She’s on the back of a white stallion and holding the reins of a second horse at her side. Her silver-white hair falls behind her in a thick braid. To my absolute shock, she’s dressed in what looks like traditional Basean clothes—a loose, billowing white shirt with easy knots twisting down the front, a pair of high-waisted pants with a wide black belt fastened by a gleaming silver buckle in the shape of a crescent moon. It’s finery I’ve never seen her in, not even in Basea.

  Everything in me floods with gratitude that today, I’m probably far enough from Constantine for him to have trouble sensing my emotions through our bond. Even if he can, I don’t care right now. The sight of my mother like this brings me to tears. At the same time, a well of anger pools thick in my stomach. Last month, she’d been kept in the prison district. Now she is on the mayor’s estate, indulging in food and leisure. The wounds on her hands from the prison labor have healed, and her gaunt face has rounded, the color having returned to her skin.

  Constantine and his games, the mayor had said. And it’s true. This is him toying with his prey, pulling these emotions out of me to train me into obedience. Perhaps even to love him, like one of his citizens.

  I look around, searching for a way I could spirit my mother out of here and to safety. But Constantine has warned me of this. I am always watching you, he told me. Even if I cannot see them, I know there are hidden soldiers in the trees and along the horizon, snipers on the roofs of the estate, their guns trained on my mother’s head. If I try something, they will shoot her dead. Even I, with all my Skyhunter enhancements and strength, cannot stop them all.

  My mother smiles sadly at the look on my face. She knows that the luxury she gets to indulge in this month is solely because my obedience has pleased the Premier. And this time I can see, behind all this new luxury around her, the weight her eyes carry no matter what conditions she’s in. Her safety always comes at a cost.

  Still, she brushes it away. “What?” she says, a teasing lilt in her voice. “You’ve never imagined your mother as a Basean noble?”

  Genuine relief floods me. Being trapped in Cardinia, where no one else can understand Maran sign language, with only Constantine able to comprehend everything I want to say, with my emotions held back tight within my chest, has left me a hollow shell. But on these days, I can be with my mother. I can let my heart open a little and take her in.

  I suppose I can thank the Premier for that too.

  “I was about to say that you look like you belong in those clothes,” I sign.

  She nods to the horse waiting beside her, and I hurry to it, ready to savor every minute of this day. I grab the saddle and swing easily onto the creature’s back, then guide it around to follow my mother. We turn in the direction of the rolling hills that make up the rest of the estate. The breeze is gentle, the air just the right hint of warmth, and I find myself leaning into it, trying to ignore the strangeness of enjoying this perfect morning in a hostile nation.

  “How is your pain?” my mother asks after a comfortable silence, and I feel myself lean toward the soothing sound of Basean on her tongue. It’s a question she brings up during each of our visits. For a while, my answers had been always, constant, never-ending. She would see the small changes happening on my body—one month, the metallic tint of my hair; another month, the addition of bladed tips on my wings. When they infused the marrow of my bones with steel particles; when my heart was forced to grow larger and stronger to accommodate the changes in my body; when I spent those early weeks sitting up at night, gasping for breath and clutching my chest in agony, certain that my heart would burst from the strain … my mother saw the consequence of each week.

  For all the anguish I feel in seeing my mother suffer, I imagine the sight of me causes her even more pain.

  I shake my head. “Only a little, sometimes, when I’m sleeping,” I answer as I drop the reins to sign. “There’s not much left to my transformation now.” And before we can dwell on this, I quickly ask, “The mayor’s treating you well, then?”

  My mother snorts a little. “That woman,” she says. “Do you know how she delivered this horse to me? She waited until I was lounging in a bath, and then had the horse stick its head right through the open window to drink my bathwater. I could hear her laughing even over my shrieks. A Cardinian with a sense of humor. I’ll be damned.”

  I laugh in surprise, the sound coming out in a thin wheeze. “I suppose someone has to be a real human being in this country.”

  My mother laughs too, then quiets as our horses leave the manor behind us and enter a stretch of grassland bordered by thickets of trees. “They bring me three meals a day,” she says in a low voice. “Porridges fat with chicken and eggs. White buns and scented rice. Fish and stewed beef and noodles. Basean foods, Talin. All of it, as if made by some master chef. The Premier keeps his word and wants to remind us of it at every turn. And all I can think about every single day is that, somewhere in their kitchen, a chef who likely fled Basea’s collapse is now making me meals in exchange for Karensan coins. By the order of the Premier.” Her lips tighten as she turns her eyes to the horizon. There we can see a few silhouettes of ruins from the Early Ones, tall pillars sticking out of the ground and reaching up to nowhere. “I’m sorry, Talin, that you have to serve them because of me.”

  I start to shake my head. During the first couple of months, I’d lived in terror of my mother killing herself in order to spare me the torture of continuing to obey the Premier. She had become so listless, so damaged by the sight of my suffering. I’d fallen to my knees during our second visit, sobbing like I was still a little girl, and begged her to stay alive. Told her that if she died, I would too. I forced her to promise me to live. So she had lived on, month after month.

  Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve done a terrible thing to her, making her stay alive.

