THE LAND LOOKS BRUISED AND purple under the sun-killing clouds by the time we set down in the field June pointed to on the map. Buildings stare at us from across the wide expanse, blank-eyed and dark. Their rooftops bow under the weight of years, jagged holes in their walls where the bricks have been stolen.
Abandoned. That’s what this farm is.
What looked like fields on the map is a clogged mess of low shrubs and grass. The City hasn’t been here for years, by the look of it. I glance over at the buildings, the thought of eyes watching us from inside shivering through me.
Tai-ge pulls open the heli’s hatch, but June puts a hand on his arm to stop him from going out. “How likely are there to be people here we should be worried about?” Tai-ge asks. “Scavengers? Sephs taking shelter? We already have to keep an eye on the sky to make sure no one followed us.”
June grabs the binoculars and a flashlight for an answer and heads toward the hatch. She’s never used the flashlight as a light source while scouting; I think she just likes how heavy it is, as if in a past life it was a bludgeon. A featherlight gust of wind wisps up through the hatch when she pulls it open.
“What if there are gores?” I dart to the ladder, about to climb down after her, but she waves me off. I know we can’t risk not scouting, and she’s made it clear on several occasions that my help is a hindrance, but it’s hard to stand here doing nothing. I move to the console, where I’ll be able to see her through the front windows, as if watching June will somehow keep her safe.
“I don’t know why you keep talking about gores like they’re going to pop up and tear us all to shreds.” Tai-ge’s eyes follow June as she makes a round of the field, then peeks into the buildings one by one. “Those stories that Outside patrollers tell are ridiculous.”
“Gores are not made up, Tai-ge.” June disappears into another of the dilapidated buildings, flashes of gold hair and pale skin showing through the holes marking the walls. “I might have spent half my time Outside hallucinating, but—”
“That’s my guess about what you saw. Hallucinations would make anything seem worse. I’ve been Outside for weeks now. Wouldn’t we have seen evidence of huge savage creatures that like to snack on fingers and toes?” Tai-ge leans against the console next to me and puts a hand on my shoulder when I don’t respond. “Are you okay, Sevvy?”
I look away from the window as June trots off into the trees, her little frame lost in the darkness. “What?”
“Are you okay?” Tai-ge lets his hand drop down my arm, settling it on the console right next to mine. He feels warm standing so close. “I mean, none of us are okay, exactly. But you seem even less okay than you did before.”
I look down at our hands, the traitor star burned between my pointer finger and thumb a horror next to the two smooth scars marking him a Second. A line of brown scabs pokes out from his sleeve, a crescent shape that looks suspiciously like a bite.
“I’m fine, Tai-ge. Take off your coat. We’ll put some more anmicro on your arms.”
“Don’t worry about it. The scabs pull, but I think we’ve kept up on them enough that they’re not infected.” He pulls me away from the console, waiting until I have no choice but to meet his eyes. “I’m worried about you, Sev.”
“I said I’m fine.” Taking a step away from him, I turn to the problem I wish I could ignore. The storage closet almost seems to smolder and distort at the edges, as if it’s a door into the eighteen levels of hell instead of the only barrier between me and the boy I didn’t ever want to see again. “I mean . . . I will be once we decide what we’re going to do with that.” I point to the door. “Once we’ve got maps. And when we get to Port North before Dr. Yang does.”
Tai-ge nudges my shoulder, narrowing the space I put between us. “You know the tubes that were in Sun Yi-lai’s things? I thought at first they were some kid of weapon, or hiding something inside, but they’re just rolls of paper. Shall we have a look? Maybe it will give us a better idea of what he was trying to accomplish.”
“You know, I am sitting right here.” I flinch, Howl’s voice muffled from inside the closet. So he can hear us. “Just open the door. I’ll tell you what they are.”
“It’s fine.” Tai-ge lowers his voice, as if speaking too loud would shatter me into a million pieces. “He can’t get out of there.” He crouches by the console, opening the small compartment where we found the binoculars and a few other odds and ends. Now there are five tightly rolled papers, each a crisp white, about as long as my arm, and sealed with City wax. Carefully extracting the one on top, Tai-ge runs his hands down the length of the tube, fingers stalling on the falcon-and-beaker seal. “Do you remember the time we snuck into the market square with some of Mother’s saved ration cards? It was the year those red beetles came out of the walls of the orphanage. You wanted a scarf, but they wouldn’t give you enough cards to get one.”
I blink, the change of subject whistling through me like vertigo. “Yeah . . . I guess. But . . .”
He peels the wax back carefully, using only his fingertips, playing with it as it goes soft in his hand. “You were going to cut the ends off so you could hide little bits in Sister Lei’s bed so she’d think the beetles were living in her sheets. It took all afternoon to convince you to get a black one instead and to leave that poor old lady alone.” He smiles. “Black looked better on you, anyway.”
