WE SET DOWN HALF A day’s walk from the Mountain, far enough away Gein can’t push any buttons that will kill hundreds of people. Also far enough that if there’s a high concentration of Sephs still hanging around the Mountain, they’d be unlikely to see us set down. When Gein releases the door and Song Jie pushes it out, a gust of icy air wafts into the heli’s stale interior.
Pine needles and snow. Cold that freezes inside your nose. Something in my chest relaxes now that I’m so close to home again. Every moment by the ocean I felt as if one of my senses had been stifled. Here the colors tell me how old a tree is, how far we are from the Mountain. The branches cluster on the correct side of the trunk, pointing which way is south. I can see again.
But with the familiar smells and colors comes a gritting of teeth, as if there are eyes in the tree watching me. My home, where the chemical tang of SS in my lungs is more familiar than the scent of pine. Where gores are desperate, and people are gores—the sound of wind rustling through the branches makes my skin itch because it might not be wind at all.
Reifa was less than happy to hear about the Mountain, the Menghu invasion of the City, the refugee camps, the many places fictional Sun Yi-lai could be. Song Jie looks even more grim, as if his job went from plucking a dandelion out of the ground to gathering its seeds one by one where they’ve blown on the wind.
He shivers when I join him at the door, the two of us peering out into the frigid landscape. “You’re sure these Mountain people will help us find where City camps are located? You’ve had contact with this Dr. Yang person who is in charge?”
“I was spying for them when the invasion forces went to your island. I got hurt just as news came in that SS was spreading. That’s why I had to get back.” I lean out, anxious to get moving, “They’ll have all the information we need on where the Chairman might be.” Lie.
Reifa slips in next to me, her eyes narrowed on the open door and the endless expanse of white beyond, listening to Song Jie’s translation of what I’ve said. Sole might know where the Chairman is, I suppose, but it’s doubtful. She’s the only person who might know where Sev ended up who will also be willing to share that information, though. Also, the only person who can help figure out how to keep this death heli grounded.
Reifa taps my shoulder and holds out her hand as if she wants something. I look at Song Jie.
“She wants the guns. The one you took from her and the one you took from me.”
“I dropped both when we were taking off.” Lie. I dropped them very conveniently into a compartment at the back of the heli. “Let’s go, Song Jie. You and me.”
He blinks, and Reifa’s scowl is sufficient enough to suspect she knows what I’ve said.
I point toward footprints marring the snow, though they’re at least a week old. “Can you imagine?” I ask, keeping my spot in the doorway. “Hundreds… maybe thousands of people, all like your Speakers. Infected, but with no Baohujia to stop them when their brains go funny. Doesn’t help that the surge in infections is probably making any soldiers out here even more jumpy than usual.” I step down into the snow. “You know we can’t take Reifa and Gein with us. Not if we want to live. They’re too loud, and they move too slow. You’ll have to persuade her.”
Not a lie. I don’t know what we’ll find out there. If Sole is even still right in the head, or if we’ll find her an empty husk with bite marks up and down her limbs.
Song Jie’s huff of annoyance comes out in a cloud of condensation, a front, because he still won’t meet my eyes. But he nods, scrubbing at his shirt again, though the brown stains have sunk in deep.
“It doesn’t get easier.” I say it quietly because it is a lie and it also isn’t.
He meets my eyes, letting his hands fall to his sides. “No? You didn’t hesitate.”
“I didn’t enjoy it. I killed those men to save your life.”
“Oh, is that why?” He looks me up and down and can’t meet my eyes again, a shudder rippling up his spine. “I know what you are. You can’t hide it from me.”
I look out into the trees, Song Jie’s words crawling under my skin. I didn’t kill him when I could have. I didn’t kill any of them. I’ve been trying to do right.
Is Song Jie correct? Is that what I am? Born to scare the crap out of people?
It’s what I was, and it stained me deep. But I can choose to be something new underneath. I’m not what he says. I’m not like him anymore, a vessel of revenge, expecting people to accept me because of my crimes and not despite them. I hope that’s not a lie.
