I woke a hundred feet in the air, curled between three tree branches that had grown so close they’d formed a hollow, a mile into the forest. I was in a cluster of pines. My hands were shaking, the nightmare still burned into my brain.

We were running. We were in an alley just outside of Tajrann, the capitol, huddling for the night among the homeless. And a group of soldiers passed by, their lithe bodies stalking in their shimmering, black-as-ink velocity suits. They clung to their bodies like water, a second skin that covered them from chin to toe, making them amorphous, half not-real. There was a man laid out across their path, huddled in rags and sleeping. They moved so fast I didn’t even realize one of them had kicked him until his body flew over the gritty cobblestone and hit the brick wall of the alley with a crunch.

My mother pulled me close to her body, but I couldn’t turn my face away.

He choked and spasmed, but he was young—and they must have seen something like defiance in his eye. They threw him around like a rag doll, like a cat throws around a mouse, the man bouncing in the triangle of their blurring bodies. It was less than two seconds, clicks and crunches, a ball bouncing between poltergeists. He didn’t have time to scream. And then, when they were finished, when he was shocked and pale-faced, and missing an eye, and his arms were dangling stretched and twisted at odd angles, one of those black-covered hands drew a pistol and in a few quiet movements, shot the young man three times in the stomach. There was no bang or flash, the gun was dead silent. It made more sound when the bullet went through his body and crunched into the ground. His breathing was ragged and wheezing—I don’t think he even knew what had happened to him. My mother would not let me go to him. Within ten minutes, it went silent and stopped, and the man was a corpse.

I blinked hard, shaking—the fear had ebbed into rage. The moon made a halo in the clouds blowing by above. They drifted by darkly, blotching out the stars through the clusters of needles above me.

Meeting hall full of weapons, too many for Ru’our Kholtan to keep in a collection, laid out without their sheaths, naked slices of metal for everyone to see. One medic isn’t enough, neither is two. The size of the village, we should have at least four or five. I didn’t think for or five would be enough for a village of that size, if they had an army, really their medical corp should be much, much larger. Silks. Wives. Purple signet rings. Investors and demonstrations. Hundreds upon hundreds of weapons.

I climbed up out of the sheltered nook in the branches and the village came into view. The rest of the village was dark, but there was still firelight in the meeting hall—the village council was in session. This wasn’t a raging party. I could see my breath in the air, freezing. It was near the middle of the night, and they were still in session. Maneuvering like lightning. I wasn’t stupid. I should have seen it coming. I should have put it together the moment those weapons arrived in the meeting hall. I knew Ru’our was a liar. It took one to know one.

I dropped from the tree. My feet hit the ground.

I cracked the vertebrae in my aching back and walked, my feet, and the throb, and my thoughts settling into one steady pattern. I stroked the scar on my left cheek with my thumb and then pressed it so hard the bruise from Aldin started a sharp, aching throb. Initially I’d hated it, but over the years, the texture of the taut, ruined skin under my eye had become comforting—a gruesome oath. Seth, you live.

I should have been running. I wasn’t. I was slipping over the stone wall by the bunk house, but as my hands and feet caught the familiar handholds and toeholds in the rock.

Yin was right when she said something was off with me, like I was out-of-sync, a skipping record on the phonograph, halfway off the cliff.

Plunge.

I looked at the bunkhouse ahead of me, just over the wall, a dark block that I’d slip into through the front door, quiet and oblivious. My eyes drew to the great hall. It was just a feeling. A gut instinct with several hundred weapons to back it up.

I slipped into the shadows of the obstacle course in the training field, running alongside the repurposed trees, and then up into the draping canopies where the training field ended. I couldn’t take the trees all the way to the meeting hall, but they could carry me safely to the island it was on, branch by branch. I slid down the tree and into the shadows between the narrow alleys between shops and houses in the village square and dissolved into the dark pool where the great hall blocked the moon.