It didn’t take all afternoon. Since when did I ever have an afternoon to argue over scarves in the marketplace? I brush the annoyed thought away. “What you don’t know is that I did cut off the ends of the black one. She thought they were spiders, and it was even better,” I retort. “And you’re lucky I didn’t do it to you too.”
“You would have put real spiders in my bed.” His smile almost erases the statue-like lines in his expression. Tai-ge never was one to laugh out loud. He hoarded his smiles almost as carefully as June holds on to her words, and the moments he chose to share one have always made me stop and pay attention, as if he’s entrusting me with part of his soul. I lower myself to the floor next to him. “Did Sister Lei ever figure it out?” Tai-ge asks, batting my arm with the paper tube. “She couldn’t have, or I would have heard about it in . . .”
And just like that, the memory sours. I reach for the tube, peeling up the last of the wax and smoothing the paper across the floor. Tai-ge would have known because it would have been in my reeducation reports. The Hongs knew everything about me. They probably knew the weight of my bowel movements and how many times a day I brushed my hair.
I wrinkle my nose. Hopefully not the bowel movements.
“I just . . .” Tai-ge smiles again, and there’s a trace of my old friend somewhere deep inside him. The one who didn’t clench his jaw so hard. The one who didn’t see his dad torn to pieces two weeks ago. “I just wish things were less . . . not okay. Do you remember before?” The smile thins to a line, an uncommitted lack of expression too complete to be natural. “Do you remember how nothing used to matter? The most exciting thing that happened would be finding you’d dyed my face soap green, or the two of us hiding from the nuns to sneak in an extra game of weiqi.” Tai-ge puts his hands down on the paper to smooth it out, deliberatly brushing his palm across the back of my hand as he does so, and letting it rest there. “I miss us from before.”
It’s like a jolt of electricity shooting up my arm, and I’ve jerked away and folded my arms tight around my middle before I can properly think it through. Tai-ge crouches so close to me I can feel his body heat through my coat where our shoulders touch. He doesn’t move, staring down at the paper on the ground as if I didn’t just pull away from him like a little girl stung by a bee.
What’s wrong with me? It’s not like I’ve never touched Tai-ge before. It’s just that there was always a wall there, a bright red wall with a general’s title hammered into the bricks. Every time he looked at me, I felt as though our friendship was an impossible conundrum of sunlight shining through broken glass. The light was there, glittering, warm, inviting, but reaching out to touch it would have left both of us with cuts.
I’d still wanted to.
I’d wanted to more than I could stand, back when all we did was play practical jokes and illicit games of weiqi. Tai-ge was one of the few people who seemed to remember I was a person, no matter how many times his mother told him I was too damaged to be fixed.
It was Tai-ge’s name that convinced me to leave the City with Howl, running from the executioner’s ax because it might have sliced through my friend too. I did miss Tai-ge when we were apart, but I don’t miss living under the shadow of Traitor’s Arch, waiting for the day it would take me. I don’t miss anything about the City, and the very idea of going back to the way things were before feels like trying to cram myself into a box that’s too small.
But that’s not where we’re going. Tai-ge is here now. With me. He chose me.
He takes his time looking up, and when he meets my eyes, he doesn’t blink. The rebellion of sitting so close to Hong Tai-ge, General Hong’s son, thrills me. Looking back at him straight on, not moving away . . . it’s a challenge to what we were, what the City said could and couldn’t happen between us. The silence in the cockpit is heavy between us, a breath before something happens.
“Sevvy . . .” He’s leaning toward me now. The air is honey, stuck in my throat, choking me.
The door to Howl’s prison creaks, as if he’s leaning up against the wood. The sound releases all the air in my lungs in a huff, and I jerk back.
Before I can say anything, June’s light footsteps ping up the ladder, and her head appears through the hatch. “No one here. Not for a week at least,” she says, glancing from me to Tai-ge, squinting.
“Good. Thank you for checking, June.” I fill the awkward silence.
She nods, then walks to her rucksack to pull out her waterskin. I can’t look at Tai-ge as he gathers himself together, letting my eyes fall back to the paper instead. It’s waxy, sticking to my fingers as I smooth it out, the edges protesting after being rolled so tightly. The lines waving over the paper in tight swirls and circles don’t make much sense.
Tai-ge leans closer to the paper, and the air still feels tight in my lungs, everything stretched until it’s about to snap. I keep my eyes on his fingers as they follow the ebb and flow of the lines. “I think they’re maps.”
I glance toward Howl’s closet when the door creaks again. “Why would he have brought maps with him?”
“I don’t know. You said he spent time with the rebels.” Tai-ge pulls up a corner of the heavy paper, examining the lines and numbers splattered across its face. “Could this be some kind of rebel notation of the area?”
“They all have a City seal on them.” I draw another of the paper tubes out from under the control panel, fingers finding the red wax already pried up.
June rustles through one of the food bags and then sidles over, a slice of dried pear in her hand. She squints at the wavy lines on the paper spread across the floor. Setting her pear down, she takes the paper in my hands and unwinds it on the floor in front of her.
