Red? she says. Are you here?

  I freeze. I am dreaming. This is not real. And yet, her voice comes through to me as clearly as beads on glass, as if she can see me too. As if she can communicate with me.

  Never have we spoken to each other in our dreams before.

  Are you here? she asks again. This time, she turns around, and her eyes lock straight onto mine, as if I am standing in the room with her.

  Yes, I answer, as if pushed on by some supernatural force.

  I don’t expect her to hear me, much less answer—but the expression on her face is just as shocked as my own.

  The tears that well in the corners of her eyes are ones of fear. As we stare at each other, her words come through our link.

  Go away.

  In an instant, I feel the bond between us shudder, as if she’s pulling herself away, shuttering her windows and walling up her heart. The emotions linking us tremble, and my vision of her blurs.

  I lean forward desperately, as if my hand can now brush hers. Even though I can’t truly touch her, I feel a gate break open in her chest as the ghost of my hand sweeps across the ghost of hers, and her face crumples. It is only now that I realize I have never seen Talin cry. She is not weeping just for our connection in this moment—it is the bursting of a dam that she has carefully built over the months of her captivity. She is crying for the loss of her home, another nation gone, the deaths of those she knows, and the new life she has been forced into.

  Her sorrow rushes through me in a wave, strengthening our bond again, and I can feel tears wet on my own cheeks.

  Is this how these dreams are happening between us? When she’s unconscious enough to let down her defenses, when, in her sleep, the tide of her emotions overwhelms her … does she open the gates between us? Our bond, run cold after so many months, surges forward now in a desperate hunger. I can feel it tingling between us, yearning to connect us as much as that first moment had bonded us on the old Mara warfront.

  No. This is dangerous. This could be how Constantine sensed that something had happened between us, how he knew about our plan at the train station. What if he senses us this time?

  I pull away from her, trying to find a way out of this place, to break out of this dream. But I can’t—I don’t know how.

  Neither of us does; Talin is still here, too, the tears drying on her wounded face. We stand apart and feel the hum of the bond between us, unable to break it.

  We can’t meet like this, she says, her voice trembling. He might know.

  How can we not? I answer. How can we break it?

  She is silent at that. Because how can you keep yourself from falling asleep? How can you control what you do in your dreams?

  Can…, I start to ask, hesitate, then push through. Can Constantine sense everything you think? Can he control you?

  She shakes her head. Not yet. Constantine only controls me because he has my mother.

  I catch the unspoken warning in her answer. Not yet. The anger in me bubbles at the realization that Constantine is using her mother against us all. Where is he keeping her? I ask.

  I never know, Talin replies. He just moved her last week—something he does every other week. The information is kept a close secret. He chooses the location himself the day before he orders her moved, and tells no one else. She pauses, her expression darkening. He can sense a shift of my emotions. He’d known that you were in my dreams the last time we met like this. And through my emotions, he can assume you were up to something.

  Relief and sadness and fear flood through me at the same time. So, Constantine has not invaded all of Talin’s mind yet. She can still think for herself, make her own decisions, keep things from him if she must.

  You haven’t lost her. Not yet.

  But he is still tied to her. His mind is linked to hers as surely as mine is, able to sense her changing emotions. No wonder she’s locked her heart behind walls. No wonder she’s terrified.

  Worse, he has her mother. Forcing her hand so that she must protect her loved ones. I think back to the way her mother could fight alongside her, the ferocity of her love a beacon to us all. The way she had managed to lay out a feast for us when she had so little.

  We have to find her. We have to save her. Without her, we cannot help Talin.

  Talin looks up at me and sees the fury in my expression. She gives me a sad smile. Her emotions are a wave of grief, of pained love.

  She tilts her eyes down. I’m so sorry for what they did to you.

  Even in the depth of her loss, she’s thinking of what had happened to me when I’d first endured my Skyhunter transformation. She’s thinking of my family. Thinking of others.

  I notice something new through our bond, beyond the sadness and hope and fear, even beyond whatever affection may still exist between us, if that can be called love. She is holding back again, pulling aggressively away. I remember the tension from when we had first bonded, whenever she did not want me to know the thoughts in her mind. Now she is keeping some other secret, and I cannot begin to guess what it is.

  What if they have hurt her in ways you never endured?

  I desperately want her to tell me more, but she stays quiet, as if gauging how much she can even say.

  I don’t know why I thought it would’ve been how it once was, being able to talk again with Talin. Our early days bonded to each other ended the instant the Premier invaded her mind. Now we’re separated by a different kind of distance. In despair, I sense the barrier go up between us.

  Talin is no longer Talin, but an extension of the Premier. She will kill you without hesitation if Constantine commanded it. And you would do the same if she threatened Jeran.

  What if my blood ends up on her hands? What if hers ends up on mine?

  We are, once again, enemies, each of us standing on the opposite side of when we first met.

  I know Talin can feel the loss in me at these thoughts. I stare at her as she stands mere inches from me, as if we are in the same room together. I want to lean toward her, feel the warmth of her breath against my skin, the silk of her hair through my fingers. If I touched her hand right now, could I really feel it? The reality conjured by the strength of our bonded minds is so clear, it’s hard to tell what’s a dream and what might be real.

