can begin to sift through it. I do believe Arif’s story, but better safe than sorry and the more intel we have, the better.”
“Copy that. I assume you’re going to begin to learn it as well?”
“I am, as a sign of good faith.”
There is a slight lag. “If that’s how you want to play it, okay. Besides, we either Rift out or let them call the shots, because we have zero advantage here.”
“Roger that. Let’s get to work.” Without my asking, Doe pulls up the Faida lexicon on the laptop. I don’t know how much time I have until someone begins to question us. I assume Arif is debriefing the rest of the Faida. I have to also assume he’ll want some alone time with his wife—will that come before or after they chat with us? No way to know.
I let my thoughts drift for just a moment, wondering about Arif having a wife. What would marriage even look like when you’re a Citadel? Well, it would probably look like what I’ve just seen with Arif and Navaa, spending the majority of your time thinking that your partner is either injured or dead. I’m not sure why anyone would sign up for that.
I spend the next four hours learning how to speak Faida. It is a fluid language with long pronounced O sounds and clipped S’s. I memorize the many different words the Faida have for flight. Heouine—flight during exceptional winds. Youshin—flight in the dark when the moon is full. Dawlbei—gliding flight on a wind from the Northeast. Kaisu—high-velocity flight. Theirs is a language that rarely uses metaphor or simile, presumably because there are so many different words to describe what English has only one or two for. While this makes it in some ways easier to learn than a language like ours—which can be deceptively confounding—its massive vocabulary pushes even my brain to the limit.
When I am finished, I close the laptop and lean back on the wall. I look up at the cathedral ceilings. I am sure that I could leap to one of the beams, which might give me some kind of advantage in a fight, but I need to be honest with myself about the situation we are in. If it does come down to a fight, I have already lost. On some level, I trusted the Faida enough to bring them here, to their turf. It’s a disturbing wake-up call to realize that I felt like this Earth was somehow safer than my own.
The large wooden door swings open and Navaa enters without asking. She doesn’t say anything, but she does place her delicate hands on the thick back of a chair and lift it so that she can sit down squarely in front of me.
“So you are a human Citadel. I must admit. You aren’t what I imagined.”
I glare at her, my eyes narrowing as I take her in. “I don’t know why. You’ve been to our Earth before. You’ve seen us already,” I answer her in Faida.
Navaa gives just the briefest shake of her head. “You can do that? You can learn our language in a matter of hours?”
“I can. Is that surprising? You know what we can do. What did you think us human Citadels were going to be like? Dumber? Moodier?”
Navaa folds her hands on her lap. Her fingers are so long and her nails so neatly trimmed and perfect, I’m not sure how she could possibly do much fighting with them. I look down at my own hands, which aren’t exactly ugly but are dry and nicked and calloused from punching and blocking and holding weapons.
“No,” Navaa answers. “I thought you would be outraged. You’re adolescents whose childhood was stolen. There is little doubt that you will die young. I assumed you would be angry. Instead you seem”—she tilts her head up and looks at the wall as if it was a window—“resigned.”
I lean forward on the bed, swinging my legs around. “That is true. In a way. Although I’m not necessarily resigned to dying young. I guess it’s more that I’ve accepted what’s been done to me because bitterness won’t serve me. It won’t help me figure out the truth, or what to do with the answers once I find them.”
“And you believe that we have the answers?” Navaa asks, even though I’m not sure it was a question exactly.
“I want to know what happened here. I want to learn from your mistakes because, clearly, despite your age and experience, you made several,” I tell her boldly.
Navaa raises a single, perfectly arched eyebrow. Her spine straightens. It’s clear she doesn’t want to relive any of it. Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s pain, but her mouth sets in a firm, straight line.
I’m being combative and I don’t necessarily mean to be. I’m just feeling anxious. The Faida are so extra … everything. It worries me that they of all races find themselves in this position. I clear my throat and try a softer tone. “You don’t want to have to justify anything to me. I get it. I understand how distracting my face must be to you. You think I’m young. You don’t think I could possibly understand.” I lean closer toward her and grab the bottom of the bed so tightly the wood creaks. Navaa looks at me for a moment, then speaks.
“I won’t make the mistake of underestimating our enemies or the creatures of our enemies ever again. I don’t doubt your skill or your intelligence, but you are correct. I fear your youth makes it impossible for you to grasp the scope of what is happening here.”
“Well,” I say, chortling back to her nervously, “that’s just not true. I mean, yes, it’s true that I’m finding it difficult to wrap my head around the entirety of this, but it’s not because I’m young. It’s because the situation is absurd and I’ve only come into possession of the facts—if that’s even what they are—a very short time ago. That’s why I’m here, to try and figure out fact from hyperbole. I took Arif at his word when he said you rebelled against the altered Roones, but I gotta say, you’re not doing a lot to get the whole trust ball rolling by throwing me in a cell.”
Navaa shakes her long strawberry trusses as if we’re in some kind of a shampoo commercial instead of what this actually is. An interrogation. “Oh, come now,” she practically purrs. “We’re both soldiers. You must have known a debrief was necessary. Besides, I’ve never seen a human Kir-Abisat. You are untrained and therefore dangerous. I can’t allow you into the general population until I have a better understanding of your relationship with Rift matter.”
“Yeah,” I tell her uncomfortably. “Let’s table that just for a minute. The whole Kir thing—I’m just trying to get some answers to a few of the basics first. Why don’t you tell me what happened here. How did you win?”
Navaa’s jaw sets, making her heart-shaped face almost square. “I would hardly say we won. We survived. Some of us, and just barely.”
I shake my head warily. “I don’t get it. You knew. You all knew what the altered Roones were capable of. How could there have been dissension among the ranks?”
“Power is intoxicating. The Faida are a proud and privileged people, and the Roones played on that pride and that sense of superiority. I couldn’t have imagined that we, who had seen so much, who had persevered through eras of infighting and bloodshed, could ever be seduced into believing that some of us were better than others. That those of us who had been altered were more deserving of authority and command because of genetics, but that’s what happened.”
I scratch my head. “So it was ego? God complexes?” I ask in disbelief, because despite how they look, they really do seem like they’d moved beyond all that, like they were more evolved as an entire race—and not just the genetically altered ones.
Navaa huffs out a sarcastic, two-syllable
