Every day since his death, I have missed Corian so much that hisabsence feels like a wound in my side. Red could never replace that, no matter how long we end up knowing each other. Still, the longer I stare down at Red from the privacy of my vantage point, and the longer I feel the glimmer of thoughts through our link, the more curious I become about him. I find myself watching him the same way I used to watch Corian, in fascination over this human from a world so different from the one I was used to. In awe.
He stops pacing for a moment and glances up in my direction. I duck down into the husk of the carriage, my heart suddenly pounding. It takes me another second to remember that he, too, can sense the emotions flowing from me to him. He’d probably felt my mixture of grief, pain, fascination, and curiosity. Probably noticed the way I was watching him in interest. And now he is aware of the wave of embarrassment hitting me too.
I grit my teeth, irritated again at being forced to open my heart to this stranger and simultaneously ashamed because I’d been snooping on his feelings too. Through the bond, I can tell that he’s puzzled and even a bit bemused at my reactions, and trying to figure out exactly why I’m feeling such a wild jumble of things.
Time to put an end to that. Everything in me wants to look back out from the carriage to see whether or not he’s still looking up at me, but I force myself to turn my mind to something else. To the task at hand.
Magnesium. Right.
I let myself fall into the motions I used to do daily—find machines that haven’t yet been gutted, cut through their containers with shears and scrape through them until I find bright silver bits of magnesium, strip the metal out, toss it into my pockets. As I go, Red falls to the back of my mind. It isn’t until I’ve made my way through at least a few skeletons of carriages that I realize he’s stopped thinking about me too. I’m strangely disappointed.
Soon my fingers are raw from the work. I stand up, stretch, and note the changing light. It must be late afternoon now, the hour right before sunset. In the near distance, I can hear Jeran calling out something to Adena and Adena’s answering laugh, while the circus continues in the front of the scrapyard. I look at my arms, satisfied with the small amount of magnesium I’ve collected, and let myself search the grounds for signs of Red.
When I see him, I pause.
He’s seated on the ground, his face turned slightly away, and his wings are out in full display, stretching dozens of feet to either side of himself. But he’s not in a state of fury this time. A gaggle of children have wandered away from the circus to cluster around him instead, squealing at the black steel blades of his wings and tugging on his hair to inspect the rough, metallic texture of the strands. He has folded his wings in such a way that the blades stack carefully, so when the children touch the feathers in curiosity, they don’t slice their hands. Standing in an arc some distance away from them are adults, all too timid to approach him and hanging back instead to whisper among themselves.
My first reaction is annoyance that he’s completely disregarded my advice about keeping a low profile while in the scrapyard. But then I watch him tilt his head sideways to let a small girl play with his hair. When he shakes his head, she jumps back with a wide grin, giggling, before hurrying back to him to do it again. Red keeps his movements slow and careful as the children run around his wings and attempt to climb on top of their arches. His face is still, gentle. Joy pulses from him through our link, but underneath it is layered a level of grief so deep, the weight of it presses against my chest. And within those emotions, I see glimpses of a memory. It’s of a little girl with the same dark hair he once had, the sister who had been on the other side of the glass. Then she fades away, as if Red were too afraid to let her loose.
Corian. When I look at this scene, all I see is my dead Shield. It is always the gentle ones I fear for the most, those willing to bare their hearts, who grieve for others and feel happy for others’ happiness. Corian had been that, and I had failed to protect him. I hadn’t thought of Red, alternately grouchy and teasing, as such a person—but here, watching him stay perfectly still as children climb all over him, as he stretches out a wing where a boy is dangling from the end and deposits him carefully back on the ground, I’m filled with the same sense I used to have with Corian. A wish that I could be like him. A fear that I will lose this person.
I shake my head firmly. Red is not Corian. He never will be. And no matter what I’m witnessing right now, I have to remember that Red is still the boy soldier who had helped conquer Basea for the Federation, had been conscripted into fighting for the Federation as a child. I have to recall the light of murder on his face as he ripped through the Federation’s battalions without a single hesitation.
Can you be kind and a killer? Can you be gentle and a weapon of war?
By the time I climb back down from the stacks, Jeran is already waiting for us with a handful of magnesium chips, while Adena is gingerly making her way down a wobbly structure of leaning steel. By now, almost everyone has left behind the circus to watch Red make his slow movements, his majestic wings sweeping in slow arcs across the dirt.
When Adena approaches us, she brightens at the sight of our stash. “Good enough, good enough,” she mutters, inspecting the quality of the metal. “I can work with this. Oh!”
She’d been so busy with her gathering that she hadn’t noticed Red at all. Now, as she watches the way he treats the children, her rapid words fade away and her smile thins into a serious line. I know she must bethinking of her brother and the anger she’d first held against Red. But this sight has turned her quiet.
All I can think about is how the Federation can transform people like this, with hearts and minds and thoughtful moments, into monsters. All I can remember is how little time we have to fight against their darkness snarling at our borders.
As night settles into place and we turn in the direction of my mother’s home, I cast a glance at Red. He’s quiet, but his mind roils, sending me fragments of thoughts—of the same little girl I’d seen in his previous memory, a woman watching him from a garden window, and a door, creaking open to allow in something terrible.
I didn’t know you were so good around children, I finally tell him through our link.
He gives me a small smile.My sister was much younger than me. I’m used to it.
Your sister, Laeni.I think of the little girl from his nightmares.Was that her?I ask him, knowing he can tell what memory I’m referring to.You think about her a lot.
Red doesn’t look at me and doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s a quiet voice in my head, full of sadness.Yes. And I do.
I swallow, unable to keep my next question from going between our link.What happened to her?
Red is silent for so long that, when he finally replies as we turn onto my mother’s street, his voice in my mind startles me. When he looks at me now, his eyes are filled with the most terrible weight in the world.
The same thing that happened to my father,he tells me.They turned her into a Ghost. And I had to kill her.
17
Adena takes several vials of Red’s blood later that night, enough that it makes him weak. Even without that, though, he seems quieter than usual, and through our link, I sense the presence of memories that cloud his mind with fog.
After we retire to bed, Red’s nightmares are no longer just shimmers in the darkness. No longer just a glimpse of humanity. No longer a portal into another world. This time, his nightmare materializes as a vision so clear that I feel like I’m living it.
In the dream, he is dressed in a thin white shirt and pants and standing before a woman in a white coat, his young head bowed. He must be the same age that he was during the night of the Basean siege. I recognize the woman too. She keeps appearing in Red’s dreams, her face long and gaunt, lips thin and eyes framed by glasses.
This time, I realize that they’re back in the glass room. “Do you know where you are, Redlen?” she asks him.
