Книга - The Fates Divide

The Fates Divide
Veronica Roth


In the second book of the Carve the Mark duology, globally bestselling Divergent author Veronica Roth reveals how Cyra and Akos fulfill their fates. The Fates Divide is a richly imagined tale of hope and resilience told in four stunning perspectives.The lives of Cyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth are ruled by their fates, spoken by the oracles at their births. The fates, once determined, are inescapable.Akos is in love with Cyra, in spite of his fate: he will die in service to Cyra’s family. And when Cyra’s father, Lazmet Noavek – a soulless tyrant, thought to be dead – reclaims the Shotet throne, Akos believes his end is closer than ever.As Lazmet ignites a barbaric war, Cyra and Akos are desperate to stop him at any cost. For Cyra, that could mean taking the life of the man who may – or may not – be her father. For Akos, it could mean giving his own. In a stunning twist, the two will discover how fate defines their lives in ways most unexpected.
















Copyright (#uf3ca19ec-eca2-57fa-abcc-eb37379d90ef)


First published in hardback in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 2018

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018

Published in this ebook edition in 2018

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Text © 2018 by Veronica Roth

Map © 2017 by Veronica Roth. All rights reserved.

Map illustrated by Virginia Allyn

Typography by Joel Tippie

Jacket art ™ & © 2018 by Veronica Roth

Jacket art by Jeff Huang

Jacket design by Erin Fitzsimmons

Veronica Roth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008192198

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008192228

Version: 2018-04-09




Dedication (#uf3ca19ec-eca2-57fa-abcc-eb37379d90ef)


To my dad, Frank, my brother, Frankie, and my sister, Candice:

we may not share blood, but I’m so lucky we’re family.


Contents

Cover (#udfa79263-dd7e-54cf-803e-86658aa461be)

Title Page (#ud300c793-4a68-5142-80ba-52af669e79a2)

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Eijeh

Part 1

Chapter 1: Cyra (#ue27b7a09-deab-563f-9eeb-594befd7b8d7)

Chapter 2: Cisi (#uaa465c9e-0764-56bf-b2a6-c6d0a48d16c0)

Chapter 3: Cyra (#u1a45e34c-7270-5af3-9cb9-dc8fb9888ddd)

Chapter 4: Akos (#u2484ef74-0520-5433-916a-2099531adb5f)

Chapter 5: Cisi (#u5745b391-dc28-573c-82ec-10c0388fc007)

Chapter 6: Akos (#uad04ac86-e3ea-559f-b289-438cdfe7dc4c)

Chapter 7: Cisi (#u828687f3-ceb0-53c3-affe-3bf0b69d1937)

Chapter 8: Cisi (#u06078a9b-d3b6-5d75-9f44-8045626147d3)

Chapter 9: Cyra (#u113a7ccc-fc5f-5e74-9ad9-66eba1be6092)

Chapter 10: Akos (#ud7e7b29f-36b4-5780-a68b-841719ec0ef2)

Chapter 11: Cyra (#u8da23689-f6db-52cc-84b4-9d5e175591dc)

Chapter 12: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18: Eijeh (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 2

Chapter 21: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29: Eijeh (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 3

Chapter 31: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 4

Chapter 41: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 51: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 52: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 5

Chapter 53: Cisi (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 54: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 55: Akos (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 56: Cyra (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: Eijeh

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

Glossary

Books by Veronica Roth

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)













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“WHY SO AFRAID?” WE ask ourself.

“She is coming to kill us,” we reply.

We were once alarmed by this feeling of being in two bodies at once. We have grown accustomed to it in the cycles since the shift occurred, since both our currentgifts dissolved into this new, strange one. We know how to pretend, now, that we are two people instead of one—though we prefer, when we are alone, to relax into the truth. We are one person in two bodies.

We are not on Urek, as we were the last time we knew our location. We are adrift in space, the bend of the blushing currentstream the only interruption in the blackness.

Only one of our two cells has a window. It is a narrow thing, with a thin mattress in it and a bottle of water. The other cell is a storage room that smells of disinfectant, harsh and acrid. The only light comes from the vents in the door, closed now but not fully sealed against the hallway glow.

We stretch two arms—one shorter and browner, the other long and pale—in unison. The former feels lighter, the latter clumsy and heavy. The drugs have faded from one body but not the other.

One heart pounds, hard, and the other maintains a steady rhythm.

“To kill us,” we say to ourself. “Are we sure?”

“As sure as the fates. She wants us dead.”

“The fates.” There is dissonance here. Just as a person can love and hate something at once, we love and hate the fates, we believe and do not believe in them. “What was the word our mother used—” We have two mothers, two fathers, two sisters. And yet only one brother. “Accept your fate, or bear it, or—”

“‘Suffer the fate,’ she said,” we reply. “‘For all else is delusion.’”






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LAZMET NOAVEK, MY FATHER and former tyrant of Shotet, had been presumed dead for over ten seasons. We had held a funeral for him on the first sojourn after his passing, sent his old armor into space, because there was no body.

