Just wait and see, Skyhunter, she’d told me, a knowing smile playing on her lips.

And here I am, not six months later, the thrill of flying rushing in my veins. My stomach twists and I push down my emotions once more.

From up here, it’s easy to see the split between Newage’s own architecture and the ruins it was built upon—ancient black steel blended with clean white stone, a clash between two civilizations that nevertheless looks familiar and comforting to me. Now, though, scarlet banners cut through the city’s black-and-white features. Smoke trails into the air from where troops are emptying homes and throwing their contents onto bonfires. The Federation is burning remnants of Mara’s rule: our flags, banners, uniforms, crests. These fires have been going sporadically for a while now, turning the evening sky a muted ash brown as fine soot rains down everywhere.

Packs of Ghosts cluster here and there, some in cages, others wandering the hills at the outskirts of the city. And the train track winds away from Newage like a snake, our carriage already prepared and waiting at the train’s end. Tomorrow, that train will carry us, along with dozens of carriages full of Maran spoils—artifacts, ruins of the Early Ones, prisoners of war—back into the heart of the Federation.

This is the other reason why Constantine wants me to see the city from the sky. The view from up here offers a firm reminder of Mara’s conquest, the starkest sight of a nation overtaken. It is his unspoken way of continuing to break me down. It is his way of whispering to me: Don’t forget.

Mara no longer exists. It is only another territory in the Federation.

What little joy I’d felt from flying disappears, leaving behind the empty anguish of my new identity.

It is only here, up in the lonely wind and sky, with no one else to see me and Constantine some distance away, that I finally loosen some of the walls around my heart. I can’t restrain myself any longer. I let myself relax, and the flood of emotions I’ve been holding back rushes through me in a tide, pouring through every inch of my body.

It’s too much, this release. My eyes well with tears.

I weep in silence as I arc around the city, the wind wiping away the evidence of my grief. Up here, I can cry without a drop landing on my cheeks. My thoughts wander to my mother, then to the ever-looming question of where Constantine will decide to send her next.

Last month, I’d openly refused his order to root out a pocket of Marans who had been caught hiding in a valley outside of Newage. The next day, the Premier had my mother shipped off to one of the factories along the river winding through Cardinia. I spent our last visitation day sobbing helplessly at the bleeding scars on my mother’s chained hands and the sharp hollows of her cheeks, the sight of her struggling to load cubes of stone onto the back of a wagon. Telling her I was sorry, so deeply sorry. This month must be different.