by Marie Lu
The look I shoot him is so dark that it sends him scurrying back to his position.
7
The guards tell me the next morning, as the Firstblade sends me to retrieve my new Shield, that Red ate the rest of the bread out of the bag I’d brought him. In truly irritating fashion, he’d left the fish untouched.
They’ve also cleaned him up. How they got him to cooperate, I don’t know, but when they deliver him to me at the front gate of the prison, his hair is washed, trimmed, and tied up into a typical Maran knot, and his body has been scrubbed so hard that his skin looks pink. Even his pet mouse looks puffed up in a ball as if it’d been caught under a deluge of water and soap, its fuzz sticking out from the sides of the shirt pocket. My eyes water at the peppery smell of prison soap wafting off him. He gazes warily around the National Plaza, as if barely able to believe that he’s out of his prison cell.
I have nothing to communicate to him that he can understand, so I don’t try. I just tug on his chains, making sure they’re still locked tight around his wrists and waist, then secure a length of it around my arm. Now that I’m able to walk beside him, I get a sense for how tall he really is—more than a full head above me, and even after weeks of starvation, still solid in his shoulders and chest and arms. They’ve shaved his beard too, and underneath the grizzled scruff, his face is lean and smooth, younger than I originally thought. His breath is pleasant now, the sign of having eaten and gotten his teeth scrubbed. He doesn’t smile. My hands hover persistently near the daggers against my thighs, ready to move if he turns on me. Maybe he no longer wants to die, at least not right away, but that doesn’t mean he might not want to take someone else’s life.
The Firstblade wasn’t willing to offer him clothing beyond his prison suit. Who knows if Red might try to make an escape, maybe attempt to deliver news of what he’s seen in Mara to the Federation? So he wears a clean set of the white tunic and pants instead, which he’s already spoiled with mud at the hems. In case he breaks free, he’ll at least have to shed his prison clothing to avoid being a moving mark.
I’m a moving mark. The thought makes my shoulders tight as I head from the Plaza toward the Striker arena, where the others had long ago begun their exercises. As I walk, others turn their heads in our direction, first at me, the Basean Striker, and then at the white-clad prisoner beside me. People move aside as if we’re poisonous to touch.
Red’s chains drag too long before him. His legs tangle around them, forcing him to lurch to a halt. He takes me with him—I’m pulled off balance and stumble backward, shoving into his chest like an unsteady drunk.
Snickers around us. A gaggle of children cover their mouths and whisper something to one another, their eyes on Red, before dashing off again into the morning crowd.
I shove away from Red, annoyed, keenly aware of the unnatural warmth of his body. It’s not his fault the chain’s too long—but he had been the one who refused to answer in the arena, who hadn’t wanted to defend himself, who had forced me to step in—
He scowls at me as I tangle in his chains again. His hand closes around my arm to keep me from falling.
I yank out of his grasp. “Don’t touch me,” I sign, my teeth bared.
He understands my expression well enough to take a step back, lifting his hands in a seemingly universal gesture of surrender. Then he gestures widely again, exaggerating with his arms as he attempts to explain that he’d been trying to help me. It only irritates me more.
The laughter around us goes on. I turn away from him and stalk toward the arena again, yanking him with me, knowing how ridiculous we must look, hating that the Firstblade chose to punish me this way.
“I’m sorry,” I sign as I go, refusing to look him in the eye, not caring whether he understands. Then I gesture at the chains dragging in front of him. “Let’s do something about those.”
He casts me a hostile side glance and tightens his lips. Fine. I guess we won’t be defending each other’s lives anytime soon.
I swallow my impatience. Maybe it would be helpful to teach him a few words, after all. So I hold my hands up at him and sign the letters of my name slowly. “Talin.” I point at myself and use the established sign I use with others for my name. “Talin.” Then I spell out the letters of his name. “Red.”
His eyes follow my gestures, and then he lifts his own hands, attempting the signs. I stare as he moves, mildly surprised by the grace of his fingers. He has a good memory and manages to be accurate enough for me to understand both our names. I try more words.
