“NO, JUNE!” I GRAPPLE FOR the mask, hampered when June sits back against me, her weight heavy against my chest. When my fingers finally close around the mask’s rigid curls, Howl’s grabbed hold of it too, both of us shoving it toward her face, the thin plastic feeling as though it might break.
June rolls out of my lap, scrambling to the edge of the room, with her eyes wide on both me and Howl, as if we were the ones who took the mask off, not the people trying to put it back on. The skin around her nose and mouth is lighter, underexposed after wearing the mask so frequently in the weeks since the new strain of SS broke loose.
“You get the cure. I’m not your sacrifice.” She sucks in a deep breath and chokes as if she can feel the poison spreading out from her lungs. “You come back or I’ll find you both and kill you.”
Howl’s grip on the mask drags my hand to the ground when he lets his arm drop. I wrench it away from him and stand, taking slow steps toward June. “You don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to do this. I’ll stay here if Luokai needs a hostage. It’s not like anyone needs me anymore. You’re both better at running . . . hiding. Howl knows where Sole is. . . .”
Luokai’s chin rises in an unexpected lurch at Sole’s name that makes my fists ball. All of us are silent for a moment, watching the Speaker, as if this moment might be our last, waiting for the compulsion to come. But he doesn’t rise from his seat on the ground. He only takes a deep breath, then goes back to staring at the floor.
June’s arms fold around my ribs in a hug. I hold her, Howl’s good arm snaking around June’s spine, his side nudging into mine as he presses in close to us, the three of us crushed together like the night June’s father lay dead in the snow, as if somehow we can hold one another together. I can’t let go of the mask, can’t let go of June, wanting to stop each of the deep breaths ballooning in her chest. To keep SS from going inside her. I promised to take care of her, promised everything was going to be okay.
But my decisions have all been the ones that made it not okay. I sent June to signal our getaway in the camp, in clear sight of a Menghu who almost killed her. I trusted Tai-ge. I fought with him instead of looking outside the heli window, instead of watching for the people we knew were going to come for us. I let Xuan go, the man who stole her mother.
Xuan. The words trip out of my mouth, eager to escape even as I’m not sure they’re right to say. “June, before Xuan left, he told me about what must have happened to your mother. That he was there when they took her away, like you said.” She looks up at me, her eyes wide. “She was probably sent to one of the southern farms. You can’t . . .” I bite my lip. We can’t do any of this without June. Even if she weren’t family, I don’t know how to get back to the Post without her as a guide. How to find Lihua and Peishan and the others. The idea of of leaving her here alone sends spirals of anxiety washing down my whole body, as if I’m leaving a child just outside a gore hutch and hoping she’ll survive.
But June isn’t a child. She made her own decision. And now I have to do my part to make it all right.
“After we get the cure, we’re going to find your mother. Find out what happened to her,” I whisper into her hair. “I love you, June. You’re my sister.” My brow feels crinkled, lined forever. How long do we have before she Sleeps? The new strain moves fast. Mei was asleep within an hour when she was infected.
If only I could.
Was there ever anything I could do? Everything inside me is hollow, made of bird bones and rotted grass, the control I thought I had nothing but a shell.
That doesn’t mean we’ve lost, though. I take a deep breath, inhaling June’s dirty-hair scent, the rough sandpaper scratch of her clothes, the crinkle of crumbs where she must have hidden something down her shirt. I will make her safe. No matter what it takes.
June buries her head in my stomach, her arms ratcheted so tight around me, my bones creak. “Will you tell me a story?” she asks, the words muffled against my shirt.
“A story?” My brain is full of sick and death and the metal taste of blood. “I . . .”
Howl hugs us both closer. “I will.”
Luokai picks up his bow. “I brought this because it often makes me feel calm.” He swallows, takes a deep breath, then looks at her, kindness in his eyes that she cannot see with her face pressed into my stomach. “Would you like me to play?”
June doesn’t move for a moment, but then she nods.
Howl’s hand on June’s shoulder tightens as the first notes slip through the air. “My mother used to tell me this story. It’s old, older than SS or wars or whatever this country was before. Older than the mountains or the trees. It starts with a girl.”
