“FATHER WILL LISTEN TO US.” Tai-ge doesn’t bother to whisper as the men jerk us up the library steps, the building poking out from the spread of structures below as if it were refusing to bow to the war bubbling around its feet.
“You don’t think he’ll be worried that you showed up with me? Right after being sent to the Hole?” I jerk my arm away from the Second who is pulling me along, standing up straight as I walk through the library’s propped-open doors.
Inside, afternoon light streams through the square windows, forming a necklace of sunlight around the pagoda’s high ceiling. General Hong’s broad figure stands tall, the focal point in a maelstrom of red uniforms. A raven-haired beauty stands over him preserved in the picture window’s jade, little men around her skirts forming darker patches that splotch across the City maps covering the marble floor.
The General doesn’t look at us until our escort pushes us down at his feet. “My disobedient son.” He turns to me, features a mirror of Tai-ge’s but made from stone and iron instead of flesh. “And his traitor playmate. Was it you who let these foul rebel creatures into our City?”
Tai-ge raises his chin to speak, but a shrill screech cuts off whatever he was going to say. The floor pitches under our feet, the force of an explosion hammering down on General Hong, crashing him down on top of us. The air fills with an ear-piercing smash, my eardrums blocking everything but a high-pitched tone. I try to scramble out from the General’s heavy frame, the air smoldering all around me. Arms wrench me back from under the picture window. . . .
Only there is no window, just a smoking gash in the wall, all the bits of jade lodged in the floor and walls behind us. It’s Tai-ge dragging me away, but he freezes when his panicked gaze lands on his father’s slumped form, back peppered with yellow and green shards of jade and bits of rocks and wood. The library’s stone and timber groan overhead. Still, Tai-ge doesn’t move, as though he’s waiting for the tattered human remains to pull themselves up off the floor.
Grabbing Tai-ge’s arm, I drag him away from General Hong’s still form, over a man slumped in a pool of red, his leather jerkin torn to shreds, dodging the men and women still left standing as they scream and run back and forth in panic.
The stones shake around us from another explosion as we sprint down the stairs, but the unholy noise fades as we follow the twisting hallways to a place I’ve been once before.
A trapdoor and a ladder.
The rungs slip under my hands as I rush down, an involuntary cry ripping from my lips as I miss a step. Tai-ge moves slower, his boots scraping against the metal above me. When he steps down from the ladder, the ground quivers under our feet, a muted boom filtering down from above. Things seem too quiet, too still down here in the old City, nothing but us and the statue sitting silently behind the ladder.
Most of the Red’s nerve center must have been in that room. Maybe the Firsts that were coordinating with them too. How many of them are now dead from the Menghu-planted bombs? My heart pounds with the thought of what almost happened . . . what did happen to General Hong, who died as a human shield. Whether he meant to or not.
What will the Menghu do now that the man giving Red orders is lifeless in a pile of broken jade and stone? And with Firsts flying away with all the Mantis, what are all of the infected going to do?
The hunt up there is going to turn nasty, especially as night falls.
Tai-ge’s arms wrap tight around my back and shoulders, pressing my head into his chest. He feels sticky underneath the T-shirt. Chalky dust covers both of us. I can feel it in my nostrils, mouth, and throat, the grittiness on my tongue making me want to gag.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say, the General’s mangled body clouded by some kind of fog in my mind, as if I can’t feel anything at all.
Tai-ge hugs me tighter, chest expanding under my cheek in a deep breath. But he doesn’t say anything.
“We still might be able to stop the fighting.” I hate the cold sound of my voice. “If we find someone from the Mountain high enough to give orders and tell them what Dr. Yang is doing—”
“We have to get out of here, Sevvy.” Tai-ge’s voice breaks, too small in the darkness enveloping us. “This isn’t a fight we can win, just the two of us.”
“Get out of here? No one knows about Dr. Yang.” I think of Peishan, June, and all the little orphans stranded where I left them in the sewers. Are they safe? And even if I don’t have crowds of friends welcoming me back, no one deserves to be cut down just because of Dr. Yang’s greed. It’s just an extension of what happened to Mother. To me. “If we don’t tell the Mountain who it is they really should be fighting, this invasion will kill everyone we know. For no reason.” I grimace. “What about your mother?”
“We need to leave. Before the compulsions start.”
“Tai-ge, are you okay? Your father just . . . saved us. Accidentally.” But what I mean is that he died. Even with the detachment I feel about what happened upstairs, I still can’t quite bring myself to say it out loud. Fear stabs through to my chest as I wonder what will come next—how many more will fall like birds at a glass window before the end of today. This whole City is going to crumble if we don’t do something. But what? It’s like the days at the beginning of the Influenza War. The last Great War. So many infected people jammed together that the idea makes my head spin. And it’s happening again, right above us.
