I stop before him, forcing him to look me in the eyes.
You’re my Shield, and I am yours, I tell him.It means I always care about everything related to you. It means we will spend every waking hourtogether, that I will show you how I fight and how I move, and that you will show me the same. It means you teaching me more about this bond.I pause to point between us.It means we are eternal companions, until death.
I don’t like companions, he replies, an audible growl in his throat accompanying his words.
There he goes again with the things he dislikes. This time, though, I sense fear behind it, fear of growing close to someone he could lose. Fear of what the future might bring.
Tomorrow, I continue.We’ll train. We’ll start learning—really learning—about what links us. We’ll take it one step at a time. But I’ll always be there.I meet his gaze with my steady one.I’ll see you in the morning. I promise.
Red stares at me, annoyance on his face. Still, there is a sense of something new in the link that joins us—some kind of trust, the building of a bridge. Then he turns away and heads off to his own bedchamber, his shoulders suddenly hunched in exhaustion.
It is only then that something in my memory clicks into place with searing clarity. The brand on Red’s chest, the one I’d puzzled over from the first moment he appeared in the arena. It is the same symbol emblazoned on the sleeves of the soldiers that had invaded my town in Basea, the troops specifically assigned to massacre us. It is the same symbol as the one worn by the young soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot me.
And it is not just the symbol that is the same. It is his eyes. It is his face. Different now, as a grown man and as an experiment of the Federation, but still him. Now I suddenly understand why I’d felt so compelled to save him in the arena. The real reason.
Red is that twelve-year-old boy. The same one who had held the gun and failed to fire. The same young soldier from that night.
14
We’re quiet around each other for the rest of the evening.
The realization that Red had been one of the young soldiers assigned to invade Basea, that he had been the one standing over me the night my mother and I fled, fills me with a nausea that keeps me from eating dinner. All I can do is sit across from him at the cafeteria, my stomach churning and churning, the memory of the boy with the gun clearer now.
The symbol. His face.
Jeran and Adena puzzle over our silence, but they occupy themselves with their own talk, chalking up our tension to our usual discord.
Red ignores me too, likely because of the strange incident between us in our living room. For the first time since our minds linked, I can sense him resisting the open channel between us, the flow of his thoughts bundled tight and hostile, as if he wished I could not sense them. I do the same unconsciously, holding back until my insides feel coiled tight as a snake.
When we finally arrive back to our apartment, we each head for our bedrooms without a backward glance.
I turn restlessly in the darkness, struggling to sleep. Scenes from that night in Basea so long ago play endlessly in my mind, moments thathad once been muddy now cleared. The twelve-year-old Red that I’d seen then, young and frightened, had clearly not been experimented on yet—no metal bands on his back; no wings; no strange, artificial skin. How did that version of him then become the boy I saw in his memory, lying trembling in the glass chamber?
Would Red have fired his gun at me that night if he’d been given more time? Why didn’t he shoot? What happened to him after he refused to kill me? Did they punish him? He clearly doesn’t remember me as a child—I’ve felt no sense of familiarity from him through our link. Does that mean, then, that he’s seen so many victims of the Federation that we are all just a blur of faces to him? Before he’d been confronted with the idea of killing a child that night, had he killed any innocent people?Mypeople?
Who had I saved? What have I done?
I spin and spin on these questions until I feel ill from them. What little I’d eaten for dinner now threatens to come up, but I force myself to slow my breathing, to concentrate on one thought at a time—the weak moonlight in my room, the curves of my blanket—until my stomach steadies. But my troubled thoughts continue as I finally drift off into sleep, my mind twisting them into a nightmare.
I am eight and my mother is facing the boy soldier again, her hand still gripping my arm tightly. The boy stares back at us with his gun pointed straight at my chest. I can see him willing himself to fire it, then failing, again and again. Now, in my dream, I can recognize that everything about him is Red, even though different from age and experimentation. His hair is light brown, without the strange metallic sheen it now has. His eyes are dark and wide, his face narrower and body leaner. His expression is less haunted, more frightened. The brand marring his chest isn’t there yet; the same double-crescent insignia is emblazoned only on his sleeve.
He doesn’t fire the gun. Then I’m fleeing with my mother and notlooking back, not caring what happens to the boy or whether he will chase us. We run and run past burning homes on familiar streets, the roar of explosions and screaming. My mind obscures the worst of the horrors, but I know they’re happening all around me—Federations soldiers doing unspeakable things to people I know.
Where is my father? Something terrible had happened to him, but even in my dream, I still can’t remember what it is.
Poisonous gas clouds the only path we can take. Yellow mist fills my lungs. I cough violently, heaving, the burning indescribable as my throat feels like it’s been coated in fuel and lit on fire. My mother yanks me forward, tears streaming from her eyes as she holds her hand to her mouth.
We enter a field of darkness. Blood trickles, then flakes, at the edges of my mouth. I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and keep running. My vision blurs with hot tears.
We lose all sense of time. My nightmare runs on repeat for what feels like hours, days, weeks, as it had when we made our real escape. In this seemingly eternal night, the figure of us fleeing with thousands of other people is almost invisible, the grasslands we trample through nothing more than a black ocean. The only light comes from the full moon hanging in the sky, low and white and enormous, the stars behind it washed out in the brightness. We run and run as a horde of humanity, barely stopping, barely resting, trying to reach the edge of the warfront where we could cross over into safety. Into Mara, the last free nation.
When I look up at my mother, her eyes are wild and bloodshot, focused only on the bridges ahead of us. Maran snipers and archers wait on the other side of the ravine, alongside massive catapults, but they won’t linger for us forever. Crates of explosives line the lengths of the bridges, and the archers’ arrows are tipped with fire, ready to shoot.
Behind us, gaining quickly, are Federation soldiers and their Ghosts, their hulking shapes undulating on the horizon.
We reach the bridges. The sound of our boots against dirt suddenly changes to a hollow clang against metal. The bridges are impossibly thin. They shouldn’t be capable of holding so much weight. I squeeze my eyes shut so that I can’t look down into the dizzying darkness, with only a thin silver thread of a river thousands of feet below visible.
When I open my eyes again, I see lines of soldiers, the crest of Mara emblazoned on their sleeves, their guns hoisted and ready. Scattered among them are Mara’s famed Strikers, their sapphire uniforms prominent against the firelight, their masks on, their guns and swords out, ready to face the Ghosts. I feel a sudden surge of hope. My mother’s pace quickens, sensing the same.
