The light returns after a few minutes, this time two shadows bobbing in its wake. The quicklight’s sickly glow gives the dirty yellow scarf tied over her head a greenish halo. June.
It’s hard to tell in the dark, but she looks about twelve, shadows under her eyes carving her face into something more than the child she should be. Her eyes stay fixed on the ground, and I can see her hands clenching and unclenching around the straps of the rucksack on her back.
Liming puts a hand on her shoulder, and then points to me. Grasping his hands together, he points again at me, then at June. Another leaf comes, the word ESCAPE scratched out in shaky strokes.
The unwavering glow of the quicklight lines Howl’s face with hard, unforgiving hollows. I can feel refusal blossoming in his throat even before his lips have time to move. The air almost boils with anticipation and violence.
I speak before Howl can shush me. “You’ll help us escape if we take her? Yes. We’ll do it.”
Howl’s arm around me tightens. His face is bland, but the whisper in my ear is clear. “We don’t know anything about her. The rest of the family will have twice the reason to come after us, even if she doesn’t kill us herself.”
Liming bows his head, his face crumpled with emotion. Anger and grief twisted in an all-too-human mask. The leaf crumbles in his hand, pieces fluttering to the ground.
June watches them fall, hardly even breathing.
“Is she infected?” I ask in a whisper.
A quick jerk of his head says no.
“Are you?”
His bright green eyes lift from the ground, yellowed and wolflike in the quicklight. A nod. After a pause, he points back to the tent and the clearing, circling his finger in the air with another quick nod.
“You all are. Except for June.”
He bows his head.
“But Parhat, he’s so much worse. . . .” Even Tian and Cas seem sane compared to Parhat, if not exactly cuddly. Wouldn’t SS have changed them, too?
“SS doesn’t progress the same way in everyone.” Howl’s voice is quiet, even for a whisper as he turns back to Liming. “Why didn’t you just follow us back to our supplies?”
Liming puts an arm around June and lifts her face with a soft touch. She looks at us for the first time, and her green eyes pierce right through me. It only lasts a second before her stare is back in the dirt.
“She’s your daughter?” The sentence cracks and splinters as it presses its way out of my mouth into the heavy air.
Liming’s arm encircling June slips down to her hand to give it a reassuring squeeze. A nod. Almost a smile. A proud smile.
Something opens up inside of me, tears burning behind my eyes as I take in that smile. Longing. Wishing for something that can never be mine. “We’ll take her with us. We’ll make sure she’s safe.” A promise I can only hope to keep. But the words are out.
Liming wraps his arms around June, pulling her tight against him. She doesn’t move, woodenly enduring the hug. When he lets her go, I can see tears on her downturned cheeks.
He nods to Howl and walks back into the trees.
It’s a tightrope walk back to the packs. I feel eyes everywhere, each attached to a gun sight trained on my back as if I’m stuck in a Liberation movie, an audience waiting for any of us to trip, for a gun’s metal voice. All we need is some dramatic background music.
About the time we lose sight of the fire, a gunshot sounds through the woods. We drop to the ground, a small hand finding mine in the dirt. A larger one wraps around my other wrist, thumb running across my palm. My lungs refuse to expand, my whole body waiting for Cas’s leathery scowl to appear over us in the dark.
The hand around my wrist lifts me up. “He’s leading them away. They’re running in the other direction,” Howl whispers.
Pulling June behind us, I follow Howl to the packs. Howl holds mine up while my cold fingers fumble to clasp the straps around my hips and chest. As he grapples with his pack, I watch June. The moon is dark, but even the night can’t hide her huddled outline on the ground, shoulders shaking.
No time to talk now.
Howl grabs my hand, I grab June’s, and we run.
CHAPTER 12
MY EYES WON’T OPEN WHEN Howl shakes me awake in the morning. Taking turns watching through the night coupled with bright sunlight has pain settling across my brain in a poisonous fog. It takes a moment, even after Howl trickles freezing water across my face.
“Stop it! I’m awake!” my voice rasps out in a hoarse whisper.
Peeling my eyes open, I accept the water skin Howl is holding out toward me. He taps his cheek as I sip, studiously ignoring the new member of our group. June is perched up in a tree about ten feet above us, her sleeping bag already stuffed back down into her tiny rucksack.
June’s cheeks are pale under her tan, hands clutching her arms as if she’s cold. She lifts one hand up to the scarf around her head and pulls it off, throwing it to the ground like a piece of garbage, blond snarls falling to her shoulders.
I blink. The golden halo has been teased into a bird’s nest of tangles and dirty leaves. Still, she looks just like pictures of our enemies from the Great Wars. Like the sleeping princess trapped in her picture window. Blond like the Kamari prisoners they bring to the City for execution.
My mouth hangs open, not even sure what to say. Howl catches my eye and shakes his head. He must have seen this before. Kamari escapees. But if there is no Kamar, does that make them the Mountain people? Or just . . . people? My mind twists uncomfortably, trying to fit things together I hadn’t known could come apart.
Howl looks up at June again. “Shall we go?” he asks, lips barely moving.
I look around, trying to figure out who he thinks is watching him. “Yes. If you let me eat something on the way.”
“Fine.” He holds out a green apple. I hesitate, but I take it.
“Has she eaten?” I ask, nodding toward June.
Howl gives a curt nod. “I tried. She took one bite of everything I offered her, then stuffed the rest down her shirt. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s holding what she did eat in her cheeks.”
A wave of pity pricks at my eyes. “She hasn’t been eating very well.”
“You don’t need to see her play chipmunk to know that.”
He’s right. June doesn’t look as if she’s seen a good meal in years. Cheekbones sharp as knives stick out underneath those downturned eyes, and her clothing is loose, hanging on her as though she stole it from an older brother.
When I climb up to sit down next to her, she doesn’t even look. I try touching her shoulder, but she just moves away.
“June?” I catch myself ducking my head, as if I can catch her eye if I try hard enough. It would probably take lying on the ground. “You okay?”
A stupid question. Which she answers in kind. Nothing.
“We aren’t going to hurt you. We promised your dad that we would take care of you.”
Her eyes flicker at this, but she doesn’t move. That stillness cuts straight to bone. Tai-ge told me the same thing, breaking my first few weeks of silence after waking up. That he’d take care of me. He’d never hurt me.
I didn’t believe him. It felt wrong, as though if what he said was true, then all the things they said about my parents were true too. That I’d never see them again.
“Are you going to run back to your family?” Howl’s voice is devoid of any accusation, his eyes up with us in the trees. “Would you be better off with them?”
Her shoulder twitches in what might be a shrug.
I climb back down to the ground. June hesitates a second, but follows. When Howl leads out, June casually stuffs a hand down her shirt, comes up with a broken cracker, and takes a bite.
I look at the apple in my hand and raise it up to my lips. It is sour in my mouth. But I like the way it tastes.
? ? ?
When we stop to eat lunch, June strolls away, glancing back at us once before disappearing into the trees.
Howl starts after her, but I stop him. “She probably has to relieve herself.”
He sits back down, craning his neck to watch her until she disappears from sight. “It was too easy. Getting away last night.”