Skyhunter

by Marie Lu

  So it has finally come to this. The Speaker looks around the room, surveying the expressions of the other Senators and the Firstblade. They are murmuring to each other, but I can see the glint of hope in their eyes. The Speaker observes this for a moment, hesitating, then turns back to me.

  “Very well,” he grumbles reluctantly. He nods at Adena. “You have my permission to study this Skyhunter, but know that you’ll be watched very closely. Report everything back to me, and leave nothing out. Do you understand?”

  We all lower our heads to him. The marble floor beneath me glints cold in the evening light. Beside me, Red does the same. Jeran is right. The Speaker sees Red mostly as a weapon—I catch the glint in his eyes over the possibility that we might win this war. But even now, his distrust of me is woven into the air, that somehow this is all my elaborate ruse to take Mara down from the inside. I could hear it in his voice, the belief that we are not going to figure out what the Federation did to Red, and even if we could, we won’t do it in time, not before the Federation sends their soldiers and Ghosts crashing through our walls.

  But it doesn’t matter what he believes. We have run out of options. And for the first time, that means that the Speaker of Mara will have to put his trust in a Basean rat.

  13

  Only three Striker patrols and the Firstblade are allowed to stay in apartments on the National Plaza’s grounds. Our training in silence and speed means we make good bodyguards, and so these Strikers act as the Senate’s, tasked to protect them in a rotating shift whenever they aren’t training at the arena.

  I’ve only ever seen the apartments as a set of distant towers along one side of the Plaza, fortified on all sides by steel beams pulled from the Early Ones’ ruins. It never occurred to me that I’d now be setting foot inside one—let alone living in here, and at the personal order of the Speaker, no less.

  Adena and Jeran take the first apartment in our new corridor, while Red and I head for the one at the end of the hall. We step into a spectacular room, opulent far beyond anything I could have imagined. The walls are creamy white and lined with ornate marble pillars that stretch up to high ceilings. Morning light slants bright across a black-and-white-marbled floor. Each of the windows stretches from top to bottom and is bordered by white curtains. Furniture carved with curling details decorates our shared central room, while our two bedchambers branch off in opposite halls.

  I let out a breath at the sight. This place is bigger than my mother’s entire street in the Outer City.

  Red stops in front of the glass cabinets located on both ends of the main room. They’re weapons cabinets specifically designed for our Striker equipment, with secure slots for each of our blades and daggers and guns.

  Fancy, I tell him through our link.

  Unnecessary, he responds.

  For what you’re about to do? I raise an eyebrow at him. This is the least they could offer.

  He doesn’t answer, and when I glance at him again, he’s already stooped down to appreciate the intricate construction of the cabinet. I just roll my eyes, a smile forcing its way onto my lips.

  We each pick one of the bedroom halls to inspect, then pass each other by to look at the other. One of the rooms is noticeably larger, with a writing desk in one corner and a closet large enough to be its own room.

  I want the bigger bedchamber, Red says through our link, his arms crossed as we stand together in the second one.

  I scowl at him. How chivalrous of you.

  What does that mean?

  I don’t bother trying to explain. Besides, I add, I’m the veteran.

  I lived in a dungeon for a month.

  I have more clothes than you.

  I’m the one who got us these apartments. He gives me something that he seems to think resembles a smile. Also, I’m larger. I need more space.

  I throw my hands up. Fine.

  You and Adena are always doing that with your hands. Is that a Maran thing?

  I glare at him before stepping out of the bedchamber and leaving him to settle in. I walk back to my side of the apartment and into my own room, where I open my smaller closet.

  Inside hangs a new uniform tailored specifically for me. I stare at it for a moment, my smile fading, and pull down the new coat. I hold it out before me, noting its perfect drape down to my knees and the sleek way it falls against my shoulders.

