Tears are streaming down my face now. My hands have been clawing so hard against the bridge that my fingers are bloody, streaking scarlet against the ground.
Please stop, I beg Constantine. I press my face closer to the ground before him, not caring that all his soldiers see me prostrating like this. It’s what he wanted, after all.Please stop. I’m begging you.
I hear the sound of Constantine bending down to me, the hush of his robes against the ground. A cool hand touches my chin and brings my face up. I find myself looking straight into his eyes. In them, and through the emotions in our link, I see the truth of my punishment.
It isn’t my defiance of him at the arena. It isn’t even the escape of the Strikers, although that may have been the catalyst.
It is simply what I said to him in the privacy of that small room in the middle of the night. Because the expression in his eyes right now is the same expression I’d seen on him that night—a wild, nearly terrified rage.
Maybe you’re just scared to die.
I look back at him and let all my pain and rage flow.How can you do this, I say to him,and still say you loved your own mother?
He looks at me. This is his father in him.Because I know what it feels like to lose her, he replies.And I know what that does to you.
Then he releases me and waves at his soldier to help the prisoner to her feet.
In a daze, I look on as the soldier offers a hand to the prisoner, and when she flinches away from him as she cradles her damaged arm and hand, he grabs her good elbow and forces her back to her feet. Is Caitoman dragging my mother to her feet right now? Or is he continuing with his torture of her, doing more than what he promised his brother he would do? He is capable of anything.
The woman remains hunched, swaying from pain, as the soldiers begin to usher her away, back to whatever wretched prison they’ve taken her from. And all I can imagine is my own mother doing the same, bent with agony and blood, being led back to wherever they are keeping her.
Mayor Elland watches them go, her own face bleak, whatever thoughts churning through her mind held tightly back as she forces herself to stay calm. All she can do is cast a disappointed look toward Constantine. He makes a point to ignore her gaze, but I can see that it bothers him. The words about his mother have stayed with him.
And as I crouch there, consumed with my own fear and fury, I notice something about the soldier that Constantine had brought here. The one wearing Caitoman’s ring.
The ring features the sun and its flares carved in gold around a band. It flashes once in the light and my eyes go to it. In that moment, I remember Raina’s ring, a similar sun ring that she’d worn when we first arrived back in the capital.
No, it wasn’t a similar ring. It was thesame ring.
The exact same ring that Caitoman had now given this soldier.
We are guided by light and fated by the sun.
It suddenly occurs to me that General Caitoman was the one who had ordered the switching of Constantine’s guards after the assassination attempt.
That he had publicly called out Constantine’s weakened state during the banquet on the Sun Dial, so all would see the Premier fallen on the steps. I’d thought it real concern at the time, brother for brother.
Allies in powerful places.
My stomach turns with a sickening lurch. No, it couldn’t be. Caitoman and Constantine have an unspoken language between them. They care about each other. Constantine had allowed Red to escape in order to save his brother. And Caitoman…
But Caitoman doesn’t care about others. Even Constantine had confirmed that. And that means Caitoman doesn’t care for Constantine, either, even if his brother might pity him to some extent. Caitoman is a monster. I have seen it enough with my own eyes.
That means Caitoman is part of the rebellion.
I am working on the same side as him.
The Chief Architect and Mayor Elland are planning to dethrone Constantine. But they’re not going to overthrow the Federation.
Instead, they’re going to help Caitoman take the throne.
30
RED
When the Federation first arrested me,they took my father and sister. I still remember seeing the carriage pull up in front of our home, and my father stepping before me to greet the guard dressed in white. My father had walked around me so smoothly. He’d bent down to my ear as he passed and said to me the last words I ever heard from him.
“If you fight them,” he’d whispered, “make sure they don’t see it coming.”
