Prologue
Gilad Sword
I’m not gonna watch the Opening Ceremonies of the Secondborn Trials.
Everyone needs to shut up ’bout it, too, especially the Diamond-Fated announcers with their fancy clothes and celebrity gossip. I glance at the three-dimensional visual screens dappling the walls as I make my way from the shower closet to my locker. They installed these holographic monitors just for this tragic event, so none of us secondborns will miss just how insignificant our lives are to them. It makes me wanna puke. I feel a scowl wrinkling my nose when I look at the images of the bubbleheaded news anchor standing beside her counterpart with the high-pitched voice and glittering lashes. Neither of them would last a day as a Sword secondborn soldier. Not even for a minute.
Water drips from my hair. I slump down on a steel bench. My muscles ache from dragging metal boxes of ammo cartridges after the supply-chain vehicles broke down today. I still have titanium shavings under my fingernails. Annoyed by the prissy chatter, I toss my wet towel at one of the nearby life-sized holographic projections, hitting it just right so that the light skews and cuts everything in half. The reporters now resemble severed bodies. The images’ shrill voices prattle on, though, ’bout Roselle St. Sismode—’bout her ascension to heir after the death of her firstborn brother, Gabriel.
“Ahh, Gilad!” Hazel gripes from her locker, several units down. She slams it shut with a bang. “I was watchin’ that!”
“Nothin’ to see but a bunch of secondborn competitors at the Silver Halo,” I mutter. “They’ll be dead in a few days, and if we’re lucky, we’ll still be alive.”
Hazel ignores my lack of enthusiasm. “They’re about to start the exhibition—Roselle St. Sismode and some firstborn dope from Stars are going to duel on a platform in the arena. She’s gonna crush him. She’s got the new Salloway Dual-Blade X17!”
“She’s gonna be The Sword one day,” I snarl. “You’d think they’d play it safe with her.”
“But Roselle’s already a Sword anyway! She was one of us. Badass.” Hazel flexes, showing me her rippling muscles. She moves to the visual screen’s projection port and snatches my towel away. The hologram becomes whole again. “She doesn’t need anyone’s protection from anything.”
“You never met her mom.”
The coverage pans to the crowd in the sky arena above the Fate of Virtues. For a few minutes I can’t help but aggressively scan it for Hawthorne. I haven’t heard from him since he left our Base. We were best friends when he was secondborn. I’d thought he’d find a way to contact me—tell me he’s okay, ask me how I am. I was wrong. I’ve heard nothin’ from him. He ghosted me the minute his brother, Flint, died. He’s firstborn now. Traitor. He’s probably at The Trials tonight, even though he used to hate it. Once upon a time, he’d be anywhere Roselle was. He lost his damn mind for her at one point, thought he was in love with her, but then he ghosted her, too. I saw her around after he left. Like me, she took it hard. Now she’s firstborn, too. I wonder if she’ll forgive Hawthorne. I won’t. I would never have lost touch with him if our situations had been reversed. I hope he’s still in love with Roselle and that he has to watch while she marries that Salloway creep who the announcers say she’s engaged to, because karma. Suck on it, Hawthorne.
My stomach aches. Hurriedly, I dress for sleep. I just want to go to bed and not have to think about any of these people ever again. I slam my locker shut and pass a horde of orange-uniformed locker-room attendants. They move down the aisles, opening lockers and pulling out armor, tossing it into hovering collection receptacles. I grab an attendant by the arm, startling him. “Hey,” I growl at the young Stone-Fated secondborn, “where’re you takin’ our armor?”
“You’re getting new requisitions—Burton Weapons Manufacturing’s upgrading ’em.”
My eyebrow quirks. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. This is our last air-barracks of the night. We were supposed to be done with our Tree by this afternoon, but we fell behind.”
“When do we get the new stuff?”
“In the morning—first thing.”
I smile and let go of his arm. My armor was starting to smell like dead rodents. I could use a new liner at the very least. I exit the locker room. The catwalk leading to my capsule is practically barren. Everyone’s either in their capsules watchin’ the Opening Ceremonies or in the airship’s rec room watchin’ it together. I don’t go to the rec room anymore. It reminds me too much of Edgerton and Hammon.
An ache caves in my heart. I clench my teeth and pant a little to work through the pain. I don’t know what happened to my friends. Hamm and Edge were here one day, gone the next. No explanation. No good-bye. No nothin’. That creepy freak, Agent Crow, thought I might have had somethin’ to do with it. He took me down into Census’s hole beneath this Tree Base and interrogated me. I thought he was gonna kill me, but he must’ve realized I knew nothin’ ’bout where they’d gone or why they’d left. I think he kept me alive so he could watch me to see if they’d contact me. So far they haven’t. Whatever happened to them, I hope that steel-toothed, psychopathic Census agent never finds ’em, because if he does, they’ll probably wish they were dead.
Exhausted, I climb the ladder to my capsule, crawl inside, and close the hatch and stretch out on my mat. The small space is a cozy cocoon, and I’d stay in it forever if I could. I just want to be left alone. I hate people now. Well, I don’t hate them. I just don’t want to be friends with any of them. It’s nothing personal; it’s just that they all die or leave. It’s not worth it—friendship. I scrub my hand over my scarred face.
I resist turning on the visual screen embedded in my ceiling, for a little while, but then I think about Hamm and Edge. What if, somehow, they show up at the Opening Ceremonies? Before I know it, I turn it on, blinking as my eyes adjust to the bright light. The scene is chaos. People running—screaming—in every direction. It takes me a second to understand that an attack of some kind is taking place in the Silver Halo. People are slaughtering each other. I sit up on my thin mattress and throw aside my blanket, knowing I should do something, but what?
My nose wrinkles. An acrid scent burns my nostrils. I lift my hand to cover my nose and mouth. Hissing clouds of white vapor fill the air through my capsule’s vents. My eyes water, but when I wipe them with the back of my hand, I find a streak of blood, not tears, on my skin. Sounds of coughing and moaning erupt in the airship. I clutch my blanket and try to cover the vents. Blindly, I fight to open the capsule’s hatch, but it won’t budge. Kicking it does no good, even with both feet, as hard as I can, over and over. Light-headedness overwhelms me. My lungs feel like they’re melting. Through the slit between my swelling eyelids, I witness the end of the world play out on the ceiling of my capsule until my last, dying breath.
Chapter 1
The Poison of Our Age
My wrists are bound with steel cuffs.
Hawthorne viciously prods me forward. I stumble behind Agent Crow, through the blue banners, and exit the Sword balcony at the back of the Silver Halo suite. I glance over my shoulder, but it’s not the ache of betrayal that wrenches my heart. It’s fear that whatever has happened to Hawthorne is irreversible. Silver light beams from his eye. I might have caught a glimpse of it the last time we were together, but I can’t be sure. I can hardly process what’s happening now.