Skyhunter

by Marie Lu

At that, Red’s eyes widen. He backs up to the edge of the glass, and the color drains from his face. He knows what it is; he must have heard about it before. But my heart is still in my throat as I witness this nightmare go on, feel the terror that surges through his chest.

  “It is our most ambitious program yet. The Skyhunter will become our most fearsome weapon.” She bends down to look him firmly in the eye, and in that gaze, I see a silent apology for what she’s about to do to him. “You should be very proud of yourself. You will soar, Redlen. But in order to do that, you must first be broken.”

  Then she steps aside. On the other side of the glass wall, I see a panel rise slowly to reveal a second glass room directly opposite Red’s. And as the panel rises, it reveals a girl inside. Red’s sister. Her eyes stay trained on Red, wide-eyed with terror.

  The nightmare shudders, then shatters, as if the entire vision around me were made of glass, and the shards exploded into fine dust. I jerk awake in my bed, breathing hard at what I’d just experienced. My eyes dart wildly around the bedroom, settling first on the moonlight spilling across the floor, and then the display of my weapons hanging against the wall. I’m drenched in sweat.

  So that is how Ghosts are chosen. You, your family, your loved one makes a mistake that insults the Federation. And you are all sent away to their labs, to be broken and remade as monsters in the Federation’s image, ones unable to rebel against your leader.

  And in Red’s case, his mistake had been to spare my life.

  * * *

  I’m shaken out of a restless sleep early the next morning by a fist rapping on our front door.

  It’s Adena. Heavy bags hang under her eyes, as if she’d stayed up all night like I did, but a wide smile covers her face. Her hair sticks straight up, barely held back by the goggles pushed up on her head.

  “Is Red awake?” she says in a breathless rush before peeking over my shoulder into the apartment. Then she blinks at me. “Hells, you look exhausted. Did you sleep at all?”

  I shake my head, unwilling to explain Red’s memories. His nightmares kept me awake for most of the night, so that every time I closed my eyes, I saw the horrible images of him and his sister being held in opposite prisons, secured behind glass. Even now, I can feel the churn of it in my mind.

  “I could ask the same of you,” I reply instead. “Anyway, Red’s still asleep.”

  “Your mother’s in the Grid with me. I’ve been working with her on something.”

  My mother? I come alert now. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  But one look at her tells me that nothing is wrong. Her eyes are so bright, so eager, that I know immediately she’s discovered something. It’s the same look she gets when she has designed something no one else has ever thought of, when she sees something that no one else can see.

  “I think Red just ended our war,” she says.

  18

  It’s early enough that Adena’s shop is one of the few in the Grid that has its torches lit and machines on. Early morning light filters across the dusty floors, dotting the scattered piles of tools with patches of sun.

  My mother is still there when I arrive, hunched over a series of identical glass vials all lined up in a wooden box, each of them with a different label. She waves at me when she sees us arrive. There are faint bags under her eyes too.

  “Your friend’s been awake all night,” she tells me in Basean, touching my wrist and nodding at the display. She raises an eyebrow at me. “She came knocking on my door at some ungodly hour. I almost hit her with a pan before I realized she wasn’t a soldier or a thief. It’s as if I have two daughters.”

  “Why?” I sign back. “What for?”

  My mother takes one of the vials out of the container and hands it to Adena. “You explain it, child,” she tells Adena, switching now to her accented Maran. “You discovered it.”

  Adena beams at her as if praised by her own mother. She takes the vial and holds it up to the light. “You know that no one has your mother’s hands,” she tells me. “I asked her to help me prepare these samples in the most sterile way. You see, this contains Red’s blood. The same that I collected yesterday.”

  She hands me the vial before she takes out the second. “And this contains blood from the Ghost in the prison.”

  I look closely at the two vials. Although the Ghost’s blood is darker, they’re both a purple-black hue that sometimes looks blue under the right light. I glance expectantly back at Adena.

  Adena nods at my mother, who takes a slender glass pipe, fills it with a bit of the Ghost’s blood, and then carefully drops a bit of the liquid onto a flat tablet. Her movements are so sure and refined that I’m immediately reminded of when I was a child, when I’d watch her administer medicine to her patients.

