Last Star Burning Read online

  To Allen

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  THEY SAY WAR IS NO dinner party. Not refined, graceful, courteous, or magnanimous. It’s complete devastation. Every foul human impulse distilled into quick bursts of chaos. And yet here I sit at a table, stones to mark my soldiers in front of me in pretty lines on a grid, the conversation perfectly quiet and polite. All I need is a snack.

  “Yuan’s ax, Sevvy.” Tai-ge laughs as he flicks the edge of the weiqi board. “Is there a strategy buried under here somewhere? You don’t have anywhere else to play.”

  “My game is too advanced for you to comprehend.” My stones are pitiful and lonely spots of white in a sea of Tai-ge’s black, a besieged army with no hope. Picking up one of the smooth pieces, I weigh each of the open spaces, attempting to keep dismay from leaking through my cheerful mask. “In one or two moves, I’ll have you right where I want you.” But Tai-ge is right. Most of my stones are dead.

  Tai-ge twirls the gold ring on his middle finger, light catching the City seal stamped into the soft metal, then rubs the two raised white lines scarring the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “You’ve got as much chance to win as if you were fighting a gore with a broken bottle.”

  “I don’t believe in gores. If gores were real, there wouldn’t be so many soldiers alive and well to spin stories about them.”

  Tai-ge taps the board one last time. “You concede?”

  I take a theatrical breath and let it out, bowing low over the table.

  A little smile softens the angular lines of Tai-ge’s face as he shakes his head. Reserved gloating, as though smiling too widely would break something inside of him. “One more game? We probably don’t have time, but maybe if I walk you home . . . ?”

  I nod and sit back in my chair as he resets the pieces, looking to the bay window behind him. The last streams of orange and pink fade into black over the smokestack skyline around us as I consider the view. The City makes a wheel shape cut into the side of our mountain, ringed entirely by a high outer wall. The three spokes of the wheel divide the City into thirds to keep the different parts to themselves, with a central market hub the only common point connecting them. Below Tai-ge’s house, I can just glimpse the chimney tops and factory lights above the wall that separates the industrial Third Quarter from the martial Second Quarter. On this side of the wall, peaked roofs as clean and orderly as the Seconds themselves rise up the side of the mountain. I can’t see the First Quarter from my vantage point here. Firsts reside higher up the mountain, towering above the other two quarters where they can keep an eye on the rest of us—that is, if they bother to take a break from their experiments and research to spare us a thought.

  At least the Seconds and Thirds have their own quarters. I touch my collar, where my four metal stars are pinned. There isn’t a place for Fourths here.

  The horizon beyond the outer wall seems unreal somehow, as if the mountaintops poking up through the clouds are just a painting, a backdrop the Firsts invented for us.

  I shiver. I’ll take the fairy-tale painting. If Outside is distant and out of focus, I won’t have to watch the desperate survivors out there trying to kill each other.

  Under the table, I continue digging a cluster of Tai-ge’s pencils point-first into the red candle I stole from the Hong family shrine downstairs. I hate seeing Tai-ge so smug from beating me, but it’s not like I can tell him I’ve been sabotaging his writing supplies, not to mention desecrating his ancestors’ shrine. But the next time he sits down with his Watch reports, he’ll know exactly why I was so distracted during our game of weiqi. He’ll swear over his red-smeared reports, but then I know he’ll laugh. And my friend needs more reasons to laugh.

  Dark wood paneling makes the room seem small and dim in the waning light. Nothing has changed much in Tai-ge’s room since we were kids. Everything is so red. Down to his striped bedcover, the accents in the hardwood bookcase, and the portrait of our City’s founder, Yuan Zhiwei, matted in red on the wall. I suppose it’s typical in the Second Quarter to deck out everything in City colors. They’re proud to protect the City. Though I do wonder sometimes if sleeping in this room coats Tai-ge’s dreams in red paint.

  Before the board is clear of stones, Tai-ge’s door pops open.

  “Tai-ge, Fenghua just brought in . . .” Comrade Hong trails off as she notices me across the table from her son. “What are you doing up here?”

