JUNE LEADS US INTO A bank of trees that huddle together against the wind beyond the abandoned dwellings, blocking its harsh bursts. As we walk, something crunches under my boot. I pause, expecting to find a bone half submerged in the mud under my boot. It would fit this murky place.
But when I stoop to look at the pieces, I find the shattered bits of a rice bowl. June turns to see what’s stopped me, her nose wrinkling as I pick up one of the shards. A faded pattern of flowers is stenciled along the rim, fragmented characters in measured strokes just below.
Long life. Prosperity.
I set the shard back next to its fellows in the mud.
June watches, her eyes narrowed on the orphaned fragments of pottery in their bed of muck, but then she turns back to the trees, gesturing for me to follow. The trees seem almost purposely planted, a windbreak for the village that used to be here, but left long enough that the trees had children and grandchildren of their own. We follow along the line, staying on the village side of the trees until the wind begins to calm, mollified when the sun begins to burn through the veil of mist overhead.
The vegetation grows thicker before I see signs of habitation again—only they’re not the sorts of signs that inspire hope. We step over the rusted remains of an I-beam, our feet finding scatterings of brick and tile mired deep in the ground as if they’d grown up from the earth itself. A shape in the trees ahead turns into the starved outline of what looks like it was a building long ago, nothing left but metal ribs and spine exposed to the elements.
A flutter of movement in the foliage to our left sends a cascade of nervousness down my spine, but June only gives the waving branches a casual glance. It’s not until we’ve walked on that I see a creature there I’ve never seen or heard of before, thick pelt heavy and brown and an ungainly, heavy head. It watches us pass, then goes back to grazing.
June points toward a line forming a belt across the tree trunks ahead. A fence, sharpened posts pointed toward us. It’s not new-looking exactly, but the posts are scored wood. Much more recent than the ruins, or the wood would have rotted and gone long ago.
We slip under the fence, sunlight hardly a flicker of warmth against my back as light begins to filter through from ahead, space between the trees giving hints at something beyond. June stops as we get to the end of the trees, reaching one hand out to a nearby trunk, as if to steady herself. I steel myself to look as I step up next to her, only to have my breath stolen.
We’re standing at the top of a hill. And beyond that hill there’s . . . nothing. A vast rolling mass of gray nothing. Water. An ocean. The weight of it pins me to the ground, every inch of me feeling the rush of waves below us as they churn up the rocky beach, foaming fingers reaching up the stretch of pebbles toward us.
If eternity has a face, this is it.
I crouch to the ground, breathing the salted air, fear and wonder a complicated snarl in my chest. June ducks behind a large rock sprouting from the unstable sea of pebbles underfoot. She points down the beach.
There are boats bobbing along with the waves, ribbed cloth structures sticking up from each one, like a bat’s wings. Beyond them, a shadowy hulk leers at us from out in the water, like a fortress suspended out on the waves. Three craggy points mark its top, and when the wind blows a column of mist past, I get a fleeting view of carved stone and sun on glass windows.
“Is that . . .” I try to catch my breath, but I’m full of salty air, full to exploding.
June edges back from the rock and up the beach into the trees, walking much more softly now. Following, I angle back the way we came, but she doesn’t follow, staring at the wind-stripped trees, the trunks bald where they face the ocean. Her eyes are full of something I can’t understand. Seawater instead of the hard, scratched jade I’m used to. And then she starts walking. Parallel to the tree-formed windbreak, toward the shadowy mass of rock and the bat-winged boats worshipping it below.
“June!” I whisper it as loud as I can, picking up the pace behind her, but she dodges and weaves through the trees, and it’s all I can do to keep her snarled hair in sight, her curls a golden smudge against the blasted gray-green of this forest. The colors of this place are all wrong.
She hops over plants and around rocks until we come to a path. Slows to a jog when fences crop up, and the path turns into something that almost looks like a dirt road. And then to a walk when the first dwelling comes into view.
“June, we can’t . . .” She waves me to silence, letting me catch up.
I touch her shoulder, knowing it won’t be enough to stop her if she doesn’t want to. “But we don’t know . . .”
She shakes back her curls and walks forward, every step measured and confident. “I know.”
Emotions collide in me. Worry and fear. Excitement and anticipation. And a shadow of surprise tinged with uncertainty. June knew where to set down the heli. She seems to know this road. And she isn’t going to stop.
What will it mean if this road spills into a village where the children know June’s name? Where she has real family, not the adopted Seph clan she was a part of when we found her? What if in all these weeks of looking for where we belonged, she finds a place already hollowed out for her, but there’s no space for me? June is as good as my sister now. Neither of us had a place, so we made a new one together.
I keep pace, willing my steps not to slow. It isn’t just June who might find something that fits here. Saying out loud what I hope for is too frightening, as if by voicing it, the universe will realize I want something and take it away. Will I find people here who read with my mother’s same cadence? People wearing her eyes and mouth, who can look into my face and see something other than the secrets mother hid in my brain, or the scar on my hand?
