I’m sorry we have to end like this, Talin, Constantine says to me. But it is what it is.

Too late, I sense a person at my back. I whirl on the figure, but already I feel the stab of something sharp and strong in my neck. A pain hits my veins like nothing else I’ve ever felt before. Not even during my transformation. Not even when I saw the prisoner meant to be my mother tortured before me. It burns through my body like liquid fire.

I collapse to my hands and knees. It’s poison. I know it. It surges through me. My vision blurs. I look around at the chaotic arena and sense my bond with Constantine shudder.

Memories flash before my eyes. I think of my mother, my father, Basea. Corian. The Strikers. Red. The panic in me rises to a fever pitch, and I try in vain to command my poisoned limbs to react, but I can’t.

Maybe my mother is already dead too. Maybe Mayor Elland had been lying, after all. Maybe Constantine has ordered her killed, just like Raina’s family.

Around the arena, the soldiers take their positions. They open fire.

Through my hazy vision, I see someone else suddenly barrel into the person standing over me. Someone with metallic-silver hair, eyes so dark blue they look black.

Red?

I think I am dreaming, but I hold up my hand to his face anyway. He’s saying something to me. It takes me another second to understand his accented Maran.

“Your mother’s with us, Talin,” he’s saying. “She’s safe.”

My mother? It can’t be true. I try to focus on his face, but there’s too much happening around me. Then the world is fading away, and I drop into a maw of darkness, the screams around the arena still echoing in my mind.

33

RED

Everything around us seems to be a blur—fires in the streets where only a day earlier there had been celebrations, flags and banners burning where before red paper had rained down in festive strings. All of Cardinia has descended into chaos. The rebels that Talin had promised may have lost their leaders, but that has not kept them from bursting out into the city. The unrest that we had sensed when we first arrived in the capital has exploded into a full-blown revolution. There are soldiers on every corner, and what seems like every Ghost in the entire Federation has been released into the city, jaws open and milky eyes searching, ears tuned toward any human nearby.

Talin does not move. She does not speak through our bond. She lies limply in my arms as our carriage rushes us back to the estate of Mayor Elland, the woman who found us and fetched us from the damaged prison.

I shake her, shouting at her, trying to get her to stay awake, but her head only lolls to one side, her eyes unfocused as we jostle up the path to the mayor’s gate.