  I jump to my feet, subtly dropping the pencils and pocketing the stolen candle so she won’t see it, keeping my eyes on my boots. The peeling leather toes are half-hidden by the City’s star-and-beaker seal cut into the deep red fibers of the carpet. I smile a little to make up for the humble bow, refusing to give in completely to the tight disapproval in Comrade Hong’s voice. “We were playing weiqi, Comrade.”

  Tai-ge gestures to the empty board from his seat at the table. “Well, I was playing. I’m not quite sure what Sevvy was doing.”

  Comrade Hong does not look amused.

  General Hong and his wife may have graciously volunteered to reeducate me after my parents’ blunders—it was an honor for their family to be trusted with a subject as corrupted as I, and there are few families so true to Yuan Zhiwei’s vision that they’d even be allowed near me—but Comrade Hong’s eyes don’t seem to register that any improvement has taken place over the last eight years. Her hair is cropped short in the new City fashion, the utilitarian line only accentuating how beautiful she is. Tai-ge’s mother is shorter than I am, her heavy Watch uniform making her look as though she’s a child playing war. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows are raised in dismay, as though the neighbors might have glimpsed me sitting across from her perfect Second son with something other than reeducation materials in front of us. Not many of the high-ranking Seconds would permit a Fourth within a block of their homes up here on the Steppe, much less inside, playing an unsanctioned game of weiqi with their children.

  “You were supposed to be back down in the Third Quarter over an hour ago, Jiang Sev. Just because the General is too busy for reeducation tonight does not mean you can sit up here wasting time.” Her eyes freeze on the pin hanging cockeyed at my collar, as if she can’t see me past those four red stars. “Sister Lei will be hearing about this. Now get out of my house.”

  Tai-ge pulls himself up from the table, the lamplight glossing over his thick hair, trimmed so close to his scalp. He glances out the window where the lamps are starting to glow in the falling darkness. “Come on, Sevvy. I’ll walk you down.”

  The little glow of warmth I feel at hearing my nickname on Tai-ge’s lips winks out when Comrade Hong snaps back, “No, Tai-ge, you stay here. And don’t call her that. It’s too informal.”

  Tai-ge smiles at his mother as he guides me past her and out into the hallway. “That’s her name.” But when Comrade Hong’s expression blackens, he drops the smile and gives a respectful nod. “Sorry. Jiang Sev. I’m the one who told her to stay, so I’ll walk her back. The Watchman on the bridge at night is always crabby.”

  “She knows the rules.” Comrade Hong follows us down the stairs and past the family shrine. Hongs long gone, somber-eyed in their portraits, watch us through the screen of smoke issuing from a garden of newly lit incense. The missing red candle makes the table look off balance, but Tai-ge’s mother is too busy arguing to notice. “Your father is never going to be able to teach Jiang Sev correct social theory or her place in it if she can’t even adhere to basic policy. . . .”

  Tai-ge grabs both our jackets from the hooks in the entryway, and before his mother can protest any further, he throws open the front door and drags me down the steps.

  “Be quick!” Comrade Hong yells after us. “If you aren’t back in the next ten minutes . . .
!” But the rest of whatever she wanted to say is lost as we run through the circular gate that connects the Hong compound to the street, our breath misting out in front of us in the frozen air.

  Tai-ge tows me around a corner, but slips on the icy paving stones when I don’t move fast enough, sending me sliding into a patch of early snow. The fall knocks the wind out of me, but I manage to kick his feet out from under him before he’s done laughing. We both lie on the ground for a few minutes, looking up at the stars. It’s a miracle we can even see the first few in the twilight. Smoke from the Third Quarter factories usually keeps the whole City under a cover of smog.

  It almost seems impossible that it has been eight years since I stood sullenly outside the Hong’s house, hand still scabbed over from the brand newly burned into my skin. It sort of looks like a star. A melted, ruined star, seared into the flesh between my thumb and forefinger.

  The man who gave it to me didn’t say anything. Just unpinned the star from his collar. I sat there watching as he stuck the pin in the fire until the metal glowed red, only a rag protecting his hand from the brutal heat. I closed my eyes before he pressed the pin to the single line that marked me as a First, charring away any evidence that I ever had a place in the City. I don’t remember if it hurt, how it smelled, or whether I said thank you afterward. I only remember the vertigo of my entire world shifting from First to Fourth.

