by Marie Lu
Where is my father? Something terrible had happened to him, but even in my dream, I still can’t remember what it is.
Poisonous gas clouds the only path we can take. Yellow mist fills my lungs. I cough violently, heaving, the burning indescribable as my throat feels like it’s been coated in fuel and lit on fire. My mother yanks me forward, tears streaming from her eyes as she holds her hand to her mouth.
We enter a field of darkness. Blood trickles, then flakes, at the edges of my mouth. I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and keep running. My vision blurs with hot tears.
We lose all sense of time. My nightmare runs on repeat for what feels like hours, days, weeks, as it had when we made our real escape. In this seemingly eternal night, the figure of us fleeing with thousands of other people is almost invisible, the grasslands we trample through nothing more than a black ocean. The only light comes from the full moon hanging in the sky, low and white and enormous, the stars behind it washed out in the brightness. We run and run as a horde of humanity, barely stopping, barely resting, trying to reach the edge of the warfront where we could cross over into safety. Into Mara, the last free nation.
When I look up at my mother, her eyes are wild and bloodshot, focused only on the bridges ahead of us. Maran snipers and archers wait on the other side of the ravine, alongside massive catapults, but they won’t linger for us forever. Crates of explosives line the lengths of the bridges, and the archers’ arrows are tipped with fire, ready to shoot.
Behind us, gaining quickly, are Federation soldiers and their Ghosts, their hulking shapes undulating on the horizon.
We reach the bridges. The sound of our boots against dirt suddenly changes to a hollow clang against metal. The bridges are impossibly thin. They shouldn’t be capable of holding so much weight. I squeeze my eyes shut so that I can’t look down into the dizzying darkness, with only a thin silver thread of a river thousands of feet below visible.
When I open my eyes again, I see lines of soldiers, the crest of Mara emblazoned on their sleeves, their guns hoisted and ready. Scattered among them are Mara’s famed Strikers, their sapphire uniforms prominent against the firelight, their masks on, their guns and swords out, ready to face the Ghosts. I feel a sudden surge of hope. My mother’s pace quickens, sensing the same.
We reach the other side. I nearly fall as the soldiers shout for us to move past their ranks. There, I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and dare to look back across the chasm.
All around us, the other refugees are crying, some kneeling on the ground, retching up what little is in their stomachs after the exertion of the sprint. Most are still on the bridges, streaming to safety like a teeming mass of ants.
My mother collapses to the ground. She’s weeping in pain now, her eyes shut tight, her hands pressed to her leg wound as if she can stop the agony from engulfing her. I kneel beside her, not knowing how to help her. Blood smears on her skin. There’s so much of it.
Behind us, the archers fire at the bridges still crowded with people. Their arrows hurtle down. Some strike the refugees—others embed in the crates resting along the bridges’ joints.
The crates explode as if they had been struck by lightning. Like the earth has split in two. And the bridges, the only trade routes Mara has left, buckle, tearing apart in a deafening groan of metal. A great wail of panic comes from those still crossing. I can see them climbing over one another, crushing their neighbors in their desperation to flee. On the other side of the chasm fly the Federation’s red-and-black banners, their Ghosts letting out their piercing shrieks into the night.
“Don’t look,” my mother tells me. Her voice is a trembling murmur, and her brown skin is ashen pale. She shakes her head in despair, pulls me close to her, and lets me cry. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispers into my hair. “Keep your eyes on me. It’s okay.”
* * *
It’s okay, baby.
I stir in the night with the sound of my mother’s voice still echoing in my dreams. The hallways of our new apartment are disorienting in the darkness, and for a moment, I can’t be sure where I am. Gradually, my thoughts settle. I’m sitting upright in my bed, my body washed in silver from the rectangle of moonlight that spills into the room from the windows.
