Another sculpture nearby has been vandalized too, painted in scarlet and smudged with angry words.
KARENSA IS DEAD
I blink, stunned for a moment into silence. “No, that’s new,” I murmur.
The news of occasional unrest in the city is familiar to me; my superiors used to do plenty of rotations here, spying on potential rebels and arresting those who seemed suspicious. But this kind of open rebellion? I’ve never seen that.
Jeran stares for a moment longer, taking stock of which sculptures have been damaged. “Can you sense Talin at all here?” he asks.
The mention of Talin sends a wave of new fear through me. Her heartbeat had accompanied me for the entire train ride, but now it seems to flicker in and out, some of the vibrations lost among the noise and chaos of the festival. Whatever emotions she might be feeling right now, I can’t sense them. She must be holding her thoughts tight.
I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I admit. “She’s in the city. That’s all I can tell.”
The memory of her last night comes back to me now. Part of me still believes that our entire conversation had just been a dream, but it seemed so sharp, so unwavering even after sleep that it must have been real.
Jeran glances sidelong at me. “Do we know how long her mother has been in her current location?”
My mother, Talin had told me through our bond, and her voice had sounded so sharp, so desperate in its sadness and fury, that I can feel the stab of her pain even now. Talin works for the Premier solely because of her mother. I know the agony of that trap.
“Nearly a week,” I answer in a low voice. “She’ll stay there for another week. Then Constantine will order her moved again, depending on his pleasure or displeasure with Talin.”
Jeran winces. Is he thinking about his own father? I wonder. But when he speaks, he just says, “Then we’ll need to figure out where she is soon. How would we start a search like that?”
I look around at the festive scene. Wherecouldwe even begin? “Talin said the Premier decides the location on his own,” I whisper as we slide past a crowd gathered around a street performer. “But without consulting anyone else, the day before her mother is moved. That means we have a slim window to find out ahead of time where her mother is going to be transferred. That window is our only shot at freeing her.”
Jeran shakes his head. “Butsomeoneknows where her mother is. A guard at the future location, maybe, so they can prepare for a new, high-profile prisoner. After all, the Premier doesn’t move her himself.”
I snort at the mental image. “If he tried, he’d be unconscious and bleeding in the grass.”
Jeran laughs a little, in spite of himself.
“Rumors of prisoner movement tend to spread among the guards,” I tell Jeran as we near the lab complex. “I remember gambling on that when I was a young soldier here.”
“Gambling?” Jeran asks.
I nod. “My friends and I would place bets on where we thought high-profile prisoners would end up, and which patrols would be assigned to them. I was once assigned as a junior guard to the patrol for a general arrested from Basea. We weren’t to talk about his location, on penalty of death. But we still placed our bets anyway.”
“Did you win?”
I look away, unwilling to meet his steady gaze. “Three hundred notes,” I answer in a low voice, “yeah, I did.”
“Where would we go if we wanted to catch conversations like that?”
I shrug. “Wherever the highest concentration of soldiers is right now—and seeing as how the new Maran prisoners have the most attention, wherever they’re headed.”
Jeran looks around. “Where do you think they would bring Striker prisoners during all this?”
“They’ll either be at the National Laboratory,” I reply, “or held in the rooms underneath the arena seats.”
At that, Jeran glances sharply at me. “Arena seats?”
I nod once. “Karensans love sport,” I tell him. “The Premier likes to hold the events to keep the people happy, and they especially like to do it with prisoners of war. The events are always a secret. The audience gathers in the arena each day without knowing what they’ve come to witness.” My voice halts, and when I speak again, it sounds hoarse. “The Strikers will be either qualified for some experimental program at the lab complex or used to entertain the people.”
Jeran’s silent, but when I look at his eyes above his mask, they shine with a grave light. There is fury there for what Karensa will do to ourfriends—but there is also a twinge of guilty understanding. Mara did something similar with their prisoners, after all. I’d been one, hadn’t I? It’s never as entertaining when you are the one sent into the stadium to die.
We look away from each other, two soldiers from enemy nations, and the silence settles awkwardly between us.
When we pass by the lab complex, I can tell immediately that the Strikers aren’t there. No crowd has gathered in front of its gates, peering curiously for a look at the new prisoners of war. So we move on in the direction of the arena at the center of the city.
