WE WALK IN SILENCE. SHE always was good at silence. I don’t ask her where she got her uniform, and she doesn’t ask me where Howl is. Her presence brings me back to the forest, aware of time passing for the first time in days.
“Where are you headed?” June’s question sounds like cold iron, inhuman and airless through the gas mask. “Or are you just going . . . away?”
“The City.” I have to warn Tai-ge about the invasion. Even if the rest of that place almost deserves the Menghu, I can’t let him be killed. And there are others that I can’t justify leaving for the Menghu to piece together in bracelets. My roommate, Peishan, locked away in the Sanatorium. Sister Shang. I can’t let them be shot down just because of where they are standing, like my father was.
And Mother. It feels like checking rat traps back in the orphanage. Dreading what I’d find, but knowing that leaving the dead creatures would just draw more rodents . . . I have to look. I have to know once and for all why she left me. And the only way to find out is to ask her. The syringe in my pocket feels like another limb, a part of me. The kiss to cure her awake.
She could be the end to SS and this stupid war. The end of people dying and forcing other people to die for them . . .
“You can go back to the City?” June interrupts my thoughts. “The Reds weren’t after you, they were after—?”
Howl. I cut her off before she can finish the question. “Things have changed.”
“The Menghu aren’t following you, though.”
I stop, letting the statement sink in. “They must be.”
She arches an eyebrow at me, glancing behind us into the woods. I blush at what she isn’t saying. If they were after me, I would already be back at the Mountain with my throat slit. Running away from the Menghu shouldn’t be as easy as falling down a mountainside. I’m their cure. They wouldn’t just let me walk away, would they? Maybe they just moved their focus onto Howl instead. That thought gives me a twinge of guilt, even after everything he’s done, but I stamp it down, smothering it under all the lies he told me.
June just shrugs, handing me a handful of dried apricot slices, the flesh feeling gummy under my fingertips. “Eat that. You look like you’ve missed a few meals.”
I hold the apricots in my fist, squeezing them between my fingers. June sighs and pries my hand open, taking one of the orange fruits to hold in front of my nose. “Eat it.”
The taste burns, my tongue curling up in protest, but I still swallow. It slides down my throat and settles in my stomach like a rock.
June’s mask stays attached to her face, a green hood covering her bright hair. Rumors about contagious SS must have spread like a fire through the Outsiders, though she won’t tell me how. June isn’t the helpless little girl I thought she was. She’s smarter than me, better off than I ever was.
When we settle down for the night, she pulls an envelope out of her pocket, rattling it as she holds it out to me. Two green pills fall out of the paper into my palm. I shake my head, tears stinging behind my eyes.
“I don’t need it anymore.” If I did, then I would still have a mother and Howl might have actually loved me. I would have a home instead of wandering around out here, an outcast. “I wish I did.”
• • •
Trekking back to the City blurs into one long day of heavy feet plodding mercilessly forward and one long night of terrible nightmares, each one featuring Niulang transforming into one of the qilin monsters he attended and tearing after Zhinu through the forest with his teeth bared.
When we get close to the City, June and I use the ditches to get past the farms, playing dead whenever patrols wander by. June swaps her green coat for a leather jerkin stamped with the City seal. I find one as well, the ditches populated with many uncomplaining donors. Remembering the dead man stamped with my boot prints from the first day Outside leaves me wiping dead smell from my shoulders and arms, and I keep catching myself holding my breath to keep the death from going inside me.
The inlet leading to the Sanatorium sewers is on the cliff side of the City. It isn’t that hard to slip past the guards, because they’re all concentrated in front of the City’s main gates, the few Seconds who notice us just nodding as we walk toward the thin path that curves around the back side of the mountain.
My stomach churns as I size up the single, icy board running out to the sewer outlet, a simple hole in the side of the cliff. There’s a chain bolted to the cliff wall above the board to aid the unfortunate Third who was required to unblock the sewer pipe. From here, the wind pushes up on my arms and face as if I’m a bird getting ready to take off over the terraced rice paddies, each strip of water reflecting the blue sky like a mirror from hundreds of feet down. Beyond that, mountains pop up from the ground, laden with robes of green as far as I can see. The City wall zigzags far above my head, gray stone following the lines of the mountain in a disorganized-looking sprawl, a square-shaped turret almost directly over us.
