“Hear me out, Zivah,” says Tal. He faces us again. “Suffice it to say that Arxa has taken an interest in Zivah, and he will personally see to her placement in the colony. If Zivah were to introduce him to a plague survivor with exceptional fighting skill, the soldier could likely get assigned to a unit close to the capital.”

“There would still be the need for papers,” says Gatha.

“Plague victims get abandoned at the colony all the time. Very few have papers.”

“And some come out of the fever with no memory of their past,” Zivah finishes softly.

It takes me a moment to catch on. “Wait. You’re proposing that I should pose as a plague survivor with no memory? And somehow, I’m to charm myself into the commander’s good graces?”

“It’s a dangerous mission,” says Tal. “Can you keep up a pretense?”

My chair clatters backward as I jump to my feet. “You want to send me, alone, into the heart of the Amparan army and pretend, day after day, that I don’t remember who I am? That I don’t want to kill every last one of them?”

The whole thing feels wrong. It’s one thing to kill a man honestly face-to-face. But to pretend to be something else…

And could I even pull it off? I think about what happened yesterday when Arxa’s name threw me into the past, how I’d stood there, blind and deaf to the world while the memory held my mind captive. If even the sight of one of these soldiers debilitates me, how can I possibly join their ranks? The thought fills me with shame. If Gatha knew just how much my imprisonment has broken me, she’d never put me on the battlefield again.

“Dineas has already been imprisoned once by the Amparans,” says Gatha. “I can’t demand this risk of him.”

Rather than relief, Gatha’s words only increase my guilt. We’ve been searching for an advantage for so long.

A traitorous voice inside me whispers that it might have worked too, if I wasn’t so broken. I speak Amparan like a native, since we lived on the main continent until I was twelve. And since our Shidadi share the same forefathers as the Amparans, our peoples look decently similar—certainly more similar to each other than to the lighter-skinned, black-haired Dara. Shidadi fighting styles have changed over time, but different tribes have adapted to so many different circumstances that no one style would be recognized as distinctly ours.

Zivah shifts in her seat. “Leader Tal,” she says. “You said that recent events have made you fear things will get worse for our village. Why is that?”