When the temperature around us rises, Maven pulls back, his jaw tense and clenched. The way his eyes flash, I half expect him to attack whoever interrupted us. I don’t turn around, mostly because I can’t feel my limbs. I’ve gone numb, though my lips still tingle with memory. What this means, I don’t know. What I feel, I can’t begin to understand.
“The queen requests your presence on the viewing deck.” Cal’s voice grinds like stone. He sounds almost angry, but his bronze eyes look sad, defeated even. “Passing the Stilts, Mare.”
Yes, the shoreline is already familiar to me. I know that mangled tree, that stretch of bank, and the echo of saws and falling trees is unmistakable. This is home. With great pain, I force myself away from the rail to face Cal, who seems to be having a silent conversation with his brother.
“Thank you, Cal,” I murmur, still trying to process Maven’s kiss and, of course, my own impending doom.
Cal walks away, his usually straight back bowed. Each footfall sends a pang of guilt through me, making me remember our dance and our own kiss. I hurt everyone, especially myself.
Maven stares after his fleeing brother. “He does not like to lose. And”—he lowers his voice, now so close to me I can see the tiny flecks of silver in his eyes—“neither do I. I won’t lose you, Mare. I won’t.”
“You’ll never lose me.”
Another lie, and we both know it.
The viewing deck dominates the front of the ship, enclosed by glass stretching from side to side. Brown shapes take form on the riverbank, and the old hill with the arena appears out of the trees. We’re too far from the bank to see anyone properly, but I know my house in an instant. The old flag still flutters on the porch, still embroidered with three red stars. One has a black stripe through it, in honor of Shade. Shade was executed. You’re supposed to rip a star off after that. But they didn’t. They held on to him in their own little rebellion.
I want to point my home out to Maven, to tell him about the village. I’ve seen his life and now I want to show him mine. But the viewing deck is silent, all of us staring at the village as we come closer and closer. The villagers don’t care about you, I want to scream. Only fools will stop to watch. Only the fools will waste a moment on you.
As the boat continues on, I begin to think the whole village might be made of fools. All two thousand of them seem crowded onto the bank. Some stand ankle deep in the river. From this distance, they all look the same. Fading hair and worn clothes, blotchy skinned, tired, hungry—all the things I used to be.
And angry. Even from the boat, I can feel their anger. They don’t cheer or call out our names. No one waves. No one even smiles.
“What is this?” I breathe, expecting no one to answer.
But the queen does, with great relish. “Such a waste, parading down the river when no one will watch. It seems we’ve fixed that.”
Something tells me this is another mandatory event, like the fights, like the broadcasts. Officers tore sick elders from their beds and exhausted workers from the floor, forcing them to watch us.
A whip cracks somewhere on the bank, followed closely by a woman’s scream. “Stay in line!” echoes over the crowd. Their eyes never falter, staring straight ahead, so still that I can’t even see where the disruption was. What happened to make them so lenient? What has already been done?
Tears prick at my eyes as I watch. There are more cracks and a few babies wail, but no one on the bank protests. Suddenly I’m at the edge of the deck, wanting to burst through the glass with every inch of myself.
“Going somewhere, Mareena?” Elara purrs from her place next to the king. She sips placidly at a drink, surveying me over the rim of her glass.
“Why are you doing this?”
Arms crossed over her magnificent gown, Evangeline eyes me with a sneer. “Why do you care?” But her words fall on deaf ears.
“They know what happened at the Hall, they might even agree with it, so they need to see that we aren’t defeated,” Cal murmurs, his eyes on the riverbank. He can’t even look at me, the coward. “We aren’t even bleeding.”
Another whip cracks and I flinch, almost feeling the lash on my skin. “Did you order them to be beaten as well?”
He doesn’t rise to my challenge, jaw firmly clenched shut. But when another villager cries out, protesting against the officers, he lets his eyes close.
“Stand back, Lady Titanos.” The king’s voice rumbles like faraway thunder, an order if there ever was one. I can almost feel his smug smile when I step away, moving back to Maven. “This is a Red village, you know that better than us all. They harbor these terrorists, feed them, protect them, become them. They are children who have done wrong. And they must learn.”
I open my mouth to argue, but the queen bares her teeth. “Perhaps you know of a few who should be made an example of?” she says calmly, gesturing to the shoreline.
The words die in my throat, chased away by her threat. “No, Your Majesty, I don’t.”
“Then stand back and be silent.” Then she grins. “For your time to speak will come.”
This is what they need me for. A moment like this, when the scales could tip out of their favor. But I can’t protest. I can only do as she commands, and watch as my home fades out of sight. Forever.
The closer we get to the capital, the larger the villages become. Soon the landscape fades from lumber and farming communities to proper towns. They center around massive mills, with brick homes and dormitories to house the Red laborers. Like the other villages, their inhabitants stand in the streets to watch us pass. Officers bark, whips crack, and I never get used to it. I flinch every time.
Then the towns are replaced by sprawling estates and mansions, palaces like the Hall. Made of stone and glass and swirling marble, each one seems more magnificent than the last. Their lawns slope to the river, decorated with greenwarden gardens and beautiful fountains. The houses themselves look like the work of gods, each one a different kind of beautiful. But the windows are dark, the doors closed. Where the villages and towns were full of people, these seem devoid of life. Only the flags flying high, one over each structure, let me know someone lives there at all. Blue for House Osanos, silver for Samos, brown for Rhambos, and so on. Now I know the colors by heart, putting faces to each silent home. I even killed the owners of a few.
