SECURING THE FACTORY AND GATE comes with only one terrible mishap. One of the younger soldiers found a friend sheltering inside one of the old worker dorms. It only took a moment for the Seph to get my soldier talking and then stab a knife in his chest before the soldier had even finished explaining what we were doing with the torches.
When Captain Bai found the soldier’s body, the Seph was still kneeling over him, crying. Saying he didn’t mean to over and over, pressing hands to his friend’s chest as if he could somehow put the blood back inside. The fact that Captain Bai included these details when he reported makes me want to trust him. As if he’s sending up a signal that he knows what I’m doing and it’s right.
My stomach twinges with hunger as I walk with my soldiers, some of them joking and playing with one another as they go. Seeing them smile makes me realize how tight they were wound when I first got here. I wave them on, stopping to check the spot I hid my link. It’s there waiting for me.
The deal with Mei is working already.
Leaning on the cement wall just outside the cafeteria door, I compose my message to Mother: Success. Factory should be operational within days of reinforcements arriving. Unfortunately, a small number of Sephs broke into the market square during the operation, fouled most of the food, and left Captain Bai infected. His expertise is needed. Extra rations and any amount of Mantis you can spare, needed to get us through. We’ve had radio failure as well. Probably a week before any of our other connections will be up.
Writing the words feels as if I’ve stuck a gun in my own mouth, my finger twitchy to shoot. Lying to my own mother. My General. The last hope for the City.
I’ve decided I can’t let her see what I’m doing until it’s a success. This is a risk I’m taking, so she can’t be implicated.
Mother’s response comes later than I anticipated. Not until I’ve already finished my first bowl of rice scraped from the pot and begun a discussion with Captain Bai about the best route to the Mantis labs. Expect a delivery after dark, Mother writes. The purple light is dim against the back of my hand, barely discernible even in the ill-lit cafeteria. We can spread ourselves no thinner after this. No more mistakes.
Mistakes. My jaw sets, teeth aching from grinding together.
“Is everything all right, sir?” Captain Bai asks. He still looks as if he’s afraid our mission this morning was a dream and there are piles of dead comrades outside for him to drag away.
I stand up from the table, staring down at the flickering characters. It isn’t in Mother’s nature to accept that a subordinate—her own child especially—has come up with a better plan than hers. If we do succeed, if everyone can see it, not even Mother will be able to call it a mistake.
But if I succeed by disobeying her, that will mean I’m telling everyone that she made a mistake. How can I take the orders I was given and make it plain they hinted at what we’ve done instead?
Shaking my head, I dismiss the thoughts as premature. Before justifications can be drawn up, the initial groundwork needs to not disintegrate in a flaming mess. The fragile threads that link me to Lieutenant Hao aren’t going to thicken and thrive unless food keeps coming and the promises I’ve made about Mantis are realized. I avoid Captain Bai’s eyes when I respond to his question. “Everything is fine. We can start planning our approach on the First Quarter tomorrow when Lieutenant Hao is present.”
“I look forward to it.”
When I look up at the undercurrent of praise, Captain Bai locks eyes with me the way he’s not supposed to. As I fill my bowl with a second helping of rice and vegetables and meat, a dangerous warmth fills me, because even if I’m not sure of everything, at least I know one person now believes in me.
Upstairs in my room, Mei sits against the wall with both hands pressed to her mask as if it will somehow keep her compulsions in. Her forehead knits when I hold out the bowl for her. Dinner isn’t the only thing I brought from downstairs. I pull the length of cord I took from the supplies heaped outside the orphanage from my shoulder. “No word from your colleague downstairs? Should I expect a building full of dead soldiers in the morning?”
She stares straight ahead, her thick eyebrows crinkling. “You know it’s just me.”
I set the bowl next to her when she doesn’t take it, then kneel next to her. “You want to eat first?”
She shakes her head.
“Is this where you want to be until the Mantis comes?”
Mei’s eyes finally focus on me, her mask blocking all but the ice crystallizing in the air between us. “I hate you,” she says. And puts her hands out to be tied.
I leave Mei in the room alone to take off her mask and eat, stalling the moment I have to go to bed until long after the sun has gone down. When I finally enter the room, Mei refuses to look at me from where she’s tied to her bed, leaving me to lie down without so much as an insult. When I close my eyes, though, sleep seems to laugh at me, directing my attention to the Menghu only a few feet away, waiting for compulsions to take her.
Still, I close my eyes, hope with all my heart the knots will hold, and wait.
It isn’t until hours later, my guard relaxed, that an agonized scream jolts me up from my fake slumber. Falling sideways off the bare mattress, I land on my knees, groping for my gun. By the time I have it up and pointed at nothing but darkness, my fuzzy eyes finally focus on Mei, her face cadaverous in the pale moonlight. She pulls against the ropes, her breaths rushing like steam out of the cannery vents before she lets out another desperate yelp.