I swallow the dizzying height down, curling my fingers around the chain. I don’t have time to be scared. I don’t even have time to look down. Failure to get in means Tai-ge will die.
June grabs my hands before I can take a step, shaking her head. I try to smile to reassure her, but my face has forgotten how. “Don’t wait for me. A war is about to start.”
Her eyes don’t waver, a faint blush staining her cheeks as she pulls again. “Don’t leave me.” The first words between us in days. “I’ll keep you safe.”
Taking care of me when, only a few weeks ago, I thought I was taking care of her. I couldn’t save Aya, and now my new little sister is trying to save me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that there is no such thing as safe. Not Outside or In. But I nod. “Come. But this could be as messy as a gore’s dinner party.”
Inch by inch, June right behind me, we make our way to the outlet, a coating of brownish slime staining the rock underneath the opening. My heart sinks when we get close enough to see the ice-plastered grate covering the sewer, bars set so closely together I can’t even get my arm through. But, on the far side, two of them are cut.
I bite my lip. Does that mean Menghu are already here? Is Helix already inside, waiting for the right moment to open the City’s main gates?
Even with the cut bars, squeezing through leaves my ribs feeling bent. Dirty water pools around me, soaking my pants to the knees, the stench of rotting garbage curling in my nose. But the filth down here doesn’t scare me so much as what must be waiting for us up in the Sanatorium.
Parhat’s wild eyes; Mei’s bared teeth. My sister with her ax. The Sanatorium is full of men and women who are infected. I’ve had nightmares about ending up in the Sanatorium since the moment they set the first stone, since the first instance of infection trumping Mantis.
I don’t have to worry about Mantis not working for me anymore. I just have to get through the Sanatorium without being eaten. I remind myself that the infected aren’t monsters, they’re victims, and if I want to save my friends from the true monsters of this world—the City and the Menghu alike—I have to push forward.
My quicklight breaks, catching the slow ripples of water around me in an eerie glow. The water trough narrows as we walk along, cement walls closing in around us as the roar of rushing water down the channel finds my ears. There should be a cement wall, about fifty feet high, with sewage rushing over the side up ahead—the City’s insurance that Outsiders won’t sneak in this way, and City dwellers won’t use it to sneak out.
By the time we get to the wall, the sound of rushing water fills me up, echoing off the cold cement until it feels like the dirty water is inside of me, all around me, that there’s no reason I should still be able to breathe. Water careens over the side from above, leaving only a foot-wide section of cement clear of falling water. I slip on my gloves and pull out the rope and the two sets of metal disks that Sole stole for me when I ran from Howl. Part of the plan that wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t raided Zhuanjia storerooms for me, getting the materials Howl was supposed to bring when we escaped. Two attach to my boots, one strapped to each hand. The disks are magnetic, bonding with the iron reinforcement through the cement, sticking like glue with every move upward. I skate up the wall, concentrating on the dark above me to avoid thinking about what will happen if I fall, if I move too far to the side and the roaring water grabs me from my delicate perch to go crashing into the sewage channel.
Howl’s voice whispers in my mind, The sewers will take us straight up into the Sanatorium. There are no connections to the old City underground, but they will get us past the walls. My shoulders hunch up around my ears, and I stop for a moment to shake his warm touch from my head. I need to concentrate. It only takes a few more lung-wrenching minutes to pull myself up over the top, and I give myself a second to choke down breaths of sewage-infused air before turning the magnets off in the disks and carefully dropping them back down for June. The red of my quicklight flickers over her spider-like crawl up toward me, much faster and more sure of herself than I was.
After June scales the wall, we continue down the narrow walkway next to the channel until the next screaming fall of water. This one, however, has a ladder ascending into the darkness above us, the rungs slippery with muck. As I climb, my quicklight begins to wane, so I break another at the top to reveal a cavernous cement room, the water coming from a break in the wall across from us but confined to its channel running the length of the space. Ladders crawl up the blank faces of the room, and drains dot the floor every few yards, the cement shiny and damp.
