Howl laughs as he climbs a tree, looping the rope around one of the branches. “I wish I’d thought of that.”
“If I’d known you’d like the idea so much, I would have put some in your pack too. What are you doing?”
“There are gores in the area. They tend to hang out where there are more people to hunt, and I’ve seen scat and trails all over the place. I thought we could sleep up here on the packs.” He smiles down at me from the tree, “Unless you want to see if Helix really is as tough as he says.”
I shiver, remembering the huge paw prints and gouge marks in the rock just under the ledge where we slept on our first night out here. How different are things now? Howl and me talking like friends from birth, my ribs almost healed. I hand up my pack, then Helix’s, watching as Howl wedges them between two branches and ties them down to form a platform.
June stomps up from the river, dumping the four water skins at my feet, one of them still empty.
“June.” Her eyebrows come down at my soft tone. “I don’t like him either.”
Howl jumps from the tree to join our little chat, whispering, “And I’ll put gravel in his sleeping bag tonight, if you two will help me distract him.”
She looks from me to Howl, something close to a smile curling at the corners of her mouth. She picks up the empty water skin and heads back toward the river.
“You know, she’s only two years younger than I am. My sister’s age.” Or at least the age she would have been, if she were still alive. It seems odd to say what I am thinking. I haven’t ever talked to anyone about my family. Not even Tai-ge. He didn’t seem to want to know.
“She reminds you of her. Your sister.” Howl watches as June skips a rock across the placid surface of the river, waterskin on the ground next to her. “What happened to her?”
“Don’t you know?” I try to laugh, as if the horrific story is some kind of joke. But the laugh wells up in my mouth like bile. “Everyone else does.”
Howl doesn’t smile. “But you’re one of the few who really knows. There’s a difference between truth and propaganda.” He takes a step closer, touching my shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me. But I’d like to know.”
It’s hard to look back, hard to do anything but try to stop the deluge of memories and pictures swamping my mind. I’m not allowed to talk about my sister. Not about my father. None of it. But there they are, staring at me from the back of my head, where they live, buried. I see us all together, me and Father and Mother, Aya holding my hand as we walked together, Mother playing tag with us in the First Quarter park, prodding my reserved father until he laughed and joined us. Of Aya, circles under her eyes, watching silently as they burned Father’s body under the Arch. I held her hand, our palms sweaty and slipping against one another as we watched, Mother looming over him in her glass box as if she were the one who lit the fire. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look. I think my mind made up something even worse than what actually happened.
“She . . . Aya . . .” Saying her name out loud feels so wrong and so right at the same time. “She was quiet. Shy and reserved like my father. She didn’t want people looking at her because the attention made her . . . I don’t know.” I look at the ground. “Curl up inside. She would only play with me.” And Mother. The thought of the three of us together plays like a dissonant chord, rattling me. I hastily think of trees, of the sun, of the wind as it paints stories across my skin. Howl listens with his head cocked, silently offering to take a burden that I can’t hand over, however much I wish I could. “She loved playing weiqi, just like June. I always felt like as long as we were all together, she’d be able to smile. She’d be happy and safe. I could stand between her and whatever it was that made her so afraid.”
I tried to protect her. Tried to make sure the other children at the orphanage left her alone, though the nuns kept us apart. She was assigned to a different family for reeducation, but she had no one like Tai-ge to slip her candies and smile at her when it was hard. Everyone always misjudged her quiet for anger, her reserve for pride. Even at six years old.
Howl doesn’t say anything, letting me think and feel without interrupting. I wish he would interrupt.
“Mother didn’t give her SS. She caught it in a Kamari air strike . . . a City air strike, I guess.” Why would the City want a little ten-year-old with hardly any words, hardly the gall to look anyone in the eye except for me, to fall Asleep? “Two years later, Mantis . . . stopped working. She was in a self-sufficiency class, chopping firewood, and I was right outside the orphanage, hoping to see her when she walked to the cafeteria for lunch. But instead of lunch, she came out with an ax. She was chasing one of the nuns.”
I falter. It was Sister Lei Aya chased into the cold, cobbled street, brandishing her ax. And there was a bruise on Aya’s cheek when they finally let me see her body later. The suspicion blurts out, something I’ve never been brave enough to say out loud. “One of the nuns hurt her, and SS made her brave enough to fight back.”
Howl knows the rest of the story, that the Watch shot my little sister in the street right in front of me. Like I said, everyone knows. Jiang Gui-hua’s daughter proving her true designation: Fourth. Swinging an ax at the very order of women who had taken her in, clothed, and fed her when no one else would have. Traitors, the whole family.
I knew after that just what it meant to be a Fourth. It meant no one cared. No one wanted us. That they’d rather we were dead than alive. Aya was a hole burned out of my soul with only one Red bullet. I knew if I were to live, if I were to matter, I would have to wipe the brand from my skin. Become a new person. The kind General Hong would recommend for reintegration into normal society. The kind that fit. Aya was a memory I had to blur, to forget in order to keep my smile in place.
But she’s there now, sharp and clear in my mind, a crack in my heart.
I look at June, still throwing rocks in the water one at a time. Howl’s hand on my shoulder seems solid, as if it’s bracing me. June doesn’t look at all like my sister, but her silence—her fierce, angry silence—is just like Aya’s, who never even for a moment believed anything they said about Mother or Father no matter how many times she had to swallow Mantis pills.
My father didn’t deserve to die. He was quiet, but he loved us. He would have saved us, would have fought for us if he’d had the chance. If Mother hadn’t made it so they killed him before he could. Reeducation is only for those the Firsts think they can save.
“It wasn’t fair.” Howl’s voice is tight. “She didn’t need to die. Didn’t deserve it.”
“It was so pointless. She was there one minute, asleep in a room down the hall, and the next day . . .” I look up at the sky, framed by the trees. It hurts too much to continue. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. That’s why we’re out here. It matters more than anything else. The people they kill for no reason. Because they’re hungry or sick or can’t control compulsions . . .” Howl’s voice crumbles at the edges, and he clears his throat, avoiding my eyes. “Sorry. Old argument. I don’t need to say it to you. I wish . . .”
But he doesn’t finish, clearing his throat again instead. Pity and sorrow turn the edges of his mouth down, as if Howl knows what it means to lose people, though I don’t know how he could. I stare at him, wishing I knew the right question to ask, how to open the doors to his past so he can let out whatever demons chased him from the City into the Mountain’s arms. I want to know.
Howl looks toward the river, watching June. He smiles. “June’s cute when she’s acting human, don’t you think?”