by Marie Lu
Even so, I can’t help feeling a bit at home as I walk these streets. Here, to me, is the part of Mara I understand, the people that Mara had allowed into its borders even as the Federation pushes in from all sides. We’re still here and alive. It’s enough of a reason to defend this place.
Now I slow my walk as I reach our quarters. From the end of this muddy path, I can see the humble little home I grew up in, its door open to let in fresh air.
If I could have, I would’ve moved my mother into the Striker apartments with me years ago. But even my position isn’t enough for the Senate to let her into the Inner City. It would set a dangerous precedent, said the Speaker. Instead, my friends each gave their offerings, the limits of what they could do to make her life in the Outer City more bearable, without inviting punishment on her or me. Corian made sure her house was built better than many in the shanties. The walls are now made of solid terrywood, and our slanted metal roofs are sturdy and don’t leak. Corian helped us install a proper chimney that Adena hammered into shape in her shop, so that my mother could cook indoors, and dug a tunnel underneath the house so that she had something like a toilet instead of the public outhouses at the end of each makeshift street, places so filthy that my childhood nightmares were filled with visions of falling into their dugout troughs. Knowing my mother’s skill with plants, Jeran had brought her seeds from his family’s garden—lettuce and carrot and radish—and even climbing roses, which now hang their beautiful blooms along the walls, and pink feather grass, which sways in a ring around the house.
She’s feeding a log into the stove when I step up to the open door. I just stand there for a moment, watching her sturdy shoulders at work, unaware of my silent arrival.
The house is small but warm, the single room barely big enough to walk a few steps from one end to the other. Potted plants crowd the damp corners and leaning ledges. Lush green vines, still dewy from being watered, drape down from her rusted windowsill. A little tree with long spring-colored leaves sits by the doorway, its scent as clean and sharp as lemon.
It’s not our home. But you try your best to take your home with you, even if it’s a shack in the middle of a desperate place.
She pours a spoonful of water onto the stove’s hot surface. Steam sizzles, humidifying the space. When she finally steps away from the flames, I knock twice against the doorframe.
She turns at the sound. Her eyes widen with joy at my smile.
Every corner of my heart fills as she steps toward me and reaches up to cup my face in her calloused hands. “There’s my girl,” she signs, then runs a hand through my hair. “She doesn’t visit often enough.” She pats my cheeks and adds aloud, in Basean, “Or eat enough.”
Like my Striker companions, with whom I flip back and forth regularly between our sign language and Maran, my mother communicates with me in a mix of Maran sign language and, when she can’t quite figure out what signs to use, in Basean. I lean into the familiar rhythm of my homeland’s tongue on her lips and the coarse movements of her fingers, then hand her the bag of spice from the market. “You said you missed woodruff.”
She sighs at the dried leaves and flowers, taking a moment to inhale their aroma. “Oh, it’s perfect.” She nods toward the table. “Sit down. I’ll fix something for you.”
“Ma, I’m not hungry.”
She clicks her tongue disapprovingly at me. “Never hungry, never learned how to cook. What a daughter. Tea, then.”
I follow her to the makeshift table in the corner of the room. It’s only large enough for two people to crowd around. As I take a seat, my mother puts the dried woodruff into two tin mugs. Then she takes a pot off the fire and pours me a steaming cup of water.
“Will you stay for dinner?” she asks me.
I close my eyes and inhale the scent of tea. “Can’t. I have to be back at the mess hall.”
She smiles a little. “How are your friends?”
“Fine.” I hesitate, not sure how to begin my story of what had happened in the arena.
“Tell Adena that I appreciate her bringing over that box of ginseng for me.”
“She said you helped her prepare some samples of camifera so she could experiment with its strength as catapult rope.” I smile briefly. “She always tells me no one has steadier hands than you.”
My mother shrugs and winks at me. “Well, she’s not wrong.”