And yet my brother, Ryzek, imprisoned in the belly of this transport ship, had said, Lazmet is still alive.

My mother had called my father “Laz,” sometimes. No one else would have dared but Ylira Noavek. “Laz,” she would say, “let it go.” And he obeyed her, as long as she didn’t command him too often. He respected her, though he respected no one else, not even his own friends.

With her he had some softness, but with everyone else … well.

My brother—who had begun his life soft, and only later hardened into someone who would torture his own sister—had learned to cut out a person’s eye from Lazmet. And how to store it, too, in a preservative, so it wouldn’t rot. Before I truly understood what the jars in the Weapons Hall contained, I had gone there to look at them, on shelves high above my head, glinting in the low light. Green and brown and gray irises, afloat, like fish bobbing to the surface of a tank for food.

My father had never carved a piece of someone with his own hands. Nor had he ordered someone else to do it. He had used his currentgift to control their bodies, to force them to do it to themselves.

Death is not the only punishment you can give a person. You can also give them nightmares.

When Akos Kereseth came to find me, later, it was on the nav deck of the small transport ship that carried us away from my home planet, where my people, the Shotet, now stood on the verge of war with Akos’s home nation of Thuvhe. I sat in the captain’s chair, swiveling back and forth to soothe myself. I meant to tell him what Ryzek had told me, that my father—if he was my father, if Ryzek was even my brother—was alive. Ryzek seemed certain that he and I didn’t actually share blood, that I was not truly a Noavek. That was why, he had said, I hadn’t been able to open the gene lock that kept his rooms secure, why I hadn’t been able to assassinate him the first time I tried.

But I didn’t know how to begin. With the death of my father? With the body we had never found? With the niggling feeling that Ryzek and I were too dissimilar in features to have ever been related?

Akos didn’t seem to want to talk, either. He spread a blanket he had found somewhere in the ship on the ground between the captain’s chair and the wall, and we lay on top of it, side by side, staring out at nothingness. Currentshadows—my lively, painful ability—wrapped around my arms like black string, sending a deep ache all the way down to my fingertips.

I was not afraid of emptiness. It made me feel small. Barely worth a first glance, let alone a second. And there was comfort in that, because so often I worried that I was capable of causing too much damage. At least, if I was small and kept to myself, I wouldn’t do any more harm. I wanted only what was within arm’s reach.

Akos’s index finger hooked around my pinkie. The shadows disappeared as his currentgift countered mine.

Yes, what was within arm’s reach was definitely enough for me.

“Would you … say something in Thuvhesit?” he asked.

I turned my head toward him. He was still looking up at the window, a faint smile curling his lips. Freckles dotted his nose, and one of his eyelids, right near the lash line. I hesitated with my hand just lifted off the blanket, wanting to touch him but also wanting to stay in the wanting for a moment. Then I followed the line of his eyebrow across his face with a fingertip.

“I’m not a pet bird,” I said. “I don’t chirp on command.”

“This is a request, not a command. A humble one,” he said. “Just say my full name, maybe?”

I laughed. “Most of your name is Shotet, remember?”

“Right.” He lunged at my hand with his mouth, snapping his teeth together. It startled a laugh from me. “What was hardest for you to say, when you were first learning?”

“Your city names, what a mouthful,” I said as he let go of one of my hands to catch the other, holding me by pinkie and thumb with all his fingertips. He pressed a kiss to the center of my palm, where the skin was callused from holding currentblades. Strange, that something so simple, given to a hardened part of me, could suffuse me so completely, bringing life to every nerve.

I sighed, acquiescing.

“Fine, I’ll say them. Hessa, Shissa, Osoc,” I said. “There was a chancellor who called Hessa the very heart of Thuvhe. Her surname was Kereseth.”

“The only Kereseth chancellor in Thuvhesit history,” Akos said, bringing my palm to his cheek. I propped myself up on one elbow to lean over him, my hair slipping forward to frame both our faces, long on one side though I was now silverskinned on the other. “I do know that much.”

“For a long time, there were only two fated families on Thuvhe,” I said, “and yet, aside from that one exception, the leadership has only ever been with the Benesits, when the fates have named a chancellor at all. Is that not strange to you?”

“Maybe we aren’t any good at leading.”

“Maybe fate favors you,” I said. “Maybe thrones are curses.”

“Fate doesn’t favor me,” he said gently, so gently I almost didn’t realize what he meant. His fate—the third child of the family Kereseth will die in service to the family Noavek—was to betray his home for my family, in serving us, and to die. How could anyone see that as anything but a hardship?

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”

“Cyra,” he said. Then he paused, frowning at me. “Did you just apologize?”

“I do know the words,” I replied, scowling back. “I’m not completely without manners.”

He laughed. “I know the Essanderae word for ‘garbage’; that doesn’t mean I sound right saying it.”

“Fine, I revoke my apology.” I flicked his nose, hard, and when he cringed away, still laughing, I said, “What’s the Essanderae word for ‘garbage’?”