  Tai-ge was out on the front steps that day to usher me in before his parents could shoo him away, as if he didn’t care how far my family had fallen. He was the army personified, honored to take part in my reintegration into the politically correct proletariat. But the moment his parents looked away, Tai-ge’s military straight posture relaxed and he shoved a red cellophane–wrapped candy into my sore hands, the same shifty look in his eye as Mother had when she used to make a game of slipping my sister, Aya, and me sweets, seeing how many we could hide before Father noticed.

  I close my eyes and shake the thought away before it can burn like molten lead at the back of my mind. No thoughts of Aya tonight.

  When I open my eyes, Tai-ge is pointing up at a blinking light as it slowly pulses across the sky. “Satellite or Kamari heli-plane?” he asks me, the lamps hanging over the nearest compound gates casting a golden sheen over his skin.

  “Better hope it’s a satellite. A Kamari bombing spree would definitely keep you out here longer than ten minutes, and I don’t think your mother would consider an enemy attack a good enough excuse for your being late.”

  “It’s probably just a City patroller.” Tai-ge squints at the sky as if trying to decide.

  When Tai-ge stands, he pulls me up with him, brushing at the snow clinging to the dark wool of my coat. My face pinkens as his hand catches on one of my buttons.

  “I don’t think you have to worry.” I pretend to look up the street to hide my blush, the mountain pricked yellow and white above us, lights from the First and Second Quarters too dim to wash out our view of the stars. “Even Kamar seems to know that bombs so close to the First Quarter are unacceptable. They keep it to the Thirds and the factories.”

  “Where they can destroy our munitions and food. It makes sense.”

  “Well, if I were in charge, I’d go straight to the top.” I point up the mountain to the highest lights twinkling in the darkness. “The First Circle all live right in the same neighborhood, don’t they? If you cut the head off, the chicken might flap around for a little bit trying to pretend it’s still alive, but it’ll still lie down dead in the end.”

  “Lucky I’m not a First, I guess. Don’t let my parents hear you talking like that, or they’ll be checking your room for knives.”

  I close my mouth, wishing it would just cement shut. “You might as well be First, Hong Tai-ge. Or don’t you see the way we all jump when your father barks? Perhaps Reds will move up to the First Quarter, and a new era will begin where Second comes before First.”

  Reds. Tai-ge shakes his head at the nickname, looking down at the two lines scored into the skin on the back of his hand that mark him a Second. I’m not the only one who calls Seconds “Reds.” It’s hard not to, with their City-red coats, City-red carpet, and City-red souls.

  Tai-ge reaches across to flick some snow from my cheek, snapping my attention away from my thoughts. I can’t help but look at him now, his hand warm against my cold skin. His eyes are so dark the irises look black. He doesn’t move, as if the cold has frozen the two of us together.

  But then he blinks, pulling his hand away from me to stick it deep in his jacket pocket. “My father knows his place. He knows mine, too, and often reminds me that it isn’t playing with you in the snow.” He starts down the street without me, but then waits for me to draw even with him, leaving a few feet of space between us.

  I run my fingers through my long hair to brush out the last bits of damp clinging to me, trying to shake the hollow feeling that growls deep in my chest as he keeps the appropriate distance between us on our walk. Tai-ge is right to keep his distance. And I should be more careful about keeping mine. I won’t ruin his future. Not on purpose, at least.

  We silently turn down the road toward the Aihu River bridge that marks the edge of the Second Quarter, both of us trying to ignore the awkwardness between us. Somewhere up the mountain is a lake that feeds the river, above the First Quarter and the blunt cliffs that edge the whole east side of the City. On the other side of the bridge lies the dividing wall that will forever separate my life from Tai-ge’s. A Third climbs a ladder propped up against the closest bridge support as we walk by, only allowed on this side of the barrier to blow the red paper lanterns strung across the bridge back to life. The lights sparkle in the dark waves of the river and across the sheen of frost coating the bridge.

