The Chief Architect is already waiting for me at the entrance, shoulders perpetually tense. A young translator stands by her side.

  The Chief Architect lowers her head at the sight of me, then pushes her glasses higher and smiles a smile that never reaches her eyes. “You’re early this morning, Skyhunter,” she says to me in Karenese. Beside her, the translator signs to me in Maran sign language.

  As always, I wonder who this girl used to be. Whether she was once a Striker now taken from her old position and made a translator by Constantine. Where she used to live in Mara and how she ended up here.

  Now, though, I have a new suspicion: whether or not she’s actually a spy for a rebellion.

  I look at the translator, searching for some clue in her eyes, but she just turns her gaze nervously down and follows the Chief Architect as she leads us inside. As we go, I manage to glance behind the translator’s ears, searching for any telltale scar. But there’s nothing.

  My gut gives a nauseating lurch as we head through the entrance and deeper down the hall. It’s the feeling I have every time I step in here. I’d spent months within these corridors, bearing torture as they transformed me. Every corner is full of terrors. I can feel those nightmares crowding in my mind now, threatening to overwhelm me, but I force myself to stay straight and unerring, to put one foot in front of the other. I’ll be damned if I’m going to show weakness to the one who turned me into the weapon that I am.

  “The Premier wants an update on how the other Skyhunters are progressing,” I sign to her now, an order she’s used to seeing from me. To my relief, my hands are steady, nothing like the turmoil in my mind.

  “Since you’re early, I’m afraid one of them is still resting,” she tells me after the translator explains my words. “One of our Skyhunters-in-progress can’t be disturbed right now. But you’re welcome to see the second one.”

  I nod at her. “Show me.”

  The Chief Architect turns to the two guards trailing me. “Stay out of the room,” she tells them in Karenese that I understand. “This is only for the Skyhunter to see.”

  They don’t hesitate to do her bidding. One of them casts a nervous glance down the hallway, knowing that the vast rooms beyond contain a multitude of monsters.

  They stop at the end of the hall while we continue on. The Chief Architect opens one of the doors and ushers me inside.

  It’s a dimly lit space, lighting that I remember from my time here, tailored specifically not to injure our new eyes when they’re healing.

  Before, my eyes had to adjust to the dark. Now, though, I can see everything immediately. My gaze goes straight to the figure sitting in a warm bath at one side of the room. It looks like it should be luxurious and relaxing, but he’s hunched in the water and trembling slightly. His eyes are hidden behind a layer of bandages.

  His head turns toward us at the sound of our arrival, and every muscle in his shoulders stiffens. His trembling worsens.

  “Our second Skyhunter,” the Chief Architect tells me, her hands folded behind her back. “As you can see, he has just had his eyes enhanced. A process you’re familiar with, I’m sure.”

  I remember this procedure right away. It’s a process that—for several weeks—leaves you feeling like you’ve been completely blinded, with a deep, aching pain behind your sockets. The procedure also makes you colder than you should be. When I’d undergone it, I’d shivered even in warm rooms, even when the windows were left open to the summer air.

  The hot bath is necessary to stabilize his body’s heat.

  The nausea stirring in my stomach lurches, and I wince, fighting back the urge to retch. His pain suddenly seems to be mine, and for a moment, I feel as if I’m the one undergoing the transformation again. In the low light, his hair—already going gray with the metallic additives in his bloodstream—reminds me of Red.

  I force myself to nod calmly. “His progress seems slower than before,” I sign to the translator, dutifully asking the questions that Constantine wants.

  “He had a close call earlier in the week,” the Chief Architect explains as she wrings her hands unconsciously. “His heart stopped during his eye operation, and we had to postpone it in order to let his body rest. We think he’s out of the danger zone.”

  Her words make me want to laugh. Out of the danger zone. As if they are at all concerned about our health.

  “Where is this one from?” I ask her. This isn’t one of Constantine’s questions.

  “Tanapeg,” she replies.

  One of the border states. I wonder if he might be who my mother is talking about.

  “May I?” I ask the Architect, and she bows her head slightly to me, giving me permission.

  I skirt my way around the room until I’m standing over the young man in the bath. He senses my presence. I see his skin prickle at my nearness, as if he knows somehow that something powerful and deadly is at his side. Then I lean down to take a better look at him.

  No scars behind his ears. Nothing else to go off. But I still linger, taking in his face and his body. He nearly died during the eye procedure—he thinks this is torturous. But he hasn’t yet begun the process of steel infusion, of installing the great black wings on his back. There is so much pain ahead of him, and no way for me to prepare him for the worst of it.

  Did he leave a family behind? Who once called him son? Did they mourn him? Do they know where he ended up? Are they also imprisoned here, like Red’s family had been, or are they perhaps—mercifully—dead? Trapped in this room, blinded and frightened, who does he think about? Does he weep for anyone in his sleep, as I wept for Red?

  If the Early Ones had not destroyed themselves, what would they think of the way the Federation has used their knowledge? Would they shrink away in disgust? Or would they approve? Would they see an echo of themselves in this?

