him, and in my dream, I have a voice, the voice of a child right before it is stolen from her.
Maybe everything that had happened was one long nightmare. Maybe Mara still stands, with her flags flying blue and free over the ramparts.
There’s a familiar voice that calls to me in the dream, and it does not belong to Red. It sounds like the most beautiful and horrible voice in the world, at once soothing and dark, the sound of bells in a temple of death. I find myself turning toward it, curious to hear it again at the same time I push away from it, repelled.
“Wake up, Talin,” he says in Basean, and the sound of my native tongue stirs me out of the blur of my dream.
The towering flames fade into gray, and the image of my father before me turns to mist. My heart lodges in my throat. I reach out for him, desperate for him to stay. But of course he can’t hear me. His figure turns lighter and lighter until it disappears altogether, replaced by this voice that keeps calling for me from another world.
“Talin, it’s time to wake up.”
Pain starts to lance down my arms and legs. There’s such a sharp agony in my side that I can’t take a full breath. I think I’m standing, but I can’t possibly have enough strength to be holding myself up alone. The pain turns acute and real now. Tingles run through my limbs as I try in vain to move. Something is securing my arms tightly behind my back, and the way my weight seems to hang tells me that I must be chained upright. There is no gag on my mouth, but with the way my hands are bound, I’m as good as silenced.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
The Premier of the Karensa Federation is standing before me, resplendent in a brilliant yellow coat. The kind of outfit a king would wear to his coronation. When he sees me awake, his lips curve up.
“There she is,” he says encouragingly to me, again in Basean. Hearing the language on the lips of the man responsible for tearing my life apart … I want to reach out and rip the words out of his mouth.
I see that we’re in the banquet room of Mara’s National Hall, the same chamber where Red and I had once stood before the Senate and demonstrated to the Speaker what we could do.
The Premier ignores the anger on my face, nods behind him, and lets me see everyone else in the room. A ring of his personal guards circles the space around us, their hands resting on the guns at their belts, their scarlet uniforms emblazoned with the Federation’s double crescents. My gaze stutters to a halt on the Speaker of Mara, who now stands in a corner with guards on either side of him, his hands behind his back. He clears his throat at me, but something in my stare must unnerve him, because he quickly averts his eyes.
Then I see her.
Chained and kneeling, with two guards on either side of her … is my mother. Bloodied, but alive.
I come fully awake now, and every muscle in my body screams in pain. A cold sweat breaks out all over my body—I struggle to catch my breath as the wound in my side and my leg flare to life. My eyes stay fixed on my mother, who stares back at me in anguished silence.
One of the soldiers steps forward, the ornate trim of his sleeves distinguishing him from the others. His gloved hands go to the sword at his belt.
The Premier just holds a hand up and shakes his head. He takes a few steps away from me and folds his arms across his chest. “Have you trained as a Striker all your life?” he asks me, this time in Maran.
I only nod at him.
“So, starting when you were twelve.”
Another nod.
“They say you can’t speak,” he muses out loud, “but I can arrange for my Chief Architect to fix that.”
My eyes narrow at his words. He doesn’t understand that scars can be invisible, that his soldiers—that he—was the one who’d broken my voice. His words are so dismissive, so confident in his assessment and control over my own body that I resolve, in this instant, that I’d rather die than give him the power to force me to speak.
Beside him, one of his soldiers steps forward and bows his head. General Caitoman, the