HER VOICE IS SOFT IN my dream, the slow words familiar. “She could not wake, trapped by the spell. Asleep.” A bedtime story.
I try to look at her, but my eyelids won’t open. They never do when I dream about the time I spent Asleep. Her hand brushes mine, and I want to grab it, to hold on to her, but my fingers won’t move, my voice won’t obey when I tell it to call out to her. My whole body is so still I might as well be dead, except I can hear her. I can feel her. I’m paralyzed, begging for my muscles to respond.
“Sleep settled over the whole kingdom: the cook, the butcher, the guards. The horses and cows. Even the flies. Waiting for one brave enough to break the spell.”
Frozen. Inside, I start to scream.
The beautiful voice breaks. “I’m so sorry, little rose . . .” And then again, again. The painful words chime in my head, growing darker and darker as they twist around me. A monster’s growl that squeezes the breath from my lungs, claws sinking in because I cannot move, I cannot run. My eyes will not open. I have to escape, have to break away, but I am stuck. No one can hear my voice. No one will ever hear the screams trapped in my mouth.
The world cracks apart, and I gasp, air slashing my lungs to shreds. My head feels as though it’s about to cave in, pressure from trying to open my eyes threatening to split skin and bone.
I roll over and pain tears through my abdomen. A hands presses against my shoulder, as if the owner wants me to stay Asleep forever. Suddenly, all I can see are tentacles and a black creature squeezing me, the fallen timbers from the bridge burning all around me.
“Sev? Sevvy?” a panicked voice cries. “Someone help!”
The pressure against my head pushes harder until I realize it’s my hands covering my eyes, blocking out the light. Shaking, I draw my hands away from my face, my own whitewashed walls and ceiling too bright after the darkness of my nightmare. A face swims above me, familiar but I can’t place it. Terror floods over me as the person pins my shoulders against my pillow, threatening to steal my breath and fill my lungs, to leave me cold and still at the bottom of the river. Awake, to feel myself drowning forever.
“Sevvy, please! I’m right here. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Please just calm down. . . .”
The voice pours like honey into my ears, slowing everything down until I recognize Tai-ge’s face only inches from mine, lips drawn tight with fear.
I’m not Asleep. Not trapped forever in my own body, waiting for the day the doctors say I’m lost. For them to burn me.
Not enough room for burials inside the City walls.
A nun bangs through the door. “Is she compulsing? Hold her still!”
“No . . .” The word grates in my throat, catching with every wave of pain cascading up from my ribs. What happened to me? I remember walking with Tai-ge and fire and . . . something dark and alien all around me.
The nun pulls my arm from my side, sending a jolt of pain through my middle. It’s Sister Shang, a syringe ready in hand.
“No! I’m not having a compulsion.” My voice tears through my throat, barely coming out in a hoarse whisper. I try to relax my arm, knowing if I pull against her, the terror of sleep will return at the tip of her syringe. “But if you touch me with that needle, I think I can come up with a better compulsion than lying in bed. Like maybe cutting all your hair off and selling it to Wood Rats as a fire starter.” The joke rolls off my tongue, as if pretending that scavenging Outsiders are reasonable enough to trade with will drown out the sound of Mother’s hollow apologies still ringing in my ears.
“I’d have to grow it out first. Or did you mean Tai-ge’s?” Sister Shang rubs her bald scalp as she pulls the syringe away from me. She’s one of the nuns I actually like, usually ready with a joke or an off-the-books snack for days when the factories don’t take normal human eating habits into consideration as they schedule orphan hours. “You should be a little more grateful, seeing as it was Tai-ge who found you half-drowned and dragged you to the medics. But if you aren’t set on shattering your windows and shaving poor passersby with the glass pieces, then you can take a more conventional dose of Mantis. You’re due.” She sticks a hand into her brown robe and holds out a packet, two green pills inside.
I take them, holding them carefully in my palm as my breaths come in painful wheezes. What is wrong with me?
