Page 7 of Red Demon

By now, we should have heard army trucks rumbling along the road between the gorges or seen airships lighting the milky, star-flecked sky.

“Did you hear that?” Iden said.

I focused, unsure if I was imagining the flicker of fear in his voice. I heard nothing but the sigh of the wind through the branches. “Hear what?”

Iden sat up, startled. “Thought I heard a kid’s voice,” he muttered, shaking his head.

The treehouse creaked. Rising, I shivered as a breeze tickled my neck.

“Just the wind, I think.” My laugh sounded brittle.

Iden shivered. “There’s a man whispering now. From there...” He pointed wide-eyed through the gap in the boards, toward the dense shadows at the edge of the clearing.

Only gnarled shapes of trees reached out from the darkness; the dancing shadows cast by the moon. I looked back, bewildered.

“M–Maybe I just need sleep.” His voice lacked conviction. But his eyes, even in the faint moonlight, held a ghost of something I couldn’t name, something that reminded me of Mal. I rubbed the bruised abdomen where Mal had punched me, the last touch from my brother.

Sleep felt like a betrayal. Dreams waved in and out of waking thoughts, fitful cycles of Mal’s final, choked gasp before I’d raise my head to scan the woods once more. I’d see Mal’s wild eyes flickering in the dark, pulling that knife on me. Then he’d be standing sentinel in our tree stand, staring into the darkness where Iden heard the voices. In that place between waking and dream, I felt a presence haunting the forest. When the first rays of dawn bruised the sky, Iden was gone.

“Iden?” I hissed. I didn’t dare yell, but his tracks were clear in the drifting snow.

I shoved the blanket back into our bag, then shimmied down the bark where the steps had fallen off, landing with a crunch of ice. Iden’s tracks led me upstream where he sat by the bank, an empty canteen beside him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. A stupid question if there ever was one.

Iden didn’t respond, his eyes fixed on the trickle of water between planes of fresh ice.

“They’ve been waiting for me all night,” he said, voice raw in the cold.

“Who?”

He pointed to something in the snow, footsteps, not ours, circling back through the wood near our tree. “They’re afraid of the Red Demon too.” Iden turned his haunted eyes to me. “She’s watching us now, somewhere near that ridge.”

“Is that who you heard last night? Her?” It clicked into place, the prickling of unease beyond the cold; the feeling of being watched.

“A whole crowd of them are watching me, but it only takes one,” Iden whispered. He scratched his hair, pulled it. “And there’s only my set of tracks, so…” A bitter laugh escaped him.

“What the fuck, Iden?” He winced. I took a deep breath. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

He opened his mouth, stopped himself, tried again. “I’ve been trying to remember everything we learned about Chaeten-sa, to make sense of this. Not the General, the rest of them. I wished I’d paid more attention.”

My mouth opened. “Why?”

“Most of those others went crazy, or died too young to see battle,” he said. “They’d break in different ways, even after the war, right? Did Ms. Orozca ever tell us why?”

I remembered the lesson from school. Suicide rates among Chaeten-sa were very high after the war. Some would see things that weren’t there. Some seemed healthy, then killed friends—unprovoked.

“Dad said we’re unbreakable. They got stronger mods than any of us. They still broke.” Iden’s head jerked up, looking around.

I saw nothing. My breath hitched, lost. “So? They’re not you.”

Iden held my stare. “I’m breaking, Jesse.”

“You’re fine,” I said, too quickly. I followed his gaze to the sky, the clouds tinged with red. “I won’t let you break.”

He didn’t look at me. “She’s close.”

I scanned the woods for the Red Demon—the one who must have done this to him. The trees watched in silence on the ridge where Iden focused his attention.