“Give him more time. He may know something invaluable.”
“Step aside, Talin,” Aramin answers coldly.
“Corian wouldn’t.”
Aramin sighs at that. This is Corian’s spirit haunting me, giving me the stubbornness to take a stand here. I grit my teeth, not knowing how else to answer him. Not caring. “Haven’t you said before,” I sign, “we could use any help we can get? What if he can give us what we desperately need?”
He grunts in irritation as I use his words against him. “Help?” he says with disgust. “We need a miracle.”
“And yet things clearly aren’t desperate enough, are they?” I’m angry now, and my signs turn cutting. “After all, we still haven’t opened up Striker recruitment to the refugees in the Outer City.”
“I’m not having this argument with you today.”
“When, then? When the Federation’s banners fly over our nation?”
The tension between us grows thicker. I’ve challenged him, dared him to remove me. “What do you want to do, Striker?” he finally asks. “Or are you so noble as to take his place?”
I cast my eyes down at the ground. “With all due respect, sir. If you want to waste a prisoner like this during a losing war, then so be it. But if we execute him now, we might be digging our own graves.”
It’s a reckless, stupid answer—here I am, facing my superior before an audience of our entire Striker force, banking on nothing but the fact that we were once equals, two soldiers fighting a losing war.
He faces me in silence, and for a moment, I think he will raise his blade and cut me down.
Then, finally, he takes a deep breath and nods once at the guards. “Leave him,” he says.
Murmurs ripple through the audience. Disbelief. Even I stare up in surprise. The Firstblade does not take orders from a Basean rat.
He casts one last, disgusted look at the bloodied form of the prisoner, then points his sword at me. “He lives,” he says, loud enough for the audience to hear.
The surprised murmurs turn into a disgruntled chorus. People had come out today for the catharsis of an execution, and now I was the reason they would be robbed of it. Up in the stands, I can see Adena’s stormy expression.
Aramin lowers his sword. The blade’s tip buries into the ground with a heavy thud. “But since you seem so fond of him, I assign him to you.”
I look sharply at him. “Sir?”
“You’re in charge of him now.” Aramin’s gaze pierces through me with an edge of vengeance. “Every Striker needs a Shield, don’t they? And it seems to me that you need a new one. Well, here’s your wish. You get to stay. You get your Shield. Your prisoner gets to live. Are we all satisfied now?”
The insult of his words sinks into me. Heat rises on my cheeks. I had made the mistake of embarrassing him before the entire Striker force and the Maran public—so this is my punishment. Of course a prisoner of war couldn’t join the Striker forces. So instead of dismissing me from the Strikers, instead of taking my challenge, the Firstblade has instead turned me into a joke. I picture myself having to lead a chained prisoner around during training sessions. Forced to sit with him beside me in the mess hall. Would the Firstblade go as far as making me share living quarters with him too? The stares from the arena weigh against my shoulders. Snickers echo around me, their laughter cutting.
Aramin reads my expression with a look of grim satisfaction. “I’ll hold you responsible for anything he does,” he says. “Look out for him. He’s your Shield now. Maybe you’ll be able to get the information that you so firmly believe he holds.”
“And how long might that be, sir?” I ask him.
His eyes stay cool and calm. “As long as any Striker stays with her Shield.”
This is worse than a dismissal. It’s a death sentence.
The laughter continues. The words that Corian’s father had spoken to me echo in my thoughts. You weren’t good enough. On the ground, the prisoner slowly pushes himself up to a seated position and meets my eyes with an accusing glare. I stare back, loathing myself for being sympathetic, hating him for forcing me to be kind.
A rat and a prisoner of war. Perhaps we’re not so different after all.
5
Evening falls. I can’t get him out of my head.
The sound of clashing blades in the arena still rings in my ears as I head out through the Inner City’s walls and into the streets of the Outer City, toward my mother’s home. Roads of mud cut through columns of haphazard shacks leaning this way and that. Everything is cobbled together out of scrap wood, threadbare cloths, and sheets of thin, rusted metal useless for anything else, leftovers from the worlds where we all came from. That no longer exist.
I pass all of it in a daze. My mind lingers on the prisoner—my new Shield, I have to keep telling myself.
The reminder sends a fresh wave of revulsion through me.
I haven’t yet changed out of my Striker gear. I can hardly believe I still get to wear it. Basean refugees call out to me from their stalls, holding out reams of bright fabrics or gesturing to their burlap bags filled with red and gold and purple spices, hoping I have money to spend. Servants sent by their noble Maran masters point at the hanging trails of crimson peppers and black garlic, haggling for the lowest price. Though Marans won’t let us live inside the walls, they have certainly developed a taste for our food.
I pause to buy a bag of spices, then continue until I reach another shanty neighborhood, my mother’s. Difficult as it is to be apart from her, here she is surrounded by a community of other Baseans. A small comfort that I hold dear. You can always tell the Basean streets apart because of the green they somehow manage to coax up from the dirt: tangles of squash vines snaking along the ground, mint and rosemary shrubs cutting through the scent of grease and perfumed rice and spiced fish. Fires burn low, dangerously close to doors, and in front of them crouch an assortment of people, cooking in iron kettles and on homemade metal grills laid over their fires.
They are my people and I am theirs, but they still stare at me as I pass by, eyeing my Striker uniform with a mixture of fascination and dislike. A familiar murmur from them buzzes in my ears. There are such things as spies who patrol the Outer City. They’re sent by the Senate to listen for rumbles of unrest from these people who have been stripped of everything. Pushed to their limit, some lash out, inciting attacks against Maran guards and riots in the streets. I’ve seen the occasional Outer City resident dragged from their leaning shack, locked away after some spy or other has reported their plotting. I always feel confused afterward, a mix of pity and anger and grief.
There are enough people in my mother’s neighborhood who think I’m one of these spies, dressed up in the fine uniform of a Striker and sent to watch over everyone’s affairs here. That I’m the eyes and ears of the elite, reporting who to punish. In this way, they see me the same way that the Marans do: undeserving of the Striker uniform. It keeps me suspended between the Inner City and the Outer—where I’m neither accepted nor entirely cast out by either side.
Even so, I can’t help feeling a bit at home as I walk these streets. Here, to me, is the part of Mara I understand, the people that Mara had allowed into its borders even as the Federation pushes in from all sides. We’re still here and alive. It’s enough of a reason to defend this place.