Sister Shang watches me for a moment, as if to be sure I’m not about to cut Tai-ge’s nose off before leaving. The door squeaks as she walks out.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, only now able to take in Tai-ge’s battered appearance. His arm is in a red mesh sling, a splint sticking out from underneath his hand, and shallow cuts line cheeks and jaw, as though he washed his face using a bowl of broken glass. That arm looks broken. How did he drag me anywhere with a broken arm? “Was it an SS bomb? Are you—”
“I’m fine, Sevvy.” He sort of smiles, cradling his arm as he settles onto the other bed in my room. Peishan’s. It’s been stripped of sheets, bare mattress bending under him as he sits. “I haven’t fallen Asleep or tried to kill or maim anyone, members of the Watch excluded. You, however, have been unconscious for a day and a half and have at least two broken ribs. You scared me just now.”
There’s a hint of question in his voice that I don’t care to answer. I lie very still in bed, every movement sending a jolt of pain through my abdomen, each one grasping at me like the tentacles and darkness from the waking nightmare at the bridge. The hallucination.
I’ve never had a compulsion before, and he knows it. I don’t think that is what he means, though, and suddenly I’m worried I said something in the last throes of my dream or did something to alert him. I may never have had a compulsion, but SS has definitely done other things to my brain I don’t have the courage to explain. Compulsions make you believe things that aren’t true, dire things, horrible things. They don’t make you see things that aren’t there.
The monster grabbing me at the bridge is not the first time I’ve seen the world warp around me, letting in monsters and ghosts that should not exist. I’m already like a piece of faulty machinery here in the City, gumming everything up. What would they do to me if they knew my mind was broken too?
I can’t bring myself to tell Tai-ge. Not him or anyone else. I’ve never heard of any other SS victim actually hallucinating, confusing the darkness inside with the things going on right in front of them. It isn’t even what the First Circle would do if they found out that scares me most. What would Tai-ge think if he knew that I’m not just infected? That it’s worse than that.
I change the subject. “I’ve been asleep for a day and a half? Has the canning shift officer come to drag me out in front of the Watch yet? Or is that what you meant by wanting to maim the Watch?”
Tai-ge reaches for a tray balanced on the chest at the end of my bed and pulls it onto his lap, a bowl of cold rice, cooked cabbage, and what looks like canned peaches next to a glass of water. His fingers wrap around the glass, swirling it once before handing it to me and looking meaningfully at the Mantis pills still sitting on my palm. “I couldn’t find you that night. I was worried. . . .”
I wait, something other than pain uncurling from under my ribs, my eyes locked on his face with an irrational hope that he’ll finish the sentence. But the door opens, and Tai-ge looks up, one of the other girls who lives on my floor freezing halfway into the room when she sees Tai-ge. “I was looking for Peishan. . . . Sorry.” She backs out, fear of interrupting a Red General’s son chasing her down the hall.
Sighing, I take a sip of the water and swallow my pills.
Tai-ge takes the glass back and sets it and the tray aside. “It took some arguing to get them to take you to a medic at all. And when the medic got a good look at you, I thought he was going to faint. I had to shove my stars in his face before he even let me put you down. He still might turn himself in for aiding Jiang Gui-hua’s daughter.”
People stopped staring in the streets years ago, and even the Watch hardly notices me anymore. My long hair helps to hide it, but my face belongs to my mother, right down to the birthmark that spreads out from my ear to my cheek. Every comrade has her face branded in their memories along with a good dose of fear and disgust. I rub my cheek thoughtfully and wince at the sliced skin, realizing that my face must look a bit like Tai-ge’s right now. “He should have just finished me off. I bet Chairman Sun would have given him a medal. Or maybe a red uniform.”
“He was an army medic, double stars and all. No shabby Third doctors for a celebrity like you, Sevvy.”
