THE IDEA OF SLEEP FEELS wrong, as if giving in to my tired eyes will be some sort of betrayal. That doesn’t stop me from taking the medicine-doused cup of tea Luokai offers and holding it in front of Howl’s face until he succumbs, taking the cup and drinking. Only a few minutes pass before he lets me help him back to the pallet, eyes closing as his head touches the pillow. It reminds me of the time we were together out in the forest. How he used to fall asleep in the oddest places and times, as if he could just turn his body off, knowing his next opportunity to rest might not come for a while.
Except, when we were in the forest, June was with us. After all those nights of waking up to find her tousled hair, there’s nothing to find. Nothing but a quivering ghost of an image in my mind, a presence I keep reaching out to touch, only to find it gone.
I huddle next to Howl, my brain slowly losing the fight against sleep. I keep the link balled in my fist, staring down at the glowing letters as they scroll across the back of my hand, the light too bright in the cell to allow me to read them. If Sole answers, I can’t see it.
Luokai returns within the half hour, the erhu still strung across his back, but somehow it looks as if it weighs a hundred pounds less, no cure weighing it down. He settles himself down across from me, noting with an approving nod that Howl’s eyes are closed. “We’ll give him some time to sleep. We are safe here for a few more hours.”
I wrap a blanket around me, refusing to answer. Its scratchy fibers seem to have soaked up all the water in the air, leaving me shivering. Luokai folds his hands comfortably in his lap, back straight, closing his eyes. Watching is almost uncomfortable because I keep waiting for movement, wanting to itch and scratch in sympathy as a fly lands on his forehead, crawling down to his cheek and across his lips. Not even a twitch.
Is he asleep? Maybe—just as being able to flop over anywhere and start snoring is part of being a Menghu—pretending to sit at attention and snoring away inside your head is part of being Port Northian.
It’s the last thought that twists in my brain before my eyes close.
• • •
“You are angry at me.” The voice brushes past my ears, not enough to ratchet my eyes open when they seem gummed shut with sleep.
“You just took someone very important to me, Luokai.” Howl’s voice rasps with sleep, sending prickles down my arms. I keep my eyes closed, not sure I can face Luokai right now.
“I’m sorry about June. But you cannot pretend that is the only reason you are angry.”
“You’ve got everything about me figured out, then? We might share blood, but that doesn’t make us the same.”
Long pause. “I didn’t want to leave at all, much less disappear without even saying good-bye. Every day I’ve been here I’ve thought of you there in the Mountain with no one but the dormitory heads and Jiaoyang to take care of you. I wanted to come back.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t.”
Silence.
“I would go back with you now if I could. You’re not the little boy I left there, but you’re not a young man the way you should be either. There’s something hard inside you that I wish I could . . . fix.”
“I don’t need to be fixed.” Howl shifts, and I can feel his warmth against my side.
“Maybe not. I’m glad you aren’t alone now. I worried that . . . you would be.” I can almost feel Luokai’s eyes flick past me. “I wish I could be so lucky. The two of you move together. One an extension of the other. Two halves of something yet unfinished.”
“Me and Sev?” I can feel them pause; now it’s Howl looking down at me and a thread of nervousness sews its way up my spine. “Sev’s made it pretty clear that she was done with me a long time ago, and it was only you opening the door earlier that saved me from hearing it out loud. Again.” Howl’s voice is quiet. “And you know very well that Sole is still sitting in the Mountain waiting for you. More alone than you are here, I think. You could write her a message now, if you wanted. She’s on the other end of this link.” There’s a rattle, the sound of the link inside the gore tooth around Howl’s neck. He must have taken it out of my hand and put it back where it belongs.
Now the silence is Luokai’s, heavy and thick, tasting of something I can’t define. Mourning, perhaps. When the Speaker finally speaks, his voice creaks, as if he’s gained a hundred years in only a few moments. “I’m dangerous, Howl. Just because they try to give me a place and a life here doesn’t mean it’s less of a risk to be in the same room.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me. We’ve had Mantis at the Mountain for years.”
For a while I think Luokai isn’t going to answer, but when he does, the strain in his voice sends a jolt of surprise down my spine. “There are men and women who protect me from myself, protect others from my sickness. Their life’s work is to hold me up when I fall, to make sure no one else falls when I do, like human crutches. They can’t change me into someone who isn’t infected, though. Mantis might make some people feel safe, but what if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t take enough or take too much? With so much at risk, how do you make friends, love, marry, if at any moment, your mind could decide to hurt the people you care about most? You could only watch yourself do it. Live with the memories that you took away your happiness with your own hands.”
