What can he do?
I go back to his eyes. He still has his scowl on, and his expression is defiant, his lips on the edge of baring his teeth.
But I’m silent. I think of what it must be like to have something artificial embedded into your body like this, what he must have experienced, what the Federation’s plans for him had been. What unspoken things lie in his past. Here, in this cell, he looks less like a threat and more like just a prisoner in a strange place, among strange people.
My thoughts make me shake my head, irritated with myself. “I don’t know what might have happened to you,”I sign to him,“and I don’t expect you to tell it to me. We all have pain from our past. But at the warfront, none of that matters. I’ve been handed the responsibility of your care, and that means you will accompany me as I go about my duties. And if you help us, we might even be able to help you.”
He turns distant again and glances away. “I don’t need your help,” Jeran says, his soft voice a mismatch to the acid in Red’s.
“Maybe you’ll be surprised,”I retort.
“I don’t like surprises.”
“Apparently you don’t like anything.”My gestures are so annoyed that Jeran backs slightly away, his eyes going to the prisoner and his hand to his belt before he remembers he doesn’t have his weapons with him.
Red meets my eyes again. We hold each other’s stare, and for a moment, I think I see something vulnerable in him. It is the part of him that has not yet been touched by the Federation.
Then the moment ends. He looks away from me and tilts his head up to the light beaming down from the ceiling grate. The mouse stirs in his pocket, its whiskers peeking out. A sigh rumbles in the prisoner’s chest as he pats the creature absently. I wait a moment, wondering if he’s gathering his thoughts, but when he doesn’t speak again, I finallystand up and turn my back on him. Jeran walks with me. I can feel the questions stirring in him, and his hesitant eyes on me, but I don’t answer and I don’t look back. I can’t. If I see the prisoner’s face again, I might want to throw a fist at his stubborn jaw. The reasons why I saved him are beginning to wane in my mind.
“Any luck, little rat?” one of the guards says, sneering at me as he opens the cell door to let us through.
The look I shoot him is so dark that it sends him scurrying back to his position.
7
The guards tell me the next morning, as the Firstblade sends me to retrieve my new Shield, that Red ate the rest of the bread out of the bag I’d brought him. In truly irritating fashion, he’d left the fish untouched.
They’ve also cleaned him up. How they got him to cooperate, I don’t know, but when they deliver him to me at the front gate of the prison, his hair is washed, trimmed, and tied up into a typical Maran knot, and his body has been scrubbed so hard that his skin looks pink. Even his pet mouse looks puffed up in a ball as if it’d been caught under a deluge of water and soap, its fuzz sticking out from the sides of the shirt pocket. My eyes water at the peppery smell of prison soap wafting off him. He gazes warily around the National Plaza, as if barely able to believe that he’s out of his prison cell.
I have nothing to communicate to him that he can understand, so I don’t try. I just tug on his chains, making sure they’re still locked tight around his wrists and waist, then secure a length of it around my arm. Now that I’m able to walk beside him, I get a sense for how tall he really is—more than a full head above me, and even after weeks of starvation, still solid in his shoulders and chest and arms. They’ve shaved his beard too, and underneath the grizzled scruff, his face is lean and smooth,younger than I originally thought. His breath is pleasant now, the sign of having eaten and gotten his teeth scrubbed. He doesn’t smile. My hands hover persistently near the daggers against my thighs, ready to move if he turns on me. Maybe he no longer wants to die, at least not right away, but that doesn’t mean he might not want to take someone else’s life.
The Firstblade wasn’t willing to offer him clothing beyond his prison suit. Who knows if Red might try to make an escape, maybe attempt to deliver news of what he’s seen in Mara to the Federation? So he wears a clean set of the white tunic and pants instead, which he’s already spoiled with mud at the hems. In case he breaks free, he’ll at least have to shed his prison clothing to avoid being a moving mark.
I’ma moving mark. The thought makes my shoulders tight as I head from the Plaza toward the Striker arena, where the others had long ago begun their exercises. As I walk, others turn their heads in our direction, first at me, the Basean Striker, and then at the white-clad prisoner beside me. People move aside as if we’re poisonous to touch.
Red’s chains drag too long before him. His legs tangle around them, forcing him to lurch to a halt. He takes me with him—I’m pulled off balance and stumble backward, shoving into his chest like an unsteady drunk.
Snickers around us. A gaggle of children cover their mouths and whisper something to one another, their eyes on Red, before dashing off again into the morning crowd.
I shove away from Red, annoyed, keenly aware of the unnatural warmth of his body. It’s not his fault the chain’s too long—but he had been the one who refused to answer in the arena, who hadn’t wanted to defend himself, who had forced me to step in—
He scowls at me as I tangle in his chains again. His hand closes around my arm to keep me from falling.
I yank out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me,” I sign, my teeth bared.
He understands my expression well enough to take a step back, lifting his hands in a seemingly universal gesture of surrender. Then he gestures widely again, exaggerating with his arms as he attempts to explain that he’d been trying to help me. It only irritates me more.
The laughter around us goes on. I turn away from him and stalk toward the arena again, yanking him with me, knowing how ridiculous we must look, hating that the Firstblade chose to punish me this way.
“I’m sorry,”I sign as I go, refusing to look him in the eye, not caring whether he understands. Then I gesture at the chains dragging in front of him.“Let’s do something about those.”
He casts me a hostile side glance and tightens his lips. Fine. I guess we won’t be defending each other’s lives anytime soon.
I swallow my impatience. Maybe it would be helpful to teach him a few words, after all. So I hold my hands up at him and sign the letters of my name slowly.“Talin.”I point at myself and use the established sign I use with others for my name. “Talin.” Then I spell out the letters of his name.“Red.”
His eyes follow my gestures, and then he lifts his own hands, attempting the signs. I stare as he moves, mildly surprised by the grace of his fingers. He has a good memory and manages to be accurate enough for me to understand both our names. I try more words.
“Yes.”I hold my middle and index fingers together, then wave them toward myself. He imitates me.
