But her words sound muffled and distant in my ears. I listen numbly, my breath frozen in my chest.
How can the Chief Architect be the one behind a rebellion? She had personally overseen the mutilation of Red into a Skyhunter, then mine. She has torn thousands of families apart in her creation of hermonstrosities, has been instrumental in the Federation’s conquering of so many nations. She spends her days walking anxiously around her lab, always doing the Premier’s bidding, always bowing to the horrors she inflicts.
She finishes talking now and turns to look at me. Something in my eyes must catch her attention—because for an instant, she hesitates, and some emotion flashes by on her face.
Then the Chief Architect nods at the young translator. “That will be all,” she says. “I have a few checks I need to do with our Skyhunter.”
The girl glances quickly at the woman’s face, as if checking to make sure she is being given a proper dismissal. But the Chief Architect just nods again at her. “Go on.”
We watch the girl leave. For a moment, we are alone here in the corner of the institute.
The Chief Architect turns away. “Follow me,” she calls over her shoulder, glancing back briefly at me.
“Architect—” I start to sign at her, but she glimpses my movement and interrupts me.
“My name is Raina de Balman,” she replies.
We move like a pair of shadows, with nothing but the sound of our boots echoing along the corridor. Finally, she leads me into one of the private rooms. In the weak light filtering in from outside, I see a sparsely furnished space, equipped only with a bed and dresser.
I tense immediately. I used to be sent into chambers like this one to recover from each round of experimentation during my Skyhunter transformation. They’d put me in a bed, and I’d lie still for an entire week at a time, waiting for the wounds in my back to slowly heal around my new wings or my skin to graft back together. An involuntary shudder courses through me at returning to this space, and I wonder what new experiment she’d brought me here for.
But she doesn’t turn on any of the lights. Instead, she walks over to the side of the bed and presses her hand against a section of the wall there.
A slight groove in the wall materializes, then indents, as if a section of the wall has pushed inward. She waits without a word as the wall slides open by a couple of feet, then glances at me and nods for me to walk through the narrow darkness.
It opens abruptly into an illuminated space.
I find myself standing in a large chamber filled with what appears to be the same equipment used during my Skyhunter transformation.
We aren’t alone in here. At the other end of the windowless space, seated calmly at a low table sprawled with what look like blueprints, is Mayor Elland.
She leans back in her seat and regards me with her penetrating look. “Ah,” she says. “You all took your time out there.”
My mother’s quiet message to me at the mayor’s estate. Her hint to me. Suddenly the words of the prisoner from Carreal return to me again.
I am not the rebel leader you think you have. I am just one of many.
The mayor had used my mother to communicate with me, had wanted me in on whatever this meeting is. I stare at her, unsure how to react or what to expect.
When I hesitate longer, the woman rolls her eyes and gestures to the seats beside her. “You don’t have all day here,” she says. “Constantine will expect you back eventually, so let’s talk.”
I feel uneasy as I settle into a seat across from the mayor and the Chief Architect shuffles to sit beside me.
The Chief Architect glances sidelong at me. “Panic room,” she explains, gesturing around us at the enclosed space. “The lab complex is equipped with a small number of these. In the event that something goes wrong with one of our experiments, our scientists can escape to relativesafety for a moment while sending out a distress signal to have guards sent in.” She nods at me, her own tense nature in contrast to her words. “No one can hear us in here.”
Mayor Elland folds her arms against the table. Unlike Raina, she looks as regal and self-assured as she did at her estate. “A good place for you to flee if Constantine ever discovers the real reason why he’s ill all the time,” she quips.
At that, my eyes dart from the mayor to the Chief Architect. Constantine’s failing health. The fog in his mind. Then I think of the medicinal soup that Constantine drinks, that it was formulated by the Chief Architect to help him think. “Constantine’s treatments,” I sign to her, my hands faltering for a moment. “His illness. You—”
She greets my realization with a blink. “It’s just an illness, Skyhunter,” she says pointedly. “Or is it?”
An illness. Or a poisoned body, slowly dying.
“The tonic I gave you on the wall,” she continues, pushing up her glasses in a nervous gesture, “was one I sometimes used on Red when we were still figuring out his limits. He was the first person I ever attempted a link upon. This tonic weakens the effects of your mind link so that the effects reduce to a trickle. It should prevent you from sharing with the Premier most visions of where you currently are. It is a suppression of one of the many threads that make up your bond with Constantine.”
It is a suppression.Her words are so quiet I barely hear her. But there they are, hanging in the air.
Mayor Elland tucks a strand of silver-gray hair behind her ear and leans toward me. “You thought the war ended when you lost Mara. But this, Talin, can be our chance to truly end the war. This can be the real end. And I know you want to see the fall of the Karensa Federation. Don’t you?”
