WHEN SUN YI-LAI WAKES, IT’S with a sneeze. June, tucked in next to me as we finalize all our plans over the link with Kasim, stifles her own sneeze in response, as if the suggestion was too much for her.
The Chairman’s son is sitting within minutes, up on his feet not long after I’ve sent his image awake and blinking to his father. His mouth opens, his voice a jarring mess of words and syllables I can’t link together that sound foreign and familiar at the same time.
“He’s asking for his mother.” June’s voice is small. “But like an Islander.”
He’s speaking Port Northian?
The link buzzes, and I hold it up to my face, my nose scrunching so tears won’t come. This boy has been in a box for so long he doesn’t even know his own mother is dead. That she probably has been since before he was even in the box. The message is a barrage of instructions from the Chairman: where to take his son, where to wait for the heli.
I send him a message back, detailing the list of things June and I came up with together, then look back up at this boy, who has been at the center of so many years of war.
He smiles at me. Guileless, young-looking though he’s probably older than me. There’s nothing but hope in those eyes. “I don’t know where your mother is.” I hate the way it sounds as June translates. “We want to help you. But before we can do that, we need your help.”
June’s translation feels pained. “He says all he wants is his mother. He’s happy to help in any way he can.”
The Chairman’s wife has been dead for years. Not much we can do in that area. Doing my best to smile, I lean forward. “How are you feeling?”
He gestures to his head. “Glad to see and hear something other than whatever it was I had to listen to in here.”
“Brain stimulation programs?” I ask.
June shrugs, then her head cocks when he speaks again. “It was a long, long wait in the dark,” she translates.
Dr. Yang tried to keep him sane, then. Gave him something to look at and listen to. Took better care of him than he ever did my mother, if Sun Yi-lai’s health is anything to go by: He has muscles to hold him up, where Mother’s had long wasted away. I didn’t have a muscle stimulation setup to keep me strong when I was at the garrison. I guess Mother and I weren’t royalty, untouchable. The Chairman’s own blood. But I push that thought away. “When I first woke up, I could hardly believe the world had kept turning. Everything was different.” It had been, the first time. My mother and father were both gone, and everyone I knew shunned me. A Red branded my hand and sent me to live with nuns who didn’t seem to care much if I lived or died—a poor exchange for parents who loved me.
Sun Yi-lai sighs, speaking. “He doesn’t even know what about the world is different,” June supplies. “Only that he’s grown. He wants to believe his family is still out there. His mother…” She brushes a wisp of hair behind her ear, glancing at the bed, where Xuan is snoring, a shiver shuddering through her.
She hasn’t run away from Xuan like last time. Or even mentioned his connection to her mother’s disappearance. But I can see it there, lurking beneath the surface.
When her eyes come back to me, she continues, “Reifa. That’s her name.”
“His mother’s name?” I try to hold back my surprise, because I happen to know his mother’s name was not Reifa. Unless the Chairman’s wife isn’t who he is talking about. “Was she from the island?”
When June queries and then nods to answer, I can’t help but wonder what I’ve missed and whether or not it will be important enough to tip this already harebrained mission over sideways. This boy is like me and Howl combined. Used and orphaned, hidden away. One of Dr. Yang’s pieces lined up in his tidy rows. “I’m going to do everything I can to find out if Reifa—your mother?—is still alive, Sun Yi-lai. But I’m afraid that we’ll need to do some things first. I’m going to need you to listen very carefully.”
Kasim manages to delay a heli for us to meet, one of two waiting to take off. He hurries us into the port, hissing for me to keep my head down and not to talk to anyone.
As I’m pulling June and Sun Yi-lai into their seats, attempting to shield their faces from the other Menghu nervously chatting among themselves in the heli’s transport hold, I notice Kasim pushing the door to the other heli closed.
He runs to our aircraft as the propellers roar to life, climbs in to check in with the pilot up front, then closes the outer door. It’s hard to think as we take off, nervousness brimming inside me as the heli’s frame begins to shake, June’s hand in my white-knuckled grip. None of us speak. Yi-lai is pale under his mask, and June’s characteristic silence suddenly seems less out of place. Everyone on this heli is worried.
I reach out and take Yi-lai’s hand, June keeping hold of my other one as the heli lifts off the ground, the three of us linked together until we find smoother flying. Even then, though, the Chairman’s son holds on to me, as if the connection between us is valuable. Precious.