“Why do you think they are maps, Tai-ge?” I ask.
“I don’t know. They sort of look like the encryptions of routes we flew back when I was finishing my pilot training. They kept all the big maps—the complete pictures—locked away in the City. You only saw those if you needed to.” Tai-ge slides over to examine the second paper, similarly covered in dots, lines, and numbers, though the flow is different from the first one we unrolled. “These lines are almost definitely topographical, and maybe the numbers give coordinates? Specific sites? I don’t know.” He looks toward Howl’s room.
I push off from the desk, moving between Tai-ge and the storage closet. “No.”
June looks up, startled by my quick movement. Tai-ge’s hands scrub across his mouth, and he goes back to staring down at the nonsensical mess of numbers and lines. “He could tell us, Sevvy.”
“No.”
“No?” Tai-ge stands up, facing me, his voice soft. “What’s our plan? To sneak into Dazhai and hope we stumble on something with ‘Port North’ starred in bold and step-by-step directions how to get there? He came straight to us, and I’m almost sure they are maps. . . .”
“Would you trust a gore if it told you it could lead you across the forest?” I counter. “Or do you really believe it wouldn’t take you straight back to its hutch?”
“More gores, Sevvy?” Tai-ge’s voice rises a fraction. “We have very important information about countering SS when everyone we know is living in fear under a mask. You won’t go to the Seconds. Now you won’t even look at the information dumped in our lap. Were you hoping we could just keep flying until the sky opens and points out where to land? We need help.” He points to the closed storage closet. “He would have had access to the bigger maps back in the City.” He turns to June, who shrinks back a fraction, even though he isn’t yelling. “How long was Sun Yi-lai in the cargo bay?”
June’s eyes stay down. “A day.”
“So he might have even seen maps from the camps after the invasion. . . .”
“No, he wouldn’t have, because he’s not the Chairman’s son, Tai-ge! What’s it going to take for you to listen to me?” Heat seeps into my cheeks, my voice coming out in a whispered rasp, as if I can keep Howl from hearing what I’m saying.
But Howl answers me anyway, each word an icy blade down my back. “I brought you the information you need, Sev.”
Fear trickles down my neck. How did Howl know we were looking for anything?
“I want to help,” he continues. “Open the door. You know I don’t bite.”
“Stabbing and shooting are not preferable to biting,” I yell back, pacing the length of the heli. There’s nowhere to go in this tiny space.
“Last I checked, it was you guys who were trying to shoot me.” Something thuds against his door as if he hit the back of his head against it for emphasis.
“We should at least see what he has to say.” Tai-ge’s voice is too calm, a mediator trying to soothe me down. “Unless you’d rather radio in and try to get some information from the Seconds. We might be able to do it without giving up who we are—” Tai-ge breaks off as one of the smaller packs of rice hits him in the shoulder. June startles back, looking between me and the bag as if she can’t believe I threw it.
“Bloody dismembering Sephs, Tai-ge, we cannot talk to the Reds. We can’t listen to anything Howl says. That’s how he got me to . . .” I stutter to a stop, the heli suddenly feeling very, very quiet. Tai-ge stares at me, his mouth open. I don’t think I’ve ever yelled at him before. I’ve definitely never thrown anything at him before.
I clear my throat. “We don’t know how Howl found us. What if those Reds after us at the Post were because of him? Maybe they weren’t Reds. Menghu can change clothes just as well as you or I can.” I gesture to my threadbare Liberation Army jerkin. Only weeks ago I was wearing Menghu green. “You don’t understand. There are only two reasons he would come after us. . . .”
A loud thud echoes from Howl’s door, as if he hit it again. “What is wrong with you, Sev? What do you think changed? When did I magically turn into a killer?”
“You lied about everything!” I scream.
“You’re the one who just left!” he yells back.
“I’m not doing this.” I go to the hatch, hardly waiting for it to hiss open before I start down the ladder. “I can’t do this. Good luck to you all; I’m sleeping outside.”
“With the gores? Come on, Sev. Just sit down, I’ll make you some tea.” Tai-ge almost looks as if he’s about to laugh, half of it reserved for the gores he can’t quite believe in because he hasn’t seen them with his own eyes. How could he see anything in Howl but what he thinks he knows? Howl looks just like the City’s imperial family, down to the portrait hanging in the City Center. It’s not in Tai-ge to see anything but test tubes, tassels, and a golden soul from someone he thinks is a First. Before he could believe, he’d probably have to see Howl in a tiger-snarled coat, dancing with the other Menghu across the Mountain’s sunken amphitheater floor like a prince from the dead pages of a book.
That’s what it took for me to truly see it. That Howl wasn’t any of the things he’d told me.
“I don’t want tea.” I stomp down the ladder, the rungs shaking with each step. “I’m sleeping outside. Better to be with the gores, the ghosts, and the Sephs than in here wondering whether or not Howl is going to slit my throat. I’ll see you in the morning.”