Suddenly it shrieks, slapping at its neck as if a bug has stung it. Behind it, Adena pulls another syringe away from its neck and steps back.
It takes less than a second. The Ghost blinks twice and sways on its feet, then backs up a few steps. The snarl in its throat morphs into some kind of whine. Those eyes flutter again. It tries to focus on Adena, its teeth still gnashing, but then it collapses to its knees. Its muscles flex as it struggles to stay awake, but it’s no use.
I look on as it goes limp and splays unconscious across the stone floor.
Adena’s forehead gleams with sweat. “It didn’t attack you,” she signs, nodding once at Red.
“It’s as if it knew you,” Jeran adds, materializing out of the darkness to join us.
Red stands his ground. It isn’t trained to attack me, he tells me through our link. His voice in my mind sounds hoarse and exhausted, weighed down with unspoken grief.
I repeat Red’s words to Adena and Jeran, signing with my hands.
We step out of the Ghost’s cell, and Adena carefully locks each layer of the cell’s doors behind us. Only when we’re completely out and standing back in the dungeon’s corridors do I let my shoulders loosen.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in all my years of studying Ghosts,” Adena exclaims, trying to keep her voice down and squeaking in the process. “The way it reacted to you? It didn’t even try to attack.” There’s a bright light in her eyes as she holds up the vial of blood she’d taken from the Ghost.
Jeran has a glint in his eyes too. “We are going to figure out what the Federation tried to do to Red,” he says. “And we are going to figure it out soon, before they can take us down.”
“What do we do now, though?” I sign, my eyes going from the vial of blood in Adena’s hand to the dark silhouette of Red’s figure.
Adena takes a deep breath. “Now you’re going to help us get around the scrapyards in the Outer City. Because I need some good magnesium.”
16
“I just need enough of the metal to test Red’s blood against that Ghost’s,” Adena tells us as we head out of the Inner City gates and into the muddy paths of the shanties. “Magnesium metal doesn’t do much when dropped in water. But when mixed with Ghost blood, it froths and turns pale. Ghost blood is wild. The result is a sample where the froth trails let us see the movement of the blood inside the mixture.”
Around us, people cast Red nervous glances. Even without his fearsome wings, he looks taller and stronger than most here.
“You’ll have to help me gather it,” I tell her and Jeran. “It’s not the easiest metal to find. Would be better if we all searched for an afternoon.”
Before I became a Striker, I spent most days twisting my way through the scrapyards littering the Outer City. You can see them towering in the distance, beyond the jumble of makeshift tin roofs that make up most of the shanties—the silhouette of stacks and stacks of discarded metal, artificial mountains behind wired fencing that rise every dozen or so blocks.
The one closest to my mother’s home—the one I now lead the others to—is no different: an acre of useless dirt and mud, piled high with a random assortment of everything. Old parts from ruins left behind by the Early Ones, pieces of engines or buildings or machines, things that regularly turn up on farmers’ land and out in the valleys. There are also discarded metals from the Inner City. Broken carriage parts. Pieces of buildings that have been taken apart and rebuilt—roofing, cladding, doors, and window frames. Old pots and pans and cans, chairs with three legs and tables without any. Wheels. Screws. Pipes. Forks and knives and spoons.
It sounds like a broken, ugly landscape, but in reality, I find the scrapyards one of the most beautiful places here.
People in the Outer City scavenge in the scrapyards all the time. My mother and I certainly did. Most of the shanties are built using rusted metal sheets found here for their walls and roofs. My mother learned how to identify the strongest steel for resale, though, and with my help, we would haul the pieces to the gates of the Inner City’s wall and barter them to the Grid in exchange for money. I learned too how