I suck in my breath, and for an instant, our surroundings flicker again—this time to those baths. I can feel the warm pool suddenly lapping against my skin, can look over to see Red there beside me, water beading on his bare chest. Steam floats between us, softening his features behind it. The surface of the bath ripples between us, colliding in the middle.

  The memory shivers and fades again as I hastily pull it back, embarrassed. The tree branches return around us. But Red doesn’t tease me. His blue eyes remain steady, searching my gaze, and I realize that perhaps he was thinking about those baths too.

  He hesitates again, his hand in midair. Then he closes the gap between us, reaching out in the dream to smooth the strands of my hair away from my face.

  I almost expect his touch to pass through me—but when his hand brushes my face, I feel him. I can sense his skin against mine.

  He feels me too, and jerks his hand back in surprise. His eyes dart abruptly to mine.

  I didn’t know we could do that, he whispers.

  He’s scarcely uttered his words before I lean forward and kiss him.

  I have wondered about what it might be like to kiss him since that day in the bathhouse. It’s hard to imagine that we would embrace in our dream, through our bond—but I startle just the same. His lips are full and warm, his body yearning toward mine. He’s kissing me back before I can comprehend what I’m doing. I wrap my arms around his neck—can I do this? He loops his arms around my waist—can he do this?

  Talin, he whispers, my name hoarse on his tongue. Moments from our past flash through me—the night after our first battle together, when he’d touched my hand and begged feverishly for me to stay at his side; the way we’d sat side by side at my mother’s table, enjoying the quiet of each other’s company; the last time I’d seen him before Mara fell. Then I think of today, of sensing him out there in the audience while I hovered over Adena, trying to decide between killing my friend and sparing my mother any more pain.

  The sun-soaked trees and the street of my childhood waver around us, my peace threatening to topple. Will Constantine find a way to dig into my mind and unearth everything? Will I accidentally utter something that gives Red away, as I did outside Newage? If I did, would I ever be able to forgive myself? Could I ever undo the harm that would cause?

  I could be the weak link again.

  This is the thought that finally forces me to tear away from Red. My arms leave him, my body draws back from his. The air between us cools. He opens his eyes and stares at me as we both breathe heavily, dizzy with the presence of each other.

  We’re going to free you, he whispers to me. And we’re going to free the others. I swear it.

  I shake my head. Save yourself and save Jeran. Get him away from here.

  He narrows his eyes at me. You can’t be willing to sacrifice yourself for the others and then tell us to save ourselves.

  Everything in me wants to tell him about Raina, that he and Jeran aren’t operating alone out there, that there are so many other forces at work in this city. But I find myself holding back, afraid. My hands chained once again by fear.

  Yes I can, I reply. Because this is no way for us to keep meeting. I’m sorry, Red.

  We can find a way to work together, he starts to say.

  No, we can’t! The peace in me trembles, and with a great effort, I pull the world around us back together. The wind makes the leaves flutter in the trees. A cloud covers the sun overhead.

  No, I say again, calmer. We can’t.

  Talk to me, he insists. Talk to me when you’re awake, not when we’re dreaming. At least we can then have better control. Maybe our link is just aching for our connection. Maybe it’ll stop in our dreams if we just connect when we’re awake.

  I shake my head. I’m too afraid to hurt them again.

  We can’t win if we don’t help each other, he says, and through our bond, I can feel his heart breaking. Talin, please.

  You can’t help me, I answer.

  He reaches for me, then stops short. The street of my childhood finally fades around me. At my back, the dark tunnel yawns. The feeling of his lips against mine has become a faint memory. I’m suddenly unsure it ever happened.

  I’m sorry, I tell him as I feel the dream pulling to an end. I’m not entirely sure what I’m sorry for. Everything, maybe.

  Then he’s gone, and I’m back in my bed, lying on my side with my blankets sprawled around me. I can tell that the Premier is still asleep, lost in his own dream. My emotions must have calmed enough with the peaceful memory of my childhood home to keep from stirring him awake.

  Red and Jeran are out there. They are on the move. I hang on to this belief, feverishly hoping it to be true.

  I should tell them everything. I should keep reaching out to Red.

  We can’t win if we don’t help each other, Red had said to me.

  But how can we win if I am the tool Constantine uses to hurt everyone I love? How can I help them, even with Raina’s tonic weakening my link with the Premier? I have already put my friends in the arena and nearly gotten Red recaptured.

  Next time, they may die. The only way I can help them is to keep my distance.

  The image of Adena facing me in the arena hovers over my heart. How brave I’d been then, thinking I could turn Constantine’s own game against him. And yet, here I am again, sick to my stomach about what that moment might do to my mother. What good am I to Red and Jeran now, anyway? Will I help them best by simply staying away?

  Someday, maybe, I will be free too. Then I will show everyone what I’m capable of doing against this Federation.

  But I may have to do it alone.

  21

  RED

  If there’s one place in the capital that no one is interested in tonight, it’s the National Museum.

