Glass Sword

The figures of the first line are not wearing the clouded gray of Cal’s hard-trained Silver soldiers. They are not even soldiers at all. They are servants in red coats, red shawls, red tunics, red pants, red shoes. So much red they could be bleeding. And around their feet, clinking against the ground, are iron chains. The sound scrapes against me, drowning out the airjets and the missiles and even the harsh-barked orders of the Silver officers hiding behind their Red wall. The chains are all I hear.

“And even if, if, the list is true, and the names do lead to other”—[the Colonel] searches for the word, not bothering to be gentle—“things like you, then what? Do we dodge the worst agents of the kingdom, hunters better and faster than us, to find them? Do we attempt a mass exodus of the ones we can save? Do we found the Barrow School for Freaks, and spend years training them to fight? Do we ignore everything else, all the suffering, the child soldiers, the executions, for them?”

Nix clenches a single fist, but resists the urge to charge. “You won. They drowned in the river, and their bodies went over Maiden Falls. The grave diggers couldn’t even find their shoes. What was it the letter said?” he presses on, and Cal winces. “Ah yes, that my girls ‘died for victory.’ To ‘defend the kingdom.’ And there were some very nice signatures at the bottom. From the dead king, the general of the Hammer [Legion], and the tactical genius who decided an entire legion should march across the river.”

Terrorism, anarchy, bloodlust, those are the words the broadcasts use when describing the Guard. They show the children dead in the Sun Shooting, the flooded wreckage of the Archeon Bridge, everything to convince the country of our supposed evil. All the while, the real enemy sits on his throne and smiles.

I’m the lightning girl, and now I have too many ideals to count. Freedom, revenge, liberty, everything that fuels the sparks within me, and the resolve that keeps me going.

The kids about to be sent into the Choke are a consequence of the Measures, a way to punish the kingdom for the Scarlet Guard’s insurrection. It feels as if I’ve sentenced them to death myself, and I don’t doubt many would agree. Soon there will be an ocean of blood on my hands, and I have no way of stopping it.

“Newbloods, silverbloods, redbloods, it’s all the same, all over again. Some who are special, some who are better than the rest, and the ones who still have nothing at all…Division. Favoring one over the other. You’re on the hunt for people like you, to protect them, to train them, to make them fight your war. Not because they want to, but because you need them…A hundred years from now a newblood king will sit the throne you built him on the skulls of children.”

Their laws, their conscription, their doom for every single one of us. They did this. They have brought this ending upon themselves. Even now, when it is Cameron and me destroying them, they beg for Cal’s mercy. They beg to a Silver king, and spit upon Red queens.

“No one is born evil, just like no one is born alone. They become that way, through choice and circumstance. The latter you cannot control, but the former…Mare, I am very afraid for you. Things have been done to you, things no person should suffer. You’ve seen horrible things, done horrible things, and they will change you. I’m so afraid for what you could be, if given the wrong chance.”