We climb the ladder on the far wall, coming to a high-ceilinged hallway. The area is still unlit and unrelieved cement, but there are doors cut into the deep gray walls every ten feet. The first door I come to has three hand-size windows across the top. My footsteps draw a scuffling sound from inside, and reflective retinas peer out at me from the cell. “I’m not gone yet,” a voice scratches out, wobbling like an unbalanced top. “Not yet.”
The voice repeats itself over and over, rising into a scream that follows me all the way down the hall, past door after door of other frightened eyes blinking after my quicklight.
Flickering light ahead means people. Firsts?
June drags me into the inky blur of an alcove, grabbing my quicklight and stuffing it under her heavy leather jerkin. The deep murmur of voices penetrates my hood.
“. . . entire floor locked down. At least until the Watch comes back from Outside. They’ve spent the last two weeks pasted to the City gates like graffiti. Our security here cannot be set back in priority. One exposure . . .”
A voice interrupts, rasping through the mesh of a gas mask. “We understand the importance of what you are doing, but the Watch is spread thin at the moment. We’ve lost three farms already. My soldiers . . .”
The first man cuts back in, “This ridiculous experiment is ravaging the Wood Rats as we speak. We have no way to stop it! We can’t set foot Outside without risking exposure! We can’t even tell who is infected because the Sleep stage can’t be regulated anymore. A single night’s rest could be the first stages, or even less, and we have no way of knowing who is infected and who isn’t. Dr. Yang couldn’t have known. . . .”
Dr. Yang? The name echoes out behind them, the last word I catch from the exchange before their voices disappear into the dripping gray prison. I pull my boots off and pad after them in my wet socks, but I can’t pick apart the hollow echoes bouncing off the cement walls. Frustration bubbles through me as I lean against the wall, stuffing my boots into the pack. Is Dr. Yang involved on this end too? Is that how he knew about the contagious strain of SS?
And did Firsts release it into the wild as an experiment? As though they could just document the effects and file it away, never expecting it to affect them? That’s the same kind of hubris that got the world into this mess in the first place. Some of the resolve I felt back at the Mountain resurges in my chest, warmth burning holes through the lead cocoon protecting me from my feelings.
Tai-ge will know. The Hongs will be able to do something, whatever is going on. The thought is a bright point in the darkness. Taking a deep breath, I turn to go back to June.
But my head jerks back, crashing into one of the metal doors.
A cackling laugh stabs through me as I fumble to detach the hand tangled in my braid. I can’t see anything, the assault snaking out from the small window leading into the cell behind me. Sputtering hoots of laughter die down, smothered as the prisoner pulls again, shoving the end of my long braid into his mouth.
I wrench away from the cell door, the hair at the nape of my neck tearing at my skin, but the prisoner is stronger. He lets me pull just far enough away to smash me back into the door with a crack. The contact resounds through my head like a bell tolling, sick dread flooding through me as another hand reaches out from the holes in the door, fingers digging into my chin from behind.
My fingers find my star pin, leather cord cutting against my throat as I tear them from the necklace. Using the stars’ sharpened metal edges, I saw through my braid, the star pin’s points glancing across the hand clutching at my face. The arms recoil back into the cell with a howl, my severed braid snaking after them.
The irregular ends of hair scratch at my eyes and mouth as I run, my hands too busy keeping hold of the stars, feeling for my mother’s jade and the rusted ring on the leather cord to brush them away. My whole body convulses with fear and revulsion, slimy fingers crawling across my skin in ghostly memory of the Seph’s touch.
I grab June’s hand and we sprint down the hallway, wetness clinging to us like a diseased haze. She doesn’t question it, but pulls me to a stop when we get to the first stairwell, the severed remains of my hair a harsh revelation under the bare bulb.
I lean back against the wall, pulling my hair away from her, trying to let my gasping breaths calm. The white-knuckle grip I have on my stars refuses to unfold, as though my fingers are permanently bonded to them. My palm throbs as the metal stabs into my palm, a dribble of blood squeezing out of my fist to drip on the floor.
Cocking her head, June twines a finger around a lock of hair, ending jaggedly at my cheekbone. The shadow of distress in her face is enough to get me talking again. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I tie the broken leather cord back around my neck, stars and jade bloody red next to the ring. “The Menghu could be waiting right outside the City. We have to go.”