You’re an idiot, Seth, a voice in the back of my head instructed. You should be running if you intend to run, before they can send a search party out after you, while they’re distracted by whatever fatal bullshit they’re involving themselves in.

I socked my better judgment away.

The windows by the eaves would be open. It was warm enough. The indents where each thick, rough log was placed on the one above it created half-decent footholds, and together, the dead trees seemed to form a sort of gracious ladder. They sung to me: freeclimb.

This was going to be mostly grip strength—relying on my bare fingers in the plummeting night temperatures. My back was going to kill me, my shoulders were one enormous bruise after the caning. This was not the welcoming boughs of a tree, there were no branches to rest on, I would stay completely and entirely vertical.

I took off my shoes and tied them to my belt. The freezing grass bit my feet.

I had callouses on my hands. I ran my thumb over my own skin, the rough, wadded on my palm from gripping a poorly-balanced practice sword. They were in different places than where I had them in my childhood. I’d been twisted into a shell of myself, one that was immolated on the inside and still burning like the night our villa in Islingraet on the Oranjesuul went up in a four-story blaze with the servants still in it. I’d become ruthless. Once you’d had your limits broken so many times, you were capable of anything. Yinjane saw part of it, and it scared her. Mirjam saw part of it, and she didn’t care. But me? I could do anything, the cold settling into my bones like power.

I stepped back, picked the section of the wall that looked like it had the most handholds in the dim light, stepped up, and propelled myself onto the wall, catching a knot in a horizontal trunk. I felt for another grip and found it in a fissure in the bark in the log above my handhold. The adrenaline and night breeze caught me. I could freeclimb with a whipped back, I could do anything. Risk my life to eavesdrop on a council meeting? What the hell. It was only twenty feet. Easy. My grip on the fissure was solid. I planted my toes between the logs and pushed up, finding the next handhold.

Nice, Seth.

The pain felt like high octane fuel. I bit my tongue so hard I bled, balancing which regions of my body the screaming was coming from. I inhaled, exhaled, and flexed to my tippy-toes, my fingers just barely brushing the next knot in the wood. I let my feet go flat and then propelled back up with the entire strength of my legs. Caught the knot. Got my feet into the fissure, climbed.

I didn’t dare climb into the windowsill. I would have to stay out here. But they were below, so they wouldn’t notice if I used it as a hold for my fingers. I did just that, and held my position against the wall to listen, the tinny repeat track of pain and fatigue playing through my body in the background.

Mirjam’s voice: “I’m your medicine woman. When it comes to provision for human lives, I’m the most qualified to answer. I completely and adamantly advise against everything that’s just been proposed. We already barely survive every few winters. If we were to have thin one, a stormy one, or worse, a plague in tandem with a war, we wouldn’t just risk eradication, we would be certain of it.”

Fuck.

“That’s just it! We need this!” Kholtan insisted, “I am only one man, I cannot provide rice for a whole village, no matter how much I trade, I cannot build you schools, I cannot stop your winters! Even if I could, a man only lives so long! This is for a future! A real future, where we aren’t just struggling to survive, where we aren’t just waiting for the next plague! I can only open opportunities for the village, but I cannot build you a future. This council must do that! I promised you a real solution, and I have brought you one. This option—”

Mirjam interrupted him. “ This is not an option. We don’t have medicine in the quality or the quantity to deal with war injuries. The conditions here for open wounds are terrible, and god forbid you have a conflict during winter. I’ll be amputating limbs with hack-saws by candlelight. People will die horribly. The inevitable result will be the decimation of our warriors and destruction of our village.”

“The village has already been decimated!” Ru’our shot back, “You treat this as if we have alternatives! Let me tell you what our other option is, it’s losing the children you work in your garden to starvation every winter! It’s having half our village die of diseases you cannot treat! It’s a subsistence of rice, and weeds, with no education, no culture, no higher purpose, no meaning! If we want a future, we must fight for it! It is time we were truly alive!” He roared, and there were cheers.