Maybe they’re not alive at all. Maybe this is my imagination.

Red sits back, frustrated, but unwilling to argue Adena’s point. At his silence, one of other figures sitting nearby stirs, and Red turns to look at him. I suck in my breath. Aramin.

“You’re both right,” the Firstblade says, his eyes reflecting the night. When he speaks, everyone else hushes. “Talin as a Skyhunter isn’t something we bargained for. We can’t fight against her. But if we’re lucky, we won’t have to. If everything goes as we plan, we can destroy the tracks and escape with those prisoners before she can hunt us all down.”

“It isn’t worth it,” Red snaps. “A ruined train track and a few prisoners, for your lives?”

At that, the figure beside Aramin speaks up. It’s Jeran. He looks like he has a fresh wound on his face, a scar running along his cheek that changes his beauty. His uniform is worn, fraying at the elbows, but he still looks so much like himself that I can hardly bear seeing him.

“I think there’s another reason why you’re holding back, Red,” Jeran says in his soft voice. “I know what Talin means to you.”

“Talin is not a human anymore,” Red replies. His words are stated in a cold, vicious way that I recognize. It’s his defense against the grief that might otherwise overwhelm him, the same habit he had when I first met him and he seemed ready to give up his life. “She is a war machine. She is designed to do one thing—carry out Constantine’s orders, whether they are to protect him or kill everyone in sight. She will do as he asks without hesitation. Why do you not understand this?”

His words pierce me as painfully as a blade. My own grief wells up in me now, surging through my chest and up my throat until I can feel the pressure of a cry wanting to burst from me. Red, I try reaching through our link again, but he doesn’t react at all.

“We understand just fine,” Aramin says, his voice just as cutting.

“For what? A brief delay of the Federation’s plans?”

“Do you really think we will stay here, camped safely, for another month?” Aramin narrows his eyes. “Two months? Three? How long? Meanwhile, they hunt for us in the hills. Do we let them capture us like frightened children? Or do we do something?”

“Something would have to shift the odds in our favor,” Red mutters. He looks down at his feet, and now I can feel the fear flowing through him. With a start, I realize it’s directed at me.

Not because he’s afraid to go against me in battle. He’s afraid to come face-to-face with what I really am. To be unable to help me.

“You are our odds,” Adena tells him. “You are a Skyhunter too.” She shrugs, her gaze going momentarily toward Newage in the distance. “We have to believe in something.”

Red’s silent. A wave of his emotions roils over me, and I gasp, drowning for a moment in his grief. He’s thinking of the last time we saw each other, and the flash of that memory appears sharp in my own mind.