his breathing even out. The shadows flickering across the back of his mind slowly fade, until all I can sense through our link is a low, steady pulse of a person in deep sleep.
Red had told me that the Federation originally created this link so that their Premier could control his mind, keep him from attacking their own troops. They may not have had the chance to finish linking him to the Federation, but the fact that I can use my own mind to calm his is both fascinating and unsettling. Maybe he would be able to do it to me too. Maybe there are other small, subtle things we are capable of controlling about each other. The thought makes me shiver. How had he gone from that scared boy pointing the gun to the experiment pinned down on a table in a glass room? How had the Federation turned him from a child into a war machine?
What a cruel sense of humor this world has, to join me with a soldier partly responsible for the destruction of my old world. A soldier who nevertheless spared my life.
Eventually, I fall back to sleep. But the nightmares continue again, casting me this time as a puppet controlled by the faceless form of a soldier bearing an insignia on his sleeve. He tells me to point the gun at myself, sobbing, on the ground. He tells me to shoot. And in the nightmare, I do exactly as I’m told.
15
The winter sun shines bright and searing against rain-dampened paths. As the other Strikers head to the mess hall, Red and I cross the National Plaza with Adena and Jeran at our sides, on our way to the prison.
As we enter and head down, the dampness seeps through our clothes. It chills us, although Red doesn’t shiver at all. Through our bond, I can sense his sheer exhaustion from the day before. He’d spent a good part of the afternoon hurling his guts in an alley of the National Plaza, then skipped dinner to head to bed early. Whatever his nightmares had been last night, they’d kept me awake and restless.
“We keep a Ghost down here,” Adena whispers to Red as we approach the lowest level of cells. “It’s been alive here for over a year. We’ve subjected it to enough starvation and experiments that it stays mostly quiet now.”
Red stares at Adena after Jeran translates, but he doesn’t flinch at the lack of mercy in her words. When Red casts me a questioning glance, I just shake my head. I should tell him about how Adena had lost her brother, but I don’t want to mention how Adena had also stood in the stands during Red’s execution and shouted for his blood to be spilled.
My own sympathies for Ghosts are limited, anyway.
The cell, unlike others down here, has two layers of doors, with torches lit in the tiny corridor between them. They’re the only light source that filters through the inner door’s bars. After the guards step aside for us, we go through the first into a dark corridor that ends in a second chained door. Here, Adena takes out a different key and unlocks it. My hands are already resting on the hilts of my swords, the blades partially pulled out of their sheaths.
The ceiling is low, barely tall enough for Red, the largest of us, to stand fully upright. There are no windows. The Ghost doesn’t make a sound, but I know it’s here the instant we step inside. I can hear the faint, incessant grinding of its teeth in the dark, the chilling tang of its rotting flesh that presses against my senses like a dagger.
My gaze rests automatically on the ashen figure crouched in one corner of the cell, the bones of its spine an uneven silhouette in the torchlight as it keeps its back turned to us. It rasps weakly with each breath. Patches of its white, cracked skin have peeled off, revealing the decay underneath. Shackles around its wrists keep it chained firmly to the wall. Based on how tight the cuffs are, I can tell the Ghost has grown larger since the last time it was fitted.
I’m surprised every time I’m in here that a Ghost can possibly be subdued. But even a monster has its limits, I suppose, and its figure stays slouched even as it can hear our entrance, knowing soldiers have come to deliver another round of torture.