THAT NIGHT, THE DREAMS COME. Not the ones I used to have of being trapped inside my own body, paralyzed by SS. Now Cale visits me, a pile of Red corpses under her feet and her gun pointed at my head. June’s old clan—Tian, Cas, Parhat, and Liu—lying in pools of their own blood. A gore’s black eyes watch me from behind a curtain of vines, and Cale’s dead weight on my shoulders pins me to the ground when the monster charges. Mother. Her papery skin tearing under my fingers, her eyes vacant.
I wake in a sweat, fear wrapped tight around my ribs. Rolling over, I go through a calming ritual of finding June’s corn silk hair snarled across the rucksack she’s using for a pillow. Safe. Next, Tai-ge, the shadows sinking deeper into the creases in his face that I don’t remember being there before. Still alive. My breath catches at the blank space where Peishan and the kids are supposed to be, but then I remember: They’re up in the trees with Cai Ayi. Before, when we all squeezed together in the cockpit, they snuggled together in the corner, arms and hands and tear-smudged cheeks sprouting from the muddled pile of humans.
I force my eyes to close again, but I can’t stand the thought of sleep. Can’t let the dead creep into my head again. I’m so tired, though, my body won’t comply. Just as dreams start to twist my thoughts into stories, a noise scrapes my eyes back open. The whisper of metal brushing metal. Screwing my eyes shut, I wrap my fingers tight around the inhibitor spray.
I don’t hear the sound again. But that doesn’t stop me lying awake, waiting.
• • •
I must have fallen asleep, because I wake to Tai-ge at the control panel, the buzz of static in my ears. An echoing fear lances through me before I can brush it down as my brain tries to sort through the sounds that must have woken me. Voices squeezed through the tiny holes in the radio, Tai-ge whispering into the microphone . . .
I rub my eyes. Nightmares trying to claw their way into daylight. Tai-ge’s not talking to anyone over the radio. He’s listening to more reports. “Anything new?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Sleep okay?” I ask.
Tai-ge’s hands drag down his cheeks, as though pulling them off might wake him up. “Like a chicken waiting for his turn to be fried.”
“Let’s not wait any longer, then. We’ll eat, get our packs together.” I pull myself up from the sleeping bag. “Choose a landing spot far enough away from Dazhai that we’ll be able to get away before the Seconds can come find the heli. . . .”
June bolts up from her sleeping bag, almost like a bird diving for safety in the face of a predator. She grabs from our pile of potatoes, has the hatch open, and is down the ladder before I can finish my sentence. I glance back at Tai-ge, his mouth hanging open. He still isn’t used to June.
“Shall we continue this conversation outside?” I ask, pulling the sleeping bag down and extracting my legs.
He nods. “Yeah. Let me find Dazhai on the downloaded maps and plot a course first. I’ll be down in a sec. Throw a potato on the fire for me, would you?”
“Yes, sir.” I give him a mock salute and am gratified when it teases an almost-smile from my friend instead of festering at the back of his expression like an unwelcome memory. He’s going to be okay. All of this is going to be okay.
June glances up from kicking at the ashes of our fire ring when I come down, the Junis residue catching in the morning breeze adding a burned tinge to the air. I help her arrange wood from what we gathered the night before into something that might catch fire, though I suspect my presence is being tolerated rather than actually helping. By the time we have flames leaping between us, Tai-ge slides down the ladder. He rubs his eyes as he walks toward us, stomach audibly rumbling.
“Find what we need?” I ask.
“I think so.” He fiddles with the zip to his coat before looking back up. “I still feel like we’re doing this the hard way.”
June stands up, a potato in each hand. “Leftover rice up in the heli,” she informs me.
I blink at her, waiting for her to continue, but instead she turns around to start poking at the edge of the fire. Though I’m still not adept at interpreting June’s lack of words, I think that might have been a request for me to get the leftover rice.
As I pull myself through the hatch, a dull thud sounds from deep inside the heli, the sound of metal on glass making my skin crawl. Rodents? Rats lived in the walls back at the orphanage. They would come out at night, looking for bits of contraband food smuggled up to the rooms. I hate rats. More than spiders or mosquitoes or . . .
How could rats have found their way up the heli ladder?
I hear another thud, something moving around in the aircraft’s bulbous stomach, just behind the cargo bay’s barricaded doors—where I heard the sound last night. And then, quiet. I close my eyes, trying to rein in my imagination. Maybe rats can get up here. Really large . . . person-size rats.
Did Loss and Ze-ming follow us? Or could it be Menghu, tiger snarls on their faces to match the slavering insignia on their collars? Wood Rats, ready to strip the heli down? Dr. Yang, planning to slit our throats before we realize he’s here? Gores tearing through the broken metal? Or, worst of all, swarms and swarms of infected, crying for help beneath us, just waiting to break our bones and bite our fingers off one by one . . . I shake my head, trying to end the images, each more preposterous than the last.