  Here is when one can see the true difference between their blood and our own. The Ghost’s congeals immediately into a tight circle and then expands out as thin as it can go, as if the rage contained in a Ghost shows up even in their veins, moving outward in a hungry pursuit of unaffected blood. I stare at the unnaturally flat sheet of blood that’s stretched itself thin, my stomach roiling at the sight.

  “Ghost blood has low surface tension,” Adena explains to me when she sees my face. “It likes spreading itself out.” She opens a jar of the magnesium flakes we’d collected the day before and drops a few into the blood sample. “So you can see what’s happening,” she says. The circle of Ghost blood suddenly shimmers with bright bits of dust, the metallic flecks winking in and out of existence. After a while, the magnesium dissolves into the blood, leaving the liquid a shade lighter.

  My mother holds a vial of Ghost blood near the sample on the glass tablet. As I look on, the froth in the sample stays completely still, reacting in no visible way to the presence of the vial.

  “As you can see,” Adena says as she goes, “Ghost blood is obviously uninterested in itself. Ghosts have no interest in attacking one another, or anyone else with the same poison in their blood.”

  She nods at the Ghost’s blood. “Now watch what happens when I put my own blood beside it.”

  My mother takes another red vial from the container. She puts a few scarlet drops of Adena’s blood right next to the sample of the Ghost’s on the tablet.

  The color of the sample blood almost seems to move toward the vial, forming a gradient with darker blood on the nearest end, as if drawn by an invisible force.

  “Ghosts hunger for us,” Adena says, pointing at herself, my mother, and me. “Their blood wants to bind with ours and consume it.” She pauses to point at the Ghost’s blood. “The blood has a gradient now because it has likely gathered against the side, as if yearning toward my blood, wanting to mix its poisons with mine. Until they’re killed, Ghosts are designed to seek us out.”

  I nod at Red’s vial. “What about his, then?” I ask.

  Adena brightens. “Take a look at Red’s blood.”

  This time, my mother puts a few drops of his blood on a clean glass tablet beside drops of the Ghost’s. The Ghost’s blood doesn’t react at all to Red’s blood. Neither does Red’s. It’s as if both were completely uninterested in each other, as still and unaffected as if two samples of human blood were side by side.

  “I think,” Adena murmurs, “that the Federation wanted Red to be the more advanced iteration of their Ghosts. A far more intelligent war machine, a more unstoppable one. Ghosts aren’t designed to attack him, because they see him as one of their own.”

  Adena then puts a sample of Red’s blood beside her own on a new tablet. No reaction either.

  She smiles at my mother and me. “Now, for the best part. Are you ready?”

  I nod faintly.

  First, Adena mixes Red’s blood with the Ghost’s blood. Then she puts another sample of her own blood beside this mixed sample.

  None of the blood samples move. The Ghost blood mixed with Red’s stays floating in its own circle. There is no eerie, hungry movement that the pure Ghost’s blood originally
had.

  I look quickly up at Adena, not trusting myself to understand what she’d just done. “Wait. Does this mean what I think it does?” I sign.

  Adena’s smile is so large and so full of hope that I’m afraid to believe it. She nods. “Red’s blood causes the Ghost’s blood to stop reacting to ours, to stop hungering for ours.”

  It means that Red, the Skyhunter, is the walking, living, breathing antidote for the Ghosts’ hunger for attacking us. His blood is the key to breaking the bond between the Federation and their monsters.

  I’m in such disbelief over what I’ve seen that a part of me thinks this is when I’ll wake from this dream. My eyes dart from Adena to my mother and back again. “Why would the Federation create their Skyhunter to do this?” I ask.

