Not ready to talk about family yet. Just as much as I’m not, I suppose. So I give him an exaggerated wink, running from thoughts of my sister, of all the bad in the world just to watch June skipping rocks. That’s one right thing. “Cute how? Should I sleep between you two tonight?”
At my joke, Howl falls into line with an exaggerated eye roll. He seems to understand, running right alongside me from whatever it is he’s not saying out loud. “No, thank you. You can keep all the little girls to yourself.”
“Are you sure? I think a few days back I remember her looking at you from across the fire with something less than outright hatred.” This is more comfortable territory, my jagged edges blurring as if joking will make him forget what I said. Will make me forget. “Or, if she’s not your type, I know a whole bunch of little girls back in the City who would wait on you hand and foot.” I grab his wrist and twist his hand down, tapping the single white line there with my finger. “Even if they didn’t see this.”
He grabs a handful of dead leaves from the ground and rubs them into my hair. “Because I’m devastatingly good-looking. Yes, I know.”
I drop his wrist, scrubbing at the leaves to cover my embarrassment. I never said anything about devastating good looks. What I said after the explosion . . . I had a concussion. It doesn’t count.
Helix’s voice muscles in between us from behind the tree line. “Come over here, Sev. You can try starting the fire tonight.”
It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to start a fire. I have to get away from the mischievous smile that is sending pulses of electricity through my chest. I sit with my back to Howl, cheeks burning.
CHAPTER 18
WHEN NIGHT FALLS, SLEEP WANDERS away from me. The prickly feeling of eyes watching us still leaves me feeling restless and exposed. Helix and Howl volunteer to take turns watching, setting up on the ground to give us more room up in the tree.
My breath freezes in an icy mist above me, but I’m hot inside the sleeping bag, squashed against June. Howl’s sleeping bag is probably in some Second’s tent right now, so we only have three. Helix volunteered to share, but no one took him up on it. It seems impossible that the outside of the fabric could be so cold when inside it’s like sitting in a campfire.
June’s face next to me is calm and childlike in sleep. Innocent. Like Aya. Like my mother looks in her box above Traitor’s Arch.
Sometimes Mother is just a silent form on the other side of her glass display case in my memories. A doll. Left up on the shelf to remind me of games, of pretending, of silly stories whispered in the dark. She’s a pain under my ribs, older and deeper than Tai-ge. The skin has healed over the festering wound, but it spews out in painful spurts when I remember.
Mother’s crimes are the reason I spent the last eight years branded a Fourth. The reason I’m out here, peeling the blotchy shadows for movement, waiting for a shot to be fired. She’s handed me a life of sleepless nights worrying my roommate’s Mantis would stop working. Of being friends with Tai-ge, but not allowed to ever think of more than that. Why I have to worry about broken bottles and glass in my mouth, about the monster buried inside of me.
But Kamar is just a fairy tale. Turned around, does that mean that I escaped because of her? I’m out here with Howl because of the things she did.
If she was a rebel, she couldn’t have sold the City’s coordinates to the Mountain. They would have known where the City was already from anyone who had escaped the City or the farms. And why would she have left a bloody trail from house to house on the Steppe, First Circle members dead in their beds? What was the point? Why would she have gone back to the City at all after infecting me?
No matter what she did or why, I can’t turn Mother’s story into some kind of fairy tale. Things aren’t going to line up no matter what angle I choose to look at them, because in real life, people aren’t separated into black and white like pieces on a weiqi board, good and evil.
There is one thing that is black and white, though. Her hands pushed the needle into my arm, her fingers put the SS monster inside of me. Even if everything from those weeks is a fog of paralyzed nightmares, I do remember the stab of pain, and the feel of my mother hovering over me. She’s been rotting away in the deepest recesses of my mind since the hazy days after I woke up, with Seconds guarding my bedroom door and Father being dragged away, head down and hopeless. It’s too late to bring Mother out now and hope the decay will have magically disappeared.
I slide down the trunk of the tree, frozen leaves crackling under my weight as I land. Helix rolls over, his eyes softly touching me in the moonlight. But he just pulls his sleeping bag back over his head.
Howl sits up a few feet away, wrapped in his coat. “Something wrong?” There’s a line of dirt along his neck that looks smudged into a cross shape, kind of like Parhat’s scars. He tries to look down to see what I’m staring at, rubbing at his neck until the dirt is gone.
“Nothing I can put my finger on. Something has just seemed off all day.”
One side of his mouth quirks in a half smile. “Sick of walking behind that?” He jerks his head toward Helix.
I shake my head. “More like we are being followed.”
He nods, eyeing the trees around us. “I’m with you on that. Will you keep watch up there with June? Just in case?”
The casual agreement takes me by surprise. “You mean just in case it’s her family?”
Howl shrugs, meeting my eyes squarely. “Yes. But even if we get attacked by a bunch of hungry gores, it will be nice to have you up there out of reach.”
I smile a little. “Don’t think I can take care of myself?”
“I mean, if your aim is half as good as you claim . . .”
What he’s saying sinks in slowly, dread flowing through to my toes. “You don’t have the gun down here?”
Howl’s eyes open wide. “I thought you had it. Is it up . . . ?”
I race back to the tree before he can finish his sentence. The twigs and branches scratch my face and arms as I scale the trunk to get back to our packs, back to June. But the platform is bare. She’s gone.
“Howl!” My hands are sweaty, slipping against the plastic fabric of the pack as I search for the gun, but come up empty. All but four of the Mantis pills are gone as well. “We have a problem!”
He doesn’t answer. “Howl?”
I stick my head over the edge to look and my heart stops. Howl is kneeling in a pool of yellow light, a gun inches from his forehead.
Cas and Parhat stand below me, each with a gun trained on my friend. Parhat looks even more terrifying than before, eyes boring into Howl like he’s breakfast. A shudder buzzes through me as I realize that might be the plan.
Tian’s voice sings out from the trees, playing down my spine like the out-of-tune strings of a guzheng. “You can come down from there, Wenli. Sev. Whatever you’re calling yourself. And bring your new Menghu friend down with you.”
Helix? My eyes find his sleeping bag, covered with leaves. Empty.
Howl’s eyes catch mine from below and his head gives a miniscule shake. He returns to watching the gun leveled at his nose, almost cross-eyed. “What do you want? We don’t have anything of value.”
Cas ignores him, his raspy, barbed-wire croon reaching up to wrap around my throat. “We don’t need you or your friend here all in one piece, girly. He’s going to be missing a leg if you don’t get down here right now.”
“Okay!” I yell. “I’m coming down.”
I take my time, crawling to the other edge of the pack, looking for something that might do as a weapon. A handful of quicklights? Cas and Parhat would have to lean down and let me stick it in their eyes for the broken glass to do any good. The pack has a metal frame, but after a moment of my fiddling, Tian loses patience.
“I’ve seen a one-legged rabbit move faster than you up there. You get that rebel down here or you’ll see what I mean.”