Skyhunter

by Marie Lu

It sounds like a broken, ugly landscape, but in reality, I find the scrapyards one of the most beautiful places here.

  People in the Outer City scavenge in the scrapyards all the time. My mother and I certainly did. Most of the shanties are built using rusted metal sheets found here for their walls and roofs. My mother learned how to identify the strongest steel for resale, though, and with my help, we would haul the pieces to the gates of the Inner City’s wall and barter them to the Grid in exchange for money. I learned too how to crawl between the stacks of wreckage, my delicate fingers fishing for wire to strip from machinery and my body squeezing through dangerous narrows to find pieces valuable enough to sell.

  But as we draw closer this afternoon, I see that the scrapyard has been temporarily transformed into a betting stage. There is a crowd of Outer City folk here, all shouting up at a series of daredevil games in play.

  “What the hell is going on?” Adena asks me as we stop at the fencing to stare into the yard at the crowds.

  “The Scrapyard Circus,” I sign, pointing at the games set up.

  Someone has strung a series of wires high between two metal stacks, and now several are balancing their way precariously along the lines while people down below exchange coins and cheer them on. Elsewhere, people are competing over how far they can throw iron sewer caps or how accurately they can shoot down cans lined along the fence.

  They are makeshift games that change every time, a circus of spontaneous entertainment that pops up now and then and offers the populations out here something to distract them from their troubles for a night.

  “Is it safe for us to head in?” Jeran asks. “Should we wait?”

  I shake my head. “No less safe than any other time. People look happy enough.” Then I push my way in through the fence’s open gate.

  Red’s curiosity comes in through our bond, and when I look over at him, I see his head tilted up at the high-wire walkers, watching them wobble and hesitate as people down below shout encouragement. I remember staring up in awe at the competitors when I was small. I’ve seen people make it across on their first try; more often, I’ve witnessed people slip on the wires and go plummeting to the ground, hitting the sharp edges of protruding metal sheets along the way. The memory of the accidents makes me cringe, my muscles tense as I will the current walkers to make it across.

  Red looks at me. Did you ever try?

  I shake my head. My mother did. She never let me. But the circus is good for distracting others while you dig for parts in the piles.

  “How do you know where to find magnesium?” Adena asks as I lead us away from the main festivities toward the back of the scrapyard, where the piles of metal cast long, quiet shadows across the land.

  I point at the stacks. Magnesium was something I occasionally searched for as a child. Metalworkers in the Grid paid a good price for it because they liked mixing it with steel and iron. It’s lightweight, good for tools. You could fetch enough from even a small haul of magnesium to buy bread and flour from the markets to feed you for a week.

  “The Early Ones sometimes used it in their tools and machinery,” I explain as we reach the stacks. I reach into one of the piles and pull out what looks like a flat, rectangular machine. When I turn it over, exposing its innards, I can see that it’s already been salvaged hollow. I hold the object out to the others. “Look for similar ones that haven’t been taken apart.” Then I point out a massive cylinder of an ancient flying object. “They used them to fly once. You’ll find it sometimes in these hulls, although most have been stripped clean.” I turn my head up. “And the best, of course, will be up high, where fewer people can reach.”

  Adena and Jeran look somewhat lost for a moment, like they always do when I explain pieces of my past life to them. To their credit, they don’t question me.

  “How did you stay alive climbing these stacks as a child?” Adena grumbles instead as she starts moving her way up one of the stacks. Even trained in the footwork of a Striker, she’s unused to the way the unstable metal shifts and groans with every turn of her body.

  Farther up, though, Jeran is already hopping from stack to stack, nimble as a goat on the edge of a cliff, his face intent on the task before him.

  I wedge myself in at the same time Red regards me. He starts to unfurl his wings. I can carry you higher, he says.

  I hesitate, imagining the thought of being in his arms as he hoists me into the air. It would make the entire process faster, and if I’m being honest, I’ve wondered how it must feel to soar through the air the way he did on the field. Then the idea embarrasses me. It’s probably best not to draw that kind of attention out here, anyway. So I force myself to shake the idea off and frown at him.

  You take to the skies here, I tell him instead, nodding toward the crowds, and we might spend the rest of the afternoon trying to quell the panic. I point up to one of the stacks. Just watch for me. If you see any of us slip, feel free to rescue us.

  Red scowls. So I’m going to stay down here?

  You’re too heavy to climb these stacks, I tell him, then start making my way up the side of one.

  It’s been years since I’ve climbed stacks in the scrapyards, but the muscle memory of years spent here comes rushing back to me, and I find my footing as naturally as I always did—gingerly shifting my weight along the edge of a metal sheet until I find the stable spot, knowing where to hop to get to another stack, feeling the body of it move beneath me like a living thing. You had to make decisions quickly out here. I wasn’t the only child scavenging, but often I was the smallest. Other children formed roving gangs, teamed up to both take the best metal and beat down anyone else trying to prowl in the same areas. So I learned how to squeeze my body tightly between the stacks, how to hide myself inside hollowed-out carriages and rusted roofing.

