now is Jeran, his arms folded, as he watches her. At the sound of our approach, he looks up at us. His eyes jump to Red. “Oh!” he says, then glances nervously at Adena. “I thought you’d both be in the arena.”
“Same with you two,” I sign back.
Adena pulls her mask back and goggles up, stares at me, and then looks down again as if she’d never noticed us.
We all stand there for an awkward moment, Jeran glancing uncertainly between Red and me, Red looking around the workshop with a wary expression, me staring at Adena and trying to figure out what to tell her. Adena, pointedly ignoring us.
Finally, I reach out and tap her gently on her shoulder.
Adena’s face jerks up, her white-hot-flame rod still in her hand. We all startle back from its heat. Even Red blinks.
“What do you want?” she says to me in a clipped voice.
I give her an apologetic look and nod at Red’s chains. “Something to shorten this,” I reply. “I can’t function if he’s stumbling on this all day. I was wondering if you could help.”
Adena glares at me, gesturing haphazardly with the burner. “You didn’t know I’d be here. You came over hoping I’d be gone, so that you could take one of my tools and do it yourself.”
I give her a guilty look. “Maybe?”
Adena points the flame at Red, who blinks at her. “Sneaking around my shop. For him. My tools.”
“Talin just wanted to make his life easier,” Jeran tells her, an attempt to defend me.
“Would’ve been easiest if she’d just let this one die,” Adena says to Red without flinching. When he narrows his eyes at her, she sticks her chin up at him, daring him to react. “You would’ve done him a favor, Talin. At least he wouldn’t have to be paraded around like this, trying to understand what everyone’s saying about him.”
She goes back to her work, leaving me standing there without knowing what else to do.
Jeran steps closer to me and puts a gentle hand on my arm. “Why don’t I ask Red if he wants to eat anything at the mess hall before practice starts?” As a hint, he glances pointedly in Adena’s direction before looking back at me. My chance to patch things up.
I give Jeran a grateful nod, then unclip Red’s shackle from my wrist and look on as Jeran tries to make casual conversation with the prisoner. Red stares ominously at him, enough to make Jeran fidget, but at least his posture softens, knowing this boy is his only link to his surroundings.
As Jeran starts asking him about his favorite foods, I approach Adena. She still doesn’t look at me, but at least she doesn’t move away. I look on, watching her shape the soft metal into a small cylinder before turning off the flame and refining its edges.
“He reminded me of Corian,” I tell her after a beat. “It was the way he swept his hands across the arena floor.”
Adena is silent for a while, forcing all her concentration onto her work. The clink of metal against metal rings in the room. There’s a furrow between her thick brows that always appears when she’s going between two emotions—like when the Firstblade handed her the gold threaded cord that graduated her to Striker but didn’t give one to her friend, and when she chose Jeran as her Shield after her brother’s death.
“I didn’t mean it, you know,” I add, hesitating, and then, “I didn’t think about how it would affect you. I should have.”
Adena stops hammering at the steel cylinder long enough to glance up at me. “You’re as bad as Corian,” she mutters at me, shaking her head. “Your mother agrees.”
“You talk to my mother about me?”
“Of course I do, every time I stop by her place.”
I think of the housewares that Adena has begun making lately out of scrap metal and the collection of them growing in my mother’s kitchen. It’s not until now that I realize how frequent her visits must be.
“Like when you gave water to that recruit who got in a fight with a Striker in the arena,” Adena continues. “What was his name again? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was supposed to be punished and withheld food and drink, and there you were at midnight, sneaking him a flask.”
“What about you?” I remind her. “Remember when you spent all night wrapping bits of copper around every weapon you could find?”