THERE IS NO CURE.
The thought is bleak and true as the rough lines of cement under my hands, behind my back where it’s pressed against the wall, my bare feet extended before me. Who takes a man’s shoes? Sole does, because she knows me.
What does it mean that she knows me and still all she sees are lies?
I shrink down, my good hand knotted around my arm as I hold it close to my chest, willing the pain to stop. But it won’t. It can’t. Because it’s inside me. The world is breaking down around us, hope a match that burned my fingers. When Sole looks at me, she sees someone too twisted to save. Worth more cut up for microscope slides.
I was different when I came back from the City, she said. But not different enough. An opportunity to make up for… everything. As if the only thing that could redeem me from my past is if I lay down and let her bring the scalpel.
I was defending my home when I still lived by my gun. My friends. My family.
But the truth of it is there, right underneath. Myself. I was defending myself at the expense of anyone who came too near. Isn’t that what I did to Song Jie? Sev is my family now. I want her to live. So I used Song Jie and his creepy heli to get here, then got him thrown in prison.
I shift, trying not to think it, but it’s there. It’s real. Every step I’ve taken was for me. I tried to kill Song Jie with the knife. I thought about using those bombs on Dr. Yang. I want to run away now, to take the one last whisper of hope for survival away from Sole, and she doesn’t expect anything more of me.
The cells are suitably gloomy to go along with the fact that the world is going to end. If this enclave under the Mountain is unsustainable, whatever it is Dr. Yang is attempting to accomplish—no matter how many lies he tells about the cure—will be unsustainable too. The Mountain, the City, everything in between—they’re all going to flicker out like a quicklight that’s been spent.
But we can survive. Me and Sev.
Is that ironic? I can never remember which is ironic and which is just people pretending to be smart by saying something is ironic when it isn’t. Regardless, it’s kind of funny: Jiang Sev and Sun Howl—the two sorry saps doomed from the moment Jiang Gui-hua sucked SS from our brains—we’re the ones who could live. At least it would be funny if I weren’t locked in a storage room converted into a cell, waiting for Sole and any research medics she has here to take chunks out of my brain one spoonful at a time.
I never was very good at waiting.
I trace the lines of the door with my fingers. The garrison’s within a day’s hike, but I don’t know how many hours are left before Kasim and Mei break in to get Sev. I’ll have to move faster than humanly possible to get to the garrison on time, and then somehow infiltrate the place without having done any recon. No backup. No gun even, unless Reifa hasn’t found the ones stashed in the heli.
First things first: Get out of my cell.
I’ll need some of that anti–Suspended Sleep serum, so the second thing will be to break into Sole’s room. It wasn’t locked when we went in before. And the way she talked about testing the formula makes me think it’s there in her things.
Third, get out of the Mountain.
Fourth… The solution is so obvious and so wrong it hurts my head, like looking straight into a halogen light after being safe in the dark under the stars.
But there’s no help for it. All these people are going to die anyway. The thought is lead in my chest, but I push off the feeling. When you live in a world of people hurting one another, you have to take care of your own self. Your own family. The ones who want you alive, anyway.
I kick the cell door, satisfied when it gives a metal boom. Storage rooms aren’t meant to withstand violence, and Sole’s little safe haven seems to be built on separating, quarantining, restraining rather than real imprisonment.
Using my feet, I drum at the door until the metal thumps echo up the hall and my bare feet begin to ache. Everyone down here is on Mantis, so Sole led me to believe. In this sea of people grateful they can finally rest, it isn’t difficult to attract attention.
A guard’s feet come tapping up the hall. “Everything okay in there?”
Frantic isn’t so hard to fake. “I need help!”
I let the guard who so naïvely opened my cell door keep his mask but not his gun. He leads me toward the new arrivals quarantine, his whole frame shaking. He only tries to shout for help once before we start opening doors.
The first one we open makes my stomach jolt, the little girl and her father looking up from a plate of what looks like rehydrated vegetables and rice shared between them. “You guys okay?” I ask, keeping the guard’s gun out of sight.
“We’re just down here until they’re sure he isn’t contagious anymore,” the girl supplies. “They have medicine to make his brain better.”
I nod. “Good. Just… be good.”
Sweat drips down the guard’s temple as I back him out of the room and shut the door. Jangling the keys in my hand, I open two more cells before I find Song Jie. He jumps up from the sleeping mat the moment the door opens. “I knew we couldn’t trust you. No First could ever—”
I shove the guard into the room, keeping the gun against his side. “What’s your name?” I ask him quietly, ignoring Song Jie.
The guard’s voice trembles. “Hanli.”
“Nice to meet you, though I’m sorry about the circumstances. Clothes off, Hanli. And give me your mask. One sound out of you and I’ll shoot.”
The guard’s eyes widen, silently pleading for mercy. I raise the gun and wait until he reaches up to unclasp the mask from his face, his hands shaking. He holds it up to his mouth and nose for a moment before pulling it away and extending it toward me. A tear slips down his cheek.
