am to train with him in both mind and body, and that when we next fight together at the warfront, he and I will know the other’s movements as surely as we know our own limbs.
More than that, I just don’t want to see him like this.
So I find myself following him down the hall to the bedchamber, where he’s pulling off his new Striker coat to hang in the closet. There, I lean against the doorframe.
He glares at me. What do you want?
I don’t ask him about what had flashed through his—and my—mind. You’re in my room, I think instead, nodding at the smaller space.
Red pauses, realizing his mistake.
Unless you want me to take the bigger chamber, I add.
What do you care, anyway? he mutters through our bond as he grabs his coat out of the closet again.
I stop before him, forcing him to look me in the eyes.
You’re my Shield, and I am yours, I tell him. It means I always care about everything related to you. It means we will spend every waking hour together, that I will show you how I fight and how I move, and that you will show me the same. It means you teaching me more about this bond. I pause to point between us. It means we are eternal companions, until death.
I don’t like companions, he replies, an audible growl in his throat accompanying his words.
There he goes again with the things he dislikes. This time, though, I sense fear behind it, fear of growing close to someone he could lose. Fear of what the future might bring.
Tomorrow, I continue. We’ll train. We’ll start learning—really learning—about what links us. We’ll take it one step at a time. But I’ll always be there. I meet his gaze with my steady one. I’ll see you in the morning. I promise.
Red stares at me, annoyance on his face. Still, there is a sense of something new in the link that joins us—some kind of trust, the building of a bridge. Then he turns away and heads off to his own bedchamber, his shoulders suddenly hunched in exhaustion.
It is only then that something in my memory clicks into place with searing clarity. The brand on Red’s chest, the one I’d puzzled over from the first moment he appeared in the arena. It is the same symbol emblazoned on the sleeves of the soldiers that had invaded my town in Basea, the troops specifically assigned to massacre us. It is the same symbol as the one worn by the young soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot me.
And it is not just the symbol that is the same. It is his eyes. It is his face. Different now, as a grown man and as an experiment of the Federation, but still him. Now I suddenly understand why I’d felt so compelled to save him in the arena. The real reason.
Red is that twelve-year-old boy. The same one who had held the gun and failed to fire. The same young soldier from that night.
14
We’re quiet around each other for the rest of the evening.
The realization that Red had been one of the young soldiers assigned to invade Basea, that he had been the one standing over me the night my mother and I fled, fills me with a nausea that keeps me from eating dinner. All I can do is sit across from him at the cafeteria, my stomach churning and churning, the memory of the boy with the gun clearer now.
The symbol. His face.
Jeran and Adena puzzle over our silence, but they occupy themselves with their own talk, chalking up our tension to our usual discord.
Red ignores me too, likely because of the strange incident between us in our living room. For the first time since our minds linked, I can sense him resisting the open channel between us, the flow of his thoughts bundled tight and hostile, as if he wished I could not sense them. I do the same unconsciously, holding back until my insides feel coiled tight as a snake.
When we finally arrive back to our apartment, we each head for our bedrooms without a backward glance.
I turn restlessly in the darkness, struggling to sleep. Scenes from that night in Basea so long ago play endlessly in my mind, moments that had once been muddy now cleared. The twelve-year-old Red that I’d seen then, young and frightened, had clearly not been experimented on yet—no metal bands on his back; no wings; no strange,