I keep hold of his arm as he tries to push past me. “Go through the storage on the heli. If there’s equipment on this thing that’s going to help us get through this alive, I want it in my pack.”
Song Jie blinks, jaw clenching tight as Gein pushes by him into the snow to poke at it suspiciously with one finger. But then he looks out into the frozen woods, the chill turning his cheeks ruddy and his nose flaring as if can smell nothing but urine, gore scat, and a thousand shadows harder than his own. Fear of the unknown: a tool known to break even the bravest of men and women.
Not a lie.
We walk for hours, the stark outline of the Mountain like a monument to the dead against the sky. I take us by way of the river so we can refill our waterskins, but also so I can see what my home has become. It was always dangerous out here, but the prints, the trash, the blood splattered across the snow… It’s hard to believe there’s anyone left breathing. The air is the kind of cold that bites straight through you, an arctic chill before a storm blows in.
Song Jie doesn’t notice me in his pack while he’s attempting to fill his waterskin. Probably because the rock he was standing on shifted and dumped him onto the thick ice, cracks forming all around him. I don’t find any special weapons or tools from the heli. My hands stall when I find the scored knife, the long one I almost killed him with, stashed at the bottom of his pack.
I zip it back inside, wondering when he exchanged it for the one he used to cut vegetables.
The two of us slide between trees, listening, watching, hiding our footprints as best we can, though there’s almost no point in the mucked-up snow. Song Jie moves differently than a Menghu. Like he’s being hunted rather than hunting. It’s him who hears the crying first, though.
Yuan’s double axes. I scrub at my ears, wondering how much damage those grenades did to my eardrums, disconcerted to see Song Jie go tense a whole second before I knew why. The sound is high, frightened. A child, or meant to sound like one. June—as she was when Sev and I first met her—flashes through my thoughts, her chicken-bone arms and legs barely enough to hold her up.
“What is that?” Song Jie’s voice hisses as he fumbles with the top of his pack, groping inside, then peering through the opening when he doesn’t find anything. Weapons don’t do much good when they’re inaccessible.
I walk toward the sound, Song Jie’s following footsteps quiet enough to be acceptable. The sobs seem to needle straight through my heart, as if I’m absorbing them directly from the air.
When I first see the girl responsible for the sound, she just looks like a child in the snow. A confusing picture because there’s a man sitting next to her, talking to her. But when I draw close enough to see tears dripping down her face, my eyes find the knife he’s stabbing into the snow at her feet over and over as if it’s a game to see how close he can come without nicking her.
We’re supposed to be hiding. Not calling attention to ourselves. It’s almost second nature to look away. File the image with all the other impossible situations I’ve had to walk by in my life, the girl’s ribs sticking out like finger bones in a Menghu’s bracelet.
I almost walked past June, so concerned for my own neck and Sev’s that I didn’t have room to think about hers, but this time I’m running before I even realize, shoving Song Jie to the ground when he tries to pull me back. The man with the knife doesn’t look up, folding like grass in the wind when I hit him shoulder-first, hooking my leg behind his knee and flipping him over. His face hits the ground, but the loud crack that tells me something broke isn’t enough to stop him squirming, bending at awkward angles to get free of my weight. A tremor of pain ripples through my shoulder as I grab hold of the knife in his hand and slam it into the ground.
The man’s squirming intensifies, his elbow twisting under my arm. Pain tears through me as he pulls against my injured shoulder, and I have to let go. In less than a breath, he’s on top of me, the man’s low mutter—something about worms under the ice—like death in my ear. The girl cries out, and everything in me not focused on the man goes on high alert, wondering if she’ll be the one to stab me, but no extra attack comes.
Song Jie’s worn boots appear at the corner of my vision, the Islander wrenching the man off me by his collar. The two of us pin him to the ground, his fingers so tight around the knife I’m afraid they’ll break as I pry them back one by one and then throw the weapon into the trees.