I can’t look past the iron wall in my brain, the one that’s going to allow me to get out of here in one piece. This kid was going to get sick anyway, eventually. The mask still feels like it’s made from something slippery and rotten as I take it. “And the uniform,” I instruct. “Come on, quick.”
The guard begins undoing buttons, the Menghu uniform he doesn’t quite fit into coming off one piece at a time.
“What are you—” Song Jie starts.
“Quiet.” It’s not hard to use the voice that made my whole company jump. It works even on poor Song Jie, his mouth clamping down in a grimace. “They put you down here, and now I’m here to get you out. Is that enough for you?” I gesture for him to stay back while I pull off my own clothing and exchange it for the guard’s, down to his boots, which pinch my toes. Once I’m dressed and the guard is tied and gagged with strips of Song Jie’s blanket, I go to the door.
Song Jie hesitates, crouched on the ground next to the guard.
I hold the mask out to him, raising my eyebrows when he doesn’t reach for it. “You’re mad I got you stuck down here… but you want to stay?”
A lump bobs in Song Jie’s throat as he looks down at the mask. “They said I’m sick.”
I put the mask in Song Jie’s hand, then haul him from the room, pushing him down the hallway in front of me. “Just put that on. I’m going to take care of it.”
“Take care of me being sick?”
“Trust me. I can make it better.” Lies. I promised not to lie anymore.
But what else can I do? What else?
Song Jie doesn’t need instruction on how to act like a prisoner as we walk out of quarantine. I keep my head up, wearing the uniform like authority, while he sags, keeping his eyes down. His breaths rasp faster and faster through the mask as we walk, and by the time we get back up to Sole’s door, his face is red enough I’m afraid he’ll faint.
Inside, Sole’s sleeping mat is empty. I go to the desk crammed in at the end of the table, fingers shaking as I wrench open drawer after drawer, the lights from the exam table a dull glow by which to see.
“What are you doing?” Song Jie’s voice is only half angry. The remainder is all fear.
“Making sure this excursion wasn’t for nothing.” Ten drawers, all unlocked, no vials like the one I stole from Dr. Yang to wake Jiang Gui-hua. Papers, chemicals with paper labels in protective containers, a half-eaten dumpling smashed into the binding of a book on medicinal compounds. If there aren’t enough doctors or medicine to go around, I can see Sole trying to brush up on mixing medicine—no. That isn’t what it is.
I look over the page with the dumpling wrinkled into the paper. It’s a knockout agent. Sole did say they were using gas grenades to neutralize people upstairs. Based on the chemicals she’s got stashed up here, she’s the one making them.
When I open the bottom drawer, a bottle rolls loose inside. I pick it up, finding familiar green pills inside. Mantis.
My pack still sits on the floor by her pillow where I left it before. I shove the Mantis bottle inside, and when I check the rest of the contents, I find them untouched. Taking long, measured breaths, I set myself down on Sole’s bed and look at the room from her perspective.
Sole knows I’ll try to escape. If she believes a single word of what I said before about going after Sev, she’ll know I’m going to come after the serum. Where would she have put it? What are the chances it’s even in here?
“Can we please go now?” Song Jie stands next to the hinges of the door, watching it carefully. Admirable instincts, if all you know to do is hide. “What happened, anyway? I thought you said these people were your friends.”
“Be quiet, Song Jie.” My eyes catch on a ripple of movement, a paper on top of Sole’s desk quivering in a thin stream of air. There’s an air vent back there.
Sole used to have a box of things she hid. Not trophies, though that might have been what they were when she first took them. Reminders of the people she killed that she took out every now and then, as if she had to remind herself of the things she’d done. She hid it in an air vent back when she had a room in the Yizhi wing.
I stand and cross the floor, the close space making it difficult to get a hold on the desk to pull it away from the wall. “Song Jie, any time you feel like helping…?”
Song Jie joins me, the two of us together managing to wrench the desk back from the wall with an ugly screech of metal on cement. My fingers find the vent cover’s edges, easing it from the wall, then stick my arm into the opening. Inside, there’s cloth. Twine. I pull the thing out to find a little faceless doll in my hand, just like the thousands produced in factories inside the City. I always thought they were a little creepy, but this one is a whole level worse, a brown stain marking its red dress and white apron, as if a doll Menghu shot this particular City comrade.
The doll’s head is partially detached, loose threads poking out around her cloth chin. I pull the head back to find a plastic cap marked with characters I remember from Jiang Gui-hua’s notes. Using my fingernails to pry it from the doll’s torso, I’m rewarded with a vial full of clear liquid, the toy’s stuffing knotted around the glass, the label on the cap clear. The serum.
“If you don’t start talking, I’m going to—”
I tuck the doll into my pocket, waiting expectantly. “You’re going to what, Song Jie?” I push the desk back into place, then wrench open the drawers I searched earlier, rifling through her books until I find the right compound again. “I said I’d get you out of here. And luckily, Sole’s given us all the tools we need. Come help me.”