Tiptoeing through the shadowy hallway, he focused on thestaircase at the opposite end. He wouldn’t dare risk his gaze slipping to the room three doors down on his left. Even after a year, the thought of the final moments he spent inside that cramped space made his guts gurgle with resentment.
He bounded up the steps leading to the comandante’s office. He’d been up and down them so many times, he knew the rug would conceal any sounds he made. There were no longer portraits on the walls. Any sign of the family the comandante once boasted about had been wiped away as if they never existed. As if Ignacio’s mother had never mattered. As if Ignacio himself didn’t matter.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even before his mother had died at the hands of Dos Palos spies, Ignacio’s father had kept him at arm’s length. It seemed his father wanted an obedient soldier, not a son. Ignacio had given him what he wanted until he couldn’t any longer.
And his disobedience fractured what little relationship they had into a thousand shards that could not be pieced back together again.
The door to Father’s office was ajar. Ignacio peered back over his shoulder, searching for a single looming shadow in the darkness. But Father wasn’t home. Ignacio had memorized his weekly routine.
The comandante would have supper at El Portal del Rey first. It was a known haunt for members of the Blackbirds. Then he’d make an impressively fast stop at Muñeca’s, a secret establishment where Blackbirds could also be found, but under silk sheets instead of sitting at linen-draped tables. Such businesseshad been banished by the king of Costa Mayor several years ago, but, unsurprisingly enough, his soldiers were beyond the laws of the land they served. Father’s final stop of the night would be a swanky speakeasy on the other side of town, where other arrogant worms assembled in tucked-away rooms and bragged about their great wealth while drinking booze that cost more than what most people earned in a month.
Father wouldn’t be back before daybreak.
And yet, Ignacio couldn’t force himself to move past the threshold and into his father’s office. His fingers twitched at his sides. Memories poured over him. The smell of leather varnish. The mausoleum-like quiet. The sting of Father’s wrath when Ignacio was five years old and burst into the office without being summoned. How many punishments did he suffer for not knocking properly, for not showing enough regard, for not being exemplary in every way? Enough to still feel the repercussions deep in his marrow even now when he was a few days shy of turning nineteen.
Ignacio shook his head. That was the dreadful thing about memories. One could try to flee from them, but they always caught up. And often at the most inconvenient moments.
Nevertheless, he had a job to do. A task far more important than his own discomforts.
The day after Ignacio turned eighteen, Father had enlisted him in the training core to become one of his elite soldiers—the Blackbirds. Ignacio grew up believing he would follow in his parents’ footsteps. Mother had been King Amadeo’s comandante before she was killed protecting him. Father was giventhe title of comandante soon after. Both his mother and father had served in the military with honors. When he was a boy, Ignacio had believed he would do so as well, but as he matured, his dreams had begun to change. Still, he went to training camp, and he endured it for six long months, even while suffering a broken heart.
The day before he was going to receive his official Blackbird marking, he and the cadets had been called to action. They stormed into a tiny village across enemy lines and destroyed everything, believing their adversaries to be lying in wait. But there were no opposing forces. The army of formidable soldiers constantly trying to demolish the barriers between his country of Costa Mayor and the neighboring kingdom of Dos Palos, the villains he’d been taught to despise and fear, were nowhere to be found.
As Ignacio marched into the village, he quickly realized the people he had been ordered to take down were only farmers and their families. The rulers of Dos Palos and their soldiers had retreated north, leaving their subjects who couldn’t escape at risk. And they were so obviously lacking in provisions because King Amadeo’s army had cut all supply chains going in or out of the village and between Costa Mayor and Dos Palos.
These citizens were the monsters he was supposed to kill? These thin and weary people who hardly had clothes on their backs?
When the first shots rang out, screams tore through the sky. And Ignacio did nothing but stand there like a shell-shocked fool as the Blackbirds obliterated whatever lay in their path.
General Keara, the leader of the platoon and his father’sright hand, commanded the cadets to stand guard while she and the other officers charged ahead. Ignacio followed them. He didn’t know why. Probably to ease his guilt. To try to convince himself that he was wrong, that what they were doing was imperative to the safety of Costa Mayor.
That didn’t happen.
Whooping and laughter led him to the truth. The general and the senior Blackbirds were digging through a steaming stream in the middle of a meadow. Water sloshed around them as they filled thick satchels to the brim with whatever was inside the hot springs.
“We’ve hit a payload!” one of the Blackbirds yelled.
“I was starting to believe we’d drained these lands dry,” another added.
“Just keep digging,” General Keara ordered. She stood, stretching her long back. “I’ll send word to the comandante. Congratulating him on his magnificent find.”
Ignacio had tried to get a look at what they were stashing away, but he couldn’t without being spotted. He felt sick. The Blackbirds under Keara’s command were not hunting for enemies of Costa Mayor. They were searching for whatever lay within that meadow. The enemy he had been taught to hate all his life was not trying to infiltrate Costa Mayor. Costa Mayor was trying to infiltrate them because they wanted something Dos Palos had.
In a haze, he ran until he reached the next village, thinking he could at least warn the citizens of the soldiers nearby. But it had already been decimated by the Blackbirds. The corpses picked clean by vultures.
That was the day Ignacio defected. The day he turned his back on everything he thought he knew.
He’d once thought his father was the epitome of what it meant to be righteous and noble. But there was nothing righteous or noble about what Ignacio had witnessed in the war. Under Father’s command, innocent people had died. And Ignacio had done nothing to stop it. He was going to do whatever it took to make up for that now.
Emboldened by these memories, he took a deep breath and stepped into his father’s office. The place was still cold and bare, much like his father’s soul.
Ignacio reached under the desk and pressed a nearly imperceptible button. For most of his life, he’d never known the hidden switch existed. He might never have known if his first and only love hadn’t told him of it right before she squished his heart under her shoe.
The well-greased mechanisms engaged, and the door to his father’s real office opened as quiet as the swish of a horse’s tail. His pulse quickened as he entered.
At the center of the circular war room stood a massive table with a detailed map unfurled over the glossy wood. Figures in the silver-and-black regalia of Costa Mayor stood in a dense line far past the borders of Costa Mayor and into the northern territories of Dos Palos. Father had markedX’s over landmarks. The markings might seem random. But Father’s actions were never random.
TheseX’s must have been other places where they had found whatever material General Keara and the Blackbirds had stuffed into their satchels in that village. Ignacio’s eyes roamed over themap. TheX’s were almost all the way to the farthest tip of Dos Palos. Nearly the entire country had been overtaken.
