I say it again, struggling. In the months since the Federation’s final siege, I have learned enough Maran to communicate with the others on a basic level. But moments like these still confuse me.

  Adena twists something against my back, and I feel a twinge of pain. “Tomorrow isn’t much time for us,” I continue. “But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

  She sighs. “No, we don’t. That train will be carrying at least several dozen Maran prisoners of war bound for the capital. If we’re going to free those soldiers and destroy that track, we’ll need to do it by morning.”

  I’m tempted to say that it’s better to leave the Maran soldiers to their fate. Even if we could free them, where would they go? You’d just delay the inevitable. General Caitoman sends more soldiers and Ghosts into the forests every day. They’d find them eventually if they continued to hide near the city. And then what?

  But I don’t. What’s the point? If we’re the only ones left to fight against the Federation, to slow them down, and we don’t act, then no one else will. So I nod. “Better to do it now,” I mutter in agreement.

  “Damn everything, but I wish Talin were with us right now,” Adena mutters. “She could sneak around better than the rest of us combined.”

  My thoughts turn, as always, to Talin.

  For a long time after we were separated, I listened for her—hoping for her presence to come through our link. Now and then, I felt stabs of pain from her, of heartbreak and anguish. I spent many of those first nights of our separation sleepless, retching, feverish, wondering what they might be doing to her. It took every last one of the others to prevent me from going off in search of her.

  Over the last few months, though, there has been little from Talin. Whenever I reach out to her, I sense only her heartbeat thrumming in rhythm with mine. Still, I’m hopeful. You have to be, right?

  What would I say, if I could reach her?

  Be safe. Protect yourself.

  I’m sorry.

  I love you.

  I wait and wait. But there’s nothing.

  The ways they could have hurt her haunt my every nightmare. I wake each night in a sweat, whispering her name, my mind seared with the image of her left on the battlefield, when I was unable to save her. Maybe her heartbeat in our link is just a figment of my imagination. Maybe she’s already dead.

  And if she is, it’s my fault.

  I feel the edges of a deep, familiar panic at the recesses of my mind. The memories of my lost sister and father, their Ghosts snarling at me. If we go down to the walls of Newage right now, will I confront a Ghost with Talin’s face?

  These questions are still swirling when a sharp pain suddenly lances down my back. Instinctively I whirl, knocking Adena off-balance enough to send her tumbling.

  “Ow!” I growl.

  Adena props herself back up and scowls at me. “Let me know if you’re going to flinch that hard!”

  “Let me know if you’re going to stab me with a knife.”

  “I didn’t stab you with a knife!” Adena snaps as she holds both arms out.

  “Well, it felt like it.”

  “I tried to straighten one of your feather blades, and you squawked like you just saw a lizard crawl out of my mouth.”

  I blink at her strange analogy. “Is that possible?”

  “You’ve never heard that phrase before?” She stands up and dusts off her hands. “Never mind. Give your wings a try. You still won’t be able to fly well, but I think you can glide.”

  I stand up, my wings still extended. At the sight, Adena backs away automatically, her expression wary. I may be their friend now, but it doesn’t mean they think of me that way. To the rest of this camp, I’m still a Karensan war machine, one that’s somehow gone rogue and ended up temporarily allied with them. No one forgives an enemy that easily. There will come a day, they must think, that I’ll turn on them again.

  I step back, then gingerly try to move my wings. Immediately I wince—whatever Adena thinks she did to dull my pain, I can’t tell. But to my pleasant surprise, I’m at least able to fold them enough into a pair of narrow blades against my back, if not a complete and proper fit into their slots. I grit my teeth and extend them again. The pain lances through me like a ripple of heat. Still, my wings extend, casting their shadow on the forest floor beneath me until they can reach almost halfway open.

  Not exactly perfect, no, but much better than before. What can I say? You take the little wins when you can.

  I nod at Adena with a tentative smile. “Make sure you don’t ever fall into Federation hands, all right?” I tell her. “You’d make them a valuable ham.”

  “A valuable what?”

  I must have used the wrong Maran word. “Ham?” I try again.

  Adena smiles wryly. “I think you mean soldier, but the words sound close enough.” She holds up a small metallic cylinder, then tucks it back in her belt. “You’ll just need to be able to move quickly enough to be a distraction tomorrow. Can you do it?”

  At that, I give Adena a half smile. “I was literally created to be a distraction.”

  Adena laughs once at that. “You must have been a real pain in the ass before your transformation.”

  I laugh, but as I follow her back to the campsite, her words linger in my mind. A real pain in the ass. It’s hard for me to remember anything about who I was before the Federation came for me and my life descended into fragments, years of torture. Before my mind bent under the weight of isolation and experimentation.

  Who were you before that? I ask myself constantly. It’s a question I used to grapple with back in the glass chamber, something I forced myself to answer whenever I felt my grip on my sanity fading. I would ask myself this until my voice no longer sounded like my own, but like some second being that lived in my mind, talking to me because I had no one else. That other voice echoes through my head now.

  Who were you before that?

