Jeran shakes his head. “But someone knows where her mother is. A guard at the future location, maybe, so they can prepare for a new, high-profile prisoner. After all, the Premier doesn’t move her himself.”

I snort at the mental image. “If he tried, he’d be unconscious and bleeding in the grass.”

Jeran laughs a little, in spite of himself.

“Rumors of prisoner movement tend to spread among the guards,” I tell Jeran as we near the lab complex. “I remember gambling on that when I was a young soldier here.”

“Gambling?” Jeran asks.

I nod. “My friends and I would place bets on where we thought high-profile prisoners would end up, and which patrols would be assigned to them. I was once assigned as a junior guard to the patrol for a general arrested from Basea. We weren’t to talk about his location, on penalty of death. But we still placed our bets anyway.”

“Did you win?”

I look away, unwilling to meet his steady gaze. “Three hundred notes,” I answer in a low voice, “yeah, I did.”

“Where would we go if we wanted to catch conversations like that?”

I shrug. “Wherever the highest concentration of soldiers is right now—and seeing as how the new Maran prisoners have the most attention, wherever they’re headed.”

Jeran looks around. “Where do you think they would bring Striker prisoners during all this?”

“They’ll either be at the National Laboratory,” I reply, “or held in the rooms underneath the arena seats.”

At that, Jeran glances sharply at me. “Arena seats?”

I nod once. “Karensans love sport,” I tell him. “The Premier likes to hold the events to keep the people happy, and they especially like to do it with prisoners of war. The events are always a secret. The audience gathers in the arena each day without knowing what they’ve come to witness.” My voice halts, and when I speak again, it sounds hoarse. “The Strikers will be either qualified for some experimental program at the lab complex or used to entertain the people.”

Jeran’s silent, but when I look at his eyes above his mask, they shine with a grave light. There is fury there for what Karensa will do to our friends—but there is also a twinge of guilty understanding. Mara did something similar with their prisoners, after all. I’d been one, hadn’t I? It’s never as entertaining when you are the one sent into the stadium to die.

We look away from each other, two soldiers from enemy nations, and the silence settles awkwardly between us.

When we pass by the lab complex, I can tell immediately that the Strikers aren’t there. No crowd has gathered in front of its gates, peering curiously for a look at the new prisoners of war. So we move on in the direction of the arena at the center of the city.

All around us, people are dressed in the colors of Karensa. They’re happy and laughing, hungry as they wait in lines at the food stalls, giddy to see what’s going to happen in the arena on each day. I watch them go about their celebrations with a surreal sense of shame. I used to be that little boy, waiting in line for fried cheese. I used to be the one running into the arena, curious about what new entertainment they would have for the day. Now I’m here, heart in my throat, waiting to see if my friends will be the ones forced to amuse this crowd.