THE ORPHANAGE LOOKS COMFORTABLE IN the lamplight, the mishmash of peaked tile roofs turned up at each corner and the sprawling glass windows just like a family compound from a feel-good propaganda film. Warmth glows from inside, seeming almost cozy until you catch sight of the plaque nailed above the entrance reading HALL OF WAR-ORPHANED CHILDREN in peeling black characters.
When I pull open the front door, I’m careful not to dislodge the handle from its precarious one-screw tether. It feels good to do something softly, to stop trying to break a hole in the road with my boots, to calm the angry demon stretching inside of me, howling to come out.
My mother the traitor.
Even the mention ignites an illness deep in my belly looking for the quickest way out. As the door opens, someone comes running through from the other side, slamming the heavy wood against my shoulder and wrist.
“Sorry!” It’s one of the younger residents. She runs past me without another word, late for a factory shift, no doubt.
I roll my shoulder and look at my hand where the door scraped me, a drop of blood welling at the point of the star burned into my skin—the mark of a traitor. The mark that will never wash away, no matter how many years I spend being reeducated by General Hong.
I clench my fist, trying to tune out the memories of her beautiful voice telling me bedtime stories, of her duets with Aya, which always dissolved into laughter when one or the other couldn’t hold their part. She left us. She left us for them. Every chemical bomb that falls might as well have Jiang Gui-hua’s name chiseled into its brassy nose, because she’s the one who told Kamar where we are.
My back hunches as I walk into the orphanage’s open-air courtyard, gulping down deep breaths of the frozen air. Focusing on any one thing seems too difficult. My eyes dart between the cracked cement ground to the main desk that blocks access to the rest of the orphanage, my hand creeping up to the fleshy inside of my elbow, where the soft, smooth expanse feels as if it’s on fire.
And it might as well be. That seemingly insignificant spot on my arm is Mother’s last word to the City, delivered through me. Because she didn’t just tell Kamar where to find us and our Mantis stores. She didn’t just leave half of the First Circle dead in their beds before she was finally caught.
No, she also brought SS back to us personally. To me, her own daughter, in a syringe.
I was the City’s first Seph.
I didn’t understand what my mother had done to me until later. Much later, when General Hong found time to explain it all to me. All I could think during those first few months was that somehow the Circle and the Reds were all wrong, but even I couldn’t erase the memory of her voice in my room, her face hovering near mine, and the prick of the needle.
The Sister on duty peers over the counter, her bald head reflecting the golden light filtering down from the lamps hung above the waist-high wall between me and her desk. It takes me a moment to get control of myself and find a calm sort of a smile for her. The nuns are supposed to be even more honored than Firsts, giving up everything to serve those who can’t help themselves. The ultimate example of society before self.
I don’t see a flicker of charity in this Sister’s expression. Not surprising. It’s Sister Lei, who seems to think her life’s purpose is to bring up good members of the City with a switch in one hand and a book with every word Yuan Zhiwei ever said in the other. She actually slapped me once for pretending to compulse. I was chasing some of the younger kids, telling them I was hungry for ears to make them laugh, when I felt a sharp sting on my cheek. “SS is not something to joke about!” she fluted, pointed finger level with my nose. “Especially not for you, Ms. Jiang. I suppose I should expect nothing better, considering where you came from.” Then she ordered me to report my gross disrespect during the next morning’s self-criticism.
I did, complete with sound effects.
“You’re late,” she says, standing up. “And you didn’t eat dinner.”
“Class went a little late. I’m sorry, Sister.” The smile isn’t so hard now that I’m talking. “I haven’t managed to wrench out any of my own teeth, though, so I think we’re okay.”
“You can joke about SS even now? After what happened to Peishan?” She pulls at her long brown robe, flashing a tattoo of a City seal on her hand. However many slashes were cut into her skin to mark her place in the City, they’ve been obscured since the day she took the oath to serve. I could probably see if I looked close enough, but for some reason, I think she’d be offended. “Come flouncing in here long after you’re due for Mantis? You are putting us all in danger.”
