“I don’t know how that train works,” I tell them, nodding in the direction of the station, “but smoke is starting to pour from its front.”
Jeran nods at me. “Do you still feel his pull?” he signs.
Even unconscious, Red’s mind sends a faint, steady pulse that touches my thoughts, just as when he’s asleep or dreaming.
“Yes,” I sign.
Jeran looks off toward the train station. “Let’s go, then.”
The night has set in fully now, so that the only light floods from the station lanterns and the train itself. Steam pouring from its chimney drowns it in a fog that hides the silhouettes bustling around its base. Good. It’ll help us hide too.
We steal closer to the station under the cover of darkness until we’ve reached the long line of carriages sitting on the tracks, and then slide underneath them to wait for soldiers to hurry past. They must be in the process of laying down more tracks, I realize, given the steel and wood piled high on the side of the station. And then it occurs to me that they’re doing this because they’re preparing for the day when Mara falls, so they can continue expanding their world into ours without interruption. The realization leaves me cold.
Finally, we see an opening as soldiers step away from the train. A whistle blisters the air with its shrill shriek, and for an instant, my heart jumps in the way it does when a Ghost is near. Then Adena is tapping my shoulder quietly and gesturing at the carriage nearest us, now loaded with wooden crates.
“They’re about to move,” she signs, before we steal out into the shadow cast by the train on the side facing away from the station. Through the sea of steam obscuring the ground, we make our way along the side of the train until we find the nearest carriage with its door slid open. Jeran pulls himself up into it without missing a beat, then reaches down to grab Adena’s arm. He hoists her up. When he reaches to help me up, the train jerks forward. The movement makes me stumble as I land inside with them. We readjust our footing as the train begins to pick up speed, then push ourselves back into the darker recesses of the carriage, where the scent of wood and pine and metal fill the space.
I’ve been in wagons and on horseback. But seeing this enormouscontraption of steel move from a crawl to a steady roll to a roar is like something out of a bad dream. The stench of black smoke makes my eyes water. The train station behind us vanishes rapidly as we speed into our enemy’s land. Jeran curls up beside Adena in an attempt to keep warm, while Adena reaches into her canvas bag to hone some of her blades.
I settle near the edge of the carriage, partly shielded from the cold night by crates in front of the door, and let myself lean against the wall, feeling the sway and jostle of this strange machine. I have no idea how many times or where it will stop, if at all—and at this pace, I have no idea how quickly we’ll arrive in the capital. The night swallows everything outside the door, swathing it all in black. Now and then, I see a flicker of light in the darkness from some cluster of lonely country settlements. What kind of technology will we find once we arrive deeper into the Federation?
I hold my trembling hands out in front of me, turning them this way and that, missing the warmth of my Striker coat and gloves. Suddenly, home feels achingly far away. Is it even home now? If we return, will we be imprisoned or executed?
The only thing that steadies me is the constant, quiet pull of Red on the other end of my link, a sure sign that he’s in another carriage on this train.
My jaw clenches tight. I’m not here to save him, but to find a way to take down the Federation before the Federation can take Mara down. Still, the entire mission now suddenly takes on a personal tint. I couldn’t promise Red that we would help him escape back to Mara. I couldn’t promise that we would live through this. But now, as we make our way inland, I tell myself that promise. I’m going to get him out of here.
And it’s only here, in the shadows of a strange land, that I realize I’m finally thinking of Red as my Shield.
23
I’m not sure what I expected the Federation to look like.
The farther we travel away from Mara’s borders and into foreign territory, the warmer the climate gets. The next afternoon, as the chill of Mara’s winter winds fades away into lighter breezes and clearer skies, we stop shivering beside one another, and the landscape switches to rolling hills dotted with bushes and tiny towns. Here too are ruins from the Early Ones peeking out everywhere—rusted hulls of hulking structures and flying craft, some draped in greenery, others still standing stark against the sky. There are old, hollowed-out buildings of crumbling stone that have never been rebuilt. Small towns circle other ruins, stripping those structures down to their barest bones so they are nothing more than piles of rock in the center of a dozen buildings.
Then, by late morning, we cross over a hilltop and find ourselves pausing at a station inside a small city.
It’s only here that I realize something that turns my stomach. We’re traveling through Basea.
I barely recognize it. The town where I’d grown up was a landscape of green, rows of plants lining the edges of neat grids of houses. But this place where we’ve stopped looks nothing like what I remember.
The land around it has been stripped of the forests from my childhood. It now lies bare and yellow, and beyond it is a thick, half-built jumble of civilization—the wooden lattice of buildings under construction leaning against old steel bones of ancient cities, dirty roads churned into mud, logs sliding down their paths to the workers below, stacks of apartments leaning on either side of the rows. Beyond the unfinished borders of the city rise towers crowded one next to the other, their windows hung with lines of drying clothes. Lines of steel slice through the ground, along which run smaller trains filled with people. Signs written in Karenese hang over window fronts.
Baseans bustle in the streets. They hunch their shoulders nervously as they pass Federation soldiers standing idly on the intersection corners. Maybe there’s some sort of curfew in place.
A weight sinks in my stomach. It’s a childish fantasy, but somehow I’d always imagined a day when Basea would win back its independence and my mother and I would travel back to our old home, then see it still standing there the way it does in my memory. That, in my wildest dreams, we might even stumble across my father, as if he’d just gotten lost wandering through Basea and was waiting for us to return. Of course we couldn’t—I’d seen this land burn with my own eyes. But how could so much strangeness pop up here in the years since I’ve been gone? What would my mother think if she saw this?
I’m glad she can’t. I’m almost even glad my father isn’t around to witness what has happened to his nation.
This is a different land. This is Karensa.
Adena’s hand on my arm makes me startle. I look up to see her face pointed grimly out at the scene. “Best we get back inside,” she signs at me. “I think they’re checking the carriages.”
I rip my eyes away from the scene and scoot into the shadows withAdena as soldiers hurry by, carelessly glancing inside to make sure their cargo is there before patting the side of the train and moving on.
A short time later, the train’s whistle cuts through the air and I feel the carriage lurch forward again. We leave Basea behind. Soon, we’re traveling through wide stretches of alternating farmland and wilderness. Jeran and Adena don’t speak at all. Our Striker training has embedded in us the need to stay quiet in hostile surroundings, so here we use the occasional sign, nothing more. I find myself oddly comforted by our shared silence. When my stomach squeezes in hunger, I take out hunks of cooked yam and flatbread from my canvas bag and share it with the others as they pass me cold strips of chicken.
Through my link, I can tell that Red is still unconscious. They’ll probably keep him this way until we arrive at the capital, and I’m glad he doesn’t have to be awake for this journey, but I find myself missing his voice all the same.
