We dare to linger in this dream for another beat. Neither of us says anything. I concentrate on the rise and fall of her breaths, knowing she could disappear any moment. She studies my face, searching for something.
I try to reach out to her.
Then our dream shudders. We are waking. The world around us blurs again.
Talin.I reach for her one more time, knowing I shouldn’t, yet unable to stop myself.
And somewhere in the suspension of reality, in this haze of a moment, she fades away, and I awaken back on top of the train car, jolting and bouncing along in the night.
I gasp as my eyes open. My hand comes up to rub across my face, and I find tears. The image of her is still imprinted in my mind. She’d been so damn real. I should be relieved that we’ve finally broken out of our dream—where we’re so vulnerable to Constantine’s suspicions—but instead I’m just desperately empty. Leaving Talin feels like ripping my heart out of my chest. I wince. I can feel the pain of it as if my body is still torn open.
My eyes wander to Jeran. He’s asleep. I was supposed to have stayed awake during my shift guarding us atop this train. Guiltily, I shift so that my weight is sure to block him from rolling off the top of the car, and then I look around at the rest of the train.
My gaze settles on the platform several cars ahead of us, the one carrying the heavy artifact.
I’m grateful for the darkness that hides us from the few workers stationed to guard the artifact. They are still there, swaying with thetrain cars. At first I think they are all clustered together in sleep—but then I see that a couple of them are holding up one of the workers as he vomits over the side of the train car, his figure hunched over in pain.
You would think they would all be used to the motion of a train by now. I’m surprised any of them could be sick because of it.
It takes me another moment to realize that the ill worker is vomiting a trickle of blood, inky black, into the night. I know what it looks like, of course—I’ve seen plenty of blood in darkness. As if to confirm it, I can smell the faint scent of something metallic in the wind. My insides recoil.
The worker must have some old injury. Maybe it was made worse during the struggle to secure the artifact. I look on, feeling queasy myself, as the worker continues to retch until he finally slumps backward in exhaustion.
Over on the other side of the artifact, another worker is also vomiting over the side of the moving platform. Even from here, I can hear the occasional moan coming from him.
That man, too, is retching blood.
My grief over Talin fades momentarily as I watch them. Eventually, they seem to settle back down into a restless sleep. More old injuries? Somehow, it doesn’t quite make sense to me. My eyes go from their resting figures to that strangely familiar metal cylinder, and I concentrate on the faint glow it seems to emit.
Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe it’s just the way the lights from an occasional village hit the artifact whenever the train curves along its track.
But something about it feels off. It’s the same feeling I remember as a child, watching Karensa’s parades of early Ghosts down Cardinia’s avenues.The same feeling I had during each year’s solstice festivities when red paper rained down on me even as prisoners of war were hauled through the streets.
It’s the unmistakable feeling of something unnatural shifting in the air. It’s the feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong.
12
TALIN
My first night back in the Cardinian palaceis an unsettling one. I never get used to the sheer size of this space, a maze of corridors and gates and spiraling staircases. There are moving platforms they call elevators here, steel boxes moved by pulleys up and down through the palace to get from one story to another. To the east, in a separate building connected to the main palace by a hallway, is an enormous greenhouse, a glass structure built against the marble and stone of the palace. When I’d first set foot in Cardinia with the other Strikers, the glass exhibition hall erected for the national fair had been modeled on this greenhouse. It is a luxury, a paradise of fruit trees and rainbow-hued rows of sweet-scented flowers that Constantine frequents.
The main palace’s atrium features a glass ceiling, and the walls are framed with gilded edges. They’re painted with elaborate scenes of Karensan history, from their earliest days as a nomadic race to the era when they built their first permanent city atop a ruin of the Early Ones along the banks of a northeastern river.
It is an estate of grotesque extravagance. Everywhere I look, there is something new and overwhelming.
My footsteps echo down the lonely halls. There must be thousands of servants in this space, but at night, I feel like the Premier is the only other person here with me.
Once again, I can’t sleep. I’d dreamed of Red in my state of exhausted collapse earlier in the evening, a vivid dream so startling that I bolted out of it with tears in my eyes, Red’s name still echoing in my mind. It truly felt like we’d spoken, even though that’s impossible. I had looked at him and known with horror that he was really seeing me. After all, hadn’t my last dream turn out to be a real vision? For a span of minutes, I’d exposed him to Constantine in my mind, had risked the Premier’s sensing us connecting once more. For hours after, I forced myself to stay behind my walled heart, wondering when Constantine would turn to me and ask me about my second dream with Red.
Or worse, that I would somehow turn a corner with the Premier and see Red chained and on his knees. That somehow just glimpsing Red in my dreams would have alerted the Premier to his location and gotten him captured.
But there’s been no word from Constantine this time. We may not be this lucky again.
So tonight, as I roam these empty halls, my thoughts are filled with shadows and nightmares. Fears of my private thoughts being unveiled again. Fears of being watched by spies. Fears of Constantine’s mood, that my mother will suffer depending on how it swings next. On top of it all, the eternal fear that some rebel assassin might be making their move against the Premier right now, that someday, I might fail to protect Constantine from that threat, and that my mother will be executed for it.
All of these worries swirl in my stomach until the nausea becomes unbearable. I pause in my walk, then return to my chambers, where I retch in the bathroom until I have nothing left.
No matter what happens, I will suffer. There is no light at the end of these tunnels.
