to him that he’s not letting on, and he might be our best chance to learn more about what the Federation’s war scientists are doing.”
“And is that really why you saved him, Talin?” my mother asks.
She thinks I did it out of pity too, just like the Firstblade. I scowl at her and lean back in my chair. Why did I? Looking back, it all seems so stupid. He had run out of reasons to live, an emotion I knew all too well, and his gesture had reminded me of Corian. Corian, who said blessings over the bodies of monsters, who I wanted so much to be like, who would have stepped into the arena to confront the Firstblade had he been there.
But this prisoner wasn’t Corian. He wasn’t me. Had I really bet my entire career on a moment of desperate grief?
“Does it really matter?” I sign instead. “The Firstblade paired him with me as punishment. I wonder if he really means to let a prisoner of war into the Striker forces or if this is his way of executing the prisoner anyway, forcing him out to the warfront with us.”
My mother takes one of my hands in hers. She turns my palm up, massaging it by pressing her thumbs gently into my skin. I think back to when Nana Yagerri, the old woman who lives at the end of my mother’s street, first taught me how to sign in Maran. She had fled to Newage from a small village near the border between Mara and Basea. “Come here,” she’d said to me one day as she watched me try and fail to sell herbs I’d picked on the street to the houses around us. She had patted my hand and led me to her shack to share oatcakes and tea. “We’ve all forgotten how to take pity on one another,” she’d told me. “But you can talk to old Nana. She’ll teach you how.”
My mother had then learned it from me so that she could understand her daughter once again.
“There was one summer when the rains came early,” my mother says in Basean, rubbing the base of my thumb. “You were only five years old. Do you remember that? You went out to the garden when the sky was already black with clouds, and came back cradling a thin branch with a butterfly’s chrysalis hanging on it. You were so determined to save it from the storm.”
It had been a beautiful turquoise-colored chrysalis dotted with flecks of gold, and inside it I could see the first fragile outlines of a wing. The rains would rip it from its branch, I’d known without a doubt.
“You spent the entire week guarding that chrysalis until the butterfly emerged,” my mother continues. “And when the storm passed, you were so proud to release it.” Her eyes soften, and this time, she signs to me. “My Talin. You’re just like your father.”
My father had been the one to help me cut the small branch it hung from, had sat beside me as we balanced that branch carefully between two rocks on the table. It’s a fragile thing, Talin, he’d told me as I sat there, legs swinging impatiently, waiting for the chrysalis to break open. So be gentle to it. He mussed my hair, and I leaned my head against his side. You’ll see, it will come out when it’s ready.
I remember every detail of this moment, but not my father’s face. I can’t even recall where he went. I’ve asked my mother many times what had happened to him that horrible night, whether we’d lost him at the house or during our flight from the Federation. My mother deflects the question each time. All she will tell me, over and over again, is that I have his easy smile, his compassionate eyes. And I’d go to bed each night haunted by dreams of that smile and those eyes, of his soft laughter filling the house on warm, rainy days.
I don’t know how much of his kindness I inherited, though. I have killed men and monsters in ways I will never share with my mother.
“I was just a child then,” I sign.
“You haven’t changed, my little love.” She leans closer. “We aren’t trusted here—not because of who we are, but where we come from. Is that so different from this prisoner you decided to save? Go talk to him. Find out why you were drawn to him.”
I give her an annoyed frown. “He