A loud knock made me jump. My mother clamped a hand over my mouth and forced us to crouch lower into the hole, but through the slit in the floor, I could see my father move to stand calmly in front of the door. Earlier in the afternoon, he had rushed in with family heirlooms in his arms—a copper ring, a set of bracelets from my grandmother, a series of rare coins from my grandparents’ time—and flushed them all down the toilet. The Federation wants things, he’d said to us, his voice dark with fear. Things, and people.
People. I’d heard this about the Federation, the way they fixated on the most efficient uses for their people—as soldiers, as weapons, asexperiments, as labor—as well as the rewards lavished if you did well and the punishments given if you failed.
Maybe we could just do well for them, and they would let us keep on living.
The soldiers shouted something I couldn’t understand. My father cast one glance in our direction before they burst inside, guns already drawn. One of them asked my father questions in harsh words, but my father just shook his head calmly. He lifted a hand and touched his fingers to his lips. Instantly I knew it was a gesture meant for us.
“Silence, my little love,” my mother whispered to me in the darkness. My heart hammered so loudly against my ribs that I thought they’d hear us for sure.But what about my father?I kept thinking.How would he save himself?
Then one of the soldiers pointed a gun directly at his face.
I was eight years old, and I couldn’t stop the squeal of terror that burst from my lips. “Pa!” I squeaked, before my mother clamped a hand over my mouth.
Oh no—what have I done?The thought flashed through me at the same time as my shout.
At first I hoped the soldiers couldn’t hear it over the chaos—but they all turned simultaneously in our direction. My father’s face turned sickly white in an instant. The soldiers headed toward us and threw the carpet aside. The trapdoor flung open over our heads. Light flooded down over us.
My father moved so quickly. He lunged forward, tackling the closest soldier to him and knocking the gun from his hands. Shouts went up. There was a scramble. It couldn’t have lasted longer than a minute, but to me it felt like hours and hours. I saw a second soldier lift his gun to my father’s face. This time there was a blast of sound, a burst of sparks.
My father fell and didn’t get up again.
I screamed and screamed as hands hauled my mother and me out from our hiding place and dragged us toward the front of the house. As I went, I caught a glimpse of my fallen father’s ruined face. Then we were out in the night, and I was thrown to my knees. My mother struggled against her captor—she managed to escape him. And I knelt, sobbing, before a twelve-year-old Red, helpless as he stood over me and weighed the risk of punishing himself and his entire family against murdering the little girl in front of him.
My lost voice. My hazy recollections of my father. My inability to remember his face.
The Federation’s poisonous gas permanently scarred my throat, yes. But that was never the true reason why I stopped speaking after that night. If I hadn’t called out for my father, they likely would have offered him and my mother the chance to join the Federation’s ranks, keeping me as insurance that they would stay loyal to their new nation. We would have lived.
But instead I had raised my voice. And my voice had killed my father.
Oh, Talin, Talin, my mother had said to me.Sometimes, it’s better to forget.
That’s what I’d done. I’d buried that memory along with my voice.
Until the Premier’s words echoed my mother’s from that night, against a backdrop of similar carnage.
I feel myself slip away. The world around me fades to nothing but the face of the approaching Premier. Then he fades away too, until all I know is the ground cold beneath me, my mother’s words echoing into the darkness.
Better to forget.
35
In my dream, I run after my father. All around us tower columns of fire, and behind that, the burning silhouette of a fallen Mara. I’m trying to call out to him, and in my dream, I have a voice, the voice of a child right before it is stolen from her.
Maybe everything that had happened was one long nightmare. Maybe Mara still stands, with her flags flying blue and free over the ramparts.
There’s a familiar voice that calls to me in the dream, and it does not belong to Red. It sounds like the most beautiful and horrible voice in the world, at once soothing and dark, the sound of bells in a temple of death. I find myself turning toward it, curious to hear it again at the same time I push away from it, repelled.
“Wake up, Talin,” he says in Basean, and the sound of my native tongue stirs me out of the blur of my dream.
The towering flames fade into gray, and the image of my father before me turns to mist. My heart lodges in my throat. I reach out for him, desperate for him to stay. But of course he can’t hear me. His figure turns lighter and lighter until it disappears altogether, replaced by this voice that keeps calling for me from another world.
“Talin, it’s time to wake up.”
Pain starts to lance down my arms and legs. There’s such a sharp agony in my side that I can’t take a full breath. I think I’m standing, but I can’t possibly have enough strength to be holding myself up alone. The pain turns acute and real now. Tingles run through my limbs as I try in vain to move. Something is securing my arms tightly behind my back, and the way my weight seems to hang tells me that I must be chained upright. There is no gag on my mouth, but with the way my hands are bound, I’m as good as silenced.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
The Premier of the Karensa Federation is standing before me, resplendent in a brilliant yellow coat. The kind of outfit a king would wear to his coronation. When he sees me awake, his lips curve up.