The image crimps inside me, memories of the darkness of the Sanatorium, the people sequestered from society because they couldn’t trust their own hands to obey. The one compulsion I did have is buried deep in my memory, a curtain drawn over it so I don’t have to look. The terror, the rot and bile it tracked through my mind, leaving nothing but a wish that I could scrub myself clean from the inside out. It happened right before I left the City, right before it was just me and Howl, before I knew I’d been cured. I worried for him every day, just the way Luokai is saying. Worried I’d wake up one day and he’d be dead next to me. But the reality of that first brush with the sickness curdling in my mind . . . I hardly knew where to draw the line between myself and it.
SS wasn’t me. It terrified me. It was inside me, and I couldn’t get it out. How many times had Luokai had those same moments of terror, of not realizing until it was too late that he was not himself, and not being able to stop?
I open my eyes, finding the two of them sitting across from each other, sunrise streaming through the window to touch Luokai’s lined face. There are threads of gray caught in his hair I didn’t notice before.
“How could I come back, knowing I couldn’t trust myself to be near you?” Luokai asks. “Couldn’t be near her? I’d have had to watch as you played without me, pretend I was happy for her as she fell in love with someone else. I’ve had nightmares of situations like . . . this.” The frustration lacing through Luokai’s voice seems to weigh down his shoulders as he gestures to us, the room, him in here with us. “I can’t even have guards to protect you, or they might miss their chance at escaping the contagion. Anything could happen in here. I’d never forgive myself if something did.” Luokai sighs. “Even in Port North, my life is one of watching from afar. I can help people. Mediate problems, look at crops and decide how they can be grown better. Bring food when it is scarce. Give peace when there is none. But that’s all I can do. The only way I can keep from hurting others is by choosing to be alone. I don’t think I could make that choice if I were with you.”
I close my eyes again as the two of them stare at each other.
“I was alone. For a long time. It wasn’t a choice.”
“But now it is,” Luokai says, and once again, I feel them both looking at me.
“It’s her choice too,” Howl whispers. “You’ve been worried that you could hurt me or Sole. I did hurt her. She hurt me. We’re both . . . You can’t take back the worst things you’ve done unless the other person lets you. But even after everything . . . I think I love her.”
My brain goes blank, just trying to fit around those words. I love her.
“She’s kind when she doesn’t have to be.” Howl’s still talking. “Makes me laugh. Makes me want to do better.” He stops, and it takes everything I have to keep my eyes shut. “I would do anything to make her happy. I think she loves me too, and that’s what makes it so . . .” He exhales. “So frustrating.”
I feel an echo of what he’s saying in my chest, as if it’s been traced there over and over, suddenly feeling trapped in the tiny space of those words. Maybe it is that control Luokai is talking about that makes my hands start to shake when I think of Howl. If I choose Howl now the way I did back in the Mountain, that means entrusting a tiny bit of control over my fate, my plans, my life to another person. Again.
Trying to go against the war machine Dr. Yang is creating is dangerous enough without allowing someone else to have a finger on the self-destruct button. Someone who could have pushed it before. Someone who almost did, whether he meant to or not. I let myself be vulnerable for the first time in my life, realized the walls I had built so firmly around myself were a weakness instead of a protection. That I could finally let them come down. And it was a mistake.
And now . . . ? Now what? After everything? I open my eyes again, willing myself to really look at Howl. At the things he’s said and done. The things people have said about him versus the things I’ve seen with my own eyes.
Luokai takes another deep breath, his lungs expanding through his stomach and ribs. I catch myself holding my own breath, waiting for him to exhale. “Hope is something you fight for, Howl.” He breathes again, deep. “I would do anything to have that kind of hope. To be able to control this weakness, the awful base humanness SS imposes on me.”
“Humanness?” Howl looks up. “I wouldn’t call compulsions particularly human.”
“I disagree.” Luokai’s voice curls up in a smile. “If humans’ first inclination were to love and trust, then there would be no war, no starving, no infected. No kidnappings. No slaves. SS doesn’t create violence or greed in its victims. It merely removes all the barriers we impose on ourselves. It’s people listening to their basest instincts who harm others.” He sighs. “No, we rise above the fact that we are human and control ourselves. We ignore the fact that others are human too, and choose to love them anyway.”
He looks at me, catching me with my eyes open. I pinch them back shut, trying not to think. Trying not to agree with his words because it hurts. My whole life I’ve been attempting to do exactly what he is saying. I thought it was my sickness or traitor blood in my veins that made me selfish, made me want to think of myself, when I should be treating people like equals. Like people, not as though they were objects standing between me and the things I want.
It makes me think of Sole, trying to recompense for her crimes by sewing up wounds just like the ones she inflicted for so many years. Of Howl recounting what my mother said about enemies looking like friends if you are close enough to see. It is not anyone’s first inclination to do that. We fight, we are defensive, we assume. We kill.
I might as well have. I left Howl to die instead of me.
But I can’t let it go. “You don’t know what happened between me and Howl. It’s not just a matter of being imperfect, something you can wave away and hope everyone tries to do better tomorrow. He might have been killed because of me. And me because of him.”
