He frowns.They’ll find us eventually, he tells me, his gaze falling on Adena. I sign his words to her, but she just grimaces, not wanting to believe it.
“The Federation stretches in every direction,” Jeran signs. His lips have stretched as tight as a string. “They’ll find us.”
I can hear the warning in it, but Adena plunges on anyway, too exhausted to care. “Well, maybe the Federation will even treat us better than they do in Mara. What are we going to do—sit in prison cells until they come?”
Jeran glares at her. “Because we’ll soon be under Federation rule, anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter either way, does it?” she signs. “If we stay or if we flee.”
“Then why did we do any of this?” he hisses aloud, his voice low and angry. Fury rolls off him like mist, and it is so sudden and dark that both Adena and I pause. “Risk our lives? Give up our honor and our standingand go barreling into the heart of the Federation on a fool’s mission? What was the reason? Why do this?”
“Why, indeed!” Adena is furious now too, her eyes flashing, her voice a sharp whisper. “You think it doesn’t affect me? I tried. Itried, Jeran.” Then her voice catches, and she stops herself, too embarrassed to let out a sob in the middle of her argument. She looks away so that we don’t see the well of tears in her eyes. “It’s all the same,” she signs. “They’ll come for us in the end.”
I can feel the way this has broken us, deep in our bones. Maybe we are all too good for Mara. Would I be a fool for stepping back into their territory, to be the one arrested when the true criminal is our Speaker? Why do I still feel a pull to return?
“We have to go back,” Jeran signs.
“Why, Jeran?” Adena signs, leaning toward her Shield’s face in anger and anguish. “Whydo we need to go back?”
“The Firstblade would stay and fight,” he signs. “Even after what the Speaker has done.”
And then I finally understand Jeran’s reason. Back before we fled into the Federation, when we were gathered around my mother’s table, he had told us that he fought as a Striker in order to prove himself to his father. Then he told us he fought because of his brother, because he wanted to learn how to defend himself from Gabrien’s vicious attacks. These must all be true reasons—but they are not the final one. They’re not the reason why he went into the Federation with us, why he fought so hard to get out, and why, even after the knowledge of what the Speaker had done, he wants to return.
It’s because of the Firstblade. Because Jeran, young and kind and forever loyal, would rather return and give his life alongside Aramin than live knowing he had turned his back on the man he loves.
Isn’t that why I fight too? Because of Jeran. And Adena. And Corian. It’s because of that dinner at my mother’s table, with everyone’s faces reflecting warm in the evening light. It’s because of the children I see running through Mara’s Inner City, their bones sharp and jutting from all the years of war. Someone has to stand for them.
“I’m going back,” I sign. I look at Red and repeat it through our link.I’m going back.
Red taps his fist to his chest in the Striker salute.If you go back, so will I, he tells me.
I look at him, feeling that tug between us, knowing I would kill for him, and that he would for me. How strange it is that the Federation had given us this gift, the bond that cannot be broken.
“For Mara?” Adena signs.
“For the idea of Mara,” Jeran replies.
“Ideas are nothing but air,” Adena mutters.
“Then we’re truly lost,” I sign.
We don’t say anything after that. The sun shifts until its light spills warm over us through the forest canopy, then blankets the valley in pink and purple. After the last rays vanish over the horizon, we pack up our campsite in the twilight and move on, using the night to protect us.
It is evening on the fifth day of our flight from Cardinia when we finally cross the warfront from the Federation into Mara, our hands up, weapons sheathed away. The Maran soldiers who fetch us from their defense compounds come bearing rope, shouting between one another, and I know they already recognize us.
Strikers. The deadliest fighters in the land, the pride of Mara, the only thing standing between freedom and annihilation.
It doesn’t matter. We are still led back to our country as criminals.
NEWAGE
THE NATION OF MARA
30
Our return to Mara is a somber, silent one.
We are all wounded and exhausted, shadows of ourselves from when we’d first left the country.