Then I reach toward my belt and unhook a pouch of coins. Half of my weekly pay. I put it on the table between us.
She smiles sadly at me. During a normal visit, she would scold me more, telling me to keep a higher portion of my wages, buy myself something nice. But she knows I’m here because I always visit before we head back to the warfront. She knows this time is harder, given Corian’s death. So she spares us her usual argument and just leans her head against her hand. “I heard the Firstblade paired you with an unconventional Shield,” she says.
The rattle of her breathing is strong tonight. I’m lucky that the Federation’s poison gas that had destroyed my vocal cords did not permanently injure my lungs. My mother wasn’t so fortunate. Her lungs have never fully healed from that attack, and Mara’s cool, damp winters haven’t helped. Every year around this time, liquid rasps in her chest, and the shack will fill with the scent of lemongrass and mint.
“Less a Shield,” I answer, “and more a punishment for me. He was a prisoner. They said he surrendered willingly at the warfront.”
“What happened?”
I sigh. The smell of dust and sweat from the arena still lingers on me. “He was due to be executed, but I got in the way.”
“You mean you saved someone’s life,” my mother signs gently. “That’s not something to be ashamed of, Talin.”
Not something to be ashamed of. A sudden memory comes to me of the night when Federation soldiers first arrived in our Basean town of Sur Kama. I’d awoken to the sound of breaking glass, the din of voices outside. Then someone, a soldier, was dragging me out of my bed and across the floor of our home. His grip around the skin of my arm burned. I yelped, my heart startled out of slow slumber into a desperate beat, my voice shouting for my mother. And my father, where was my father? What had happened to him?
The soldier forced me to stand outside my home. When I looked up, sobbing, searching for any familiar face, I’d found myself staring up into the frightened eyes of another soldier. He’d been so young, perhaps no older than twelve or thirteen—but he was pointing a gun at me, the insignia on his red sleeves shining. My memory has blurred away the details—in my mind, the emblem is now nothing but a smear of silver.
The first soldier had snapped at the second, at the boy, in Karenese. Probably telling him to hurry up and shoot me. But the boy just stared at me, his hand trembling under the weight of the gun.
Then he said something in protest, voice small and trembling. The first soldier cursed at him, and when the boy stayed frozen, he shoved me again so that I lost my balance on my hands and knees and fell to the ground, my cheek scraping the dirt.
My eyes tilted up enough to see the cut of branches over me, the sinews of the ancient tree that twisted in front of our house. And there, I saw my mother, moving along the branch like a cat, soundless. Her dark gaze met mine, and she shook her head once. I stayed silent. The boy continued to hesitate.
The first soldier lost his patience with the boy and yanked out his own gun. Then my mother moved. She leaped down from the tree, directly onto the first soldier, and snapped his neck with such a clean break that I heard the crack ring through the air. In almost the same movement, she seized the gun from him and pointed it straight at the boy.
The boy stared at her in terror. My mother kept her gun steady, daring him to hurt her daughter. When he hesitated a moment longer, my mother pulled me to my feet. Already, flames were devouring the roof of our house, lit by the embers from a neighbor’s. I didn’t look back at the boy before we ran. Even now, I don’t know whether or not he would have pulled the trigger, if given enoug
h time. He hadn’t fired, but his hand hadn’t dropped either.
Was that saving someone’s life? Or hesitating because you lost your nerve?
Did my mother ever have nightmares about the soldier she’d killed? Or did she thank the skies every day, knowing I could have died instead?
I leave the memory behind and shake my head, irritated at how much it can still shake me. “It was a fool’s act,” I tell my mother now, and I know it. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a prisoner of war from the Federation, Ma.”
“And?”
I look up at her. I’d half-expected my mother to flinch at the thought that I’d endanger my position because of an enemy soldier. To my surprise, though, she just looks intently at me. “Why did you choose to save him, then?” she asks.