The gray cement wall boasts a large red number four centered above the flight of stairs. At the top of the staircase, we come to clean, rose-colored tile, utilitarian and boring. Each hall seems like an endless string of doors, with red handles marked ALARM set into the walls every hundred feet or so.
Offices. Each inhabited by a ruthless monster, every case of SS blood on their hands. How do Firsts work in here, so close to their victims? Do they worry that someday their charges will get out? My hand trails across the glass door protecting an alarm handle in the wall. I suppose the moment anything unusual happens, everyone runs.
The first person we see has his face buried in a pile of papers, a single red star glinting in the harsh lights as he walks up the hall toward us. I duck through a doorway, June slipping in under my arm, before he looks up.
The room is a small office, gagged by loose papers overflowing from the small metal desk and gray filing cabinets that line the walls. June stays by the cracked-open door, eyes on the man as he passes. I slide into the chair at the desk, interest caught as the miniature telescreen set into the wall blinks white and blue. A file pulls up in response to my sitting down, the words MEDICAL TRAINING black against the screen. A group of pictures pops up underneath.
My eyes catch on one familiar face near the bottom. Peishan, my old roommate from the orphanage.
I select her picture and it fills the whole screen, bringing up an ant’s march of text denoting time spent in the Sanatorium, notes on how often and how much she eats, how often she has bowel movements, and a long list of other statistics and notes. Next to her face reads BULLET RECOVERY TEST SUBJECT: STOMACH. And a date.
“What is today’s date?” I snap at the screen, at once feeling proud and awkward that I know how to work a telescreen after my time at the Mountain. Black characters crawl across her face like a spider, and I blink. Today’s date is two days before the date next to her picture.
She’s been here in the Sanatorium since before I left the City, since her outstretched fingers reached for Captain Chen in our Remedial Reform class all those weeks ago. Mantis stopped working for her, but she went quietly once her compulsion was under control. How did Peishan end up with a bullet in her stomach? And if Peishan somehow did get shot, why would Firsts let her sit in the hospital for days with a hunk of metal in her stomach before treating her?
I scroll through the details of her file, looking for something, anything to explain how someone safe inside the Sanatorium could be nursing a gunshot wound, images of Cale storming through the dimly lit halls blackening the edges of my vision. But there’s nothing. Just a blue box marked SIMULANT with that date two days from now tagged underneath and a short blurb about treatment: SIMULATED FIELD TEST. MEDICS HAVE TEN MINUTES TO STABILIZE SUBJECT AND EXTRACT BULLET.
Something here doesn’t make sense. I click out of Peishan’s file and scan through the other notes, but there are no other circumstances or problems listed for Peishan. . . . It’s not until I click into a file labeled SECOND FIELD TESTING that I find my answer.
Red sharpshooters have a test the same day as Peishan’s scheduled bullet removal.
Horror chokes me as I let this sink in. They’re going to shoot Peishan in two days, and then let the student medics try to sew her up before she dies. Is this always how they train Red medics?
I press through to the other case files up on the telescreen, recognizing two from my shift at the cannery and four more from the younger kids at the orphanage. People I didn’t even know were infected. Now each one has an expiration date fixed beneath their grainy pictures. June snaps her fingers, jerking my attention away from the telescreen. She’s still hunched against the door, watching the hallway. She points back out, but I hold up a hand, silently asking her to wait.
I put my head down on the desk to clear my thoughts. How did all these people get SS? All orphans or Thirds. A bright red box on the screen flashes, catching my attention. I click into the boy’s case file, and instead of a blue box marked SIMULANT, this record has a red one with the word PLACEBO noted in large characters.
I flick back through the other case files, but this is the only one flagged red. The rest are all flashing the blue SIMULANT. Most of the records are labeled FIELD STUDY, but three of the ones I sift through have a black bar cutting the subject’s picture, bold white characters blocking out the word RESEARCH above their foreheads instead. Bone reconstruction research. Heart and lung recovery and reconstruction research. Brain trauma research. I think back to the new pamphlet that came out right before Dr. Yang dragged me underground all those weeks ago. Wasn’t it something about bone remodeling?
