'Have an ear for the truth and a heart to find it in yourself.'
Everything is silent in the field of ruined metal. Shards stick out the ground like posts in a field, footprints have left the soil in trails and traces that tell the story of an ambush.
The scent of burned fuel and dirt sticks to his nose, a nose clogged with blood and dirt. He can't breathe through it. Water rises in his eyes as he blinks. Everything pounds. His legs spasm and reject the force he funnels into them. He loses consciousness, regains it, seconds of life pounding through his flesh. A desperate attempt, and he pushes one arm out. Face still down. If no one saw this movement, they will assume he is one of the fallen. As before, as a soldier, as before, as a sheer witness of terror.
This time, no one shouts in surprise. It is the digging that saves him. Someone has seen that he is still there, and they push through the metal strands and take him, to wherever.
He is used to people lifting him around, to carrying his never quite dead body. Even now, half lost in the haze, a haze that protects him like the fog of his memories, he smells it, he sees it, and he feels everything.
No dancing imagines of his life safeguard and tempt him this time. Only dim light and voices. Voices hard to discern. They all share one thing. They are exhausted and drained. They're as hopeless as the blackness around him.
A male voice he doesn't know sweeps in somewhere behind his ear. "I can help carry him if you want me to, Bree."
"No. He doesn't weight much."
A third male, quiet voice, the voice he has come to recognize as Tiberias Calore. "He was right. He never dies."
"It doesn't help much right now, does it, silver prince? We could as well just be dead. How are we not? She traded herself in." A sullen voice he has come to recognize. "How'd he know?"
"I don't know."
"What the fuck are you good for then, now? We didn't even make it. We didn't even make it!"
"Cameron, stop."
"No, let her talk."
When he comes back to himself Bree Barrow has carried him off the shards of the plane, away, in the middle of a group of a nightmarish hopeless party. It's strange being dragged everywhere. It's stranger looking at every face now. The Ghost needs to breathe through his mouth. His nose hurts with a solid punch and cracked bones. Blood has crusted and dried on him. A second skin of sorts.
It reminds him of the march of the injured rebels, after the attack on the trench. They lost some, they took intel for it.
Right now, judging by the size of the group and the state they are in, this time, nothing was taken to compensate the loss.
He stares at the group. He counts them. One face he doesn't know, one he barely recognizes as the shapeshifting one, back to an old woman, one a blond-haired younger man, Calore, Bree, Tramy, Cole. A significantly easy observation pierces into his brain. One is missing.
"An ambush?" he rasps.
One is missing.
The lightning girl, as they chose to call her, is not with them in the nowhere.
He scoots himself out of the grip of the pain. He has had it worse. The world around them is touched in blackness, but even with his good eyesight, nothing remarkably familiar stands out. The Ghost is, for a better purpose or worse, lost again, and needs to rely on other people to navigate.
He wiggles his hurt body and cracked bones free out of Bree's grip to stand. "Thank you for not leaving me."
"You were the only one that was still alive."
It's a grave testimony of destruction and it leaves the rotten taste of sweat and salt in his mouth as he licks his lips.
"The jet went down. Metal benders?"
No one looks at him. A part of them could be angry. A part of them doesn't know him. And only one person in the group knows the full truth. And even he avoids looking at Thomas ghostly , ruined form.
"Yes."
Recognizing anything in the darkness is rationally, he focuses on the moving shapes. "How are you not all dead?"
A long, long pause. A reluctant pause. A defensive body in high arched backs. "Mare traded herself in."
"To..."
"To Maven."
The boy that was Thomas has a shrill voice and even the ghost of him can't control it. It is a creaking, cracking tone of frustration and disbelief. He stares at the exiled prince. "He was there? He was there at the ambush? Where are we?"
"Save, for the moment, we need to move."
"He was there and I didn't even see him." It leaves at least the possibility that Maven didn't see him either. The Ghost hisses in another breath. Another missed shot. Another missed opportunity. A broken promise. This is why he doesn't promise things to people. "I've been here before. I won't ask. Lead the way."
Another trudging, painful march, another rotten, missed chance, another trick, another misplaced mission. Suicide. Suicide he thought. Defeat, defeat it is.
Unsurprisingly, after the capture, the island gets abandoned. Marked and unmarked graves get left behind. No more driftwood and no more staring at the water, the Ghost is very sure he won't see the ocean again fast.
