia did it over my boots, so I might be able to do something about that. The long knife is accessible, gripped only between an old woman’s wrinkled fingers, though it’s countered by a flash of gunmetal gray at her hip. I could throw one of the packs behind me, lob a fistful of dirt into their eyes even with my hands tied.
But the list flickers down to one solitary item: I still can’t move.
I can’t even see more than fuzzy outlines, and the floor seems to be spinning. The woman hefts the knife, leaning forward to examine the single line carved into the spot between my thumb and forefinger, the same spot the Baohujia paused to look at while tying me up. My First mark.
She turns to the young man, making an impatient gesture with her hand.
“Why did you break into our camp?” he asks.
“Why did…?” His language is perfect, not choppy and squeezed the way every word Luokai said was, as if he’d forgotten the words he was born with. “I was hungry. You have food.”
His eyes skate down to touch the First mark carved into my hand, his fingers white as he clutches at the tear in his coat. But he turns to the old woman, speaking to her in Port Northian. A translator. The woman, her shoulders hunched and her neck bowed, seems to be just a bit of skin wired to a frame, her movements pained. She speaks for a moment, then pulls my shirt collar back to show the scabs stuck to my skin like leeches.
“You are important, and yet you have gore teeth in your shoulder. You’re miles away from a place sanitized and safe enough for your rank…” The young man takes a shaky breath, his shoulders hunching as he speaks. “She asks if you are thirsty.”
I lick my lips, dry from my sprint to get to the Islanders before Reds found me. “Yes, I am thirsty.”
The young man’s lips purse into a grimace before he shares what I’ve said with the old woman. She nods and jerks her head at him as if he doesn’t even deserve the effort it takes to say out loud what she’s asking for. The young man stands, goes to one of the packs, and comes back with a waterskin. Hesitating a moment, he opens it and holds it out toward my mouth, but I don’t drink.
Sitting forward, the woman runs a finger along the edge of the long knife I held only moments ago. As she speaks, the young man translates. “What are you doing so far from your guards? Your camps?” She holds up the bottle of pills. “Injured, no less. I’ve never seen someone survive a gore bite like that.”
I shrug, the word still spinning around me in a drunken swirl, words limping along inside my mind when I need them to run. Now that there’s water right in front of me, all I can think is how dry my throat feels. “I… didn’t like what the soldiers were doing. It was my first trip here, and I didn’t realize…”
“If you lie to me”—she interrupts the translation with a flood of Port Northian, the translator licking his lips as he switches from Port Northian to my language. The old woman leans forward to press the point of the knife to my sternum with a little smile—“I will split your heart in two and make Song Jie eat it.”
I look away from the knife to eye the interpreter, the knife’s pressure too soft to be much of a threat. “Song Jie? Is that you?”
He keeps his eyes down as if looking at me while also listening and speaking simultaneously would make something in his head explode.
The knife creeps back to my collarbone, pain twinging through me as she once again examines the red, raised skin. Song Jie takes a moment to listen to what she’s saying before passing it on to me. “She wants to know what you’re running from.”
“I’m not running from anything. I’m trying to get back to the mountains.” Why didn’t I walk into the camp first? Luokai said they’d welcome me if they knew I wasn’t on the Reds’ side. That they needed help… Scrunching my eyes together doesn’t help dispel the way everything seems to be out of focus.
But there’s something else funny happening in my head. A crackling sound, like boots on grass. The guards outside? Suddenly, as Song Jie begins to speak again, a sound I know all too well clicks through my brain, all of my muscles tensing in response.
The metal click of a soldier pulling open the slide on his weapon to check there’s a bullet in the chamber. It takes only a second to skip through all the members of the group. The only gun is the old woman’s, and she’s sitting right here in front of me.
“Run.” I look at Song Jie. “We all have to run.”
Song Jie blinks, his mouth hanging open midsentence, as if he can’t quite process what I’m saying.
“They’re outside. They’re coming in right now.” I pull against the ties the Baohujia used to restrain me. “Untie me. They’ll probably concentrate fire on the south side because your tents are—”
“Who is outside?” Song Jie cuts in.
The old woman looks from me to the interpreter, her brow drawing down farther every moment Song Jie doesn’t translate.
“Your guys outside might already be down.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “Maybe not if they’re trying to cart you off to a farm. Maybe they’ll try to take us alive.” Pulling against the ties sends stabs of pain through my shoulder. I can’t move. Can’t fight. Can’t run. My eyes go to the hint of metal in the old woman’s sash, the gun just out of reach. “Untie me now.”
Song Jie says something to the woman, who goes to the tent door and peers out at their bright fire, smoke like a signal in the trees. Panic sweats out of me every moment they stand here doing nothing.
This can’t be how I finally go. With my head down and my hands bound.
Wrenching up from the ground with a gasp, I barrel into the tent’s central pole, pushing until the stakes wrench up from the ground and the whole thing tumbles over. Toward the spot the stupid smoking campfire should be.
