“I’m already infected. Are they trying to see if being exposed again makes me worse? If I become contagious too? Or if Mantis will stop working like it has in the City?”
Howl scrunches his eyes closed, hands tightening on my shoulders. I want to brush them away because it’s starting to hurt, his fingers digging into me. “They wanted to see if it would affect you because you aren’t infected. You’ve been cured.”
“Cured?” I pull away from him. That doesn’t make sense. With a cure, there would be no war. No Mountain, no City. We wouldn’t have to fight for Mantis anymore. “You haven’t been messing around with Da’ard, have you? There is no cure. If there were, they would have found it a long time ago.”
Howl is already shaking his head. “No. The Mountain doesn’t have the cure. And to the best of our knowledge, the City doesn’t have it either. The cure is what your mother was working on when she came here with Dr. Yang. And she succeeded. With you.”
He rubs his cheek, uncomfortable for some reason, but the rest comes out in a rush. “That is why those primary kids have been staring at you since the day you walked in here. Not just the primary kids. Anyone who saw that birthmark. You are hope. The end of SS. The cure.”
It’s my turn to shake my head. “That’s impossible. It doesn’t even make sense. Why would the City have put my mother in Suspended Sleep for creating a cure?”
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. But that is why she left you. Not to save the Mountain, and not to give Mantis to Outsiders or to win any wars. It was because the City put you to Sleep and wouldn’t let her help you. The moment she and Dr. Yang had something she thought would work, she ran straight back to your bedside.”
“The City . . . Why would they have put me to sleep? SS wasn’t even supposed to be there before Mother brought it back.” Everything seems to burn red around me, Howl’s face blurring. The City gave me SS? But why? The City told me my mother hated me enough to inject me herself. . . . I can’t even finish the thought, General Hong’s deep voice enumerating my mother’s many crimes in my head. The City did it. The City did it? And she left only to figure out how to fix me?
Dr. Yang told me they used SS as a punishment, as a warning for people venturing across the line of First rule. That I wasn’t the first SS case at all, just one in a long string of warnings of what it meant to defy Firsts. If she was like Howl, questioning what the Firsts were doing . . .
No, it isn’t possible. I remember her coming back, the press of a needle in my arm and her voice . . . but that was after I was Asleep, wasn’t it? I knew she’d come back, I knew she’d given me something. Did I somehow make up memories to go along with the stories General Hong told? Pinching and pulling the nightmares until they fit? “What about my hallucinations? And remember the first night we met, when I tried to kill myself? That wasn’t an act to make you feel sorry for me.”
“And it scared me halfway back to Liberation days.” His smile falls crooked. I want to reach out and smooth it out, to put it back the way it’s supposed to be. “Those hallucinations were side effects of the pills you were taking. Firsts have been working nonstop to re-infect you, to see if they can beat the cure. The medicine they were having you take instead of Mantis can cause patients to demonstrate SS symptoms, and they were experimenting with it to see if they could get better results. The orphanage accidentally gave you a little too much that day, so the hallucinations turned into a full-blown compulsion.”
I hadn’t ever had a compulsion until the night we ran. The story fits so many things together so that they finally make sense. I didn’t start hallucinating until the weeks following my sister’s death. Perhaps getting rid of Aya gave the Circle the idea to get rid of me, too, using my poor, sad little life as one last experiment to force the disease Mother had purged from my system on me. When they realized Thirds saw Aya as yet another proof of my family’s corruption, I became a tool. The last Jiang to go out in a flame of compulsions and insanity, the last of the sleeping princess’s family to be punished for her crimes. An ache springs up inside of me, filtering through my chest all the way down to my toes.
I want to believe this nonsense.
I want to believe that I’m free. That the black ugliness waiting under my skin is just my imagination. That we can run.
My breath catches on something even deeper, more painful. If she did cure me, does that make the monster who lives above Traitor’s Arch the mother I loved after all? A refugee from the City because they wouldn’t let her help me? My hand finds the jade strung around my neck, the sharp edges pressing into my skin. It would mean she loved me and died for it. Worse. Spent the last eight years imprisoned in her own body, unable to die because of it. All for me.
Something clicks in my head, another puzzle piece landing. “I started having hallucinations again when we got here. They aren’t nearly as bad, but . . . Dr. Yang is doing the same thing to me that they were in the City, isn’t he?”
Howl nods curtly. “Dr. Yang didn’t tell me they were going to continue the tests. It has something to do with figuring out what part of your brain changed, what your mother did to cure you.”
“But the levels tests, the pills they’re giving me . . . It isn’t enough.” That’s why I ended up immobile in the levels machine, a bone saw lying next to me with my name on it. That’s what Dr. Yang was asking the council to do that night. “They need to dig deeper. All those tests they were asking for, the people trying to drag me into the hospital . . .” It wasn’t until this moment that the horrifying truth occurs to me. “Wait, you knew?”
He shakes his head, his tone a plea. “Dr. Yang promised not to hurt you. He told me scans would be enough, that he’d be able to just look at your brain and see what had been changed and how. I wanted to believe him. I knew the pills Dr. Yang gave us when we left the City weren’t Mantis, but I didn’t realize what they were doing to you at first.” He blinks as though trying to banish something in his thoughts. “You were so scared. Convinced that something was wrong with you. That day, with the dead soldiers . . . I started giving you the real Mantis, the stuff meant to go back to the Mountain. Then when we got here . . . I can’t tell you how many arguments I had with Dr. Yang. How many times I followed you to make sure you were okay.”
“But you knew the whole time I didn’t have SS. That I didn’t have to worry every single day my mind was slipping, that I wasn’t going to wake up one morning and kill you?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me, Sev.”
I open my mouth, the beginnings of anger curdling across my tongue, but then swallow it down. He’s right. I wouldn’t have believed him. Not after so many years of believing it was only a little green pill between me and compulsion’s tight grip.
“Don’t they suspect that you had something to do with me disappearing from the operating table?” I ask, but Howl won’t meet my eyes. There’s something more that he isn’t saying.
“I’m not the likeliest person to be hiding you. For a lot of reasons.”
Howl lets go of me as I start to squirm away from him. I need space. To think. “What do you mean? You’re my only friend here who isn’t currently in quarantine. Of course it would be you hiding me—”
“We have another problem,” Howl interrupts, looking up toward the path. “When you disappeared, Nei-ge voted to invade the City. Root says with this new strain of SS, we don’t have a choice. No cure, and even the Mantis stockpiled here would never be enough if SS starts spreading from person to person.”
I can’t take in all this new information. I wish I could slow it down, make it stop.