  As the celebrations go deep into the night, fireworks whistling and sparking through the evening air, Jeran and I head to the quiet paths around the museum.

  There are no soldiers here. Why should there be? No one is thinking about the relics on display in these halls, and every guard is busy with the rowdy crowds swarming elsewhere in the capital. Only a single sentry is posted at the front and one at the back of the museum, watching halfheartedly for petty thieves. One look at their faces tells me that they’re just biding their time, grouchy for having to spend a solstice celebration night stuck at the museum’s steps.

  I’m quiet, but my mind is a storm. I can’t stop thinking about the dream I’d had with Talin earlier in the night, that half kiss. I can still feel the heat of her touch, however phantom it might’ve been. I can still feel myself pleading with her not to go, to reach out to me when she wakes. I can still feel the agony of her pulling away again, her fear returning. Her pain had washed over me in waves.

  Constantine is certainly pressuring her will at every turn, and I can feel her cracking under the strain of it all. They are breaking her as surely as they’d wanted to break me, to turn her into the perfect Skyhunter—obedient, efficient, cruel.

  If you don’t find a way to take this whole damn system down, they just might succeed.

  My fists clench. No. No way I’m going to lose Talin too.

  My focus turns back on the museum. If we can uncover what exactly the artifacts from Mara are—and why Constantine is so hell-bent on retrieving them—then maybe we can figure out how to use them against him. How to destroy them.

  The benefits of Striker training never cease. Jeran moves so quietly within the shadows of the museum that even I lose him now and then as we go. I head to the opposite side of the building. We take note of each other at either end of the museum’s looming steps, above where a sentry stands guard. As we do, I remove some of the wristbands from my arm and untie the ceremonial sash around my sleeve. Then I make my way to the thickets that line the edge of the museum’s raised foundation.

  There, I purse my lips and make a whistle that imitates one of the fireworks launching along the thoroughfares.

  The sentry turns in my direction. He sighs, then heads down the steps while grumbling to himself. I press against the side of the rising stone stairs, melting into the shadows. He passes by without noticing me at all.

  From the other side of the building, Jeran steals into the museum without a sound.

  As the sentry goes to investigate, I pull myself up the side of the entrance steps and rush toward the entrance. As I move, I hear the sentry again make his annoyed huff as he finds my abandoned wristbands and sash.

  “Bunch of wild children,” I hear him mutter out loud.

  Before he can turn back around and return to his post, I disappear inside the darkness of the museum.

  Skylights up above us shed squares of blue light against the marble floors, where objects stolen from every corner of the Federation’s conquered lands stand in beautiful, curated rows. Graceful statues, jewels that sparkle in the night, enormous vases and carved plaques. Pillars and pieces of monuments. Tapestries hang on the pale stone walls. It’s so quiet I can hear my heartbeat thumping in my ears.

  I’ve never been in here at night before. The daylight cast the entire space in a dreamy fog. In this midnight air, though, the museum feels haunted. There are spirits in here, whispering stories ripped away from their roots.

  Jeran materializes from the shadows beside me. The light halos him in silver. He looks questioningly at me, waiting for my cue on where to go.

  I nod, then close my eyes, trying to remember the paths I used to take. Then I turn down a hall, and he follows.

  We make our way past old doors salvaged from early Karensa and conquered Reo, plates and dishes and silverware taken from the rubble of destroyed homes in Benton, rugs depicting Azaran folk tales that must have once decorated the walls of their libraries. As we go, I can feel a flicker of my boyish self in here, taking these same steps, walking these same corridors. I’d seen these same displays back then. I’d lift my sister so she could get a better look at paintings and artwork on the walls. Laeni would let out purposefully loud laughs just to hear the way it echoed down the corridors. I can almost hear her now, some memory of her voice still preserved in this space.

  I nod at a table set that we pass by. “See that?” I whisper so quietly that my voice seems to dissolve into the air. “I remember the soldiers bringing that into the museum for the caretakers to polish. They’d brought it back on a train from Carreal.”

  “Did you have happy memories here?” Jeran asks.

  We reach the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor. “So many,” I whisper.

  Jeran gives me an understanding smile. “It’s okay to keep those memories, you know,” he whispers. “Even here.”

  “I know,” I murmur back as I look up. Then I make my way up the same steps I used to take as a child.

  We emerge onto a second floor dedicated entirely to relics from the Early Ones.

  Jeran sucks in his breath. Rows and rows of artifacts are on display—archways from ancient halls, shards of twisted metal, gadgets that must have once worked, old engines and intricate gears, metal and glass polished to such a fine sheen that they look like nothing that exists today. One display is a series of charts drawn inside an old notebook, meticulously spelling out the life spans of various persons. They seem impossibly long: 140 years, 151 years, 160 years. Another is a line of glass jars containing curiosities preserved inside murky liquid, pieces of something organic that must have been alive a long time ago.

  Goose bumps rise on my arms. No matter how many times I see these objects, I’m always haunted by them.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jeran whispers as he stops in front of a glass display case showing what looks like a rectangle covered with rows of slim, shiny metal. “Does the Federation know what it’s for?”

