by Marie Lu
It’s Red.
Except he is almost unrecognizable.
He crouches right behind me, close enough that his shoulder brushes mine. I have no idea how he reached me this quickly. His once-dark eyes now glow such a bright silver white that I can see neither pupil nor iris. Just light and fury. A low, inhuman growl rumbles in the back of his throat, and his teeth are bared, flashing a ferocious white.
And from his back … arch a pair of enormous black wings formed from blades of steel. They are the most massive things I’ve ever seen, easily forty feet wide, spread to form a protective shield on either side of us.
In ancient stories we salvaged from the Early Ones, there are mentions of figures called angels. They were mythical, winged humans, an order of armored supernatural beings that served some almighty god. Creatures with the power to both protect mankind and rain down destruction. Above all, the Early Ones seemed to believe in them as guardians. Warriors. Beings of incredible beauty, meant to be loved and feared.
It is the first thought that comes to me now. An angel of death.
For an instant, I think Red is finally going to reveal his true Federation nature. He is going to kill me.
Then I realize his face is turned toward the Ghosts, and his expression is that of sheer hatred. He hovers over me in a protective stance. I am a Striker, trained never to freeze in combat like a deer lost in its own panic—but now I do, unsure what I’m witnessing. Who do I defend myself from? The Ghosts, or him? Is he about to help me? With a jolt of terror, I finally remember what he said the Federation called him.
Skyhunter.
Their experiment. Their weapon of war.
He attacks.
I’ve trained with the most elite warriors of Mara since I was twelve years old. I have seen Strikers and soldiers alike cut down their enemies without mercy. I am not naïve about what we are capable of doing to one another in war.
But never in my life have I seen an attack like what he unleashes.
He moves like a bolt of lightning. I can barely see him through the blur of motion. The force of him launching forward at the Ghosts is so strong that the wind knocks me to my knees. The black blades of his enormous wings slice clean through the nearest Ghost as if it were made of soft clay, cutting the creature into bloody ribbons of flesh. He twists and shears through a second. A third. The Ghosts, riled up, scream and turn toward him, but they barely have time to blink before he cuts through them again. The tang of blood fills the air.
A Ghost towering a dozen feet high lunges at him. It doesn’t even have the chance to open its jaws before he pushes his wings down. He surges into the air and spins. His wings expand to its terrifying span and then cut straight into the Ghost.
Like it’s made of nothing. Like it’s a ghost of the air.
He decapitates it and shreds the body into pieces. Across the battlefield, he soars and dips, expanding his wings and then contracting them like a falcon on the hunt, diving through packs of Ghosts, destroying them, littering the field with their blood. Federation soldiers in his way are slaughtered like sheep. Their terrified screams reach my ears.
I find my feet again. As Red—the Skyhunter—continues his rampage, I leap up and pull out my blades. They flash through the air, cutting, slicing, finding new life as I follow his path and make my way through enemy lines. A strange fervor hums through me. Miraculously, I can see Red scattering the Federation’s forces, splitting their formations and sending them fleeing in confused clusters, right into the paths of our waiting soldiers and Strikers.
My body moves in a rhythm of its own, following the instincts that come with years of training. I fight my way back to where Adena and Jeran are pushing against a tide of Federation soldiers. The soldiers shrink away, knowing the reputation that comes with our sapphire coats, but Adena is in the throes of battle frenzy, her eyes alight with the fire of potential victory. Beside her, Jeran moves in sync with her every attack, his jaw clenched and movements lithe.
I can feel the tide of change in our moods. Before us, we cut through their troops like a scythe through wheat. The Ghosts are few now. The ones left are being called to retreat. A short distance from us, I see Red dive into a battalion of Federation soldiers. Blood follows in his wake.
And then I hear it. The horn echoes across the valley, the Federation’s call to stand down.
A roar goes up from our soldiers. New strength rushes through my veins, and I throw myself into every cut and thrust, every spin and crouch. Their soldiers are retreating. Our men pursue them.