June must have those same hopes, wondering about the people who might be waiting for her. Who might see her and welcome her in because they are the same. She looks over her shoulder to see what is slowing me down, giving an annoyed sort of jerk with her chin to keep up, as if nothing between us has changed by coming here. As if nothing could.
I smile. And keep up.
When we get to the house, it’s almost shocking how normal it looks. Not the materials or the shape of it—the roof is heavily sloped against the wind, and the walls and chimney are made from some kind of rock I’ve never seen before, one laid right on top of the other. Not like anything from the City or the Mountain, Cai Ayi’s Post, but it looks like a place people live. Permanent. A home.
Smoke issues from the chimney and there are boxes set into the ground to either side of the steps that lead to a red-painted front door. They look so similar to the Third Quarter garden boxes that I almost feel as if I should don gloves and rifle through the empty dirt looking for peppers.
A chimney, garden boxes, and a boy on the front steps. He looks up as we pass, ruddy round cheeks, a shock of hair splintered down his forehead, a chunk of wood in one hand and a thin knife in the other. The boy raises the knife-heavy hand, and I flinch before he speaks, expecting an alarm, a call to arms. Instead he waves, yelling one long, drawn-out syllable that reveals two missing front teeth but absolutely no meaning I can discern.
June raises a hand in return and keeps walking. Something inside me threatens to burst, salt wet in my eyes as we pass him.
He’s not afraid.
June notices my tears and rolls her eyes, but then she slips her arm through mine as we continue down the dirt path. There are more houses, each low to the ground, leaving a whole world’s worth of sky overhead. One has a cluster of silvered old men chatting together over tiny cups of tea just outside the front door. A woman walks by with a young child tethered to her back. They raise a hand to us as we walk, and June raises her hand back. Another woman, perched on a droopy fence, calls out to us. June gives her a sharp nod, and the woman’s slack lips twist into a smile.
“What did she . . . ,” I whisper once we’re past, pulled along by a cacophony of voices ahead. “Did you understand her?”
June’s mouth is buttoned shut, the edges turned down. But she puts one of her hands up and measures with her thumb and forefinger, a knuckle’s worth of understanding. We pass a pen housing scruffy-furred animals, their heads down in the scrappy grass. Three old women sit in front of the gate, their wrinkly fingers sliding tiles in some kind of game back and forth. It’s like the Mountain all over again, a riot of color where I’m used to a monochromatic selection of people. Olive skin and sunburned pink and warm brown. Snowy hair and ebony, sunlight and polished oak.
The farther we walk, the closer the buildings are together until the road turns to a street cobbled over in stones. A murmur sinks through the gaps in buildings, the washed-over sound of hundreds of voices smashed to make one soft roar. It makes me think there must be some sort of gathering nearby, the noise breaking through the weeks of solitude and silence I’ve endured. Memories of infected claw their way across my brain, the last time I was with lots of people. Being dragged across the Mountain Core, my boots squeaking against the stone floor, Yizhi doctor fingers digging into my arms and Cale’s pale stare stabbing even deeper. Large group meetings in the City market square back before I left it all behind for Howl’s stories, the speakers crying out over the crowd for us to look hard at our neighbors, as traitors could be anywhere.
What if the reason I didn’t belong before was because this place was supposed to be my home?
June pulls me toward the noise, her steps hurried until we spill out into a street packed with people. A smile finds my lips as the people press in around me, booths lining the road with sellers yelling about how fresh their fish is, how dry their rice, how thin their china.
At least that’s what I assume. I can’t understand a single word. A man thrusts a whole fish in my direction, the dead creature’s eyes fixing me in a ghastly stare, the salt-and-tepid-water smell humid in my nose. The stream of words splashing out from the man’s mouth as he tries to offer me a trade feels so familiar, as if all the words belong to the same page torn from my dictionary.
June elbows her way in next to me, and for a moment, I think her mouth will open, that these foreign words will appear on her tongue, but instead, she waves him away and pulls me on through the crowd. A display of cups and plates catches my eye, beautiful calligraphy sweeping across the rims in blue that turns my stomach.
Long life. Prosperity.
Not broken. Not yet left forgotten in the mud.
A grandmother toting twin baby boys squeezes past me, one of the boys attempting to grab for my unevenly shorn hair. She smiles an apology before walking to a table loaded with treats I never could have imagined. The people clustered around the table argue with the man behind it as if there is something contrary about his bread. But it’s a good-natured sort of argument. As if these people grew up bantering and know what the other is going to say before the words come out.
The idea of family . . . of fitting into a place like this . . . feels warm inside my chest.
That is, until a high-pitched siren suddenly takes the air, shattering the hubbub like glass shards to an eye.
The people around us look up to the sky, not the panicked floundering of a crowd about to stampede, but with quiet questions, anxious hands reaching out to touch their brothers and sisters, children, as if to make sure they’re still there. The grandmother hauling her twin boys holds them close, not bothering to pull the boys’ hands away from the bread forgotten on the table, the seller equally lost in the clouds above us. June links her arm through mine and pulls me close to her side, the two of us clutching each other as we search the sky. Perhaps there is no home without bombs, without danger lurking just out of sight.