  Red is, no doubt, doing the same in his bedroom, admiring his new uniform just as I am. Or perhaps he isn’t—I realize I don’t know exactly how he feels about officially becoming a Striker in our forces, especially when the Strikers had almost sentenced him to death just a few short weeks earlier.

  Tentatively, I reach out to him through our link, a mental exercise as instinctive as squinting to see something more clearly, in an attempt to find out what he’s thinking. As usual, there’s a trickle of his emotions between us, accompanied by the dull, ever-present thud of his heart pressing against my mind.

  Then I realize that the emotion I’m sensing from him is dread. It’s something so heavy that I wince slightly at the weight it brings. I turn away from my closet and leave my bedroom to check on him.

  When I step into the living room, Red is standing in front of the windows, his posture so stiff that he looks frozen solidly in place. Now the tension pours out of him in waves, violent and terrified, each hitting the shoreline of my mind like a nightmare repeating itself. I step over to him to see what’s caught his attention. Down below, in the plaza outside the National Hall’s front gates, other Strikers are gathered in loose groups on their way back from the training arena. Some of them look up in the direction of our new apartments, unsmiling.

  Red doesn’t acknowledge my presence. Nothing about him resembles the young man I’d seen just moments earlier, who had admired the cabinets and joked with me about which bedroom he wanted. Gone is his relaxed expression. I follow his gaze, puzzled, until I realize that he’s not staring at the scene outside but at the window itself. At the glass.

  Red? I think at him, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t seem to be aware of anything except for the windowpane. On instinct, I reach out to him. My hand touches his arm, and when he doesn’t react, I close my fingers around his elbow and squeeze gently. Red, I try again.

  The bond between us trembles, the disturbed surface of a pond.

  All of a sudden, a flash of bright light blankets my mind. The apartment around me vanishes.

  In its place appears a room around us made entirely of glass, set somewhere in a vast, dark chamber. I’m seeing the scene as if I were Red himself, strapped facedown on a cold metal table with a menagerie of metal instruments hovering over me. A cold, bright light overhead makes me squint every time I try to angle my head up.

  This is one of his memories.

  I swallow hard at the sight. When he looks at the reflection of himself against the glass, I can see portions of his arms and legs that have been cut neatly open, and two long shafts of steel being grafted into his back. A small portion of the brand on his upper chest is visible when he cranes his neck. The brand appears freshly done, the skin there a blistered, bloody red. His blood drips in lines from the sides of the table and stains the floor beneath him. I stare down at the near-perfect circles of blood as they expand, threatening to join with one another.

  Red seems delirious in his half sleep, trembling and sweating from pain. I can even feel a faint spasm of that long-ago agony lancing through my own limbs.

  Before him stands Constantine Tyrus, Premier of the Federation, along with a woman wearing glasses that catch the glare of light.

  “I’m already giving him as much medication to dull his pain as he can take,” she says to the Premier.

  “He won’t survive,” Constantine responds in his rasp, his hands folded behind his back. “Give him something else.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Give him a reason, then,” the Premier interrupts her, impatience lacing the edge of his words. “You’re my Chief Architec
t. You figure it out.” He casts Red a concerned frown before stepping around the woman and leaving the room.

  The woman turns to look at Red with an aggrieved expression. “Is there anything else I can give you to make you hold on?” she asks him.

  Red’s parched lips part. He’s obviously younger in the glass’s reflection, but the shadows under his eyes make him look like an old, weathered soul. “My sister,” he whispers. “My father.”

  The woman nods, turns toward the door, and hesitates. Then, in a quieter voice, she says over her shoulder, “I hope you’ll find a way to forgive me someday, for what I’ve done to you. I hope you know that everything you’ve ever done to protect your family, I’m doing to protect mine. My little boy. My husband.” She swallows. “So, I’m begging you, cooperate with the Premier. If you do well, I do well, and my family remains untouched.”

  Red doesn’t respond, and after a guilty silence, the woman called the Chief Architect leaves.

