“No.”I make my hand into a fist and twist my wrist.
“Friend.” I hold my middle and index fingers up and make a cutting V motion straight toward him.
He does the same.
Well, it’s a start. Now I point in the direction we’re walking, then again at his chains. I make a breaking motion at the chain itself bysliding my palms against each other, then tap my chest twice with my right hand.“We’re going to fix it,”I sign.
I haven’t yet moved away from him when his mouse suddenly jumps out of his pocket and onto my arm. It scurries up to my shoulder before perching there.
Years on the warfront, ready for any Ghost’s attack—and yet I still suck my breath in sharply and jump back, shaking my arm wildly. The mouse lets out an undignified squeak as it goes flying and lands on the ground. It scampers up Red’s body and shoves itself firmly back in the pocket, its tailless bottom poking out from the top.
Red laughs—a rich, guttural sound—and I hate that I immediately want to hear it again. He only smiles enough to lift the edges of his lips a bit, but it brightens his entire face.“Talin,”he signs at me. “Red,”he signs the letters and points at himself. “Friend,” he signs down at the mouse before petting its head.
He has a sense of humor. Wonderful. My skin is still crawling from the feeling of tiny feet running up my arm, and I shudder, glaring daggers at the creature’s little head that now pokes out to stare at me.
“Next time,”I sign at Red angrily, then drag a finger across my throat.
Red just shrugs and pats the mouse’s head again. “No,” he signs back, amusement lingering on his lips. Then he says something to me in Karenese, knowing full well that I can’t understand him, and walks on, forcing me to follow him instead of the other way around.
My annoyance flips into outright anger. I wonder how much trouble I’d rile up if I simply killed him now, just stuck a dagger in his back and let myself be done with him, or even just stabbed his foot so that he has to hobble the rest of the way. I fantasize about it until we’ve passed by the arena’s entrance, where I finally abandon the thought in the presence of so many others.
Without a cloud in the sky, the stadium looks blindingly bright, and I have to shield my eyes from the light. I don’t go into the arena. No need to put my punishment on full display to my fellow Strikers if I can delay it a little longer. Instead, I head toward the rows of workshops located next to the arena, where Adena’s shop sits.
I don’t know what this area used to be. A park, maybe. The workshops were built from the ground up without any foundation from the Early Ones, and they came up haphazardly, so that each workshop crowds tightly beside the next, all of them forming a snake of buildings folded over and over into a rectangular area we all call the Grid. Every shop is a different size. One shop showcases three enormous, unfinished catapults built from wood and steel looming several stories high. On top of them sit metalworkers fitting giant hinges onto the shoulders. Other shops specialize in our armor, a lattice of chains so finely made that they look like a silver shirt underneath our vests. These stores are narrow and brightly lit with dozens of torches, the metallic shirts stretched out flat against weaving looms. Still others are workshops crafting the blades we use or melting down steel from broken weapons to recycle into bullets. Some are even used as research areas, where various combinations of herbs, woods, and metals are tested and retested against vials of Ghost blood to see if any of them can be used as a deterrent against the creatures.
During the day, as it is now, the area is usually filled with bustling workers in goggles and heavy gloves and vests to protect them at their stations. But as the war has worn on and our supplies have dwindled, some workers shutter their stations and use the space to drink instead. It has caught on—and now, at night, the Grid turns into a place where Strikers and metalworkers alike, dejected from a losing war and dead friends, come to horse around, drinking and playing with the stoves, daring one another to mad antics out in the test yard.
Adena’s workshop sits on the last row, looking out across the acres of yellowing land they use to test everything designed in the workshops. I don’t expect to see her when I reach the shop—I’d been hoping that she would have a tool on her wall that I can use to shorten Red’s chains.
But when I arrive, she’s here, goggles and mask on, hair strapped back, her dark skin illuminated by the sparks coming off a small steel cylinder she’s welding. In her hand is a metal rod connected to a furnace, and at the end of the rod is a concentrated spout of fire so hot it looks blue.
As always, my eyes wander around the rest of the shop. One entire wall is dedicated to tools of every shape and size, knives and hammers and tongs, needles so thin I can barely see them, curling lengths of metal that I wouldn’t begin to know how to use. Against another wall are four stoves, all lined up in a row. Every spare inch of the other walls is covered in carefully sketched schematics and scribbled notes, as well as shelves of glass jars containing her collection of anything she’s found interesting—which is everything. Unusual feathers. Bird bones. Colorful stones. A perfect spiral of shell. Chips of wood. Dried grasses and flowers. This would almost be a problem, Adena’s obsessive collecting, if she didn’t organize it all so neatly. Instead, everything just looks like an extension of her eternally curious mind.
Standing not far from Adena now is Jeran, his arms folded, as he watches her. At the sound of our approach, he looks up at us. His eyes jump to Red. “Oh!” he says, then glances nervously at Adena. “I thought you’d both be in the arena.”
“Same with you two,” I sign back.
Adena pulls her mask back and goggles up, stares at me, and then looks down again as if she’d never noticed us.
We all stand there for an awkward moment, Jeran glancing uncertainly between Red and me, Red looking around the workshop with awary expression, me staring at Adena and trying to figure out what to tell her. Adena, pointedly ignoring us.
Finally, I reach out and tap her gently on her shoulder.
Adena’s face jerks up, her white-hot-flame rod still in her hand. We all startle back from its heat. Even Red blinks.
“What do you want?” she says to me in a clipped voice.
I give her an apologetic look and nod at Red’s chains. “Something to shorten this,” I reply. “I can’t function if he’s stumbling on this all day. I was wondering if you could help.”
Adena glares at me, gesturing haphazardly with the burner. “You didn’t know I’d be here. You came over hoping I’d be gone, so that you could take one of my tools and do it yourself.”
I give her a guilty look. “Maybe?”
Adena points the flame at Red, who blinks at her. “Sneaking around my shop. For him.Mytools.”
“Talin just wanted to make his life easier,” Jeran tells her, an attempt to defend me.
“Would’ve been easiest if she’d just let this one die,” Adena says to Red without flinching. When he narrows his eyes at her, she sticks her chin up at him, daring him to react. “You would’ve done him a favor, Talin. At least he wouldn’t have to be paraded around like this, trying to understand what everyone’s saying about him.”