  Adena crosses her arms. “I don’t think they meant to,” she replies. “I think they made a mistake. Maybe it’s because they didn’t finish working on him before he escaped. Red doesn’t respond to the Federation’s beck and call. He doesn’t stay trapped under their commands like the Ghosts do. Whatever it is that the Federation put in their Ghosts’ blood, poisoning it, they failed to do with Red.” She leans closer to me, feverish with hope. “And when Red’s blood is mixed with a Ghost’s, that Ghost can do the same. That Ghost can stop responding to the Federation’s will. Somehow, it interferes with whatever bond that exists between their minds and the Federation.”

  “So where does this all leave us?” I ask. “We take Red’s blood and figure out how it can inoculate the Maran population?”

  Adena shakes her head. Her eyes are intense and serious now, and all signs of smiles have vanished from her face. “Red’s blood works best with Ghost blood, not our own. At any rate, Mara has too many people. Red can only afford to lose so much blood before it endangers his life.”

  “What do you propose?”

  She points at us. “We head into Federation territory. You, me, Jeran, and Red. We get into the heart of their capital, into Cardinia, where their lab is. We’ll snake our way into the heart of their darkness, where they create all their monstrosities.” She nods at me. “And we find a way to infect their Ghosts with Red’s blood. If the Ghosts are corrupted with what his blood contains, they’ll stop obeying the Federation. They’ll become useless. And we’ll break the most fearsome weapon they have.”

  “What about new Ghosts they create? Surely they’ll just fix the problem.”

  “Yes. But it will cost them time, money, and effort. Meanwhile, our soldiers can, for the first time, mount an offensive attack at the warfront into their territory. Push the Federation back. Give us time to find a way to make enough serum to protect us all against their Ghosts. All of this might just set them back enough that they’ll think Mara isn’t worth the trouble of invading.”

  Now my heart has started to beat rapidly with the thought. Destroy the Federation’s monster machine. Destroy their Ghosts.

  Impossible.

  But then, I just witnessed the impossible right here in Adena’s shop.

  This is a suicide mission in every way—maybe none of us will return from an expedition like this. Red, with his traumatic history and strange relationship with the Ghosts, might even refuse to be used in this way. But maybe he’ll agree, maybe it could work, and we could all return having dealt the Federation a heavy blow.

  My eyes return to the vials in Adena’s container. Then I stare at my mother. In her eyes, I see my father’s gentle face, the way his absence turned her hair white, the pain and suffering that has plagued us ever since we fled our homeland. I see everything that my patrol mates and I have lost, all the grief from Corian’s death. It’s hard to believe that it stems from something as small as this. A sample of blood.

  If we can sever the Federation’s control from its war beasts, we’ll end all of that suffering. It is worth the sacrifice of a few lives.

  My mother touches my hand. “You don’t have to do anything,” she signs to me. “You have no obligation to this world. But if you do, my heart will go with you.” There is an urgency in her watery expression now. She’s afraid, I realize, because she knows what this means for me.

  Adena has the same expression mirrored in her eyes, the near inevitability of our deaths. No more summer days working in her shop here. No more afternoons arguing at my mother’s home in the Outer City, with the smell of hand-rolled noodles and soup wafting around us. But I see no signs of hesitation in Adena either. She knows, as well as I do, that we don’t have a choice.

  “I didn’t want my brother to become a Striker,” Adena says quietly to me. She leans against the table, her eyes distant. “I woke up in a sweat one night and ran into his room, certain he was dead. He just laughed and hugged me. I asked him if he was willing to give anything in order to stop the Federation. He said he was. I asked him if he’d be willing to sacrifice me to achieve that. And he stopped to give me the strangest, most wounded look.” She shakes her head. “I’ll never forget that, as long as I live. Because to him, not being a Striker was sacrificing me. He told me he couldn’t control the future, only what he could do to alter it. He knew that my future couldn’t exist unless there were those willing to fight to protect me. Now that he’s gone, I carry his promise.” She lifts her eyes to me. “If you go, I go. This is the future we can alter.”

  My hand tightens against my mother’s. I’m silent for a breath. Then I let go, and my hands start to move.

  “It has to be a fast mission,” I sign. “Get into the Federation’s capital. Get into their labs. Do what we need to do, get out.” My eyes narrow as anger surges through me. “And when we’ve accomplished it all, we destroy their labs. Burn them down.”