I stay where I am for a moment, letting the nightmare slowly fade from my consciousness and become replaced by the unease of my reality. On the other side of the apartment, I can still feel Red’s low undercurrent of emotions rippling across my mind, trapped in a nightmare of his own that I can’t see. The sensations of his dreams are more erratic than his waking thoughts—subtler, fewer whole scenes and words, but deeper feelings and shadows, with the occasional spikes of terror. And always the hint at the corner of my mind—just barely out of reach—of reflections in glass and the flash of scarlet uniforms in the darkness.
Maybe his nightmares had triggered my own, his fears leaking through our bond like water from a dam, soaking the walls of our minds.
Maybe his nightmare is even the same as mine, except from his point of view. From the boy soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot.
If that’s true, then perhaps the bond goes both ways. If I calm myself, will he calm? And subsequently—if I can calm his nightmares, will he stop triggering mine? I close my eyes and think of Corian, how we used to sit in silence across from each other in the middle of his family’s garden and just let ourselves listen to the world around us. It is another daily Striker exercise, this meditation. I do it now as I turn in bed to lie on my back, imagining the ripples disturbing the surface of my mind, then letting them slow, still the surface back to glass. I let myself remember the sound of an evening forest, the call of the birds in the boughs. Then, gently, I send this meditation of thought through our link, slowly, slowly willing the ripples in Red’s mind to still, the nightmares churning in his thoughts to fade back into nothing.
It’s hard to tell if any of it is working, and for a moment I feel foolish for even attempting to understand this link between us.
Then I feel the subtle rhythm of his breathing even out. The shadows flickering across the back of his mind slowly fade, until all I can sense through our link is a low, steady pulse of a person in deep sleep.
Red had told me that the Federation originally created this link so that their Premier could control his mind, keep him from attacking their own troops. They may not have had the chance to finish linking him to the Federation, but the fact that I can use my own mind to calm his is both fascinating and unsettling. Maybe he would be able to do it to me too. Maybe there are other small, subtle things we are capable of controlling about each other. The thought makes me shiver. How had he gone from that scared boy pointing the gun to the experiment pinned down on a table in a glass room? How had the Federation turned him from a child into a war machine?
What a cruel sense of humor this world has, to join me with a soldier partly responsible for the destruction of my old world. A soldier who nevertheless spared my life.
Eventually, I fall back to sleep. But the nightmares continue again, casting me this time as a puppet controlled by the faceless form of a soldier bearing an insignia on his sleeve. He tells me to point the gun at myself, sobbing, on the ground. He tells me to shoot. And in the nightmare, I do exactly as I’m told.
15
The winter sun shines bright and searing against rain-dampened paths. As the other Strikers head to the mess hall, Red and I cross the National Plaza with Adena and Jeran at our sides, on our way to the prison.
As we enter and head down, the dampness seeps through our clothes. It chills us, although Red doesn’t shiver at all. Through our bond, I can sense his sheer exhaustion from the day before. He’d spent a good part of the afternoon hurling his guts in an alley of the National Plaza, then skipped dinner to head to bed early. Whatever his nightmares had been last night, they’d kept me awake and restless.
“We keep a Ghost down here,” Adena whispers to Red as we approach the lowest level of cells. “It’s be
en alive here for over a year. We’ve subjected it to enough starvation and experiments that it stays mostly quiet now.”
Red stares at Adena after Jeran translates, but he doesn’t flinch at the lack of mercy in her words. When Red casts me a questioning glance, I just shake my head. I should tell him about how Adena had lost her brother, but I don’t want to mention how Adena had also stood in the stands during Red’s execution and shouted for his blood to be spilled.
My own sympathies for Ghosts are limited, anyway.
The cell, unlike others down here, has two layers of doors, with torches lit in the tiny corridor between them. They’re the only light source that filters through the inner door’s bars. After the guards step aside for us, we go through the first into a dark corridor that ends in a second chained door. Here, Adena takes out a different key and unlocks it. My hands are already resting on the hilts of my swords, the blades partially pulled out of their sheaths.
