Cale swats another green-coated girl on the behind as we walk by, the Menghu jumping away. When she sees it’s Cale, her face relaxes, smiling when Cale rolls her eyes toward us. “Do you mean Yizhi? They’re medics. Jiaoyang does primary education and research.”
“How did I end up in Menghu?” I ask, trying to ignore the girls in yellow trailing behind us. “I can point a gun, but that isn’t exactly difficult.”
“Everyone in this zoo can shoot a gun.” The new voice turns me around. “We thought Menghu would appeal to you because of your history with the City.”
The newcomer’s grandfatherly face creases in a friendly smile. His gray-green military jacket matches the ones I’ve seen all over the Menghu dorms, but the canvas doesn’t quite fit, loosely falling from his shoulders and hanging in baggy folds down past his stomach and hips. Instead of an outline of a tiger at the collar, the rounded edges are embroidered with a simple square on each side, like the space between pieces on a weiqi board. He has dimples. Like Tai-ge.
“General Root!” Another of those foreign-tasting names. Eye rolls gone, Cale gives a deferential bow. “I was just about to bring them up to meet you, sir.”
General Root’s iron-gray head gives Howl a brief nod. The woman a step behind him gives Howl a nod too. Her skin is ebony dark. “Jiang Sev, welcome to the Mountain. I’m Jen Child, in charge of Menghu operations.”
I blink, trying to keep my eyes respectfully on the floor when facing someone so important instead of peeking at the woman as she smiles at Howl. She’s beautiful, her wide-open eyes confident when they switch from Howl to me, as though she knows I have never seen someone with coloring like hers before and doesn’t care.
Trying to cover my awkwardness, I mimic the General’s nod, but his slight pause tells me this was not the correct response. “Thank you,” I say, trying to fill the silence. “It’s nice to be out of the cross fire.”
“Helix tells me you stumbled into more than your fair share of it,” the General says. “Get used to it, because the southern garrison is tearing the area apart looking for you.”
“They sent the entire garrison out to find us? And failed?” Howl rubs his fingers through his hair with a cocky smile. “Makes you feel good about yourself, doesn’t it, Sev?”
I ignore him. “And the . . . Outsiders? June’s family?”
“June? Oh. The Wood Rat you dragged out here.” He turns to Howl. “I’m glad Helix was able to take care of that situation.”
I feel my eyes narrowing, but General Root doesn’t give me a chance to respond, focusing his attention on Cale instead. “Take Jiang Sev to get those tests done. Dr. Yang is practically compulsing with impatience. You”—he points at Howl—“I need upstairs. Come on.”
Howl hangs back. “I’ll finish walking through with Sev, just to be sure she’s comfortable.” He doesn’t shrink under General Root’s stern gaze. “Raj mentioned that Yizhi wanted my SS levels anyway. Might as well do it now.”
The General gives him a small nod, then walks with Jen Child toward the mirrored elevator doors. Cale immediately steers us down a white hallway that smells of disinfectant, then through a set of double doors marked LAB. The girl sitting behind the front desk smooths long bangs out of her eyes and stands, tucking her open white coat around her. “Jiang Sev? And Howl, of course. I’m Siyu.”
I lean over to Howl and whisper, “This is ridiculous. Do they do telepathy injections around here or something?”
“The telescreen let me know you were coming.” Siyu smiles. “The system knows which tests you need, and I already have your ID chips ready.” She nods to Cale. “I’ll take them from here. Follow me, please.”
Cale shrugs and shoulders her way back through the double doors, every step a little too hard, as though she’s trying to stomp a hole in the floor.
“I already have an ID chip, thanks,” Howl says when she’s gone. “And Sev already talked to Dr. Yang about sticking with the card for now. She had a nasty infection out in the forest, and Yang thought she needed some extra time to heal before implanting the chip so her immune system doesn’t overload.”
I glance at Howl, confused. Why doesn’t he want me to get a chip? But Howl is the only one I know here, the only person I have a reason to trust, so I play along. “I . . . don’t want to spend my first month here in bed.” Glancing at the double doors, still swinging from where Cale went through, I add, “My roommates don’t seem like the types that would give me a sponge bath.”
Siyu smiles over her shoulder at us. “I doubt implanting the chip would have that dramatic of an effect, but I can postpone the order, if you’d like. And Howl, your chip was deactivated when you went undercover. We have to extract it and give you a new one.”
Howl shrugs. “I’ll get it done when Sev comes back in. They won’t starve me or anything.” He pulls out the temporary ID card to show her, grimacing over the picture. “Though they might tell me I need to stop stealing Da’ard.”
Siyu smiles tolerantly. “The thing we are most interested in is your encephalitis lethargica levels, in any case. Not invasive in the least.”
We walk into a high-ceilinged room, the white floor shiny and reflective. Dim lights surround a long white tube on a raised platform in the center of the space. Siyu presses her thumb to a pad by the door and a square of light with two flashing circles labeled RESEARCH and PROCEDURE pop up on the blank wall. She taps RESEARCH and thumbs through different circles that appear.
I’m too distracted by the tube to pay much attention to her. One end is closed off, wires trailing down from the circular wall inside the machine. A pink pad sits under the blinding white lights inside, crisscrossed by what look like nylon ropes. Restraints.
A picture of a brain pulls up on the bright square. Siyu points and a light appears, following her finger. “Levels test gauge swelling. When you are infected with encephalitis lethargica, your frontal lobe swells.” The circle of light following her finger tightens, and the picture magnifies, focusing on something that looks like a snake circling the center of the brain. “Which interferes with the way it interacts with the basal ganglia. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that determines personality, controls inhibitions and self-control. Emotions. Here,” she says, highlighting a piece of the snake, “is the part of your brain that regulates sleep. SS causes lesions in this area, hence the sleeping stage of SS. Those lesions also cause the other . . . problems that come after you wake up.”
Problems. That’s a nice way of putting it. The emotions that aren’t being correctly regulated flare out into something terrible, a psychotic break from reality. Fear causes men to turn on their own wives and children; anger drives the incendiary to mass murder in the street. Pain can whisper deep inside an infected’s brain, forcing them to cut off whatever hurts. I once saw a little orphan, no more than four or five years old, begin chasing her friends around the orphanage cafeteria with a steak knife, and it was no game.
That little girl meant to kill.
That’s what Mantis is for. Regulating those reactions. Tricking infected brains into skipping their moments of psychosis. Except for . . . “Do you have cases in the Mountain that don’t respond to Mantis?”
Siyu blinks, and I think it’s her version of being surprised. “What do you mean?”