artificial skin. How did that version of him then become the boy I saw in his memory, lying trembling in the glass chamber?
Would Red have fired his gun at me that night if he’d been given more time? Why didn’t he shoot? What happened to him after he refused to kill me? Did they punish him? He clearly doesn’t remember me as a child—I’ve felt no sense of familiarity from him through our link. Does that mean, then, that he’s seen so many victims of the Federation that we are all just a blur of faces to him? Before he’d been confronted with the idea of killing a child that night, had he killed any innocent people? My people?
Who had I saved? What have I done?
I spin and spin on these questions until I feel ill from them. What little I’d eaten for dinner now threatens to come up, but I force myself to slow my breathing, to concentrate on one thought at a time—the weak moonlight in my room, the curves of my blanket—until my stomach steadies. But my troubled thoughts continue as I finally drift off into sleep, my mind twisting them into a nightmare.
I am eight and my mother is facing the boy soldier again, her hand still gripping my arm tightly. The boy stares back at us with his gun pointed straight at my chest. I can see him willing himself to fire it, then failing, again and again. Now, in my dream, I can recognize that everything about him is Red, even though different from age and experimentation. His hair is light brown, without the strange metallic sheen it now has. His eyes are dark and wide, his face narrower and body leaner. His expression is less haunted, more frightened. The brand marring his chest isn’t there yet; the same double-crescent insignia is emblazoned only on his sleeve.
He doesn’t fire the gun. Then I’m fleeing with my mother and not looking back, not caring what happens to the boy or whether he will chase us. We run and run past burning homes on familiar streets, the roar of explosions and screaming. My mind obscures the worst of the horrors, but I know they’re happening all around me—Federations soldiers doing unspeakable things to people I know.
Where is my father? Something terrible had happened to him, but even in my dream, I still can’t remember what it is.
Poisonous gas clouds the only path we can take. Yellow mist fills my lungs. I cough violently, heaving, the burning indescribable as my throat feels like it’s been coated in fuel and lit on fire. My mother yanks me forward, tears streaming from her eyes as she holds her hand to her mouth.
We enter a field of darkness. Blood trickles, then flakes, at the edges of my mouth. I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and keep running. My vision blurs with hot tears.
We lose all sense of time. My nightmare runs on repeat for what feels like hours, days, weeks, as it had when we made our real escape. In this seemingly eternal night, the figure of us fleeing with thousands of other people is almost invisible, the grasslands we trample through nothing more than a black ocean. The only light comes from the full moon hanging in the sky, low and white and enormous, the stars behind it washed out in the brightness. We run and run as a horde of humanity, barely stopping, barely resting, trying to reach the edge of the warfront where we could cross over into safety. Into Mara, the last free nation.
When I look up at my mother, her eyes are wild and bloodshot, focused only on the bridges ahead of us. Maran snipers and archers wait on the other side of the ravine, alongside massive catapults, but they won’t linger for us forever. Crates of explosives line the lengths of the bridges, and the archers’ arrows are tipped with fire, ready to shoot.
Behind us, gaining quickly, are Federation soldiers and their Ghosts, their hulking shapes undulating on the horizon.
We reach the bridges. The sound of our boots against dirt suddenly changes to a hollow clang against metal. The bridges are impossibly thin. They shouldn’t be capable of holding so much weight. I squeeze my eyes shut so that I can’t look down into the dizzying darkness, with only a thin silver thread of a river thousands of feet below visible.
When I open my eyes again, I see lines of soldiers, the crest