I had too much time to think. I sat in that glass cage and thought about whether I should have spared a young girl’s life, whether I was responsible for my family’s deaths, how I could possibly rationalize murdering one innocent person to save another. I thought until I couldn’t distinguish good from wicked anymore.

Now I’m free, but there will always be a part of me, I think, trapped in that chamber. There will always be a part of me lost to that small evil.

NEWAGE

MARA

THE KARENSA FEDERATION

Six Months After the Fall of Mara

1

TALIN

The place where my mother’s house once stood is now a field of scorched dirt. I have a memory of her rows of green plants, fat pea pods hanging from their vines, water dewing on the lemon-scented leaves of her sweetgrass. That’s all gone.

The rest of her old street is gone too—every leaning shack, every pot steaming over a fire. The narrow alleys crowded on either side with makeshift vendors, draped with faded fabrics and rusted tin sheets, arrayed with bags of spices and salvaged tools from the scrapyards for sale, the air pungent with the smell of frying fish, grease, and raw sewage. All gone.

The slums of Newage’s Outer City were never a beautiful place, but now they’re nothing more than mud and earth and debris. The only footprints are those of Karensan boots, the Federation coming through for their inspections. Off in the distance, their workers are hammering down new train tracks leading straight into Newage—once Mara’s capital—now another city fallen to the Federation.

The National Plaza has been taken over by a sprawl of pallets, nurses caring for injured Federation troops and Maran prisoners of war. The apartment where I used to share quarters with Red has been converted into barracks where eight Federation soldiers are bunking together. And the underground prison pit, where Red was once kept and where I’d been held upon our return to Mara, has become a massive excavation site. I can see Mayor Elland of Cardinia standing beside the churned earth, talking with the head engineer about the logistics of shipping their findings back to the capital.

The Federation believes that the Early Ones left behind a powerful, ancient source of energy in the land underneath Mara, and Premier Constantine thinks they’ve found it here, in the depths of what used to be our prison. Karensan engineers have exploded open the entrance and sent their drill teams down into the silo. The lowest floor is now a pit leading into darkness, the space cut by dozens of ropes and pulleys.

The changes extend to everything. The wall where I used to crouch as a small child, eyes shining and legs swinging, as Striker patrols headed out to the warfront, is completely covered with papers from Marans searching for lost loved ones. It has looked like this since the city first fell six months ago.

Lost: Damian Wen Danna, beloved father.