“I-I-I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry.”
The anger on Sole’s face drains at my downcast eyes, leaving the contrite apology hovering between us. She sighs, running her fingers along the wooden frame. “You can look if you want.”
She takes a long look at them, nose close to the glass, before holding it back out toward me, pointing to the young man. “He taught me to shoot a gun. Chan.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes. They were all . . . They all died together. About ten years ago. In the forest. The Reds . . .” She shivers as though trying to shake the memory loose. “It’s still difficult to talk about. They were trying to steal food from one of the convoys going to the City.”
“I’m so sorry.” It’s uncomfortable to watch her, raw grief quaking through her.
“When it first happened, I was so angry.” She glances at me. “I’m sure they’ve told you. The moment I was old enough, I joined the Menghu. I was the worst of them. Completely out of control. Took out every Red I came across. Signed up for every mission. I hardly ate or slept, I was so busy taking revenge for what the City did to my family.”
I hand the picture back to her, Kasim’s words coming back to me. One of the best . . . She sees the question in my face before I can hide it away, too personal to ask.
“You want to know why I stopped.” She pulls a stray hair behind her ear with a trembling hand. “Why I shake and can’t look anyone in the eye.”
She abruptly turns away from me, walks back toward the bathroom, leaving the picture on the table. When she comes back, there’s a box in her arms, rattling with each step. It drops to the floor at my feet with a clatter.
“I started taking things from the people I killed. Little things, so I could keep track. For my parents, for my brother.”
Sole, too? “You mean like the bracelets they all wear?”
“I think I was the first to keep score.” Sole’s voice is dead. “Though I never took fingers.”
I back up a step, my legs hitting her bed. Sole has always seemed like she didn’t fit in somehow, as if she was rebelling against something here, so when it was Sole who hid me in her tub, I didn’t question it. Suddenly, that seems like a gross misjudgment.
She points to the box, sending a chill down my spine. Is she even worse than the rest, with a box of severed ears or bloody feet in her bathroom? When I don’t bend down to look inside, Sole pulls the lid away herself, thrusting her hands down inside.
A doll. One that I’ve seen before.
The City mass-manufactures the same doll for all the kids. I had one when I was little. I remember her braided yarn hair and her red uniform. Did Sole kill children, too? I feel myself shrinking farther and farther down against the bed, wondering if I jumped off the operating table just to land in the butcher shop.
Her eyes eat at the doll, voice evaporating from her lips so I scarcely catch the words. “About six years ago, on patrol, we found a set of Reds outside the City. A man and a woman. We shot them before they could even blink, heads blown open all over their gear. The tent was ripped to shreds, but then a little girl rolled out and started to run. That’s when I realized that they weren’t Reds, they were just a family trying to escape the City. But my partner shot her before she ran five steps.”
“She cried while she died. I held her, but she was scared of me. I made it worse. They could have been my family. Running away from the Reds and their guns, the Firsts and their experiments. All dead.” Tears trail down Sole’s face, and she holds the doll to her chest as if it’s a real child. I lean over to look in the box, full of odds and ends. Books, rocks, rings and necklaces. “I keep them now to remember what I’ve done. I switched over to Yizhi, but no matter how many lives I save, I can’t give any of these back. I can’t give back the lives I’ve taken.
“The Menghu can’t remember that people out there, even City-born, are people. That they have families, parents, brothers and sisters, kids. That they all deserve a chance to live, to grow old with the ones they love. I can’t keep taking away from them what some stupid Red took from me. The Menghu think it is a game, a tally.” Her voice starts to shake with emotion. Anger. “It’s worse than SS. They choose to be monstrous.”
“Why do you stay here, then?” I ask.
“I have to make up for what I’ve done. Even if it means saving the monsters who are making it worse. They are people too, even if they’ve forgotten.”
The sentence sticks in my head, and I remember the Red I refused to kill back in the forest. “We need to do something. To stop this.”
Sole looks tired, lifting her gaze to hold mine for the first time since she grabbed the painting from my hands. “I am. Getting you out of here . . .” She gestures to the door. “That is all I can do.”
Her eyes jump between me and the door, and for a second I think she might run away—run from her past. But when she speaks, it is for me. Needle sharp. “But before you go out there, before you put your life in Howl’s hands, you need to know something about him.
“My partner . . .” Her voice breaks, the jagged fragments slicing through her composure. “My partner, the one who shot the little girl? That was Howl.”
CHAPTER 35
SHE KEEPS TALKING, BUT THE words rush past me as though she’s speaking some dead language, meaningless. Noise. Sick panic seeps up into my lungs and throat and the words erupt out of me. “City-born Howl? My Howl?” I can feel frenzied laughter rising in my throat. “That isn’t possible. Wouldn’t he have still been in the City when it happened?”
She’s shaking her head, and for one bright moment, I believe she means a different person. But then her ragged whisper snakes into my ears, the poison slowly killing all hope. “Howl isn’t City-born. He’s not even a refugee. I grew up with Howl. Our parents were friends, killed by the same attack. He was just as bad as I was. We were partners, destroying the City one comrade at a time.”
Not possible. Those are the only words in my head. The only thing I can think. Why would he pretend to be from the City? “What do you mean, killed by the same attack?” I’m pretty sure I would have heard if the Chairman had been murdered.
“Our parents were killed outright by a bomb, but our brothers, Chan and Seth . . .” She stumbles over the names like hot coals, pausing for a moment. “They were infected. The Mountain didn’t have Mantis back then, so the minute they woke up . . .” She trails off, eyes wandering as though she’s lost her train of thought.
“You mean they were put down? Like sick animals?” The calm tone shrouding the disbelief in my voice is starting to shred.
She laughs, a bitter, unhappy sound. “You don’t believe me. No one understands anymore. Any infected inside the Mountain—any at all—would have tried to killed all of us. We didn’t have Mantis to keep infected from hurting people or hurting themselves. We didn’t even have tranquilizers. When the people who lived here took the rebels in, infected weren’t welcome. Almost one hundred years underneath this rock, afraid to do more than turn on the lights and use the greenhouses because it would bring attention down on us. The Menghu weren’t even organized until a few years before I was born. We knew what would happen with just one compulsion, just one person out of control in the dark.
“They weren’t shot outright. When they woke up, they had to leave. Just as effective as a death sentence.” Her fingers find my pocket holding the gore-tooth necklace, drawing it out. “This was his. Seth’s. He must have given it to Howl before he left.”
Her face crumples. “Seth and I . . . We were close.”