What was I doing again? I can’t remember.
My eyes burn, my eyelids suddenly very heavy. Lying down here seems like a good idea. Maybe Tai-ge will come tell me a story to chase away the bad dreams. Like the one of someone shaking me and yelling in my ears.
A light flares and my eyes spring open to find Howl’s face too close to mine. He is kneeling over me, holding something that smells terrible under my nose. “Stop!” I feebly bat his hand away. “I don’t need help. Where’s June?”
“Safe. I carried her first. Normally I would love to sit down and chat, but there is an entire garrison of Reds within a mile and I’m pretty sure you have a concussion.” He hoists me up so I’m draped across his shoulders, head and arms down on one side of his head, my legs banging against his chest on the other.
“I can walk. Put me down.” It comes out in a slur, and the world starts to spin around me again.
“This is faster than you walking, believe it or not.”
My head is right by his ear. From this angle he looks younger, the curve of his cheek soft and smooth. I’m breathing his hair, short and dark and smelling vaguely of sweat and campfire. It suits him. The thought seems to circle around in my head, jerking to a stop with each jarring step. He belongs Outside, all the starch and City pride stripped away. I like it.
“You know”—my voice jars with each long stride—“you aren’t bad-looking.” The clouds are pressing harder against my eyes and mouth, but from the inside.
“Thank you. I’m strong, too. And very, very funny.” He’s whispering now and things have gone darker and a few degrees cooler, as if we’ve walked into the shade.
My head keeps fuzzing in and out, like the scream of heli propellers as they pass overhead, the cadence twisting uncomfortably. Howl’s head presses into my stomach as if it is supposed to fit there, and suddenly I am very aware of his arm around my leg, holding me balanced across his shoulders.
Heat floods my cheeks in the moment of clarity. I grasp for something to say that will distract him. “Tai-ge used to take care of me too. “
Howl doesn’t answer for a minute. Then he squeezes my arm and says, “I’m glad someone did.”
The black around us deepens until he stops, a bright lantern pushed up against the wall ahead of us searing into my eyes.
“Can we put that light out?” I ask, squinting. “I think it’s burning my brain.”
The muscles in his back and shoulders bend and flex underneath me, and suddenly I’m sitting on the ground next to another person huddled against the wall. Her eyes follow me cautiously as I scoot up closer to her, but she doesn’t move away. “June?” My voice sounds tinny in my ears, and my head starts to hurt. “How did you get here?”
She glances over at Howl, hands rubbing back and forth over her arms. He bends down, handing me a leaf that leaks a syrupy sap onto my fingers. The sudden, sharp smell wafting up from the leaf burns up through my nose, sharpening my vision for a moment.
“Keep breathing. It’ll clear your head.” Howl’s back is to us, blocking the worst part of the lamplight, though even the dim ring around him is sending slivers of pain through my head. “Talk to me.” His voice is too quiet, as though the earplugs didn’t quite do their job earlier. “Tell me about Tai-ge. If you can string whole sentences together, then hopefully it’ll mean you aren’t broken.”
The pain pounding in my head starts to clear all the cottony fuzz from my brain, and I can feel my cheeks heat. “You keep bringing him up. Did you know Tai-ge?”
“Of course I did.” Howl brushes his fingers along the wall, following a depression in the stone that looks too regular to be natural.
An uncomfortable feeling joins the ache in my head, trying to imagine Tai-ge and Howl together. Talking. I can’t think of anything else to say, avoiding Howl’s glance when he raises an eyebrow at me.
He pulls out Tai-ge’s dull knife and traces along the depression in the rock wall, shavings of plaster showering down. When the line is big enough, he squeezes his fingers between the stones, and a section of the wall crumbles away. Inside is a black metal box sitting under a thick layer of dirt and broken plaster. He pulls out the box and pries it open, a water skin with about two inches of gelatinous liquid falling out.
The water skin goes to June, who just looks at it in her hands like it’s something disgusting.
“It’s Choke,” Howl tells her. “A nutritional supplement.”
“What is this place?” I ask. “How did you know . . . ?”
“We are right on the Menghu patrol circuit,” Howl says as he rifles through the box, fanning the cloud of dirt that follows. “This is one of their emergency caches. I stumbled over one of their signs as I was carting June out of there.”
“Menghu?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word before. It sounds like an old language. One of the dead ones from before the Liberation standardized things.
“The army from the Mountain. Rebels. They have safe havens set up all through here just in case Reds catch them out in the open.” Howl dumps the contents of the box onto the dirt floor. “Reds haven’t found this one yet, or they would have taken the supplies.”
Looking around me, I realize that we must be underground. Light from the entrance doesn’t penetrate to where we are sitting, rocks fitted together like a puzzle forming the walls and ceiling. The cave continues past us, but the light doesn’t reveal much. The air is cool and dry, smelling of dirt and stale sweat.
“You just . . . stumbled across something marking the cave?” I ask.
“I learned some of the signs when I was with them. I was lucky to have found it when we needed it so badly, though.”
Very, very lucky.
Howl piles the few water skins and some dried fruit and crackers from the supplies back into the box and comes over to sit by me. Leaning in close, he whispers, “She hasn’t spoken yet. I’m not sure what happened, but she’s been awake since we dragged her away from the tent, so she should be okay. Even the eye.”
June’s eye does look pretty fantastic. What was only bluish purple before has now darkened to almost black, her entire eye encircled. She looks back calmly and whispers, “I’m not dead. I can hear you.”
Howl smiles. “Good.”
June tilts her head and touches her bloody nose, grimacing. “You don’t know how to fix this, do you?”
“I can.” Both June and Howl look at me, surprised.
“I grew up with orphans as likely to eat their spoons as their morning rice if Mantis wasn’t working. The nuns didn’t get too excited about anything unless bones were sticking out, so we learned to take care of one another.”
June’s eyes well up as I remold her nose back to how it is supposed to be, but she holds still. When I’m finished, she resumes staring at the wall. I was expecting a gasp at least. Most kids would have screamed their way through the whole thing.
“Don’t touch it for a while, okay? Noses heal fast, but it won’t be the same.”
She just nods. Like it’s happened before. Or maybe she’s never looked in a mirror to know what “the same” would be. Her hands rub her arms for warmth, the Choke lying forgotten in her lap.
Howl holds another water skin full of the white jelly out toward me. I wrinkle my nose as I take it, but have no intention of gagging the slimy concoction down. My experiences with Choke have been less than appetizing.
Poking at it through the plastic, I look up at Howl. “So.” I wait until he looks at me. “Grenades?”
“Not a real one.” He shrugs at my black expression. “I know. We could have saved ourselves some trouble running from the Wood Rats if I’d brought it out earlier.”
June looks up, scowling.
“Sorry. I mean . . . I didn’t want to attract attention.”