him a reason, then,” the Premier interrupts her, impatience lacing the edge of his words. “You’re my Chief Architect. You figure it out.” He casts Red a concerned frown before stepping around the woman and leaving the room.
The woman turns to look at Red with an aggrieved expression. “Is there anything else I can give you to make you hold on?” she asks him.
Red’s parched lips part. He’s obviously younger in the glass’s reflection, but the shadows under his eyes make him look like an old, weathered soul. “My sister,” he whispers. “My father.”
The woman nods, turns toward the door, and hesitates. Then, in a quieter voice, she says over her shoulder, “I hope you’ll find a way to forgive me someday, for what I’ve done to you. I hope you know that everything you’ve ever done to protect your family, I’m doing to protect mine. My little boy. My husband.” She swallows. “So, I’m begging you, cooperate with the Premier. If you do well, I do well, and my family remains untouched.”
Red doesn’t respond, and after a guilty silence, the woman called the Chief Architect leaves.
Sometime later, a small figure approaches the other side of the glass wall. She stares at Red in fright. Her gaze wanders to Red’s destroyed back, and she starts to cry.
“Laeni,” Red whispers. A current of joy and terror rushes through him now—joy, at the sight of her, and terror, for what they might do to her. I notice a mouse sitting on her shoulder, watching the scene with its beady eyes. Red’s old words come back to me. My sister had a mouse for a pet.
This is her.
The little girl presses her hands against the glass. “Red,” she replies, “what are they doing to you?” Her voice is clear, small, and anguished.
“I’m okay,” Red says, reaching his hand out in an attempt to touch the glass too. He tries to smile. “It doesn’t hurt, I promise. They’ve given me medicine.”
Finally, when Laeni manages to compose herself, she says, “Papa’s here too. They’ve brought us both. They told us you can’t leave yet, that you’ll die. What can I do for you?”
“Just stay,” Red replies. His eyes are closed now, and his lips move as if he’s counting his breaths, one second at a time. “Tell me a story and distract me.”
Laeni glances nervously at the guards before she sits down outside the glass and takes out a well-worn book. She opens it to a page. “Shall I read you my favorite?”
“Yes.”
She clears her throat, then touches her finger to the page and scans the sentences right to left, the opposite of how Marans read. “A hall with no end. A day to live. A million ways to bridge the rift,” she begins.
As rapidly as it came, the vision of his memory scatters in a burst of light—and I’m standing back in our new apartment, with sunbeams slanting against the floor and tall white curtains framing the windows and floors marbled black and white.
I blink, disoriented, and release his arm. Before me, Red has his hand pressed against the window’s glass, the same way he’d attempted to in the vision. My heart races; my mind whirls again and again through the grotesque moment I’d witnessed.
Red glances at me, the glint in his eyes terrified. You saw it, he tells me.
There’s nothing I need to say to him. I know it was a memory of him acquiring the wings on his back, the weapons that ultimately turned him into a Skyhunter.
All I can do is nod.
The terror in his eyes vanishes in a flash. His eyes shutter, and he takes a step away from the window, bringing his hand back down to his side. I shouldn’t have let her see me like that, he says before he shoves past me.
I watch him as he heads down one of the halls toward his bedchamber. Out of all of us involved in this mission to defeat the Federation, Red is the only one who will head back into a nightmare he’d experienced from the inside, a world so horrifying that he’d wanted to kill himself in order to escape its trauma.
And yet, he’s still here. Still trying to help us.
A part of me wants to let him go and leave him alone. But he is no longer just a prisoner of war under my guard. He is my Shield, an official Striker wearing the sapphire coat, and that means I am to be here for him, I