“River Row,” Maven explains. “The country residences, should a lord or lady wish to escape the city.”
My gaze lingers on the Iral home, a columned wonder of black marble. Stone panthers guard the porch, snarling up at the sky. Even the statues put a chill in me, making me remember Ara Iral and her pressing questions.
“There’s no one here.”
“The houses are empty most of the year and no one would dare leave the city now, not with this Guard business.” He offers me a small, bitter smile. “They would rather hide behind their diamond walls and let my brother do their fighting for them.”
“If only no one had to fight at all.”
He shakes his head. “It does no good to dream.”
We watch in silence as River Row falls behind us and another forest rises up on the banks. The trees are strange, very tall with black bark and dark red leaves. It is deathly quiet, as no forest should be. Not even birdsong breaks the silence, and overhead, the sky darkens, but not from the waning afternoon light. Black clouds gather, hovering over the trees like a thick blanket.
“And what’s this?” Even my voice sounds muffled and I’m suddenly glad for the glass casing over the deck. To my surprise the others have gone, leaving us alone to watch the gloom settle.
Maven glances at the forest, face pulled in distaste. “Barrier trees. They keep the pollution from traveling farther upriver. The Welle greenwardens made them years ago.”
Choppy brown waves foam against the boat, leaving a film of black grime on the gleaming steel hull. The world takes on a strange tint, like I’m looking through dirty glass. The lowlying clouds aren’t clouds at all, but smoke pouring from a thousand chimneys, obscuring the sky. Gone are the trees and the grass—this is a land of ash and decay.
“Gray Town,” Maven murmurs.
Factories stretch out as far as I can see, dirty and massive and humming with electricity. It hits me like a fist, almost knocking me off my feet. My heart tries to keep up with the unearthly pulse and I have to sit down, feeling my blood race.
I thought my world was wrong, that my life was unfair. But I could never even dream of a place like Gray Town.
Power stations glow in the gloom, pulsing electric blue and sickly green into the spider-work of wires in the air. Transports piled high with cargo move along the raised roads, shuttling goods from one factory to another. They scream at each other in a noisy mess of tangled traffic, moving like sluggish black blood in gray veins. Worst of all, little houses surround each factory in an ordered square, one on top of the other, with narrow streets in between. Slums.
Beneath such a smoky sky, I doubt the workers ever see daylight. They walk between the factories and their homes, flooding the streets during a shift change. There are no officers, no cracking whips, no blank stares. No one is making them watch us pass. The king doesn’t need to show off here, I realize. They are broken from birth.
“These are the techies,” I whisper hoarsely, remembering the name the Silvers so blithely toss around. “They make the lights, the cameras, the video screens—”
“The guns, the bullets, the bombs, the ships, the transports,” Maven adds. “They keep the power running. They keep our water clean. They do everything for us.”
And they receive nothing but smoke in return.
“Why don’t they leave?”
He just shrugs. “This is the only life they know. Most techies will never leave their own alley. They can’t even conscript.”
Can’t even conscript. Their lives are so terrible that the war is a better alternative, and they’re not even allowed to go.
Like everything else on the river, the factories fade away, but the image stays with me. I must not forget this, something tells me. I must not forget them.
Stars wait for us beyond another forest of barrier trees, and beneath them: Archeon. At first I don’t see the capital at all, mistaking its lights for blazing stars. As we sail closer and closer, my jaw drops.
A triple-layered bridge runs across the wide river, linking the two cities on either side. It’s thousands of feet long and thriving, alive with light and electricity. There are shops and market squares, all built into the Bridge itself a hundred feet above the river. I can just picture the Silvers up there, drinking and eating and looking down on the world from their place on high. Transports blaze along the lowest tier of the Bridge, their headlamps like red-and-white comets cutting through the night.
Both ends of the Bridge are gated, and the city sectors on either side are walled in. On the east bank, great metal towers stab out of the ground like swords to pierce the sky, all crowned with gleaming giant birds of prey. More transports and people populate the paved streets that climb up the hilly riverbanks, connecting the buildings to the Bridge and the outer gates.
The walls are diamondglass, like back at the Hall, but set with floodlit metal towers and other structures. There are patrols on the walls, but their uniforms are not the flaming red of Sentinels or the stark black of Security. They wear uniforms of clouded silver and white, almost blending into the cityscape. They are soldiers, and not the kind who dance with ladies. This is a fortress.
Archeon was built to endure war, not peace.
On the western bank, I recognize the Royal Court and the Treasury Hall from the bombing footage. Both are made from gleaming white marble and fully repaired, even though they were attacked barely more than a month ago. It feels like a lifetime. They flank Whitefire Palace, a building even I know on sight. My old teacher used to say it was carved from the hillside itself, a living piece of the white stone. Flames made of gold and pearl flash atop the surrounding walls.
I try to take it in, my eyes darting between both ends of the Bridge, but my mind just can’t fathom this place. Overhead, airships move slowly through the night sky, while airjets fly even higher, as fast as shooting stars. I thought the Hall of the Sun was a wonder; apparently I never knew the meaning of the word.
But I can’t find anything beautiful here, not when the smoky, dark factories are only a few miles back. The contrast between the Silver city and the Red slum sets my teeth on edge. This is the world I’m trying to bring down, the world trying to kill me and everything I care about. Now I truly see what I’m fighting against and how difficult, how impossible, it will be to win. I’ve never felt smaller than I do now, with the great bridge looming above us. It looks ready to swallow me whole.
But I have to try. If only for Gray Town, for the ones who have never seen the sun.