June, too tired to climb up through the metal tears below like she usually does, pushed all the boxes away from the cargo bay doors before we went to sleep yesterday to check that nothing had snuck in. She’s inspected the empty space every day we’ve been out here, the threat of stowaways or hijackers much more likely this close to the Post. We’ve been so careful. There couldn’t be anyone back there. It must just be rats.
I reach for the chain that hooks over the handle to keep the door shut just to prove my fears wrong. As my hand touches the chain, something falls on the other side of the door, metal clattering as it hits. Accompanied by a hushed exclamation involving Yuan Zhiwei’s underclothing.
City rats? Who can swear.
I jerk back from the door, almost falling over as my foot catches in the folds of Tai-ge’s sleeping bag. Trying to be quiet, I slide through the hatch and back down the ladder, one hand clamped tight over my mouth. Tai-ge stands up when I get to the bottom, alarm twisting his eyebrows in a knot. June is nowhere to be seen, her leaf-wrapped potatoes left to cook at the base of our fire.
“Are you okay?” Tai-ge asks, looking me over as if there should be blood. “What’s wrong?”
I put a finger to my lips to shush him. “Did June climb up into the cargo bay?” I whisper, hoping against hope that it was her I heard.
Tai-ge shakes his head. “Why are we whispering?”
“There’s someone up there.”
His hand slips down to his side where a gun would normally hang, and he looks a little lost when there’s nothing to grab. We don’t have any more ammunition, so the guns are stashed up in the cockpit. “June ran off into the forest to . . .” Tai-ge stops. “Actually, I don’t know why she ran off into the forest. June doesn’t usually talk to me directly. How many people?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. One? Probably?”
“Did they hear you?”
“I . . . don’t think so.” It’s almost more disconcerting to see Tai-ge turn his calculating gaze toward the heli’s torn undersides than it is to see the longing in his eyes as he listens to Reds talk back and forth on the radio. We used to do tutoring sessions when his family was still in charge of brainwashing me back into City graces, but it was all history and ideology. I don’t like to think of Tai-ge as someone who knows how to mark a target.
“You make some noise up front with the door.” Tai-ge jumps up. “I’ll come in from underneath and take them by surprise.”
“You’re not trained for one-on-one fighting, are you? You were supposed to have some cushy job behind a desk.”
“I’ll be just fine, Sev. Even I had to work my way through normal combat training. ‘Believe you can conquer, and the world will bend.’ ”
“Is that a quote from Chairman Sun’s book of sayings . . . ?”
Tai-ge ducks under the heli instead of answering. I hop on the ladder’s bottom rung, watching until he’s ready to climb up into the tears in the heli’s belly before scrambling through the hatch. He doesn’t seem flustered or worried that someone has invaded the closest thing we have to a home. I feel violated, as though something sacred is broken.
Once inside, I’m so distracted by the sound of my own heartbeat thumping in my chest that I don’t notice the chain lock hanging limp against the cargo bay door until my hand is on the knob. Did June leave it loose last night? As I push the door open, it yanks out from under my hand, sending me stumbling into the cargo bay. Arms grab hold of me as I fall, pinning my arms to my sides.
The prick of a knife lights a line of fire under my chin. “Don’t move. Don’t yell.” The voice is male. Whispering, but calm. “Wait until your friend gets up here.”
That voice. Like the sting of alcohol on a cut as my brain tries to tell me I recognize it. Someone I heard speak in a dream, now come to life. I pull against him, curve around the arm pressing into my ribs so I can bite him, stomp on his feet, elbow his stomach. Anything to get away or warn Tai-ge. But jerking my head to the side only brings the knife closer, my breath drawing out in a gasp as the blade digs against my windpipe. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see scarring against the tan of my attacker’s hand. A First mark.
It can’t be. My brain refuses to process it. . . I try to cry out a warning, but before I can make a sound, Tai-ge’s head pops up through the jagged metal hole. When he spots me, the color drains from his face.
“Sevvy!” He scrambles up, eyes wide. “Let her go. You can have whatever you want. Just leave her alone.”
“Everyone. Calm. Down.” I can feel the man’s heartbeat through his coat, pumping fast. A metallic thud echoes through the room, and the man’s arms loosen. I push out of the circle of his grip, half running, half falling toward Tai-ge. He grabs me, and I spin around in time to see June hit my attacker again, the medikit sounding hollow as it strikes his head.
But the man still doesn’t fall, hood shadowing his face as he stumbles forward, barely catching himself on unsteady feet. Just in time to catch a full blast of my inhibitor spray to his face. The knife falls to the ground, hood pulling back an inch or two as the rest of him goes down.
Which is when I start to scream. Because all the disbelief and horror attempting to shield me from the truth fall away. Of course I know his voice.
It’s Howl.