tests on him. I can already hear the Speaker’s command to send Red out immediately to fight at the warfront. Will they have the patience to understand this bond we have? Or will they consider him too great a threat to use? Will they want him dead?
Maybe there’s a way we can help each other, I tell him. But first, rest. We can talk more in a few hours.
I pull my coat back over his body, and then start to get up.
His hand shoots up without warning and grabs my wrist. His skin is still feverishly hot. When I glance at his face, that undercurrent of panic has reappeared in his eyes.
Stay, he whispers in my mind, his voice hoarse with a sudden terror that I can’t explain. Please. Just for a while.
I may not have known him for long—I’m not even sure if I like him—but I recognize everything about the fear now roiling in him. It’s the way I’d felt in the months and years after my mother and I fled into Mara, the way I’d bolt awake in the middle of the night at the slightest sound, certain that the Federation’s soldiers were breaking down our door. It’s the way I’d stumble out of our shack to retch into the grass whenever I smelled smoke from the stove, because I thought it was the Federation lighting houses on fire, setting dead and living bodies alike aflame. It’s the way I’d cling to my mother, crying, until she finally rocked me to sleep.
His fear is the same as mine, and it never really goes away.
I settle back down beside him, my hand still in his, and nod once without a word. The heat of his skin seeps into my palm. My eyes linger on his face, his dark, bloody lashes, the curve of his lips. The brows that stay knotted even in rest, never at peace. There is a beauty about him, in the same way that the Early Ones must have imagined their angels. I study him in wonder, my cheeks flushed. He mumbles as he drifts off. Whatever he’s saying, he doesn’t send it through our bond—but keeps repeating it as a mantra to himself until he slips gradually into sleep again. And I find myself thinking about whether ancient angels were actually real or not, and whether they were the reason the Early Ones vanished.
11
I stay beside him for some time after he falls back into a fitful asleep. Everything about him seems enhanced now through our link, as if I’m seeing him clearly for the first time. He moves restlessly, his fingers twitching, his eyes shifting beneath their lids in an endless dream. He murmurs a feverish string of Karenese words.
“A hall with no end,” he whispers. The language still sounds foreign to my ears, but through our bond, I know what they mean. “A day to live. A million ways to bridge the rift.” He repeats this over and over again until it feels engraved into my memory.
The bond between us pulses steadily as he rests. I don’t see his dreams, but I can feel the unease that seems to churn forever in him, the kind borne from a lifetime of fear. Now and then, a glimmer of his unconscious thoughts even seems to trickle through. I stare at him, trying to understand this new bond between us, until his eyes finally stop moving underneath their lids and he has fallen into a steady sleep.
At last, I force myself to stand and leave his side, then step out of the building. Every part of my body aches from the fight. Our link fades slightly, settling into a steady presence at the back of my mind. I glance back at him one last time before I head out of the compound.
With the dawn, the bite of winter eases slightly against my cheeks and lips. I turn my face up to the compound’s fire-scorched ramparts, where tiny figures sitting along its ledge are outlined against the sky. The others must have headed up there. It’s become a common ritual after each one of the Federation’s sieges.
I sigh and run a hand through my hair, untangling strands knotted with dried blood, and head up toward the ramparts. The farther I go from Red, the fainter our link pulses, until the glimmer of his thoughts is replaced with the beat of his heart and a small, subtle current of his emotions, flickering deep and troubled as he