  I nod at her hands. “Your wounds have healed faster than I’d thought they would.”

  She nods and looks down, turning her now-scarred fingers this way and that. “The headman for the prison team I worked for took me off my shift early, after the Premier sent word halfway through the month that you’d been doing well.” Her words turn careful as her eyes dart back to me. “I spent two weeks in the hospital there, doing nothing but listening to stories coming back from prisoners of war along the outer Karensan states.”

  I am careful not to react to my mother’s words, careful to keep my mind calm so that even at this distance from the palace, I don’t potentially alert Constantine to what I’m thinking. But my heart skips a beat.

  This is the other reason my mother has decided to keep living. This is something that Constantine didn’t anticipate. Few others in Cardinia move around as much as my mother, from prison district to mayor’s estate in the span of a month. With each new place she’s brought to, she listens. She searches for information that might be useful to me.

  She is spying.

  “I’m grateful you had those stories to listen to while you healed,” I answer her, my fingers moving casually.

  “They were nothing but rumors.” My mother shrugs. “Just a few skirmishes and protests from citizens in Tanapeg. A few of the ones arrested were sent to the prison district I worked in. The mayor has put them to work on her estate.”

  Just a few skirmishes and protests. It is a careful phrasing. As she says it, she turns to give me a pointed, sidelong look, and I know immediately what my mother is really trying to tell me.

  The mayor has put them to work on her estate. And I remember what the mayor said to me when I first arrived. She’s stronger than she should be after such a long captivity. Maybe we’re treating our prisoners right, after all.

  Did my mother heal quickly because of the mayor’s help? And if so … why would the mayor help her? The thought is so wild that I’m afraid to follow it. What else is the mayor helping?

  “Oh?” I answer calmly, waiting for more. “I didn’t think they had much to protest, now that they’re under the Federation’s fold.”

  My mother eases her horse into a slow trot, and I nudge my steed to do the same, until we’re riding around the edge of the thicket of trees. “Does it really matter if the other states have the occasional group that wants to separate?” She glances back once at me. “It’s only real trouble for the Federation if they bring it here.”

  At that, I look sharply at my mother. My fingers move rapidly, words that she can see but no one else can hear. “And have they brought it to Cardinia?”

  She nods once. “Right into the heart,” she signs back to me.

  Then she prods her horse into a fast trot. I do the same. “And now I’m here, resting on this estate. Who knows where those prisoners have been shipped off to? Maybe they’ve already died in the prison district.” She laughs a little. “Or maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.”

  Her statements are said lightly, with such little fanfare, that anyone who doesn’t know her might think she’s speaking sarcastically. But I catch the glint in her eye. Maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.

  She knows some of those former prisoners. She knows some of these rebels hiding in plain sight. She knows where they’ve been placed.

  Right here.

  “What kind of higher places?” I sign.

  “The National Laboratory,” she signs back.

  I trot alongside my mother as we fall into silence, but my hands are shaking now. Someone has found their way into the very birthplace of the Federation’s war experiments.

  She smiles a little at my expression and signs again: “Only rumors. But they say you should speak to someone there with a scar behind their ear.”

  All my thoughts swirl in a din in my head. I tamp it down, force myself to turn my mind back to riding with my mother.

  But she has already told me what I need to know. The rebels that have been stirring unrest at the Federation’s border states have brought it to Cardinia. They are here, in the capital. Working under the mayor.

  Perhaps working with the mayor.

  If Mayor Elland is actually involved, then that means the unrest could be much larger than I’d thought. It is a movement gathering steam. And if I can find out more about it, if I can find a way to help the cause … well. An old thought returns to me, one I’d clung to on the day Mara had been defeated.

  The Federation has conquered us. But it has not annihilated us yet.

  13

  RED

  The last time I walked through Cardinia freely, I was twelve.

  Think back, and I remember it all. It was a warm, sticky day, and the summer exhibition was happening throughout the city, a festival showcasing a system of irrigation tunnels that children were allowed to slide down. I’d gone with two friends, and returned drenched and laughing, two frozen pops melting over our hands with their sticky sugar.

  What a fun time I had. How little I thought about everything happening around me.

  Back then, I’d looked at the guards standing on street corners and watching me play as my guardians, protecting me from falling or drowning or running into the streets in front of the horses and carriages. A year later, I’d return to the city as a disgraced soldier, accused of the indirect murder of my superior because I’d failed to shoot a girl. Talin.

  Talin, the girl I can’t stop worrying about. The girl I can’t imagine not saving, not taking with us out of this place.

  As I walk through Cardinia’s streets with Jeran behind me, dressed in a flowing Karensan outfit and a reveler’s mask over my face, I find myself tensing along every street with more than two guards standing watch.

  Our train had finally arrived in Cardinia two evenings after we’d left Mara’s borders, to a city fully immersed in the solstice celebrations. The first thing we’d done when we arrived in the city was trade several of our knives for money, acting as peddlers selling scraps of the newly conquered Mara, and then we bought ourselves new clothes. Cardinia had once been Togaia’s capital, after all, before it became the Karensa Federation’s, and that means it’s a city where everyone is used to newly conquered visitors struggling to fit in. With so many different people in Cardinia, we’ve blended in with the crowds easily—but that doesn’t mean General Caitoman doesn’t have his soldiers on alert, possibly searching for anyone who resembles us.

