In that moment, I make a vow to be like him. I’m going to find a way to walk through life with courage seared into my bones.
“No pressure, of course,” he calls over his shoulder as he turns in the direction of the arena. “I just thought I’d suggest it.”
The sun is warm, the sky a cloudless blue. My heart beats rapidly against my ribs. I wait a breath longer. Then my legs finally loosen, and I find myself doing what I would do for the next six years—I follow him. I run and run and run.
But in my dream, I never catch up.
* * *
A knock against my door jerks me awake. My face is still streaked with tears.
I swing my legs over the side of my bed. Weak morning light bands across my arms. My head throbs in a rhythm, aching from nightmares I can’t remember. It takes me a second to register that I’m back in my Striker apartment in Newage, and another to remind myself that I now live here alone. My hand goes instinctively to the black bits of Ghost bone studding my ears. The piercings are still fresh enough to hurt when I touch them.
It’s been two weeks since I tried to deliver Corian’s uniform. I wonder if I will ever stop dreaming about him. The shadows are haunted by echoes of where he used to be. Across the hall is his room, the door closed. I haven’t looked in there since I hung his uniform back in his closet. There’s no need to see his bed, tidy and unused. His dressers empty and weapons cabinet hollow. I can feel his emptiness in the air around me, and the reminder every morning sends such a sharp pain through my chest that I want to curl back into my bed and drift off into oblivion, to lie here and never wake, to stay and stay until death comes to claim me too.
Corian would scoff at me if he saw me like this. He’d roll me right out of bed and toss my coat at my head. The thought of his exasperated glare is almost enough to make me laugh through my grief.
Corian, I think. When you first met me, did you see someone with potential? Or is your father right? Did you really just feel sorry for me?
What does it matter, anyway? No new Striker wishes to pair with me. The Firstblade is debating what to do. Soon, I have no doubt, he’ll kick me off the patrols. Then I’ll be forced to stand by, as helpless as the day my mother and I fled our home, as the Federation comes marching through the gates of Newage.
The pounding against my door starts up again.
Walk with courage, I remind myself, thinking of the vow I’d once made to be more like Corian. I sigh, force myself to push up from the bed, and reach for my shirt.
When I finally answer the door, I see Adena Min Ghanna from my patrol standing there in her uniform, her smile so big that it looks like it hurts. Her frizzy hair is tied up into a neat bun, and the morning sun gives her dark skin a warm highlight. She adjusts a pair of goggles on her forehead and wrinkles her nose at me.
“You look like hell,” Adena scolds. She reaches down to brush a few strands of hair away from my eyes, then tugs once on the bottom of my shirt, which I’d left carelessly loose. “Tuck it in, you heathen.”
“I thought Marans didn’t have an official religion,” I sign, my mood turning me sarcastic.
“It’s a saying, Talin,” she signs back.
“Why do you look like you swallowed a frog?”
“All Strikers are to gather in the arena this morning.”
I squint up at the sky, my gaze settling on the bands of distant clouds. “For what? Is the cease-fire over already?”
Adena shakes her head. “No. We caught a deserter from the Federation.” She leans forward eagerly. “He’s to be interrogated today, before an audience.”
A prisoner of war. Now I remember Corian mentioning someone being seized during the same sweep when he’d died. This must be the soldier.
My heart hardens. By tradition, the Firstblade of the Strikers is the one responsible for interrogating enemy soldiers we capture. He questions them in public at the arena, often by stone or by whip, until they tell us what they know about the Federation. If they don’t cooperate, they are executed before an audience.
It sounds cruel, torturing a prisoner to death. But sometimes cruelty is catharsis. I’ve witnessed firsthand what Federation soldiers can do to the people they conquer. To women. To families. To children. This public death is a kindness in comparison, a pitiful fragment of justice for all of us who have lost loved ones in the most horrific ways.
“You made me get out of bed just because we’re executing some Federation coward today?”
“Is arguing with me your new habit?” Adena responds.
I hold my hands up innocently before replying, “Just asking questions.”
“Firstblade’s orders. Strikers to the arena. So stop playing around and go put on your full gear.”
Adena had been close with Corian too, but the way she copes with his death is to drown herself behind her meticulous habits, nitpicking everything as if she could organize the grief out of her system. She’s stopped by my apartment every day for the past two weeks, bringing me savory pancakes and meat pies wrapped in cloth from the cafeteria, checking to see if I’m sleeping and putting on clean clothes.
I hate myself a little for forgetting that others are also learning how to move on from Corian’s death, that Adena is the more considerate one of us, that she knows to think of me even as she struggles.
I haven’t lost my Striker uniform just yet. And watching the execution of a Federation soldier might at least distract me from my haze of grief. I bow my head to Adena and start to turn away. “I’ll be quick,” I promise her.
Adena waits in the open doorway while I wash my face and strap on my harnesses and weapons. A few minutes later, I emerge in my full uniform, and together we head out of the Striker quarters in the direction of the training arena.
Everywhere, there are signs of strain from years of war. The streets are cracked and in desperate need of repair. People buying food in the exchange market clutch ration cards for seaflour, while auctions run high for cuts of beef from the limited numbers of wild cows we’re allowed to cull for the month. When a string of children run past us, I notice their bony arms, the too-sharp jut of their chins.
The conditions are even worse beyond the walls, in the Outer City’s shanties. Every time we head to the warfront, we ride through their narrow mud paths, lined on either side by shacks made of rusting tin sheets and threadbare cloth. Hollow-eyed refugees from Kente, who brought their famed metalworking skills here to help us build our walls and weapons. Merchants from Larc, whose reams of fabric and bags of colorful spices are popular with Marans. Baseans, whose agricultural skills and hardy crop seeds have helped in harvesting the land more efficiently.
Basean refugees are the most difficult for me to see. Their eyes always light up at me, as if the fact that I’m one of them means that I can somehow save their families.
But I can’t remember the last time we didn’t have a food shortage. Mara’s ruin-dotted cliffs and mountain ranges have served as a natural advantage for us in the war—but in the end, they may be what kills us. The only crop that Mara harvests is camifera, a leathery, nutrient-rich plant that thrives on the wet cliffs fed by salty waves. Originally an invasive species that leached the damp soils of nutrients, camifera could be pounded into a flour for breads and noodles or woven into a coarse fabric called seasilk, we learned.