“He’s someone important to the Federation.” I offer her the reasons I’ve been listing in my head. “There’s more to him that he’s not letting on, and he might be our best chance to learn more about what the Federation’s war scientists are doing.”
“And is that really why you saved him, Talin?” my mother asks.
She thinks I did it out of pity too, just like the Firstblade. I scowl at her and lean back in my chair. Why did I? Looking back, it all seems so stupid. He had run out of reasons to live, an emotion I knew all too well, and his gesture had reminded me of Corian. Corian, who said blessings over the bodies of monsters, who I wanted so much to be like, who would have stepped into the arena to confront the Firstblade had he been there.
But this prisoner wasn’t Corian. He wasn’t me. Had I really bet my entire career on a moment of desperate grief?
“Does it really matter?” I sign instead. “The Firstblade paired him with me as punishment. I wonder if he really means to let a prisoner of war into the Striker forces or if this is his way of executing the prisoner anyway, forcing him out to the warfront with us.”
My mother takes one of my hands in hers. She turns my palm up, massaging it by pressing her thumbs gently into my skin. I think back to when Nana Yagerri, the old woman who lives at the end of my mother’s street, first taught me how to sign in Maran. She had fled to Newage from a small village near the border between Mara and Basea. “Come here,” she’d said to me one day as she watched me try and fail to sell herbs I’d picked on the street to the houses around us. She had patted my hand and led me to her shack to share oatcakes and tea. “We’ve all forgotten how to take pity on one another,” she’d told me. “But you can talk to old Nana. She’ll teach you how.”
My mother had then learned it from me so that she could understand her daughter once again.
“There was one summer when the rains came early,” my mother says in Basean, rubbing the base of my thumb. “You were only five years old. Do you remember that? You went out to the garden when the sky was already black with clouds, and came back cradling a thin branch with a butterfly’s chrysalis hanging on it. You were so determined to save it from the storm.”
It had been a beautiful turquoise-colored chrysalis dotted with flecks of gold, and inside it I could see the first fragile outlines of a wing. The rains would rip it from its branch, I’d known without a doubt.
“You spent the entire week guarding that chrysalis until the butterfly emerged,” my mother continues. “And when the storm passed, you were so proud to release it.” Her eyes soften, and this time, she signs to me. “My Talin. You’re just like your father.”
My father had been the one to help me cut the small branch it hung from, had sat beside me as we balanced that branch carefully between two rocks on the table. It’s a fragile thing, Talin, he’d told me as I sat there, legs swinging impatiently, waiting for the chrysalis to break open. So be gentle to it. He mussed my hair, and I leaned my head against his side. You’ll see, it will come out when it’s ready.
I remember every detail of this moment, but not my father’s face. I can’t even recall where he went. I’ve asked my mother many times what had happened to him that horrible night, whether we’d lost him at the house or during our flight from the Federation. My mother deflects the question each time. All she will tell me, over and over again, is that I have his easy smile, his compassionate eyes. And I’d go to bed each night haunted by dreams of that smile and those eyes, of his soft laughter filling the house on warm, rainy days.
I don’t know how much of his kindness I inherited, though. I have killed men and monsters in ways I will never share with my mother.
“I was just a child then,” I sign.
“You haven’t changed, my little love.” She leans closer. “We aren’t trusted here—not because of who we are, but where we come from. Is that so different from this prisoner you decided to save? Go talk to him. Find out why you were drawn to him.”
I give her an annoyed frown. “He doesn’t understand my signing. He doesn’t even speak Maran.”
“Aren’t we all always searching for someone to understand us? Find a translator. Your sweet friend Jeran. He speaks Karenese, doesn’t he? You saved the prisoner for a reason, even though you might not yet know what it is. Try to find out what made him flee the Federation.”
I roll my eyes. “Now you sound like the soft one.”
She shrugs. “Everyone has a different story.”
