“Thank you, Peishan.” The captain’s nod is a little surprised. He doesn’t expect much from a classroom of Thirds, but then Peishan has always been an overachiever. “Did it work? Are we liberated?”
The question annoys me, and I start to roll my eyes, but wrench them back down to my desk when Captain Chen’s gaze falls on me.
Once again, Peishan provides an answer. “Our work is Liberation. Seconds fight and Thirds work to make sure Firsts can find the cure and end the war. We are far more free here than anyone trying to survive Outside.” The pledge regurgitated, but it’s true. Safety from SS and Kamari soldiers is enough for anyone—even a hated Fourth like me—to fight to keep their place inside the City. Peishan is still trembling as if the thought of SS doomed the rest of her evening to looking over her shoulder and watching shadows, terrified an unmedicated SS victim could be sneaking along after her, wondering what her flesh tastes like.
I sit up straight, suddenly noticing the rigid line of my friend’s back, the way her hands grip the sides of her desk, fingers turning white. Peishan’s whole body shakes in palsied bursts, her grasp on the desktop the only thing keeping her from falling to the ground.
“Sir!” I jump from my bench and run for Peishan. “Sir, she’s . . .”
Peishan slides from her seat, the shakes suddenly stopping as if she’s done fighting the compulsion that’s taken her. Hands outstretched, she strides toward Captain Chen, who only has time to fall off his chair as he frantically gropes for his crutches.
I crash into Peishan, my ribs and sternum crushed against her bony back as I tackle her to the floor. Other students in the class spring up from their desks to pull her arms flat on the ground, grab her feet to keep her from kicking. They leave me to lie on top of her, to keep her twitches and screams smashed against the floor, where they can’t hurt anyone. Or at least where they won’t hurt Captain Chen.
The captain yells for help, members of the Watch sprinting from their posts in the hallway at his call. One of the Watchmen pulls me off my friend, gathering her in a bear hold until her muscles stop straining and pulsing, and her head hangs down, sobs of fear and revulsion tearing from her chest.
“I took Mantis an hour ago!” Tears spill down her cheeks, her hair a tangled bird’s nest atop her head. “I’m supposed to be safe!”
I can’t watch as they drag her out. No late-night discussion in our room to look forward to tonight. None of Peishan’s silly questions about Seconds and Tai-ge and whether we really are just friends. Our room will just be dark now. Silent. Asleep.
Captain Chen’s chest heaves as he pulls himself up on his crutches. “This is, perhaps, an unfortunate but appropriate launch into the rest of our class discussion.”
Peishan’s sobs echo down the long hallway, fading as the Watch carries her away.
“For a hundred years, the City was completely free from SS. We didn’t need Mantis. We certainly hadn’t seen strains of Mantis-resistant SS. Chemical bombs and the war were no more than an uncomfortable memory. All of this was true, until eight years ago. Now SS is here, rearing up in the places we least expect—the epidemic we were supposed to be safe from.” He pauses, and my stomach cramps. “What changed?” He makes a show of looking back and forth over the students, half of us still standing, frazzled from restraining Peishan.
Then, as I knew would happen, his stare fixes on me.
I shrink from where I stand at the front of the room, wishing I could go back to my bench, that I could duck behind the broad-shouldered Thirds, still smelling of the metal and soot from the factories. I don’t know why I’m still trying to take these classes; I should have known that having a military captain for a teacher was enough of a promise of misery to just take double shifts at the cannery and stop trying to play at school. Tai-ge had to argue to even get me here, but my stars will always speak louder than he ever could.
Captain Chen’s glare stings, expectantly waiting until I look up. “SS has returned to the City, and Kamari heli-planes fly over us daily. What changed?” His voice is pinched and poisonous. “Jiang Sev? Care to enlighten us?”
I straighten and meet his stare, refusing to blink, refusing to let him bully me. Hating the way his mouth pinches over my name—my mother’s name, the one they made me take instead of my father’s. Another kind of brand, just as loud as my scar. “Jiang Gui-hua happened. My mother betrayed us all.”
CHAPTER 2
THE ORPHANAGE LOOKS COMFORTABLE IN the lamplight, the mishmash of peaked tile roofs turned up at each corner and the sprawling glass windows just like a family compound from a feel-good propaganda film. Warmth glows from inside, seeming almost cozy until you catch sight of the plaque nailed above the entrance reading HALL OF WAR-ORPHANED CHILDREN in peeling black characters.
When I pull open the front door, I’m careful not to dislodge the handle from its precarious one-screw tether. It feels good to do something softly, to stop trying to break a hole in the road with my boots, to calm the angry demon stretching inside of me, howling to come out.
My mother the traitor.
Even the mention ignites an illness deep in my belly looking for the quickest way out. As the door opens, someone comes running through from the other side, slamming the heavy wood against my shoulder and wrist.
“Sorry!” It’s one of the younger residents. She runs past me without another word, late for a factory shift, no doubt.
I roll my shoulder and look at my hand where the door scraped me, a drop of blood welling at the point of the star burned into my skin—the mark of a traitor. The mark that will never wash away, no matter how many years I spend being reeducated by General Hong.
I clench my fist, trying to tune out the memories of her beautiful voice telling me bedtime stories, of her duets with Aya, which always dissolved into laughter when one or the other couldn’t hold their part. She left us. She left us for them. Every chemical bomb that falls might as well have Jiang Gui-hua’s name chiseled into its brassy nose, because she’s the one who told Kamar where we are.
My back hunches as I walk into the orphanage’s open-air courtyard, gulping down deep breaths of the frozen air. Focusing on any one thing seems too difficult. My eyes dart between the cracked cement ground to the main desk that blocks access to the rest of the orphanage, my hand creeping up to the fleshy inside of my elbow, where the soft, smooth expanse feels as if it’s on fire.
And it might as well be. That seemingly insignificant spot on my arm is Mother’s last word to the City, delivered through me. Because she didn’t just tell Kamar where to find us and our Mantis stores. She didn’t just leave half of the First Circle dead in their beds before she was finally caught.
No, she also brought SS back to us personally. To me, her own daughter, in a syringe.
I was the City’s first Seph.
I didn’t understand what my mother had done to me until later. Much later, when General Hong found time to explain it all to me. All I could think during those first few months was that somehow the Circle and the Reds were all wrong, but even I couldn’t erase the memory of her voice in my room, her face hovering near mine, and the prick of the needle.