He said it. It sounded like a word reflected in a mirror, said once forward and once backward.

“I’ve found your weakness,” he said. “I just have to taunt you with knowledge you don’t have, and you’re distracted immediately.”

I considered that. “I guess you’re allowed to know one of my weaknesses … considering you have so many to exploit.”

He raised his eyebrows in question, and I attacked him with my fingers, jabbing his left side just under his elbow, his right side just above his hip, the tendon behind his right leg. I had learned these soft places when we were training—places he didn’t protect well enough, or that made him cringe harder than usual when struck—but I teased him now with more gentleness than I had thought myself capable of, drawing from him laughs instead of cringes.

He pulled me on top of him, holding me by the hips. A few of his fingers slipped under the waistband of my pants, and it was a kind of agony I was unfamiliar with, a kind I didn’t mind at all. I braced myself on the blanket, on either side of his head, and lowered myself slowly to kiss him.

We hadn’t kissed more than a few times, and I had never kissed anyone but him, so each time was still a discovery. This time I found the edge of teeth, skimming, and the tip of a tongue; I found the slide of a knee between mine, and the weight of a hand at the back of my neck, urging me closer, further, faster. I didn’t breathe, didn’t want to take the time, and so I ended up gasping against the side of his neck before long, making him laugh.

“I’ll take that as a good sign,” he said.

“Don’t get cocky, Kereseth.”

I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. Lazmet—and whatever questions I had about my parentage—didn’t feel as close to me now. I was safe here, floating on a ship in the middle of nowhere, with Akos Kereseth.

And then: a scream, from somewhere deep in the ship. It sounded like Akos’s sister, Cisi.







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I KNOW WHAT IT is to watch your family die. I am Cisi Kereseth, after all.

I watched Dad die on our living room floor. I watched Eijeh and Akos get dragged away by Shotet soldiers. I watched Mom fade like fabric in the sun. There’s not much I don’t understand about loss. I just can’t express it the way other people do. My currentgift keeps me all wrapped up tight.

So I’m a little bit jealous of how Isae Benesit, fated chancellor of Thuvhe and my friend, can let herself grieve. She wears herself out with emotion, and then we fall asleep, shoulder to shoulder, in the galley of the Shotet exile ship.

When I wake up, my back hurts from slumping against the wall for so long. I get up and lean to the left, to the right, while I take note of her.

Isae doesn’t look right, which I guess makes sense, since her twin sister, Ori, died only yesterday, in an arena of Shotet all chanting for her blood.

She doesn’t feel right, either, the texture around her all fuzzy like the way your teeth feel when you haven’t brushed them. Her eyes skip back and forth over the room, dancing across my face and body, and not in a way that would make a person blush. I try to calm her with my currentgift, sending out a smooth feeling, like unrolling a skein of silk thread. It doesn’t seem like it does much good.

My currentgift is an odd thing. I can’t know how she feels, not really, but I can feel it, like it’s a texture in the air. And I can’t control how she feels, either, but I can make suggestions. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries, or a new way of thinking about it. So instead of silk, which had no effect, I try water, heavy, undulating.

It’s a bust. She’s too keyed up. Sometimes, when a person’s feelings are too intense, it’s hard for me to make an impact.

“Cisi, can I trust you?”

It’s a funny word in Thuvhesit, can. It’s can and should and must all squished together, and you can only suss out the true meaning from context. It leads to misunderstandings, sometimes, which is probably why our language is described by off-worlders as “slippery.” That, and off-worlders are lazy.

So when Isae Benesit asks me in my mother tongue if she can trust me, I don’t really know what she means. But regardless, there’s only one answer.

“Of course.”

“I mean it, Cisi,” she says, in that low voice she uses when she’s serious. I like that voice, the way it hums in my head. “There’s something I have to do, and I want you to come with me, but I’m afraid you won’t be—”

“Isae,” I cut her off. “I’m here for you, whatever you need.” I touch her shoulder with gentle fingers. “Okay?”

She nods.

She leads me out of the galley, and I try not to step on any kitchen knives. After she shut herself in here, she ripped all the drawers out, broke everything she could get her hands on. The floor is covered with shreds of fabric and pieces of glass and cracked plastic and unrolled bandages. I guess I don’t blame her.

My currentgift keeps me from doing or saying things that I know will make people uncomfortable. Which means that, after my dad died, I couldn’t cry unless I was alone. I couldn’t say much of anything to my mom for months. So if I’d been able to destroy a kitchen, like Isae did, I probably would have.

I follow Isae out, quiet. We walk past Ori’s body. It has a sheet tucked nicely around it, so it’s just the slopes of her shoulders, the bump of her nose and chin. Just an impression of who she was. Isae stops there, draws a sharp breath. She feels even grittier now than she did before, like grains of sand against my skin. I know I can’t soothe her, but I’m too worried about her not to try.

I send airy feathergrass tufts, and hard, polished wood. I send warm oil and rounded metal. Nothing works. I chafe against her, frustrated. Why can’t I do anything to help her?

