The gaze of the girl who would be Blue fixes on her, soft with dreams, trusting. She tastes what she is offered, knows the pain in it, and swallows.
Hunger rushes crimson through the girl’s veins and out her roots into the glen; it pulses and snaps in flower petals; it sears the wings of moths. The grove burns. Red flees. Burning moths dart for her, carve furrows in her legs and arms and gut, but they cauterize the wounds they carve as they strike. One clips off Red’s little finger. Grass catches her leg, ungloves skin from a section of her right calf, but the grass, too, shrivels with hunger, and Red lurches out, bleeding, and gropes upthread toward the home she has betrayed, toward safety that is no longer safe.
But she does not know where else to go.
The slick heavy weight of space is still no longer. Anger tenses the skin of worlds. Eyes that are stars seek a traitor.
Garden chases her.
• • •
Red is swift, clever, mighty, and in pain. Free of the grove, subtlety no longer needed, she deploys her armor, her weapons, and makes it a running fight. Suffice to say, this does not go well. The stars that are eyes pin her between possibilities. She wrestles giant taproots in the void. Tearing herself free, she loses armor, bones, fingers, teeth. She calls upon her last secret engines of war, burns the taproots, blinds the eyes—stars collapse and explode at once, and Red falls through a gap in worlds as into a mouth.
She tumbles between threads, in silence and null time, to crash at last, broken, bleeding, barely conscious, in a desert beside two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
She looks up, stares, and, broken-throated, laughs.
And then Commandant’s legions fall upon her like the night.
A cell is all Red’s world.
They take her from it sometimes to ask her questions. Commandant has so many, all variations on the basic: why, and when, and how, and what. They think they know who.
The first time Commandant asked those questions, Red grinned and told her to ask nicely. Then they hurt her.
The second time Commandant asked questions, Red told her, once more, to ask nicely. They hurt her again.
Sometimes they offer pain. Sometimes they offer steak and freedom, a word which means something to them presumably.
But when she’s not in use, the world’s this cell, th
is box: gray walls meeting overhead; a flat, gray floor; rounded corners. A bed. A toilet. When she wakes, she finds food on a tray. When they come for her, a door opens at a random point on the curved wall. Her skin is raw. There are hollows beneath it where her weapons used to be.
She suspects they built this prison especially for her. They drag her past other cells, all empty. Perhaps they want her to think she’s alone.
The guard comes for her one morning. She has decided to believe whenever she sleeps is night, whenever she wakes is morning. Absent sun, who’s to care? They drag her down another empty hall. Commandant waits. No pliers this time. Commandant looks as tired as Red feels. She’s learned exhaustion in their many sessions together, as Red has learned fear.
“Tell us,” she says. “This is the last time I ask. Tomorrow, we’ll take you apart and sift the pieces for what we want to know.”
Red raises an eyebrow.
“Please,” Commandant says, dry as steel.
Red says nothing.
She does not think about pomegranates. She does not dare hope. All they ever had was a chance. And even if it worked, even if she woke, who’s to say she’d come for you?
You betrayed her.
Red does not think.
The guard drags her back down the long empty hall and pauses at the open door.
Red, ready to be tossed once more into her small gray world, looks back. The guard watches her with still and weighing eyes and a mouth twisted to a cruel, clever line.
“Why are you doing this?” Gruff, low. They aren’t supposed to talk to prisoners.
Red’s always been one for small talk. And—tomorrow’s the end. “Some things matter more than winning.”