The Chief Architect watches the crowd without reacting, her expression as blank as a hollowed soul.
“Do you ever feel power over Red like this?” Adena whispers beside me, her eyes riveted on the Chief Architect. “Or him over you?” Every fiber of her being seems fascinated by the control this woman has over her monsters.
I shake my head.
Adena chews her bottom lip as she thinks. I know she’s picturing the samples of blood that she’d experimented with, how Red is the key to severing this powerful bond. “Tonight,” she finally murmurs. “We’ll get into those labs. We’ll change all this.”
Everything in me wants to bolt out of this crowd and aim for the woman standing before those cages. The one responsible for creating these monsters that have destroyed so many lives. I could kill her, even with only my knives. I could do it so quickly that no one would know until she lay dead at my feet.
Of course, I don’t. Adena is right. We have come here for a plan bigger than that. So I take a deep breath instead and wait with the crowd, enduring their cheers.
It’s only then that I pick out some of the downcast expressions andanguished eyes in the crowd. Here and there, I spot a man looking anxiously from one cage to the next in search of something, or a woman hugging a child to her with a pained expression. Near me stands a little girl leaning so far out to see the cages that she looks like she’ll fall any second. She continues to strain at the edge of the crowd until someone pulls her back.
The families of those who had been mutilated into Ghosts. Those permanently separated from one another and then condemned to this half death. They’re here too, silent and helpless, looking on at all the people around them who don’t seem to care. Searching quietly for something familiar in the faces of these creatures. Trying to find the lost pieces of their families and terrified that they will get their wish. Those who have felt firsthand the true cruelty of the Federation, their tool for keeping their military mighty and their people under control.
Red’s sister and father.
As I think this, I feel a shock of pain come through our link. Perhaps he can sense that they’re on my mind. And suddenly my anger at this crowd dampens, replaced by true sorrow. How many of them applaud and cheer because they have no choice, because not doing so invites the risk that the Federation will come to their doors one night and rip their families apart? How many of them, then, have faked this glee so often that they now believe it?
Even though I know he can’t hear my words from this distance, I send him my thoughts anyway.
We’re not leaving this place without you, I tell him.And all of this—these sick games, this awful display, the torment of these souls—will come to an end. We will avenge your family, and mine. I promise.
I don’t know how much of that promise Red can feel. But the thread of emotions between us turns dark, determined. My eyes lock on thePremier still standing casually up on the balconies, his cool eyes turned down at this hall. We may all die by the end of this mission, but so long as I’m alive, I’m going to bring this Federation down. I’ll tear down every brick of this place if I have to, until there is no breath left in my body.
26
All throughout the day, I feel Red’s pain shoot through me. It’s a knife in and out of my mind, coming and going, until finally it fades away with the sunset. I don’t know what is happening, but either they’ve stopped what they’re doing to him, or he’s collapsed into unconsciousness.
His agony leaves a sheen of sweat over my brow as dusk falls and the fairgrounds begin to quiet. Fog settles into the corners of every street, haloing the city’s lights and blurring the crowds like a dream. We linger with the people, watching and waiting, until finally the guards unhook each of the Ghosts’ cages from their platforms in the glass exhibition hall and start to pull them out of the space. As they do, the remaining crowds jostle to watch the procession.
We join them. Adena nods in the direction of where the hedges wrap around a gate, the same luxurious courtyard we’d seen earlier in the morning.
“I think they’re going to parade them down the paths toward there,” she whispers.
Jeran glances at me. “Red?” he asks.
I nod, my eyes fixed on the hedges too. I jut my chin in its direction.
“Do you know what he’s doing? Can you see anything?”
“No,” I reply. “We’re too far away. I’ll try when we’re closer.”
The crowd begins to disperse as the procession rumbles toward the complex gates. In the misty twilight, the Ghosts stir, gnashing their teeth, their eyes turned on the hedges with what I think is almost fear. Several of them, the ones still somewhat humanlike, avert their gazes altogether so that they don’t have to see. The lone human among them is curled into a tight ball on the floor of his cage, his shoulders shivering with sobs.
I close my eyes for a beat, concentrating. Red’s pulse feels shallow, a nervous and flittering rhythm. Gradually, as we edge closer to the far side of the government halls, our link begins to take a more distinct shape. I sense more of the pattern of his emotions, followed by the faint haze of thoughts, so vague that they feel like dreams forgotten by the first light of dawn, hovering just out of my mind’s reach. Then, as we pass another bridge toward the hedged gate and the crowds turn sparser again, Red’s mind sharpens—I’m finally able to focus on some blurry memory.
I see glass walls and the glint of light against them. Somewhere nearby, whimpers echo.
We’re close enough to the complex now that the gate emerges from behind tendrils of fog. The procession continues on, and as it goes, several of the guards at the gate move to open them. As I look on, one of them heads to what looks like a rectangular lock on the side of the entrance. He turns dials on the lock that I can’t see from here, and then twists the entire lock in a full circle until it completely inserts into the wall. The gate groans open.
Adena watches all of this from the corner of her eye. “It’s a code they’re using,” she murmurs as we continue to walk, “although we’re not anywhere near enough to see it.”
The first of the Ghost cages reaches the opened gate. More guards come around the perimeter to look on as the cage is ushered inside.They keep guns out and drawn, visible for the spectators to see, so that the remaining crowd gathers in an arc around the outside of the gate while each of the cages heads in. We stop here too, clustering with the others as each cage rumbles by.
The open gate is so close. Inside, I glimpse only a few trees and the wide expanse of a grassy courtyard leading up to a series of windowless buildings.
There’s a sudden commotion on the other side of the gate. One of the people in the crowd has broken free from the others with an anguished cry. He steps forward as the cage holding the untransformed young man rolls in, and for a few seconds, his foot crosses the threshold inside the gate.