I think, for a tick, of asking for help. Akos and Cyra are right there on the nav deck. Mom’s somewhere below. Even Akos and Cyra’s renegade friend, Teka, is right there, stretched out on the bench seats with a sheet of white-blond hair sprawled across behind her. But I can’t call out to any of them. For one thing, I just can’t—can’t knowingly cause distress, thanks to my giftcurse—and for another, instinct tells me it’s better if I can earn Isae’s trust.

Isae leads us down below, where there are two storage rooms and a washroom. Mom’s in the washroom, I can tell by the sound of the recycled water splattering. In one storage room—the one with the window, I made sure of that—is my other brother, Eijeh. It hurt me to see him again, so long after his kidnapping, and so small compared to the pale pillar of Ryzek Noavek next to him. You think when people get older, they’re supposed to get stronger, fatter. Not Eijeh.

The other storage room—the one with all the cleaning supplies—holds Ryzek Noavek. Just knowing he’s that close, the man who ordered my brothers taken and my dad killed, makes me tremble. Isae pauses between the two doors, and it hits me, then, that she’s going in one of those rooms. And I don’t want her to go in Eijeh’s.

I know he’s the one who killed Ori, technically. That is, he was holding the knife that did it. But I know my brother. He could never kill anyone, especially not his best friend from childhood. There has to be some other explanation for what happened. It has to be Ryzek’s fault.

“Isae,” I say. “What are you—”

She touches three fingers to her lips, telling me to hush.

She’s right between the rooms. Deciding something, it seems like, judging by the faint buzz around her. She takes a key from her pocket—she must have lifted it off Teka, when she went out to make sure we were headed to Assembly Headquarters—and sticks it in the lock for Ryzek’s cell. I reach for her hand.

“He’s dangerous,” I say.

“I can handle it,” she replies. And then, softening around the eyes: “I won’t let him hurt you, I promise.”

I let her go. There’s a part of me that’s hungry to see him, to meet the monster at last.

She opens the door, and he’s sitting against the back wall, sleeves rolled up, feet outstretched. He has long, skinny toes, and narrow ankles. I blink at them. Are sadistic dictators supposed to have vulnerable-looking feet?

If Isae’s at all intimidated, she doesn’t let on. She stands with her hands clasped in front of her and her head high.

“My, my,” Ryzek says, running his tongue over his teeth. “Resemblance between twins never fails to shock me. You look just like Orieve Benesit. Except for those scars, of course. How old are they?”

“Two seasons,” Isae says, stiff.

She’s talking to him. She’s talking to Ryzek Noavek, my sworn enemy, kidnapper of her sister, with a long line of kills tattooed on the outside of his arm.

“They will fade still, then,” he says. “A shame. They made a lovely shape.”

“Yes, I’m a work of art,” she says. “The artist was a Shotet fleshworm who had just finished digging around in a pile of garbage.”

I stare at her. I’ve never heard her say something so hateful about the Shotet before. It’s not like her.

“Fleshworm” is what people call the Shotet when they’re reaching for the worst insult. Fleshworms are gray, wriggly things that feed on the living from the inside out. Parasites, all but eradicated by Othyrian medicine.

“Ah.” His smile grows wider, forcing a dimple into his cheek. There’s something about him that sparks in my memory. Maybe something he has in common with Cyra, though they don’t look at all alike, at a glance. “So this grudge you have against my people isn’t merely in your blood.”

“No.” She sinks into a crouch, resting her elbows on her knees. She makes it look graceful and controlled, but I’m worried about her. She’s long and willowy in build, not near as strong as Ryzek, who is big, though thin. One wrong move and he could lunge at her, and what would I do to stop it? Scream?

“You know about scars, I suppose,” she says, nodding to his arm. “Will you mark my sister’s life?”

The inside of his forearm, the softer, paler part, doesn’t have any scars—they start on the outside and work their way around, row by row. He has more than one row.

“Why, have you brought me a knife and some ink?”

Isae purses her lips. The sandpaper feeling she gave off a moment ago turns as jagged as a broken stone. By instinct, I press back against the door and find the handle behind my back.

“Do you always claim kills you didn’t actually carry out?” Isae says. “Because last time I checked, you weren’t the one on that platform with the knife.”

Ryzek’s eyes glint.

“I wonder if you’ve ever actually killed at all, or if all that work is done by others.” Her head tilts. “Others who, unlike you, actually have the stomach for it.”

It’s a Shotet insult. The kind a Thuvhesit wouldn’t even realize was insulting. Ryzek picks up on it, though, eyes boring into hers.

“Miss Kereseth,” he says, without looking at me. “You look so much like the elder of your two brothers.” He glances at me, then, appraising. “Are you not curious what’s become of him?”

I want to answer coolly, like Ryzek is nothing to me. I want to meet his eyes with strength. I want a thousand fantasies of revenge to come suddenly to life like hushflowers at the Blooming.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

Fine, I think, and I let out a peal of my currentgift, like a clap of my hands. I’ve come to understand that not everybody can control their currentgifts the way I can. I just wish I could master the part that keeps me from saying what I want to.

