doesn’t understand my signing. He doesn’t even speak Maran.”
“Aren’t we all always searching for someone to understand us? Find a translator. Your sweet friend Jeran. He speaks Karenese, doesn’t he? You saved the prisoner for a reason, even though you might not yet know what it is. Try to find out what made him flee the Federation.”
I roll my eyes. “Now you sound like the soft one.”
She shrugs. “Everyone has a different story.”
I stare at my mother’s long, graceful hands. They bear new scars since I last saw her: burn marks from the stove and pale cuts and calluses from skinning mice and rabbits—the reliable protein that runs rampant out here—but they don’t make her fingers any less deft. She drums them against the table in an idle dance. My memory of her during our life in Basea comes to me in snatches. Her dark, lush hair, her tall figure. She used those skilled hands to serve as our village doctor and as a huntress who’d come striding home with a young boar slung over her shoulders. The same hands that gutted and skinned an animal could also sew the most careful stitch against a wound or tend to delicate medicinal herbs in our garden. At night, those hands would stroke my hair until I fell asleep. My father had been drawn to that contrast in her, the huntress and healer.
“I’ll go see him,” I sign.
My mother squeezes my hands before pulling away and looking out her window. Despite her strong shoulders, she looks small and alone. “Visit me when you return from the warfront. You will tell me all your stories.”
It’s her way of making me promise to return home alive and safe, a promise we both know I can never be sure to keep. But I bow my head anyway. The truth is, for the past few weeks, when I’ve struggled to find a reason to get up every morning, I think of my mother. I think of this tiny home. And I always push myself out of bed.
“I will, Ma,” I reply.
6
The road leading to the prison is quiet tonight. No one notices Jeran and me as we make our way down the path, nothing more than a pair of shadows in the darkness.
The buildings that make up the National Plaza include one of the most spectacular ruins in Mara—twelve buttresses lining a structure with three arched entrances. This building was once a grand library of the Early Ones, with rows and rows of shelves uncovered when Newage first began cleaning up the ruin, but many of its books had long ago rotted away. By some miracle, a few remained, and from those, we learned what little we know about the Early Ones. Inside the building, the space is cool and dark, with towering stone pillars. Once upon a time, the sides were lined with narrow glass windows that rose up along the building’s walls. Now, this ancient library has been modified into our National Hall. We’ve fortified its crumbling sides with steel and added hallways that radiate from where the windows used to be. Down each hall is a fine apartment where a Senator lives, paired with a team of soldiers to safeguard them and their family.
Below the National Plaza, we discovered an enormous, cylindrical pit five levels deep. Originally, this pit had been dug out by the Early Ones, the walls made of smooth metal, like a silo for storing grain. Adena thinks they may have once used it to launch weapons more massive than anything we’ve ever seen. She’s always sniffing the air when she’s down here, murmuring about the lingering scent of something sharp and chemical.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter what it used to be. We now use it as our underground prison.
Guards standing drowsily at the prison entrance snap awake at the sight of my approach, then relax at the Striker emblem on my coat. Jeran gives them a polite smile and bows. They part and let us through toward the damp steps that wind into the darkness.
As we go, the familiar smell of water and blood and mold hits me, the filth of people kept here for decades, of interrogation chambers built into the metal walls. Shafts of dim blue light illuminate the steps from the gratings above. We move down the stairs at an even pace, spiraling and spiraling, passing one level of archways after another. Every floor is lit sparsely with torchlight, and against their flickering circles, the