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Steelstriker

Marie Lu
Contents (97)
  1. RED
  2. NEWAGE
  3. MARA
  4. 1
  5. TALIN
  6. 2
  7. RED
  8. 3
  9. TALIN
  10. 4
  11. RED
  12. 5
  13. TALIN
  14. 6
  15. RED
  16. 7
  17. RED
  18. 8
  19. TALIN
  20. 9
  21. RED
  22. CARDINIA
  23. 10
  24. TALIN
  25. 11
  26. RED
  27. 12
  28. TALIN
  29. 13
  30. RED
  31. 14
  32. TALIN
  33. 15
  34. RED
  35. 16
  36. TALIN
  37. 17
  38. RED
  39. 18
  40. TALIN
  41. 19
  42. RED
  43. 20
  44. TALIN
  45. 21
  46. RED
  47. 22
  48. TALIN
  49. 23
  50. TALIN
  51. 24
  52. RED
  53. 25
  54. TALIN
  55. 26
  56. RED
  57. 27
  58. RED
  59. 28
  60. TALIN
  61. 29
  62. TALIN
  63. 30
  64. RED
  65. 31
  66. RED
  67. 32
  68. TALIN
  69. 33
  70. RED
  71. 34
  72. TALIN
  73. 35
  74. RED
  75. 36
  76. TALIN
  77. 37
  78. TALIN
  79. 38
  80. RED
  81. 39
  82. TALIN
  83. 40
  84. RED
  85. 41
  86. TALIN
  87. 42
  88. RED
  89. 43
  90. TALIN
  91. 44
  92. TALIN
  93. 45
  94. TALIN
  95. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  96. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  97. CONTENTS
Steelstriker by Marie Lu

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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For all who have weathered loss,

for all who have endured,

and for all who make it possible for others to survive

RED

Your first lesson as a Federation soldier is efficiency.

You learn to burn down neighborhoods with ease.

You have no trouble clearing a town for train tracks in mere days.

You can execute prisoners in a steady stream, one after another, until you hardly remember who came before or after.

I see the soldiers now, down below, churning up the land around the city of Newage until the serene landscape looks no different than a salvage yard. But that’s what happens when the Federation finds something they want. We come to your borders and we break you and we take it for ourselves.

If I listen closely, I can hear laughter in the soldiers’ voices, jokes, stories from home.

Sure—their actions are evil, even if they are not inherently evil. I close my eyes and see who they really are—someone’s brother, someone’s daughter. Just kids, forced to choose between protecting their family or their soul.

How do I know? Because I was once one of them.

That’s the thing about evil. You don’t need to be it to do it. It doesn’t have to consume all of you. It can be small. All you have to do is let it exist.

The soldiers down there laugh and joke because it keeps them from dwelling too long on what they’re actually doing. But soon, the Federation will have them back on the battlefield. If you let your people think too much, give them time to remember their humanity, you risk them realizing the horror of their actions. The blood of innocents staining their hands. You risk them looking back to see the carnage they’ve left behind, the parts of themselves they’ve destroyed in the name of the Federation. You risk them falling to their knees in anguish.

Think too much, hesitate, and he locks you in a glass cage inside one of his laboratories, isolates you so there’s no one to talk to but yourself. So you talk and you talk until the idea of me and you has lost all meaning, until you lose your mind.