“Yes.” I hold my middle and index fingers together, then wave them toward myself. He imitates me.
“No.” I make my hand into a fist and twist my wrist.
“Friend.” I hold my middle and index fingers up and make a cutting V motion straight toward him.
He does the same.
Well, it’s a start. Now I point in the direction we’re walking, then again at his chains. I make a breaking motion at the chain itself by sliding my palms against each other, then tap my chest twice with my right hand. “We’re going to fix it,” I sign.
I haven’t yet moved away from him when his mouse suddenly jumps out of his pocket and onto my arm. It scurries up to my shoulder before perching there.
Years on the warfront, ready for any Ghost’s attack—and yet I still suck my breath in sharply and jump back, shaking my arm wildly. The mouse lets out an undignified squeak as it goes flying and lands on the ground. It scampers up Red’s body and shoves itself firmly back in the pocket, its tailless bottom poking out from the top.
Red laughs—a rich, guttural sound—and I hate that I immediately want to hear it again. He only smiles enough to lift the edges of his lips a bit, but it brightens his entire face. “Talin,” he signs at me. “Red,” he signs the letters and points at himself. “Friend,” he signs down at the mouse before petting its head.
He has a sense of humor. Wonderful. My skin is still crawling from the feeling of tiny feet running up my arm, and I shudder, glaring daggers at the creature’s little head that now pokes out to stare at me.
“Next time,” I sign at Red angrily, then drag a finger across my throat.
Red just shrugs and pats the mouse’s head again. “No,” he signs back, amusement lingering on his lips. Then he says something to me in Karenese, knowing full well that I can’t understand him, and walks on, forcing me to follow him instead of the other way around.
My annoyance flips into outright anger. I wonder how much trouble I’d rile up if I simply killed him now, just stuck a dagger in his back and let myself be done with him, or even just stabbed his foot so that he has to hobble the rest of the way. I fantasize about it until we’ve passed by the arena’s entrance, where I finally abandon the thought in the presence of so many others.
Without a cloud in the sky, the stadium looks blindingly bright, and I have to shield my eyes from the light. I don’t go into the arena. No need to put my punishment on full display to my fellow Strikers if I can delay it a little longer. Instead, I head toward the rows of workshops located next to the arena, where Adena’s shop sits.
I don’t know what this area used to be. A park, maybe. The workshops were built from the ground up without any foundation from the Early Ones, and they came up haphazardly, so that each workshop crowds tightly beside the next, all of them forming a snake of buildings folded over and over into a rectangular area we all call the Grid. Every shop is a different size. One shop showcases three enormous, unfinished catapults built from wood and steel looming several stories high. On top of them sit metalworkers fitting giant hinges onto the shoulders. Other shops specialize in our armor, a lattice of chains so finely made that they look like a silver shirt underneath our vests. These stores are narrow and brightly lit with dozens of torches, the metallic shirts stretched out flat against weaving looms. Still others are workshops crafting the blades we use or melting down steel from broken weapons to recycle into bullets. Some are even used as research areas, where v
arious combinations of herbs, woods, and metals are tested and retested against vials of Ghost blood to see if any of them can be used as a deterrent against the creatures.
During the day, as it is now, the area is usually filled with bustling workers in goggles and heavy gloves and vests to protect them at their stations. But as the war has worn on and our supplies have dwindled, some workers shutter their stations and use the space to drink instead. It has caught on—and now, at night, the Grid turns into a place where Strikers and metalworkers alike, dejected from a losing war and dead friends, come to horse around, drinking and playing with the stoves, daring one another to mad antics out in the test yard.
Adena’s workshop sits on the last row, looking out across the acres of yellowing land they use to test everything designed in the workshops. I don’t expect to see her when I reach the shop—I’d been hoping that she would have a tool on her wall that I can use to shorten Red’s chains.
