him. Then they’re taking him away, and the images vanish from my head as Red’s concentration switches to something else.
It doesn’t take long for the soldiers to follow in his wake. The ones remaining settle into the task of unloading items from the train, starting from the very back. As they work, we find a moment to slip out from the tracks, and in the clouds of steam, we vanish into the city.
It’s too easy to get lost in this overwhelming place, this maze of streets and alleys and plazas, of towering buildings lined with severe columns and harsh lines. Here too are what look like ruins—except they don’t resemble the Early Ones’ ruins that we have in Mara. Curves of steel that might have once been the side of a ship, an exquisitely carved wall that must have held up a beautiful building, uniform steel structures that look like rib bones, stretch up to the sky in dizzying patterns. Unlike in Mara, though, these ruins do not look like they originally belonged here. They’re not embedded in the ground as if they’ve been there for a thousand years. They look freshly planted here, then fenced off and marked with labels.
Jeran stops to read one of the descriptions. Then he clears his throat, careful not to use sign language here in public, lest he give away our Striker status. “Wall of the National Courthouse,” he translates in a low voice. “Larc.”
And then I realize that these are not ruins from the Early Ones at all—but pieces of destroyed buildings and structures taken from the nations that the Federation has conquered, then brought back here to display as trophies.
I take a step back from this open-air museum of graves, suddenly queasy. Soldiers stroll past us with leisurely expressions, as if they’re not concerned at all about the war happening at their far border. They’re the faces of those who know that the war is all but won for them. Who are ready to march through Mara’s steel walls and plunder it, bring our ruins back to this capital and put them on display for their enjoyment.
The night when their soldiers had raided my home in Basea now comes flooding back to me. I no longer feel like I’m walking down a manicured path in the Federation’s capital. I see Basea around me, falling. Screams filling the air. My mother, seizing my hand and telling me to run. My father, already disappeared, whose memory I still cannot recall from that night.
What former Basean landmarks will I find displayed here? What will they take from the ashes of Mara, once they invade and burn us to the ground?
“Look,” Adena whispers as we make our way down another street.
Her voice cuts through my rising tide of thoughts, and I gratefully turn in her direction, eager for the distraction. My eyes settle on what’s caught her attention. In sconces on either side of each building’s entrance are torchlike objects. But when I look closer, I see that they’re not flames. At least, not candles or torches in any form that I recognize. The golden glow from them are contained inside small glass bulbs.
“I don’t understand. How do they light?” Adena murmurs in fascination, reaching a hand tentatively out to touch the surface of one glass bulb. She jerks her hand away, as if it burns the same way a flame does, but then goes back to touch it again, tapping delicately against the glass, her eyes wide.
“Doesn’t it burn?” I ask her, standing closer so that others near us don’t see me signing.
She shakes her head. “It’s hot, but bearable. Not like a flame.” She squints at the fixture, and I can tell she wants to take the whole thing off the wall and bring it back to Mara to study.
I touch the glass too. The light inside the bulb is so steady and warm, like a frozen flame. I frown, tapping the glass the same way Adena had done.
In Mara, we’d learned from the Early Ones how to make guns and buildings out of their leftover steel, fortified our estates with their otherworldly metals and stone. But what kind of technology is this? Fire that doesn’t burn, light that gives off heat but no flame.
In the back of my mind, Red’s presence tugs at me. I look away from the strange invention and out into the street in the direction he must be.