“HAS IT ALL BEEN LIKE this?” Peishan’s voice echoes down the empty hallway, our light creating a bubble of red in the dark.
I hold my light up a little higher, red catching on nondescript doors, each with a plaque detailing its contents. We had to come through an air lock to get here, but Sole said the whole of sector thirteen was likely to be empty. There might have been personnel down here when SS started spreading, but it’s dark, and there’s no food or water, and nothing of value to keep anyone here, unless they have compulsions to file things.
That Peishan volunteered to come with me feels like a warm outline to the darkness. I’m trying to pretend it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that we found Lihua covered in some kind of soot, and that getting her washed up was going to be a more difficult battle than walking down empty hallways.
“I know I was brought up to believe anyone living Outside had something wrong with them, but after the weeks I’ve been out here…” Peishan jogs across the hall to check the identifying marker on the wall: BW10. We’re close. Peishan heaves a sigh before continuing. “I’m beginning to wonder if they were right.”
“Cai Ayi wasn’t bad, was she?”
“She’s down in quarantine. Nearly killed herself getting us here.”
“And the roughers? June?” Even saying June’s name hurts. Where is she? I wonder. Is she awake? Did Luokai even have access to the resources he’d need to take care of her after the invasion?
“June was nice,” Peishan agrees, her light bobbing as she jogs up the corridor. “But the others… I don’t know. It’s hard to know what people are really like when they’re always worried about dying.”
“I’m sorry we yanked you out of the City without explaining what was going on.” I hold up my light this time to check the wall, punching our coordinates in a link that connects me to the Menghu watching the air lock we came through. If we don’t send anything through for fifteen minutes solid, they’ll come after us.
“Whatever happened to Tai-ge?” she asks. “How many nights did we sit up talking about him? That boy would have broken his own arm to make you happy.”
The question hits me right in the stomach. I close my eyes, flickers of nausea winking in and out clear to my throat. Of course she’s going to ask about Tai-ge. We used to stay up late talking about him. About how it was hopeless but how much I wished… wishes that were hollow and shallow and senseless. I didn’t understand who he was or who I was either. I lick my lips, trying to find an answer that won’t require hours of explanation. “He did once. Break his arm, I mean. After the explosion at the Aihu Bridge.” She laughs a little at this response, but waits for more. More I don’t want to give. “He might have been willing to break an arm for me, but he would have broken every bone in his body for his mother. And she doesn’t like me much.”
“Would have?” Peishan looks back at me. “Are you saying Tai-ge’s…” She frowns, not wanting to speak the word out loud.
“No, he’s not dead. I don’t think. He might be now, I guess.” She frowns over the casual way I say it.
“Are you… okay?”
“I will be. Once we find BW12. And the Chairman’s real son.” I haven’t told Peishan about Howl. His was one of the murders she laid at my feet when I first found her in the Sanatorium. The reality of who Howl is and what’s happening to him now seems like too much to explain. But the inadequacy of how I explain away Tai-ge makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. “Things just didn’t work out.”
We enter a new hall, an unblemished coating of dust covering the floor and BW12 on the wall in blocky letters. A curl of anxiety tightens inside me as we stop and look at the doors. There aren’t any lights to show a generator humming down here. No footprints to mark visitors. Dr. Yang’s been gone two months. What if that light on the grid was a malfunction? Or worse, a fluke: a generator that kicked on to keep a gigantic fish freezer from defrosting or something.
Three more days. It’s like a City-wide announcement, ringing between my ears. Three more days until they kill Howl.
It’s an offshoot hallway, two doorways on one side, three on the other, one making a dead end. Windows cut into each door, labels underneath each that I can’t even understand. One says INSURANCE CLAIMS with a span of five years from Before under it, the next with the same label, only a later span of years. When I shine my light through the windows, all I see is filing cabinets.
I try the door. It doesn’t budge. “Help me, would you?”
Peishan’s eyebrows go up. “Help you…?”
I take a running start, slamming my shoulder into the door. It shudders under the impact but remains solidly shut, leaving me with a dull pain down my arm to add to all the aches and pains from our excursion upstairs yesterday. Peishan tries next, then kicks it with her full weight, and the door slams open.
A billow of dust clouds out at the violence, but my mask filters it out. Peishan follows as I lead the way into the room, perfectly square and divided by three rows of filing cabinets.
My hands begin twitching as if I’ll be able to find the Chairman’s Yuan-cursed son if I just keep moving. Or maybe if I wish hard enough the filing cabinets will melt and lighting will strike and suddenly Sun Yi-lai will rise up through the floor in a glass coffin like my mother’s. I go out to check the hallway again, making sure I didn’t read it wrong. The numbers are there in black and white. “Is there any way I’m remembering the number wrong?” I ask.
“What happens if we don’t find him?” Peishan walks back inside the room, running her light along the walls for anything we missed. There’s nothing to miss, though. Four walls and filing cabinets.
“Um, the Chairman will try to kill everyone down here.” I blink at Peishan’s alarmed expression. “He probably won’t be able to. There’s a reason the City never came head-on at the Mountain, but it would make it a lot harder to get food in here. I was just hoping that if I found his son, he’d help me get to the City. That’s where the cure is.”
“And if we don’t find the cure, then you die. Right?” Peishan’s biting her lip when I look at her. “That’s why Sole was so anxious to get you here. Why she marched you straight to my room, so you’d see Lihua and agree to let her experiment on you.”
“That’s the long and short of it.” I let out a long breath, the air catching in my mask the way worry is curdling in my stomach. Heaving myself onto one of the filing cabinets, I brush dust away in a big arc around me, the fuzzy feel of it sending squirms of disgust down my spine. No Sun Yi-lai means no leverage to get help from the Chairman. No way to reach the City at all within the three-day deadline.
No way to save Howl.
An explosion of movement catches me off guard, sending me careening off the metal cabinets to escape, visions of monsters made from dust and darkness or a toothless old SS victim happy to have found meat after so many years of living off paper and ink. It’s Peishan, though. She backs up and slams her shoulder into the cabinets on the far wall again, her eyes glassy.
My whole body goes cold. “Peishan?” I whisper as her hand slides off the cabinet, scraping blood from her palm, but she just goes back to pushing. “Peishan, are you okay?” She can’t have SS. She had her mask on every second we were outside the air lock—
She grunts, the metal screeching against the floor. “How about you help me.”
The filing cabinet she’s pushing didn’t slide out into the aisle between cabinets. It pushed into the one next to it, fitting inside. I run to her side and put my hands next to hers, the two of us pushing together. When the cabinet folds another inch, she gives a cry of triumph, the metal cabinets folding up inside one another to leave a blank space of wall.
Not blank. There’s a metal door flush with the wall.
“How did you know to do that?” I ask, staring up at the wall, not sure what to feel. Excitement, dread. Awe.
“The first one was already folded back a little.” She presses a hand to the metal door, and it swings back easily. The lock must have shorted out when the power went down, I guess. Peishan licks her lips and looks back at me. “Think there are more filing cabinets behind there?”
Hope unfolds inside me, tentative because I know the slightest bit of doubt will turn it to ash. But when I hold my light up into the room, the red leaks through the darkness to touch…
A box of glass.
The link to the Menghu guards buzzes at my side, a message spelling across my hand. Everything okay?
I type back quick, my hands shaking. I think we’re going to need some help. Come fast.
Because inside the glass box, there’s a boy.