bits of magnesium, strip the metal out, toss it into my pockets. As I go, Red falls to the back of my mind. It isn’t until I’ve made my way through at least a few skeletons of carriages that I realize he’s stopped thinking about me too. I’m strangely disappointed.
Soon my fingers are raw from the work. I stand up, stretch, and note the changing light. It must be late afternoon now, the hour right before sunset. In the near distance, I can hear Jeran calling out something to Adena and Adena’s answering laugh, while the circus continues in the front of the scrapyard. I look at my arms, satisfied with the small amount of magnesium I’ve collected, and let myself search the grounds for signs of Red.
When I see him, I pause.
He’s seated on the ground, his face turned slightly away, and his wings are out in full display, stretching dozens of feet to either side of himself. But he’s not in a state of fury this time. A gaggle of children have wandered away from the circus to cluster around him instead, squealing at the black steel blades of his wings and tugging on his hair to inspect the rough, metallic texture of the strands. He has folded his wings in such a way that the blades stack carefully, so when the children touch the feathers in curiosity, they don’t slice their hands. Standing in an arc some distance away from them are adults, all too timid to approach him and hanging back instead to whisper among themselves.
My first reaction is annoyance that he’s completely disregarded my advice about keeping a low profile while in the scrapyard. But then I watch him tilt his head sideways to let a small girl play with his hair. When he shakes his head, she jumps back with a wide grin, giggling, before hurrying back to him to do it again. Red keeps his movements slow and careful as the children run around his wings and attempt to climb on top of their arches. His face is still, gentle. Joy pulses from him through our link, but underneath it is layered a level of grief so deep, the weight of it presses against my chest. And within those emotions, I see glimpses of a memory. It’s of a little girl with the same dark hair he once had, the sister who had been on the other side of the glass. Then she fades away, as if Red were too afraid to let her loose.
Corian. When I look at this scene, all I see is my dead Shield. It is always the gentle ones I fear for the most, those willing to bare their hearts, who grieve for others and feel happy for others’ happiness. Corian had been that, and I had failed to protect him. I hadn’t thought of Red, alternately grouchy and teasing, as such a person—but here, watching him stay perfectly still as children climb all over him, as he stretches out a wing where a boy is dangling from the end and deposits him carefully back on the ground, I’m filled with the same sense I used to have with Corian. A wish that I could be like him. A fear that I will lose this person.
I shake my head firmly. Red is not Corian. He never will be. And no matter what I’m witnessing right now, I have to remember that Red is still the boy soldier who had helped conquer Basea for the Federation, had been conscripted into fighting for the Federation as a child. I have to recall the light of murder on his face as he ripped through the Federation’s battalions without a single hesitation.
Can you be kind and a killer? Can you be gentle and a weapon of war?
By the time I climb back down from the stacks, Jeran is already waiting for us with a handful of magnesium chips, while Adena is gingerly making her way down a wobbly structure of leaning steel. By now, almost everyone has left behind the circus to watch Red make his slow movements, his majestic wings sweeping in slow arcs across the dirt.
When Adena approaches us, she brightens at the sight of our stash. “Good enough, good enough,” she mutters, inspecting the quality of the metal. “I can work with this. Oh!”
She’d been so busy with her gathering that she hadn’t noticed Red at all. Now, as she watches the way he treats the children, her rapid