Sliding a small paper cup across the counter, she jerks her head toward a water jug pushed up against the metal grate that bars entrance to my home. Not all of us in the orphanage are infected, but separating the sick from the well has never seemed to be something the nuns or anyone else cared about. Not down here, anyway.
Back during the Great Wars, no one really knew what SS was, just people catching sick and falling asleep for too long. Days, weeks, sometimes even months. In those days, people were so terrified of being buried alive because of SS that they went down with a bell at their side just in case they woke up. And not everyone does. It is still almost impossible to tell the difference between the dead Sleep of encephalitis lethargica and the plain dead.
If only that were all SS did to people. Put them to Sleep.
I take the cup, rattling the two green pills against the sides as I get a cupful of water to wash them down. But Sister Lei doesn’t buzz the door open.
“There’s been a change of schedule. The Watch had to take Peishan to the Sanatorium for observation, and the cannery needs someone to cover her shift.”
The deep pool of anger bubbling inside my chest begins to froth again. Peishan. The newest in a line of unforgivable sins to lay at my mother’s feet.
I glance down at the pills now cupped in my hand, suddenly not wanting to swallow them. Yuan Zhiwei invented Mantis himself. It’s the only way to combat the second half of what SS does to us—the half that happens after the victim wakes up. One moment, you could be sitting and chatting about the weather; the next, singing the City anthem with full vibrato, or trying to pull out your own hair. Or attacking your Remedial Reform teacher. Compulsions aren’t exactly random. They just destroy inhibitions and agitate the victim. A bad toothache might have you in the bathroom, trying to extract it with a wrench. An annoying sibling you wish you could smack might end up with strangling bruises. Mantis cured all of that and allowed those of us Sephs who woke up to go about their lives as normal, needing only two doses a day. Yet, about a year ago, Mantis suddenly stopped working for certain people. People like Peishan. The First Circle hasn’t even issued a statement about the problem. The victims are just carted away to the Sanatorium one by one, and they don’t come back.
“Are they sure Peishan isn’t responding to Mantis? She didn’t miss a dose or—”
“Her shift starts in eleven minutes.”
I look at the floor. What was Peishan’s infected brain telling her to do when I landed on top of her? It distracts me from wondering how anyone could manage to survive in the Sanatorium. Uncontrollable compulsions, floors and floors of untreatable inmates confined. I don’t know why the City doesn’t just let them go. Send them Outside.
I close my eyes, ashamed of myself for even thinking it. The Sanatorium is a blessing from the Firsts. Nothing could be worse than being forced Outside.
Taking a deep breath, I force myself to think instead of a problem I can actually address, like my empty stomach. Only Firsts can help Peishan now.
“Food? Before I go?” The orphanage cafeteria usually stays open for those of us with odd shifts over in the factories, and I don’t think I can face another four hours of a sweaty rubber jumpsuit and gloves without something to go on.
Sister Lei doesn’t even blink. “Comrade Hong informed me of your trespassing in her home this evening, Sev.” Her eyes go back to the paperwork on her desk. “You have leave to enter the Second Quarter only for specified reeducation sessions. All of your lessons were canceled for this week, yet you still crossed the wall. If you can’t keep your Fourth tendencies in check, the Hongs aren’t going to continue trying to reeducate you back into the City’s good graces. If I were making the decisions, you’d be doing hard labor like a Fourth deserves.”
I quickly swallow the pills, the feeling of Mantis lodged in my throat remaining long after they go down.
It’s a hungry walk to the cannery, and a long night of sweating in the rubber getup that keeps me safe from the chemical-laced fruit they cart in from farms Outside. But I can’t complain. Not when I know Peishan—or any of the other kids locked away inside the Sanatorium—would die to trade places with me.
• • •
Tai-ge appears at the orphanage doors right as the sky falls dark a few days later, bearing an official invitation to sit across the table from General Hong to have my brain reorganized to better fit the City’s aims. Something must be brewing up in the Second Quarter for the General to summon me this late. He would have had to ask for special permission to have a Fourth out after dark.
