She’s dead. Just like that. A few minutes with the woman who blighted my existence for eight years and she’s exonerated. Allowed to be my mother again. Then gone forever. Half a smile tugs sadly at my mouth, her last words a temptation to forget all of my years alone. I wish I could be her little rose. But, instead, I am the one who woke her up. Whether I can piece Mother back into my life or not, I am the true betrayer. I gave Dr. Yang the key my mother died to protect. Port North and the family. Our family? Is my name so painfully foreign because Mother isn’t from the City at all? That doesn’t make sense.
I can only hope it means as much to Dr. Yang as it does to me. Nothing. He’s right, the world is more important than one miracle. But my life isn’t standing in the way of curing the world of SS. If he’s the one who controls it, somehow I doubt he’ll use it to cure anyone but those who will bow to him.
The Watch didn’t chase Dr. Yang, didn’t even blink when I screamed my head off that he was escaping. Shrieking that she’s dead, that they didn’t understand. They just saw Jiang’s cage open with her fugitive daughter running in the other direction and came to their own conclusions.
Which, strictly speaking, were correct.
My future is blank. All I have to hope for now is that June will realize I’m not coming back. Maybe she can get Peishan and the others out of the old City before the Menghu descend like a killing frost.
Something inside me wants to replay the situation with not just me, but the way I thought it was going to happen back when I was still in the Mountain. If Howl had meant to come here with me to wake her up, would my mother’s secrets now be in Dr. Yang’s hands? Or would I? Would “Port North” and “the family” have been enough to keep us going, enough to keep the merciless survivor buried down deep inside of him?
I close my eyes, trying to stop the line of thought, to bat down the tiny flame of regret flickering inside of me. I’ll never know. I can’t. Howl is a road that can never be walked. The fact that he was willing to lead me to my death, joking and teasing the whole way . . . My head rings in the silence, the blackness pressing in on me, every breath wringing my lungs as I try to extinguish the betrayal tearing at my insides. Someone who can do that . . . Sole was right. Howl is not anything close to the caring and warm person I thought I knew. He’s just like Helix. Cold inside. A killer. His mask is just more cunningly carved, an art honed over years and years of fooling those around him. Of surviving.
If we had come here together, I would probably be lying right next to Mother, eyes closed forever.
I sit trapped inside my thoughts for hours. Days. Years, for all I know, before I hear sounds. Shouts bleeding through the thick walls, muted by my cell door. Running footsteps. Screams growing louder and louder until it’s right outside. Three or four men yell to each other over the top of an inhuman screech, flailing limbs thumping against the heavy wood of my cell door. Each blow shivers against my ear, pressed against the wood, drinking in the sound. Tumblers fall as a key breaks the lock, and the whole fight spills over right on top of me.
A boot connects with my chin, and my head hits the ground, ringing with the impact. A soldier’s heel grinds my open palm into the stone floor before I can roll away to the edge of the tiny cell, banging my arm against the rough stone wall. Curling up in the corner, I wrap my head and neck in my arms, half protecting myself, half blocking out the unearthly screams as a man is thrown into the cell, kicking and wrestling as though his life depends on it.
“Give them back!” he screams. “I need them back! My eyes! What about my eyes?” The Watchmen slam the door, vibrations reverberating through my bruised jaw. The prisoner is at the door, fists pummeling the wood until his bones must be broken.
A Watchman’s heavy breaths mist through barred window, the yellow flare of a quicklight blindingly sharp after the unrelieved dark. “All yours, Fourth, since you made him what he is,” he yells over Seph’s screams. “Better hope he stays self-destructive, because neither of you are going anywhere.”
His meaning catches at my lungs like pneumonia, my breaths coming quickly but never making it into my system. So it isn’t even going to be the execution block. Unless this guy has nice compulsions. Like brushing other people’s teeth. Or chewing gum.
The Seph continues pounding on the door as the quicklight fades, then spins to look at me. “Scream.” His voice’s ragged ends barely come together for the word to make sense. “Scream! Now!”
When I don’t respond, he lunges at me, and the demanded scream rips out of me like a barbed hook out of a fish’s mouth. He crashes down on to the floor next to me, scuffling against the stones as his hands search for me. I brace myself, the muscles in my arms aching, frozen with tension as if they’ll never move again. Waiting.
But nothing happens. I can’t see him, but his breath touches my eyelashes, washing over my face and down my neck, everything still. My skin crawls. He must be inches from me, just waiting for infection to order him to strike. Tears tickle my nose and cheeks, but I can’t brush them away, can’t even force my lungs to inflate, afraid any noise at all will trigger the time bomb lying beside me.
His hand grazes my elbow, fingers trailing up toward my shoulder, following my collarbone to rest in the hollow at the base of my neck. Trapped. And it is in this moment that I realize how badly I want to live. I don’t want to die down here in the Hole’s inky depths. I want to live so much that it burns, the blank shell slated for destruction forgotten in my silent fight to survive.
“You okay, Sevvy? Did they hurt you?” I jerk away from the whisper, hitting my head against the wall. His voice must be tearing his throat to rags after all that screaming, but it’s calm. Sane. The hand on my collarbone slips up under my chin, to my cheek. “I think they’re gone.”
Tai-ge’s voice. Anxiety thick in his deep tones when I don’t answer. I can’t. I curl forward, gasping for air as I wrap my arms around him, the sobs finally shaking out of me. His arms pull me in tight, my head tucked under his chin, the slow rise and fall of his chest the only thing I understand.
“What are you doing down here? How did you find me? Why did you find me?” The questions trip over themselves to get out of my mouth.
“They told everyone when they caught you. I think they might have had a parade if rebels hadn’t started popping out of every nook and cranny in the Third Quarter.”
I sit up in alarm. “It’s happening. What is the Watch doing? Are Thirds being evacuated?”
Tai-ge’s voice goes quiet, anger seeping out from the cracks. “I was there. I watched them pour out of the Sanatorium and start ripping into the factories. The dead are everywhere. People just slumped all over each other, shot down before they could even run. And instead of helping, I came down here. But there were no heli-planes. No chemical bombs.”
“I told you they didn’t have planes.” My nightmares of Menghu loose in the City would have been bleak enough without the exhausted hopelessness in his voice, confirming that even my bleakest of dreams wasn’t enough. I can just imagine the Menghu calling to one another, keeping score as whole families crumple at their feet. More bracelets to make.
“All the people I am supposed to protect, dying by the hundreds. And I’m down here making sure you are all right.” My heart twinges in my chest, pressure building in my throat at the condemnation clouding over me like a poisonous gas. “I had to come save the traitor. . . .”
I reach out toward him, grabbing his wrist so hard that his bones crack. “Listen to me, Tai-ge.” He doesn’t pull away, waiting for the defense he refused to hear earlier. “I did not kill anyone. It was all a setup. Dr. Yang convinced me that if I left—”
“Wait, Dr. Yang? Yang He-ping?”
“You know him too?” The confirmation bites at me.