The man with the fish points toward the sea with his curved fish-gutting knife, the hulking form of the island crouching just off the sandy shore. There’s some kind of movement up at the tops of the three peaks stabbing up from its stony mass, like winking jewels in a crown.
And then the scream of heli propellers.
June ducks even before the sound finishes poisoning the air, dragging me toward one of the buildings. But the people don’t seem to be worried so much as confused, following the heli’s progress toward them.
“Friendly!” I shout to June, grabbing hold of her shoulders. “It’s friendly, I think.”
She puts a finger to her mouth with a hiss, looking from left to right to see if my City-tinged words will bring trouble faster than a heli ever could. The crowds seem to be on the move, a mother hoisting up her daughter to sit on her shoulders, patting her feet fondly even as her eyebrows pinch at the heli’s steady progress toward us.
I point back the way we came, the safest way to ask that we go back. We know where the island is. That’s what we came for.
June shakes her head, eyes glued to the heli. Now that it’s closer, I can see its scored metal skin, the gutter of laboring gears making me wonder at its vintage. June cranes her neck to watch until the buildings block its final resting place on the other side of the town. Grabbing my arm, she moves with the crowd, toward the ancient mechanical beast.
The heli landed in a field, a scattering of animals prancing away from the air-churning propellers even as they power down. A woman and two men climb down from the heli’s cockpit, the machine a much smaller creature than the one waiting with Tai-ge, Xuan, and Howl locked away inside. Beyond the heli, I see my first clear view of the bridge, probably half a mile farther down the beach, a stone statue of a woman standing with her hands raised on the other side.
The woman in front of us raises her hands too, but it’s to quiet the crowd. Her hair is cut to a blunt line just below her chin, her hooded eyes and olive skin looking as if she could belong to the City.
Not just the City. She looks like me. Even with the unsettled shifting and the cry of a frightened child echoing out over our heads, excitement fills me, threatening to burst out. We’re here. I can feel it in my bones. We’re going to find my family here. My mother’s cure.
These people aren’t afraid. Are they strong enough to fight off whatever it is Dr. Yang and the Chairman bring to their doors?
The island’s sharp peaks grin down at me, its secrets locked behind bars of stone. Xuan says it doesn’t matter how many helis the Chairman sends; none will get in.
When the woman speaks, her voice is lower, huskier than I imagined it would be, sewn through with urgency. She points to the clouds above us, and then to the south. There’s a reaction from the people around us, looking to one another and then to the island across the thin stretch of sea.
The woman speaks again, and the people nod along, the current of unease rippling to form waves and then a storm. She raises her hands, entreating and calm, finally turning to point to the island herself. When the speech comes to an end, I’m unprepared. She’s talking, and then all of a sudden she’s not anymore, heading off the back of the platform, the clusters of people around me beginning to shuffle toward the edge of the open space.
June grabs my arm and pulls us back the way we came, pushing us to go faster and faster until we’re past the market street, past the house where we saw the little boy, sprinting back toward the skeleton village and its broken china. The light has begun to fade to roses and gold, the air turning colder.
“You understood what she said!” The words come out in a gasp as we duck under the spiked fence, branches reaching out to slap at my face and arms. “What did she say? Was it about Dr. Yang and the invasion? She pointed south, toward the staging area we saw on the map.”
“Speakers,” she calls over her shoulder.
“Speakers?” I swear as a branch catches me across the collarbone, its sharp whip stinging. “What does that mean?”
“Speakers will protect them from the soldiers coming. On the island.” June hops over a fallen log and trundles to the side to avoid a hole into the ground.
“Protect them how?” Are speakers like Reds? With generals and guns and bombs? “Can you speak back? You’ll be able to tell them who we are and . . .”
A wind flushes past us, stealing the words from my mouth and setting the wide leaves on their hunched branches into an agitated fluster. June freezes, putting a hand out for me to stop as she swallows down a breath of thick air, her nose twitching. She puts a hand over her mouth, fingers clamping down.
“June?” I can hardly bring myself to whisper as every inch of her goes still, as if standing quietly enough will convince the grass and vines to slither up her legs and hide her.
“Run.” It’s a whisper that bites. She takes off into the trees, not quite the way we came. “Run!”
My heart batters at my rib cage in the split second it takes for me to launch after her, my insteps screaming as they pound against the uneven ground. Hands up to protect my face, vines and long grass tear at my feet, each trying to fell me as some kind of prey. Suddenly, June’s bright head disappears in front of me, going down hard. I slide to a stop, finding her on the ground, a long skid in the mud where her foot caught on a rock.
Her chest heaves up and down, her eyes wide as she scrambles up, hardly able to stand upright, as if she can’t decide whether to run or to hide. She grabs my arm, fingers painting bloodless white stripes across my skin.
One breath. Two. My lungs are too full of salt to inflate. I clench my eyes tight, waiting for teeth or claws, gunshots or knives to break the awful silence.
June raises her head, her vertebrae straightening one at a time as she listens to the forest. “They’re awake,” she whispers.
“Who?” I ask, my chest squeezing down until there’s no room left for bones or flesh or air or anything but fear.
As if in answer, a long howl cuts through the air.