“Why?”
“We don’t have much time before they figure out the fire upstairs is just a bunch of smoke and the cameras all go back online.”
We hobble down the blue-and-white-checkered halls, the drone of the alarm pounding against my eardrums until they must be bleeding. We finally come to a long, unfamiliar hallway dotted with heavy wooden doors every few feet. Sole pushes through the first door on our right.
A simple room, single bed neatly made with blankets patched in blues and greens. Sole deposits me on the quilts, moving back to the door. “I need to report to my station. If I leave now, I might be able to convince Root that I had to come up from level one. Stay here. Hide in the shower if anyone tries to come in.” With that, she runs, dark hair streaming behind her.
I push through the only other door in the room, pulling the communicator out of my gore-tooth necklace. Light tile and glass shower doors shine in the lights, too clean to belong here in the Mountain. Flipping the light off, I squeeze my hand around the communicator. The characters glowing on the back of my hand are unhelpful.
It simply says, Wait for me.
CHAPTER 33
WORSE THAN BEING CHASED. WORSE than hiding.
Waiting.
Sweat pours down my forehead from underneath a chin-length wig, though the cold air mists with my every breath. I adjust my borrowed tool belt, too tight over the brown Zhuanjia uniform Sole procured for me. Howl said it was too risky to go down to Sole’s rooms, and he had to show me something out here in order to make our escape work, but if this takes much longer, I might have to start pretending to fix something in order to fool the cameras trained on this solar panel maintenance platform. That would bring unwelcome attention even faster.
A Zhuanjia ducks out of the metal door, face hidden beneath a billed hat. The small tube of inhibitor spray Sole gave me is supposed to stop an attacker for a few minutes, which would give me a chance to run, but where to? He walks toward me, head down, inspecting the walkway, so I can’t see his face.
Pressing myself up against the wall, the inhibitor spray feels slippery in my palm. It fits in my hand perfectly, small enough that no one would know it was there until their eyes started burning, but that won’t do much if I drop it.
The Zhuanjia draws closer, shielding his face against the sun, only seconds from noticing me. Do I spray him, then push him over the side? No, the fall would kill him. Leave him here for someone to find?
Just as I’m about to do . . . something, the young man looks at me, and I realize he isn’t shielding his face from the sun. He’s shielding brown eyes I’d know anywhere from the cameras. Howl.
I sigh in relief, the tube going back in my pocket as I follow his lead, trailing behind him along the narrow ledge cut into the side of the mountain that leads around to the base of the earth-colored solar panels. He slides between two of the panels, off the path.
“Are you okay?” he asks when I follow him in. It seems like a stupid question, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
“They didn’t saw anything off.” Just remembering the table all set up to cut me open gives me the shivers. “What is going on? Why did they suddenly decide to steal my kidneys? And Mei . . .”
“Not your kidneys.” Howl takes his hat off, twisting it between his hands. “I thought they’d do more tests, not that they’d just try to . . .” He rubs his forehead.
“There must be other people here with SS, Howl. I’m not that annoying, am I? My hallucinations can’t be that special.” Trying to stay lighthearted is all that is keeping me from dissolving into tears. I can feel them, white hot behind my eyes.
“Others with SS, it’s true. Three more this week. You were a test, in the hospital room across from Cale. Mei was the control subject. The mine you brought back is carrying a new strain of SS, one that transfers from person to person instead of having to contract it from a bomb. Kasim is showing all the signs of post-Sleep behavior and never even went through the sleeping stage. . . .” He points to the pocket of my Zhuanjia uniform, where a bit of red fabric is sticking out. “What is that?”
I can’t answer for a moment, my breath catching in my throat. SS, contagious. SS infecting people without even making them fall Asleep first. The entire Mountain could be a slaughterhouse in minutes. The whole world will be trying to slice off their own fingers within months. There’s no way they have enough Mantis stockpiled to keep everyone lucid. “What are they going to do? What are we going to do?”
He leans over and pulls the red fabric from my pocket. “What is this? Where did you get it? Did Sole give it to you?” His fingers pull at the pieces. “It could be bugged. Don’t say anything.”
“No, it’s just . . .” I’m still reeling, mind blank. “I made it for you.” It’s a red flower, tied out of an old piece of ribbon I found in Sole’s room. The long hours of staring at the wall before Howl could meet me were too much.
He holds it up, the ends of panic replaced by surprise, looking from the folds of rose-colored ribbon to me.
“Sole told me that you make good-luck charms for . . . for people about to go out on patrol or . . . or something dangerous. . . .” I stumble over the words. She’d stumbled over them too, presenting them to me like some sort of offering during the long wait in her room, as if she was trying to show me that the people who had almost cut me to pieces had good sides to them too.
Howl’s face softens. “For Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Husbands and wives.” His mouth is starting to curve into a grin. “So they’re with you when you go. And to make sure everyone knows you’ve been spoken for.”
“Right.” My cheeks heat up and my hands twist into my shirt of their own volition. I made it with butterflies in my stomach, nervous that he would just laugh at me. But it’s too late to worry; the flower is in his hand, so I might as well see it through. My hands reach out like they belong to someone else, settling on his shoulders. “But if you are asking me to marry you, then my answer is no. I’m only sixteen.”
He laughs and leans forward, closing the gap between us, his hands pressing into my waist and back. “Thank you. I’ve never wanted something like this. Not until now.” Howl’s head is heavy on my shoulder, holding on tight.
I hug him back, surprised by his reaction. “I hope that is a good thing.”
Howl pulls away, pressing his lips together. “I need to tell you something. Something that I should have told you the moment I dragged you off the street in the City.”
“More important than the fact that the Mountain is probably already boiling over with loose infected?” I look down the slope, my mind teetering on the rocky edge below us, wondering how far down it goes. “Should we just make a break for it right now?”
Howl’s fingers brush my chin back toward him. “Dr. Yang suspected something odd was going on, so Kasim and Cale have been quarantined since the moment they took their masks off. They can’t do anything else until they figure out how long this new contagion lasts. The Mountain isn’t going to turn into a slaughterhouse unless someone else steps on a mine and doesn’t tell anyone.”
The medics all knew and they did nothing. They wore their masks, breathing filtered air while Mei poisoned herself sitting in Cale’s room. “How will they know when it stops being contagious? Is Dr. Yang just going to keep sending people into Cale’s room to see if they start having compulsions?” The bite of anger in my voice isn’t meant for Howl, but he shrinks back a little.
“You were the one they were testing in that room. Mei was there to make sure it was contagious to normal people.”