  Sometime later, a small figure approaches the other side of the glass wall. She stares at Red in fright. Her gaze wanders to Red’s destroyed back, and she starts to cry.

  “Laeni,” Red whispers. A current of joy and terror rushes through him now—joy, at the sight of her, and terror, for what they might do to her. I notice a mouse sitting on her shoulder, watching the scene with its beady eyes. Red’s old words come back to me. My sister had a mouse for a pet.

  This is her.

  The little girl presses her hands against the glass. “Red,” she replies, “what are they doing to you?” Her voice is clear, small, and anguished.

  “I’m okay,” Red says, reaching his hand out in an attempt to touch the glass too. He tries to smile. “It doesn’t hurt, I promise. They’ve given me medicine.”

  Finally, when Laeni manages to compose herself, she says, “Papa’s here too. They’ve brought us both. They told us you can’t leave yet, that you’ll die. What can I do for you?”

  “Just stay,” Red replies. His eyes are closed now, and his lips move as if he’s counting his breaths, one second at a time. “Tell me a story and distract me.”

  Laeni glances nervously at the guards before she sits down outside the glass and takes out a well-worn book. She opens it to a page. “Shall I read you my favorite?”

  “Yes.”

  She clears her throat, then touches her finger to the page and scans the sentences right to left, the opposite of how Marans read. “A hall with no end. A day to live. A million ways to bridge the rift,” she begins.

  As rapidly as it came, the vision of his memory scatters in a burst of light—and I’m standing back in our new apartment, with sunbeams slanting against the floor and tall white curtains framing the windows and floors marbled black and white.

  I blink, disoriented, and release his arm. Before me, Red has his hand pressed against the window’s glass, the same way he’d attempted to in the vision. My heart races; my mind whirls again and again through the grotesque moment I’d witnessed.

  Red glances at me, the glint in his eyes terrified. You saw it, he tells me.

  There’s nothing I need to say to him. I know it was a memory of him acquiring the wings on his back, the weapons that ultimately turned him into a Skyhunter.

  All I can do is nod.

  The terror in his eyes vanishes in a flash. His eyes shutter, and he takes a step away from the window, bringing his hand back down to his side. I shouldn’t have let her see me like that, he says before he shoves past me.

  I watch him as he heads down one of the halls toward his bedchamber. Out of all of us involved in this mission to defeat the Federation, Red is the only one who will head back into a nightmare he’d experienced from the inside, a world so horrifying that he’d wanted to kill himself in order to escape its trauma.

  And yet, he’s still here. Still trying to help us.

  A part of me wants to let him go and leave him alone. But he is no longer just a prisoner of war under my guard. He is my Shield, an official Striker wearing the sapphire coat, and that means I am to be here for him, I am to train with him in both mind and body, and that when we next fight together at the warfront, he and I will know the other’s movements as surely as we know our own limbs.

  More than that, I just don’t want to see him like this.

  So I find myself following him down the hall to the bedchamber, where he’s pulling off his new Striker coat to hang in the closet. There, I lean against the doorframe.

  He glares at me. What do you want?

  I don’t ask him about what had flashed through his—and my—mind. You’re in my room, I think instead, nodding at the smaller space.

  Red pauses, realizing his mistake.

  Unless you want me to take the bigger chamber, I add.

  What do you care, anyway? he mutters through our bond as he grabs his coat out of the closet again.

  I stop before him, forcing him to look me in the eyes.

  You’re my Shield, and I am yours, I tell him. It means I always care about everything related to you. It means we will spend every waking hour together, that I will show you how I fight and how I move, and that you will show me the same. It means you teaching me more about this bond. I pause to point between us. It means we are eternal companions, until death.

  I don’t like companions, he replies, an audible growl in his throat accompanying his words.

  There he goes again with the things he dislikes. This time, though, I sense fear behind it, fear of growing close to someone he could lose. Fear of what the future might bring.

