words fade away and her smile thins into a serious line. I know she must be thinking of her brother and the anger she’d first held against Red. But this sight has turned her quiet.
All I can think about is how the Federation can transform people like this, with hearts and minds and thoughtful moments, into monsters. All I can remember is how little time we have to fight against their darkness snarling at our borders.
* * *
As night settles into place and we turn in the direction of my mother’s home, I cast a glance at Red. He’s quiet, but his mind roils, sending me fragments of thoughts—of the same little girl I’d seen in his previous memory, a woman watching him from a garden window, and a door, creaking open to allow in something terrible.
I didn’t know you were so good around children, I finally tell him through our link.
He gives me a small smile. My sister was much younger than me. I’m used to it.
Your sister, Laeni. I think of the little girl from his nightmares. Was that her? I ask him, knowing he can tell what memory I’m referring to. You think about her a lot.
Red doesn’t look at me and doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s a quiet voice in my head, full of sadness. Yes. And I do.
I swallow, unable to keep my next question from going between our link. What happened to her?
Red is silent for so long that, when he finally replies as we turn onto my mother’s street, his voice in my mind startles me. When he looks at me now, his eyes are filled with the most terrible weight in the world.
The same thing that happened to my father, he tells me. They turned her into a Ghost. And I had to kill her.
17
Adena takes several vials of Red’s blood later that night, enough that it makes him weak. Even without that, though, he seems quieter than usual, and through our link, I sense the presence of memories that cloud his mind with fog.
After we retire to bed, Red’s nightmares are no longer just shimmers in the darkness. No longer just a glimpse of humanity. No longer a portal into another world. This time, his nightmare materializes as a vision so clear that I feel like I’m living it.
In the dream, he is dressed in a thin white shirt and pants and standing before a woman in a white coat, his young head bowed. He must be the same age that he was during the night of the Basean siege. I recognize the woman too. She keeps appearing in Red’s dreams, her face long and gaunt, lips thin and eyes framed by glasses.
This time, I realize that they’re back in the glass room. “Do you know where you are, Redlen?” she asks him.
He shakes his head, eyes wide. I can see the brand peeking out from under his shirt, except this time it looks freshly done, the wound still bloody and swollen. It’s the same double-crescent insignia that had been on his uniform sleeve during the invasion.
“You’re in the Laboratory of Cardinia,” the woman tells him. Cardinia, I think, the name registering in my mind. The capital of the Federation. “Do you know why you were sent here?”
Now Red is trembling, his lanky twelve-year-old frame bent like a willow. I can tell he knows exactly what she’s talking about, but the woman tells him again anyway, as if she feels sorry for him. “Soldiers of the Federation are to, above all, obey the command of their Premier. You are very young, Redlen, but that’s never an excuse to fail at your duty in battle. I heard that you were shadowing your captain in Sur Kama. He gave you a direct order to shoot, and you refused. Your hesitation cost him his life.” She sighs, sounding sad, and looks down at the floor. Then she asks him a fateful question. “Did you understand that it was a direct order?”
Red hangs his head and nods quietly. “Yes, ma’am,” he murmurs.
“Of course you did, because you deliberately disobeyed.”
Red suddenly looks at her with an expression of desperate intensity. “I didn’t mean to. Can you please help me get an audience with General Caitoman again? I’m not ready to go. Is my sister all right? My father? I…”
The woman gives him such a look of pity, of deep understanding, that I immediately wonder who she had also lost before, and who she