  We dare to linger in this dream for another beat. Neither of us says anything. I concentrate on the rise and fall of her breaths, knowing she could disappear any moment. She studies my face, searching for something.

  I try to reach out to her.

  Then our dream shudders. We are waking. The world around us blurs again.

  Talin. I reach for her one more time, knowing I shouldn’t, yet unable to stop myself.

  And somewhere in the suspension of reality, in this haze of a moment, she fades away, and I awaken back on top of the train car, jolting and bouncing along in the night.

  I gasp as my eyes open. My hand comes up to rub across my face, and I find tears. The image of her is still imprinted in my mind. She’d been so damn real. I should be relieved that we’ve finally broken out of our dream—where we’re so vulnerable to Constantine’s suspicions—but instead I’m just desperately empty. Leaving Talin feels like ripping my heart out of my chest. I wince. I can feel the pain of it as if my body is still torn open.

  My eyes wander to Jeran. He’s asleep. I was supposed to have stayed awake during my shift guarding us atop this train. Guiltily, I shift so that my weight is sure to block him from rolling off the top of the car, and then I look around at the rest of the train.

  My gaze settles on the platform several cars ahead of us, the one carrying the heavy artifact.

  I’m grateful for the darkness that hides us from the few workers stationed to guard the artifact. They are still there, swaying with the train cars. At first I think they are all clustered together in sleep—but then I see that a couple of them are holding up one of the workers as he vomits over the side of the train car, his figure hunched over in pain.

  You would think they would all be used to the motion of a train by now. I’m surprised any of them could be sick because of it.

  It takes me another moment to realize that the ill worker is vomiting a trickle of blood, inky black, into the night. I know what it looks like, of course—I’ve seen plenty of blood in darkness. As if to confirm it, I can smell the faint scent of something metallic in the wind. My insides recoil.

  The worker must have some old injury. Maybe it was made worse during the struggle to secure the artifact. I look on, feeling queasy myself, as the worker continues to retch until he finally slumps backward in exhaustion.

  Over on the other side of the artifact, another worker is also vomiting over the side of the moving platform. Even from here, I can hear the occasional moan coming from him.

  That man, too, is retching blood.

  My grief over Talin fades momentarily as I watch them. Eventually, they seem to settle back down into a restless sleep. More old injuries? Somehow, it doesn’t quite make sense to me. My eyes go from their resting figures to that strangely familiar metal cylinder, and I concentrate on the faint glow it seems to emit.

  Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe it’s just the way the lights from an occasional village hit the artifact whenever the train curves along its track.

  But something about it feels off. It’s the same feeling I remember as a child, watching Karensa’s parades of early Ghosts down Cardinia’s avenues. The same feeling I had during each year’s solstice festivities when red paper rained down on me even as prisoners of war were hauled through the streets.

  It’s the unmistakable feeling of something unnatural shifting in the air. It’s the feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong.

  12

  TALIN

  My first night back in the Cardinian palace is an unsettling one. I never get used to the sheer size of this space, a maze of corridors and gates and spiraling staircases. There are moving platforms they call elevators here, steel boxes moved by pulleys up and down through the palace to get from one story to another. To the east, in a separate building connected to the main palace by a hallway, is an enormous greenhouse, a glass structure built against the marble and stone of the palace. When I’d first set foot in Cardinia with the other Strikers, the glass exhibition hall erected for the national fair had been modeled on this greenhouse. It is a luxury, a paradise of fruit trees and rainbow-hued rows of sweet-scented flowers that Constantine frequents.

  The main palace’s atrium features a glass ceiling, and the walls are framed with gilded edges. They’re painted with elaborate scenes of Karensan history, from their earliest days as a nomadic race to the era when they built their first permanent city atop a ruin of the Early Ones along the banks of a northeastern river.

  It is an estate of grotesque extravagance. Everywhere I look, there is something new and overwhelming.

  My footsteps echo down the lonely halls. There must be thousands of servants in this space, but at night, I feel like the Premier is the only other person here with me.

  Once again, I can’t sleep. I’d dreamed of Red in my state of exhausted collapse earlier in the evening, a vivid dream so startling that I bolted out of it with tears in my eyes, Red’s name still echoing in my mind. It truly felt like we’d spoken, even though that’s impossible. I had looked at him and known with horror that he was really seeing me. After all, hadn’t my last dream turn out to be a real vision? For a span of minutes, I’d exposed him to Constantine in my mind, had risked the Premier’s sensing us connecting once more. For hours after, I forced myself to stay behind my walled heart, wondering when Constantine would turn to me and ask me about my second dream with Red.

  Or worse, that I would somehow turn a corner with the Premier and see Red chained and on his knees. That somehow just glimpsing Red in my dreams would have alerted the Premier to his location and gotten him captured.

  But there’s been no word from Constantine this time. We may not be this lucky again.

  So tonight, as I roam these empty halls, my thoughts are filled with shadows and nightmares. Fears of my private thoughts being unveiled again. Fears of being watched by spies. Fears of Constantine’s mood, that my mother will suffer depending on how it swings next. On top of it all, the eternal fear that some rebel assassin might be making their move against the Premier right now, that someday, I might fail to protect Constantine from that threat, and that my mother will be executed for it.

