DROWNING IS EXPECTED. SOME PART of me knew I would end this way. But I honestly don’t know what to expect when I wake up after I die. Blurry eyes, sore muscles. That makes sense, I guess. It’s the fire I’m wondering about, and the prickly feel of a blanket, heavy and a little bit damp.
A figure comes into view, dropping something into the fire in a shower of sparks, poking at the flames with the broken end of a long pole. Dad?
He squats next to me. “Are you awake, June?”
Not Dad. His voice has been gone since Parhat cut his tongue out. No, this voice I know: It’s Luokai.
“I saw your hands just before you went under and just barely managed to grab you. Cracked the ice with the punt.” He sets the broken pole across his knees. “Skies and gores, what were you doing walking out into a storm like that? It turns places you know into places you don’t.”
I know that. But when you’re afraid enough to run, you don’t always remember the things you should. Blinking feels too frightening, as if closing my eyes will push me back to where all the dead people live. I swallow, and it chokes every inch.
We’re in a cave. A different one than before, but it’s another of Cai Ayi’s, the doorway shielded with supplies spilling out from compartments at the back. Luokai must have found it while he was carrying me.
Luokai settles next to me. When he finally speaks, it’s quiet. “You’re still frightened.”
My eyes close by themselves, and I hardly manage to peel them back open.
“I promised my brother you would live. You’re Howl’s family, which makes you mine, too. The world has lost too many little girls, and today we foiled it. Together.”
I stare up at him, my mind catching on every word but not sure how to proceed. One word. “Sev.”
He stares at me, frozen for a moment. “You’re talking to me.”
“Sev’s gone.” I pull the blanket over my face.
But Luokai peels it back. “We can figure it out. Sole says she’s already made progress on the antidote.”
An antidote? To death? His calm is something I’d like to smash. Not only is everyone dead, but this Seph just saved my life. I don’t like owing people.
Luokai’s long blink dissolves into something horrified as he stares at me, more of an expression on his face than I’ve seen on him since we met. “She’s not… Skies above, June. Jiang Sev isn’t dead. She’s Asleep. Like her mother was. There’s an antidote, and it’s complicated. They have to figure out the right dosage, and it’s dangerous, but there’s a chance they can wake her up. Sole didn’t say any more.” A little bit of a smile curls at the corner of his mouth. “Well. Until just now. She hadn’t sent anything in a few days, but this morning she sent me a message to go die.”
I’m too cold to feel anything at all other than Sev’s alive, Sev’s alive, Sev’s alive.
“Don’t you understand what that means?” Luokai leans forward. “Howl must have made it. The only other person who knew I had the link was Howl. If Sole knows I’m not Howl, then Howl must have told her I was the one on the other end, so he must be alive.”
Sole. The girl he left with Howl, the one he wants back in his family.
He smiles a little more. “They’re alive, June. Howl and Sev are alive. We’re not that far from them. There are supplies here.” He gestures to the cave. “If we go together, we can make it. We can get Mantis. We can live again. If you take me with you, then I can help with… everything. Compulsions. I know how to get into the Mountain.”
Words don’t usually come easy for me, but… “You infected me.”
Luokai’s swallows. “I need you, June. Without help I’ll never make it back.”
My chest feels tight. “You hurt me. You broke my head.”
Luokai’s eyes well up with tears. “I’m sorry. I know an apology won’t fix it. But I was sorry as it happened and I’m sorry now.”
I feel the wind again, tousling my hair. Dad was always sorry too, but it didn’t stop him from hurting me.
“What I did was wrong, and I’ve been trying to make up for it every moment since. My whole life has been full of doing things the wrong way. With my brother. With Sole. And now you.” He looks down, his lower lip trembling. “I want SS to be gone. This cycle of hurting needs to stop. It wasn’t just you I hurt that night. I wanted more from life than a cold room and people to restrain me back when compulsions come. I don’t want to exist in a state of waiting anymore.” He holds up the link. “The girl on the other end of this thing is all I ever wanted from this life. I was too afraid of…” He takes a ragged breath. “Too afraid of what I became. As if SS made me into a new creature. Something that shouldn’t mix with humans or animals, too warped to belong anywhere here on this Earth.”
