SUNRISE. I HAVE TO KEEP moving. I stagger downhill, knowing I won’t last long if I don’t find water. The air clear of winter’s low-lying clouds, I can see the rounded tops of the mountain range disappearing into the northern horizon. The City clings to the side of one of those mountains. And if I can find the river, it will take me back. Back to the Reds, to Traitor’s Arch. Back to the people who weren’t shy about why they wanted to kill me.
Back to Tai-ge. Back to Mother. Maybe waking her up will stop people from killing one another, stop SS. Or maybe it will just stop them from killing Tai-ge, keep him off the list of people I loved who are now dead.
When I finally stumble into the river’s smooth-rolling current, I sit, mindlessly running a stone along the sharpened edges of my metal stars. Unprotected and Outside. Howl still has the knife that Tai-ge gave to me, my only weapon stolen even before we left the City walls. My stars will have to do as a defense, the edges honed until they can cut. A brief image of me attempting to stab a gore with my tiny pin flashes before my eyes. I shake my head to clear it. What else can I do?
Food finds its way to my lips when I remember that I am supposed to eat, though the first time I look in Sole’s borrowed pack for sustenance, my hands find the book Howl gave me instead. The one with the sleeping princess on the front, and the promise of a happy ending. I can’t even touch it, staring down at the glint of gilt on the front cover until I can force my fingers to zip the pack closed.
What would a happy ending mean to Howl, anyway? Happy the way Zhinu and Niulang were? Separated by a wall of stars in the sky, seeing each other behind the sun’s back with help from a world’s worth of confused birds? Or perhaps just a life—any life—would be happy for him as long as his lungs still move air in and out of his body and his heart still beats, regardless of who around him has gone silent.
Every day the sun watches my slow progress along the river, and every night the moonlight is the same, stolen from where it should belong. I find myself looking over my shoulder as I walk, expecting Howl’s white smile and Kasim’s boisterous laugh to emerge from the trees at any moment, the two of them ready to drag me back to the tubes and knives. Why haven’t they caught up with me yet?
Finally, a shadow blocks the sun rising over my lonely hammock. The flap that protects me from rain, insects, and my nightmares is stenciled with a human outline. It wrenches back to let in the full blaze of pink morning sun. A crane startles from branches above us at the quick movement, wings stainless white against the patchwork sky. The person’s face is obscured by the black curls of a gas mask, but I recognize the green Menghu jacket buttoned up to her throat.
She doesn’t cut me down immediately, head cocked as though she’s not quite sure what kind of butterfly she’s found in this strange cocoon.
I’m glad it’s over. No more running, no more pretending. I don’t have to think anymore. I don’t have to breathe.
I reach my hands out, wrists together so the Menghu can tie them. “What took you so long?”
She tears the gas mask from her face, letting loose a cascade of blond curls. “What did they do to you, Sev?”
June.
PART IV
CHAPTER 39
WE WALK IN SILENCE. SHE always was good at silence. I don’t ask her where she got her uniform, and she doesn’t ask me where Howl is. Her presence brings me back to the forest, aware of time passing for the first time in days.
“Where are you headed?” June’s question sounds like cold iron, inhuman and airless through the gas mask. “Or are you just going . . . away?”
“The City.” I have to warn Tai-ge about the invasion. Even if the rest of that place almost deserves the Menghu, I can’t let him be killed. And there are others that I can’t justify leaving for the Menghu to piece together in bracelets. My roommate, Peishan, locked away in the Sanatorium. Sister Shang. I can’t let them be shot down just because of where they are standing, like my father was.
And Mother. It feels like checking rat traps back in the orphanage. Dreading what I’d find, but knowing that leaving the dead creatures would just draw more rodents . . . I have to look. I have to know once and for all why she left me. And the only way to find out is to ask her. The syringe in my pocket feels like another limb, a part of me. The kiss to cure her awake.
She could be the end to SS and this stupid war. The end of people dying and forcing other people to die for them . . .
“You can go back to the City?” June interrupts my thoughts. “The Reds weren’t after you, they were after—?”
Howl. I cut her off before she can finish the question. “Things have changed.”
“The Menghu aren’t following you, though.”
I stop, letting the statement sink in. “They must be.”
She arches an eyebrow at me, glancing behind us into the woods. I blush at what she isn’t saying. If they were after me, I would already be back at the Mountain with my throat slit. Running away from the Menghu shouldn’t be as easy as falling down a mountainside. I’m their cure. They wouldn’t just let me walk away, would they? Maybe they just moved their focus onto Howl instead. That thought gives me a twinge of guilt, even after everything he’s done, but I stamp it down, smothering it under all the lies he told me.
June just shrugs, handing me a handful of dried apricot slices, the flesh feeling gummy under my fingertips. “Eat that. You look like you’ve missed a few meals.”
I hold the apricots in my fist, squeezing them between my fingers. June sighs and pries my hand open, taking one of the orange fruits to hold in front of my nose. “Eat it.”
The taste burns, my tongue curling up in protest, but I still swallow. It slides down my throat and settles in my stomach like a rock.
June’s mask stays attached to her face, a green hood covering her bright hair. Rumors about contagious SS must have spread like a fire through the Outsiders, though she won’t tell me how. June isn’t the helpless little girl I thought she was. She’s smarter than me, better off than I ever was.
When we settle down for the night, she pulls an envelope out of her pocket, rattling it as she holds it out to me. Two green pills fall out of the paper into my palm. I shake my head, tears stinging behind my eyes.
“I don’t need it anymore.” If I did, then I would still have a mother and Howl might have actually loved me. I would have a home instead of wandering around out here, an outcast. “I wish I did.”
? ? ?
Trekking back to the City blurs into one long day of heavy feet plodding mercilessly forward and one long night of terrible nightmares, each one featuring Niulang transforming into one of the qilin monsters he attended and tearing after Zhinu through the forest with his teeth bared.
When we get close to the City, June and I use the ditches to get past the farms, playing dead whenever patrols wander by. June swaps her green coat for a leather jerkin stamped with the City seal. I find one as well, the ditches populated with many uncomplaining donors. Remembering the dead man stamped with my boot prints from the first day Outside leaves me wiping dead smell from my shoulders and arms, and I keep catching myself holding my breath to keep the death from going inside me.