Song Jie, so reedy and small, slams into me as the canvas falls down over all of us, taking me to the ground. Pain strips me down to the basics, nothing left inside but needing to escape. My elbow jams into Song Jie’s chest, and even though it isn’t a good hit, he recoils.
A shout sounds from out in the trees. I squirm free of the tent’s folds just as flames begin to lick at the canvas. The old woman and Song Jie are yelling to each other as they extract themselves. Charred canvas smell chokes my throat. Fire might be distracting enough for the Reds to miss one or two of us running free. Frantically pulling at my bootlaces, I curve on the ground and loosen the ties as best I can with my one good hand, but I can’t slip my feet out. “Untie me,” I wheeze. “If it was a scout, then the rest will be here soon.” My brain goes to where it’s most comfortable, the many times I’ve seen Reds attack, the times I’ve attacked Reds. “We have maybe a minute. They’ll hit this side of your camp, circle around if they haven’t already…” My eyes are dimming again, my balance all off, nothing but pain inside me. “Please, cut me loose.”
A blast of light ignites off in the trees, the sound of gunfire like nails pounding into my ears. The old woman yells something, and someone—the big Baohujia?—hefts me over one shoulder. Bones press painfully into my stomach as he runs, and all I can see is fire, impressions of the Islanders scurrying to grab things like shadows lurking at the corners of my eyes.
My collarbone is a solid white light of blinding agony, and it isn’t long before even those last shadows fade to nothing.
When I wake, my body is cocooned in fabric. The hammock—long bamboo poles thrust through the fabric on either side of me to hold it aloft—bobs and sways sickeningly, a figure shouldering the two poles just behind me as he walks. There must be someone in front, too, but I can’t muster the energy to look. My eyes drift closed again. Every part of me aches and my mouth tastes of sick, like acid and decay both at once.
A creaky old voice speaking nonsense eases the silence, the old woman’s shadow falling across me as she walks alongside me. “You’re awake,” a lower voice interprets. Song Jie. He’s the one carrying the back half of this makeshift litter.
I groan, holding my arm close to my chest, though no matter how I adjust, the persistent ache in my shoulder won’t quiet as she continues to speak. When Song Jie translates, his voice is flat. “You saved us.”
Opening my eyes hurts, but I do it, straining to look up at her. “If they find me, they’ll…” Kill me probably. If Dr. Yang or the Chairman haven’t ordered their soldiers to torture me first. But I can’t tell these people that. It’s like Luokai said—this old lady is interested in my First marks. “If they find me they’ll take me back to the City. There’s someone who needs help far away from there, and if I don’t get to her…” The words boil in my throat, too desperate, too sick. Sev’s face is like a stone in my head, weighing me down. “I need to get back to the mountains.”
“She says the medicine you brought with you is making you sick.” Song Jie grumbles it, adjusting the pole on his shoulders. “That it’s poison. Enough to kill the bacteria the gore left in you, but only barely enough not to kill you. Whoever gave it to you didn’t expect you to run away. Or meant for you not to.”
I twist to the side, some choice words brewing in my mouth. Seph-eaten Luokai. The cure, Sole’s life, June’s life, his life are all riding on whether I can get the cure from Dr. Yang, and Luokai gives me poison? What a complete—
“Reifa says we need your help. Maybe as much as you need ours right now.” A frown touches his mouth, and for a moment I think he’s going to go back to fingering the slit I made in his coat.
Reifa. That’s what Luokai called the leader of this group. I try to raise my head to look at her. “Unless you can get me back to the mountains within a few days, I’m not sure you can help me.” I let my head sag back against the hammock, too tired to continue thrashing. “What were you hoping I could help you with that was worth carting my dead weight away from that camp?”
“I don’t think it was worth it to carry you.…” Song Jie’s mouth presses into an ugly line as Reifa hisses something in his direction, but after a moment, he translates what I’ve said. I think. Reifa laughs, skimming a hand across the hammock as if she’d like to pat me on the head and can’t reach. I count myself lucky she isn’t still clutching that knife.
“We know how to get to the mountains,” Song Jie translates. “But not what lies inside them. We need help filling in the blank spots on our map. Where the farms are. The City itself.” He pauses, grimacing over my weight.
“And… you want me to tell you where to find the best grub?” I snort, wondering if it would even hurt anyone to give up that information to this crew. That’s what Jiang Gui-hua was supposed to have done—given up the City’s coordinates to Kamar, that nonexistent enemy the City’s been using as a scapegoat for the horrors necessary to keep their workers in line.
Only… Kamar is a story. The island, Port North, where Sev’s mother was born, is real enough. Just without the teeth and claws the First Circle wrote in. I attempt to focus on Reifa, wondering what she is even trying to accomplish.
Reifa speaks again, Song Jie listening very carefully, his face a little too blank when he finally translates. “We don’t just need help filling in our maps. You’re highly ranked. You’ll be able to show us how to get into the City. Smuggle us in, even.”
The beginnings of curiosity bud up inside me. “Why would you need to get inside the City?”
Song Jie stalls over this answer for a moment, finally contenting himself with, “We need a miracle. We need to find your Chairman’s son.”