They built this place to house infected that aren’t responding to Mantis. But why would Mantis suddenly stop working? Siyu, that nurse back at the Mountain, seemed to think it was impossible.
Firsts gave me medicine to make me think I had SS. Why couldn’t they do that to any number of orphans, Thirds, people they don’t care about? Are there drugs to make you think you fell Asleep, too? My throat constricts as I think of my mother in her glass coffin. Of course there are.
Perhaps they started using SS victims for their experiments, giving them placebos instead of Mantis and then claiming they were resisting the Mantis so they had a healthy number of subjects to cart off to the Sanatorium for research. But now they don’t even have to give real SS to the people they want to experiment on. With their SS “simulants,” Firsts can cause an “outbreak” anytime they need to refill the kennels, but with an added benefit: When Thirds watch their families fall to SS, it keeps them scared, just like the bombs the City drops on itself.
And the medical discoveries kept us convinced as to how wise and powerful Firsts are. That maybe, someday, they would find the cure to SS. That their place above us was right. How many dead bodies are attached to each discovery? The Sanatorium is just one big operating table, allowing Firsts to play without anyone being able to complain. Or even realize what is going on.
Contagious SS, this new strain they gave to Cale and Kasim . . . did Firsts invent it in the Sanatorium? Disgust balloons up from my stomach, my throat tightening around the acid boiling up in my esophagus. If they use SS to control the City, are they even trying to find a cure? I doubt it.
I flip through pictures, faster and faster until I can’t even see the faces, just looking for the red and blue SIMULANT and PLACEBO boxes. About half are red, most of those who are actually infected with floor designations in the wet, dark halls I just came from below. They were all denied Mantis, so who knows how many have lost control of their minds from compulsions or solitary confinement? And the rest of the people here, blue SIMULANT boxes blinking over their pictures, are all unknowing, unwilling volunteers in a City-wide medical experiment when there’s nothing wrong with them.
At least Howl wasn’t lying about everything. The Sanatorium really is full of gruesome medical experiments. The thought pops up, a spot of hope in a gaping abyss, but I push it away. Howl doesn’t get any points for telling the truth about one or two things when he lied about literally everything else.
Sitting up, I motion June over, pointing to the picture in front of me of a girl with a prim little smile. “They’re going to kill her. They told her she has SS to force her into the Sanatorium, and now they are going to kill her.”
June scans the rest of the screen with an appraising air, shrugging one shoulder. “Are they running out of Mantis?”
“No. They’re reading all the old medical journals and trying to regain some of what doctors were able to do Before. This girl is a lab rat—a lab rat who allows Firsts to stay in control here.” I slap the table. “How do we fix this?” The same feeling of helplessness that I’ve always felt facing down the Sanatorium makes me feel glued to the table. Paralyzed.
June glances back out into the hall. “How about we get out of here before trying to solve any other problems? You can’t help anyone if Firsts catch us in here.”
The hallway outside is bare once again. Artificial lights glare down on the shirt underneath my jerkin, brown and slippery with sewer sludge, raggedy hair hanging in an uneven mess across my shoulders. June looks equally bedraggled, her gas mask and hood making her look as if she belongs here. Just another terrible science experiment.
Kneeling by the next pull-handle alarm we come across, I stuff my feet back into my boots, pulling the clasps tight against my calves. Next, the gas mask goes on, my face hidden behind its metal screen.
Now the alarm. I rip the glass door open and pull the handle from the wall. The high wail of a siren starts to keen through the building, and the hallway floods with confused Firsts calling to one another to ask what is going on. Three members of the Watch elbow their way up the hall, eyes falling to the broken handle chafing in my hand. I yell to them before they get close, my gas mask distorting my words. “Breakout on four! They’re newly infected!”
The lead Watchman swears and pulls a mask over his face. “How did they get down there? Testing is supposed to be restricted to ten. Actively compulsing?”
I pull at my torn Watch jerkin and muddy clothes. “I wouldn’t say they were friendly.”
“You alert Captain Zhao on two; I’ll set up a block.”
