HANDS GRASP MY SHOULDERS, FORCING me to look up. It’s June, her eyes hidden under a worried scowl. Half a second of inspection later, she gives a jerky nod and rushes over to Howl and the dead gore on top of him. Another baying cry rips through the air over us. More gores are coming.
The pull from Xuan’s handcuff suddenly changes direction as he charges after June. My hands ball into fists, ready to pull our shackled hands behind him, jump on his back, or raise my gun and shoot until he stops trying to attack. But instead of lashing out at June, he tugs at the gore’s hulking shoulders, attempting to pull the creature’s dead weight off Howl. Tai-ge appears next to me, moving with an almost drunken slowness, our hands twisting deep into the mottled brown-and-black fur to help move the monster.
I can hardly look when the gore finally rolls off Howl. It seems impossible that he could still be alive under the dark wash of red thick across his skin. He doesn’t move, staring blankly at us.
June kneels, tugging at one of his shoulders, but Xuan pulls her back. “We can’t pick him up.” His voice is eerily calm. “If his back or neck is injured—”
“Then he’s dead anyway.” June doesn’t let him finish, another gore’s awful cry echoing out from the trees as if to punctuate the sentence.
Together we lift him, June at his feet, Tai-ge and Xuan at his shoulders and torso, with me bracing Howl’s neck, walking backward to get him to the heli. One of his shoulders is a bloody mess, a jagged hint of his collarbone stabbing up through his skin. Howl stares up at me as we rush him toward the heli ladder, eyes seeming almost black against his ashen skin.
When we get to the ladder, it looks impossibly tall, a climb I hardly even thought about five minutes ago suddenly an insurmountable barrier. Movement in the mist flickers out from the odd scrubby trees, twisting fear through my chest. We don’t have time to figure out how to get Howl up into the heli.
A shudder runs through Howl and he blinks, finally tearing his eyes away from my face. He jerks one foot away from June, and she sets the other on the ground, Tai-ge and Xuan lowering the rest of him to the grass. The handcuffs pull as I try to help him sit upright.
“We have to get you inside,” I say. We’re so close, I can’t see anything but Howl’s blanched skin, feeling his whole frame shake as if it’s my muscles shuddering out of control. But he nods.
Slowly, painfully, he rolls onto his knees, his bloody, broken shoulder slumping to one side. I pull his good arm over my shoulder, groaning at his weight as we walk to the ladder. Xuan helps from the other side, carefully pulling here and there without touching the broken clavicle, or Howl’s arm dangling painfully down. June snakes up the ladder past us, stationing herself at the top, where she can pull at Howl from above. The gallop of Howl’s heart raps out through his side, the beat too fast, too hard. He attempts to link one arm through the first rung and use it to leverage himself up, and Tai-ge lodges himself beneath Howl, half climbing, half carrying him up from the ladder as June pulls from above.
Feeling useless, I try to stay out of the way to allow the two of them to get him the rest of the way into the heli. The world feels too close, Tai-ge’s boots in my face when he climbs above me, Xuan and the handcuff pulling at my wrist as we bend and crawl all over each other trying to get inside. When my head clears the hatch, all I can see are Howl’s boots lying on the stained carpet.
“Shut the hatch,” Xuan orders once we’re in, crouching next to Howl’s side. “And someone get me towels. Something clean to stop him bleeding. And water. And where’s your medikit?”
The length of chain between the cuffs pulls as he leans over the jagged edges of the wound. Howl thrashes away, his breaths coming in a hyperventilated frenzy as he tries to put space between himself and Xuan. June hovers protectively over his bloody shoulder, her fists clenched.
“You stay away from him!” I shove myself between Xuan and Howl. Tai-ge stands next to me, medikit in one hand, gun in his other, the barrel pointed at Xuan’s chest.
“Move.” Xuan’s voice is cold, shattering my panic into a thousand fizzing pieces. But when he tugs on the handcuff to encourage me to obey him, it’s gentle. “You want him to live, then get out of my way. I’m a medic, remember?”
