A DOOR OPENS, THE HINGES creaking with age. The sound sticks in my ears as if I could somehow catch hold of it, use it to reenter my body. Pull myself back on like a set of gloves so I can see who is breathing so quietly in my room.
Something drags across a hard floor. A chair, perhaps, legs screeching as they slide across the cement. The person settles next to me instead of by the far wall as they usually do. The creak of wooden joints adjusting, a sigh of relief at sitting down.
Shouldn’t you be sending orders to Dazhai? Dr. Yang asked that day, the first time I noticed my strange visitor. And suddenly, I know exactly who it must be.
“I liked your mother very much, Jiang Sev.” The same voice I’ve heard puncture the most secluded and secret places I hid in the City, whether I wanted it there or not. It was always going to be his voice.
Chairman Sun.
“We were good friends, even after we both married, had children.” He pauses. “It was terrible the day she realized that the bombs falling from the sky were supposed to come from Kamar. She believed it along with everyone else, that her own family had reneged on our treaty, not even troubling themselves to extract her first. She was heartbroken. It broke my heart to watch her. That I couldn’t tell her the truth.”
He pauses. “She came when the last exchange died. Couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I didn’t really understand how difficult that must have been for her, how she cried at first. Not until I had to give Yi-lai to the island.”
A treaty between our city and Port North. Leaders sent their children to be raised by their enemies. It kept bombs from falling on either place, until the City began bombing itself to keep its citizens in check and blamed it on Port North. Until Jiang Gui-hua, my mother, found a cure to SS, the cancer that kept people beholden to the Chairman and his Mantis stores.
The Chairman sighs, his breath itching when it brushes my cheek. He’s not wearing a gas mask because he was cured long before Mother came along.
“Sending my boy away was like killing something inside of me.” The Chairman sighs. “I was so angry. My wife got sick soon after Kamar took him, and without her little boy…” He trails off. “I knew that if I had children, one would go to the island, but I didn’t truly understand what I was giving up until it was too late. My little Yi-lai was so happy and smart.… He was talking long before the other children his age, you know. Asked to wear stars before he even knew what they meant. The perfect patriot.” Another pause. “Duty is much heavier than you could ever imagine.”
My mind screams at me to sit up, to run from the man who commanded the kidnapping of so many. Who dropped bombs on his own people to force them to stay smashed beneath his thumb. Who hid in his castle at the top of our City, hatching ways to pull the noose tighter around us. The man who ordered SS injected in my veins and sent my mother running to find a cure. My hands want to clench, to rise up and grab hold of him. But they lie next to me, dead.
“When we found out Jiang Gui-hua was trying to save us from SS, we tried to reason with her first. Threats came next. Your sudden contraction of the disease—oh, that was an unfortunate necessity. But then Gui-hua disappeared, and I knew she’d gone back to the island. So it was only fair that my Yi-lai should come home too. But when I demanded my son’s return, Kamar wouldn’t give him to me. You see, Kamar hadn’t spent their years building walls or medicines or aircraft or guns. They built farms. Factories. They trusted that diplomats would keep them safe. And without their hostage, they didn’t believe that we would leave them alone.
“So when Gui-hua came back, I put her up on the Arch,” he continues. “Told Kamar that if they didn’t produce my son, I would take every single one of their farms, every son I could lay hands on, every daughter walking free. Still, they refused to let my Yi-lai come home.”
And he’d made good on those threats. Stealing every Port Northian he could find, using them to make the City flourish. To pick our pears, harvest our rice, and mine our metal. To provide nightmares for our children and bodies to string up on our walls. But he’d gotten Yi-lai back.
Sort of. He’d gotten Howl. Did he realize the difference?
“Dr. Yang was the one pulling the strings.” The Chairman sighs. “If only I’d realized… He was assigned to a farm outside the City as a punishment after he tried to interfere with the Circle, saying he knew a better way to do things. That must have been how he got involved with the Mountain in the first place. How he got Gui-hua to go there. He had the oddest ideas about who needed power and how to keep it. Didn’t listen to instruction. But sending him away meant no one was watching him closely. In charge of all the Second medics in the southern garrison, with access to the City, access to Outside… He even asked for his First marks to be removed, to serve the City like the nuns, putting the good of the City before his own status. He came to me saying he’d found my son, that Kamar had told the truth about sending him back to us, only he’d been kidnapped by our true enemies at the Mountain. He extracted Yi-lai, brought him home… but I knew the moment I saw Howl that he wasn’t my son.”
He stops, silence lost in the drip of liquids and the slow rush of cold as the Chairman breathes on me. “I… wanted my son. I wanted a son,” he whispers. “I watched him, made sure he couldn’t hurt anyone or have any information that would undermine the City. I think I even loved him.”
My heart hurts. He knew Howl was a spy, but let him stay? Because he was lonely?
“Having Howl there helped. But it made me all the more consumed with finding my real son.” The Chairman stops, the sheet at my side twitching as if he’s fiddling with the starchy fabric. “Dr. Yang is going to kill Howl when they find him, you know. He’s crossed too many lines, made too many important people angry on both sides. It would be appropriate, no? To use a traitor to all sides in an attempt to bring everyone at war together?”
The quiet anger in my head shatters, the pieces burning all around me. Dr. Yang is going to kill Howl? Everything inside me writhes, begging my arms to move, my eyes to open. Howl has almost died too many times because of me. I can’t… I won’t let Dr. Yang hurt him.
But then I go back over the Chairman’s words. When they find him. So, Howl isn’t here? Mother sighs in relief in the back of my head.
“I’ll be back to see you. I think you and I may be able to help each other.”
Help each other how? Why would I ever help you? I want to scream. And though I know internal screams don’t do much to hold people’s attention, I’m infuriated when the chair scrapes the floor. The door squeaks. And then… silence.
He’s left me with no way to answer back. I didn’t believe there was a way for me to be less heard back when I lived in the City. I didn’t realize how low you could sink.