But when I arrive, she’s here, goggles and mask on, hair strapped back, her dark skin illuminated by the sparks coming off a small steel cylinder she’s welding. In her hand is a metal rod connected to a furnace, and at the end of the rod is a concentrated spout of fire so hot it looks blue.
As always, my eyes wander around the rest of the shop. One entire wall is dedicated to tools of every shape and size, knives and hammers and tongs, needles so thin I can barely see them, curling lengths of metal that I wouldn’t begin to know how to use. Against another wall are four stoves, all lined up in a row. Every spare inch of the other walls is covered in carefully sketched schematics and scribbled notes, as well as shelves of glass jars containing her collection of anything she’s found interesting—which is everything. Unusual feathers. Bird bones. Colorful stones. A perfect spiral of shell. Chips of wood. Dried grasses and flowers. This would almost be a problem, Adena’s obsessive collecting, if she didn’t organize it all so neatly. Instead, everything just looks like an extension of her eternally curious mind.
Standing not far from Adena now is Jeran, his arms folded, as he watches her. At the sound of our approach, he looks up at us. His eyes jump to Red. “Oh!” he says, then glances nervously at Adena. “I thought you’d both be in the arena.”
“Same with you two,” I sign back.
Adena pulls her mask back and goggles up, stares at me, and then looks down again as if she’d never noticed us.
We all stand there for an awkward moment, Jeran glancing uncertainly between Red and me, Red looking around the workshop with a wary expression, me staring at Adena and trying to figure out what to tell her. Adena, pointedly ignoring us.
Finally, I reach out and tap her gently on her shoulder.
Adena’s face jerks up, her white-hot-flame rod still in her hand. We all startle back from its heat. Even Red blinks.
“What do you want?” she says to me in a clipped voice.
I give her an apologetic look and nod at Red’s chains. “Something to shorten this,” I reply. “I can’t function if he’s stumbling on this all day. I was wondering if you could help.”
Adena glares at me, gesturing haphazardly with the burner. “You didn’t know I’d be here. You came over hoping I’d be gone, so that you could take one of my tools and do it yourself.”
I give her a guilty look. “Maybe?”
Adena points the flame at Red, who blinks at her. “Sneaking around my shop. For him. My tools.”
“Talin just wanted to make his life easier,” Jeran tells her, an attempt to defend me.
“Would’ve been easiest if she’d just let this one die,” Adena says to Red without flinching. When he narrows his eyes at her, she sticks her chin up at him, daring him to react. “You would’ve done him a favor, Talin. At least he wouldn’t have to be paraded around like this, trying to understand what everyone’s saying about him.”
She goes back to her work, leaving me standing there without knowing what else to do.
Jeran steps closer to me and puts a gentle hand on my arm. “Why don’t I ask Red if he wants to eat anything at the mess hall before practice starts?” As a hint, he glances pointedly in Adena’s direction before looking back at me. My chance to patch things up.
I give Jeran a grateful nod, then unclip Red’s shackle from my wrist and look on as Jeran tries to make casual conversation with the prisoner. Red stares ominously at him, enough to make Jeran fidget, but at least his posture softens, knowing this boy is his only link to his surroundings.
As Jeran starts asking him about his favorite foods, I approach Adena. She still doesn’t look at me, but at least she doesn’t move away. I look on, watching her shape the soft metal into a small cylinder before turning off the flame and refining its edges.
“He reminded me of Corian,” I tell her after a beat. “It was the way he swept his hands across the arena floor.”
Adena is silent for a while, forcing all her concentration onto her work. The clink of metal against metal rings in the room. There’s a furrow between her thick brows that always appears when she’s going between two emotions—like when the Firstblade handed her the gold threaded cord that graduated her to Striker but didn’t give one to her friend, and when she chose Jeran as her Shield after her brother’s death.
“I didn’t mean it, you know,” I add, hesitating, and then, “I didn’t think about how it would affect you. I should have.”
Adena stops hammering at the steel cylinder long enough to glance up at me. “You’re as bad as Corian,” she mutters at me, shaking her head. “Your mother agrees.”
