WORSE THAN BEING CHASED. WORSE than hiding.
Waiting.
Sweat pours down my forehead from underneath a chin-length wig, though the cold air mists with my every breath. I adjust my borrowed tool belt, too tight over the brown Zhuanjia uniform Sole procured for me. Howl said it was too risky to go down to Sole’s rooms, and he had to show me something out here in order to make our escape work, but if this takes much longer, I might have to start pretending to fix something in order to fool the cameras trained on this solar panel maintenance platform. That would bring unwelcome attention even faster.
A Zhuanjia ducks out of the metal door, face hidden beneath a billed hat. The small tube of inhibitor spray Sole gave me is supposed to stop an attacker for a few minutes, which would give me a chance to run, but where to? He walks toward me, head down, inspecting the walkway, so I can’t see his face.
Pressing myself up against the wall, the inhibitor spray feels slippery in my palm. It fits in my hand perfectly, small enough that no one would know it was there until their eyes started burning, but that won’t do much if I drop it.
The Zhuanjia draws closer, shielding his face against the sun, only seconds from noticing me. Do I spray him, then push him over the side? No, the fall would kill him. Leave him here for someone to find?
Just as I’m about to do . . . something, the young man looks at me, and I realize he isn’t shielding his face from the sun. He’s shielding brown eyes I’d know anywhere from the cameras. Howl.
I sigh in relief, the tube going back in my pocket as I follow his lead, trailing behind him along the narrow ledge cut into the side of the mountain that leads around to the base of the earth-colored solar panels. He slides between two of the panels, off the path.
“Are you okay?” he asks when I follow him in. It seems like a stupid question, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
“They didn’t saw anything off.” Just remembering the table all set up to cut me open gives me the shivers. “What is going on? Why did they suddenly decide to steal my kidneys? And Mei . . .”
“Not your kidneys.” Howl takes his hat off, twisting it between his hands. “I thought they’d do more tests, not that they’d just try to . . .” He rubs his forehead.
“There must be other people here with SS, Howl. I’m not that annoying, am I? My hallucinations can’t be that special.” Trying to stay lighthearted is all that is keeping me from dissolving into tears. I can feel them, white hot behind my eyes.
“Others with SS, it’s true. Three more this week. You were a test, in the hospital room across from Cale. Mei was the control subject. The mine you brought back is carrying a new strain of SS, one that transfers from person to person instead of having to contract it from a bomb. Kasim is showing all the signs of post-Sleep behavior and never even went through the sleeping stage. . . .” He points to the pocket of my Zhuanjia uniform, where a bit of red fabric is sticking out. “What is that?”
I can’t answer for a moment, my breath catching in my throat. SS, contagious. SS infecting people without even making them fall Asleep first. The entire Mountain could be a slaughterhouse in minutes. The whole world will be trying to slice off their own fingers within months. There’s no way they have enough Mantis stockpiled to keep everyone lucid. “What are they going to do? What are we going to do?”
He leans over and pulls the red fabric from my pocket. “What is this? Where did you get it? Did Sole give it to you?” His fingers pull at the pieces. “It could be bugged. Don’t say anything.”
“No, it’s just . . .” I’m still reeling, mind blank. “I made it for you.” It’s a red flower, tied out of an old piece of ribbon I found in Sole’s room. The long hours of staring at the wall before Howl could meet me were too much.
He holds it up, the ends of panic replaced by surprise, looking from the folds of rose-colored ribbon to me.
“Sole told me that you make good-luck charms for . . . for people about to go out on patrol or . . . or something dangerous. . . .” I stumble over the words. She’d stumbled over them too, presenting them to me like some sort of offering during the long wait in her room, as if she was trying to show me that the people who had almost cut me to pieces had good sides to them too.
Howl’s face softens. “For Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Husbands and wives.” His mouth is starting to curve into a grin. “So they’re with you when you go. And to make sure everyone knows you’ve been spoken for.”
“Right.” My cheeks heat up and my hands twist into my shirt of their own volition. I made it with butterflies in my stomach, nervous that he would just laugh at me. But it’s too late to worry; the flower is in his hand, so I might as well see it through. My hands reach out like they belong to someone else, settling on his shoulders. “But if you are asking me to marry you, then my answer is no. I’m only sixteen.”
He laughs and leans forward, closing the gap between us, his hands pressing into my waist and back. “Thank you. I’ve never wanted something like this. Not until now.” Howl’s head is heavy on my shoulder, holding on tight.
I hug him back, surprised by his reaction. “I hope that is a good thing.”
Howl pulls away, pressing his lips together. “I need to tell you something. Something that I should have told you the moment I dragged you off the street in the City.”
“More important than the fact that the Mountain is probably already boiling over with loose infected?” I look down the slope, my mind teetering on the rocky edge below us, wondering how far down it goes. “Should we just make a break for it right now?”
