I take a step back, not wanting to touch the fruit accidentally. Raw fruit is poison, one of the reasons the cannery that I spent so many hours sweating in is so important to the City. Ingesting something before the canning process . . . I gasp as Howl casually sinks his teeth into the fruit.
“Howl!” I reach toward him, not sure what to do.
He dodges me, dark eyebrows puckering together. “What?” The word comes out muddy, obstructed by the chunk of apple in his mouth. “I’m sure there are other trees. We’ll find something you like.”
“Spit it out! Quick, before the juice gets too far into your system!”
“What are you talking about?” Howl swallows, holding the apple protectively against his chest. “It’s an apple!”
Years of heavy gloves and eyewear, now here I am trying to figure out how to wrest a raw apple away from Howl with my bare hands, as if I don’t know how dangerous it is. “It’s poison! Why do you think we have so many canneries in the City?”
Howl’s abashed expression would have had me in fits of laughter if the situation weren’t so dire, but instead he’s the one who starts laughing. “Poison? Fruit isn’t poisonous.” He shakes his head. “You actually believe all that junk the propaganda department puts out? I guess people don’t try to escape if they think that all the food out here is going to kill them.”
“Why would anyone want to escape?” I look down self-consciously. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
He pulls a branch down, picking another of the hard green fruits to hold out to me. “Here. Try one.”
Everything I know screams against me even touching the thing. I had to take a chemical shower once from contamination back at the cannery. My glove cracked and I ended up in the hospital, an acidic tang wafting up from the pulp threatening to eat away my palm. Death by uncooked peaches.
I shake my head. “You’ve been living on a hill with someone to prepare all your meals since the day you were born. You couldn’t know the first thing about what is safe to eat out here.”
Howl smiles through another mouthful of apple and shrugs, tucking the second apple into his pocket. “When I don’t die, and you are convinced, I’ll have this waiting for you.”
But only a few steps later, Howl’s hands begin to shake. He gropes at his pack, barely getting one of the pockets open before falling to his knees and then onto his face.
“Howl?” My head spins as I try to pull him onto his back, the bulky pack too heavy to move off him. Unclipping it and pushing it off Howl’s back, I finally mange to roll him over.
His eyes are white, rolled back into his head, and his skin is chalky and pale.
Why did you eat that stupid apple? I yell inside my head. What now? A finger sweep? Rescue breaths? Heart pounding, I try to remember what to do in an emergency from back at the factory, but the only thing coming to mind is a stupid song the nuns used to sing to us about Yuan Zhiwei’s unbreakable ax.
With shaking hands, I turn him onto his side, bending close to put an ear next to his mouth. He’s breathing. I lean forward again to check his pulse, but stop short when I notice white powder all over my hands. I run a hand across Howl’s cheek, and the powder smears under my fingers.
“Sev!” The whisper has me on my feet and ready to run, heart hammering against my ribs. Howl’s eyes open, a wicked smile cracking across his face.
“Sev, the apple! It’s killing me! Save me.”
“You . . .” I back away as he sits up and brushes the dirt from his shirt. “You dirty Seph! What is wrong with you? You scared me to death!”
Howl wipes the powder from his face, wrinkling his nose as it sticks to his hands. “You’d better watch your language around me, young lady.”
“I just about had a heart attack! I thought you were dead! I thought . . .”
“That you’d never be able to speak to me again? The tragic fate of a handsome First you just couldn’t save . . .”
The impish smile spreads even wider, and I have to concentrate very hard to keep from slapping the expression from his face. “Come on,” he says. “I’m funny. You can admit it.”
He’s so pleased with himself, it’s hard to stay angry. And I can’t stop myself from laughing as he tries to wipe the powder out of his hair. Unsuccessfully. “It’s stuck in your eyelashes. What is that stuff?”
“Water purifier.” He unzips the top pocket of his pack to get at his water skin. Pouring a little water over his hands, he scrubs at his face and hair, the water turning it purple. “Lychee flavored. Disgusting.”
“Wasting water purifier just to scare me?”
He rubs the water from his cheeks, shrugging. “I was going for a laugh rather than terror. You haven’t spent much time laughing since I met you. I’m trying to help.”
I laugh again, but underneath a scary sort of opening suddenly brings itself to light. I thought the exact same thing about Tai-ge back in the City, and did everything I could to fix it. It’s what friends do. Is Howl my friend?
I watch as he packs away his water skin and gathers the rest of his things together, a single hash mark on his hand flashing at me like a warning light. Am I friends with the Chairman’s son? A week ago I would have laughed at the thought, but Howl isn’t what I expected. Not snobby or self-important. He hasn’t looked at my brand even once.
Howl finally notices my absent stare in his direction. He smiles.
I smile back.
It feels safe, as if Howl is the boy from his story about the stars, ready to sing away the monsters lurking in this forest, in my past. Or tease and joke them away, anyway. He doesn’t seem like the singing type.
But, as I follow him out of our campsite, an uncomfortable thought wiggles to the surface of my brain. Howl is most certainly not dead, if a little sticky. If the City lied about raw fruit, what else isn’t true about the reality I thought was mine?
CHAPTER 10
HOWL CONTINUES TO STAY VERY much alive, but I don’t give in to the fruit. Even if hard crackers have begun to feel like cement piling up in my stomach, biting into an apple feels like some sort of disloyalty to the City. To Tai-ge.
Walking is a slow affair, with rests for me to concentrate on something other than my ribs attempting to poke holes out my abdomen. Howl can’t keep still when we’re stopped, sometimes pulling up plants with barky-looking roots to eat boiled with dinner, something I do allow, though it makes me look twice at that single line scarred into his hand, wondering how the Chairman’s son knows tubers from onions from bloodsucking leeches. He must have been preparing to leave for a long time, figuring out how to survive Outside so he’d be ready.
My cuts and bruises start to disappear, the days slipping by like sand through my spread fingers, mesmerizing and uniform. The cold doesn’t bite the way it did up high on the mountain, but it lurks in the open sky and the shorter days, waiting to bare its teeth. Before many days have passed, every tree we walk by starts to look the same, every burr caught in my hair just another task for our chats around the fire at night as Howl tells me stories about other constellations, other worlds, everything except his own life back in the City.
It must be hard for him, too—leaving. I can see traces of something trapped beneath the easy smile that splits his face in two as we walk away from his home and mine. But questions don’t go over well. Whatever it is that made him run—that made him help me—stays cloaked, hidden by his mask of smiles, jokes, and stories.