“You talk to my mother about me?”
“Of course I do, every time I stop by her place.”
I think of the housewares that Adena has begun making lately out of scrap metal and the collection of them growing in my mother’s kitchen. It’s not until now that I realize how frequent her visits must be.
“Like when you gave water to that recruit who got in a fight with a Striker in the arena,” Adena continues. “What was his name again? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was supposed to be punished and withheld food and drink, and there you were at midnight, sneaking him a flask.”
“What about you?” I remind her. “Remember when you spent all night wrapping bits of copper around every weapon you could find?”
After a few coincidences at the warfront, Adena had been convinced for a while that copper was a deterrent against Ghosts, that the metal repulsed them and kept them away. In her eagerness to protect us, she’d spent a sleepless, feverish night tinkering with every single one of our weapons, stringing copper wiring around their handles. It ended up not working, of course. But I’ve never forgotten that night—the hope in her eyes that she might have something to save us.
She shrugs grumpily and ignores my reference. “You’re lucky the Firstblade went easy on you.” As usual, though, the anger is already seeping from her gaze. “I thought he was going to cut you down right there in front of us all.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t make saving Federation soldiers a habit.”
Adena glances skeptically at me, then takes a pair of pincers and sinks the steel cylinder into a bucket of cold water. It hisses, steam obscuring the air between us. Adena takes out the cylinder and hands it to me.
“For your blades,” she says.
I take the cooled cylinder curiously. “Why?”
Adena reaches over and yanks out both of my swords. She twirls one expertly, then attaches the cylinder to the end of one hilt. It fits so neatly that I wonder if she’d stolen my blades in my sleep just to measure them properly. Then she takes the second sword’s hilt and fits it into the cylinder’s other side. It snaps neatly into place, transforming my swords into a double-ended weapon.
Adena hefts it twice and gives me a confident nod, her eyes shining. “Twist once to take it apart,” she says, doing it. The swords separate again.
“You were doing this for me?” I ask her as I take back my weapons. “I thought you were angry.”
“I can be both. I told
you I’d make you one, didn’t I?”
She doesn’t mention her brother once. Maybe it’s for the best, not to acknowledge the memory of his death right now. But I understand all the same, and I bow my head once. “Thank you.”
Adena glares at where Jeran and Red have stepped right outside her workshop to talk. “Don’t thank me yet. I still don’t know about your new companion.”
Suddenly, we both hear the Firstblade’s voice outside, addressing Jeran.
Adena shoots me a startled look. “I didn’t think today was an inspection day in the Grid.” Then she steps away from me and darts outside. I follow her.
We come face-to-face with Aramin, standing with his hands tucked behind his back. Beside him is Jeran’s father, Senator Barrow Wen Terra, and older brother, Senator Gabrien An Terra.
I look quickly at Jeran. The easy attitude he’d had moments earlier has vanished, and his face is drained of blood. He looks down, away from these two Senators who are his family, pretending to be fascinated by the samples of glass that a metalworker across the path is laying out across a table. Everything about his posture has stiffened. His father, Senator Barrow, looks at him without much of an expression, but even then, I can feel the tension between them crackling in the air like a living thing. Jeran speaks so rarely about him that I sometimes forget his position.
But I never forget that this man exists. The bruises on Jeran’s arms always remind me.
“Training to be a metalworker now, Jeran?” he says to his son.
Jeran doesn’t dare look up. “No, sir,” he replies, anxiety laced through his words. “I’m only waiting for my Shield.”
His father’s eyes scan him slowly, from head to toe, before finally settling on his eyes. “Waiting on others, your specialty,” he says mildly. “Just like your mother.”
Jeran says nothing to that. All of his cheery air has vanished under the scrutiny of his father and brother. My attention turns to Gabrien. He looks like the taller, crueler version: handsome where Jeran is beautiful, with wider shoulders and longer legs; his robes elegantly cut to resemble their father’s Senate coat; his face similar to Jeran’s but chiseled into something made out of stone.