  Tomorrow, I continue. We’ll train. We’ll start learning—really learning—about what links us. We’ll take it one step at a time. But I’ll always be there. I meet his gaze with my steady one. I’ll see you in the morning. I promise.

  Red stares at me, annoyance on his face. Still, there is a sense of something new in the link that joins us—some kind of trust, the building of a bridge. Then he turns away and heads off to his own bedchamber, his shoulders suddenly hunched in exhaustion.

  It is only then that something in my memory clicks into place with searing clarity. The brand on Red’s chest, the one I’d puzzled over from the first moment he appeared in the arena. It is the same symbol emblazoned on the sleeves of the soldiers that had invaded my town in Basea, the troops specifically assigned to massacre us. It is the same symbol as the one worn by the young soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot me.

  And it is not just the symbol that is the same. It is his eyes. It is his face. Different now, as a grown man and as an experiment of the Federation, but still him. Now I suddenly understand why I’d felt so compelled to save him in the arena. The real reason.

  Red is that twelve-year-old boy. The same one who had held the gun and failed to fire. The same young soldier from that night.

  14

  We’re quiet around each other for the rest of the evening.

  The realization that Red had been one of the young soldiers assigned to invade Basea, that he had been the one standing over me the night my mother and I fled, fills me with a nausea that keeps me from eating dinner. All I can do is sit across from him at the cafeteria, my stomach churning and churning, the memory of the boy with the gun clearer now.

  The symbol. His face.

  Jeran and Adena puzzle over our silence, but they occupy themselves with their own talk, chalking up our tension to our usual discord.

  Red ignores me too, likely because of the strange incident between us in our living room. For the first time since our minds linked, I can sense him resisting the open channel between us, the flow of his thoughts bundled tight and hostile, as if he wished I could not sense them. I do the same unconsciously, holding back until my insides feel coiled tight as a snake.

  When we finally arrive back to our apartment, we each head for our bedrooms without a backward glance.

  I turn restlessly in the darkness, struggling to sleep. Scenes from that night in Basea so long ago play endlessly in my mind, moments that h
ad once been muddy now cleared. The twelve-year-old Red that I’d seen then, young and frightened, had clearly not been experimented on yet—no metal bands on his back; no wings; no strange, artificial skin. How did that version of him then become the boy I saw in his memory, lying trembling in the glass chamber?

  Would Red have fired his gun at me that night if he’d been given more time? Why didn’t he shoot? What happened to him after he refused to kill me? Did they punish him? He clearly doesn’t remember me as a child—I’ve felt no sense of familiarity from him through our link. Does that mean, then, that he’s seen so many victims of the Federation that we are all just a blur of faces to him? Before he’d been confronted with the idea of killing a child that night, had he killed any innocent people? My people?

  Who had I saved? What have I done?

  I spin and spin on these questions until I feel ill from them. What little I’d eaten for dinner now threatens to come up, but I force myself to slow my breathing, to concentrate on one thought at a time—the weak moonlight in my room, the curves of my blanket—until my stomach steadies. But my troubled thoughts continue as I finally drift off into sleep, my mind twisting them into a nightmare.

  I am eight and my mother is facing the boy soldier again, her hand still gripping my arm tightly. The boy stares back at us with his gun pointed straight at my chest. I can see him willing himself to fire it, then failing, again and again. Now, in my dream, I can recognize that everything about him is Red, even though different from age and experimentation. His hair is light brown, without the strange metallic sheen it now has. His eyes are dark and wide, his face narrower and body leaner. His expression is less haunted, more frightened. The brand marring his chest isn’t there yet; the same double-crescent insignia is emblazoned only on his sleeve.

  He doesn’t fire the gun. Then I’m fleeing with my mother and not looking back, not caring what happens to the boy or whether he will chase us. We run and run past burning homes on familiar streets, the roar of explosions and screaming. My mind obscures the worst of the horrors, but I know they’re happening all around me—Federations soldiers doing unspeakable things to people I know.