ESTABLISHMENT DAWNS WITH NEW FALLEN snow. I can’t see it or taste it, cloistered in Sole’s room the way I’ve been for days, but the air feels different. Patrols are all coming in for the festivities tonight, wet with the sky’s melted offering.
Sole bars the door as passing field medics stop to say hello. Excitement buzzes through the halls, conversations humming constantly outside the door. Even hidden beneath the wig and a long white Yizhi uniform, I feel exposed, as if whoever was slated to cut me open will notice the line of my skull or the width between my eyes and recognize me.
When Sole has to leave for Establishment games, she locks me in. “My ID chip will open this door, but no one else can just walk in. Don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
“You’re kidding, right? I’m not dumb enough to let anyone in here.”
Sole’s head ticks sideways and she blinks four times in a row before answering. “Yes. It was meant to be a joke. Here, Howl told me to give you this.”
She holds out a book, and I recognize the sleeping princess on the front. Sleeping Beauty, but with a happy ending. I take it, and Sole wipes her hand on her tunic three times, as if trying to destroy some unseen germ colony deposited on her hand from something so old and dirty.
The whole time I’ve been stuck in Sole’s room, she’s been kind. Kind but odd. Staring at the wall for long periods of time, never making eye contact. Laughing when we haven’t even been talking. But it’s less unnerving than it was at first.
The only thing that bothers me anymore is the way she looks at the gore tooth strung between the four stars and my mother’s jade around my neck. I had to hide it away in my pocket. Every time her eyes touched my neck, it felt like she wanted to take a bite out of me.
Sole gave me her medic pack, full of food, water purifiers, medicine, a hammock. A padded jacket with rough fur lining the hood. A huge brown blotch stains the left side, but I don’t care to ask where it came from. The hours left to wait seem to be stretching out as I pace, hundreds of times longer than they should be. If only I had someone to play weiqi with.
The book could be good company for the last hours I have to wait, but I’m still not sure I can bring myself to open it.
I reorganize my things in the borrowed pack one last time before settling down on the bed to look at the peaceful sleep of the princess on the book’s cover. The long hours of silence have been painful. Thinking hurts too much. About being cured, about my mother and why she really left. There are so many pieces still missing, but for the first time, the raw edges of hurt where she lives in my chest aren’t nauseating pains of betrayal. It’s just a sad story that I don’t know the ending to yet. What if, just like Howl said, Sleeping Beauty really does wake up? What if she isn’t really the villain after all? And if she isn’t, who is?
It hurts. Every thought of her still leaves me feeling broken and alone. But now I can ask her myself. I can have the truth from her lips.
I check for the syringe that Howl pressed into my hand before we parted. It’s the same syringe I remember seeing in Dr. Yang’s office, mounted on a plaque like some great award. Howl told me that Dr. Yang was a member of the research team my mother headed, studying the effects of SS. But he discovered this instead: Suspended Sleep. Similar to the first stages of SS, induced by a simple injection, but controllable. This syringe is full of the only thing that can wake the subject up.
He gave up everything, his First status, his family, to follow Mother here, thinking that his breakthrough might be a step toward the cure. Instead, the First Circle used his discovery to put mother to Sleep.
Maybe he regrets it now. Making the poison that closed her eyes forever.
Breaking out tonight is still the best plan we can come up with. With most people inside celebrating Establishment, there won’t be as many patrols or guards out. Howl will put in an appearance at the festivities tonight so no one will go looking for him until morning.
I put the book down, not sure I can handle the hope that a happy ending would open up inside of me. Stories are just stories, however much we want to believe them.
Sole’s room is small, a bed and a desk packed into the tiny room. Piles of paperwork black with spidery handwriting spill over the scarred wooden surface of the desk, a few loose leafs on the floor and under the chair. I turn one over and it’s an inky monster, black teeth bared in a snarl. Next to the beast, a little girl cowers, hiding her head under her arms.
Pushing the sketch away from me, I notice a drawer that is cracked open, a set of eyes staring out from the gap. I pull the drawer open and four people look up at me from the blacks and grays of a framed watercolor. A family of four, mischievous grins matching across all of their faces. The mother has Sole’s clear blue eyes, the color scratched in long after the original paint dried, her hand intertwined with that of the man standing next to her. The young man seated in front of them looks a little too straight-backed for the grin on his face, probably elbowing the younger girl sitting next to him. She would be just like Sole except for the unmistakable joy in her face.
