Dr. Yang? The name echoes out behind them, the last word I catch from the exchange before their voices disappear into the dripping gray prison. I pull my boots off and pad after them in my wet socks, but I can’t pick apart the hollow echoes bouncing off the cement walls. Frustration bubbles through me as I lean against the wall, stuffing my boots into the pack. Is Dr. Yang involved on this end too? Is that how he knew about the contagious strain of SS?
And did Firsts release it into the wild as an experiment? As though they could just document the effects and file it away, never expecting it to affect them? That’s the same kind of hubris that got the world into this mess in the first place. Some of the resolve I felt back at the Mountain resurges in my chest, warmth burning holes through the lead cocoon protecting me from my feelings.
Tai-ge will know. The Hongs will be able to do something, whatever is going on. The thought is a bright point in the darkness. Taking a deep breath, I turn to go back to June.
But my head jerks back, crashing into one of the metal doors.
A cackling laugh stabs through me as I fumble to detach the hand tangled in my braid. I can’t see anything, the assault snaking out from the small window leading into the cell behind me. Sputtering hoots of laughter die down, smothered as the prisoner pulls again, shoving the end of my long braid into his mouth.
I wrench away from the cell door, the hair at the nape of my neck tearing at my skin, but the prisoner is stronger. He lets me pull just far enough away to smash me back into the door with a crack. The contact resounds through my head like a bell tolling, sick dread flooding through me as another hand reaches out from the holes in the door, fingers digging into my chin from behind.
My fingers find my star pin, leather cord cutting against my throat as I tear them from the necklace. Using the stars’ sharpened metal edges, I saw through my braid, the star pin’s points glancing across the hand clutching at my face. The arms recoil back into the cell with a howl, my severed braid snaking after them.
The irregular ends of hair scratch at my eyes and mouth as I run, my hands too busy keeping hold of the stars, feeling for my mother’s jade and the rusted ring on the leather cord to brush them away. My whole body convulses with fear and revulsion, slimy fingers crawling across my skin in ghostly memory of the Seph’s touch.
I grab June’s hand and we sprint down the hallway, wetness clinging to us like a diseased haze. She doesn’t question it, but pulls me to a stop when we get to the first stairwell, the severed remains of my hair a harsh revelation under the bare bulb.
I lean back against the wall, pulling my hair away from her, trying to let my gasping breaths calm. The white-knuckle grip I have on my stars refuses to unfold, as though my fingers are permanently bonded to them. My palm throbs as the metal stabs into my palm, a dribble of blood squeezing out of my fist to drip on the floor.
Cocking her head, June twines a finger around a lock of hair, ending jaggedly at my cheekbone. The shadow of distress in her face is enough to get me talking again. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I tie the broken leather cord back around my neck, stars and jade bloody red next to the ring. “The Menghu could be waiting right outside the City. We have to go.”
The gray cement wall boasts a large red number four centered above the flight of stairs. At the top of the staircase, we come to clean, rose-colored tile, utilitarian and boring. Each hall seems like an endless string of doors, with red handles marked ALARM set into the walls every hundred feet or so.
Offices. Each inhabited by a ruthless monster, every case of SS blood on their hands. How do Firsts work in here, so close to their victims? Do they worry that someday their charges will get out? My hand trails across the glass door protecting an alarm handle in the wall. I suppose the moment anything unusual happens, everyone runs.
The first person we see has his face buried in a pile of papers, a single red star glinting in the harsh lights as he walks up the hall toward us. I duck through a doorway, June slipping in under my arm, before he looks up.
The room is a small office, gagged by loose papers overflowing from the small metal desk and gray filing cabinets that line the walls. June stays by the cracked-open door, eyes on the man as he passes. I slide into the chair at the desk, interest caught as the miniature telescreen set into the wall blinks white and blue. A file pulls up in response to my sitting down, the words MEDICAL TRAINING black against the screen. A group of pictures pops up underneath.
My eyes catch on one familiar face near the bottom. Peishan, my old roommate from the orphanage.
I select her picture and it fills the whole screen, bringing up an ant’s march of text denoting time spent in the Sanatorium, notes on how often and how much she eats, how often she has bowel movements, and a long list of other statistics and notes. Next to her face reads BULLET RECOVERY TEST SUBJECT: STOMACH. And a date.
“What is today’s date?” I snap at the screen, at once feeling proud and awkward that I know how to work a telescreen after my time at the Mountain. Black characters crawl across her face like a spider, and I blink. Today’s date is two days before the date next to her picture.
She’s been here in the Sanatorium since before I left the City, since her outstretched fingers reached for Captain Chen in our Remedial Reform class all those weeks ago. Mantis stopped working for her, but she went quietly once her compulsion was under control. How did Peishan end up with a bullet in her stomach? And if Peishan somehow did get shot, why would Firsts let her sit in the hospital for days with a hunk of metal in her stomach before treating her?
I scroll through the details of her file, looking for something, anything to explain how someone safe inside the Sanatorium could be nursing a gunshot wound, images of Cale storming through the dimly lit halls blackening the edges of my vision. But there’s nothing. Just a blue box marked SIMULANT with that date two days from now tagged underneath and a short blurb about treatment: SIMULATED FIELD TEST. MEDICS HAVE TEN MINUTES TO STABILIZE SUBJECT AND EXTRACT BULLET.
Something here doesn’t make sense. I click out of Peishan’s file and scan through the other notes, but there are no other circumstances or problems listed for Peishan. . . . It’s not until I click into a file labeled SECOND FIELD TESTING that I find my answer.
Red sharpshooters have a test the same day as Peishan’s scheduled bullet removal.
Horror chokes me as I let this sink in. They’re going to shoot Peishan in two days, and then let the student medics try to sew her up before she dies. Is this always how they train Red medics?
I press through to the other case files up on the telescreen, recognizing two from my shift at the cannery and four more from the younger kids at the orphanage. People I didn’t even know were infected. Now each one has an expiration date fixed beneath their grainy pictures. June snaps her fingers, jerking my attention away from the telescreen. She’s still hunched against the door, watching the hallway. She points back out, but I hold up a hand, silently asking her to wait.
I put my head down on the desk to clear my thoughts. How did all these people get SS? All orphans or Thirds. A bright red box on the screen flashes, catching my attention. I click into the boy’s case file, and instead of a blue box marked SIMULANT, this record has a red one with the word PLACEBO noted in large characters.
I flick back through the other case files, but this is the only one flagged red. The rest are all flashing the blue SIMULANT. Most of the records are labeled FIELD STUDY, but three of the ones I sift through have a black bar cutting the subject’s picture, bold white characters blocking out the word RESEARCH above their foreheads instead. Bone reconstruction research. Heart and lung recovery and reconstruction research. Brain trauma research. I think back to the new pamphlet that came out right before Dr. Yang dragged me underground all those weeks ago. Wasn’t it something about bone remodeling?