The ceiling is low, barely tall enough for Red, the largest of us, to stand fully upright. There are no windows. The Ghost doesn’t make a sound, but I know it’s here the instant we step inside. I can hear the faint, incessant grinding of its teeth in the dark, the chilling tang of its rotting flesh that presses against my senses like a dagger.
My gaze rests automatically on the ashen figure crouched in one corner of the cell, the bones of its spine an uneven silhouette in the torchlight as it keeps its back turned to us. It rasps weakly with each breath. Patches of its white, cracked skin have peeled off, revealing the decay underneath. Shackles around its wrists keep it chained firmly to the wall. Based on how tight the cuffs are, I can tell the Ghost has grown larger since the last time it was fitted.
I’m surprised every time I’m in here that a Ghost can possibly be subdued. But even a monster has its limits, I suppose, and its figure stays slouched even as it can hear our entrance, knowing soldiers have come to deliver another round of torture.
Adena steps forward first. A small metal kit is in her hands, and when she opens it, I see the glint of a long syringe.
“I’m going to take its blood,” she signs to us. It’s so dark in here that I squint to make out the movements of her fingers. “When it turns around and sees you, do not attack it. Let it come.” She glances at Red. “To him.”
Jeran looks back at the Ghost. “Those chains don’t look stable enough,” he signs.
“I’ve been in here enough times,” Adena replies in silence. “Trust me.”
Now she steps closer to the Ghost. She moves with confidence, but I can see the slight stiffness in her shoulders, the nearly imperceptible tremor in her hands. She reaches the beast, then holds out the syringe toward the bones of its spine that jut out. We remain still, not daring to breathe as she approaches it. Beside me, Red’s emotions stir slightly, and through our link, I sense a rising tension in him that almost feels like anticipation. Like he wants to see this Ghost approach him.
Adena hesitates for a second—then injects the syringe deep into its spine and pulls a vial of blood from it as fast as she can.
The creature whirls. It moves so fast that at first I think it will catch Adena in its jaws.
Its eyes are still milky white like every Ghost I’ve ever seen, its teeth still long and bloody around its ruined mouth. But its scream is hoarse and liquid, like its throat has almost completely rotted away. I notice that one of its eyes is missing, and it only has two or three claws per hand.
That doesn’t stop it from lunging at Adena. Hate burns cold in its eyes.
Adena spins smoothly away, slicing back with her dagger as she goes. It cuts a long ribbon into the creature’s upper arm—a piece of flesh comes away from its body at the action. This Ghost is falling apart.
I realize that she’s trying to lead it toward Red. Jeran whips out one blade and spins forward, cutting the Ghost hard enough on its other arm to force it to turn. It bares its overgrown teeth at him, then lunges again. Like water, Adena moves out of its way and cuts it once more, bringing it closer to Red. The two of them work together in a seamless pattern of movement, goading the Ghost toward one, then the other, then finally close enough to where I’m poised with Red for it to sense his presence.
I tense. Somehow, in this darkness, I don’t remember that Red is the one beside me. Instead it’s Corian, still bent on one knee on the forest floor, paying his respects to the Ghost he had just killed, unaware that this will be one of his final moments. My blades are in my hands before I can think, and I take a step toward Red, baring the steel before me as if his life might depend on it. The logic in me struggles against the tide of my memories.
Hold back. This is not the forest. He is not Corian.
Beside me, Red stills. For an instant, I’m afraid he’ll transform right here in the cell. Or, worse, he won’t—and the Ghost’s chains will break and it’ll sink its teeth into him.
The Ghost reaches Red—its chains pulled taut, its arms stretched tight behind it—and it screams in frustration. At first, it doesn’t seem to treat him any differently from how it treats us. But when its milky eyes meet his, it halts. Its teeth are still bared, and it still glares at him with an inhuman curtain of fury—but instead of lunging, it continues to stare, tilting its head at him in confusion. A low growl rumbles at the base of its ruined throat.