Howl’s swivel to see me awake was almost comically abrupt. Luokai cocks one eyebrow, unsurprised. “On purpose? You tried to kill each other? Guns? Knives? Poison?”
I pull my head up from the floor and sit with my hands in my lap, thinking of the scar at my throat made by Howl’s knife when I found him in the heli cargo bay. It was a mistake. An awful, horrendous, horrible sort of mistake, one that makes me question Howl’s judgment. But it wasn’t on purpose.
Luokai catches my expression, turning it over and over in his mind as though he can discern my thoughts, a picture painted across my eyes and mouth. “Trust is a choice, Jiang Sev. Love is a choice. Choices you should be happy to have . . .” He blinks. Takes a deep breath. Tries again. “No matter which choice you make, it’s . . .” His voice squeezes to silence, cutting off midsentence.
Luokai’s mouth screws down tight, and he takes a deep breath through his nose, the way he did when we were looking out over the underground market, as if he can send all his thoughts flying. He slowly raises a hand, his fingers flexed. His eyes open, but it’s almost as if he’s looking straight through me. He lowers his hand to the frayed yellow hem of his tunic and pulls out a thread. The concentration bouncing between him and the fiber pulses burns. The hairs on my arms stand up as he takes another thread, carefully placing it on the ground. He does it over and over again, each thread adding to a precisely arranged pile.
“Luokai?” Howl’s voice crimps over the word as Luokai pulls each string, his unraveling hem boasting more and more available threads each time he takes one from the dusky yellow fabric.
He can’t hear us, the compulsion’s grip on his mind blocking out everything but the design. Horror punches through me, pushing me to move between him and Howl, to keep June safe from this uncontrolled compulsion, only to feel as if I’ve stepped over a cliff into thin air when I remember she isn’t here.
The swirls grow to form a design, interlocking circles covering the stone floor in front of him. Luokai’s hands are graceful, each movement part of a ritual, a dance. He’s in another world, at peace with compulsions, allowing them to take place instead of being controlled by them. The measured movements look like harmony and tranquility personified.
The breaths scrunched down tight behind my throat slowly relax and flow. After a few minutes, Luokai stops, his eyes refocusing. He stares at his hands and then they drop, as if his marionette strings have been cut.
“What you need,” Luokai whispers, as if our conversation hadn’t broken, “is to stop trying to decide who people are. Look at what they are doing. It is actions that make a person, not the ideas you choose to attach to them.”
When I look over at Howl, he’s looking back, a self-conscious expression quirked at the corners of his mouth, as if I overheard something he wasn’t ready to share. “I didn’t know you were awake,” he says.
I bite my lip. “Do you wish I hadn’t been listening?”
He glances at Luokai, but then looks back at me as if he’s made some sort of decision. “I wish you’d heard me saying those things to you, not to him.”
Electricity seems to spark through my chest, but it’s swirled together with indecision, with the fact that Luokai is sitting here watching us.
Luokai looks up at the ceiling, discomfort twitching across his expression. “I’d really rather not be a part of this conversation.”
“I’d really rather you weren’t too.” Howl sort of laughs. “Could you give us a minute?”
The nervous energy sparking through me flares as Luokai gives a slow nod, then rises from the floor, leaning down to pick up the erhu case. I’m not sure I have answers to the questions I’m afraid Howl will ask me.
“You’re both awake, so I’d like to move you to a safer place. And then go get the device your mother left.” Luokai’s eyes weigh on me for a moment before switching to Howl. “I’ll go find someone to carry you.”
“If anyone tries to carry me, I’ll kill them.” Howl’s head jerks back toward me, his eyes wide. “Figuratively. Without any actual violence.” He presses his lips together when I raise an eyebrow at him, then looks up at his brother. “I’m glad to have finally found you after all these years . . . but it’s hard.”
“I understand. I, too, am guilty of many such moments. Just talking about the Mountain still makes me angry, when I should have long ago let go of what happened.” Luokai runs a hand along the case’s long neck once, twice. Then opens it and takes the instrument out.
The stone underneath me begins to hum, a loud crack echoing through the window and shaking the stone floor. Howl and I look up at the ceiling as a cloud of dust mists down over us, like a stone-made smattering of snow.
“Are the helis here already? You said something about things shaking.” Part of it is concern that makes me ask. Part to forestall the moment when I’m in here alone with Howl, because everything is too close to see clearly. I know that what he says is true. I do care about him. A lot. Maybe even love him. But that thought in and of itself is terrifying, even without all the extra baggage weighing us down like cement up to our necks.
“She’s . . . at the top . . . the central tower.” Luokai’s every sentence trails off as if he can’t remember that he’s speaking, the endings not so important as the beginnings. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks, fingering the erhu’s long neck.
But then he looks at Howl. Raises the instrument.
Swings it directly at Howl’s head.