I stare at my mother’s long, graceful hands. They bear new scars since I last saw her: burn marks from the stove and pale cuts and calluses from skinning mice and rabbits—the reliable protein that runs rampant out here—but they don’t make her fingers any less deft. She drums them against the table in an idle dance. My memory of her during our life in Basea comes to me in snatches. Her dark, lush hair, her tall figure. She used those skilled hands to serve as our village doctor and as a huntress who’d come striding home with a young boar slung over her shoulders. The same hands that gutted and skinned an animal could also sew the most careful stitch against a wound or tend to delicate medicinal herbs in our garden. At night, those hands would stroke my hair until I fell asleep. My father had been drawn to that contrast in her, the huntress and healer.
“I’ll go see him,” I sign.
My mother squeezes my hands before pulling away and looking out her window. Despite her strong shoulders, she looks small and alone. “Visit me when you return from the warfront. You will tell me all your stories.”
It’s her way of making me promise to return home alive and safe, a promise we both know I can never be sure to keep. But I bow my head anyway. The truth is, for the past few weeks, when I’ve struggled to find a reason to get up every morning, I think of my mother. I think of this tiny home. And I always push myself out of bed.
“I will, Ma,” I reply.
6
The road leading to the prison is quiet tonight. No one notices Jeran and me as we make our way down the path, nothing more than a pair of shadows in the darkness.
The buildings that make up the National Plaza include one of the most spectacular ruins in Mara—twelve buttresses lining a structure with three arched entrances. This building was once a grand library of the Early Ones, with rows and rows of shelves uncovered when Newage first began cleaning up the ruin, but many of its books had long ago rotted away. By some miracle, a few remained, and from those, we learned what little we know about the Early Ones. Inside the building, the space is cool and dark, with towering stone pillars. Once upon a time, the sides were lined with narrow glass windows that rose up along the building’s walls. Now, this ancient library has been modified into our National Hall. We’ve fortified its crumbling sides with steel and added hallways that radiate from where the windows used to be. Down each hall is a fine apartment where a Senator lives, paired with a team of soldiers to safeguard them and their family.
Below the National Plaza, we discovered an enormous, cylindrical pit five levels deep. Originally, this pit had been dug out by the Early Ones, the walls made of smooth metal, like a silo for storing grain. Adena thinks they may have once used it to launch weap
ons more massive than anything we’ve ever seen. She’s always sniffing the air when she’s down here, murmuring about the lingering scent of something sharp and chemical.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter what it used to be. We now use it as our underground prison.
Guards standing drowsily at the prison entrance snap awake at the sight of my approach, then relax at the Striker emblem on my coat. Jeran gives them a polite smile and bows. They part and let us through toward the damp steps that wind into the darkness.
As we go, the familiar smell of water and blood and mold hits me, the filth of people kept here for decades, of interrogation chambers built into the metal walls. Shafts of dim blue light illuminate the steps from the gratings above. We move down the stairs at an even pace, spiraling and spiraling, passing one level of archways after another. Every floor is lit sparsely with torchlight, and against their flickering circles, the steel prison doors reflect a shiny black.
Beside me, Jeran moves without a sound, his steps sure and steady tonight as if he were out on a sweep. Light and shadow band across his face in a silent rhythm.
“They still aren’t feeding him?” he asks me as we go, his eyes flickering to my hands for my response.
I shake my head and raise my hands so he can see me sign in the near-darkness. “They are. He won’t eat. No one can make him.”
“I guess he’s determined to die, isn’t he?”
“Maybe this was all part of the Firstblade’s plan to get rid of me.”
“Aramin thinks you’re a valuable Striker, Talin.”
“Oh, is that what he told you?”
“It’s just the truth. You did defy him in front of the entire arena.”
“You’re always defending him, Jeran.”
Jeran looks embarrassed. “Not always,” he mutters under his breath.
“If this prisoner dies of hunger,” I sign gloomily, “at least my punishment will be brief.”
