“Then why is there a gun to my back? Why did my mother have to die?” I scan the empty building, grasping at wisps of insubstantial, ill-conceived plans to escape. “Let’s help the Thirds.”
“Only a select few of the Firsts know about the cure, the highest in their ranks, who doled the cure out as a reward, a sign of authority. The Circle. When a young, upstart First started to make headway on discovering their secret, they did everything they could to stop her. Gui-hua wanted to save the world, but she couldn’t see that she was putting her faith in the wrong people.” He turns me around to face him, not batting an eye at my mother’s lifeless face. “Who is there to trust here or anywhere? The people who hand SS to their own children? Or the Menghu, who kill indiscriminately, convinced that every light needs to be snuffed out but their own? No one could be trusted with the cure but us—Gui-hua and me. But when we finally put all the pieces together, she stole the whole experiment, all the data. Handed it straight to the Firsts. I had to do something.”
“You put her to Sleep.” The syringe Howl took from Dr. Yang’s office takes on new meaning. A triumph. A trophy. The anger building inside me threatens to tear through my skin, biting through the confusion of sorrow and regret. “You let her decay up here for ten years because she didn’t want to work with you?”
“They didn’t know it was me who put her to Sleep. The medics knew it wasn’t the same as a normal SS infection the moment they saw her. They went through the whole ceremony of the Chairman pretending to inject her for the cameras.” He starts to laugh. “And they didn’t know how to wake her up. She was the signature on the devastation I left when I destroyed their access to the cure. All of the scientists who knew, all of the records. Nothing left but a group of old men who remember what used to be. Still, they work with me almost every day with no idea that they could be next ones to die. That they put the wrong person to Sleep.” Dr. Yang’s smile is so triumphantly ugly, worming its way through his doctor’s calm. Finally, he can boast. “The scientists here are untrained. Unimaginative. Able to create terrible pain in the name of science, to control with fear, but not much more. They were completely unprepared to reinvent the medical miracle Yuan Zhiwei’s discovered. When the armies came with SS, he saw the opportunity to set up this empire and became the little king of a little kingdom, the promise of a cure keeping the slaves hard at work while the cure itself kept him and his own safe as the rest of the world fell to pieces. Gui-hua was the First Circle’s only hope to rediscover the key, the cure, if only they could get her awake. I only wish I’d been there when the Chairman found her.”
Dr. Yang lowers the gun a hair, chuckling. It still points to my chest. “I knew she went somewhere else first. I knew she wouldn’t be stupid enough not to leave a copy of everything we achieved. She trusted you. Loved you. I knew she either had told you where it was already or would, given the chance.”
A light dawns in my mind. “You couldn’t reproduce the cure, could you? Not even with Howl right in front of you. Not even with both of us opened up on an operating table.”
“There was never much of a chance that examining brain scans would have resulted in any helpful—”
“She was smarter than you are. She figured it out, and you just watched. How long did it take before you realized there was no hope? That Howl’s brain would never be enough? How did you convince him to help you?”
“Howl would have done anything to come home. He has been a very effective tool, doing everything I ask without even knowing I asked it because he believes he knows the true state of the world. That he’s smarter, faster, more moral than I am. He thinks he knows me and what I want. He thought I wanted you on that hospital table with your head cracked open, so he saved you. Convinced you that coming back here and waking your own demons was the only solution. If Howl hadn’t been so taken with you, I still could have convinced you, given time. But fear worked the fastest. It always does.” Dr. Yang’s grin speaks horrors and violence, prickling down my neck. “Intelligence doesn’t come in only one form, Jiang Sev. I got what I wanted after years and years of delicate manipulation. This all would have been so much easier if Gui-hua hadn’t chosen to come back here instead of saving the world from SS. But now things will come out right. Now I finally know where it is.”
The words sink down to my stomach, a hard rock of cancer threading its way through my body, waiting to kill. “It wasn’t between the world and the City. It was a choice between me and you.” The door of the glass coffin is cold and unyielding against my back as I try to inch away from him, fingers grasping for something, anything. “She chose curing her daughter over starting a new world order, with you in charge. You want to use the cure just like Firsts use Mantis. To hold it over our heads and start your own slave pens. Why did you wait? Why drag me out to the Mountain? Why didn’t you just bring me here years ago?”
“Would you have told me anything if I’d just ripped you away from Tai-ge without reason? Would you have believed back then that she wasn’t a monster without Howl to show you why the City was wrong, without Mei and her City-inflicted scars?” He smiles as he says it. “You had to want to leave yourself, to know this place was going to kill you and to make your own decisions, or Jiang Gui-hua would have seen the puppet strings and wouldn’t have told you anything.” He scowls. “She did such a good job on you. But the world is more important than one miracle.”
He jams the gun hard against me just as my fingers find the tangle of wires that protected the City from my Mother’s return for so long. I wrench them away from the door, pulling them up from the floor in one swift motion.
An alarm blares, and the gun in Dr. Yang’s shaking hand wavers as he looks up in surprise. Red and white lights flash all over the Center, but I don’t have time to cover my ears. I’m over the edge of the balcony, sliding from one of the long banners framing Traitor’s Arch to the ground. Above me, Dr. Yang’s swearing bleeds through the overwhelmingly loud siren coiling and striking at my eardrums. His face disappears behind the empty glass box just as something crashes into me from behind, slamming my head into the shiny marble floor, leaving nothing but darkness.
CHAPTER 43
I NEVER APPRECIATED THE HOLE’S name until this moment. Shadows compose the very air, soaking through my thin shirt and into my skin. Damp stones make up the floor and walls, radiating cold. I can’t have been here long, but I already feel as though the jagged remnants of my hair have begun to mold. I am blind, masked by a world that has never seen the light of the sun. Seldom even brightened by a torch or quicklight. I’m actually glad.
If the heavy stench of decay is anything to go by, I’d rather not know what I’m sitting in.
The dark doesn’t speak to me anymore, empty of all the nightmares. It’s so quiet down here I can hardly think, my own breaths ringing in my ears, every scrape against the stone deafening. My eyes keep trying to adjust, to make some sense out of the static deadness surrounding me. Eventually, I have to close them to stop myself from hoping, from jumping every time my brain tricks me into believing the darkness is thinning. Silence presses against my eardrums as if I’m deep underwater, the air so thick I have to remind myself to breathe.