  Maybe you’ve lost him forever. You have vague memories of a boy chasing his sister through a garden, playing a game of hide-and-seek with his father. There are pieces of your life as a boy soldier, laughing and joking with your fellow troops. Memories of friends you once had. A girl named Lei Rand. A boy named Danna Wendrove. How you all would bet on which of you could perform some stunt, just to trade guard duties or long night shifts. Danna had come over frequently for dinner. Lei once told you that you were too soft.

  You live life, certain it will always stay this way, until it doesn’t.

  You must have been happy back then, before the Federation took that from you.

  3

  TALIN

  After the worst is done, the prisoners are dragged back into their cells to finish their transformations into Ghosts. As they’re led out of the arena, Constantine turns to me with those steely eyes and nods up at the sky.

  “Go scout the tracks, Talin,” he says, “and report back to me at the National Hall. I want to make sure they are clear for the train.”

  Of course, I know this isn’t the only reason for him to send me on this mission. Whenever I soar around the city walls, everyone looks up at my silhouette, fear naked on their faces. The people of Mara need to see the power of the Federation overhead, be reminded of why fighting back against Karensa is futile. I am Constantine’s champion—and his spectacle.

  Though, mercifully, I was not the one to deliver Constantine’s punishment today, I remain exhausted. All I did was stand and watch. Still, the muscles of my mind tremble from the effort of holding back. Of having no choice but to obey.

  Every time Constantine gives me an order, a jolt of anguish shoots through me. Will this be the time when he’s displeased with me? Will this time be when he kills my mother?

  So I step forward without hesitation. My fears stay held firmly in my heart, behind the barriers I’ve erected to keep my emotions in check. Black steel unfolds from my back, clicking as metal feathers slide against one another, until my wings have opened to their full span. I bow my head to Constantine, then lift my eyes to the sky. I launch myself up with a surge.

  As I soar through the air, it’s hard to resist the only part of being a Skyhunter that brings me any hint of joy. The world rushes away below me, and suddenly Constantine looks small, his slender figure disappearing from sight as I clear the height of Newage’s walls, until I’m high above the city and the people below me turn into dots. In this small moment, even as my link tethers me to the Premier, I get the illusion of freedom.

  Immediately, the guilt overwhelms me. During my transformation, when I lay trembling in a recovery ward on my stomach so that my back—which had been carved and opened up in preparation for steel wings—could heal, the Chief Architect told me that I would relish the feeling of my new power. That I would become addicted to the strength of being a Skyhunter, that there will be nothing more intoxicating than the realization that I can do anything I want.

  I can fly. I can destroy. I can kill at will.

  I told her then that I would hate it with every fiber of my being. I’d signed it through a sheen of sweat over my entire body, my vision blurring from fresh tears. She’d understood me too—she’d seen enough of my Maran sign language over the months of my captivity to parse some of what I say.

  Just wait and see, Skyhunter, she’d told me, a knowing smile playing on her lips.

  And here I am, not six months later, the thrill of flying rushing in my veins. My stomach twists and I push down my emotions once more.

  From up here, it’s easy to see the split between Newage’s own architecture and the ruins it was built upon—ancient black steel blended with clean white stone, a clash between two civilizations that nevertheless looks familiar and comforting to me. Now, though, scarlet banners cut through the city’s black-and-white features. Smoke trails into the air from where troops are emptying homes and throwing their contents onto bonfires. The Federation is burning remnants of Mara’s rule: our flags, banners, uniforms, crests. These fires have been going sporadically for a while now, turning the evening sky a muted ash brown as fine soot rains down everywhere.

  Packs of Ghosts cluster here and there, some in cages, others wandering the hills at the outskirts of the city. And the train track winds away from Newage like a snake, our carriage already prepared and waiting at the train’s end. Tomorrow, that train will carry us, along with dozens of carriages full of Maran spoils—artifacts, ruins of the Early Ones, prisoners of war—back into the heart of the Federation.

  This is the other reason why Constantine wants me to see the city from the sky. The view from up here offers a firm reminder of Mara’s conquest, the starkest sight of a nation overtaken. It is his unspoken way of continuing to break me down. It is his way of whispering to me: Don’t forget.

  Mara no longer exists. It is only another territory in the Federation.

  What little joy I’d felt from flying disappears, leaving behind the empty anguish of my new identity.

  It is only here, up in the lonely wind and sky, with no one else to see me and Constantine some distance away, that I finally loosen some of the walls around my heart. I can’t restrain myself any longer. I let myself relax, and the flood of emotions I’ve been holding back rushes through me in a tide, pouring through every inch of my body.

  It’s too much, this release. My eyes well with tears.

  I weep in silence as I arc around the city, the wind wiping away the evidence of my grief. Up here, I can cry without a drop landing on my cheeks. My thoughts wander to my mother, then to the ever-looming question of where Constantine will decide to send her next.

  Last month, I’d openly refused his order to root out a pocket of Marans who had been caught hiding in a valley outside of Newage. The next day, the Premier had my mother shipped off to one of the factories along the river winding through Cardinia. I spent our last visitation day sobbing helplessly at the bleeding scars on my mother’s chained hands and the sharp hollows of her cheeks, the sight of her struggling to load cubes of stone onto the back of a wagon. Telling her I was sorry, so deeply sorry. This month must be different.

