Once we’re both inside, the doors close, isolating us in the tiny room. Alone again. After so long together Outside, it’s nice to not be fighting a crowd. Just me and Howl. Quiet. At least, until his eyes latch on to the envelope sticking out of my pocket. “What is this?” He draws it out without asking permission.
My name blinks back at me, the envelope bulging with something small and round. I shrug. “It came with my dinner.”
He raises his eyebrows, silently asking my consent before ripping the end open, sliding two green pills out on to his palm. Brows furrowed, he looks back up at me. “You still have the Mantis I left you?”
“How did you sneak it into my room without waking Cale?” I take the envelope back when he extends it out to me, but he doesn’t answer. Clearing my throat, I voice the worry that has been brewing inside me all day. “Is there something I should be worried about? These Mantis pills aren’t right? And the tests in Yizhi . . . ?”
Howl shakes his head, but he looks put out. “No, of course not. Go ahead and take these pills. I just need to talk to Dr. Yang about it again, I guess. They’re messing with your dosage for some reason.” He shrugs and turns back to stare at the closed elevator doors. “I think I’ve squared things up with Yizhi anyway, so you shouldn’t have any more trouble from them. I checked into it and they were never supposed to do more than those SS scans.”
“Are you sure?” I try to sound light, as if hiding today were some kind of joke. “No one ever chased me around back in the City. . . .”
“The City wanted to kill you. I’m just trying to make sure the Mountain doesn’t poke any more holes in you than they need to.”
“You said this place would be safe.”
Howl is quiet for a moment. “It will be. It is. You don’t have to worry.”
The elevator doors open to a large room, the ceiling domed high over my head. The walkway splits in the center of the room, branching out in ten different directions, each leading to a door set back into the wood paneling. But I can’t look at the heavy wooden doors or the mural dancing across the high arch of the ceiling. I’m lost in peering at the shelves and shelves of books. Old leather covers tooled with gilt, brightly colored paper screaming out their titles, tall, short, thick and fat, everywhere all around me.
“We’re here a little early,” Howl says when we reach the center, a crossroads that could lead anywhere, “because I wanted to show you these.”
I can’t speak, a wave of something I don’t quite understand rushing up through my chest and pricking at my eyes, all questions about needles and Yizhi forgotten. If I didn’t know better, I would think it was homesickness. Homesick for a time long before I left the City. Long before I met the nuns, before a star graffitied my hand.
“This is . . . like home. Like the library.” The smell of dust and old, creased paper sinks down into me as if it’s the only thing that really knows who I am. I catch sight of a title I remember reading over and over, the outline of a sleeping maiden draped across the binding. All I need is the picture window. The picture window and . . .
“Your mother brought the first few. Every time we send someone into the City, they smuggle some out.” I can hear the smile in his voice, warm memories leaking out. “There’s hope in fairy tales and stories like these. Sleeping Beauty always woke up.”
“She always woke up?” I look at the book. “I thought they let her lie there until she rotted. She was the one who brought in the evil fairy. Being cursed to sleep is a fitting end to someone who tries to work with evil and hide it. Isn’t that the moral?” It was mother’s story, one of the few fanciful tales the Firsts didn’t seem to mind leaking all over the Third Quarter.
“Sev . . .” Howl’s laugh echoes over us as he pulls the book from the shelf and holds it out to me. “That sounds like classic City manipulation. Read the real story. It has a happy ending.”
The painting on the cover at once calls to me and makes me want to go wash my hands. I know too well what it means to be Asleep, and it doesn’t help that this sleeping princess’s story resembles my own history so closely. How could the sleeping princess in this story have a happy ending when I know very well that Mother won’t ever wake up? That she deserves to be up on display. Asleep.
I wave the book away. There are so many other stories here, tales I’ve never read that have nothing to do with me. “They’re so beautiful.” But beauty hardly comes close. This place is a shrine. Sacred. I walk toward the closest shelf, reaching up to pull a book down, Howl’s exultant smile at seeing me happy a warm glow in my chest.
Howl steps up to the shelf next to me, one arm brushing mine. He touches my wrist, then slips his hand into mine. “You’ll stay, won’t you? Mantis aside, it isn’t so bad. Safe. Better than the City.”
Right now, surrounded by books with Howl beside me, it does feel safe. Like I could fit in here, next to him. He puts the book down and steps a little closer, his eyes trapping mine as he looks at me, all thoughts of the books dulling to fuzzy background haze.
The sound of footsteps breaks the electric silence between us, and heat burns my cheeks. I pull back from Howl to look at the books, not wanting to share this moment with whoever it is walking up the hall toward us. “Didn’t my mother work from inside the City? When was she here?”
“After you fell Asleep.” A new voice answers my question, slicing between Howl and me as it echoes through the huge room. A voice I recognize. “The First Circle refused to allow our research to go forward. So we left. This is what she wanted to bring with us.”
Dr. Yang’s bowed worker frame from the City has straightened underneath his Yizhi coat, Nei-ge’s squares at his throat. He walks with dignity, authority. The master of this space. He makes me feel small, as if I’m the one who is intruding. “?‘There is more strength in true beauty and power in imagination than you could ever find in the barrel of a gun.’ She used to say that all the time. Gui-hua didn’t stay here long, though. She missed you. She couldn’t leave you to the City. The Circle.”
“She couldn’t have missed me.” My hand finds the crook of my elbow, the spot where she injected me with SS. The momentary charm of remembering the woman who read me stories before bed instead of the monster who infected me fades. This room is a shrine. Worship for an idol for whom I will not light incense. “Or if spreading infection is how you show affection around here, I think you’d better show me to the door.”
Patience and tolerance seem almost painted on the doctor’s face. “Sometimes memories tell us a story that fits what we think we know rather than the truth. You weren’t the first SS victim in the City after one hundred years of safety, Jiang Sev. SS has been used to hurt families not following First Circle orders for years.”
I keep myself from rolling my eyes. “I didn’t realize you were from the City.”
“I was a First at the beginning. Just like you, Jiang Sev.”
I look down at my hand, the shiny blotch of scarring all that’s left of my First mark. I’m not a First. That life died with Father, with Mother leaving us. And out here . . . out here it doesn’t even matter what my scars look like.
I take a deep breath. It feels unrestrained. Free.
Dr. Yang gestures for us to follow him straight across the book room into a tall, arched doorway. I don’t follow, looking at the book I almost took, Howl waiting beside me. “Can I borrow one?” I ask. I haven’t read a book, a real book with no First scientific discovery announcement, no war propaganda, in far too long. I ache to sit down and let myself get lost in a story.
Dr. Yang stops, a funny smile on his face. “No. We don’t allow them downstairs. They’re too fragile.”
I glance at Howl. “But people can come up here to read them?”
Dr. Yang shakes his head. “These stories have to be understood. Appreciated. And explained to those who would not understand. We don’t have time for that.”