Her statements are said lightly, with such little fanfare, that anyone who doesn’t know her might think she’s speaking sarcastically. But I catch the glint in her eye.Maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.
She knows some of those former prisoners. She knows some of these rebels hiding in plain sight. She knows where they’ve been placed.
Right here.
“What kind of higher places?” I sign.
“The National Laboratory,” she signs back.
I trot alongside my mother as we fall into silence, but my hands are shaking now. Someone has found their way into the very birthplace of the Federation’s war experiments.
She smiles a little at my expression and signs again: “Only rumors. But they say you should speak to someone there with a scar behind their ear.”
All my thoughts swirl in a din in my head. I tamp it down, force myself to turn my mind back to riding with my mother.
But she has already told me what I need to know. The rebels that have been stirring unrest at the Federation’s border states have brought it to Cardinia. They arehere, in the capital. Working under the mayor.
Perhaps workingwiththe mayor.
If Mayor Elland is actually involved, then that means the unrestcould be much larger than I’d thought. It is a movement gathering steam. And if I can find out more about it, if I can find a way to help the cause… well. An old thought returns to me, one I’d clung to on the day Mara had been defeated.
The Federation has conquered us. But it has not annihilated us yet.
13
RED
The last time I walked through Cardiniafreely, I was twelve.
Think back, and I remember it all. It was a warm, sticky day, and the summer exhibition was happening throughout the city, a festival showcasing a system of irrigation tunnels that children were allowed to slide down. I’d gone with two friends, and returned drenched and laughing, two frozen pops melting over our hands with their sticky sugar.
What a fun time I had. How little I thought about everything happening around me.
Back then, I’d looked at the guards standing on street corners and watching me play as my guardians, protecting me from falling or drowning or running into the streets in front of the horses and carriages. A year later, I’d return to the city as a disgraced soldier, accused of the indirect murder of my superior because I’d failed to shoot a girl. Talin.
Talin, the girl I can’t stop worrying about. The girl I can’t imagine not saving, not taking with us out of this place.
As I walk through Cardinia’s streets with Jeran behind me, dressed in a flowing Karensan outfit and a reveler’s mask over my face, I find myself tensing along every street with more than two guards standing watch.
Our train had finally arrived in Cardinia two evenings after we’d left Mara’s borders, to a city fully immersed in the solstice celebrations. The first thing we’d done when we arrived in the city was trade several of our knives for money, acting as peddlers selling scraps of the newly conquered Mara, and then we bought ourselves new clothes. Cardinia had once been Togaia’s capital, after all, before it became the Karensa Federation’s, and that means it’s a city where everyone is used to newly conquered visitors struggling to fit in. With so many different people in Cardinia, we’ve blended in with the crowds easily—but that doesn’t mean General Caitoman doesn’t have his soldiers on alert, possibly searching for anyone who resembles us.
The entire city has turned out for the solstice festival, and the crowds jostle beside us, giving us the protection of anonymity. As we go, I make a habit of noting the armbands on any passing guard’s sleeve, each marked with a distinct symbol detailing which city patrol they belong to.
My eyes hitch each time I spot a guard who still looks like a boy, no older than I was when I became one.
The sight sends a current of unwelcome nostalgia through me. Suddenly, I feel like a young soldier again, little more than a child recruit, double-banding my insignia in order to make sure it doesn’t slip down my boyish arm. I used to keep track of the other city patrols during my daily duties because it told me where I could find my friends that were assigned to other patrols. I push that memory away as I keep a mental tally of the symbols I see. The brand of my old patrol insignia, which had been burned into my chest, aches underneath my clothing.
Are any of those old friends still here, patrolling the city? They were only children then, like me. Would they recognize me now, even behind my reveler’s mask? On instinct, I reach up and adjust the cloth I’ve looped loosely around my head.
Jeran walks beside me, his eyes wide behind his half mask as he takesin the sights. “I’ve read about this festival,” he says in near-perfect Karenese, “but I didn’t realize how big it was.”
Thank you, Jeran, I think to myself,for being so fluent. “It’s not ours,” I reply. “It was a tradition from Carreal. When Karensa overtook that country decades ago, they found their solstice festival so enlightening that they decided to adopt it.”
Jeran’s lips tighten. He stares as we walk the main thoroughfare and pass the hundreds of stalls lining the wide avenue. “Was it always this contentious?”
At his words, I glance over to what he’s looking at. Jeran’s attention is fixed on a smear of black paint scrawled against the marble base of a sculpture along the thoroughfare.
It’s the Premier’s seal, consumed in flames.
