that he seems to think resembles a smile. Also, I’m larger. I need more space.
I throw my hands up. Fine.
You and Adena are always doing that with your hands. Is that a Maran thing?
I glare at him before stepping out of the bedchamber and leaving him to settle in. I walk back to my side of the apartment and into my own room, where I open my smaller closet.
Inside hangs a new uniform tailored specifically for me. I stare at it for a moment, my smile fading, and pull down the new coat. I hold it out before me, noting its perfect drape down to my knees and the sleek way it falls against my shoulders.
Red is, no doubt, doing the same in his bedroom, admiring his new uniform just as I am. Or perhaps he isn’t—I realize I don’t know exactly how he feels about officially becoming a Striker in our forces, especially when the Strikers had almost sentenced him to death just a few short weeks earlier.
Tentatively, I reach out to him through our link, a mental exercise as instinctive as squinting to see something more clearly, in an attempt to find out what he’s thinking. As usual, there’s a trickle of his emotions between us, accompanied by the dull, ever-present thud of his heart pressing against my mind.
Then I realize that the emotion I’m sensing from him is dread. It’s something so heavy that I wince slightly at the weight it brings. I turn away from my closet and leave my bedroom to check on him.
When I step into the living room, Red is standing in front of the windows, his posture so stiff that he looks frozen solidly in place. Now the tension pours out of him in waves, violent and terrified, each hitting the shoreline of my mind like a nightmare repeating itself. I step over to him to see what’s caught his attention. Down below, in the plaza outside the National Hall’s front gates, other Strikers are gathered in loose groups on their way back from the training arena. Some of them look up in the direction of our new apartments, unsmiling.
Red doesn’t acknowledge my presence. Nothing about him resembles the young man I’d seen just moments earlier, who had admired the cabinets and joked with me about which bedroom he wanted. Gone is his relaxed expression. I follow his gaze, puzzled, until I realize that he’s not staring at the scene outside but at the window itself. At the glass.
Red? I think at him, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t seem to be aware of anything except for the windowpane. On instinct, I reach out to him. My hand touches his arm, and when he doesn’t react, I close my fingers around his elbow and squeeze gently. Red, I try again.
The bond between us trembles, the disturbed surface of a pond.
All of a sudden, a flash of bright light blankets my mind. The apartment around me vanishes.
In its place appears a room around us made entirely of glass, set somewhere in a vast, dark chamber. I’m seeing the scene as if I were Red himself, strapped facedown on a cold metal table with a menagerie of metal instruments hovering over me. A cold, bright light overhead makes me squint every time I try to angle my head up.
This is one of his memories.
I swallow hard at the sight. When he looks at the reflection of himself against the glass, I can see portions of his arms and legs that have been cut neatly open, and two long shafts of steel being grafted into his back. A small portion of the brand on his upper chest is visible when he cranes his neck. The brand appears freshly done, the skin there a blistered, bloody red. His blood drips in lines from the sides of the table and stains the floor beneath him. I stare down at the near-perfect circles of blood as they expand, threatening to join with one another.
Red seems delirious in his half sleep, trembling and sweating from pain. I can even feel a faint spasm of that long-ago agony lancing through my own limbs.
Before him stands Constantine Tyrus, Premier of the Federation, along with a woman wearing glasses that catch the glare of light.
“I’m already giving him as much medication to dull his pain as he can take,” she says to the Premier.
“He won’t survive,” Constantine responds in his rasp, his hands folded behind his back. “Give him something else.”