And he is right. Instead of walks along a beach, wandering away, it is the underground of leaking pipes, cold freezing in his body and no light that can help him see this not as a prison of another dimension.
It only takes one day to be dismissed, another to be scornfully told off any chance of duty, another to find Gisa Barrow in the underground and watch her from afar. It takes another night alone in his tiny cell in the tiny bed with the tiny blanket, and his face makes it hard to breathe. If the ghost was ugly in scars before, he is now sure to just be hideous for everyone to look at.
Then, unexpectdly, in the middle of the night, a visitor comes brushing over, one he is familiar by now, sharing the frustration and the anger, and maybe, just maybe, he will answer the question the Ghost posed. Or so he thinks until he sees the exiled prince hasn't come alone but brought two others.
He has no knife this time, he can barely stand, but he still jumps upward.
"What are you doing here? Who are you two?"
"Her name is Sara Skonos," the man says. "She wanted to take a look at your face. No one will hurt you, I'm sure you're aware. And my name is Julian Jacos. I know who you are."
And then he does something that breaks a hurdle in the Ghost's spine and makes his brain jackslaw for a second, unable to fence of the panic. He says his full name.
"You told him." It is an accusation. It hits the exiled prince straight in the chest like a stab. "You promised me you wouldn't."
"Listen to him, just a moment, I didn't tell anyone else, just listen." It is an insistence, at it is made with soft force. In his cradled blanket and the pain, the Ghost of a boy has no choice but to listen.
"Do you know what you are, Thomas?" Julian Jacos asks, looking at him from brown eyes too smart and waiting patiently. The Ghost has told everyone his value is almost only depicted by his hand on his weapons and not by the things he used to be.
Dead. Reborn.
I was a son. I was a servant. I was a lover. A friend. A soldier. I am a Ghost.
"Red." It is all he answers and he stands still, holding his breath like he does before he aims, like he does when he wakes up from the Pulls.
"That is still the color of your blood. But there is more to it."
The Ghost stares at the face of Julian Jacos, looking for a trace of mockery, for something that is just trying to make a bad joke.
When nothing else comes out of the old man's mouth, the Ghost does the talking for him.
"I am not able to heal, shapeshift or swing electricity." He whispers the words like curses. "And if I was a New Blood, as they call it, the Colonel would have arrested me or the likes."
"Why would he arrest you when you are a perfect subordinate? Your case is complicated, Thomas-"
The Ghost is unmoving. He has to be. These people have already cracked him open too much, and he owes them. He does not like owing people at all. And he does not like the way those eyes study him. It makes him uncomfortable to hold this long and unnecessary discussion.
"You were assumed dead, had a different name after that, so I suppose that adds to no one telling you." Sound reasoning. Still, the Ghost wishes it all away. "And then there is the fact your power is easily disregarded, as you did just prove."
"I am Red," The Ghost repeats and blinks, slow. "I do not have any powers. I am not involved in this."
Next to him, the woman just watches with eyes that remind the Ghost of sad summer days with briny green water and nothing to eat. The prince just looks strained. As if he knows how close to snapping the Ghost is.
"So you don't have heightened senses?" The old man tilts his head. He looks like he has slightly lost a bit of patience on the Ghost's insistence. Not too much to be too unfriendly, but his voice is as dried out as a mud pit at a river in the summer. "You can't smell perfectly? See in the dark? Your reflexes and muscle memory are not above any other average? I heard you took Silks and Swifts down, but maybe I was mistaken."
Every word is true. But it still makes little sense. "I still lose if I am not armed and very careful. I don't have super strength."
"That is not what you do. You are about instincts. How many times did you jump or sprint , for your body to know how to curl together and protect you? How many times did you think any other person would have given up but you endured? You don't need much , be it food or anything else, isn't that so?"
The Ghosts knows he is right. He thinks about the times his body got hurt. When he jumped into the water and survived. When he fought and survived. When he got shot, stabbed, burned, but always came back.
Remarkably you can walk, they told him with his broken ribs. The pain was nothing but a fueling need to leave everything behind.
"So, what is my..." For the first time in a long while, the Ghost's voice does not stutter because he barely uses it and it is hoarse, but because the words get stuck in the back of his throat as a hot iron someone has shoved down there.
"Let us say, for simplicity's sake," Julian Jacos offers. "It is surviving."