Howl’s fingers brush my chin back toward him. “Dr. Yang suspected something odd was going on, so Kasim and Cale have been quarantined since the moment they took their masks off. They can’t do anything else until they figure out how long this new contagion lasts. The Mountain isn’t going to turn into a slaughterhouse unless someone else steps on a mine and doesn’t tell anyone.”
The medics all knew and they did nothing. They wore their masks, breathing filtered air while Mei poisoned herself sitting in Cale’s room. “How will they know when it stops being contagious? Is Dr. Yang just going to keep sending people into Cale’s room to see if they start having compulsions?” The bite of anger in my voice isn’t meant for Howl, but he shrinks back a little.
“You were the one they were testing in that room. Mei was there to make sure it was contagious to normal people.”
“I’m already infected. Are they trying to see if being exposed again makes me worse? If I become contagious too? Or if Mantis will stop working like it has in the City?”
Howl scrunches his eyes closed, hands tightening on my shoulders. I want to brush them away because it’s starting to hurt, his fingers digging into me. “They wanted to see if it would affect you because you aren’t infected. You’ve been cured.”
“Cured?” I pull away from him. That doesn’t make sense. With a cure, there would be no war. No Mountain, no City. We wouldn’t have to fight for Mantis anymore. “You haven’t been messing around with Da’ard, have you? There is no cure. If there were, they would have found it a long time ago.”
Howl is already shaking his head. “No. The Mountain doesn’t have the cure. And to the best of our knowledge, the City doesn’t have it either. The cure is what your mother was working on when she came here with Dr. Yang. And she succeeded. With you.”
He rubs his cheek, uncomfortable for some reason, but the rest comes out in a rush. “That is why those primary kids have been staring at you since the day you walked in here. Not just the primary kids. Anyone who saw that birthmark. You are hope. The end of SS. The cure.”
It’s my turn to shake my head. “That’s impossible. It doesn’t even make sense. Why would the City have put my mother in Suspended Sleep for creating a cure?”
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. But that is why she left you. Not to save the Mountain, and not to give Mantis to Outsiders or to win any wars. It was because the City put you to Sleep and wouldn’t let her help you. The moment she and Dr. Yang had something she thought would work, she ran straight back to your bedside.”
“The City . . . Why would they have put me to sleep? SS wasn’t even supposed to be there before Mother brought it back.” Everything seems to burn red around me, Howl’s face blurring. The City gave me SS? But why? The City told me my mother hated me enough to inject me herself. . . . I can’t even finish the thought, General Hong’s deep voice enumerating my mother’s many crimes in my head. The City did it. The City did it? And she left only to figure out how to fix me?
Dr. Yang told me they used SS as a punishment, as a warning for people venturing across the line of First rule. That I wasn’t the first SS case at all, just one in a long string of warnings of what it meant to defy Firsts. If she was like Howl, questioning what the Firsts were doing . . .
No, it isn’t possible. I remember her coming back, the press of a needle in my arm and her voice . . . but that was after I was Asleep, wasn’t it? I knew she’d come back, I knew she’d given me something. Did I somehow make up memories to go along with the stories General Hong told? Pinching and pulling the nightmares until they fit? “What about my hallucinations? And remember the first night we met, when I tried to kill myself? That wasn’t an act to make you feel sorry for me.”
“And it scared me halfway back to Liberation days.” His smile falls crooked. I want to reach out and smooth it out, to put it back the way it’s supposed to be. “Those hallucinations were side effects of the pills you were taking. Firsts have been working nonstop to re-infect you, to see if they can beat the cure. The medicine they were having you take instead of Mantis can cause patients to demonstrate SS symptoms, and they were experimenting with it to see if they could get better results. The orphanage accidentally gave you a little too much that day, so the hallucinations turned into a full-blown compulsion.”
I hadn’t ever had a compulsion until the night we ran. The story fits so many things together so that they finally make sense. I didn’t start hallucinating until the weeks following my sister’s death. Perhaps getting rid of Aya gave the Circle the idea to get rid of me, too, using my poor, sad little life as one last experiment to force the disease Mother had purged from my system on me. When they realized Thirds saw Aya as yet another proof of my family’s corruption, I became a tool. The last Jiang to go out in a flame of compulsions and insanity, the last of the sleeping princess’s family to be punished for her crimes. An ache springs up inside of me, filtering through my chest all the way down to my toes.
I want to believe this nonsense.
I want to believe that I’m free. That the black ugliness waiting under my skin is just my imagination. That we can run.
My breath catches on something even deeper, more painful. If she did cure me, does that make the monster who lives above Traitor’s Arch the mother I loved after all? A refugee from the City because they wouldn’t let her help me? My hand finds the jade strung around my neck, the sharp edges pressing into my skin. It would mean she loved me and died for it. Worse. Spent the last eight years imprisoned in her own body, unable to die because of it. All for me.