I see how he relaxes when my gift hits him. It has no effect on Isae—none that I can see, anyway—but maybe it will loosen his tongue. And whatever Isae is planning, she seems to need him to talk first.

“My father, the great Lazmet Noavek, taught me that people can be like blades, if you learn to wield them, but your best weapon should still be yourself,” Ryzek says. “I have always taken that to heart. Some of the kills I have commanded have been carried out by others, Chancellor, but rest assured, those deaths are still mine.”

He slumps forward over his knees, clasping his hands between them. He and Isae are just breaths apart.

“I will mark your sister’s life on my arm,” he says. “It will be a fine trophy to add to my collection.”

Ori. I remember which tea she drank in the morning (harva bark, for energy and clarity) and how much she hated the chip in her front tooth. And I hear the chants of the Shotet in my ears: Die, die, die.

“That clarifies things,” Isae says.

She holds her hand out for him to take. He gives her an odd look, and no wonder—what kind of person wants to shake hands with the man who just admitted to ordering her sister’s death? And being proud of it?

“You really are an odd one,” he says. “You must not have loved your sister very much, to offer your hand to me now.”

I see the skin pull taut over the knuckles of her other hand, the one not held out to him. She opens her fist, and inches her fingers toward her boot.

Ryzek takes the hand she offered, then stiffens, eyes widening.

“On the contrary, I loved her more than anyone,” Isae says. She squeezes him, hard, digging in her fingernails. And all the while, her left hand moves toward her boot.

I’m too stunned to realize what’s happening until it’s too late. With her left hand she tugs a knife out of her boot, from where it’s strapped to her leg. With her right, she pulls him forward. Knife and man come together, and she presses, and the sound of his gurgling moan carries me to my living room, to my adolescence, to the blood that I scrubbed from the floorboards as I sobbed.

Ryzek slumps, and bleeds.

I slam my hand down on the door handle and stumble into the hallway. I am wailing, crying, pounding on the walls; no, I’m not, my currentgift won’t let me.

All it allows me to do, in the end, is let out a single, weak scream.







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I RAN TOWARD CISI Kereseth’s scream, Akos on my heels, not even bothering with the rungs of the ladder that took me below deck—I just jumped down. I went straight toward Ryzek’s cell, knowing, of course, that he was likely the source of anything that caused screaming on this ship. I saw Cisi braced against the corridor wall, the storage room door across from her open. Behind her, Teka dropped down from the other end of the ship, beckoned here by the same noise. Isae Benesit stood inside Ryzek’s cell, and below her, in a jumble of legs and arms, was my brother.

There was a certain amount of poetry in it, I supposed, that just as Akos had watched his father spill his life on the floor, so I now watched my brother do the same.

It took far longer for him to die than I anticipated. That was intentional, I assumed; Isae Benesit stood over his body the entire time, bloody knife in her fist, eyes blank but watchful. She had wanted to take her time with this moment, her moment of triumph over the one who killed her sister.

Well, one of the ones who killed her sister, because Eijeh, who had held the actual blade, was still in the next room.

Ryzek’s eyes found mine, and almost as if he’d touched me, I was buoyed into a memory. Not one that he was taking from me, but one I had almost hidden from myself.

I was in the passage behind the Weapons Hall, with my eye pressed to the crack in the wall panel. I had gone there to spy on my father’s meeting with a prominent Shotet businessman-turned-slumlord, because I often spied on my father’s meetings when I was bored and curious about the happenings of this house. But this meeting had gone bad, which had never happened before when I peeked in. My father had stretched out a hand, two fingers held aloft, like a Zoldan ascetic about to give a blessing, and the businessman had drawn his own knife, his movements jerky, like he was fighting his own muscles.

He brought the knife to the inside corner of his eye.

“Cyra!” hissed a voice behind me, making me jerk to attention. A young, spotted ryzek slid to his knees beside me. He cradled my face in his hands. I had not realized, before that moment, that I was crying. As the screaming started in the next room, he pressed his palms flat to my ears, and brought my face to his chest.

I struggled, at first, but he was too strong. All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart.

At last he pulled me away, wiped the tears from my cheeks, and said, “What does Mother always say? Those who go looking for pain …”

“Find it every time,” I replied, completing the phrase.

Teka held me by the shoulders, and jostled me a little, saying my name. I looked at her, then, confused.

“What is it?” I said.

“Your currentshadows were …” She shook her head. “Never mind.”

I knew what she meant. My currentgift had likely gone haywire, sending sprawling black lines all over me. The currentshadows had changed since Ryzek tried to use me to torture Akos in the cell block beneath the amphitheater. They drifted on top of my skin now, instead of burrowing beneath it like dark veins. But they were still painful, and I could tell this episode had been worse—my vision was blurry, and there were impressions of fingernails in my palms.

Akos was kneeling in my brother’s blood, his fingers on the side of Ryzek’s throat. I watched as his hand fell away, and he slumped, bracing himself on his thighs.

