The skin of my right shoulder flares with pain. Pulsefire from our pursuers misses me by inches. Still, my skin bubbles and smokes, lighting my jumpsuit’s sleeve on fire. The wind kills the flames. But the pulsefire rips past again and boils into the Son’s gravBoots just ahead of me, melting the man’s legs into a single chunk of molten metal. He jerks in the air, slamming into the ceiling, where his body crumples. Helmet ripping off and spinning straight toward me.
—
Red light throbs through my eyelids. There’s smoke in the air. Meaty. Stings the back of the throat. Fat tissue charred and crispy. Chest hot with pain. A swamp of screams and howls and cries for mother all around. And something else. The sound of bumblebees in my ears. Someone’s above me. See them in the red light as I open my eyes. Screaming into my face. Pressing a mask to my mouth. A damp wolfcloak dangles from a metal shoulder, tickling my neck. Other hands touch mine. The world vibrates, tilts.
“Starboard! Starboard!” someone screams in the distance, as if underwater.
We’re on a ship. I’m surrounded by dying men. Burned, twisted husks of armor. Smaller men atop them, bent like vultures, saws glowing in their hands as they peel the armor away, trying to free those dying of their burns inside. But the armor’s melted tight. A hand touches mine. A boy lying beside me. Eyes wide. Armor blackened. The skin of his cheeks is young and smooth beneath the soot and blood. His mouth not yet creased by smiles. His breaths come shorter, quicker. He mouths my name.
And he’s gone.
I’m alone, far away from the horror, standing weightless and clean on a road that smells of moss and earth. My feet touch the ground, but I cannot feel it underfoot. To either side stretches the grass of wind-beaten moors. The sky flashes with lightning. My hands are without Sigils and drift along the cobbled wall that meanders on ahead to either side. When did I start walking? Somewhere in the distance, wood smoke rises. I follow the road, but I feel I have no choice. A voice calls to me from beyond a hill.
It is my uncle’s voice. Is this the Vale? Is this the road I walk before death? It can’t be. In the Vale there is no pain, but my body aches. My legs sting. Still I hear his voice ahead of me, drawing me through the mist. The man who taught me to dance after my father died, who guarded me and sent me to Ares. Who died himself in a mineshaft and dwells now in the Vale.
I thought it would be Eo who greeted me. Or my father. Not Narol.
“Keep reading,” another voice whispers. “Dr. Virany said he can hear us. He just has to find his way back.” Even as I walk, I feel a bed under me. The air around cold and crisp in my lungs. The sheets soft and clean. The muscles in my legs twitch. Feels like little bees are stinging them. And with each sting, the dream world fades and I slide back into my body.
“Well, if we’re gonna read to the squabber, might as well be something Red. Not this poncy Violet shit.”
“Dancer said this was one of his favorites.”
My eyes open. I’m in a bed. White sheets, IVs going into my arms. Under the sheets, I touch the ant-sized nodes that have been stuck to my legs to channel electrical current through my muscles to combat atrophy. The room’s a cave. Scientific equipment, machines, and terraria litter it.
It was Uncle Narol I heard in the dream after all. But he’s not in the Vale. He’s alive. He sits at my bedside, squinting down at one of Mickey’s old books. He’s grizzled and wiry, even for a Red. Callused hands trying to be gentle with the frail paper pages. He’s bald now, and deeply sunburned on his forearms and the back of his neck. Still looks like he was cobbled together out of cracked old leather. He’ll be forty-one now. Looks older. More savage. A brooding danger to him, lent teeth by the railgun in his thigh holster. A slingBlade has been sewn onto his black military jacket above a Society logo that’s been peeled off and inverted. Red at the top. Gold the foundation.
The man’s been at war.
