By the time morning comes in earnest and we head down to the station, I’m exhausted. Dark circles smudge the bottom of my eyes as we pass the soldiers checking the tracks that the Strikers had tried in vain to destroy.

We board the train in what feels like a blur. I sit across from Constantine and stare out the window as we pull slowly away from Newage, trying to remember the city that existed before the conquest. Already, it’s hard for me to imagine this place without scarlet-and-black banners hanging on its walls.

Before long, we’ve left Mara behind and are cutting smoothly through the countryside of Basea. It is an image of what Mara will someday look like—a homeland that is no longer a homeland, but one that Karensa has stripped of its soul. I tear my gaze away from the windows.

I half expect Constantine to needle me with a taunt, to say something to me in Basean. But he is mercifully quiet, spending his time writing notes into his leather journal. Maybe he sees the dark circles under my eyes, had sensed my exhaustion and grief and decided I’d gotten enough for now. No point in completely destroying his Skyhunter’s mind.

In these moments, he looks deceptively docile and sophisticated, like he’s someone I’m having a pleasant journey with instead of a young warlord with blood staining his hands. A man who had shoved my friends into a train car.

Other times, he speaks in low voices with advisors who come by to talk to him. I listen in helpless silence as he discusses which Maran holidays he’ll let them keep and which will be done away with, what new customs and cultures he will have installed. Among them is a change in the dress law, ordering the cutting of hair and style of clothing to more closely align with habits already in place in inner Karensa. Then there are conversations about technology to bring in. The building of new streets and tracks.

He talks as if it’s nothing to rip away a country’s customs and traditions. As if he’s chatting about the weather, while in the train cars behind us are captive soldiers, prisoners that include my former Striker companions.

His words sit like a fire in my stomach. But there’s nothing I can do except reinforce the walls around my emotions, hardening myself until it feels like anything still alive in me has died.

I reach into my pocket and pull out a small pouch of coins hanging at my waist. From them, I remove a small, silver Karensan coin. I take it out and press it facedown in my palm, so that the side showing Constantine’s profile is hidden and the side displaying Karensa’s Federation boundaries is up.

Mara is such a new territory that Constantine has yet to mint coins showing it within the borders of the Federation. As the Premier continues to talk with his advisors, I stare at the old lands. This has become how I remind myself that Karensa wasn’t always all-encompassing, that it didn’t always own Mara. I study the coin and hang on to the words of the young rebel leader before she had succumbed to a Ghost.