  We stand together, companionably watching puffs of smoke creep toward us from the Third Quarter below. A sigh streams out of me as the last bit of light drains out of the sky. Time to go back or they’ll send out the Watch to find me.

  Before I can suggest we move, Tai-ge breaks the silence, pointing to the dedication painted in red and black across the huge wooden supports just in front of the barrier that blocks the Third Quarter off from the river. He points to the characters as he reads, each syllable sharp and clear. “ ‘Aihu Bridge, erected Year Four by the Liberation Army. United to stop Sleeping Sickness,’ ” he recites, shaking his head. “That was Yuan Zhiwei’s dream, but look at us now, almost a century later. We sit up here with nowhere to hide. Bombs fall on us at least once a month. How much longer before they send their armies up here, do you think? Just cut us all down.”

  “Kamar couldn’t walk a whole army up this high on the mountain; that was the point—”

  “They were never supposed to find us at all.” Tai-ge stares up at the sky again, as if he’s searching for the blinking light we saw earlier. “Everyone thought we’d be safe, and we were up until . . .” He breaks off when he looks down, and I realize my hands are twined together as if I can hide the brand. “I’m sorry, Sevvy. I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

  I nod, but turn from him before he can see the cracks in my expression, thoughts I can’t let crystallize hovering too close to the surface.

  A figure thick with layers of clothing steps out from behind the pillar beneath the sign, making for a good distraction. Winter is coming, leaving this man with his coat buttoned up to his throat and fur hat pulled down around his eyebrows with the flaps tied tightly under his chin. He looks a little like one of the grainy old photographs from the Great Wars, needing only a bolt-action rifle and mustache to complete the picture. Lantern light glints off the two stars pinned to his red coat. A member of the Watch.

  My smile is back by the time he gets to us, ready to face whatever he might say, trying very hard not to notice Tai-ge’s arm nudging mine in apology. There’s no reason for him to apologize. I am not my stars, whatever most people believe.

  The Watchman eyes me and then looks pointedly at his wristwatch. “Do you know what ti
me it is, Fourth?”

  I wish hiding my stars weren’t a punishable offense, but I suppose keeping them out of sight wouldn’t help anyway. The Watch knows my face, the birthmark curling out from under my ear and onto my cheek. They know the burn that mars the skin between my thumb and forefinger. It’s their job to know. I pull my ID card from my coat pocket and hold it out to him. “Yes, I know I don’t have much time before the walls close, Comrade.”

  He takes it, scowling. Looking at the bright silver likeness of Yuan Zhiwei printed next to my picture, he spits on the ground at my feet. “Trash like you shouldn’t even be allowed to disgrace his image.”

  Tai-ge steps forward. “She’s not late yet. Let her go past.”

  The Watchman takes a careful look at Tai-ge. “You should watch where you go with her kind of garbage. Even if you are the General’s son.” He spits again on the ground and walks back to the Watch station policing the door between my quarter and Tai-ge’s.

  I shrug off Tai-ge’s interjection and wave good-bye, the bridge’s lights framing my friend in a warm glow.

  As soon as I cross the barrier, my eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness, as if even the light on this side of the wall is gray. It’s hard to make out the peaked roofs down the hill, where most families don’t have the electricity rations to use their cheap incandescents at night. I wait until the empty stalls from the afternoon market hide me before I start to run, not wanting Tai-ge to know just how late I actually am. I’ll have to explain missing dinner, but I don’t care. A smile steals across my face as I fall into line with the uniforms hurrying between the blocky factory buildings towering over the cracked cement walkways and the worn brick cafeteria. The thought of Tai-ge’s face when he realizes his pencils are near useless is worth missing dinner any day. Especially today. The whole Third Quarter smells like cabbage.

  The crush of bland clothing streaked with factory dirt closes in around me as I push through the school gate, students with similar tardiness problems rushing back from evening meals that went a tad too long. The hallway outside Remedial Reform is especially crowded, those with work shifts during the day here at night class to get their required dose of history and ideology in short sentences and small words so they can understand. I manage to slide onto the bench at the back of our little classroom before Captain Chen comes in.