Each tent exhibits some unusual invention, each more impressive than the last. Along the walkways, street stalls are already set up at regular intervals, selling fried meats and sweet snacks, fresh fruits and paper bags filled with candied nuts. Other stalls sell fruit too rotten to eat and bread too moldy to keep, little sharpened sticks and pebbles with sharp edges to them. These confuse me for a while before I realize they might be things meant not to be eaten or used, but to be thrown.
Finally, we enter the main plaza where the largest tents loom. Here we come to a stuttering halt. Towering several stories in the air is a massive structure built almost entirely of steel and glass, with a grand curving roof letting in the light. One look tells me immediately that this was built on top of a ruin. The Early Ones’ influence is everywhere—symbols carved into the stone floor look reminiscent of those on the structures in Mara, and the tall pillars of black steel that circle the edges of the plaza are jagged on top, as if once part of something bigger. But the glass itself reminds me of Larc, one of the nations that the Federation had conquered long ago. They must have swallowed their artisans and engineers as much as they’d swallowed the land.
Beyond this impressive building, near the end of where these government halls line the city, I see a courtyard surrounded by hedges and walled by a long gate, around which dozens of guards now stand. Red’s presence pulses in my mind. He’s somewhere in that direction, my instincts tell me. Perhaps that is the Federation’s lab complex.
Now I walk underneath the giant glass entrance with Adena and Jeran, trying hard not to let my temper get the best of me. Hundreds of guards are inside this building, pushing crowds back and forcing clear pathways between exhibitions. There are displays of enormous machines, some with wings, humming with wheels running as if they might take off into the sky. I think instantly of some of the ruins I’d seen before in Mara, the Early Ones’ winged machines, and realize with a lurch that maybe the Federation has begun to figure out some of those ancient inventions and have remade them. Other displays are of new guns that advertise to be faster, more accurate, and more devastating than ever before. There are huge cannons, as well as parts of ships and new styles of experimental armor modeled by soldiers. Children squeal in delight as one of these soldiers pretends to lunge at them, his movements shockingly fast behind plated metal that must be light as air.
Suddenly, Jeran touches my arm. I look in the direction he’s focused on.
And there we see the cages that are currently drawing the biggest crowds—along with the creatures contained inside them.
The first cage holds a Ghost as I know them. It’s lying against the cold, metal floor of its cage, its body cut with lines of shadows. If it stretches out, its hands and feet touch the opposite ends of the space. The cage’s bars are painted gold, and as it stirs, it squints under the sunlight beaming down through the glass atrium. It turns its milky eyes feverishly at the crowds surrounding it, gnashing its teeth, but unlike the Ghosts I know, it doesn’t lurch at the audience. Instead, it’s subdued. I think of what Red had told me about the Federation’s link with its Ghosts, how it can command them into rage or calm, and realize that it’s not attacking anyone in this crowd because it has been told not to.
Children mew in fright and clutch their parents’ hands. Older boys and girls laugh and point in delight, some of them tossing the rotten fruit I’d seen being sold at stands into the cage. Adults give it looks of awe and fear. I can see their expressions change as its cage rolls by, the way they nod knowingly to one another as if they’re studying a specimen in a zoo.
Standing on either side of its cage are pairs of guards, hands on their guns as they watch both the creature and the crowd.
The next cage features a Ghost too, but something about it also seems different from those I’ve fought on the warfront. Its features are less twisted, its limbs less stretched and cracked. Its eyes even seem less milky, and it turns its head from side to side as if