his hand and gesture for him to lie back down. Then I shake my head, smile a little, and point at myself, trying to tell him he’s still in Mara. Still with me.
“Talin,” I sign at myself. “Red.” I point at him. “Friend.”
For an instant, I don’t think he understands me. But his eyes settle on my moving hands as I repeat the words. A flicker of recognition appears on his face at my name. Then he finally sees who I am. His muscles gradually loosen. The wild panic on his face fades into exhaustion, and he collapses back onto his cot.
Perhaps he thought he’d somehow ended up back in his experimental chambers in the Federation. The way he reacted to the chains … maybe they kept him in shackles there.
A moment later, his head turns back toward me. His eyes go to the scarlet stains on my coat.
I give him a wry smile. “Not my blood,” I sign, not expecting him to know what I said. “I’m too good a Striker for that.” A part of me wants to go fetch Jeran and have him translate for us again, although Jeran must be in no mood for our company right now.
A rush of warmth comes through the bond between me and Red. Somehow, I sense him understand my words. He opens his mouth and responds in Karenese—but at the same time, I hear his response in my mind, something I understand so deeply and instinctively that it feels like I’m reading my own thoughts.
You look different, he’s saying. Without your Striker coat.
I don’t know how it works.
I can’t begin to describe why I understand him without comprehending Karenese.
But through the new bond between us, I know what he’s saying to me, as if his mind had fused with my own. All I can do is stare back at him, unsure how to react, stunned into complete silence.
“What did you do to me?” I finally manage to sign to him.
He lifts a hand, chains clacking, and taps his temple with a finger. You don’t need to sign to me anymore, he says. Think your words. I can hear you in my mind.
It is his voice, except his lips don’t move at all. Instead of hearing him out loud, his words echo inside my head, a trickle of his emotions accompanying it.
I stare at him, disbelieving. Then I tentatively try to do the same thing.
This is impossible, I think to him, my hands still moving unconsciously to sign the words.
Nothing is impossible, he responds in my mind.
Tears spring unbidden to my eyes.
The last time I’d ever said anything to anyone, I was eight years old and my mother was beside my sickbed in Newage, where we’d been sent to after we fled into Mara. She was holding my hand as I croaked to her, blood running from my nose, lungs seizing with dry coughs, blisters searing the skin on my face and arms. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Those were my last spoken words to my mother. I can’t remember why I said it, what I’d been so sorry for. My eyes had darted wildly around, hoping to see my father walk through the door. He would have put a hand against my forehead and chuckled apologetically, say he hadn’t meant to lose us in the mass exodus out of Basea. That he’d been right behind us. But he never appeared. And the next morning, I’d woken up silent.
I’ve gone so long without speech to communicate that I rarely think about it anymore. I spend my days in silence, signing to those who understand, steering clear of those who don’t.
But here he is, Red, the Skyhunter, answering words that I merely think in my head, his voice so clear in my mind that it’s as if I’d thought them myself.
And just like how he’s able to catch a glimpse of my thoughts and memories, I now see something of his—a boy in a chamber made entirely of glass and metal, fiddling desperately with shackles on his wrists, screaming and screaming and screaming.
The image is there and gone in my head, so rapid that I wonder if I’d just imagined it.
How…? I start to think, still unsure if my thought is being carried to him. But he seems to hear me as clearly as if I’d spoken or signed the word, because he nods and takes a deep breath.
In order to control their human weapons of war, he