WHEN THE SUN IS FULLY up, we reach the river we saw from up in the heli. Snowflakes float down to us like a light sprinkling of ash. We walk along the bank of the river until June veers up the mountainside to a cluster of boulders. They lie just under the swell of a hill, a tree growing almost directly on top of them. June points up into the tortured twists of its branches, a snowcapped bundle of something stuck near the top, as if a giant took off his threadbare coat and left it there.
They’re sticks and strings of dried grass. A bird’s nest.
June pulls her rucksack off, then creeps up over one of the boulders, dragging the bag behind her. I follow her up, stowing my pack next to hers in the open chink of space between the ground and the stone. Tai-ge opens his pack, pulling something from inside before he shoves it under the rock next to mine. The ground is dry where the tree and the hill’s curve protect the spot from the snow, though there’s a littering of odd black clumps in the tree’s twisted roots. I pick one up, turning it over in my hand.
The clump isn’t dirt. It’s soft, with bone-hard bits of white. . . . I drop it with a curse as it begins to come apart in my hands, and wipe my fingers on my pants. The white things are bone. Owl pellets.
“What’s the matter?” Tai-ge asks, his chin folding awkwardly as he tries to look down his own shirtfront. He has a pair of red stars in his hand, jabbing them awkwardly into his collar.
I look away, pointing up at the nest precariously perched in the tree above us. “There’s an owl.”
Tai-ge takes a careful step back, smoothing his collar down, the pin like drops of blood against his neck. I don’t like the way it looks so suited to his collar, almost as if putting it on made my friend complete. He looks up at the jumble of weeds and branches above us, ignoring June as she shoots us both annoyed looks before hoisting herself over the rock to wait for us on the other side.
It would be an owl’s nest standing watch over our packs. Owls and their ghostly calls in the night, a warning that death is coming.
“It looks abandoned, Sevvy.” Tai-ge pulls the growth regulator pack we bought from Cai Ayi and sticks it in a small bag looped over his shoulder. He climbs up and holds a hand out for me. “And owls are just birds. We can’t put stock in silly superstitions from Before. Come on.”
June points to the mess of twigs and grass once we’re over. “You can find your way back?”
“In the dark? When it’s snowing?” I shrug off a shudder, fiddling with the zipper of my coat instead. “I hope so. Let’s try not to get separated, though. Just in case.”
June cocks her eyebrow, and for some reason I think she must be smiling under her gas mask. “Snow’ll hide our tracks. At least it’ll help.” She leads us around the curve of the hill and back to the river, the icy bits of snow making it hard to see much but her small, hunched shoulders as we walk. After a while we get to where the ground drops out beneath us, ancient canals meant to divert river water. We’re close.
Now the real plan starts. We left Howl. Stashed the packs. Now we need to find a way in and leave June out here, where, after a decent amount of time, she can set off an explosion with the growth regulators and the tiny can of heli fuel we extracted from the tanks. We’ll find the maps or the encryption key, then run out with the Reds who rush to investigate the explosion. Should go like clockwork.
Should. I hate the questions running through my head. What if we don’t find the key or maps? What if the explosion goes off before we have a chance to find anything? What if someone recognizes us? What if sneaking in just gets one or all of us shot? What if—
Tai-ge nudges my arm, jostling me from my thoughts. “This is going to work, Sevvy. We’re going to be fine. We’ll find the key, we’ll be able to read the maps, and we’ll get the cure.”
“Right. We’ll be fine.” I wish I believed that. Even if we do find the key and escape minus extra flesh wounds, what then? If we find the cure tied up with a bow, where do we take it? How do we make it? How do we give it out?
And does it even matter? Dr. Yang has had so much time, so many more resources than we could even hope for. What if the cure is already in his sweaty fist back at the Mountain, held high for people to worship?
I set my jaw, shaking off the frantic flares of doubt in my mind. This is going to work. There aren’t any other options.
Glimpses of open space beyond the clutter of trees make me feel shaky, though we aren’t exposed. Before we’re close enough to the camp to be easily seen, June leads us up one of the taller trees and pulls out the pair of binoculars we found on the heli.