“It’s done,” Akos said, sounding thick, like his throat was coated in milk. “After everything Cyra did to help me—after everything—”

“I won’t apologize,” Isae said, finally looking away from Ryzek. She scanned all our faces—Akos, surrounded by blood; Teka, wide-eyed at my shoulder; me, arms streaked black; Cisi, holding her stomach near the wall. The air was pungent with the smell of sick.

“He murdered my sister,” Isae said. “He was a tyrant and a torturer and a killer. I won’t apologize.”

“It’s not about him. You think I didn’t want him dead?” Akos lurched to his feet. Blood ran down the front of his pants, from knees to ankles. “Of course I did! He took more from me than he did from you!” He was so close to her I wondered if he would lash out, but he made a fitful motion with his hands, and that was all. “I wanted him to fix what he did first, I wanted him to set Eijeh right, I …”

It seemed to hit him all at once. Ryzek was—had been—my brother, but the grief was his. He had persevered, carefully orchestrated every element of his brother’s rescue, only to find himself blocked, again and again, by people more powerful than he was. And now, he had succeeded in getting his brother out of Shotet, but he had not saved him, and all the planning, all the fighting, all the trying … was for nothing.

Akos fell against the nearest wall to hold himself up, closed his eyes, and swallowed a moan.

I found my way out of my trance.

“Go upstairs,” I said to Isae. “Take Cisi with you.”

She looked like she might object, for a moment, but it didn’t last. Instead, she dropped the murder weapon—a simple kitchen knife—right where she stood, and went to Cisi’s side.

“Teka,” I said. “Would you get Akos upstairs, please?”

“Are you—” Teka started, and stopped. “Okay.”

Isae and Cisi, Teka and Akos, they left me there, alone, with my brother’s body. He had died next to a mop and a bottle of disinfectant. How convenient, I thought, and stifled a laugh. Or tried to. But it wouldn’t stay stifled. In moments my knees were weak with laughter, and I fumbled through my hair for the side of my head that was now silverskin, to remind myself how he had sliced and diced me for the entertainment of a crowd, how he had planted pieces of himself inside me, as if I was just a barren field to sow with pain. My entire body carried the scars Ryzek Noavek had given me.

And now, at last, I was free of him.

When I calmed, I set about cleaning up Isae Benesit’s mess.

Ryzek’s body didn’t frighten me, and neither did blood. I dragged him by his legs into the hallway, sweat tickling the back of my neck as I heaved and pulled. He was heavy, in death, as I was sure he had been in life, skeletal though he was. When Akos’s oracle mother, Sifa, appeared to help me, I didn’t say anything to her, just watched as she worked a sheet beneath him so we could wrap him in it. She produced a needle and thread from the storage room, and helped me stitch the makeshift burial sack closed.

Shotet funerals, when they took place on land, involved fire, like most cultures in our varied solar system. But it was a special honor to die in space, on the sojourn. We covered the bodies, all but the head, so the loved ones of whoever was lost could see and accept the person’s death. When Sifa pulled the sheet back, away from Ryzek’s face, I knew she had at least studied our customs.

“I see so many possibilities for how things will unfold,” Sifa said finally, dragging her arm across her forehead to catch some of the sweat. “I didn’t think this one was likely, or I might have warned you.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” I said, lifting a shoulder. “You only intervene when it suits your purposes. My comfort and ease don’t matter to you.”

“Cyra …”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I hated him. Just … don’t pretend that you care about me.”

“I am not pretending,” she replied.

I had thought, surely, that I might see some of Akos in her. And in her mannerisms, yes, perhaps he was there. Mobile eyebrows and quick, decisive hands. But her face, her light brown skin, her modest stature, they were not his.

I didn’t know how to evaluate her honesty, so I didn’t bother.

“Help me carry him to the trash chute,” I said.

I took the heavy side of his body, his head and shoulders, and she took his feet. It was lucky that the trash chute was only a few feet away, another unexpected convenience. We took it in stages, a few steps at a time. Ryzek’s head lolled around, his eyes open but sightless, but there was nothing I could do about it. I set him down next to the chute, and pressed the button to open the first set of doors, at waist height. It was fortunate that he was so narrow, or his shoulders wouldn’t have fit. Together Sifa and I folded him into the short channel, bending his legs so the inner doors would be able to close. Once they had, I pressed the button again, to open the outer doors and slide the tray in the chute forward to launch his body into space.

“I know the prayer, if you want me to say it,” Sifa said.

I shook my head.

“They said that prayer at my mother’s funeral,” I said. “No.”

“Then let us just acknowledge that he has suffered his fate,” Sifa said. “To fall to the family Benesit. He no longer needs to fear it.”

It was kind enough.

“I’m going to clean myself up,” I said. The blood on my palms was beginning to dry, making them itch.

“Before you do,” Sifa said, “I will warn you of this. Ryzek was not the only person the chancellor blamed for her sister’s death. In fact, she likely began with him because she was saving the more important piece of retribution for later. And she won’t stop there, either. I have seen enough of her to know her nature, and it is not forgiving.”

