You are still here. And that means you have a chance.
Jeran is careful not to voice aloud what we both fear. I picture Aramin, then Adena, strapped down in glass chambers, turned into Skyhunters or worse. I see them joining Talin’s side, forced to strike down their own friends and companions.
“It will be easier, just the two of us traveling,” I tell Jeran.
He nods, and I’m grateful that he—one of the first Marans to helpme—will be at my side. The realization of leaving Mara behind to fall burdens his eyes. If we leave now, it is our acknowledgment that there is little our small group can do to take this nation back. It is him turning away from his homeland, like so many others have before him. Let things go so that we can live to fight another day.
Finally, he nods and points his boots away from the direction of the campsite. “Then let’s find a way to hitch a ride.”
CARDINIA
THE KARENSA FEDERATION
10
TALIN
I’m too scared to sleep.
As night falls, I find myself propped against the wall of my chamber adjoining the Premier’s, forcing myself to stay alert, to keep a tight handle on the walls around my heart. I pace at first. Then I pour cold water on my face, trying desperately to stay conscious. The night lengthens, the moonlight shifts across my floor. I count aloud, reciting old Basean poems or Maran folk songs, rhymes we used to say to pass the time on the warfront.
Sleep threatens to pull me under again and again. Each time, I jolt awake in a panic. No. I can’t sleep. I can’t dream. I can’t connect to Red by accident and expose him to the Premier. Not again.
I am alone now. No one can help me in this.
At some point before dawn, I pass out against the wall. I jerk upright with the first rays of dawn, bleary-eyed and gasping for air. Had I seen Red again? Had I betrayed him again?
But when I meet Constantine, he says nothing. I must not have slept for long enough.
By the time morning comes in earnest and we head down to the station, I’m exhausted. Dark circles smudge the bottom of my eyes as wepass the soldiers checking the tracks that the Strikers had tried in vain to destroy.
We board the train in what feels like a blur. I sit across from Constantine and stare out the window as we pull slowly away from Newage, trying to remember the city that existed before the conquest. Already, it’s hard for me to imagine this place without scarlet-and-black banners hanging on its walls.
Before long, we’ve left Mara behind and are cutting smoothly through the countryside of Basea. It is an image of what Mara will someday look like—a homeland that is no longer a homeland, but one that Karensa has stripped of its soul. I tear my gaze away from the windows.
I half expect Constantine to needle me with a taunt, to say something to me in Basean. But he is mercifully quiet, spending his time writing notes into his leather journal. Maybe he sees the dark circles under my eyes, had sensed my exhaustion and grief and decided I’d gotten enough for now. No point in completely destroying his Skyhunter’s mind.
In these moments, he looks deceptively docile and sophisticated, like he’s someone I’m having a pleasant journey with instead of a young warlord with blood staining his hands. A man who had shoved my friends into a train car.
Other times, he speaks in low voices with advisors who come by to talk to him. I listen in helpless silence as he discusses which Maran holidays he’ll let them keep and which will be done away with, what new customs and cultures he will have installed. Among them is a change in the dress law, ordering the cutting of hair and style of clothing to more closely align with habits already in place in inner Karensa. Then there are conversations about technology to bring in. The building of new streets and tracks.
He talks as if it’s nothing to rip away a country’s customs andtraditions. As if he’s chatting about the weather, while in the train cars behind us are captive soldiers, prisoners that include my former Striker companions.
His words sit like a fire in my stomach. But there’s nothing I can do except reinforce the walls around my emotions, hardening myself until it feels like anything still alive in me has died.
I reach into my pocket and pull out a small pouch of coins hanging at my waist. From them, I remove a small, silver Karensan coin. I take it out and press it facedown in my palm, so that the side showing Constantine’s profile is hidden and the side displaying Karensa’s Federation boundaries is up.
Mara is such a new territory that Constantine has yet to mint coins showing it within the borders of the Federation. As the Premier continues to talk with his advisors, I stare at the old lands. This has become how I remind myself that Karensa wasn’t always all-encompassing, that it didn’t always own Mara. I study the coin and hang on to the words of the young rebel leader before she had succumbed to a Ghost.
Your Federationwillfall. It is only a matter of time.
There may still come a day when the Federation turns to dust and disappears into the fog of history.
We arrive in Cardinia to a celebration unlike anything I’ve seen in my life. It pales in comparison even with the national fair we witnessed when Jeran, Adena, and I first attempted to infiltrate the capital.
The train tracks that lead into the capital of the Federation all run along black steel bridges, something I remember from my first excursion into this place—but this time, those bridges have been painted in gold. Enormous scarlet-and-black banners hang at each entry tunnel,and as our train passes through one of these tunnels, I look up to see crowds cheering our arrival, each of them flinging basketfuls of paper confetti over our carriages. Beyond sprawls the capital, a cityscape of glass domes and towers that reach for the sky.
“The celebrations will go on for the next week,” Constantine tells me as I stare at the scene. “It will escalate each day until it ends on the evening of the summer solstice. There will be a series of games throughout that time.”
