It’s the unmistakable feeling of something unnatural shifting in the air. It’s the feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong.

12

TALIN

My first night back in the Cardinian palace is an unsettling one. I never get used to the sheer size of this space, a maze of corridors and gates and spiraling staircases. There are moving platforms they call elevators here, steel boxes moved by pulleys up and down through the palace to get from one story to another. To the east, in a separate building connected to the main palace by a hallway, is an enormous greenhouse, a glass structure built against the marble and stone of the palace. When I’d first set foot in Cardinia with the other Strikers, the glass exhibition hall erected for the national fair had been modeled on this greenhouse. It is a luxury, a paradise of fruit trees and rainbow-hued rows of sweet-scented flowers that Constantine frequents.

The main palace’s atrium features a glass ceiling, and the walls are framed with gilded edges. They’re painted with elaborate scenes of Karensan history, from their earliest days as a nomadic race to the era when they built their first permanent city atop a ruin of the Early Ones along the banks of a northeastern river.

It is an estate of grotesque extravagance. Everywhere I look, there is something new and overwhelming.

My footsteps echo down the lonely halls. There must be thousands of servants in this space, but at night, I feel like the Premier is the only other person here with me.

Once again, I can’t sleep. I’d dreamed of Red in my state of exhausted collapse earlier in the evening, a vivid dream so startling that I bolted out of it with tears in my eyes, Red’s name still echoing in my mind. It truly felt like we’d spoken, even though that’s impossible. I had looked at him and known with horror that he was really seeing me. After all, hadn’t my last dream turn out to be a real vision? For a span of minutes, I’d exposed him to Constantine in my mind, had risked the Premier’s sensing us connecting once more. For hours after, I forced myself to stay behind my walled heart, wondering when Constantine would turn to me and ask me about my second dream with Red.

Or worse, that I would somehow turn a corner with the Premier and see Red chained and on his knees. That somehow just glimpsing Red in my dreams would have alerted the Premier to his location and gotten him captured.

But there’s been no word from Constantine this time. We may not be this lucky again.

So tonight, as I roam these empty halls, my thoughts are filled with shadows and nightmares. Fears of my private thoughts being unveiled again. Fears of being watched by spies. Fears of Constantine’s mood, that my mother will suffer depending on how it swings next. On top of it all, the eternal fear that some rebel assassin might be making their move against the Premier right now, that someday, I might fail to protect Constantine from that threat, and that my mother will be executed for it.