“That just means you know what will kill us fastest. It wasn’t a gore that knocked out Tai-ge.”
Tai-ge holds the medikit out to me, keeping the gun trained on Xuan’s chest. “He attacked me and ran. I didn’t even hear the gores until after June came.”
I grab the medikit, but I can hardly look at the gash in Howl’s shoulder, the gouges cutting through his shirt and across his chest. Blood soaks into the carpet from his arms and hands, like a sponge being squeezed out. One of Howl’s hands twitches toward mine, fingers curling around my wrist, his knuckles banging against the medikit’s metal case. I could help people at the orphanage. Clean up cuts and bruises. I’ve set broken bones. But this . . .
Xuan’s finger jabs toward the long gash in Howl’s shoulder, the bone peeking up through the open flesh. “If we don’t get him taped shut, he’s going to bleed to death.”
Howl moans, the first sound he’s made. His grip around my wrist is getting tighter by the moment. “If you hurt him . . .” I close my eyes and move to the side, letting Xuan pull the medikit away from me. He barks at June to get him a waterskin and something clean to stanch the bleeding, ignoring June’s features twisted over in fear and anger as she goes. His hands pick through the different bandages and packages in the medikit, my stomach squirming when he comes up with a short blade. After everything Howl’s fought in his life, is he going to die with a Red’s hands inside of him?
Xuan rejects a blanket, a dirty towel, and June’s mussed sleeping bag, finally accepting two clean shirts June stole from Tai-ge’s pack as suitable. He presses one against the gash that tears through Howl’s shoulder and back, then hands the other shirt to me to stanch the blood trickling from the cuts running the length of Howl’s arm. Taking the rejected sleeping bag, June drapes it over Howl’s legs, rearing back when he kicks it off, jostling himself onto his side. Xuan firmly pushes him back to the floor.
“Would you try to keep him still, Blondie?” Xuan nods to June. She freezes, a stone-faced expression flashing across her features, but it only lasts for a second before she’s kneeling by Howl’s head. Xuan twists all the air out of the waterskin, then keeps twisting until it bulges with pressure. He pulls back the now-bloodied shirt, jabs a hole in the bottom of the waterskin with the blade, then sprays the hard stream of water into Howl’s blood-black wounds. Howl flinches away from the strong bursts of water, June trying to hold his head still. I sit down next to her, my free hand on his unmarked shoulder to try to keep the rest of him from moving, the other following Xuan around as he ransacks the medikit, spreading the white-packaged medical supplies all over the floor around him.
“Could you please unlock these?” Xuan growls, giving the handcuffs an annoyed shake. “I’m sure you’re very nice and all, but I’d prefer to work without the extra limbs, thank you.” He finds the package he was looking for, breaking the plastic and extracting a syringe and what I recognize as a vial of sedative.
I pull my free hand back from Howl’s shoulder. Search my jacket pockets. Then my pants pockets. I come up with three pieces of old paper, a single white bean. No key. “I must have dropped it.”
Xuan pauses, a funny sort of grin flashing across his mouth. “If karma were instant, I’d be the prime example.” He pulls some kind of tape from the piles of supplies on the floor, lodging it in the wound in a way I don’t understand. Bandages come next, more tape, until Howl looks as though he’s more bandage than human.
It’s easier to look at him now that the awful broken pieces of him are hidden, only the scratches on Howl’s chest and arms still visible. The gouges in his arms run from shoulder to wrist, as if Howl dragged his arms along the points of the monster’s teeth without being bitten. His tight hold around my wrist slackens as the drugs take hold, but I don’t want to let go, threading my fingers through his. Red, white, red.
Howl, who I’ve only ever seen taking charge, running, fighting, arguing, smiling and joking . . . he’s limp, curled between me and June. Small. Broken. Unforgivably mortal.