My head swims. I feel my limbs grow weak, as if they’re moving through water. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost. I don’t even know to feel relief or joy at the death of the other Skyhunter. Somehow, in the midst of all my feelings, I find myself grieving for him.

The female Skyhunter turns her rage on me. Before she can reach me, though, I feel Red’s presence near. Then he’s here, really here, all his strength and fury barreling into the Skyhunter. The two of them tumble into a rolling heap.

I am so tired. I could lie down right here and sleep. My blurring vision sweeps the roof, searching for Constantine before I finally see him standing some distance away. No, he is already moving. He’s running away from me. I blink, trying to comprehend what I’m seeing. Everything in my mind feels so slow.

Constantine is running away because, for the first time in his life, he knows he’s lost.

I find my last vestiges of strength within. They have been buried deep in my chest, locked tightly away since childhood, since the night that Karensan troops burst into my family’s home and killed my father. They remained buried as I ran across the grassland at midnight with my mother, for nights and nights on end. That strength has been stored away since I fled across Mara’s bridges with my mother and crouched on the other end to watch the Marans cut their bridges down. The strength has been untouched, idle during all the years I’ve fought at the warfront, defending Mara even as she didn’t defend me. That strength is still inside me, shielded behind walls. Waiting for the moment when I would need every last bit of it.

This is that time.

As Red struggles with the Skyhunter behind me, I push myself onto my feet. Blood stains my hands and arms, stains everything. I trip over scarlet rivers as I go. Somehow, I break into a run. One of my daggers is clutched in my hand. I hold it tightly, afraid the blood will make it slip from my grasp, and I run toward Constantine.

Without his war machines at his side, he is weak. I’m reminded of all the times I had to steady him against my arm as he walked, the frail, human set of his body, his vulnerable nights when he couldn’t sleep. Now he runs, and as he does, I see him for what he really is: a dying young man, hanging desperately on to the shreds of a Federation he cannot hold together, the end of his father’s legacy—and his own. I realize this is what I feel through our bond now. His true, grieving realization that this is the end. That he is about to meet his greatest fear.

He is too weak to run fast. Even in my injured state, I catch up to him. He turns around, teeth bared, slashing out at me with his own knife—but I don’t care. One of my hands comes up and I pull him toward me.