In the midst of our wild joy, I pause to see Red crouched in the middle of a bloodstained field. My elation trembles.
He is surrounded by our own soldiers, but he bares his teeth at any who attempt to come close to him. His eyes are still drowned in that silver-white light, so that there is no expression on him except pure rage. His fingers claw long lines into the dirt. His giant wings drip with blood. When he shifts, those wings move with him. The soldiers around him dart away like a school of fish, only to come back with their raised spears.
“You have to stop him,” Jeran says, materializing silently beside me. His face is streaked with blood and dirt, and in this fiery night, it’s hard to see the softhearted boy I know so well. “They’re trying to rein him in. I don’t think he can tell that they’re Marans.”
He’s going to kill them. I break into a run, then slow as I reach the circle of soldiers surrounding him. His eyes dart from silhouette to silhouette, still glowing with white-hot fury. I don’t know how much of them he can see. Perhaps everything looks like a smear of monsters to him.
There is no Striker training for this. No precedent I can draw on for pulling your Shield out of a trance. He hasn’t known me long enough to recognize my gestures and habits. He might not even be able to recognize me if I approach him.
But I still turn toward Red and start to take steady steps in his direction. His glowing eyes snap to my moving figure. A low snarl comes from his throat, and his crouch tightens.
“Red,” I sign to him. I pause, point to myself and sign, “Talin.” Then, “Friend.”
The other soldiers back away at my approach, their eyes wide. I know they think this is suicide. They may be right.
I stop again to repeat the signs I’d once taught him. “Red. Talin. Friend.”
My head feels light. I barely know this prisoner. But I have given him my oath. He has saved my life, there by the ruins, when the Ghosts closed in and I knew all might be lost. I am sworn, until death parts us, to protect him, to lay down my life for him, to be there when he needs me. So I continue on. My hands are empty of weapons. The world around me seems to still and slow.
He watches me, his fingers digging against the earth. But he doesn’t move. His wings arc black against the night sky.
I step closer and closer, until finally I stop a mere foot away from his crouched figure.
Everything about him screams of death. But my heart is steady, and I don’t feel afraid. I take a knee before him, completely vulnerable to his steel wings, then remove my glove and press my hand gently against his tightened fist on the ground. His skin feels hot enough to burn.
His eyes turn narrower. He looks like he’s going to attack.
“It’s me,” I sign to him, knowing he can’t understand me, knowing I have no language I can use to speak to him. But I keep trying. “You can come back now.”
He stares at me with his burning eyes. I wait for him to strike me, for those bladed wings to cut into my flesh. But he stays still.
“You can come back now,” I sign again, gentler.
Then, gradually, the glow of his eyes begins to fade. His dark irises come back into view. For the first time, I realize that they are not black at all, but a deep blue, slashed with metallic gray. His wings droop, still dripping scarlet, their metal tips dragging lines against the dirt as they start to fold into themselves. Slowly, slowly, his posture loosens. As his wings retract entirely, slicing more lines into the shr
edded back of his coat, he blinks once, twice, then meets my gaze directly.
The light of rage fades from his eyes. He recognizes me.
Suddenly, his hands come up toward my face. Before I can stop him, he presses his palms against my cheeks and pulls me forward, so that my forehead touches his. His eyes close.
I try to pull away, but he holds us firmly together, and my body feels frozen in place, locked with his in an unbreakable grip.
A searing brightness in my head engulfs everything.
I wince and squeeze my eyes shut—but it feels like it’s coming from within me, this overwhelming light. Pain lances through my body. The brightness feels white hot, so harsh that it’s burning a hole through my mind. I gasp, trembling. It floods every inch of me before it settles into a narrow band that links me with him.