  Adena nods grimly. In her eyes is the reflection of her brother. “We will leave them with what they leave behind for the rest of us. Nothing.”

  19

  No one believes us. I can hardly believe us myself.

  So the next day, the Speaker calls the Senate to gather with us in the Grid, where they form a ring around the large, muddy square of land that we use to test our weapons. A patrol of Strikers stands evenly spaced out before them, masks up, gloved hands resting on the hilts of their weapons. I stand with Red, Jeran, and Adena. In the crowd, I pick out Jeran’s father and brother, the former’s face stony and expressionless, the latter’s looking almost bored. The Speaker himself looks disinterested in the whole experiment, as if expecting it to fail.

  Guards bring out the Ghost from the prison, snarling and squinting under the sun after many months in darkness, its fury turning frantic as its ears pick up the shuffling and voices of so many humans nearby. It tries over and over again to lunge, but its handlers hold tight to the chains radiating from its neck.

  Red cuts a small line in his arm and lets some of his blood drip into a large bowl of water in Adena’s hands. Then Jeran steps into the circle with the Ghost, and the guards let the Ghost free. It dashes for the Senators—who part for it like terrified fish—but Jeran slices wounds into its side, forcing it to focus its attention on him. They say Ghosts don’t have much capacity for higher thought, but I think this one recognizes Jeran’s scent from our last visit to its cell. It narrows its eyes at him in a sense of familiarity, then snarls and crouches, clawing at the dirt. The Ghost tries to bite him again and again. Each time Jeran spins away, the Deathdancer in his flawless state, expertly guiding it around the ring so that it never attempts to attack the audience.

  Then Adena darts forward and injects the Ghost with a serum she created using Red’s blood. The Ghost whirls, shrieking, and shakes its head, licking its lips as if tasting the poison.

  At first, it continues to lunge for Jeran, now freshly enraged. Jeran dances away each time, his eyes narrowed in concentration. I lower my eyes, unable to bear the disappointment. Something must have gone wrong in our testing yesterday.

  Adena is shaking her head beside me. “Maybe I diluted it too much,” she mutters to herself under her breath. “The serum worked yesterday.”

  T
hen the Ghost shudders. It turns to Jeran with a bewildered snarl, sniffing at him, tilting its head this way and that. The Senate murmurs, shifting their feet.

  And as I look on with disbelieving eyes, the Ghost growls low at Jeran and turns its head away from him. It stares around the ring, growling, twitching its head as if it doesn’t understand why its appetite for us had suddenly vanished.

  “Oh hells,” Adena breathes beside me. There’s a glossy sheen in her eyes. Her words tremble. “It’s not attacking. Hells. It’s not attacking.”

  I can only stare. My hands feel numb from the shock.

  The Ghost has been subdued, by nothing more than a serum made from Red’s blood.

  In my numbness, my gaze turns to Aramin. He’s watching Jeran stand unmoving beside the Ghost, who now seems to want nothing to do with him. Who now seems to have lost its purpose. The Firstblade and Jeran lock eyes, exchanging some unspoken realization between them. In Aramin, I see a glint of fire that mirrors the hope stirring in my own chest.

  I thought I knew what kind of weapon Red could be for us. A vicious killing machine, exactly what the Federation wanted him to be. But instead, it is this gift that he has given us. The key to the Federation’s downfall.

  Beside me, Red is frozen like a statue. When I reach out to him through our link, I feel a wave of … something.

  Not joy. Not relief. Not even vengeance.

  Only anguish. Because all this Ghost reminds him of is the moment when he had to stop his own family’s suffering by ending their lives.

  * * *

  I don’t know where Red goes after we’re dismissed.

  For a while, he trains in the arena, where maybe he wants to be alone after the demonstration. I think about following him to make sure that he’s okay—but the hollow, haunted look that was on his face stays with me. It’s the kind of expression that begs to be left alone. After all, it won’t be long now until the Federation shows up at the front of the Inner City’s gate. Our training arena will be theirs soon. Might as well use it while we still can.