  I have a sudden urge to kill him here. To slice out with my own steel wings and cut his throat, end his suffering. Destroy one of Constantine’s Skyhunters before he can become like me, a weapon at the Premier’s beck and call. Everything in me screams to do it. At the door, the Chief Architect watches me quietly. If she’s afraid of what I might be thinking, she doesn’t react.

  Then I feel that familiar tug in the back of my mind. Constantine’s presence, ever there. He says nothing. He probably isn’t even paying attention to what my moods are or what I might be doing right now. But it’s all the reminder I need.

  I force myself to stand up and return to the Chief Architect’s side. “He looks well,” I sign to her. Beside her, the translator murmurs my answer.

  The Architect gives me a practiced smile. “This one will join you someday, Skyhunter,” she replies. “So I’m glad you approve.”

  She then turns to open the door, ushering us out. I’m glad she doesn’t see the look of hatred on my face. I follow her out with my hands balled into fists.

  As I go through my weekly inspection of the Ghosts’ glass chambers and the Chief Architect’s report on her experiments’ progress, I feel the weight of my mother’s words shift. The translator following us doesn’t once glance up at me. She never errs in her steps around the Architect. The Ghosts in their chambers are all in various stages of their transformations. The ones that have completely changed are listless, standing at attention as if ready to be led out obediently in chains. A few other lab workers and engineers bow their heads at us as we pass by.

  Nothing seems amiss. There are no clues that anyone here might have ulterior motives.

  What am I searching for? What had my mother wanted me to find? Or—what if the things my mother had heard really were just rumors? What if she is mistaken after all? What if this, too, is another cruel game that Constantine has set up for me, giving me false hope that there might be some rebellion in the works—sending me on a desperate goose chase by using my mother as a hapless pawn?

  The thought that this last shred of hope is nothing but a ruse is almost too much for me to bear. I’ve seen my friends jailed. I’ve had to beg my mother to stay alive. Is this the rest of my life that I have to look forward to? Watching helplessly as my loved ones suffer?

  And then, just as my thoughts continue to spiral, I notice something about the Chief Architect as she turns in front of me. She steps under a bright sconce against the wall, and the shadows behind her head momentarily clear right as I catch a glimpse.

  A scar behind her ear.

  It isn’t a big scar. I’ve certainly never noticed it before. Just a line of silver skin running behind her earlobe, fading into invisibility wherever shadows hit it. But it’s unmistakable.

  The Chief Architect is still talking, rapidly now, as she gestures at one glass chamber holding a Ghost that looks like it might be dying. “We are going to put this one down,” she says as the creature shakes its broken jaw. “Its bones aren’t setting right, for some reason, and it doesn’t seem capable of keeping up with the others.”

  But her words sound muffled and distant in my ears. I listen numbly, my breath frozen in my chest.

  How can the Chief Architect be the one behind a rebellion? She had personally overseen the mutilation of Red into a Skyhunter, then mine. She has torn thousands of families apart in her creation of her monstrosities, has been instrumental in the Federation’s conquering of so many nations. She spends her days walking anxiously around her lab, always doing the Premier’s bidding, always bowing to the horrors she inflicts.

  She finishes talking now and turns to look at me. Something in my eyes must catch her attention—because for an instant, she hesitates, and some emotion flashes by on her face.

  Then the Chief Architect nods at the young translator. “That will be all,” she says. “I have a few checks I need to do with our Skyhunter.”

  The girl glances quickly at the woman’s face, as if checking to make sure she is being given a proper dismissal. But the Chief Architect just nods again at her. “Go on.”

  We watch the girl leave. For a moment, we are alone here in the corner of the institute.

  The Chief Architect turns away. “Follow me,” she calls over her shoulder, glancing back briefly at me.

  “Architect—” I start to sign at her, but she glimpses my movement and interrupts me.

  “My name is Raina de Balman,” she replies.

  We move like a pair of shadows, with nothing but the sound of our boots echoing along the corridor. Finally, she leads me into one of the private rooms. In the weak light filtering in from outside, I see a sparsely furnished space, equipped only with a bed and dresser.

  I tense immediately. I used to be sent into chambers like this one to recover from each round of experimentation during my Skyhunter transformation. They’d put me in a bed, and I’d lie still for an entire week at a time, waiting for the wounds in my back to slowly heal around my new wings or my skin to graft back together. An involuntary shudder courses through me at returning to this space, and I wonder what new experiment she’d brought me here for.

  But she doesn’t turn on any of the lights. Instead, she walks over to the side of the bed and presses her hand against a section of the wall there.

  A slight groove in the wall materializes, then indents, as if a section of the wall has pushed inward. She waits without a word as the wall slides open by a couple of feet, then glances at me and nods for me to walk through the narrow darkness.

  It opens abruptly into an illuminated space.

  I find myself standing in a large chamber filled with what appears to be the same equipment used during my Skyhunter transformation.

  We aren’t alone in here. At the other end of the windowless space, seated calmly at a low table sprawled with what look like blueprints, is Mayor Elland.

  She leans back in her seat and regards me with her penetrating look. “Ah,” she says. “You all took your time out there.”

  My mother’s quiet message to me at the mayor’s estate. Her hint to me. Suddenly the words of the prisoner from Carreal return to me again.