Something clicks in my head, another puzzle piece landing. “I started having hallucinations again when we got here. They aren’t nearly as bad, but . . . Dr. Yang is doing the same thing to me that they were in the City, isn’t he?”
Howl nods curtly. “Dr. Yang didn’t tell me they were going to continue the tests. It has something to do with figuring out what part of your brain changed, what your mother did to cure you.”
“But the levels tests, the pills they’re giving me . . . It isn’t enough.” That’s why I ended up immobile in the levels machine, a bone saw lying next to me with my name on it. That’s what Dr. Yang was asking the council to do that night. “They need to dig deeper. All those tests they were asking for, the people trying to drag me into the hospital . . .” It wasn’t until this moment that the horrifying truth occurs to me. “Wait, you knew?”
He shakes his head, his tone a plea. “Dr. Yang promised not to hurt you. He told me scans would be enough, that he’d be able to just look at your brain and see what had been changed and how. I wanted to believe him. I knew the pills Dr. Yang gave us when we left the City weren’t Mantis, but I didn’t realize what they were doing to you at first.” He blinks as though trying to banish something in his thoughts. “You were so scared. Convinced that something was wrong with you. That day, with the dead soldiers . . . I started giving you the real Mantis, the stuff meant to go back to the Mountain. Then when we got here . . . I can’t tell you how many arguments I had with Dr. Yang. How many times I followed you to make sure you were okay.”
“But you knew the whole time I didn’t have SS. That I didn’t have to worry every single day my mind was slipping, that I wasn’t going to wake up one morning and kill you?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me, Sev.”
I open my mouth, the beginnings of anger curdling across my tongue, but then swallow it down. He’s right. I wouldn’t have believed him. Not after so many years of believing it was only a little green pill between me and compulsion’s tight grip.
“Don’t they suspect that you had something to do with me disappearing from the operating table?” I ask, but Howl won’t meet my eyes. There’s something more that he isn’t saying.
“I’m not the likeliest person to be hiding you. For a lot of reasons.”
Howl lets go of me as I start to squirm away from him. I need space. To think. “What do you mean? You’re my only friend here who isn’t currently in quarantine. Of course it would be you hiding me—”
“We have another problem,” Howl interrupts, looking up toward the path. “When you disappeared, Nei-ge voted to invade the City. Root says with this new strain of SS, we don’t have a choice. No cure, and even the Mantis stockpiled here would never be enough if SS starts spreading from person to person.”
I can’t take in all this new information. I wish I could slow it down, make it stop.
“They are going to announce the invasion at Establishment and head out within a few days.” Howl’s voice sounds broken. “They’re sending Menghu into the City.”
Everything inside me goes still. My panic that SS could spread like lice in an orphanage at any time, discovering the truth about my mother’s supposed crimes, hearing that the Mountain wants to cut me open—everything bows to a vision of Helix pressing a gun between Tai-ge’s eyes, Peishan lying cold in the Sanatorium, Sister Shang weeping in front of the orphanage while it burns . . . “If the Menghu go into the City, it would be a massacre.”
Invading wouldn’t be about Mantis for any of the Menghu. It would be about killing every City-born in sight, about trophies, about revenge for everything the Mountain has had to go through in order to survive.
“Howl, what do we do? Tai-ge, your family . . . They’ll die.”
Howl’s laugh is unnerving, with a hopeless edge I didn’t expect. “There’s nothing we can do to save my family. There never was.”
“A cure would stop the invasion. It would stop this whole stupid war.” The realization that I might have grown up Fourth for nothing boils inside me, but I close my eyes, trying to think of the cure, of what Mother must have been fighting for.
She was trying to save me, not kill me. Mother wasn’t fighting for the Mountain or Kamar. She left to finish her SS experiment here so that she could cure me. If what Howl is saying is true, then she was fighting to cure everyone.
Am I brave enough to let Dr. Yang have the cure so that her work doesn’t come undone? To walk back into the Mountain and close my eyes forever so that the SS nightmare can finally be over?
If I do, does that make me like her? If what Howl says is true, she gave up everything to save me. Could I give up everything to save the world—to save the Mountain, the City, the people like June running free in between—from SS?
If it would have saved Aya, I would have done it without hesitation. If it would keep June safe now, I’d do it. And Howl . . . I look at him. He lied to me; he’s been lying to me since the day we met . . . but I’d still do it to keep Howl from ever feeling SS’s monster claws in his brain.
When I open my mouth, Howl stops me. “You don’t have to die to stop this. We can’t rediscover the cure, just the two of us. But I know someone who can.”
“What do you mean?” My head hangs as if it’s already severed, already being dissected and labeled. But Howl’s words bring me back up, hope flaring through me like alcohol under a match.
“We need your mother. We need to wake Jiang Gui-hua up.”