  Later, I’d taken Corian here, taught him how to navigate the terrain. We’d chase each other through the stacks, hopping back and forth, me saving him on more than one occasion from crashing down to the ground. We practiced first by daylight, then by moonlight. The Firstblade considered the exercise beneath that befitting a Striker, that we didn’t belong in the shanties. But there was a reason why Corian and I had once been considered the most nimble pair in the forces, and the reason was this.

  The memory of his voice teasing me to find him in the stacks brings me up short. I stop midway through digging in the skeleton of a carriage, then close my eyes and try to steady my breathing. I can hear Corian’s laugh echoing around me, still feel him squeezing in beside me as he tried to wedge himself into the same hiding places I could find.

  Then the wave passes. I open my eyes. Down below, I catch a glimpse of Red pacing beside the stacks, unused to doing nothing. His usual frown stays on his face.

  Every day since his death, I have missed Corian so much that his absence feels like a wound in my side. Red could never replace that, no matter how long we end up knowing each other. Still, the longer I stare down at Red from the privacy of my vantage point, and the longer I feel the glimmer of thoughts through our link, the more curious I become about him. I find myself watching him the same way I used to watch Corian, in fascination over this human from a world so different from the one I was used to. In awe.

  He stops pacing for a moment and glances up in my direction. I duck down into the husk of the carriage, my heart suddenly pounding. It takes me another second to remember that he, too, can sense the emotions flowing from me to him. He’d probably felt my mixture of grief, pain, fascination, and curiosity. Probably noticed the way I was watching him in interest. And now he is aware of the wave of embarrassment hitting me too.

  I grit my teeth, irritated again at being forced to open my heart to this stranger and simultaneously ashamed because I’d been snooping on his feelings too. Through the bond, I can tell that he’s puzzled and even a bit bemused at my reactions, and trying to figure out exactly why I’m feeling such a wild jumble of things.

  Time to put an end to that. Everything in me want
s to look back out from the carriage to see whether or not he’s still looking up at me, but I force myself to turn my mind to something else. To the task at hand.

  Magnesium. Right.

  I let myself fall into the motions I used to do daily—find machines that haven’t yet been gutted, cut through their containers with shears and scrape through them until I find bright silver bits of magnesium, strip the metal out, toss it into my pockets. As I go, Red falls to the back of my mind. It isn’t until I’ve made my way through at least a few skeletons of carriages that I realize he’s stopped thinking about me too. I’m strangely disappointed.

  Soon my fingers are raw from the work. I stand up, stretch, and note the changing light. It must be late afternoon now, the hour right before sunset. In the near distance, I can hear Jeran calling out something to Adena and Adena’s answering laugh, while the circus continues in the front of the scrapyard. I look at my arms, satisfied with the small amount of magnesium I’ve collected, and let myself search the grounds for signs of Red.

  When I see him, I pause.

  He’s seated on the ground, his face turned slightly away, and his wings are out in full display, stretching dozens of feet to either side of himself. But he’s not in a state of fury this time. A gaggle of children have wandered away from the circus to cluster around him instead, squealing at the black steel blades of his wings and tugging on his hair to inspect the rough, metallic texture of the strands. He has folded his wings in such a way that the blades stack carefully, so when the children touch the feathers in curiosity, they don’t slice their hands. Standing in an arc some distance away from them are adults, all too timid to approach him and hanging back instead to whisper among themselves.

  My first reaction is annoyance that he’s completely disregarded my advice about keeping a low profile while in the scrapyard. But then I watch him tilt his head sideways to let a small girl play with his hair. When he shakes his head, she jumps back with a wide grin, giggling, before hurrying back to him to do it again. Red keeps his movements slow and careful as the children run around his wings and attempt to climb on top of their arches. His face is still, gentle. Joy pulses from him through our link, but underneath it is layered a level of grief so deep, the weight of it presses against my chest. And within those emotions, I see glimpses of a memory. It’s of a little girl with the same dark hair he once had, the sister who had been on the other side of the glass. Then she fades away, as if Red were too afraid to let her loose.

  Corian. When I look at this scene, all I see is my dead Shield. It is always the gentle ones I fear for the most, those willing to bare their hearts, who grieve for others and feel happy for others’ happiness. Corian had been that, and I had failed to protect him. I hadn’t thought of Red, alternately grouchy and teasing, as such a person—but here, watching him stay perfectly still as children climb all over him, as he stretches out a wing where a boy is dangling from the end and deposits him carefully back on the ground, I’m filled with the same sense I used to have with Corian. A wish that I could be like him. A fear that I will lose this person.

  I shake my head firmly. Red is not Corian. He never will be. And no matter what I’m witnessing right now, I have to remember that Red is still the boy soldier who had helped conquer Basea for the Federation, had been conscripted into fighting for the Federation as a child. I have to recall the light of murder on his face as he ripped through the Federation’s battalions without a single hesitation.

  Can you be kind and a killer? Can you be gentle and a weapon of war?

  By the time I climb back down from the stacks, Jeran is already waiting for us with a handful of magnesium chips, while Adena is gingerly making her way down a wobbly structure of leaning steel. By now, almost everyone has left behind the circus to watch Red make his slow movements, his majestic wings sweeping in slow arcs across the dirt.

