of Mara emblazoned on their sleeves, their guns hoisted and ready. Scattered among them are Mara’s famed Strikers, their sapphire uniforms prominent against the firelight, their masks on, their guns and swords out, ready to face the Ghosts. I feel a sudden surge of hope. My mother’s pace quickens, sensing the same.
We reach the other side. I nearly fall as the soldiers shout for us to move past their ranks. There, I cling tightly to my mother’s hand and dare to look back across the chasm.
All around us, the other refugees are crying, some kneeling on the ground, retching up what little is in their stomachs after the exertion of the sprint. Most are still on the bridges, streaming to safety like a teeming mass of ants.
My mother collapses to the ground. She’s weeping in pain now, her eyes shut tight, her hands pressed to her leg wound as if she can stop the agony from engulfing her. I kneel beside her, not knowing how to help her. Blood smears on her skin. There’s so much of it.
Behind us, the archers fire at the bridges still crowded with people. Their arrows hurtle down. Some strike the refugees—others embed in the crates resting along the bridges’ joints.
The crates explode as if they had been struck by lightning. Like the earth has split in two. And the bridges, the only trade routes Mara has left, buckle, tearing apart in a deafening groan of metal. A great wail of panic comes from those still crossing. I can see them climbing over one another, crushing their neighbors in their desperation to flee. On the other side of the chasm fly the Federation’s red-and-black banners, their Ghosts letting out their piercing shrieks into the night.
“Don’t look,” my mother tells me. Her voice is a trembling murmur, and her brown skin is ashen pale. She shakes her head in despair, pulls me close to her, and lets me cry. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispers into my hair. “Keep your eyes on me. It’s okay.”
* * *
It’s okay, baby.
I stir in the night with the sound of my mother’s voice still echoing in my dreams. The hallways of our new apartment are disorienting in the darkness, and for a moment, I can’t be sure where I am. Gradually, my thoughts settle. I’m sitting upright in my bed, my body washed in silver from the rectangle of moonlight that spills into the room from the windows.
I stay where I am for a moment, letting the nightmare slowly fade from my consciousness and become replaced by the unease of my reality. On the other side of the apartment, I can still feel Red’s low undercurrent of emotions rippling across my mind, trapped in a nightmare of his own that I can’t see. The sensations of his dreams are more erratic than his waking thoughts—subtler, fewer whole scenes and words, but deeper feelings and shadows, with the occasional spikes of terror. And always the hint at the corner of my mind—just barely out of reach—of reflections in glass and the flash of scarlet uniforms in the darkness.
Maybe his nightmares had triggered my own, his fears leaking through our bond like water from a dam, soaking the walls of our minds.
Maybe his nightmare is even the same as mine, except from his point of view. From the boy soldier who couldn’t bring himself to shoot.
If that’s true, then perhaps the bond goes both ways. If I calm myself, will he calm? And subsequently—if I can calm his nightmares, will he stop triggering mine? I close my eyes and think of Corian, how we used to sit in silence across from each other in the middle of his family’s garden and just let ourselves listen to the world around us. It is another daily Striker exercise, this meditation. I do it now as I turn in bed to lie on my back, imagining the ripples disturbing the surface of my mind, then letting them slow, still the surface back to glass. I let myself remember the sound of an evening forest, the call of the birds in the boughs. Then, gently, I send this meditation of thought through our link, slowly, slowly willing the ripples in Red’s mind to still, the nightmares churning in his thoughts to fade back into nothing.
It’s hard to tell if any of it is working, and for a moment I feel foolish for even attempting to understand this link between us.