I blinked at her for a moment before it made sense to me. She was talking about Eijeh, still locked away in the other storage room. And not just Eijeh, but the rest of us—complicit, Isae believed, in Orieve’s death.

“There is an escape pod,” Sifa said. “We can put her in it, and someone from the Assembly will fetch her.”

“Tell Akos to drug her,” I said. “I don’t feel up to a fight right now.”







(#ulink_2e23308a-c227-5118-bbf6-74903e0daab8)


AKOS WADED THROUGH THE cutlery that was all over the galley floor. The water was already heating, and the vial of sedative was ready to dump into the tea, he just had to get some dried herbs into the strainer. The ship bumped along, and he stepped on a fork, flattening the tines with his heel.

He cursed his stupid head, which couldn’t stop telling him that there was still hope for Eijeh. There are so many people across the galaxy, with so many gifts. Somebody will know how to put him right. Truth was, Akos was tired of hanging on to hope. He’d been clawing at it since he first got to Shotet, and now he was ready to let go and just let fate take him where it wanted him to go. To death, and Noaveks, and Shotet.

All he’d promised his dad was that he would get Eijeh home. Maybe here—floating in space—was the best he could do. Maybe that would just have to be enough.

But—

“Shut up,” he said to himself, and he dumped the herbs from the galley cabinet into a strainer. There weren’t any iceflowers, but he’d learned enough about Shotet plants to make a simple calming blend. At this point, though, there was no artistry in it. He was just going through the motions, folding bits of garok root into powdered fenzu shell and squeezing a little nectar on top of it all, for taste. He didn’t even know what to call the plants that made up the nectar—he’d taken to calling the little fragile flowers “mushflowers” while he was at the army training camp outside Voa, because of how easily they fell apart, but he’d never learned the right name for them. They tasted sweet, and that seemed to be their only use.

When the water was hot, he poured it through the strainer. The extract it left behind was a murky brown, perfect for hiding the yellow of the sedative. His mom had told him to drug Isae and he hadn’t even asked why. He didn’t care, as long as it got her out of his sight. He couldn’t quite escape the image of her standing there watching Ryzek Noavek gush blood like it was some kind of show. Isae Benesit may have worn Ori’s face, but she wasn’t anything like her. He couldn’t imagine Ori just standing there and watching someone die, no matter how much she hated them.

Once the extract was brewed and mixed with the drug, he brought it to Cisi, who was sitting alone on the bench just outside the galley.

“You waiting for me?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mom told me to.”

“Good,” he said. “Will you take this to Isae? It’s just to calm her down.”

Cisi raised an eyebrow at him.

“Don’t drink any of it yourself,” he added.

She reached for it, but instead of taking the mug, she put her hand on his wrist. The look in her eyes changed—sharpened—like it always did when his currentgift dampened her own.

“What’s left of Eijeh?” she asked.

Akos’s whole body clenched up. He didn’t want to think about what was left of Eijeh.

“Someone who served Ryzek Noavek,” he said, with venom. “Who hated me, and Dad, and probably you and Mom, too.”

“How is that possible?” She frowned. “He can’t hate us just because someone put different memories into his head.”

“You think I know?” Akos all but growled.

“Then, maybe—”

“He held me down while someone tortured me.” Akos shoved the mug into her hands.

Some of the hot tea spilled on both their hands. Cisi jerked away, wiping her knuckles on her pants.

“Did I burn you?” he said, nodding to her hand.

“No,” she said. The softness her currentgift brought to her expression was back. Akos didn’t want tenderness of any kind, so he turned away.

“This won’t hurt her, will it?” Cisi said, tapping a fingernail on the mug so he would hear the ting ting ting.

“No,” he said. “It’s to keep from having to hurt her.”

“Then I’ll give it to her,” Cisi said.

Akos grunted a little. There was some more sedative in his pack, maybe he ought to take it. He’d never been so worn, like a half-finished weaving, light showing between all the threads. It would be easier just to sleep.

Instead of drugging himself to oblivion, though, he just took a dried hushflower petal from his pocket and stuck it between his cheek and his teeth. It wouldn’t knock him out, but it would dull him some. Better than nothing.

Akos was coasting on hushflower an hour later when Cisi came back.

“It’s done,” she said. “She’s out.”

“All right,” he said. “Then let’s get her into the escape pod.”

“I’m going with her,” Cisi said. “If Mom’s right, and we’re headed into war—”

“Mom’s right.”

“Yeah,” Cisi said. “Well, in that case, whoever’s against Isae is against Thuvhe. So I’m going to stick with my chancellor.”

Akos nodded.

“I take it you won’t be,” Cisi said.

“Fated traitor, remember?” he said.