  When Adena approaches us, she brightens at the sight of our stash. “Good enough, good enough,” she mutters, inspecting the quality of the metal. “I can work with this. Oh!”

  She’d been so busy with her gathering that she hadn’t noticed Red at all. Now, as she watches the way he treats the children, her rapid words fade away and her smile thins into a serious line. I know she must be thinking of her brother and the anger she’d first held against Red. But this sight has turned her quiet.

  All I can think about is how the Federation can transform people like this, with hearts and minds and thoughtful moments, into monsters. All I can remember is how little time we have to fight against their darkness snarling at our borders.

  * * *

  As night settles into place and we turn in the direction of my mother’s home, I cast a glance at Red. He’s quiet, but his mind roils, sending me fragments of thoughts—of the same little girl I’d seen in his previous memory, a woman watching him from a garden window, and a door, creaking open to allow in something terrible.

  I didn’t know you were so good around children, I finally tell him through our link.

  He gives me a small smile. My sister was much younger than me. I’m used to it.

  Your sister, Laeni. I think of the little girl from his nightmares. Was that her? I ask him, knowing he can tell what memory I’m referring to. You think about her a lot.

  Red doesn’t look at me and doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s a quiet voice in my head, full of sadness. Yes. And I do.

  I swallow, unable to keep my next question from going between our link. What happened to her?

  Red is silent for so long that, when he finally replies as we turn onto my mother’s street, his voice in my mind startles me. When he looks at me now, his eyes are filled with the most terrible weight in the world.

  The same thing that happened to my father, he tells me. They turned her into a Ghost. And I had to kill her.

  17

  Adena takes several vials of Red’s blood later that night, enough that it makes him weak. Even without that, though, he seems quieter than usual, and through our link, I sense the presence of memories that cloud his mind with fog.

  After we retire to bed, Red’s nightmares are no longer just shimmers in the darkness. No longer just a glimpse of humanity. No longer a portal into another world. This time, his nightmare materializes as a vision so clear that I feel like I’m living it.

  In the dream, he is dressed in a thin white shirt and pants and standing before a woman in a white coat, his young head bowed. He must be the same age that he was during the night of the Basean siege. I recognize the woman too. She keeps appearing in Red’s dreams, her face long and gaunt, lips thin and eyes framed by glasses.

  This time, I realize that they’re back in the glass room. “Do you know where you are, Redlen?” she asks him.

  He shakes his head, eyes wide. I can see the brand peeking out from under his shirt, except this time it looks freshly done, the wound still bloody and swollen. It’s the same double-crescent insignia that had been on his uniform sleeve during the invasion.

  “You’re in the Laboratory of Cardinia,” the woman tells him. Cardinia, I think, the name registering in my mind. The capital of the Federation. “Do you know why you were sent here?”

  Now Red is trembling, his lanky twelve-year-old frame bent like a willow. I can tell he knows exactly what she’s talking about, but the woman tells him again anyway, as if she feels sorry for him. “Soldiers of the Federation are to, above all, obey the command of their Premier. You are very young, Redlen, but that’s never an excuse to fail at your duty in battle. I heard that you were shadowing your captain in Sur Kama. He gave you a direct order to shoot, and you refused. Your hesitation cost him his life.” She sighs, sounding sad, and looks down at the floor. Then she asks him a fateful question. “Did you understand that it was a direct order?”

  Red hangs his head and nods quietly. “Yes, ma’am,” he murmurs.

  “Of course you did, because you deliberately disobeyed.”

  Red suddenly looks at her with an expression of
desperate intensity. “I didn’t mean to. Can you please help me get an audience with General Caitoman again? I’m not ready to go. Is my sister all right? My father? I…”

  The woman gives him such a look of pity, of deep understanding, that I immediately wonder who she had also lost before, and who she fears to lose. My little boy, she had said in the last vision I’d seen from Red. My husband.

  “This is beyond my power,” she replies apologetically, as if she’d told this to dozens of others before. “Federation law dictates that soldiers in violation of their oath be branded with their failure and then permanently separated from their family. Your family will suffer similar consequences. You knew this when your disobedience lost the Federation a valuable soldier. Yes? The Federation tells you no lies and keeps every promise. Isn’t that right?”

  Red doesn’t look like he wants to agree, but he does anyway, as if it might help. “Yes,” he repeats.

  So this is what happens to soldiers in the Federation, why they stay loyal. Obey the Federation, and it will reward your entire family. Disobey, and not only are you branded and punished, but your family will suffer similar fates.

  His sister. His father. I remember the small girl I’d seen in Red’s first memory, her look of fright.

  “You have now forfeited your life into the hands of the Federation,” she continues, “and since you have proven to be unreliable in the field, you must serve your nation in another way. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Red says, even though he doesn’t look like he does.

  “That is why you’re here, Redlen. Here, I’ve been tasked with putting you to use for the Federation.” Her eyes are weary and full of sorrow. “The Premier himself saw something very promising in you when he reviewed your training videos. Not every soldier in violation of their oath gets sent to me, you know.”

  “And what will you do with me?”

  “Have you heard of the Skyhunter Program?”