My mother eases her horse into a slow trot, and I nudge my steed to do the same, until we’re riding around the edge of the thicket of trees. “Does it really matter if the other states have the occasional group that wants to separate?” She glances back once at me. “It’s only real trouble for the Federation if they bring it here.”

At that, I look sharply at my mother. My fingers move rapidly, words that she can see but no one else can hear. “And have they brought it to Cardinia?”

She nods once. “Right into the heart,” she signs back to me.

Then she prods her horse into a fast trot. I do the same. “And now I’m here, resting on this estate. Who knows where those prisoners have been shipped off to? Maybe they’ve already died in the prison district.” She laughs a little. “Or maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.”

Her statements are said lightly, with such little fanfare, that anyone who doesn’t know her might think she’s speaking sarcastically. But I catch the glint in her eye. Maybe they’ve found themselves working in higher places.

She knows some of those former prisoners. She knows some of these rebels hiding in plain sight. She knows where they’ve been placed.

Right here.

“What kind of higher places?” I sign.

“The National Laboratory,” she signs back.

I trot alongside my mother as we fall into silence, but my hands are shaking now. Someone has found their way into the very birthplace of the Federation’s war experiments.

She smiles a little at my expression and signs again: “Only rumors. But they say you should speak to someone there with a scar behind their ear.”

All my thoughts swirl in a din in my head. I tamp it down, force myself to turn my mind back to riding with my mother.

But she has already told me what I need to know. The rebels that have been stirring unrest at the Federation’s border states have brought it to Cardinia. They are here, in the capital. Working under the mayor.

Perhaps working with the mayor.

If Mayor Elland is actually involved, then that means the unrest could be much larger than I’d thought. It is a movement gathering steam. And if I can find out more about it, if I can find a way to help the cause … well. An old thought returns to me, one I’d clung to on the day Mara had been defeated.

The Federation has conquered us. But it has not annihilated us yet.

13

RED

The last time I walked through Cardinia freely, I was twelve.

Think back, and I remember it all. It was a warm, sticky day, and the summer exhibition was happening throughout the city, a festival showcasing a system of irrigation tunnels that children were allowed to slide down. I’d gone with two friends, and returned drenched and laughing, two frozen pops melting over our hands with their sticky sugar.