“Are we safe?” I ask, wondering if we have more time than I think. “The Menghu haven’t found their way down here yet?”
Peishan’s voice breaks through from the back of the line. “No, we aren’t safe. We only moved because the fight spilled underground yesterday morning. We’ve been peeking out every now and then to grab food and water. They set the hospital down in the Third Quarter on fire. What is going to happen to us now? The walls have been breached; there are Kamari soldiers everywhere—”
“We’re going to get out of here. Somehow,” I answer. She glares at me but doesn’t argue.
June speaks again. “Peishan managed to steal some Mantis and a stash of quicklights before the fighting started. We got the masks up there too. All from a bunch of carts headed up the hill, stocked up with all this junk.”
“Dr. Yang must have started early.” Tai-ge looks at me. “I guess that explains why my father couldn’t get any medicine out of the hospitals.”
Peishan slumps down on the ground, smiling from behind her mask when June pats her on the shoulder. Purpled circles under her eyes coupled with her bald head make her look sick. Vulnerable. Too young to be scavenging for Mantis in a burning hospital. She and June make a good pair.
When Peishan catches me looking at her, the smile disappears. “What happened to you? Weren’t you going to take out General Hong’s family or something? You never came back.”
I ignore her, pulling June and Tai-ge over close so we can talk. However much I want to stop the violence happening over our heads, Tai-ge is right. “So the sewers are blocked down by the Sanatorium?” I ask. “What are the odds of getting out that way?”
June shakes her head, the darkness around us spilling all over, turning her half machine, half little girl. “Menghu aren’t asking questions, they’re shooting everyone not wearing a Mountain uniform on sight. And there have been bombs down in the Third Quarter, so leadership might be kind of hazy at this point.”
Tai-ge scrubs a hand through his hair. “SS bombs? Everyone should calm down then. Fall Asleep.”
“This new strain doesn’t do the same thing to everyone.” I think of Mei, her eyes wide and frightened. She dozed in the hospital, then woke up compulsing. Not like any SS case I’ve ever heard of. And the doctors I overheard down in the Sanatorium seemed to think this strain was capable of moving much faster in the victims. “We might have people compulsing in hours. Maybe less. Picking our way through a whole City of infected isn’t going to happen. And it’s contagious, so no one will be spared.”
“Then what chance do we have?” Tai-ge’s eyes flick between me and June. “Where is there to go? Infected must be outside the walls too.”
“What if we go up?” I ask.
“Up . . . where? Even if we get over the wall at the top of the First Quarter, there’s no way out. It’s just cliffs,” Tai-ge says.
“Helis are swarming all over the City like starving mosquitoes. They must be still moving in and out of the City heli-field. If we take one . . .”
June rolls her eyes. “Full marks for thinking big, Sev, but I don’t know how to fly those things and neither do you.”
Tai-ge smiles, the first inklings of the boy I grew up with showing through his iron mask. “That, my Outsider friend, is where I come in handy.”
CHAPTER 46
THE OLD CITY IS A black maze, my limited experience combined with June’s hours down here the only thing our group has to go on. We know how to get back to the fight, but none of us knows how to get up to the Steppe without leaving the tunnels. The roar from the Third Quarter screams louder and louder each time we stick our heads out into open air.
After another unsuccessful check aboveground, June touches my arm. “Wait until night. Compulsions might have already started, but after dark the soldiers won’t be able to see us. If we can stay ahead of them, we should be okay.”
Tai-ge looks at her, glimmers of respect behind his expression. “She’s right.” Running his fingers along the metal of the ladder, he shrugs. “And if the infected start compulsing, maybe soldiers will be too distracted to pay attention to us.”
The thought of waiting makes my skin crawl, memories of Cas, Parhat, and Mei too close to forget. “We have to go now. You don’t understand, Tai-ge.”
June shakes her head. “But I do. We can at least back up against a wall down here and keep watch. We can hide. Infected can’t follow compulsions to hurt us if they can’t see us.”
I meet her eyes, stale memories shady on her face. The pressure of being trapped pushes in on me from all sides. But there is nowhere safe. So I nod.
? ? ?
We stay underground until darkness falls completely, the sky a purpled bruise fed by smoke from the burning factories. Even in the shadows, I feel as though our every move is being watched, as if soldiers are waiting to drag us onto the bloody cobblestones only a few streets away. We make our way up the Steppe until homes loom over our heads like fairy-tale castles, a First family name spelled out over each door.
Silence dampens everything up this far, everyone from this part of the City either fighting or evacuated or dead. Of all the homes we could hide in, there’s only one with a clear view of the heli-field: the house of the god. Of all the mansions we could break into, at least we can be sure the Chairman was one of the first to be flown out. Or killed.
The battle going on seems miles away, a whole world apart from the quiet glamour of the Chairman’s home. His is the last in a long line of colossal homes that perch on the cliff that ends the Steppe. Tai-ge stares out through the window that overlooks the heli-field, nose almost pressed against the bubbled glass.
It feels odd to be back here, where it all started. I have to stop myself from trudging down into the basement to sit on that wine cellar floor. To remember the bottles, Howl’s desperate bear hug to keep the shattered glass from my mouth, the comforting words that everything was going to be all right. He didn’t know that it was impossible. That even the elaborate dance he choreographed to get me to the Mountain as a sacrificial lamb wasn’t going to be enough payment to resume his old life. Fooled by Dr. Yang, just like the rest of us. It almost makes me feel sorry for him.
Almost.
On the main floor, a set of three windows stand two stories tall, looking down on the thousand-foot drop of bare rock. June is busy ransacking the house, filling bag after bag with food from the cellar. Other things too, like paper and pens, knives, batteries.
“For bartering,” she says when I give a questioning look to the matched set of knives she is wrapping in paper. “There must be someone out there who wants them.”
She loads everything into my pack, eyeing the book Howl gave me with interest before throwing six cans of peaches on top of it.
The minutes tick by, and we all watch Tai-ge play lookout, waiting for a heli to land. Waiting for the chaos that must be boiling down in the Third Quarter to bubble up and spill into our laps. Helis buzz in and out, the huge balloons of gas fluttering over propellers, pounding the grass circle with torrents of air.