Tai-ge pulls his head back, letting me look up at him. “We can’t do anything here. We can’t stop the fighting. But we can go find the cure. And people to help us make it, distribute it . . . If no one has SS, and no one can use it as a weapon, what will they have to fight about anymore? If we get to the cure before Dr. Yang does, everything could change.” He takes another deep breath. “The entire Circle is already gone. Most of the First Quarter, too, and I think Mother might have been roped into going along with them. If we can find their camp, she and the Firsts still alive might be able to help. . . .”
Before I can object to leaning on the First Circle for any kind of help, much less his mother, who left him in the City prison during an invasion, running footsteps echo up the tunnel and a faintly glowing quicklight bobs toward us. A red quicklight.
Followed by a trickling trail of yellow ones.
Tai-ge pushes me behind him, easing the gun from the waistband of his pants to point it at the floor. By peeking around his shoulder, I can see the small dots of light looming larger. Their faces are all shrouded in the serpentine coil of gas masks, the leader’s red light too far out to cast any light on his hooded features.
The leader, who appears to be wearing a Watch uniform, draws up short about ten yards away, squinting through the quicklight’s glow to make us out, pulling the whole procession to a dead halt. Where did a Red manage to pick up a quicklight from the Mountain?
The heavy dark pushes in on them, making them look small, harmless. But the leader’s hand twitching into his jacket has nothing harmless about it. Tai-ge takes a deep breath, his ribs expanding out against my arm. “Don’t move,” he says. “We’ve already got a gun on each one of you.”
Head cocked, the person holding the red light moves forward, pulling back a hood to reveal long golden hair. “You must have a lot of hands, then, since there are only two of you.” She steps toward me. “Is that you, Sev?” Once again, June appears as my guardian angel.
Tai-ge levels the gun at her head. “Who are you?”
June raises an eyebrow at Tai-ge before looking back at me, giving me time to inch my way between them, pushing Tai-ge’s gun down. “She’s a friend, Tai-ge. From Outside.”
“A friend from Outside?” Tai-ge’s serious calm cracks a bit. “A sentence I never thought would pass my lips.”
The line of yellow lights gathers around her, the children from the sanatorium holding hands in a long train with their lights tied to their coats, all masked. One sniffles a little and June stoops to wipe her cheeks with a handkerchief and tuck loose strands of hair behind her ears.
“Are we safe?” I ask, wondering if we have more time than I think. “The Menghu haven’t found their way down here yet?”
Peishan’s voice breaks through from the back of the line. “No, we aren’t safe. We only moved because the fight spilled underground yesterday morning. We’ve been peeking out every now and then to grab food and water. They set the hospital down in the Third Quarter on fire. What is going to happen to us now? The walls have been breached; there are Kamari soldiers everywhere—”
“We’re going to get out of here. Somehow,” I answer. She glares at me but doesn’t argue.
June speaks again. “Peishan managed to steal some Mantis and a stash of quicklights before the fighting started. We got the masks up there too. All from a bunch of carts headed up the hill, stocked up with all this junk.”
“Dr. Yang must have started early.” Tai-ge looks at me. “I guess that explains why my father couldn’t get any medicine out of the hospitals.”
Peishan slumps down on the ground, smiling from behind her mask when June pats her on the shoulder. Purpled circles under her eyes coupled with her bald head make her look sick. Vulnerable. Too young to be scavenging for Mantis in a burning hospital. She and June make a good pair.
When Peishan catches me looking at her, the smile disappears. “What happened to you? Weren’t you going to take out General Hong’s family or something? You never came back.”
I ignore her, pulling June and Tai-ge over close so we can talk. However much I want to stop the violence happening over our heads, Tai-ge is right. “So the sewers are blocked down by the Sanatorium?” I ask. “What are the odds of getting out that way?”
June shakes her head, the darkness around us spilling all over, turning her half machine, half little girl. “Menghu aren’t asking questions, they’re shooting everyone not wearing a Mountain uniform on sight. And there have been bombs down in the Third Quarter, so leadership might be kind of hazy at this point.”
Tai-ge scrubs a hand through his hair. “SS bombs? Everyone should calm down then. Fall Asleep.”
“This new strain doesn’t do the same thing to everyone.” I think of Mei, her eyes wide and frightened. She dozed in the hospital, then woke up compulsing. Not like any SS case I’ve ever heard of. And the doctors I overheard down in the Sanatorium seemed to think this strain was capable of moving much faster in the victims. “We might have people compulsing in hours. Maybe less. Picking our way through a whole City of infected isn’t going to happen. And it’s contagious, so no one will be spared.”
“Then what chance do we have?” Tai-ge’s eyes flick between me and June. “Where is there to go? Infected must be outside the walls too.”
“What if we go up?” I ask.
“Up . . . where? Even if we get over the wall at the top of the First Quarter, there’s no way out. It’s just cliffs,” Tai-ge says.
“Helis are swarming all over the City like starving mosquitoes. They must be still moving in and out of the City heli-field. If we take one . . .”
June rolls her eyes. “Full marks for thinking big, Sev, but I don’t know how to fly those things and neither do you.”
Tai-ge smiles, the first inklings of the boy I grew up with showing through his iron mask. “That, my Outsider friend, is where I come in handy.”