  I glance at the placard with it. Another long-lost memory returns: I was a little boy standing beside my father, pointing at this exact object, and asking him what it does. He stooped down to my height, his hands warm on my shoulders, and said, We think it was an engine of sorts, something that could power a metal machine and tell it what to do.

  I stared in fascination at the slim, neat rows of metal. How can this tell something what to do?

  My father shrugged. Well, how does an engine tell a train to move? He glanced at me. How do we tell the Ghosts to attack or to stay? The Early Ones were always searching for that.

  For what?

  Control.

  Why’d they want that so badly?

  He stood back up, patted my shoulder, and fell silent. If you could control the entire world, all of life, with a touch of your hand, you would. In his expression, I could see a glimmer of my mother and the sadness that always accompanied it.

  I looked away from him and across the room, my eyes finding Laeni as she stood on tiptoe to peer at a mechanical doll on display in a glass case. Whenever my father got quiet like this, I found myself shying away, wanting to give him his space.

  Looking back, I realize that maybe I was trying to control my own narrative.

  The memory fades. I am looking straight across the same room and seeing the same mechanical doll on display against the opposite wall. Except now there’s no Laeni standing in front of it.

  “Control,” I whisper.

  Jeran looks at me.

  “Everything the Early Ones created was about seeking control,” I explain, leading us around the room, relying on the muscle memory of a hundred trips in here. “The philosophy behind Ghosts was to reduce a human down to something you could control. Electricity, to control when you could have light. Trains, to control a massive machine that could take you where you wanted to go.”

  I finally stop before a series of small objects in three separate glass cases.

  “I guess the question is what the Early Ones wanted to control with those artifacts,” Jeran murmurs.

  I look down at the objects. All three are identical, and all three look exactly like miniature versions of the cylinders that I’d seen dug up in Mara. The rush of familiarity comes back to me. No wonder I watched those things loaded onto the train cars and thought I’d seen them somewhere before. They were here, all along.

  “‘Purpose unknown,’” Jeran reads from the placards alongside them. “It’s all that’s written about them.”

  I shake my head, then bend closer to the objects. “These look like models of those artifacts, except these have their ends opened up.” I point to the insides of each miniature cylinder, which was loaded with thinner rods structured around a hollow center.

  “Now, come take a look at this.”

  I gesture for Jeran to follow me to the other side of the room, then point at several engravings on display against the wall. “Maybe there’s a reason they buried those artifacts so deep underground.”

  “Energy source?” Jeran asks.

  “Maybe,” I reply, nodding up at the engravings. “But to power what?”

  It’s a series of paintings long faded by time, but the grooves are deep enough to reveal what must once have been on the wood panels. “A depiction of life as it unraveled during the end of the Early Ones’ reign,” I say.

  The images show the massive height of the walls being built around various cities. Down below, an image depicts a cross section showing layers of earth beneath the walls, where bodies of people deemed infected were buried deep, deeper than any body should need to go. As if the survivors were terrified of them.

  “It’s believed that whatever they created and unleashed upon themselves had something to do with lengthening their lives,” I tell Jeran.

  He nods. “Infinite Destiny,” he murmurs. “Their words engraved on ruins in Mara. They would live as long as the stars.”

  “Now, do you see this?” I lean closer to the wood panels and point out some of the items installed on the tops of the walls.

  Jeran frowns. The engraving is rough and hard to make out. But when I look closely enough at it, I can see the subtle signs of an image once there, with blocks of text below. The image appears to depict a small crowd of people gathered in a loose circle around something. As a boy, I’d get as close to this engraving as I could, attempting to make out the faces of the Early Ones, marveling at their strange clothes, wondering if they acted like us as much as they looked like us.

  “This is a wood print of some old papers written by the Early Ones,” I explain in a low voice, nodding at the accompanying placard. “They used to release regular, written reports of events happening in their society to their people. This one discusses an accidental explosion that consumed one of their towns.”

  Jeran and I stare for a moment at the engraved image. The loose crowd of people seems to be standing around crumpled, rodlike canisters strewn across the ground.

  “What if those artifacts aren’t an energy source, but a weapon that failed?” I whisper, looking at Jeran.

  “A weapon they couldn’t control?” Jeran adds.

  I nod. “What if those cylinders were made in an attempt to create a weapon, then buried because they realized how dangerous they were?”

  Jeran looks at me. “Then they should never have been dug back out.”

  “Look at what they’ve done to the workers that rode the train with them.”

  “What if they’re unstable in the open air?”

  “Bombs?”

  If those artifacts are sitting out and are truly unstable, then we have even less time than we thought. Surely the Karensans don’t realize what they’ve gotten their hands on. They think it’s an object that has the potential to power their cities. But it may be the most dangerous thing that’s ever been brought back to Cardinia, an object that, once exposed aboveground, could unleash destruction on the entire city. Could kill us all at any moment.