“A single star, then.” Not that they actually let anyone add or subtract stars. You couldn’t get rid of the hash marks detailing your place in the world even if you wanted to, not unless you wanted to risk looking as though your marks had been burned off entirely like mine. Even if that weren’t the case, rewarding comrades for good work with a new set of stars would make people aspire. Compete. Competition makes for arguments and anger instead of duties well performed, according to General Hong. But I don’t let the General’s chiding voice in my head stop me from making fun. “One star and a job treating nosebleeds up in the First Quarter. Or whatever it is they’re excited about this week. Did I see a new pamphlet about a breakthrough in bone remodeling?”
Tai-ge shakes his head, smiling. “So chipper. At least you’re off your shifts at the cannery with your injuries. Should I figure out how to get myself a pair of broken ribs and get out of all the extra duties father is giving to me? It doesn’t look so bad.”
“It just hurts to move. And breathe. And think. I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, I want my money back. I’ll just go shake my fist a little at the guard on the bridge. Want to come?”
Tai-ge sobers a little, twirling the ring on his finger as he does when he’s uncomfortable, the City seal stark against the gold. “He didn’t make it. They found him downstream in pieces. I think the bomb hit his office dead-on. He left a wife and two kids, both in the youth corps of the Liberation Army. Between you and him, this bombing made a big enough stir for even the Chairman to notice.”
The Chairman? He actually came out of wherever it is he commands from up on the Steppe because of me? Curiosity bristles inside of me, battling the flash of regret that flames in my cheeks for making fun of a dead man.
Tai-ge’s face slides into something even more reserved. “Which means you should probably avoid shaking your fist at anyone for the next few days. Maybe not even make eye contact.”
“I’m not the one who . . .” I trail off. Tai-ge already knows I’m not the one who killed the Watchman, but there are some who won’t look closely at facts, only that I was there. Casting about for something to say, I ask, “Is the Chairman upset? Or is it your mother I have to worry about? You wouldn’t have been down on the bridge at all if it weren’t for me. Did it take a bomb to convince her that I’m not salvageable as a comrade?”
“No. Well, I hope not.” Tai-ge’s voice is a little strained. “Just stay here. Do what the nuns tell you to do. I’m not allowed to say anything else. But you didn’t do anything wrong. This will pass.”
“Didn’t do anything wrong?” A thrill of fear marches up my arms, and rubbing them sends jolts of pain through my middle. “What do you mean? What will pass?”
“I can’t talk about it.” Tai-ge frowns. “Stay here and you’ll be fine. I’m glad you’re awake. I’ll check in later to make sure . . .” He shrugs again as he stands, blinking as if he hasn’t slept in days, and starts for the door. “Oh, and Sevvy”—Tai-ge turns back, pointing a finger at me—“don’t think for a moment that pity is going to get you out of repercussions for trying to destroy my reports. My great-great-grandfather is probably trying to cross back over and kill you as we speak.”
“Don’t know what you are talking about.” I keep a straight face. “I would never touch your family shrine. Or any of your fancy Watch reports.”
“Bringing the City down, one wax-smudged document at a time.” Tai-ge’s smile is real now, stretching wide. “I’m on to you, Fourth. And the nuns wouldn’t notice if I lit your mattress on fire or snuck a baby gore in to sleep in the extra bed, so you’d better watch out. Those broken ribs should be the least of your worries.” With that, he’s gone.
I let my own smile curl for a moment, then struggle to sit up so I can watch him leave the orphanage through my window. But, when I’m upright enough to see the street outside, all thoughts of Tai-ge and smiles flee. Outside, the street is filled with Watchmen, and not the normal City Watch either. The simple cut and subdued colors of their jerkins mark these men as Outside patrollers. Men who are used to death and killing, to hunting and being hunted. Men who have firsthand experience of what untreated SS looks like when left to rot in an infected brain.
The Reds salute Tai-ge as he leaves. He looks back more than once with a troubled expression on his face as he heads off toward the Second Quarter, where he belongs.