The slow drawl of his voice familiar and comforting. It’s like the story he told me about stars and qilin when there was a gore howling at our feet, every word meant to smooth down fear.
“This girl lived under the sky and slept under the stars. No man or woman could touch her because she could leap from shadow to shadow, hiding as if she were darkness itself.”
June looks up at him, her eyes narrowed. “Darkness?”
“The people of the Earth feared her because she could flit from the highest of trees down to the ground to shelter under the smallest leaf. She could find food anywhere, shooting it down with her bow. They feared her because she didn’t need them. All she needed was the sky and the ground, the trees and their shade, and her bow by her side. She kept company of the wind, made friends of the birds and the rivers, tracked each of the ten suns as they took turns sailing across the sky.”
I’ve never heard this story before, but I can tell Howl is searching for words, either because he’s changing them for June or because he can’t quite remember. The notes from Luokai’s erhu twine together with his voice as if they were born under the same star.
Howl continues, “But one day, the sky grew too hot, burning away the girl’s beloved trees, the shade that kept her safe. Instead of one sun at a time, the sky was full of ten all at once. The ten suns, so lonely after years of solo journeys across the sky, decided to stay together. They talked and laughed, their blaze in the sky searing the forest. Each tree was like a matchstick. The village like coals. It was almost as if the suns couldn’t see the way the world burned beneath them. Or perhaps they could see, and all they cared about was their own place in the sky.”
June’s wide eyes flick to Luokai, though the Speaker doesn’t pause in pushing and pulling his bow, his eyes closed as he listens. Luokai who wants to find his own place in the sky, alone and ready to do anything to fix it, even if it leaves every corner of the world but his smoldering. Tai-ge’s mother, the new General, the Chairman, Dr. Yang. The Menghu. It feels as if our sky has been full of suns for years, and we didn’t know why we were burning up.
June looks back to Howl, her eyes wide. “What happened?”
“This fearless hunter came out from her shadows. She climbed the tallest mountain to stand the suns down. ‘You must leave!’ she shouted up at them, their rays burning at her hair. ‘You are destroying my home!’
“ ‘Your home?’ one of the suns sneered. ‘I’ve seen the way you hide. The way the others fear you. You have no home.’
“The girl looked around at the world she loved so much, her beloved trees burned to ash, the villages on fire pointing to her in dread almost as much as toward the suns, as if she were the one who brought them. The very ground began to crack under her feet, and she wondered if maybe he was right.
“But as she stared up into the ten suns’ fiery depths, she knew someone had to fight, someone had to stand, or everyone would die. The girl took her bow from her shoulder, the wood specially made so it couldn’t burn. ‘You cannot tell me I’m worthless. You may believe you’re stronger and more important than me up there in the sky. You’re too high to see any of us for who we are. Too high to know what I’m capable of.’ She drew back an arrow and let it fly straight into the sun’s heart, and he shattered into a million pieces of fire and glass, raining down in pieces on the earth.
“ ‘I am strong!’ the girl yelled up at the suns, ‘and I will protect the earth, even if the earth doesn’t want me.’ And she shot the heart out of each sun threatening her forest, and the villages cradled underneath the trees. The suns had seemed so far away, their glaring lights untouchable, but each shattered at the pierce of her arrows, falling to the ground in a deathly blaze when faced with such strength. The girl shot until there was only one sun left. He hid behind a bank of clouds, and the girl left him be. The villagers needed one sun, one bit of light they could shade themselves against, one bit of light to make her trees grow and to make her shade.”
He pauses for a moment, swallows. “We need one sun because the heat brings out the best in us.”
“I wish . . . ,” June whispers, her eyelids heavy, and I can see her thoughts just where mine were, on the many suns burning down on us, competing for space in the sky, our homes smoldering ashes, all that’s left after a fire.
I hold her close, her hair bright as sunlight against my dirty uniform shirt. “You’ve already shot the first one down, June.” Luokai doesn’t look up from his strings, though his fingers slow over the notes.
