reserved. She wears a white coat, and her eyes are so deep set that the light beaming down on her swathes her gaze in shadow. Although she doesn’t speak, I sense the tension in her, the tightness of her posture and the stiffness of her muscles, frozen like a rabbit before its predator.
It’s the woman from Red’s nightmares.
“And now,” the man continues, offering a formal hand in the woman’s direction, “a demonstration of the Chief Architect’s abilities.”
She startles a bit at this sudden introduction. Then she steps forward, turns her back to the crowd, and faces the cages. As she does, the crowd instinctively shifts to murmurs, their faces intent on her.
“Bow,” the Chief Architect says to the Ghosts. Her voice is not loud, but it carries clear and unmistakable across the room.
In the cages, every Ghost seems to freeze. They bend, bowing to the audience seemingly against their will.
The crowd gasps at the spectacle. Even I gape at the sight of these monsters on their knees, their heads lowered before this woman. They don’t look up once, don’t snarl, don’t gnash their teeth. They do exactly what they’re told.
This is it, the Federation’s real power on full display: the ability to take a human being and twist body and mind into a monster—a creature capable of such severe hatred that it would then kill others just for the need of it—and the ability to then manipulate those monsters’ minds to do the Federation’s bidding.
“That’s enough,” the Chief Architect says. This time, the Ghosts rise in unison out of their bows and go back to their crouches, their twisted, destroyed faces subdued, if unsettled. The audience gasps again in approval, then claps and whistles.
They don’t think of the Ghosts as machines of death, mutated from humans like themselves. They think they’re fun. Entertainment.
The Chief Architect watches the crowd without reacting, her expression as blank as a hollowed soul.
“Do you ever feel power over Red like this?” Adena whispers beside me, her eyes riveted on the Chief Architect. “Or him over you?” Every fiber of her being seems fascinated by the control this woman has over her monsters.
I shake my head.
Adena chews her bottom lip as she thinks. I know she’s picturing the samples of blood that she’d experimented with, how Red is the key to severing this powerful bond. “Tonight,” she finally murmurs. “We’ll get into those labs. We’ll change all this.”
Everything in me wants to bolt out of this crowd and aim for the woman standing before those cages. The one responsible for creating these monsters that have destroyed so many lives. I could kill her, even with only my knives. I could do it so quickly that no one would know until she lay dead at my feet.
Of course, I don’t. Adena is right. We have come here for a plan bigger than that. So I take a deep breath instead and wait with the crowd, enduring their cheers.
It’s only then that I pick out some of the downcast expressions and anguished eyes in the crowd. Here and there, I spot a man looking anxiously from one cage to the next in search of something, or a woman hugging a child to her with a pained expression. Near me stands a little girl leaning so far out to see the cages that she looks like she’ll fall any second. She continues to strain at the edge of the crowd until someone pulls her back.
The families of those who had been mutilated into Ghosts. Those permanently separated from one another and then condemned to this half death. They’re here too, silent and helpless, looking on at all the people around them who don’t seem to care. Searching quietly for something familiar in the faces of these creatures. Trying to find the lost pieces of their families and terrified that they will get their wish. Those who have felt firsthand the true cruelty of the Federation, their tool for keeping their military mighty and their people under control.
Red’s sister and father.
As I think this, I feel a shock of pain come through our link. Perhaps he can sense that they’re on my mind. And suddenly my anger at this crowd dampens, replaced by true sorrow. How many of them applaud and cheer because they have no choice, because not doing so invites the risk that the Federation will come to their doors one night and rip their families apart? How many of them, then, have faked this glee so often