Everything about Tai-ge is still and controlled as he waits for the Sister on duty to buzz the door open. After a Watchman gave me a bloody nose for being out in the Second Quarter alone, Tai-ge always comes to walk me to and from tutoring sessions with his father.
“Let’s go around the long way.” He edges me toward a side street that meanders between Third housing installations.
“It’s faster to go straight across the marketplace . . . ,” I start.
“There’s a new batch of soldiers all the way around the marketplace walls. They strung them up this afternoon.”
“Oh.” I let him pull me down the bricked-in alleyway, away from the wall that separates the First laboratories and Second homesteads up the hill from the Thirds. I’m glad, actually, not to pass the City Center’s layered tile roof, just above the marketplace. After the episode with Peishan, I can’t face walking anywhere near the Traitor’s Arch—the place where they keep her.
Everyone talks about how my mother left, how she infected me then ran straight to the Kamari general, whoever he is, and told him where we were so they could try to steal our Mantis. But no one explains why she came back. Why she murdered half the First Circle, all old men who were barely hanging on to life by the tips of their fingers as it was. They do, however, have videos of her arrest, of my father and sister as they were dragged out of our house while I was still waking up from SS. This video shows Mother lying in her bed of glass and tubes in front of the remaining Firsts of the Circle. Standing at their head is the Chairman. Highest of the Firsts, too wise to be in the labs anymore, now called to lead us in Yuan Zhiwei’s place. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him outside of paintings. No one beyond the Circle sees much of the Chairman or his family in person. The fact that he came himself to condemn Mother shows just how horrific her crimes were. Those few seconds of his face on the video seem like a doorway into another world, a place I’m not welcome, where I’m not even a person. He stands there under the towering hulk of Traitor’s Arch, one flick of his hand sending Mother to her fate.
We all have to watch her at least once a year on the grainy community telescreens. The Chairman injects her with something as if she’s the princess in that stupid story she used to tell me at bedtime, pricked by the crooked spindle and sent into an endless sleep. Everyone in the City Center cheers as they hoist her glass box up to the top of the Arch, on display for all to see. She’s still there, eyes closed, kept in limbo between life and death, her every breath pumped in and out of her in crackling bursts.
I have to blink away the thought, because it brings others. Real memories from after I woke up—not the ones manufactured from watching Mother’s last moments on a telescreen later—of standing before Traitor’s Arch, my face hot, and Aya so cold beside me when they finally let us leave our house. Of Father, white-faced and tired, waiting for the Circle to use Mother’s crimes to mark the rest of us.
Tai-ge and I circle back behind the blocky factory housing units, the crumbling bricks pasted up and down with big character posters, probably written during the evening’s announcements, since most of them have to do with the current campaign to “destroy revisionists” and to “strike at both tigers and flies.” I stop looking when I find my own surname in smudged ink.
They haven’t hung enemy soldiers up on the wall for months now. The City always leaves their heads bare so it’s easy to see they are from Kamar’s invading army, their odd-colored hair jarring. Blond, brown, coppery red. Vicious enemies now hanging limply against the bloodstained wall.
The same Watchman from earlier in the week opens the barrier to let us onto the bridge. The Aihu River looks so beautiful when it is lit up for the night that I can’t find it in myself to be annoyed at him when he growls at me as I walk past. The reflections from the paper lanterns frolic across the slow roll of water as it flows under the bridge.
“That guard’s all bark and no bite. A pleasant change.” Tai-ge smiles as he kicks a loose pebble over the side of the bridge and runs to watch it plop into the water. I join him at the rail, eyeing the tollhouse, where the Watchman is still glaring at us.
UNITED TO STOP SLEEPING SICKNESS. The words painted on the old timbers of the bridge make my eyes dance away, back down to the water, where I don’t have to think.
We watch ripples from the fallen stone snake out wider and wider, bending the reflected light from the bridge into swirls. The pinpoint light of a patroller blinks across the rushing surface of the river, but it looks oddly big. As though the light smoldering in the river couldn’t possibly belong to an aircraft so high up above us.