June’s head is heavy against my shoulder, her eyes finally closed. I can feel each breath in the press of her ribs against my stomach, long and drawn out at first, and then slowing. Shallow. Almost as if she’s full to the brim inside and can’t fit another mouthful of air. The long notes of Luokai’s song settle like a blanket across us, heavier than the gas mask ever was. When I slip my fingers under June’s wrist, her pulse is dying like the sputtering glow of incense as the last bits of ash fall. Howl shifts to her side, wrapping his hand around her other wrist, both of us watching her chest rise and fall. Until it stops.
The new strain moves quickly, the Chairman said. It takes hold and doesn’t let go.
I brush June’s curls back from her face, trying not to remember when she first came into the cell, panicked. Trapped. Is she awake behind those closed eyes, begging for her arms to move, for her lungs to open?
I pull her closer, confidence injected into my voice more for me than for her. “I love you, June. You’re going to be all right. No matter what happens, we will be back for you with a cure.”
Luokai’s song dwindles to a single sustained note that dies in the cold air of the cell. Silence takes the room, pressing up against me, smothering my mouth and lungs, pushing down hard on June’s still form.
He opens his erhu case and pulls back the furry inside to reveal a single sheet of paper, the white of it stained to brown. It’s black with my mother’s spiky writing.
“You had it here the whole time?” I choke on my tears and the outrage that boils just beneath.
“Most of Jiang Gui-hua’s things are in the care of the Speakers. We were worried Gao Shun would destroy it all because she was so angry with her sister. But today she removed a device from the box, a miniature telescreen.”
“The Speakers just let her have it?”
“There was no reason not to. She told the Speakers it might scare away the helis gathering like flies before they attempt to mob us.” Luokai sighs. “I can’t risk going up against her directly, not without the time it would take to convince my fellow Speakers. As it is, I took the paper without my fellows knowing. If Gao Shun realizes they’re gone and that I’m missing too . . .” He shrugs. “Tomorrow, though, Gao Shun will be distracted, and she’ll be less careful of the device once the Reds tell her they’d rather take it than bargain. You might be able to get it away from her while she’s trying to shake the helis from the sky.” He turns to Howl. “You have a link in the things I brought you. The one in the tooth. Can you send pictures with it?”
Howl sucks one of his cheeks in. “I think so.”
“Do it. I’ll take the paper back to the Speakers before anyone notices it’s gone.” His eyes follow the tooth as Howl pulls it out, his expression hungry. If I remember correctly, Luokai is the one who gave it to Howl in the first place.
Once the little black device is out, Howl hands it to me, awkwardly caving around his bound-up arm. “Will you? I can’t with my arm . . . the way it is.”
June a dead weight across my legs, I can hardly bring myself to pull my hand from her wrist, as if I keep holding on, her heartbeat will reappear. But I take the link. The paper. Find the command to capture a picture of the graphs and charts and closely knit characters strung together in sentences I don’t understand. I catch mentions of chemicals, of measurements and trials. Howl’s name is on the paper, and so is mine. At the very end there’s a frantically scrawled string of characters that almost looks like a chemical formula.
The cure?
It feels so heavy. This, my answer to the war, like a rock around my neck. But I take the pictures and send them. It’s hard to hope when June lies almost dead in my lap.
Luokai pulls the paper out from my grip once the pictures have been taken, then presses it back underneath the lining of his case and stands. He goes to the door and calls for the Baohujia, and they come with a cup of sludgy-looking tea, which Luokai sets in front of Howl.
After shooing the Baohujia away, Luokai bends down in front of me, his arms out. He wants June. To take her now.
My arms curl around her, my fingers pressing into her little arms.
“I need to take her somewhere safe.” He gently pulls her away from me. “Once she’s situated, I’ll come back for you. We need to move you before the morning light breaks. Just in case negotiations go poorly and the helis come.”
“If anything happens to her . . . if she doesn’t wake up, I’ll . . .” Howl’s voice is so tired it seems to be coming from a person choking out their last words, garbled and rough.
“If anything happens to her, I’ll be the first to mourn. I am not one of your suns, and I will not shatter,” Luokai whispers. He stands, June’s head lolling back against his arm. “But I am sorry to be the bars on her cell.”