To my horror, I can tell that Red has a strange kinship with this Ghost. I sense the surge of emotions from him—that he and this creature were both birthed from the same place, created from the same nightmare. Then I realize that this is how Red feels—there is an understanding that sparks between them, and whatever that is, it keeps the Ghost from attacking him.
The Ghost snaps out of its hesitation. It gnashes its teeth at Red, then turns away from him and shifts its attention toward me.
I’m ready for it. I yank out one of my knives and stab it into the Ghost’s arm before it can lunge at me. The creature screams. Unlike with Red, it looks at me with familiar hatred, then shifts to attack again.
Suddenly it shrieks, slapping at its neck as if a bug has stung it. Behind it, Adena pulls another syringe away from its neck and steps back.
It takes less than a second. The Ghost blinks twice and sways on its feet, then backs up a few steps. The snarl in its throat morphs into some kind of whine. Those eyes flutter again. It tries to focus on Adena, its teeth still gnashing, but then it collapses to its knees. Its muscles flex as it struggles to stay awake, but it’s no use.
I look on as it goes limp and splays unconscious across the stone floor.
Adena’s forehead gleams with sweat. “It didn’t attack you,” she signs, nodding once at Red.
“It’s as if it knew you,” Jeran adds, materializing out of the darkness to join us.
Red stands his ground. It isn’t trained to attack me, he tells me through our link. His voice in my mind sounds hoarse and exhausted, weighed down with unspoken grief.
I repeat Red’s words to Adena and Jeran, signing with my hands.
We step out of the Ghost’s cell, and Adena carefully locks each layer of the cell’s doors behind us. Only when we’re completely out and standing back in the dungeon’s corridors do I let my shoulders loosen.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in all my years of studying Ghosts,” Adena exclaims, trying to keep her voice down and squeaking in the process. “The way it reacted to you? It didn’t even try to attack.” There’s a bright light in her eyes as she holds up the vial of blood she’d taken from the Ghost.
Jeran has a glint in his eyes too. “We are going to figure out what the Federation tried to do to Red,” he says. “And we are going to figure it out soon, before they can take us down.”
“What do we do now, though?” I sign, my eyes going from the vial of blood in Adena’s hand to the dark silhouette of Red’s figure.
Adena takes a deep breath. “Now you’re going to help us get around the scrapyards in the Outer City. Because I need some good magnesium.”
16
“I just need enough of the metal to test Red’s blood against that Ghost’s,” Adena tells us as we head out of the Inner City gates and into the muddy paths of the shanties. “Magnesium metal doesn’t do much when dropped in water. But when mixed with Ghost blood, it froths and turns pale. Ghost blood is wild. The result is a sample where the froth trails let us see the movement of the blood inside the mixture.”
Around us, people cast Red nervous glances. Even without his fearsome wings, he looks taller and stronger than most here.
“You’ll have to help me gather it,” I tell her and Jeran. “It’s not the easiest metal to find. Would be better if we all searched for an afternoon.”
Before I became a Striker, I spent most days twisting my way through the scrapyards littering the Outer City. You can see them towering in the distance, beyond the jumble of makeshift tin roofs that make up most of the shanties—the silhouette of stacks and stacks of discarded metal, artificial mountains behind wired fencing that rise every dozen or so blocks.
The one closest to my mother’s home—the one I now lead the others to—is no different: an acre of useless dirt and mud, piled high with a random assortment of everything. Old parts from ruins left behind by the Early Ones, pieces of engines or buildings or machines, things that regularly turn up on farmers’ land and out in the valleys. There are also discarded metals from the Inner City. Broken carriage parts. Pieces of buildings that have been taken apart and rebuilt—roofing, cladding, doors, and window frames. Old pots and pans and cans, chairs with three legs and tables without any. Wheels. Screws. Pipes. Forks and knives and spoons.