“They are going to announce the invasion at Establishment and head out within a few days.” Howl’s voice sounds broken. “They’re sending Menghu into the City.”
Everything inside me goes still. My panic that SS could spread like lice in an orphanage at any time, discovering the truth about my mother’s supposed crimes, hearing that the Mountain wants to cut me open—everything bows to a vision of Helix pressing a gun between Tai-ge’s eyes, Peishan lying cold in the Sanatorium, Sister Shang weeping in front of the orphanage while it burns . . . “If the Menghu go into the City, it would be a massacre.”
Invading wouldn’t be about Mantis for any of the Menghu. It would be about killing every City-born in sight, about trophies, about revenge for everything the Mountain has had to go through in order to survive.
“Howl, what do we do? Tai-ge, your family . . . They’ll die.”
Howl’s laugh is unnerving, with a hopeless edge I didn’t expect. “There’s nothing we can do to save my family. There never was.”
“A cure would stop the invasion. It would stop this whole stupid war.” The realization that I might have grown up Fourth for nothing boils inside me, but I close my eyes, trying to think of the cure, of what Mother must have been fighting for.
She was trying to save me, not kill me. Mother wasn’t fighting for the Mountain or Kamar. She left to finish her SS experiment here so that she could cure me. If what Howl is saying is true, then she was fighting to cure everyone.
Am I brave enough to let Dr. Yang have the cure so that her work doesn’t come undone? To walk back into the Mountain and close my eyes forever so that the SS nightmare can finally be over?
If I do, does that make me like her? If what Howl says is true, she gave up everything to save me. Could I give up everything to save the world—to save the Mountain, the City, the people like June running free in between—from SS?
If it would have saved Aya, I would have done it without hesitation. If it would keep June safe now, I’d do it. And Howl . . . I look at him. He lied to me; he’s been lying to me since the day we met . . . but I’d still do it to keep Howl from ever feeling SS’s monster claws in his brain.
When I open my mouth, Howl stops me. “You don’t have to die to stop this. We can’t rediscover the cure, just the two of us. But I know someone who can.”
“What do you mean?” My head hangs as if it’s already severed, already being dissected and labeled. But Howl’s words bring me back up, hope flaring through me like alcohol under a match.
“We need your mother. We need to wake Jiang Gui-hua up.”
CHAPTER 34
ESTABLISHMENT DAWNS WITH NEW FALLEN snow. I can’t see it or taste it, cloistered in Sole’s room the way I’ve been for days, but the air feels different. Patrols are all coming in for the festivities tonight, wet with the sky’s melted offering.
Sole bars the door as passing field medics stop to say hello. Excitement buzzes through the halls, conversations humming constantly outside the door. Even hidden beneath the wig and a long white Yizhi uniform, I feel exposed, as if whoever was slated to cut me open will notice the line of my skull or the width between my eyes and recognize me.
When Sole has to leave for Establishment games, she locks me in. “My ID chip will open this door, but no one else can just walk in. Don’t answer if anyone knocks.”
“You’re kidding, right? I’m not dumb enough to let anyone in here.”
Sole’s head ticks sideways and she blinks four times in a row before answering. “Yes. It was meant to be a joke. Here, Howl told me to give you this.”
She holds out a book, and I recognize the sleeping princess on the front. Sleeping Beauty, but with a happy ending. I take it, and Sole wipes her hand on her tunic three times, as if trying to destroy some unseen germ colony deposited on her hand from something so old and dirty.
The whole time I’ve been stuck in Sole’s room, she’s been kind. Kind but odd. Staring at the wall for long periods of time, never making eye contact. Laughing when we haven’t even been talking. But it’s less unnerving than it was at first.
The only thing that bothers me anymore is the way she looks at the gore tooth strung between the four stars and my mother’s jade around my neck. I had to hide it away in my pocket. Every time her eyes touched my neck, it felt like she wanted to take a bite out of me.
Sole gave me her medic pack, full of food, water purifiers, medicine, a hammock. A padded jacket with rough fur lining the hood. A huge brown blotch stains the left side, but I don’t care to ask where it came from. The hours left to wait seem to be stretching out as I pace, hundreds of times longer than they should be. If only I had someone to play weiqi with.
The book could be good company for the last hours I have to wait, but I’m still not sure I can bring myself to open it.
I reorganize my things in the borrowed pack one last time before settling down on the bed to look at the peaceful sleep of the princess on the book’s cover. The long hours of silence have been painful. Thinking hurts too much. About being cured, about my mother and why she really left. There are so many pieces still missing, but for the first time, the raw edges of hurt where she lives in my chest aren’t nauseating pains of betrayal. It’s just a sad story that I don’t know the ending to yet. What if, just like Howl said, Sleeping Beauty really does wake up? What if she isn’t really the villain after all? And if she isn’t, who is?
It hurts. Every thought of her still leaves me feeling broken and alone. But now I can ask her myself. I can have the truth from her lips.
I check for the syringe that Howl pressed into my hand before we parted. It’s the same syringe I remember seeing in Dr. Yang’s office, mounted on a plaque like some great award. Howl told me that Dr. Yang was a member of the research team my mother headed, studying the effects of SS. But he discovered this instead: Suspended Sleep. Similar to the first stages of SS, induced by a simple injection, but controllable. This syringe is full of the only thing that can wake the subject up.
He gave up everything, his First status, his family, to follow Mother here, thinking that his breakthrough might be a step toward the cure. Instead, the First Circle used his discovery to put mother to Sleep.
Maybe he regrets it now. Making the poison that closed her eyes forever.
Breaking out tonight is still the best plan we can come up with. With most people inside celebrating Establishment, there won’t be as many patrols or guards out. Howl will put in an appearance at the festivities tonight so no one will go looking for him until morning.
I put the book down, not sure I can handle the hope that a happy ending would open up inside of me. Stories are just stories, however much we want to believe them.
Sole’s room is small, a bed and a desk packed into the tiny room. Piles of paperwork black with spidery handwriting spill over the scarred wooden surface of the desk, a few loose leafs on the floor and under the chair. I turn one over and it’s an inky monster, black teeth bared in a snarl. Next to the beast, a little girl cowers, hiding her head under her arms.
Pushing the sketch away from me, I notice a drawer that is cracked open, a set of eyes staring out from the gap. I pull the drawer open and four people look up at me from the blacks and grays of a framed watercolor. A family of four, mischievous grins matching across all of their faces. The mother has Sole’s clear blue eyes, the color scratched in long after the original paint dried, her hand intertwined with that of the man standing next to her. The young man seated in front of them looks a little too straight-backed for the grin on his face, probably elbowing the younger girl sitting next to him. She would be just like Sole except for the unmistakable joy in her face.
I don’t notice another person in the room until a hand comes down across their faces, grabbing the portrait away from me. Sole holds the picture to her chest, eyebrows drawn low. “What do you think you are doing?”