We are quiet for a few minutes, Tai-ge’s hands groping for something in his pocket. A quicklight. After so long in the cell, even that small light seems blinding. The yellow glow hollows out his eyes, changing my friend into a tattered ghost. “Yang He-ping is one of the lower Firsts. He has done a lot of spy work with the rebels. It was Dr. Yang who warned my father the rebels were moving. We didn’t think they could get in.”
“It was Dr. Yang who argued to send Menghu into the City. Of course he told you they wouldn’t be able to get in. He’s the one who killed half of the First Circle all those years ago. He’s the one who should have been molding over Traitor’s Arch. The deaths, this invasion, it’s all because my mother found the cure to SS.”
His head is shaking before the sentence even hits the air, anger yellow and sickly in the quicklight. “Stop lying to me. I don’t want to hear it. Why did I come down here?” He stands up and peers out the small window in our cell door. “Why do I still want to protect you when I know you are using me?”
Tai-ge tenses when I touch his shoulder. “Because deep down you know the things the City says about me aren’t true. You know I could never have set that bomb, and you know I’m right about the planes. You are the only person who believed in me, who thought my life was worth more than the price of an execution. And it’s still true.” I let my hand drop. He isn’t responding. He doesn’t believe it anymore. I can feel the emptiness yawning under me, my resurrected hope sinking back down. “I left because you mattered more to me than my life. And I came back for the same reason. I would never lie to you.”
Tai-ge holds up the quicklight, softening the grasp of night around us. “Do you really believe your mother had a cure to SS?”
“I’m living proof.”
CHAPTER 44
TAI-GE’S ACCEPTANCE BRINGS THE WHOLE story pouring out, a torrential downpour of pent-up information and feelings. Except for one thing. I can’t bring myself to tell him about Howl beyond the bare bones of our working together. The humiliation and hurt are still too raw to touch.
At the end of the story, Tai-ge pulls another quicklight from his boot, smoothing the tube back and forth over the hem of his coat. “And Dr. Yang? Our spy?”
“He’s had a foot in both City and Mountain since before my mother died, playing one off of the other. Just think, Tai-ge. Firsts set a contagious form of SS loose Outside. Dr. Yang was ready for it the moment it hit the Mountain. He must have been involved in formulating it and setting it free. The Mountain decided to invade the City specifically because of it. Not enough Mantis to go around. If Dr. Yang has his way, contagious SS is probably spreading through the Menghu, and it will infect everyone in the City not killed in the fighting. So what do we have left?”
“Lots of extremely impulsive people? With weapons?”
“SS everywhere. People getting hurt. Looting and cruelty. If Dr. Yang comes in with the cure, it’ll be like Yuan Zhiwei all over again. Except instead of Mantis, he’s offering real freedom from SS, not just a stopgap. Who wouldn’t go run straight to him? Dr. Yang will be a king, a god who fixed our broken world. Just like Yuan Zhiwei.”
The truth of the statement stares up at me as if it were sitting there all along but I was too blind to see it. Dr. Yang never needed my brain. Not mine or Howl’s. If he really thought he could reproduce the cure, then Howl would never have gotten away the first time. I would never have seen anything of the Mountain but the sterile white of Yizhi. All the threatening from Yizhi and Helix and Cale trying to drag me down . . . They might have believed Dr. Yang needed to cut me open, but in reality it was all just to scare me into coming back here and waking up my mother. He was manipulating Howl, manipulating me, manipulating both the City and the Mountain. He didn’t need my brain—he needed Mother to tell him where to find the work they had already done.
“There are Firsts in the City who have been cured. Dr. Yang could have used any of them if rediscovering the cure were as simple as analyzing a cured brain. He needed me. Not because mother cured me, but because she would only tell me where she hid their work. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone else.” I rub my eyes, which ache from lack of sleep. “He must have suspected that Howl had second thoughts about throwing me under the knives, so he used him. Must have started feeding him information about my mother, hoping he would pass it on. Practically handed him the serum to wake Mother up. Then, for the final touch, he shoved a scalpel in my face to make me run back here.”
Tai-ge shakes his head. “Sevvy, you can’t know . . .”
A laugh starts to bubble up inside of me, but there’s no humor in the broken sound. “I should have put it together the night after I escaped.” I jump up, unable to sit still. But pacing back and forth in the tiny cell just makes it worse. “The Menghu would have picked me up before I even made it down the rope. The whole Mountain should have been on lockdown the moment Dr. Yang noticed his antidote for Suspended Sleep was missing. I was too upset to think much about it at the time, but Dr. Yang must have done something to stop them from coming after me. He let me go so I could get here. To her.”
Another thought calcifies along with that revelation, a spot of cancer drilling holes through skin and bone. It never was a contest between Howl’s life and mine. We could have . . . But I take a deep breath and let all the anger for Dr. Yang and this whole situation stream out of me. Nothing changes why Howl brought me to the Mountain. Whatever Dr. Yang wanted from me, Howl didn’t know. He thought it was a choice between us, and he chose himself. Even if he did have feelings for me, if it had come down to that choice, I don’t think I would have won.
I shake my head, not willing to speculate. Not willing to try and defend him or try and unwind the events, the conversations in my head. What might have happened. It’s too late. Our story was over before it even began.
“And she told you.” Tai-ge breaks into my frenzied thoughts. “Your mother told you where the cure is. And Dr. Yang was standing right there.”
“She told me, but I still don’t understand. Have you ever heard of Port North?”
Tai-ge taps on the door experimentally, frowning at his fingertips when they come away with slivers from the rough wood. “No. There are Kamari . . . or some kind of settlements northeast of here, but . . . we need to take this to my father. If both sides know a cure is within reach, then there will be no reason to keep shooting at each other. Catch Dr. Yang before he gets out of the City, show both sides the way he has been manipulating us, and stop the fighting. We can all talk this over like civilized people.”
“The Menghu aren’t civilized. Invading for them is like a national holiday. They’re all rabid to kill City-born. And why would your father listen? General Hong doesn’t exactly trust me.”
“Add that to the fact that the whole Second Quarter thinks I’ve got SS”—Tai-ge breaks our quicklight, sending the room into darkness with the tinkle of glass shards hitting the stone floor—“and it’s hopeless.” Fiddling with one of the long metal wires from the broken light, I can hear him working on the door. “But we have to try. Otherwise, everyone out there might as well be dead already.”
“What are you doing?”
His voice sounds amused. “You think I’d come down here without a way to get out? It was a gamble, but I hoped that if I was unruly enough, they’d wait until the ‘compulsion’ stopped to search me. With everything else going on up there, I figured they wouldn’t take the time to follow safety protocols.” The wires scratch against the door’s metal lock. “We were lucky. I thought I was going to have to search this whole prison for you. But I got a set of Seconds with a healthy sense of irony.”
“Irony?”
“Because the City blames your mother for SS. If my compulsions killed you . . .” He pauses. “Wait a minute. The door isn’t even locked.”
“What?” I stand, reaching out to test for myself. He already has it open, but only a crack, as if the lock already being undone might make it safer to leave the door closed. “Why would they leave the door unlocked?”