One of the soldiers darts forward, and I crash into him, pulling the gun down. Time slows as I wait for the other to shoot. Pins and needles dance across my skin, every nerve prickling as I steel myself for the bullet.
But nothing comes. Instead of a shot, the ground starts to grumble underneath me, the deep throb of hundreds of feet pounding against the dirt reverberating up through my bones. The Red underneath me pushes me off, scrambling for the ladder leading up to the heli as men and women pour out across the field toward us. A blast of fire arcs up over the hangar, greedy fingers tearing into the wood and metal supports, huge columns of smoke making an X across the sky.
Struggling up from the ground, I look up in time to see June kick the Red trying to climb the ladder in the face, her eyes darting across the sea of people sprinting toward the heli, panic pinching at her mouth. “Get up here now!”
I rush to comply, Tai-ge at my side, but we’re only at the bottom rung of the ladder when the crest of the wave breaks over us, terrified screams mixed with the roar of soldiers setting about their horrific work. Shots zing past as Tai-ge wraps his arms around me and presses me face-first into the ladder, trying to block the deluge. June scampers up to the heli’s hatch, shoving children in ahead of her. Once inside, she peeks down at us, her hand twitching toward the door control.
A man howls, his hands grasping around Tai-ge’s protective hug to scratch at my neck and shoulders, but before the Seph can do more than gnash his teeth, he falls under a blow to the head. People are pushing up against us, the metal grid of the ladder pressing painfully into my chest and ribs, and between Tai-ge trying to protect me from the violent crowd and the ladder, I can’t unpin myself to climb.
Tai-ge shoves back against the press of swinging arms and weapons, giving me an opening to wrench myself back from being pinned against the ladder and climb. The crowd slams back up against him by the time I’m free, so now it’s his chest crushed up against the metal rungs, but I hold a hand down to him, helping to pull him up from the mess.
Up. Away from the rioting mass of humanity and violence, but they never seem to get any farther away, men and women crowding up after us, throwing one another off the ladder and snaking up to catch at Tai-ge’s boots.
June’s hands reach out to grasp mine, her nails digging into my skin and the hatch’s metal lip biting into my stomach as she pulls me through. By the time I turn to help Tai-ge, rioters from the ground are trying to climb over him into the heli, and all I can see of him are his white-knuckled fingers barely attached to the ladder.
Together, June and I grab his wrists, dragging him the last few feet, pruning the frothing mass with our feet. When the door swishes shut, several arms and legs catch between the door and the wall, flailing until I can push them out of the heli to let the door whisk closed.
We all sit for a second, unnatural quiet inside the ship filled with every gasping breath coming out of me, every drop of sweat and blood that hits the floor.
A dull thud echoes up through the shuddering heli-plane, the walls echoing like a bell. Tai-ge scrambles up from the floor to the captain’s chair and the wall of blinking lights surrounding the cockpit window, almost tipping over as his feet try to run faster than his body can unfold from the ground.
Another crash rings through our craft, and the floor seems to bend underneath me, the screech of metal drowning the children’s screams. But Tai-ge whoops from the front as we finally move. Up.
I can still hear banging on the metal hull, the people attached to the ladder outside crying to be let in or too far gone to know they need to jump. But soon all the sound dies down, nothing but smoke choking out the blue sky in front of us and the insistent whir of propellers snaking in through the vents.
The force of the aircraft moving upward pins me to the floor, but I don’t even want to get up. Screams still echo in my ears, the scratch and pull of frantic compulsions and those just trying to escape. But it isn’t enough to block out the memory of those gunshots, of Howl slumped on the floor. I take a deep breath, trying to force the air into my lungs, but it’s too quiet, too still in this little room to try and blank out the misery threatening to drag me under.
Howl took me to the Mountain to die. He was going to let me die. I keep saying it, over and over, as if the dull singsong voice in my head will blank out everything else I’m trying not to feel. Was he somehow still alive after those bullets hit him? Is he now, in the middle of that riot?
June puts a hand on my shoulder, her eyebrows drawn down. “We’re alive.” It sounds like an argument.
We. I’m not alone.
Tai-ge tears his eyes away from the smoke streaming past the cockpit’s clear glass just long enough to ask, “North?”
I try to sit up, to smile at Peishan and the cluster of children still softly crying into their masks. June is right. We’re alive. Alive to go get the cure. Alive to help all the Sephs who will flood through the forest, infecting those they don’t kill. Alive to make sure nothing like the full-out war beneath our feet ever happens again. Alive to stop Dr. Yang from tricking the world just like he tricked me, and forcing us to accept a new world set on his terms.
Alive and ready to fight. I am no longer a piece in someone else’s game. I am ready to play this game of weiqi. And this time, I need to win.
I wipe a hand across my face, dirt-smudged palm coming away wet. “Yes. Go north.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are three things I should probably make clear about this book.
First, I wrote Last Star Burning in English with an English-speaking audience in mind. The language in this book is supposed to be a version of Mandarin, or what Mandarin could look like after it’s been isolated and changed over a hundred years. That being said, if we’re going to compare the way language is handled in this book to Mandarin as it is spoken today, there are some things that don’t make sense. For instance, you can’t abbreviate things with a single letter in Mandarin. Mandarin doesn’t have letters. Each syllable is a single character, so abbreviating Sleeping Sickness to SS doesn’t really make sense. I’ve treated most issues like that as a translation problem. If I were a translator adapting this book from Mandarin, I’d have to make decisions about which words to use and how, knowing a literal translation wouldn’t make sense, or a translation without a little bit of extra explanation wouldn’t be accessible. Hyphens are stuck here and there to help separate out syllables when it seems like correct pronunciation would be impossible for English speakers without them.