  Will he reward her this time because I stood beside him in the arena today? Or will he punish her for my angry outburst? A wrenching sob bursts from me at the thought—a hoarse rattle from my lips—lost immediately in the roar of wind around me. What will happen to her? How much more will I make her bear for me?

  I weep until my lungs are heavy, until the icy air pricks my eyes, until I can no longer tell whether my tears are in anguish or from the sting of flying.

  Finally, my breaths slow. My fists unclench and the muscles in my back relax, smoothing my flight as I yield to the air currents. When I first started flying, I tired myself easily by fighting against the wind. Gradually, I learned to turn my body in tune with it instead, to observe the way birds used the air to their favor. My flights have gotten longer as a result. By the time I’ve circled over half the city, I’ve calmed enough to rebuild the walls around my heart, firmer after having been allowed to rest. Bit by bit, I compose myself again until my emotions feel securely restrained under the surface.

  Down below, the arena comes into view behind apartment towers. I can see it changing from an execution stage to a makeshift supply station, where laborers working on the nearby prison excavation site are moving crates in order to make more room for piles of debris outside the worksite.

  A closer look makes me slow momentarily in my sweep. I change my path to a tight circle over the arena as I peer at the massive pit that used to be Newage’s dungeon.

  The pulleys and ropes, which have long hung deep into the pit, are now hauling up something big from the depths. Cardinia’s mayor stands beside the teams and peers down at it.

  I frown, my heartache giving way for a moment of curiosity. Have they finally found something?

  The mysterious object looks like a cylinder the size of one of the buttresses enforcing the sides of the National Hall, but judging from the way it makes the pulleys creak and the sheer number of workers struggling to haul it up, it must weigh at least ten times that. Even caked in eons of dirt, I can still see the glint of dull metal through it, catching the weak afternoon light.

  Slowly, they manage to lift the object until, with one final, mighty pull, it hangs above the ground. A team scrambles to move it to one side while the pulleys lower it onto a rolling platform.

  My brows furrow in concentration. Nothing else I’ve seen in Mara looks anything like this, not even within the Early Ones’ ruins. I stare in wonder, and as I do, I notice the faintest glow coming from it. Maybe it’s my imagination or some remnant of the days I spent feverish in the Laboratory, never sure if what I was seeing in the mirror was me or a hallucination … but something about the object seems warm, as if it has an inner life of its own. A chill seeps into my bones as I watch the workers below circle the object, pointing at various parts of it and scrubbing down its sides. The energy source that Constantine claims lies buried underneath Mara. Is this what he’s been searching for?

  Its internal light reminds me of the first time I ever saw Red on the battlefield, on that distant night when we faced the Federation at Mara’s old warfront. Red had crouched on the ground beside me and uttered a low growl from the depths of his chest, and when I looked at him, I’d seen his eyes glow with an ethereal blue light. Had known he was something more than human.

  Red, I call out to him again through our bond, my permanent reflex, before turning my attention back down.

  I have called to him every day since Mara first fell. I go to bed with my mind still yearning for his, my emotions alight with fire and grief and desperation, hoping for an answer that would never come. In all that time, never has he replied.

  Until now.

  Something familiar tugs at my mind.

  It startles me so much that at first I think it’s another trick of my memory, my imagination conjuring things I wish were real. No. It must just be Constantine, ready to call me back to his side.

  Then the tug comes again. I turn instinctively in its direction, but it’s too subtle a feeling for me to tell exactly where it’s coming from. Still, its origin is unmistakable.

  This pull isn’t coming from the Premier. It comes from my first link, one that can never be severed.

  It is the pull of emotion from a person I am all too familiar with.

  It is the call of someone I’ve ached for every day.

  It is Red.

  4

  RED

  I first sense her when sunset glints through the trees over our campsite, right as I head out into the lengthening darkness with Adena and Jeran.

  I blink, freezing in place at the feeling. Talin. My heart begins to race, and the other voice in me stirs awake.

  Can’t be. You must be dreaming.

  For a moment, I think it’s a trick of my mind. I’ve dreamed about her almost every night since we were separated during the invasion. Maybe this is a waking dream, a hallucination of what I wish were true. It is the faintest trickle of an emotion—an absolute, soul-deep sadness, and with it, a searing flame. The fire of anger.

  Everything in me yearns for the warmth I’d always felt coming from her.

  Is Talin near enough for me to sense more than her heartbeat? Does it mean she’s here, in Newage?

  I don’t know what to do with this feeling. I don’t say a word about it. How can I share this with the others when I’m not even sure of it myself? So all I can do is stand here, frozen, my breath caught in my throat as I try desperately to catch a hint of her presence again.

  It’s me, I call to her through our bond. It’s Red. Are you there?

  There’s nothing but the ever-present pulse of her heartbeat, faint in the background of my mind.

  Talin, I call again.

  But she doesn’t answer. Of course not. There I go again, wanting the impossible. After a minute, her emotion fades away again, leaving me once more with nothing but the fragile thread of our bond.