Like Dad. Like me now.
Luokai shakes his head. “But I never was that creature or any kind of creature at all. It’s the choices that have made me… less.” He sighs. “I shouldn’t have forced Howl and Sev to leave you. I shouldn’t have infected you. But the part of us that is sick doesn’t diminish us. I don’t deserve to be alone, and neither do you.” He looks out toward the cave’s mouth, toward the snowstorm, the ice, the woods that will swallow us up. “Together we might be able to survive. I need you, June,” he repeats. “But even more than that, I want you with me.”
I cough, my lungs contracting hard inside me, thinking over my years running through the trees with Dad. Away from him. Who would I have become without him? His soft way of signing to me, his gentle hands, the way he hugged me and kept me close when his mind was clear. And that last night, when he told me to go because he couldn’t let himself hurt me anymore.
I hated him and loved him. Back then, I knew if I wanted to keep breathing that Dad wasn’t going to be any help. After that day at the river, I could see in his eyes that he knew it too.
But then Howl and Sev walked into our camp, and Dad set me free.
He loved me. It squeezes out of me, tears like fire on my cheeks. No matter how hard I tried to put him inside the gore skin, the gore voice that tells me everything wrong with me and the world, that wasn’t him. He loved me, and I loved him. And him giving me away was his last desperate gift.
The gore inside me sighs, and it’s as if a weight on my chest has been lifted. If Dad loved me, if he wanted to keep me so badly but still let me go, then maybe even with SS, I’m not just a little lost girl.
Luokai’s voice jerks my attention from my thoughts. “It was so close, you falling through that ice. I don’t know what I would have done if you had, June. Not just because of what Howl would think or the cure or because of compulsions. Because you deserve to live.”
His eyes are closed, that stillness that takes him when he’s trying to calm his brain, like a sheet over his head. Pushing compulsions away as I’ve only seen Luokai do. Parhat, Tian, Cas. Even Dad. They never saw them coming well enough to try. Luokai’s fingers tap-tap-tap against his knee, his arms shaking. “The hole. It was so dark. And you were down inside it.”
His spine snaps straight. And then he stands. Turns toward the cave opening. Goes out into the snow. I pull myself up, folding the blanket around me as I follow him outside. Icy water soaks through my socks as I trail after him until we reach the river—right where the ice cracked under my feet.
I start running before my brain catches up, the gore yelling in my head and my wind at my back pushing me faster. You could let him go, but what would it help? they say. It would just be more death. But if you help, even with all he’s done, you can stop the cycle.
Isn’t that what he called it? The cycle of hurting.
I’m quick, the wind and the gore both beside me as I crash into Luokai’s back and wrap my arms tight around his legs to keep him from walking.
Luokai screams something in Port Northian, words I don’t understand, as he claws at my arms, then drags me along with him, heading toward a black spot in the ice. The hole.
I trip him. Throw the blanket over his head and sit on his back, stuffing his face down into the snow so all he can do is writhe.
Luokai saved my life, so I owe him. He also kind of took it away, so maybe I don’t.
But neither one’s the reason I stay with him until he goes still, his hands gathering up to his chest as the shivering cold takes him.
I slide off him and offer him a hand up. He wipes a streak of blood from his nose, his eyes following the red without surprise. We limp back to the cave together, Luokai wraps the blanket back around me, and it’s the first time I’ve thought that maybe some people are worth giving a second chance—not just for them, but for me.
Later, once we’re warm again, Luokai watches as I begin packing up things from the cave. The food, waterskins, and other supplies that will keep us alive. “You’re going?” he asks.
I zip the pack shut. “We are.”