II. Shadow

Reina moved with the weightless grace of smoke, scouring the ruins for tracks. Even when she closed her eyes, she could still see everything: every crumbling stone hut, and every door that had been torn off its hinges. She could feel each loose cobblestone that laid beneath her in the road, every droplet of moisture in the fog that enshrouded her, and the sunless Valstead sky that camped above.

“Reina!” a voice shouted from somewhere uncomfortably close. Reina opened her eyes, her amorphous shadow snapping back into form. A gun glinted from the inside of a derelict shack, carried by a tall silhouette.

Like a coiled wire Reina sprung toward the danger. She spun the chain wrapped around her arm. Casting forward, she slung the hundred-link whip at the stranger and leashed his legs. The dart at the end of the chain hooked on like a snare, trapping him. One pull and he was out of the building and belly up in the dirt.

“Stop! It’s me!” The voice cried. Raymer sat in a scummy brown puddle, his long red coat covered in mud.

“I know,” Reina said smugly, standing over him like a disappointed tutor. “You should’ve parried.”

“Did you teach me that? I don’t remember that lesson,” Raymer sarcastically mused, hopelessly picking clumps of earth off his clothes. His fluffy blonde hair was frizzy from the rain.

“Clearly.” Reina broke a pitying smile and gave Raymer a hand up. The tail of his coat was drenched and stuck to the back of his pants. “Where is the captive?” she asked, cold once more.

“Always straight to business with you.” Raymer pouted. “I’ve been mucking around the ass-end of the continent for the Styx, and you’re content to deny me simple courtesy. ‘How are you getting on, Raymer?’ ‘How about a towel, Raymer?’ I promise it wouldn’t hurt.”

Reina stared at him blankly.

Raymer sighed. “He’s in the basement.”

The room smelled of mildew and leachfly larvae, sullen and familiar. It was a plain basement, the kind you would find under most rural dwellings in Valstead, with a dirt floor, gray walls, and a single slit of a window. The storm last night had rained hard and fast, flooding the room with a layer of murky water that had nowhere to drain.

The captive was in the center of the room, his hands bound to a wooden post with a pair of handcuffs. He watched Reina with a steeled gaze, undeterred by the scarf tied around his head and gagging his mouth. She circled the room like a predator sizing up her prey.

“Raymer, keep watch from the road,” Reina said. Raymer gave the captive a sympathetic glance before he went upstairs. In the times they worked together, Reina learned it would be best if he wasn’t here for what came next.

She tore away the gag from the captive’s mouth.

“Reina,” he said knowingly. “The Tormentress of Valstead.” He spit on the floor, as if the name tasted foul.

The man was no doubt a soldier at the end of his fighting years, his eyes sunken and beard almost colorless. Stygian spies had identified him as middle-aged, but this man looked at least 70 years old. Defiant, weary, or perhaps just numb, he fixed his posture like a statue. The red scarf around his neck was the symbol of his cause – his worn captain’s uniform the symbol of a bygone era.

Months ago the Scarlet Uprising had taken root in Valstead. Bitter old veterans and revolutionary youth clung to the romance of their fallen kingdom, unable to accept vassalage to the Gildian Commonwealth. Reina was still a child when the last soldier was buried, but the ire of war never really went away. The people of Valstead were infected with seditious ideas, and through sabotage and revolt, they unwisely defied their new liege.

Standing before Reina was Oleksander, the last known leader of the Uprising. Now in binds.

Reina cut the scarf off his neck and held it from the corner, as if it carried disease. “What remains of the Scarlets?”

“After the horror you unleashed? Haven’t you killed enough of us?” Olek fired back.

“Not very many of you left, then,” Reina taunted. She tossed his scarf into the seepage.

“So long as Gildians have walked our roads we have suffered,” Olek said, glaring at the stairs, where Raymer had been earlier. “We will persevere.”

“And what rock do the Scarlets persevere under now?” Reina asked.

“We don’t hide. Our cause doesn’t live in the shadows, it lives in the mind.”

“Poetic,” Reina said, unimpressed.

“Even if you don’t agree with us,” Olek said, “you have to realize that they’re using you. Gildia and the Styx have made you into a tool. A weapon in their arsenal.”

“Answer me,” Reina said, tapping the handle of her kunai. “Where are the rest of your people hiding?”

“Maybe you forget, but they’re your people too.”

Olek leaned toward Reina, the post creaking against his handcuffs.

“Your mother and father…” he started. “Volkov and Gauthier. 4th Battalion, Ferron Company.”

Reina thumbed the buckle on her collar, her voice catching in her throat. She slipped her kunai from its sheath.

“I served with them in the war,” he continued. “I remember hearing they had a daughter, named Ou-”

“Quiet!” Reina snapped, thrusting the kunai at Olek. She stopped just short, touching the point of the blade to his chin. Rage burned in Reina’s scathing eyes, but the old soldier still stood there, unflinching.

Reina lowered the knife, looking between the blade and her bone-white knuckles. She had held it so tightly that the handle broke her skin. She took a deep breath and unclenched her jaw. Stoic.

And then she jabbed the knife into his leg.

“That girl is dead,” she said, talking calmly over his scream. “She lived like a coward, hiding under the floorboards in cesspits like this, scared of being found and dragged away. Then your people took her parents away, and left her to die. But you know what?”

Olek squirmed and gritted his teeth, the kunai still jutting from his knee.

“Gildia found that girl and made me. The Styx taught me how to become a weapon, because I’m stronger than this failed country and miserable worms like you,” Reina said.

The room was stifled with pensive silence. Water dripped rhythmically from the ceiling, counting the seconds. In the corner, a ray of light filtered through the basement window, signaling that the fog outside had finally yielded to the sun. Raymer would be happy about that.

“Are you going to tell me what I need to know?” Reina asked, her anger simmering.

Olek struggled to keep his balance against the post. “What will you do after?”

“After you tell me?” she asked.

“No. After you erase us. After you deliver our country to the imperialists. What will you do then?”

“I don’t know,” she said absently, stirring the swampy floor with her boot. The water went up to her ankles.

“Once you kill everything that made you, who will you be?” he scorned. “Are you even listening?”

Reina crouched down and pulled the kunai from Olek’s leg. He yelped loudly.

“I’ll be alive,” she said, the knife staining her hands scarlet.

Olek fell against the post and withered to the floor, groaning in agony. Reina watched him lie helpless in the shallow floodwater — a pathetic shadow of strength. It wouldn’t be long before the last of the Scarlets crumpled too.

“There’s more to life than just being alive,” Olek said, hoarse and weak. “I believe in my cause so deeply that I would die for it.”

Reina forced Olek’s head down, submerging his face in the dirty water. She looked on with muted hatred as his body thrashed under her bloodstained hand.

“Then die for it.”