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Kanna hit the ground, her palms scraping on the cold stone of the temple floor.

She gasped for breath, her body shaking.

The pain was gone, a memory once more. She checked her hands, but they were pale and clean in the starlit night.

They were empty.

She clenched her fists and screamed. The loss she had always carried had a shape now, a form and a name, but she could feel it being pulled away once more. It left a void and the ache filled her, scratched at the places inside of her that she once thought abandoned.

She screamed until her throat was raw and she couldn’t anymore. She wrapped her hands around herself and hunched over, trying to keep the shattered pieces of herself from falling apart.

Footsteps approached. The sound of boots against marble was now familiar.

She leaned back, resigning herself to whatever was to come, and looked into the grey of her own eyes.

“Is that enough?” her echo asked.

Kanna shut her eyes and nodded wordlessly.

“Good.”

Her echo reached out, tapping her lightly between her eyes.

“It is time to stop hiding. Wake up.”

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GEGENES

Kanna’s heart was a hollow echo in her chest. It stuttered to a start once more and her mouth opened, gasping in stale air.

Her body jerked up, and her head spun. The visions flashed back to her and she reached for her side. Her hand came back clean, but the ghost of the pain still ached.

The skin on her wrists was red and raw. She flexed her fingers as they warmed in the dank air, her nerves prickling back to life.

While her dreams were often erratic, what she had awakened from was far from a dream. She had been somewhere else, at some other time. The Neither, she called it. And someone else. She shut her eyes, trying to cling to the memory but it slipped away. She shook her head, but the movement didn’t align the pieces inside.

The fog in her head stayed stuck, muting her surroundings. The light was soft and hazy, an orange glow casting long shadows of cell bars. There was an oil lamp in the hall on the other side, somewhere further down than she could see from her current position.

The walls of the room were solid, carved out of bedrock. She tried to breathe deep to catch the scent of the area and was met with the musty odor of straw and unkempt bodies.

Her own body was stiff, her mouth parched and her throat raw and burning. She rolled her shoulders, concentrated on the joints as they shifted. On her right, the pull of her skin was uneven as it warped around the scar on her back.

“Hey.”

The whispered hiss came from behind her and she scrambled away, dragging herself across the dusty floor.

“You’re alright.”

The practiced voice soothed her jarred nerves. She felt her body calm, her legs shifting away from her chest as she adjusted to this new reality.

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On the other side of the bars, a man crouched. His clothes were rumpled and stained, the dust clinging to the spots where he had sweated through his shirt. His brown hair was disheveled, dirty and sticking out at odd angles.

“Isco?”

Isco groped the bars between their cells and she could see orange dirt caked under his jagged nails. A few of them were broken to the quick, red lines at the end of the tips where the beds had bled. The soft light from the oil lamps made his dark eyes owl-ish, and his gaze kept darting from her to the empty hall.

She felt like she should know him, but safe for having met him in the Governor’s house, he remained vaguely familiar at best.

The events of the dinner came back to her. He had tried to stop them. It was a wasted effort, but it seemed uncharacteristically brave for the skittish man.

She followed his darting eyes to the hall. There was a door at the end, but she couldn’t see anything beyond it. When she tried to sense the guards, the effort made her dizzy and she tipped to the side.

Her body was weak, and that weakness was a betrayal.

On hands and knees, she crawled closer to him. The short distance winded her and she stopped, leaning her back against the bars between them.

“Stay quiet,” he said, his tone still velvet smooth, “or they’ll dose you again.”

Kanna closed her dry mouth and opened it. “Dosed?” She croaked.

She heard him shift behind her, landing with a thud onto the ground. “They have a drug that suppresses loa abilities.”

She choked on a bitter laugh, her throat too dry to make the sound. “That’s impossible.”

“I know,” he said, “but it’ll make it hard for you to move or concentrate.”

Kanna opened her eyes and looked down at herself finally. The white shirt she was wearing glared in the dark and she yanked on it, pulling it away from her body to see better. It was plain cotton but woven with something rougher, cheap and loose. Her legs were wrapped in tattered denim that had seen better days.

“The guards changed you a while ago,” Isco offered.

“Oh.” She reached up, her fingers brushing the scar at her shoulder. It was old, whiter than her skin and smooth.

“Did you see?”

He didn’t say anything. She tilted her head to try and look at Isco, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, “but it’s hard not to.”

Her body was a maze of scars, with some more prominent than others. There were the crossing lashes on her back, the smaller assortment across her arms and torso and legs.

There were even a few on the back of her right hand, thin and straight, clean, purposeful cuts that were then mended. Those explained the stiff aches in her fingers on rainy days, the bumps of metal she could feel against her bones.

Then there were the veins of gold that wrapped below her ribs. They radiated against the scar tissue, the light pulsing against her skin.

She couldn’t fathom the map of any of it, didn’t know where they came from or where they led.

“Right,” she said, lacking any other words.

“Do you,” Isco started to speak but his voice caught. He cleared his throat. “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” she replied, glad that he wasn’t asking questions she didn’t have answers to. “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” he said, something like sorrow in his voice. “Not really.”

Kanna always knew when people were lying. He wasn’t.

She squeezed her eyes shut as the new memories found paths in her mind. Everything was chopped apart and tossed together. She knew her name. She knew what they called her. But there was something vital missing, something important.

Kanna knew who she was, and she didn’t. She had facts, statistics, but nothing more.

Nothing that mattered.

“You should rest,” Isco said. “They’re putting you in the Theatre.”

“Hmm,” she said, her body growing heavy. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Kanna couldn’t help the smile that curled her lips.

She knew this moment would come. She had felt the tug calling her to Lugos, but at the same time she couldn’t help but yank away. There were answers there, and she didn’t want them. But it didn’t matter how hard she pulled away, she knew her past would come for her.

The world was dangerous and broken, the hatred sown so deep it was a wonder anything had lasted this long.

She remembered the man in the wastes, tried to remember what she had called him and why he was important. But the more she tried to concentrate on it, the hazier it became until she couldn’t even remember why she was trying to remember anymore.

She would have to find him to know. But first, she would have to survive whatever it was that Hautman was planning.

Sleep pulled at her limbs, and whatever drug they had given her drifted in her veins like an oil. Morning would come too soon and with it, she would take the stage.

Her hands were empty, her mind was a cloud, but she would survive.

She had a feeling there was a promise she was meant to keep.