I don’t notice another person in the room until a hand comes down across their faces, grabbing the portrait away from me. Sole holds the picture to her chest, eyebrows drawn low. “What do you think you are doing?”
“I-I-I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”
The anger on Sole’s face drains at my downcast eyes, leaving the contrite apology hovering between us. She sighs, running her fingers along the wooden frame. “You can look if you want.”
She takes a long look at them, nose close to the glass, before holding it back out toward me, pointing to the young man. “He taught me to shoot a gun. Chan.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes. They were all . . . They all died together. About ten years ago. In the forest. The Reds . . .” She shivers as though trying to shake the memory loose. “It’s still difficult to talk about. They were trying to steal food from one of the convoys going to the City.”
“I’m so sorry.” It’s uncomfortable to watch her, raw grief quaking through her.
“When it first happened, I was so angry.” She glances at me. “I’m sure they’ve told you. The moment I was old enough, I joined the Menghu. I was the worst of them. Completely out of control. Took out every Red I came across. Signed up for every mission. I hardly ate or slept, I was so busy taking revenge for what the City did to my family.”
I hand the picture back to her, Kasim’s words coming back to me. One of the best . . . She sees the question in my face before I can hide it away, too personal to ask.
“You want to know why I stopped.” She pulls a stray hair behind her ear with a trembling hand. “Why I shake and can’t look anyone in the eye.”
She abruptly turns away from me, walks back toward the bathroom, leaving the picture on the table. When she comes back, there’s a box in her arms, rattling with each step. It drops to the floor at my feet with a clatter.
“I started taking things from the people I killed. Little things, so I could keep track. For my parents, for my brother.”
Sole, too? “You mean like the bracelets they all wear?”
“I think I was the first to keep score.” Sole’s voice is dead. “Though I never took fingers.”
I back up a step, my legs hitting her bed. Sole has always seemed like she didn’t fit in somehow, as if she was rebelling against something here, so when it was Sole who hid me in her tub, I didn’t question it. Suddenly, that seems like a gross misjudgment.
She points to the box, sending a chill down my spine. Is she even worse than the rest, with a box of severed ears or bloody feet in her bathroom? When I don’t bend down to look inside, Sole pulls the lid away herself, thrusting her hands down inside.
A doll. One that I’ve seen before.
The City mass-manufactures the same doll for all the kids. I had one when I was little. I remember her braided yarn hair and her red uniform. Did Sole kill children, too? I feel myself shrinking farther and farther down against the bed, wondering if I jumped off the operating table just to land in the butcher shop.
Her eyes eat at the doll, voice evaporating from her lips so I scarcely catch the words. “About six years ago, on patrol, we found a set of Reds outside the City. A man and a woman. We shot them before they could even blink, heads blown open all over their gear. The tent was ripped to shreds, but then a little girl rolled out and started to run. That’s when I realized that they weren’t Reds, they were just a family trying to escape the City. But my partner shot her before she ran five steps.”
“She cried while she died. I held her, but she was scared of me. I made it worse. They could have been my family. Running away from the Reds and their guns, the Firsts and their experiments. All dead.” Tears trail down Sole’s face, and she holds the doll to her chest as if it’s a real child. I lean over to look in the box, full of odds and ends. Books, rocks, rings and necklaces. “I keep them now to remember what I’ve done. I switched over to Yizhi, but no matter how many lives I save, I can’t give any of these back. I can’t give back the lives I’ve taken.
“The Menghu can’t remember that people out there, even City-born, are people. That they have families, parents, brothers and sisters, kids. That they all deserve a chance to live, to grow old with the ones they love. I can’t keep taking away from them what some stupid Red took from me. The Menghu think it is a game, a tally.” Her voice starts to shake with emotion. Anger. “It’s worse than SS. They choose to be monstrous.”
“Why do you stay here, then?” I ask.
“I have to make up for what I’ve done. Even if it means saving the monsters who are making it worse. They are people too, even if they’ve forgotten.”
The sentence sticks in my head, and I remember the Red I refused to kill back in the forest. “We need to do something. To stop this.”
Sole looks tired, lifting her gaze to hold mine for the first time since she grabbed the painting from my hands. “I am. Getting you out of here . . .” She gestures to the door. “That is all I can do.”
Her eyes jump between me and the door, and for a second I think she might run away—run from her past. But when she speaks, it is for me. Needle sharp. “But before you go out there, before you put your life in Howl’s hands, you need to know something about him.
“My partner . . .” Her voice breaks, the jagged fragments slicing through her composure. “My partner, the one who shot the little girl? That was Howl.”