And all of a sudden, I witness a blur of landscapes. The glass walls of a room. A woman in a white coat and shining glasses, leaning over me while I’m strapped to a strange table draped in cloth. A lush garden with a man and a girl. A dense, foreign mass of buildings, all built in a series of circles. The Federation. A forest rushing around me as I run desperately through the trees, my throat dry with fear. And a grief so deep and yawning that it threatens to engulf my entire being.
Somehow, I know these are Red’s memories. His thoughts. His emotions.
As if my mind has been cut open and flooded with glasslike clarity.
Red releases me. The painful brightness fades in an instant, replaced by what feels like the tug of a string connecting me with him.
What has happened between us?
I stumble backward. When I glance up, I see the Premier’s horse silhouetted against the top of the hill, his figure turned in our direction. The heat from the flames distort the air around him, framing him in a halo of gold. He knows now that we have his weapon.
Red falters in exhaustion, then collapses to the ground. I’m at his side in a second. As the other soldiers step cautiously forward, I pull his head into my arms and hold him there. His eyes are closed. When I look up again to where the Premier had been, he’s gone.
The strange link between Red and me pulses like a living thing. And as I stare at his blood-streaked face, I know. I know as surely as I can smell the sting of war in the air, as surely as the fire roars against the night. The Firstblade’s words from days earlier come back to me now: We need a miracle.
He is it.
The miracle.
He is the weapon we have been waiting for.
10
There are no cheers.
We may have forced the Federation to retreat, but nothing about this night is worth celebrating. We’ve lost two defense compounds. Our warfront has been pushed farther back. Our own defense compound is destroyed, the gates burned and blackened. The valley around us is littered with our dead.
I make my way into the fields where the main battle happened. Everyone is at work—black silhouettes fill the firelit night, clearing the space of their fallen friends. Blood has soaked deep into the earth, and the tang of its coppery smell hangs in the air like a cloud of death.
Nearby, two soldiers are holding down a Striker. Right away, I know what’s happened. The Striker has been bitten by a Ghost. She’s crying. Already her limbs are trembling with an unnatural strength.
My heart sits heavily in my chest as I watch the soldiers restraining her call for a Striker’s help.
I recognize Jeran and Adena as they head to the scene. Jeran’s slender figure is straight and unerring, his face grave with resolution. As he goes, he draws a sword with a single flourish. Adena walks in step beside him. The wounded Striker sees their long blue coats approach and starts to scramble furiously against the ground. She knows what comes next.
Jeran stops before her. For an instant, he bows his head and closes his eyes, bracing himself. Then he slashes his sword down in an arc.
It’s a mercifully precise strike. The injured Striker trembles once, every muscle tight, and then slumps against the ground. Jeran nods to the two who had held her down. He looks exhausted, far too young to be bearing this, and when he turns away, Adena holds out an arm to make sure he doesn’t fall.
I look down and help another Striker hoist a body into the wagon. Elsewhere, I can hear the Firstblade as he does a survey of our dead and injured, how much land we’ve ceded.
For a while, I lose myself in the work of clearing the fields. There are more who must be executed because they’ve been bitten by Ghosts, while others are given lethal doses of a tonic when it’s obvious that their wounds are too great to bear.
Finally, as the blackness of the night sky gives way to a pale gray, I see the Firstblade striding toward me. He nods when our eyes meet.
“Talin,” Aramin greets me, nodding toward the compound. His cheeks are streaked black with dried blood. “Your Shield is starting to stir. We can finish up out here. See to him.”
Red had been brought to the makeshift infirmary hours ago. For the first time, hearing the Firstblade call him my Shield feels less like a jest and more like a formal command. Binding us together.
I bow my head and tap my fist to my chest.
Aramin lifts his head and surveys the field, ultimately settling his gaze on the ravaged compound’s ramparts. “When he wakes up and starts to talk, tell me,” he finally says. “Everyone wants to understand what happened tonight.” He’s quiet for a moment, and I wonder if there’s an apology in that silence, his way of telling me that I was right to have saved Red’s life. Then he asks, “Did he mention anything to you about his abilities?”
I shake my head.