“It’s almost dark,” I finally say, taking my eyes off the light and turning to Tai-ge. “Even you can’t charm your mother into letting me off if I’m late for reeducation with your father tonight.” But Tai-ge doesn’t look at me.
“Tai-ge?”
His eyes are still glued to the patroller’s reflection dancing across the surface of the dark water. We both look up, as if squinting at the light will force it to pass the way it’s supposed to instead of buzzing over us. The light grows brighter and brighter, larger, until I can hear the scream of its engines bearing down on us.
Kamar.
Tai-ge grabs my hand, dragging me toward solid ground, but the light in the sky falls, falls until all sound is blocked out, everything eclipsed by the bright flare of a bomb. My feet leave the ground and Tai-ge’s hand twists out of mine as I crash through the railing of the bridge. Splintered wood lashes across my arms and chest, tearing through the dark wool of my coat. I keep waiting for the cement-hard crash that will mean I’ve hit the water, but all I can feel is a high-pitched squeal that hums through me.
When the impact finally comes, it seems as though I’ve been falling for hours. I sink in slow motion, the inferno of cavorting lights above the river’s surface diluted and weak in the watery darkness above me. Something clicks in my overloaded brain, and I start to fight the water as it sucks me deeper. Panic blossoms in my chest when my lungs begin burning, all the air crushed out of me and what seems like an impossible distance to the surface. I pull off my boots and unbutton my jacket, slipping out of its heavy embrace. Still, even frantic kicking does not speed up the funeral crawl toward open air. The light becomes brighter until it’s almost unbearable, and then I break through the surface, gasping in frozen lungfuls of air.
Choking and sputtering, I flail for a few minutes until a chunk of wood bumps my head. I cling to it, coughing all the water out of my lungs before noticing the wood is painted red with one word: UNITED.
The bridge is gone. Plumes of fire above my head blast me with heat, reflections igniting all around me in the water. Face pressed against the plank, I don’t look back at the bridge until I am far enough away to feel the cold again. Small, ant-like figures scurry back and forth, frantically attempting to quell the flames devouring the splintered remains of the bridge. The beams splay out like broken teeth. Where is Tai-ge? No matter how hard I squint into the bubbling mass of people, my friend’s fate remains a hard knot of terror in my chest.
Large columns of smoke billow up from the flames. I can still see the lights of the attacking heli-plane in the sky getting smaller and smaller. On its way back to Kamar.
I take a painful breath and start kicking my socked feet toward the shore. I need to find Tai-ge, to make sure he is safe. At least, that is my intention until my mind starts wandering with cold. I wonder if Sister Lei will call the Watch when I don’t show up for reeducation with the General. The thought sends me off into a fit of giggles. I can just imagine arriving on the orphanage doorstep, sopping wet, trying to explain to the angry Watchman from the bridge why I missed my lesson.
I hazily realize that my fingers and toes are completely numb and that every kick toward the shore is getting weaker, slower. The curls of flame dancing on the bridge remind me of a troupe of fire dancers Tai-ge took me to see when I first started reeducation with his family.
When I start to imagine myself running through the flames in a pink leotard, my dream is interrupted by a soft thud. I am halfway off the board, not even kicking any longer, but by some chance of fate the pull of the river has sent my raft to shore. I know if I don’t get out of the water now, I might not get out at all. My limbs scream in protest, but my toes find the bottom and I manage to crawl out into some muddy grass.
No one is close enough to call for help. The crowds of people forming around the bridge have become one big animal-like blur, not a face to be seen. A prickle of fear needles through the fuzz coating my brain as I watch the shadows slither closer. Did that thing get Tai-ge? Will it come for me next?
The shadow thing will see me if I sit up, so I squirm down farther into the mud, clutching the board, not quite sure if it is still actively working to keep me alive. But hiding doesn’t work because my hands and feet are gone, and the huge black animal collapsing and trembling by the bridge sends two of its thousands of legs toward me. One wraps around my waist, lifting me high into the air while the other gags my mouth to stop my screaming. The slimy feelers wrap tighter and tighter around my ribs until I cannot breathe, and my vision goes black.