Before, my eyes had to adjust to the dark. Now, though, I can see everything immediately. My gaze goes straight to the figure sitting in a warm bath at one side of the room. It looks like it should be luxurious and relaxing, but he’s hunched in the water and trembling slightly. His eyes are hidden behind a layer of bandages.
His head turns toward us at the sound of our arrival, and every muscle in his shoulders stiffens. His trembling worsens.
“Our second Skyhunter,” the Chief Architect tells me, her hands folded behind her back. “As you can see, he has just had his eyes enhanced. A process you’re familiar with, I’m sure.”
I remember this procedure right away. It’s a process that—for several weeks—leaves you feeling like you’ve been completely blinded, with a deep, aching pain behind your sockets. The procedure also makes you colder than you should be. When I’d undergone it, I’d shivered even in warm rooms, even when the windows were left open to the summer air.
The hot bath is necessary to stabilize his body’s heat.
The nausea stirring in my stomach lurches, and I wince, fighting back the urge to retch. His pain suddenly seems to be mine, and for a moment, I feel as if I’m the one undergoing the transformation again. In the low light, his hair—already going gray with the metallic additives in his bloodstream—reminds me of Red.
I force myself to nod calmly. “His progress seems slower than before,”I sign to the translator, dutifully asking the questions that Constantine wants.
“He had a close call earlier in the week,” the Chief Architect explains as she wrings her hands unconsciously. “His heart stopped during his eye operation, and we had to postpone it in order to let his body rest. We think he’s out of the danger zone.”
Her words make me want to laugh. Out of the danger zone. As if they are at all concerned about our health.
“Where is this one from?” I ask her. This isn’t one of Constantine’s questions.
“Tanapeg,” she replies.
One of the border states. I wonder if he might be who my mother is talking about.
“May I?” I ask the Architect, and she bows her head slightly to me, giving me permission.
I skirt my way around the room until I’m standing over the young man in the bath. He senses my presence. I see his skin prickle at my nearness, as if he knows somehow that something powerful and deadly is at his side. Then I lean down to take a better look at him.
No scars behind his ears. Nothing else to go off. But I still linger, taking in his face and his body. He nearly died during the eye procedure—he thinks this is torturous. But he hasn’t yet begun the process of steel infusion, of installing the great black wings on his back. There is so much pain ahead of him, and no way for me to prepare him for the worst of it.
Did he leave a family behind? Who once called himson? Did they mourn him? Do they know where he ended up? Are they also imprisoned here, like Red’s family had been, or are they perhaps—mercifully—dead? Trapped in this room, blinded and frightened, who does he think about? Does he weep for anyone in his sleep, as I wept for Red?
If the Early Ones had not destroyed themselves, what would they think of the way the Federation has used their knowledge? Would they shrink away in disgust? Or would they approve? Would they see an echo of themselves in this?
I have a sudden urge to kill him here. To slice out with my own steel wings and cut his throat, end his suffering. Destroy one of Constantine’s Skyhunters before he can become like me, a weapon at the Premier’s beck and call. Everything in me screams to do it. At the door, the Chief Architect watches me quietly. If she’s afraid of what I might be thinking, she doesn’t react.
Then I feel that familiar tug in the back of my mind. Constantine’s presence, ever there. He says nothing. He probably isn’t even paying attention to what my moods are or what I might be doing right now. But it’s all the reminder I need.
I force myself to stand up and return to the Chief Architect’s side. “He looks well,” I sign to her. Beside her, the translator murmurs my answer.
The Architect gives me a practiced smile. “This one will join you someday, Skyhunter,” she replies. “So I’m glad you approve.”
She then turns to open the door, ushering us out. I’m glad she doesn’t see the look of hatred on my face. I follow her out with my hands balled into fists.
As I go through my weekly inspection of the Ghosts’ glass chambers and the Chief Architect’s report on her experiments’ progress, I feel the weight of my mother’s words shift. The translator following us doesn’t once glance up at me. She never errs in her steps around the Architect. The Ghosts in their chambers are all in various stages of their transformations. The ones that have completely changed are listless, standing at attention as if ready to be led out obediently in chains. A few other lab workers and engineers bow their heads at us as we pass by.
Nothing seems amiss. There are no clues that anyone here might have ulterior motives.
What am I searching for? What had my mother wanted me to find? Or—what if the things my mother had heard really were just rumors? What if she is mistaken after all? What if this, too, is another cruel game that Constantine has set up for me, giving me false hope that there might be some rebellion in the works—sending me on a desperate goose chase by using my mother as a hapless pawn?
The thought that this last shred of hope is nothing but a ruse is almost too much for me to bear. I’ve seen my friends jailed. I’ve had to beg my mother to stay alive. Is this the rest of my life that I have to look forward to? Watching helplessly as my loved ones suffer?
And then, just as my thoughts continue to spiral, I notice something about the Chief Architect as she turns in front of me. She steps under a bright sconce against the wall, and the shadows behind her head momentarily clear right as I catch a glimpse.
A scar behind her ear.
It isn’t a big scar. I’ve certainly never noticed it before. Just a line of silver skin running behind her earlobe, fading into invisibility wherever shadows hit it. But it’s unmistakable.
The Chief Architect is still talking, rapidly now, as she gestures at one glass chamber holding a Ghost that looks like it might be dying. “We are going to put this one down,” she says as the creature shakes its broken jaw. “Its bones aren’t setting right, for some reason, and it doesn’t seem capable of keeping up with the others.”
