She goes back to her work, leaving me standing there without knowing what else to do.
Jeran steps closer to me and puts a gentle hand on my arm. “Why don’t I ask Red if he wants to eat anything at the mess hall before practice starts?” As a hint, he glances pointedly in Adena’s direction before looking back at me. My chance to patch things up.
I give Jeran a grateful nod, then unclip Red’s shackle from my wrist and look on as Jeran tries to make casual conversation with the prisoner.Red stares ominously at him, enough to make Jeran fidget, but at least his posture softens, knowing this boy is his only link to his surroundings.
As Jeran starts asking him about his favorite foods, I approach Adena. She still doesn’t look at me, but at least she doesn’t move away. I look on, watching her shape the soft metal into a small cylinder before turning off the flame and refining its edges.
“He reminded me of Corian,”I tell her after a beat. “It was the way he swept his hands across the arena floor.”
Adena is silent for a while, forcing all her concentration onto her work. The clink of metal against metal rings in the room. There’s a furrow between her thick brows that always appears when she’s going between two emotions—like when the Firstblade handed her the gold threaded cord that graduated her to Striker but didn’t give one to her friend, and when she chose Jeran as her Shield after her brother’s death.
“I didn’t mean it, you know,”I add, hesitating, and then,“I didn’t think about how it would affect you. I should have.”
Adena stops hammering at the steel cylinder long enough to glance up at me. “You’re as bad as Corian,” she mutters at me, shaking her head. “Your mother agrees.”
“You talk to my mother about me?”
“Of course I do, every time I stop by her place.”
I think of the housewares that Adena has begun making lately out of scrap metal and the collection of them growing in my mother’s kitchen. It’s not until now that I realize how frequent her visits must be.
“Like when you gave water to that recruit who got in a fight with a Striker in the arena,” Adena continues. “What was his name again? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was supposed to be punished and withheld food and drink, and there you were at midnight, sneaking him a flask.”
“What about you?”I remind her.“Remember when you spent all night wrapping bits of copper around every weapon you could find?”
After a few coincidences at the warfront, Adena had been convinced for a while that copper was a deterrent against Ghosts, that the metal repulsed them and kept them away. In her eagerness to protect us, she’d spent a sleepless, feverish night tinkering with every single one of our weapons, stringing copper wiring around their handles. It ended up not working, of course. But I’ve never forgotten that night—the hope in her eyes that she might have something to save us.
She shrugs grumpily and ignores my reference. “You’re lucky the Firstblade went easy on you.” As usual, though, the anger is already seeping from her gaze. “I thought he was going to cut you down right there in front of us all.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t make saving Federation soldiers a habit.”
Adena glances skeptically at me, then takes a pair of pincers and sinks the steel cylinder into a bucket of cold water. It hisses, steam obscuring the air between us. Adena takes out the cylinder and hands it to me.
“For your blades,” she says.
I take the cooled cylinder curiously.“Why?”
Adena reaches over and yanks out both of my swords. She twirls one expertly, then attaches the cylinder to the end of one hilt. It fits so neatly that I wonder if she’d stolen my blades in my sleep just to measure them properly. Then she takes the second sword’s hilt and fits it into the cylinder’s other side. It snaps neatly into place, transforming my swords into a double-ended weapon.
Adena hefts it twice and gives me a confident nod, her eyes shining. “Twist once to take it apart,” she says, doing it. The swords separate again.
“You were doing this for me?”I ask her as I take back my weapons.“I thought you were angry.”
“I can be both. I told you I’d make you one, didn’t I?”
She doesn’t mention her brother once. Maybe it’s for the best, not to acknowledge the memory of his death right now. But I understand all the same, and I bow my head once. “Thank you.”
Adena glares at where Jeran and Red have stepped right outside her workshop to talk. “Don’t thank me yet. I still don’t know about your new companion.”
Suddenly, we both hear the Firstblade’s voice outside, addressing Jeran.
Adena shoots me a startled look. “I didn’t think today was an inspection day in the Grid.” Then she steps away from me and darts outside. I follow her.
We come face-to-face with Aramin, standing with his hands tucked behind his back. Beside him is Jeran’s father, Senator Barrow Wen Terra, and older brother, Senator Gabrien An Terra.
I look quickly at Jeran. The easy attitude he’d had moments earlier has vanished, and his face is drained of blood. He looks down, away from these two Senators who are his family, pretending to be fascinated by the samples of glass that a metalworker across the path is laying out across a table. Everything about his posture has stiffened. His father, Senator Barrow, looks at him without much of an expression, but even then, I can feel the tension between them crackling in the air like a living thing. Jeran speaks so rarely about him that I sometimes forget his position.
But I never forget that this man exists. The bruises on Jeran’s arms always remind me.