“Please…,” she mutters once the cry is spent. “Please, there’s something inside me.”
Her voice croaks, her whole body twisting against the ropes, attempting to get a hand to her mouth. “Please…” She says it over and over again, each more pitiful than the last, until tears bleed down her cheeks. Her breathing is so fast I’m afraid she’ll hyperventilate. Her head comes up slowly until she’s looking at me, but her eyes are empty. “Please, Tai-ge…”
I turn away, the sound of my name almost worse than the screams. I’m ashamed to see her tied up and so frightened and… not herself, whoever that is. I’m the one who took her Mantis, who put her in this awful position.
When her breathing becomes more measured, I let myself look at her again. She’s still crying, her head bowed as low as the rope will let her go.
“Mei?”
She doesn’t move.
“Can I… get something for you?”
“I don’t want anything from you, filthy Red.”
“What about a sleeping bag or pillow?”
“Go back to your mother, Hong Tai-ge. It’s where you and every other Red belongs. Kowtowing to her shiny boots.”
Mei is shaking, the raw stripe on her wrist now dripping blood where she pulled against the rope. I turn back toward the wall, eyes following the cracks in the plaster, hating the pity welling up inside me. Her hopeless posture sparks memories I don’t care to remember. Sevvy used to go somewhere else—somewhere inside her head—before she ran away from the City. She saw things no one else could. I couldn’t call attention to it or risk Mother or Father sending her to the Sanatorium, and I never brought it up because she never did. It seemed dangerous, a secret both of us were keeping.
The words are out of my mouth before I think them through, the very least of what I wish I’d said to Sevvy when I said nothing at all. When I said worse than nothing. “I’m sorry this is happening to you. I know I don’t understand exactly. But I’m sorry.”
“How can you be sorry?” Her voice dies a little more with every word. “You’ve never had to worry about SS. You’ve never had to worry about anything.” The rancor turns me toward her again, her eyes made of fire and hate. Arguments puff up inside me, but I hold them back and let her speak. “You have never once had your hands blistered over a fire when you did wrong or gone to bed with welts and bruises after a day’s hard work. You don’t know what it’s like to finally escape only to end up here with a Red’s rope around my neck yet again.” She spits, the phlegmy string landing on my boot. “I’m not begging to you or your stars. Never again.”
Her words sit like a hole in my stomach, an echo of something Sevvy told me about a girl she met in the Mountain. “Were you working for the City? Outside?”
She doesn’t look up.
“Not all of us knew about the living conditions on the farms. I didn’t even see a farm until I left during the invasion.”
“If you didn’t know, it’s because you didn’t want to. You ate the food as it came. Watched them build factory after factory, saw the helis carry materials from outside your Seph-cursed wall.” Her head tilts, and the sight of her eyes glaring through a sheet of sweat-soaked hair, her face like an angry ghost, leaves me with goose bumps. “The whole Third Quarter should have been enough for you to understand why you didn’t have to work. Just because there was no one there whispering in your ear what exactly the can of peaches in your hand cost doesn’t mean we weren’t trying to speak.”
Anger unfurls inside me again, just like every time Sevvy tried to tell me that my life, my family, everything I know, is rotten to the core. There were good people here in the City. There are good Firsts, good Seconds. Scores of loyal people who wanted…
My head falls back onto my pillow. What did they want? What do I want? To be safe again. For the world to allow me to sit in the same room as my mother without the stiff angle of my salute as the yardstick by which she measures my love. It was war that did that. Mei’s people invading, attacking us. Sev leaving and igniting the machine that ended with my home in ruins, the torch line sheltering a tiny heart of wellness in a body that is sick.
Anger is a comfortable refuge. With anger smoldering around me, it’s easy to watch Mei’s accusations burn to nothing, because she doesn’t understand. She only sees things from outside our wall, where scavengers pick one another’s bones until there’s nothing left. Where there are no people, just monsters.
Monsters. The last memory I have of Sevvy looks like Mei does right now. As if no matter how hard she looks at me, she can’t find anything of value. I don’t want you to speak for me, Tai-ge. I want to live in a place where I can speak for myself!
I turn back to the wall. Clench my eyes shut. Listen to Mei’s long, shuddering breaths as I wait for a sleep that won’t come. After a long space of trying, I finally let myself sit up. Let my cold feet find the floor and carry me to the base of Mei’s bed.
Sinking to the floorboards, I lean back against her mattress, the rusty springs squeaking.
“I told you to leave me alone,” Mei growls.
“I know.” I swallow, taking a long breath. “You’re right that I don’t understand. That I should, but I don’t. It’s my fault what’s happening to you now, so, if you’ll let me, I want to help. Until the Mantis comes.” I look up at her. She’s glaring down from her spot on the mattress. “So tell me. Everything you’ve ever wanted to say to someone like me. Say it all, if it will help.”
Silence. The creak of the rope as she shifts. But she doesn’t say no.