I nod as though I know what he’s talking about and catch June’s arm, the two of us riding the flow of confused uniforms up toward the ground floor and the exit. After a confused shuffle up a few flights of stairs, natural light pours into the cement stairwell. Pushing our way out, June and I run down the hallway, large windows that look out into a courtyard flowered in pinks and reds set into the walls every few feet. A knot of threadbare children stand out in the garden under the outstretched hands of a statue of Yuan Zhiwei. The stone’s red veins look like streams of blood all over his hands and face.
Their heads follow the tide of the panicked Firsts, eyes wide with alarm. An older girl bends down in front of them, wiping away tears. A girl I know.
I slam through the doors and the kids scatter like cockroaches under a light, leaving Peishan alone under Yuan’s hands. She faces me with firm resolution, only a hint of fear in the line of her jaw. Her hair is stubbly and short, different from the sleek locks I remember.
“You need to get out of here.” My monster voice makes her cringe away as it leaks through the gas mask. “Now. Come with me.”
She holds her ground, brow furrowing. “Sevvy?”
Surprised that she recognized my voice, I pull the mask down around my neck, and her face goes grim, more disturbed by me than by the gaping mouth of the mask. “Get away from me, Fourth.” Her eyes run over June, catching on to a blond snarl escaping from June’s hood like a fish on a hook.
“Fourth? Suddenly you care?” The children regroup in the corner farthest from me, eyes wide with tears forgotten in the presence of this new enemy. I can’t leave them here. Not to target practice and dirty syringes. “Come on!” I grab for her hand. “We need to get you all out of here.”
“Why don’t you just shoot me now?” she spits. “I’m not joining Kamar. Murderer.” She twists away, running to stand between me and the kids.
My heart stops. “What are you talking about?”
“What’s the count now, traitor? The people on the bridge. The guards you took out when you escaped. There’s even a body-cam video of you braining one of the soldiers Outside with a tree branch. And Sun Yi-lai . . .”
“I did not kill Sun Yi-lai.” His name rips through me like a rusty scalpel. Sun Yi-lai? Shouldn’t the real Sun Yi-lai be living in some laboratory up on the Steppe, unaware that a rebel used his name to seduce me away from this place? “But I do know that if you don’t get out of here, you will all die.”
Fear and anger war across her face. “We might as well be dead already. We are all infected, thanks to you and your friends in Kamar. Half of the orphanage stopped responding to Mantis after you left.”
Peishan’s file was marked SIMULANT. All those nights in our room when she whispered how afraid she was of the darkness lurking inside herself, and Peishan was never even really infected. The City just wanted that fear to keep her in line. “Peishan, please—” I start.
“You didn’t even stay to tell your pal Sister Shang good-bye.”
My breath catches in my throat. Sister Shang was the last one to see me at the orphanage, right after Tai-ge left. Did the First Circle think she helped me escape? All she did was give me my fake Mantis dosage and a comforting pat on the head. “What did they do to her?”
“Same thing that happens to all traitors.” Peishan’s voice is acid. “Same thing they are going to do to you.”
My attention strays down to a little boy peeking out from behind Peishan’s legs, tears streaming down his cheeks as his eyes dart between me and the lights flashing in time with the alarm sirens. I recognize his face. Corneal transplant. That’s what his file said.
Even if I can get them to come with me, will it help? I look at June, still hanging back by the door, one eye on the streams of people as they rush by. I would never have left her to be hurt by Cas and Parhat. How are these kids—or any of the people here being hurt by the City—any different? They don’t deserve to be left here any more than June did.
Any more than I did.
The Menghu are going to attack. Even if they weren’t, the City is going to destroy this little boy’s eyes. Make him blind. The City took so much from me. Dr. Yang and Howl did too, with their lies and their plans. . . .
Pain throbs deep down in my chest. For the first time, I can do something. I won’t let the City hurt this boy. Not any of these children. I don’t know who is infected and who is not in this little group, but if there is a cure to SS, then life doesn’t have to be this unfair. I can’t let the City or the Mountain do this to anyone else. Not when I can help. I won’t let myself fail as I did with Aya.
It’s time to be what Peishan wants. What the City taught me I was.
Time to be a monster.
“Look,” I growl, pulling out my sharpened stars. “You are coming with me whether you like it or not.”