in this cell, he looks less like a threat and more like just a prisoner in a strange place, among strange people.
My thoughts make me shake my head, irritated with myself. “I don’t know what might have happened to you,” I sign to him, “and I don’t expect you to tell it to me. We all have pain from our past. But at the warfront, none of that matters. I’ve been handed the responsibility of your care, and that means you will accompany me as I go about my duties. And if you help us, we might even be able to help you.”
He turns distant again and glances away. “I don’t need your help,” Jeran says, his soft voice a mismatch to the acid in Red’s.
“Maybe you’ll be surprised,” I retort.
“I don’t like surprises.”
“Apparently you don’t like anything.” My gestures are so annoyed that Jeran backs slightly away, his eyes going to the prisoner and his hand to his belt before he remembers he doesn’t have his weapons with him.
Red meets my eyes again. We hold each other’s stare, and for a moment, I think I see something vulnerable in him. It is the part of him that has not yet been touched by the Federation.
Then the moment ends. He looks away from me and tilts his head up to the light beaming down from the ceiling grate. The mouse stirs in his pocket, its whiskers peeking out. A sigh rumbles in the prisoner’s chest as he pats the creature absently. I wait a moment, wondering if he’s gathering his thoughts, but when he doesn’t speak again, I finally stand up and turn my back on him. Jeran walks with me. I can feel the questions stirring in him, and his hesitant eyes on me, but I don’t answer and I don’t look back. I can’t. If I see the prisoner’s face again, I might want to throw a fist at his stubborn jaw. The reasons why I saved him are beginning to wane in my mind.
“Any luck, little rat?” one of the guards says, sneering at me as he opens the cell door to let us through.
The look I shoot him is so dark that it sends him scurrying back to his position.
7
The guards tell me the next morning, as the Firstblade sends me to retrieve my new Shield, that Red ate the rest of the bread out of the bag I’d brought him. In truly irritating fashion, he’d left the fish untouched.
They’ve also cleaned him up. How they got him to cooperate, I don’t know, but when they deliver him to me at the front gate of the prison, his hair is washed, trimmed, and tied up into a typical Maran knot, and his body has been scrubbed so hard that his skin looks pink. Even his pet mouse looks puffed up in a ball as if it’d been caught under a deluge of water and soap, its fuzz sticking out from the sides of the shirt pocket. My eyes water at the peppery smell of prison soap wafting off him. He gazes warily around the National Plaza, as if barely able to believe that he’s out of his prison cell.
I have nothing to communicate to him that he can understand, so I don’t try. I just tug on his chains, making sure they’re still locked tight around his wrists and waist, then secure a length of it around my arm. Now that I’m able to walk beside him, I get a sense for how tall he really is—more than a full head above me, and even after weeks of starvation, still solid in his shoulders and chest and arms. They’ve shaved his beard too, and underneath the grizzled scruff, his face is lean and smooth, younger than I originally thought. His breath is pleasant now, the sign of having eaten and gotten his teeth scrubbed. He doesn’t smile. My hands hover persistently near the daggers against my thighs, ready to move if he turns on me. Maybe he no longer wants to die, at least not right away, but that doesn’t mean he might not want to take someone else’s life.
The Firstblade wasn’t willing to offer him clothing beyond his prison suit. Who knows if Red might try to make an escape, maybe attempt to deliver news of what he’s seen in Mara to the Federation? So he wears a clean set of the white tunic and pants instead, which he’s already spoiled with mud at the