  The entire city has turned out for the solstice festival, and the crowds jostle beside us, giving us the protection of anonymity. As we go, I make a habit of noting the armbands on any passing guard’s sleeve, each marked with a distinct symbol detailing which city patrol they belong to.

  My eyes hitch each time I spot a guard who still looks like a boy, no older than I was when I became one.

  The sight sends a current of unwelcome nostalgia through me. Suddenly, I feel like a young soldier again, little more than a child recruit, double-banding my insignia in order to make sure it doesn’t slip down my boyish arm. I used to keep track of the other city patrols during my daily duties because it told me where I could find my friends that were assigned to other patrols. I push that memory away as I keep a mental tally of the symbols I see. The brand of my old patrol insignia, which had been burned into my chest, aches underneath my clothing.

  Are any of those old friends still here, patrolling the city? They were only children then, like me. Would they recognize me now, even behind my reveler’s mask? On instinct, I reach up and adjust the cloth I’ve looped loosely around my head.

  Jeran walks beside me, his eyes wide behind his half mask as he takes in the sights. “I’ve read about this festival,” he says in near-perfect Karenese, “but I didn’t realize how big it was.”

  Thank you, Jeran, I think to myself, for being so fluent. “It’s not ours,” I reply. “It was a tradition from Carreal. When Karensa overtook that country decades ago, they found their solstice festival so enlightening that they decided to adopt it.”

  Jeran’s lips tighten. He stares as we walk the main thoroughfare and pass the hundreds of stalls lining the wide avenue. “Was it always this contentious?”

  At his words, I glance over to what he’s looking at. Jeran’s attention is fixed on a smear of black paint scrawled against the marble base of a sculpture along the thoroughfare.

  It’s the Premier’s seal, consumed in flames.

  Another sculpture nearby has been vandalized too, painted in scarlet and smudged with angry words.

  KARENSA IS DEAD

  I blink, stunned for a moment into silence. “No, that’s new,” I murmur.

  The news of occasional unrest in the city is familiar to me; my superiors used to do plenty of rotations here, spying on potential rebels and arresting those who seemed suspicious. But this kind of open rebellion? I’ve never seen that.

  Jeran stares for a moment longer, taking stock of which sculptures have been damaged. “Can you sense Talin at all here?” he asks.

  The mention of Talin sends a wave of new fear through me. Her heartbeat had accompanied me for the entire train ride, but now it seems to flicker in and out, some of the vibrations lost among the noise and chaos of the festival. Whatever emotions she might be feeling right now, I can’t sense them. She must be holding her thoughts tight.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I admit. “She’s in the city. That’s all I can tell.”

  The memory of her last night comes back to me now. Part of me still believes that our entire conversation had just been a dream, but it seemed so sharp, so unwavering even after sleep that it must have been real.

  Jeran glances sidelong at me. “Do we know how long her mother has been in her current location?”

  My mother, Talin had told me through our bond, and her voice had sounded so sharp, so desperate in its sadness and fury, that I can feel the stab of her pain even now. Talin works for the Premier solely because of her mother. I know the agony of that trap.

  “Nearly a week,” I answer in a low voice. “She’ll stay there for another week. Then Constantine will order her moved again, depending on his pleasure or displeasure with Talin.”

  Jeran winces. Is he thinking about his own father? I wonder. But when he speaks, he just says, “Then we’ll need to figure out where she is soon. How would we start a search like that?”

  I look around at the festive scene. Where could we even begin? “Talin said the Premier decides the location on his own,” I whisper as we slide past a crowd gathered around a street performer. “But without consulting anyone else, the day before her mother is moved. That means we have a slim window to find out ahead of time where her mother is going to be transferred. That window is our only shot at freeing her.”

  Jeran shakes his head. “But someone knows where her mother is. A guard at the future location, maybe, so they can prepare for a new, high-profile prisoner. After all, the Premier doesn’t move her himself.”

  I snort at the mental image. “If he tried, he’d be unconscious and bleeding in the grass.”

  Jeran laughs a little, in spite of himself.

  “Rumors of prisoner movement tend to spread among the guards,” I tell Jeran as we near the lab complex. “I remember gambling on that when I was a young soldier here.”

  “Gambling?” Jeran asks.

  I nod. “My friends and I would place bets on where we thought high-profile prisoners would end up, and which patrols would be assigned to them. I was once assigned as a junior guard to the patrol for a general arrested from Basea. We weren’t to talk about his location, on penalty of death. But we still placed our bets anyway.”

  “Did you win?”

  I look away, unwilling to meet his steady gaze. “Three hundred notes,” I answer in a low voice, “yeah, I did.”

  “Where would we go if we wanted to catch conversations like that?”

  I shrug. “Wherever the highest concentration of soldiers is right now—and seeing as how the new Maran prisoners have the most attention, wherever they’re headed.”