I unfold the papers from the envelope, trying not to blush at Howl’s nonchalance about being naked two feet away from us. Even with the towel. “Menghu. Like Helix? Aren’t they military?”
“Yes.” Howl sticks his head back under the water, washing away the last of the mud. The shower key squeaks as he turns the water off. “Good luck with them. They’re all very . . . enthusiastic.”
Raj doesn’t quite smile. “There are five collectives,” he supplies in answer to my unspoken question. “I’m part of Nei-ge. Administration and leadership. And . . .” He glances up as if there should be something to look at in here besides dirty tile. “. . . late for a meeting. I’ll just take Sev up to get her testing done so I can set you two loose.”
“Can we talk to Dr. Yang about that? Sev is afraid of needles.”
I glance back at him sharply. Afraid of needles? Any infected in the City has had enough needles jammed into them not to care anymore. Look at someone funny and suddenly your Mantis dose needs to go up. Immediately. But I don’t say anything.
Covering my eyes, I toss the last dry towel into the shower. Raj picks up the clean uniform meant for Howl from the top of my dirt-encrusted pack and hands it over. The pack seemed cleaner than the floor.
“I can ask, if you want.” Raj’s voice is uncertain. “I know General Root and Dr. Yang were both very interested in her levels, though.”
Howl walks out of the shower fully dressed, rubbing the water from his hair. “Last I checked, SS isn’t contagious. She isn’t going to infect anyone by walking too close.”
“No, but . . .” Raj trails off as we walk out the door, leaving him alone in the Outside showers.
CHAPTER 20
I HAND THE ENVELOPE TO Howl and he steers me down another blue hallway that ends with a heavy metal door. He pushes a button in the wall and the door slides open to reveal a tiny, mirrored room. Shiny silver buttons line up by the door, numbered one to eight. Howl pushes number five, the heavy metal door closing slowly. As soon as the door shuts, my stomach drops and I have to slap my hand against the wall for balance. The floor is moving.
“It’s an elevator, Sev. Don’t you remember elevators from the First Quarter?” Howl asks.
I shake my head. Fuzzy pictures of wood-paneled rooms just like this one flick through my mind, but I must have blocked out this gut-wrenching sensation. I do, however, remember walking up nine flights of stairs to get to my station at the cannery every day.
The door slips back open and my breath catches in my throat. The room beyond is big enough to feel like we’re going back Outside, large enough that I’d have to yell to talk to someone on the other side, and ceilings so high I can’t actually see them from inside the elevator. Shiny stone walls make a perfect circle around the perimeter, a stairway across the room hugging the bald rock, leading up to balconies and hallways. Windows and openings pepper the walls above us, the highest almost too far to see. When I take in more of the room, I realize there are actually four staircases dividing the large, circular space into quarters. Bright circles of light decorate the white and blue tiled floor. Stepping out of the elevator, my eyes follow the shafts of light up to an impossibly high ceiling in the stone.
“This is the Core.” Howl smiles, looking around.
It’s as though we’re standing deep in a dead volcano’s belly, its slack mouth above us turned into skylights. The stairways and window and balconies make me feel as though I’ve stumbled into an ant nest, the rock above me tunneled through to make way for the bustle of people living underground.
Howl points up toward a large panel of glass set into the stone wall, far above the reaches of the stairways, the glass surface too full of reflected sunlight to see through. “That floor is all greenhouses. They’re up high, where the windows can go all the way Outside.” He smiles again, as though he’s missed seeing this place. “If we ever end up stuck down in here at least we’d have enough to eat. As long as you don’t mind being a vegetarian. There are chickens in here somewhere, but they only let us eat the eggs.”
“Where’s the marketplace?” I ask, thinking of the City’s bustling center with comrades trading fabric and canned goods. Everything here is so clean and polished, as if no one has their own place to make a mess.
Howl shakes his head. “No official trade. Everything’s issued by Nei-ge according to need. Clothing, food, shoes and socks, paper and ink, everything. Everyone really is equal here.”
In the very center of the Core, steps sink down into a circular amphitheater. A large skylight creates a beam of light that falls in a hard circle across the entire sunken portion of the floor, more than ten times longer across than I am tall. The bright light bounces off a gold seal set into the red stone: a large star, with four smaller ones lined up next to it.
“It’s left over from Before. Secret military base of some kind, I think. At least I’m guessing from all of the telescreens and the tech and how well it’s defended and hidden. We didn’t have anything so extensive up in the City, except maybe here and there in First laboratories.” Howl nods toward the symbol. “Whatever country was stationed here must have crumbled just like everyone else when SS came through. Places like this were safe from the bombs, so the people inside survived while people Outside turned into monsters.”
Monsters. “You don’t think . . . Helix?” I stumble over the words, wanting it to be true. At least then I could understand. If shooting at June was a compulsion . . .
“Is infected? No.” Howl scratches at his scruffy chin, watching my face, but doesn’t elaborate.
We walk toward the drop in the floor, weaving through streams of people flowing into the room from large glass doors. Smells of steamed bread and cooking vegetables waft through the air, reminding me that the only things in my stomach for the past month have been dried, stale, or dirty from being dug out of the ground. People accumulate under a large opening in the stone, wooden beams forming a triangle around a counter, workers passing out plates of food. Groups of men and women sit down on the amphitheater steps, eating and talking.
Something strikes an odd chord. Color. In the City, this would have been a sea of black or gray hair, and varying degrees of olive skin, but here in the Mountain I see olive and pink and brown, and hair that burns gold, white, gray, red, and black. And . . . I like it. I thought it would be hard after a lifetime of fighting invisible Kamar, of propaganda and classes on how to detect genetic deficiency. But these people look like . . . people. As though they belong together. Like I could belong too.
A few of the sitters are staring back. One is even pointing. A ripple goes through the crowd around us until twenty people or more are all unabashedly staring in our direction. The stirrings of hope inside me dim a few watts. Maybe there’s more to belonging here than just walking in.
“Friendly bunch, aren’t they?” I remark.
Howl steps between me and the crowd of uncomfortable stares. “Let’s go find your room.”
I nod, skin crawling as hundreds of eyes follow us as we walk out.
The halls leading up to Menghu dormitories sport the same calming blue as below, but a telescreen runs the length of every hall. Back in the City, telescreens were for Firsts. And only the lucky ones.
There are three beds in my room, two of them stacked in a bunk and made up with blue sheets, a white blanket neatly folded at the end. The last bed is just a bare mattress, jacked up on stilts above a chest of drawers.
When I walk in, a girl jumps up from one of the beds. She’s tall. Almost as tall as Howl, with dirty-blond hair tied back into a ratty ponytail. Her face is heart-shaped and would be pretty if not for the murderous glare that immediately focuses on Howl. “You aren’t allowed in here. Men sleep on the other side of the dormitories.”