Tai-ge doesn’t answer, hand clenched around the edge of the door.
“Well.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s hope it’s a good omen and get out of here. Maybe your great-grandfather didn’t like the candles on your family shrine and was glad I stole them to smear all over your watch reports. Maybe he’s helping us.”
“Great-grandfather would have hated you.”
“That is a terrible thing to say to a person.” I think for a second. “Even if it is true. But we have to get out of here, no matter why the door is open.”
The hallway outside is black, silence a heavy blanket over the long line of doors. A creaky hinge brings me up short a few feet down. The cell doors are all open. We’re the only people here.
“Is this level usually empty?” I ask.
Tai-ge shrugs. “On the way in, I was too wrapped up in fake compulsions to notice.”
We don’t see anyone in our hallway or on the stairway up, not even a single guard there to make sure prisoners stay where they belong. When we break out into sunlight, it’s too bright. The rays burn into my retinas as I stumble away from the cement staircase leading down into the Hole. Tai-ge stops, shading his eyes against the beams magnified by huge windows overlooking the City from the lower edges of the Second Quarter.
The room is deserted, the prison station sign over the front door hanging crooked. The street outside should have been teeming with the midday markets selling meat and canned goods for the evening meal. But it’s empty. As if the whole City is Asleep.
My feet slip out from under me as I step in a pool of spilled water, a cup broken in the middle of the floor as though someone dropped it midsip. Papers lie in messy heaps, spilling over onto the floor. Tai-ge runs his finger along the inside of a tall cabinet set into the wall, doors torn open and askew.
“The rifle cabinet is empty. They must have been in a hurry.” His eyes follow a trail of debris, cupboards, shelves, and tables all lying on the ground, stomped to matchsticks. Drops of dried blood coat the whole scene, as if someone decided to ransack the place with nothing but his bare hands.
“Someone let all the inmates out.” Tai-ge is at my shoulder, pulling me away. “The rebels must have had allies down there.”
“Why didn’t we hear the locks go? Can they control the doors from up here?”
Tai-ge nods. “It must have been when I was still screaming. Let’s get out of here. It wasn’t just political prisoners down there, and I don’t want to find out if any of them stayed back.”
Outside, the normal cloud of smog hovering over the Third Quarter burns black instead of the normal brown-tinged gray. I can see the flames from here, wooden dwellings falling as if they’re no more sturdy than dried flowers. Heli-planes circle over the chaos like vultures waiting for their prey to give up their last breath.
“Where are all the people?” I ask.
Tai-ge points down toward the smoke. “Either down there fighting or heading up to the heli-field. Or hiding, I guess.” A red polka-dotted curtain twitches closed in the house facing us across the street.
“The heli-field?”
“The army heli-fields are down below the City, but there’s an emergency landing pad and some hangars up in the First Quarter.” He scans the City beneath us. “My father is commanding from the First library. But how are we going to get him to listen? They aren’t going to just let us in, not when they sent me screaming to the Hole an hour ago.”
“Why didn’t they give you Mantis?” I ask.
“It’s all gone. The Firsts took it all or are hiding it somewhere to keep it away from the rebels. The minute the attacks started, every single pill went missing, airlifted from the heli-field. Father has probably already killed someone, he was so angry. I saw two other Seconds in my class get sent down to the Hole before I decided to come find you.”
Did they know? I wonder. How deep are Dr. Yang’s claws in the First Quarter? Is he pulling out everyone loyal or valuable to him, letting everyone else die? Are all the City heli-planes his now?
The tiered eaves of the library tower over the First Quarter, easy to see even from the Hole’s entrance so far over in Second Quarter that it’s almost to the wall. My boots pound against paving stones worn smooth by thousands of feet as we cross over the Aihu River using one of the many bridges that connect the Second and First Quarters with no wall or checks in between, unlike the walls that pen in the Thirds down the mountain. I lengthen my stride to keep up with Tai-ge, feeling odd at being together again. He looks different. The lines I remember from the previous night in his room are still there, his face molded into a permanent frown. He was serious before, buttoned up to the throat. But he could laugh, too. I can’t imagine the statue running beside me laughing ever again.
We’re too low down on the Steppe, most of the roads twisting away from the library and up toward the lab district, but we slide through alleyways, the blocks of lesser First homes, and follow the wall that bars Thirds from coming into the First Quarter all the way to Renewal Road. I grab the tail of Tai-ge’s coat, just about dragging my arm out of the socket to pull him behind a wagon abandoned in the street as a group of Seconds march by, their synchronized steps ringing out across the wide road.
Just over the wall and bridge Howl stopped me from crossing . . . only a month or two ago? . . . the City Center towers over the central market, windows heavy-eyed and blinking in the late-afternoon light from underneath the three tiers of red tile roof. It’s hard to believe that it is empty now, the single occupant finally released.
Tai-ge’s eyes are on the tall building as well. “Sun Yi-lai.” He points, the Chairman and his son peeking from their portrait inside the doors, barely visible from our hiding place. “He disappeared the same day you did. Did Dr. Yang take him, too?”
I shake my head. “Howl looks kind of like that painting of the Chairman’s son, so I thought . . . well. It doesn’t matter what I thought now. I’m not the only one he managed to fool. He had the Premier talking to me as if I were a real person the day I left the orphanage. They couldn’t have taken him, too, or I would have seen him. I don’t know where the Chairman’s real son is.” I still can’t let myself focus on that portrait, Howl looking back at me. No, not Howl, however much I wish this coincidence could make his story and not Sole’s true.
Hugging the buildings, we move forward, stopping to cower just beyond Yuan Zhiwei’s statue as a cluster of Seconds tromp up the road. The statue glares down toward us, as if he’d alert the Reds to our presence if he could.
Just as we run across the street, one of the Seconds does look back, catching sight of me as Tai-ge and I dive toward a lesser First family’s bright red door to hide. He shouts, and all the men immediately turn back in some formation, guns up and ready.
“Come out or we shoot!” the captain yells, fear and adrenaline transforming his voice to a monster’s growl. “Yuan knows we need all the men we can get, so if you’re friendlies, then come out!”
Tai-ge bites his lip, looking at me. “Stay close to me. They won’t shoot you if it means shooting me, too.” Then he slides out from our hiding place in the doorway, hands high up over his head.
CHAPTER 45
“FATHER WILL LISTEN TO US.” Tai-ge doesn’t bother to whisper as the men jerk us up the library steps, the building poking out from the spread of structures below as if it were refusing to bow to the war bubbling around its feet.