  I am not the rebel leader you think you have. I am just one of many.

  The mayor had used my mother to communicate with me, had wanted me in on whatever this meeting is. I stare at her, unsure how to react or what to expect.

  When I hesitate longer, the woman rolls her eyes and gestures to the seats beside her. “You don’t have all day here,” she says. “Constantine will expect you back eventually, so let’s talk.”

  I feel uneasy as I settle into a seat across from the mayor and the Chief Architect shuffles to sit beside me.

  The Chief Architect glances sidelong at me. “Panic room,” she explains, gesturing around us at the enclosed space. “The lab complex is equipped with a small number of these. In the event that something goes wrong with one of our experiments, our scientists can escape to relative safety for a moment while sending out a distress signal to have guards sent in.” She nods at me, her own tense nature in contrast to her words. “No one can hear us in here.”

  Mayor Elland folds her arms against the table. Unlike Raina, she looks as regal and self-assured as she did at her estate. “A good place for you to flee if Constantine ever discovers the real reason why he’s ill all the time,” she quips.

  At that, my eyes dart from the mayor to the Chief Architect. Constantine’s failing health. The fog in his mind. Then I think of the medicinal soup that Constantine drinks, that it was formulated by the Chief Architect to help him think. “Constantine’s treatments,” I sign to her, my hands faltering for a moment. “His illness. You—”

  She greets my realization with a blink. “It’s just an illness, Skyhunter,” she says pointedly. “Or is it?”

  An illness. Or a poisoned body, slowly dying.

  “The tonic I gave you on the wall,” she continues, pushing up her glasses in a nervous gesture, “was one I sometimes used on Red when we were still figuring out his limits. He was the first person I ever attempted a link upon. This tonic weakens the effects of your mind link so that the effects reduce to a trickle. It should prevent you from sharing with the Premier most visions of where you currently are. It is a suppression of one of the many threads that make up your bond with Constantine.”

  It is a suppression. Her words are so quiet I barely hear her. But there they are, hanging in the air.

  Mayor Elland tucks a strand of silver-gray hair behind her ear and leans toward me. “You thought the war ended when you lost Mara. But this, Talin, can be our chance to truly end the war. This can be the real end. And I know you want to see the fall of the Karensa Federation. Don’t you?”

  I meet her eyes, hardly able to believe what I’m hearing. I am just one of many.

  These are the many. I am sitting with leaders of the rebellion.

  She gives me a grim nod. “Interested, eh? Good. Now let’s get you caught up.”

  15

  RED

  The evening is split by the echoes of horns blasting around the city, each of them harmonious with the next. The chorus resounds eagerly from every tower in the city as people flood into the streets, celebrating in anticipation of tomorrow’s game.

  I remember the sound of these horns. I’d sport bracelets on my arms and run alongside my father as we headed out to the festival grounds. Once, the festival had coincided with the conquering of the western nation of Larc.

  What a little fool. How could I have enjoyed myself so much back then?

  Tonight, Jeran and I try to keep a low profile in our Karenese wardrobe as we join the crowds teeming around the city. We sport yellow stripes tied around our wrists. Like the rest of the crowd, we know little about what will happen in the arena tomorrow—only that it will involve captive Strikers from Mara, and that they will each be sporting a different color so that the audience can distinguish easily between them. Already, I can overhear conversations around me from those taking bets on which colors will survive and which will perish, gambling on the lives of people none of them have even seen.

  Beside me, I can sense Jeran’s tension. Maybe Adena will be wearing the yellow bracelet. Maybe Aramin.

  Maybe Talin will be the one ripping those bracelets from their wrists after taking their lives.

  Clusters of soldiers stand at attention along the thoroughfare. I glance at them whenever I can, listening for snatches of conversations, bored chatter, clues. But the few that talk are only barking out orders, herding people in the right direction. As always, I search for the symbols on their sleeves, keeping track of the patrols I see.

  Strange. There are fewer patrols here than there should be.

  Up ahead, rising up in the center of the Solstice Circle, is Cardinia’s arena, decked out entirely tonight in colorful banners.

  We avoid the arena and end up walking along the path linking the surrounding festival grounds to the road leading to the lab complex. The guards cluster thickly around here. Immediately I know what it means; Ghosts must have been transported along this route earlier in the morning, ushered into the arena’s holding rooms in anticipation of tomorrow’s events.

  With the realization comes a wave of sickness. Whatever’s happening to the captive Strikers tomorrow, it’ll involve them facing Ghosts. Except Constantine’s not going to make it a fair fight for them.

  Soon we find ourselves lost in the crowds milling around the edges of the complex’s ivy-strewn walls, the people browsing solstice gifts and trinkets laid out for sale by small vendors along the gates. None of these little stalls are legal businesses, but the guards don’t seem to care. Now and then, I see a few of them accepting bribes from the stall owners, pocketing handfuls of coins and paper in exchange for looking the other way. Some of them hold up solstice bracelets to the light, admiring the jewelry.

  Jeran and I listen for snippets of conversation as we go, gradually letting ourselves take in the chatter of the soldiers. Most of them seem to be wondering what will happen in the arena.