When we get to the City near dusk, I can’t help but gape down at the battered outlines I thought I would recognize. “What happened down there?” I whisper to Kasim, sitting on the other side of Sun Yi-lai. My borrowed coat feels too large and too small at once, the high collar with the Menghu’s screaming tiger pinching at my neck. The river is cloudy and gray below us, snaking through the rows and rows of buildings, many reduced to ash. The market is covered with helis, and all the booths and buildings that used to crowd the square have been destroyed.
Kasim doesn’t answer, keeping his eyes on the pilot sitting ahead of us, a picture of patient relaxation, but I can see his fingers tapping against his arm. June’s eyes stay open every moment, her face encased in a gas mask, hair under a fur-lined hood that leaves only her green eyes visible.
Sun Yi-lai’s eyes are clenched shut. One of his hand presses his gas mask hard against his nose and mouth as if it’s a relief to have his skin covered. After who knows how long inside a box, it must be difficult to have been so exposed these past days. I grip his hand in mine, remembering how much worse heli drops were when I was less used to the feeling. “We’re almost there,” I whisper. “Your father is down there.”
He shrugs, murmuring something I don’t understand. “He doesn’t have a father,” June supplies. “Not that he remembers.”
I try to loosen my fingers a degree or two, but he’s gripping me back hard enough to bruise my fingers. “That’s why we’re not handing him over, exactly.”
We cruise over the top of the square and circle back over the wall. The City’s black gates and the tiered rice paddies contouring the side of the hillsides below are a dim, indistinguishable mess in the twilight. The moon is a full circle that glares down on us, washing us all over in corpse light. I keep my eyes focused on the ground, rejecting the moon, rejecting Howl’s story of escape and of living alone forever… “They’re taking us down to the bottom of the Third Quarter, by the gate,” I murmur to Kasim. “Is that—”
“With all the respect in the world,” Kasim leans toward me, his lips hardly moving, “if you don’t shut it before someone hears you, I’m going to throw you out that window, and you can tell me all about it when I get down there.”
“You know the plan. Yi-lai will stay with Kasim until—”
Kasim’s hand comes down on my knee and gives it a squeeze, even as he flashes me a toothy smile. “Shut. It.”
I push his hand away. Trusting him almost hurts after seeing Xuan’s blood splattered across his face. Maybe it should count for something that he managed to get Xuan out. Maybe that really was the only way to do it without getting caught. But every time I look at Kasim, it’s as if I can hear the gun discharging over and over, my ears ringing.
Our plan is simple. All of us will leave the heli and head toward the barracks where they’re housing evacuated Menghu. June and I will break off and sneak into the First Quarter to get the cure, while Kasim fakes getting sick from the torches that are, apparently, all that keep infected from rushing in on the refugees. Sun Yi-lai will help him toward the medic center, then double back to the helis. Once we have the cure, June will take it down to where Yi-lai is waiting for her, and they’ll sneak outside the gates until we’re ready to take off. I’d have left him back with Sole, but we need his face to lure the Chairman onto our heli when we we escape.
Kasim and I are going after Howl. And the leaders who have been starving us, kidnapping us, and killing us for the last decade: Dr. Yang; General Hong; The Chairman, though he doesn’t know it yet. His loyal soldiers will get us in, help us get Howl, then help all of us, including the Chairman, to escape after we’ve dispatched Dr. Yang and the General. We’ll have a few minutes with the assembled forces to say that we have a cure and a better way forward that doesn’t involve shooting people. Then the Chairman will come with us down to the heli, bringing a pilot with him and escaping with his son.
He actually seemed grateful for the plan. A way out, he called it, a way for him to finally be free of his responsibilities and focus on what’s really important.
The likelihood that he’s playing us is about 120 percent, of course. Which is why, once the heli has safely landed, we’ll kill the Chairman and any of his soldiers who resist. If things go badly at the City Center and we fail to appear down by the heli with the Chairman and Howl within an hour, June will sneak Yi-lai and the cure down the switchbacks to the forest below and run for Sole. Even if nothing goes to plan tonight, the cure will get to where it needs to go, and Sun Yi-lai will have a chance at a life not confined inside a box.
I absently rub my traitor mark. It’ll be better than what I grew up with. Better than the horror show Howl survived.
Killing all of them—the words still feel like swallowing a blade—is only a beginning to the end of fighting. Things could go very badly tonight, and getting rid of the leaders might make things worse. But Mei was right when she said people are scared. People don’t trust the leaders anymore. The Port Northian heli that’s been dropping bombs for the last few days doesn’t help. Maybe if there are people waiting for the right moment, people who will listen to me and Kasim, they will stall chaos long enough to give everyone who’s been fighting a new light to follow.