“I’ve never seen anyone fight like that in my life,” he mutters, and in this moment, he sounds less like the Firstblade and more like the fellow Striker we all used to train with. “He didn’t even look human.”
It’s the same thought I had when I watched Red cutting through the Ghosts like they were made of nothing. Still, I stop short of nodding in agreement. His expression when he finally snapped out of his rage, when he blinked up at me in confusion before collapsing. That was him, the boy inside the war machine.
“I’ll let you know when he’s up,” I sign, turning in the direction of the compound. “I’m not convinced he himself understands everything that happened.”
As I go, I can feel Aramin’s eyes on my back. He doesn’t trust Red. I’m not sure if I do, either.
The infirmary is actually the compound’s courtyard, now a mess of makeshift blankets lined up on the ground and ripped strips of cloth stained crimson. The low din of moans and sobs swirls around me.
Red is held in a separate room, a former officer’s quarters at the back of the infirmary. The first thing I notice when I walk in is that they have chains on him again. Shackles sit heavy on his wrists and ankles, anchored to weights even as he lies on his side, unconscious on a cot. It makes me wonder whether he’s done something in my absence that frightened the nurses.
I move without a sound to him. They’ve removed his ruined coat so that he lies in his tunic, the sleeves rolled up, the back of it cut up from his wings expanding and retracting on the battlefield. Now those wings are completely retracted into two slender strips of metal running flat against his back. He moves in a restless sleep, his fingers twitching slightly, his eyes shifting beneath their lids. His lashes rest long and dark against his cheeks. His hair, dark and tangled, fans out in a halo on the floor. A sheen of sweat gleams wherever his real skin is exposed, but he’s shivering enough to make his chains clink.
Here, he doesn’t look like the Skyhunter, the weapon I’d seen sweeping the skies, raining death down on any near him. He doesn’t even look like the cold, suspicious prisoner I’d first met in the arena. He looks young and very human, in danger of breaking if bent too far.
I kneel beside him, then remove my coat. It’s bloodstained, but at least it’s warm. I drape it over his trembling body. As I do, my hand accidentally brushes against the skin of his neck.
He’s
burning with fever. I lift my hand, then tentatively touch his shoulder, where the black armor begins. Instantly, I jerk away. It feels so hot that it could scald me. In fact, when I look down at my finger, I see a red mark, as if I’d just pressed it against the stove in my mother’s home.
I stare at Red’s unconscious form in disbelief. Heat like this feels as if it should burn skin—but he seems completely unaffected. I pull my coat off him, wondering if the fabric will catch fire. As I do, something shuffles in his shirt pocket, and moments later his mouse pokes its head out and scampers down his body onto the floor.
The sight of the creature makes me smile in surprise. Had this thing been with him during the entire battle, hanging on for dear life inside his pocket? A survivor. In spite of myself, I reach out to rub its head. It lets me, leaning into my touch with its eyes closed.
Our movements finally make Red stir. His eyes flutter open, and I find myself staring down at the silver slashes in his irises. He looks back, brows furrowed. The mouse rushes up into his pocket.
Immediately, the strange feeling of clarity rushes through my head again, like the sensation of focusing down a bright, narrow tunnel. I wince instinctively.
Red squints with the same expression.
What I’d felt on the battlefield. The fragments of my memory, the moment when he reached for me and I felt the sear of a bond between us, linking our minds together like a bridge.
He tries to get up. His shackles clank loudly. He yanks on his chains, pulling them taut—a panicked light suddenly appears in his eyes. To my surprise, I can feel a trickle of that panic through our link, as surely as if the emotion were mine, followed by a rush of fragmented thoughts. In them, I think I hear a word or two—but it all sounds like a cacophony of noise.
I reach out to touch his hand, then shake my head at him. He turns wild eyes on me.
“The Federation,” he breathes. “The Federation.” It’s all he can say, so he keeps repeating it at me, the words turning more urgent as he goes.
