“Next time,” I sign at Red angrily, then drag a finger across my throat.
Red just shrugs and pats the mouse’s head again. “No,” he signs back, amusement lingering on his lips. Then he says something to me in Karenese, knowing full well that I can’t understand him, and walks on, forcing me to follow him instead of the other way around.
My annoyance flips into outright anger. I wonder how much trouble I’d rile up if I simply killed him now, just stuck a dagger in his back and let myself be done with him, or even just stabbed his foot so that he has to hobble the rest of the way. I fantasize about it until we’ve passed by the arena’s entrance, where I finally abandon the thought in the presence of so many others.
Without a cloud in the sky, the stadium looks blindingly bright, and I have to shield my eyes from the light. I don’t go into the arena. No need to put my punishment on full display to my fellow Strikers if I can delay it a little longer. Instead, I head toward the rows of workshops located next to the arena, where Adena’s shop sits.
I don’t know what this area used to be. A park, maybe. The workshops were built from the ground up without any foundation from the Early Ones, and they came up haphazardly, so that each workshop crowds tightly beside the next, all of them forming a snake of buildings folded over and over into a rectangular area we all call the Grid. Every shop is a different size. One shop showcases three enormous, unfinished catapults built from wood and steel looming several stories high. On top of them sit metalworkers fitting giant hinges onto the shoulders. Other shops specialize in our armor, a lattice of chains so finely made that they look like a silver shirt underneath our vests. These stores are narrow and brightly lit with dozens of torches, the metallic shirts stretched out flat against weaving looms. Still others are workshops crafting the blades we use or melting down steel from broken weapons to recycle into bullets. Some are even used as research areas, where various combinations of herbs, woods, and metals are tested and retested against vials of Ghost blood to see if any of them can be used as a deterrent against the creatures.
During the day, as it is now, the area is usually filled with bustling workers in goggles and heavy gloves and vests to protect them at their stations. But as the war has worn on and our supplies have dwindled, some workers shutter their stations and use the space to drink instead. It has caught on—and now, at night, the Grid turns into a place where Strikers and metalworkers alike, dejected from a losing war and dead friends, come to horse around, drinking and playing with the stoves, daring one another to mad antics out in the test yard.
Adena’s workshop sits on the last row, looking out across the acres of yellowing land they use to test everything designed in the workshops. I don’t expect to see her when I reach the shop—I’d been hoping that she would have a tool on her wall that I can use to shorten Red’s chains.
But when I arrive, she’s here, goggles and mask on, hair strapped back, her dark skin illuminated by the sparks coming off a small steel cylinder she’s welding. In her hand is a metal rod connected to a furnace, and at the end of the rod is a concentrated spout of fire so hot it looks blue.
As always, my eyes wander around the rest of the shop. One entire wall is dedicated to tools of every shape and size, knives and hammers and tongs, needles so thin I can barely see them, curling lengths of metal that I wouldn’t begin to know how to use. Against another wall are four stoves, all lined up in a row. Every spare inch of the other walls is covered in carefully sketched schematics and scribbled notes, as well as shelves of glass jars containing her collection of anything she’s found interesting—which is everything. Unusual feathers. Bird bones. Colorful stones. A perfect spiral of shell. Chips of wood. Dried grasses and flowers. This would almost be a problem, Adena’s obsessive collecting, if she didn’t organize it all so neatly. Instead, everything just looks like an extension of her eternally curious mind.