Light. My fingers brush the window frame, and I have to squint against the blaze of torches and spotlights lighting up the City. Isn’t the doctor worried that the Port Northian heli will follow these light like a beacon? Unease twists inside me.
It’s hard to see into the dark of the City beyond the chemical torches, but I can imagine the people we left behind looking up at the roar of our propellers, drawn to the heat and noise of their people returning, unable to resist like moths toward flame.
I press the gun into my side, trying to find strength in its sharp angles. If we win tonight, then we’ll be able to help them. I’m not leaving the victims of SS below us to Dr. Yang for a moment longer. Not to the Mountain that so callously shoved Luokai from their midst, or to the City who manufactured SS and fed it to its own citizens. The people down there in the dark are my people, the ones cast aside without a thought the way I was. The way my mother, my sister, and my father were. If anyone deserves justice from our leaders tonight, it’s the moths who have already had their wings burned away.
I wish I knew how to tell them. How to ask for their help tonight.
The heli drops, blasting over the buildings in a thunder of propellers. “What are the chances that black heli didn’t see all of us congregating here?” Kasim asks as we lurch to the ground, the pilot not so skilled as Tai-ge was, apparently.
The worry in my gut twists again, because if I can see that Dr. Yang has marked a great big target around the City for the heli to find, then everyone can. Which means something is at play here we haven’t accounted for. I unclip my safety harness and help Sun Yi-lai to do the same. He doesn’t move to help me, merely nodding his thanks and standing up to follow once June and Kasim are up. His hand finds my shoulder as if he needs a guide the way a small child would, and I put a hand on top of his and look back, giving him a reassuring pat.
We file out with the rest of the Menghu, the soldiers ahead of us walking with a light-footed grace that tells me they’re no more comfortable inside City walls than I am. The wide road ahead is lined with torches that seem to breathe out instead of burn. Shapes move in the purple light on the other side of the torches, following our progress at a safe distance.
When we draw nearer to the market, the smell of char hits my nose like a wave of nausea before I can pull my mask tight against my face. It has been more than two months since the invasion, but some of the buildings still seem to be smoking, brick and cement all that’s left of the factories flanking the square. The wall separating the City Center and the market square from the First Quarter hosts a line of newly dead bodies strung up like lanterns at a festival, their clothing frosted white in the cold. More Port Northians? I’d think the threat of bombs would be enough to scare the people hiding here.
June huddles in close to me as we walk, her arm linked through mine as if she wants to anchor me against the onslaught of bad memories: The dirty looks I would get in the street. The cold indifference of the nuns. My mother, the princess in the coffin.
At the edges of the square, the torches bend in closer, the chemical outline of the smoke traced hot against the air. My gas mask sanitizes whatever it is they’re burning, but Kasim’s nose wrinkles, and he covers his nose and mouth with his sleeve.
The library sits up the hill, a blasted remnant of marble, tile, and jade, the black walls bowed in defeat. I can almost hear the flap of pages on the icy wind, the books so long imprisoned inside its walls now flying free.
A swell of people push past us into one of the side alleys, so we go around, walking alongside the main road a block down. Buildings to either side of the alley twinkle with lights, shadows dancing across the windows. A banner hangs from a balcony above us, a Menghu tiger inked into the faded fabric. In its mouth is a stylized City star, blood leaking down both sides of the tiger’s mouth. Sun Yi-lai’s brow furrows as he looks up at it, his feet slowing. June grabs his arm and pulls him past it.
“Are all the Menghu here in the City?” I whisper to Kasim. “I know they evacuated most of Dazhai to come back here. How can anyone expect Reds and Menghu to exist in the same space?”
Kasim’s eyes catch on the banner as we walk under it, a wry smile curling the sides of his unmasked mouth. “I don’t know.” He looks up again at the buildings. “Wherever the City-folk are, at least Dr. Yang was smart enough to put them far enough away Menghu can’t see them.”
The alleyway doesn’t run straight, bringing us closer and closer to the line of torches. The closer we come, the slower Kasim seems to breathe, until every breath rasps in his throat. He grabs my arm, walking us faster. “This is as good an opportunity as any,” he whispers. We only make it within twenty feet of the torches before Kasim falls to his knees, though I’m not sure if his distress is manufactured or real. Sun Yi-lai stops, crouching next to the bulky Menghu. Others from the steady stream of Menghu break from the torrent to loosen his collar and drag him back from the chemical stink.
If anyone notices June and me slipping between torches into the shadows beyond, they don’t try to follow.