She takes the first turn with them, though it only lasts a moment before she shakes her head in disgust and hands them to me. The snow is getting heavier, filling the air between us and the camp with white. All I can see are little flares of orange dotting the cleared space sheltered by the mountain below us. Hundreds of green and brown bumps that must be tents, but it’s difficult see much more about them. Then I catch sight of something just over the center of the tents. Black, with the City’s beaker and falcon stamped into the fabric. The Chairman’s own flag.
I hand the binoculars to Tai-ge on the tree branch below me, carefully not looking down. Even if trees are sturdier than those cursed ladders at the Post, the height still feels unstable. My feet belong on the ground.
“Howl wasn’t lying about the Chairman being based here,” I say when Tai-ge’s had a chance to look. “Now that we’re actually looking at it, do you think our chances of getting in are good?”
June nods, pointing to the opposite side of the camp. The sheltering hills below us are a series of snow-laden cuts making a giant’s staircase down to the tents. Tiers of rice paddies, the river water diverted to leave them dry during the winter months. Across from us and below the terracing sit long, squat structures made from something that catches the light, plastic or glass. Greenhouses? And past that there are short, flat buildings with utilitarian lines and infrequent windows. Around the curve of the hills, I catch a glimpse of several rusted silos holding last season’s harvest of rice, and snow-covered fields beyond.
It’s a working farm. Like the place Mei must have picked peaches before she learned killing from Cale and the other Menghu. Fields of people the City claimed without giving them stars, slaves instead of citizens. Fourths, like me, I thought. But there aren’t that many traitors in the City. Where did the Chairman find all the people who worked these fields, who mined our iron and picked our apples?
June shifts next to me, holding her hand out to Tai-ge for the binoculars. When he hands them up, she squints through the glass at the wavy folds marching down the mountainside below us, as if she can see well enough through the storm to plot our approach.
“Guards down along the paddies,” Tai-ge says. “But Howl was right about them not being all the way up here. Looks like they’re just walking the perimeter of the camp and keeping watch over those silos.”
“No reason,” June says.
She’s right. The fields are open on the other side of the camp, with no way to approach from that direction without being seen by guards on the tiers of rice paddies on our side. There’s a section of ground staked out beyond the camp, the stubby forms of helis lying like corpses under their tarps. As we watch, the fluid sound of heli propellers whoosh overhead, the craft moving in to land.
“You didn’t spend time in one of these farms, did you, June?” I ask, looking up into the swirl of flakes, then wish I hadn’t when the white deluge makes my mind tip sideways with vertigo.
June shakes her head.
“Do you know anyone who was taken to one? Or people who went willingly?”
“Shh.” June lowers the binoculars and hoists herself down from the branch we’re sitting on, hissing under her breath when the movement sends a cascade of snow sliding from the branches to clump in the drifts below.
The cold nips at my ears as Tai-ge and I follow her down the trunk to a stand of trees scrabbling for purchase in the rocky ground, a spot mostly sheltered from the snow to assemble the growth regulator bomb. I pull my hood up over my head for warmth, listening to the air rasping in and out of my mask as Tai-ge carefully begins to combine the bomb elements. Every breath freezes in my hair, leaving the chopped-off strands white with frost, as if I’ve started to mold.
“You been to a farm?” June’s whisper startles me against the snow’s insulating quiet. She sits with her arms wrapped around her legs, chin perched on her knees. Her green eyes look like old jade, scratched and battered.
“No.” I think back to Mei. According to her, the farms made City life for a Fourth sound like a dream. “I met a Menghu who grew up in one, though. Why do you ask?”
She shrugs.
“There are hundreds of farms and other outposts,” Tai-ge says, pausing for a moment while he pours something into the growth regulator bag. “That’s how we had fish, vegetables, rice. Mines and mills for steel. Cotton. Knowing where they were was privileged information.” He sits back, looking up from the makeshift bomb. “Well, ‘privileged’ might be the wrong word. You knew where a farm was if you had to go there. Moving goods, Outside patrol duty. As a worker.”
“But workers couldn’t have all come from the City. And it seems that if there were hundreds of work-ready Outsiders waiting to be snapped up out here, we would have met more of them,” I reply.
Tai-ge adjusts his coat, the City’s beaker and falcon embroidered across the back. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He stands, carefully holding the bomb at his side. “Let’s get this thing in position and get this over with.”