  All of these worries swirl in my stomach until the nausea becomes unbearable. I pause in my walk, then return to my chambers, where I retch in the bathroom until I have nothing left.

  No matter what happens, I will suffer. There is no light at the end of these tunnels.

  * * *

  When morning finally dawns, I am weary and moody. I extend one of my steel wings at the young manservant sent in to assist me in washing and dressing, sending him scurrying from my chamber in fright. Guilt flits through me at the sight of his fleeing figure, but I don’t have time to worry about him. Today, I’m off to see where Constantine has decided to keep my mother currently.

  Before long, I’m seated in a carriage that takes me to another district in Cardinia. As we pass through the center of the city, I notice fresh paint splashed and scrawled over some of the stone bases of the sculptures that line the thoroughfares.

  They distract me for a moment. As the carriage draws near them, I realize that they are rants of fury smeared against the stone.

  PUPPET PREMIER

  FREEDOM IS A LIE

  CUT KARENSA’S THROAT

  I stare at them for as long as I can, until our carriage has passed it all and the damage fades in the distance. No doubt someone will scrub them clean as quickly as they can. I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except the advisor’s words at the train station keep coming back to me.

  Independence.

  Threats against the Premier, scrawled on his precious sculptures.

  The thoughts linger with me as we pull away from the city’s center and into small streets.

  One look at the district we drive through tells me what I need to know. This time the path to my mother’s current location is a nice one—the open carriage passes through a Cardinian district shaded with mature oaks, the path paved smooth until we reach a set of ornate wrought-iron gates. The road beyond it is cobblestone studded with shining flecks of mica, leading to an estate of white marble and stone, the sound of trickling fountains sweetening the air.

  Behind the walls I’ve put up, the knot of terror in my heart loosens somewhat, and I feel my muscles slack a little, the air flowing a little more easily to my lungs. This is how I know Constantine is pleased with me. I’ve accompanied him to Mara and helped him punish prisoners of war by turning them into Ghosts. I’ve helped defend him and our train from espionage and turned my back on Red. I’ve bled my soul for him. In return, my mother will live here for a short reprieve—on the grandest estate I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Welcome to the home of Mayor Elland of Cardinia,” the driver tells me, bowing his head, as the gates open for us. He glances at me with a half-disgusted, half-frightened look. “Her servants will attend to your every need during your stay today. At dusk, my carriage and I will be waiting for you at the manor entrance.”

  He says more, although his Karenese is too rapid for me to understand completely. I just nod at him and turn my attention to the front of the property. Sure enough, I see a line of servants already at attention at the front of the property, their faces turned in our direction. My eyes wander to the rest of the pathway.

  Constantine has never broken his promise regarding my mother, but I still worry. My fingers tap restlessly against my leg as I search for her. She’s not here yet.

  The servants bow low as I step off the carriage and onto the path. Behind me, my driver doesn’t hesitate to urge his horses onward the instant I leave. I hear the snap of his reins, and when I look over my shoulder, his back is already turned, hunched as if bracing himself for me to attack him.

  I turn to the servants. A part of me wants to extend my wings to their full span and watch these Karensans cower at the sight of the Premier’s Skyhunter, to be the monster they see. But I remind myself that they are servants. Some of them might even be prisoners like my mother, or people from some other conquered land, now forced to serve the mayor. Instead, I bow my head in return at them.

  They don’t see me anyway. None of them dare look up at me.

  “There she is, right on time!”

  The familiar voice of the mayor drifts to me from the stairs, and I glance over to see the woman making her way down the steps toward me, regal in her silver-gray outfit and her thickly piled knot of hair.

  “It seems you behaved well enough for the Premier to reward your mother,” she calls to me. Just as I’d seen in Newage, she smirks at the forced subservience on my face. Then she scowls at the servant beside her. “Well, don’t just stand there. Make sure the Skyhunter’s horse is ready and show her to it.”

  The servant jumps a little at the command, bowing his head in a rush, then scurries off.

  The mayor looks back at me and holds her hand out at the path winding along the side of the manor. “Your mother’s been out riding this morning. She’s stronger than she should be after such a long captivity. Maybe there’s something to be said for that Basean spirit.” She smiles. “Or maybe we’re treating our prisoners right, after all.”

  My hands curl into fists at her joke, but she laughs. “Go on, then, Skyhunter,” she says, waving a dismissive hand at me. “I have a full morning of tasks ahead of me, and you’ve already taken up enough of my time.”

  I’m surprised by this noblewoman’s small generosity, but I don’t dwell on it. Instead, I give her a quick bow of my head.

  “Ah, Constantine and his games,” she says, her voice almost sad. There’s a glint of sympathy in her eyes. “He hasn’t changed since he was a child. All right, then. Off you go.”

  I turn down the path and follow in the wake of the young servant that Mayor Elland had sent running. He guides me around the side of the manor. We turn the corner, and there, waiting for me along the stone wall running beside the house, is my mother.