“What is wrong with you?” Song Jie growls, grappling to keep the man down. “We don’t have time for this.”
I step between the little girl and the knife, her eyes wide as she watches us hold the Seph down until his twitching subsides. “Thank you,” the man finally wheezes, as if a switch of humanity inside him has suddenly been turned on. Song Jie lets go, allowing him to roll onto his back. His nose bleeds from each nostril. “We heard someone was down here who could help. Is that you?”
“Help with what, exactly?” I keep the little girl in view. She hasn’t moved, though, teardrops frozen on her cheeks.
He doesn’t try to sit up, each breath expanding his ribs all the way out and then contracting them in until I’m afraid I’ll see his spine. “They said someone here was taking people in.”
“The Mountain? They haven’t been taking anyone for least a year now. No infected, for sure.” I look back to the little girl, her hands still a hopeless snarl at her waist, then dig for some of the dried meat I brought from the heli in my pack. The skin over her wrists seems to be painted straight on bone, and her cheeks are so hollow I could swear her mother was a skeleton. “If you grip too hard, your hands will fuse together like that, you know? You can relax. I’m not going to hurt you.” When she doesn’t take the meat, I toss it to her, but she lets it fall to the ground, her eyes never leaving me. Clearly food isn’t as important as watching for weapons.
“It’s new since all the helis started buzzing north and SS started spreading. They said there’s someone down there with food, even for infected. You aren’t from there?” The man flinches away from me now, suddenly unsure. “What do you want?”
Sole told me over the link that she was trying to help. “You know where they’re giving out food?”
The man gives a resigned sort of sigh. I didn’t mean to sound threatening. “If you promise not to hurt us—”
“No.” The little girl steps between me and the man. “What will you give us if we help you?”
Song Jie stands up, going into the trees to retrieve the knife. I let him go, raising an eyebrow at the little girl. “Seems like you could do with some extra hands to make sure you get to where you’re going in one piece.”
“He wasn’t trying to hurt me!” It’s almost a yell, turning Song Jie back toward us, his eyes wide. The girl is defiant but still frightened. Ashamed that I tackled her father and she did nothing. That she was helpless to do anything. A feeling I know deep in my bones.
“He can’t help it!” She’s gaining volume. “And if you are going to treat us like slime, then just go away!”
Once I’m sure she’s done, I sit back into a crouch, attempting a deferential expression. “I don’t think you’re slime. I think we’re headed in the same direction, and I’m a little worried I’ll get lost is all. I’ve got a bunch of these”—I pick up the dried meat from the ground where she left it—“and a few are flavors I don’t like. So I guess we could share some of the gross ones, if that would be an acceptable payment.”
Chest thrust out and feet square with her shoulders, the girl’s eyes narrow. But then she looks at her father, taking in his bleak smile. “I’m not a child. Don’t treat me like one.”
Air feels heavy in my chest. I don’t remember a time when there was enough room in this world for children. Not when SS turns fathers and mothers into strangers—into enemies—at will. Not with Reds and Menghu out here shooting down anyone wearing the wrong color.
Not with me standing right in front of her, her father’s blood on my hands. I should have walked away from these two. But the thought makes me sick inside.
“I won’t stop you if you want to go,” I say. “But if we can help each other get to safety, then why not?”
Song Jie’s face is a snarl of indecision when I stand, looking between me and the little girl. But I don’t care.
I trust you. Sev said it, but that matters less than the fact that I can feel something more inside me than just wanting her trust. I didn’t want to shoot those guys on the hangar roof. I don’t want to bomb the City until it’s nothing but ash. I didn’t want to leave this little girl to her father’s knife.
I’m not perfect. But everything I’ve done up until now has been like my feet are on shaky ground, not sure who I’m supposed to be anymore, just that I don’t want to be the person I was.
And now the sun almost feels warm on my face. The snow looks bright and white, despite the footprints and mud and murder lurking just out of sight. It’s not that I have to make the choice to change. I’m already different.