We reach the other side. I nearly fall as the soldiers shout for us to move past their ranks. There, I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and dare to look back across the chasm.
All around us, the other refugees are crying, some kneeling on the ground, retching up what little is in their stomachs after the exertion of the sprint. Most are still on the bridges, streaming to safety like a teeming mass of ants.
My mother collapses to the ground. She’s weeping in pain now, her eyes shut tight, her hands pressed to her leg wound as if she can stop the agony from engulfing her. I kneel beside her, not knowing how to help her. Blood smears on her skin. There’s so much of it.
Behind us, the archers fire at the bridges still crowded with people. Their arrows hurtle down. Some strike the refugees—others embed in the crates resting along the bridges’ joints.
The crates explode as if they had been struck by lightning. Like the earth has split in two. And the bridges, the only trade routes Mara hasleft, buckle, tearing apart in a deafening groan of metal. A great wail of panic comes from those still crossing. I can see them climbing over one another, crushing their neighbors in their desperation to flee. On the other side of the chasm fly the Federation’s red-and-black banners, their Ghosts letting out their piercing shrieks into the night.
“Don’t look,”my mother tells me. Her voice is a trembling murmur, and her brown skin is ashen pale. She shakes her head in despair, pulls me close to her, and lets me cry.“It’s okay, baby,”she whispers into my hair.“Keep your eyes on me. It’s okay.”
It’s okay, baby.
I stir in the night with the sound of my mother’s voice still echoing in my dreams. The hallways of our new apartment are disorienting in the darkness, and for a moment, I can’t be sure where I am. Gradually, my thoughts settle. I’m sitting upright in my bed, my body washed in silver from the rectangle of moonlight that spills into the room from the windows.
I stay where I am for a moment, letting the nightmare slowly fade from my consciousness and become replaced by the unease of my reality. On the other side of the apartment, I can still feel Red’s low undercurrent of emotions rippling across my mind, trapped in a nightmare of his own that I can’t see. The sensations of his dreams are more erratic than his waking thoughts—subtler, fewer whole scenes and words, but deeper feelings and shadows, with the occasional spikes of terror. And always the hint at the corner of my mind—just barely out of reach—of reflections in glass and the flash of scarlet uniforms in the darkness.
Maybe his nightmares had triggered my own, his fears leaking through our bond like water from a dam, soaking the walls of our minds.
Maybe his nightmare is even the same as mine, except from his point of view. From the boy soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot.
If that’s true, then perhaps the bond goes both ways. If I calm myself, will he calm? And subsequently—if I can calm his nightmares, will he stop triggering mine? I close my eyes and think of Corian, how we used to sit in silence across from each other in the middle of his family’s garden and just let ourselves listen to the world around us. It is another daily Striker exercise, this meditation. I do it now as I turn in bed to lie on my back, imagining the ripples disturbing the surface of my mind, then letting them slow, still the surface back to glass. I let myself remember the sound of an evening forest, the call of the birds in the boughs. Then, gently, I send this meditation of thought through our link, slowly, slowly willing the ripples in Red’s mind to still, the nightmares churning in his thoughts to fade back into nothing.
It’s hard to tell if any of it is working, and for a moment I feel foolish for even attempting to understand this link between us.
Then I feel the subtle rhythm of his breathing even out. The shadows flickering across the back of his mind slowly fade, until all I can sense through our link is a low, steady pulse of a person in deep sleep.
Red had told me that the Federation originally created this link so that their Premier could control his mind, keep him from attacking their own troops. They may not have had the chance to finish linking him to the Federation, but the fact that I can use my own mind to calm his is both fascinating and unsettling. Maybe he would be able to do it to me too. Maybe there are other small, subtle things we are capable of controlling about each other. The thought makes me shiver. How had he gone from that scared boy pointing the gun to the experiment pinned down on a table in a glass room? How had the Federation turned him from a child into a war machine?
What a cruel sense of humor this world has, to join me with a soldier partly responsible for the destruction of my old world. A soldier who nevertheless spared my life.
Eventually, I fall back to sleep. But the nightmares continue again, casting me this time as a puppet controlled by the faceless form of a soldier bearing an insignia on his sleeve. He tells me to point the gun at myself, sobbing, on the ground. He tells me to shoot. And in the nightmare, I do exactly as I’m told.
15
The winter sun shines bright and searing against rain-dampened paths. As the other Strikers head to the mess hall, Red and I cross the National Plaza with Adena and Jeran at our sides, on our way to the prison.
As we enter and head down, the dampness seeps through our clothes. It chills us, although Red doesn’t shiver at all. Through our bond, I can sense his sheer exhaustion from the day before. He’d spent a good part of the afternoon hurling his guts in an alley of the National Plaza, then skipped dinner to head to bed early. Whatever his nightmares had been last night, they’d kept me awake and restless.
“We keep a Ghost down here,” Adena whispers to Red as we approach the lowest level of cells. “It’s been alive here for over a year. We’ve subjected it to enough starvation and experiments that it stays mostly quiet now.”
Red stares at Adena after Jeran translates, but he doesn’t flinch at the lack of mercy in her words. When Red casts me a questioning glance, I just shake my head. I should tell him about how Adena had lost her brother, but I don’t want to mention how Adena had also stood in the stands during Red’s execution and shouted for his blood to be spilled.
My own sympathies for Ghosts are limited, anyway.
The cell, unlike others down here, has two layers of doors, with torches lit in the tiny corridor between them. They’re the only light source that filters through the inner door’s bars. After the guards step aside for us, we go through the first into a dark corridor that ends in a second chained door. Here, Adena takes out a different key and unlocks it. My hands are already resting on the hilts of my swords, the blades partially pulled out of their sheaths.
The ceiling is low, barely tall enough for Red, the largest of us, to stand fully upright. There are no windows. The Ghost doesn’t make a sound, but I know it’s here the instant we step inside. I can hear the faint, incessant grinding of its teeth in the dark, the chilling tang of its rotting flesh that presses against my senses like a dagger.
My gaze rests automatically on the ashen figure crouched in one corner of the cell, the bones of its spine an uneven silhouette in the torchlight as it keeps its back turned to us. It rasps weakly with each breath. Patches of its white, cracked skin have peeled off, revealing the decay underneath. Shackles around its wrists keep it chained firmly to the wall. Based on how tight the cuffs are, I can tell the Ghost has grown larger since the last time it was fitted.
I’m surprised every time I’m in here that a Ghost can possibly be subdued. But even a monster has its limits, I suppose, and its figure stays slouched even as it can hear our entrance, knowing soldiers have come to deliver another round of torture.
Adena steps forward first. A small metal kit is in her hands, and when she opens it, I see the glint of a long syringe.
“I’m going to take its blood,”she signs to us. It’s so dark in here that I squint to make out the movements of her fingers.“When it turns around and sees you, do not attack it. Let it come.”She glances at Red. “To him.”
Jeran looks back at the Ghost.“Those chains don’t look stable enough,”he signs.