“Akos.” She crouched in front of him. At some point he had sat down on the bench, which was hard and cold and smelled like disinfectant. Cisi rested an arm on his knee. She had tied her hair back, messy, and a chunk of curls had come loose, falling around her face. She was pretty, his sister, her face a shade of cool brown that reminded him of Trellan pottery. A lot like Cyra’s, and Eijeh’s, and Jorek’s. Familiar.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, just because Mom raised us fate-faithful and obedient to the oracles and all that,” Cisi said. “You’re a Thuvhesit. You should come with me. Leave everyone else to their war, and we’ll go home and wait it out. No one needs us here.”

He’d thought about it. He was as torn now as he’d ever been, and not just because of his fate. When he came out of the daze of the hushflower, he would remember how nice it felt to laugh with Cyra earlier that day, and how warm she was, pressed up against him. And he would remember that as much as he wanted to just be in his house again, walk up the creaky stairs and stoke the burnstones in the courtyard and send flour up into the air as he kneaded the bread, he had to live in the real world. In the real world, Eijeh was broken, Akos spoke Shotet, and his fate was still his fate.

“Suffer the fate,” he said. “For all else is delusion.”

Cisi sighed. “Thought you might say that. Sometimes delusion’s nice, though.”

“Stay safe, okay?” he said, taking her hand. “I hope you know I don’t want to leave you again. It’s pretty much the last thing I want.”

“I know.” She squeezed his thumb. “I still have faith, you know. That one day you’ll come home, and Eijeh will be better, and Mom will stop with the oracle bullshit, and we can cobble together something again.”

“Yeah.” He tried to smile for her. He might have halfway accomplished it.

She helped him get Isae settled in the escape pod, and Teka told her how to send out a distress signal so the pod would be picked up by Assembly “goons,” as Teka called them. Then Cisi kissed their mom good-bye, and wrapped her arms tight around Akos’s middle until her warmth was pushed all the way through him.

“You’re so damn tall,” she said, softly, as she pulled away. “Who told you that you could be so much taller than me?”

“I did it just to spite you,” he replied with a grin.

Then she got in the pod, and closed the doors. And he didn’t know when he would ever see her again.

Teka tripped up to the captain’s chair on the nav deck and pried the cover of the control panel off with a wedge tool she kept on her belt. She did it while whistling.

“What are you doing?” Cyra asked. “Now’s not really the time to take apart our ship.”

“First, this is my ship, not ‘ours,’” Teka said with a roll of her blue eye. “I designed most of the features that have kept us alive so far. Second, do you really still want to go to Assembly Headquarters?”

“No.” Cyra sat in the first officer’s chair, to Teka’s right. “The last time I went there, I overheard the representative from Trella call my mother a piece of filth. She didn’t think I could understand her, even though she was speaking Othyrian.”

“Figures.” Teka made a scoffing sound in the back of her throat as she pulled out a handful of wires from the control panel, then ran her fingers down them like she was petting an animal. She reached under the wires, to a part of the control panel Akos couldn’t see, so far her entire arm disappeared. A projection of coordinates flashed up ahead, glowing right across the currentstream in their sights. The ship’s nose—Akos was sure there was a technical name for it, but he didn’t know it, so he called it a “nose”—drifted so they were moving toward the currentstream instead of away.

“You going to tell us where we’re headed?” Akos said, stepping up to the nav deck. The control panel was lit up in all different colors, with levers and buttons and switches everywhere. If Teka had spread her arms wide, she still wouldn’t have been able to reach all of them from where she sat.

“I guess I can, since we’re all stuck in this together now,” Teka said. She gathered her bright hair on top of her head, and tied it with a thick band she wore around her wrist. Swimming in a technician’s coveralls, with her legs folded up beneath her on the captain’s chair, she looked like a kid playing pretend. “We’re going to the exile colony. Which is on Ogra.”

Ogra. The “shadow planet,” people called it. It was rare to meet an Ogran, let alone fly a ship in sight of Ogra. It was as far from Thuvhe as any planet could be without leaving the safe band of currentstream that encircled the solar system. No amount of surveillance could poke through its dense, dark atmosphere, and it was a wonder they could get any signal from the news feed. They never fed any stories into it, either, so almost no one had ever seen the planet’s surface, even in images.

Cyra’s eyes, of course, lit up at the information. “Ogra? But how do you communicate with them?”

“The easiest way to transmit messages without the government listening in is through people,” Teka said. “That’s why my mom was on board the sojourn ship—to represent the exiles’ interests among the renegades. We were trying to work together. Anyway, the exile colony is a good place for us to regroup, figure out what’s going on back in Voa.”

“I have a guess,” Akos said, crossing his arms. “Chaos.”

“And then more chaos,” Teka said with a sage nod. “With a short break in between. For chaos, of course.”

He couldn’t imagine what Voa looked like now that—the Shotet believed—Ryzek Noavek had been assassinated by his younger sister right in front of them. That was how it had looked, anyway, when Cyra appeared to cut her brother in the arena, waiting for the sleeping elixir she had arranged for him to drink that morning to kick in and knock him flat. The standing army might have taken over, under the leadership of Vakrez Noavek, Ryzek’s older cousin, or those who lived on the outer edges of the city might have taken to the streets to fill the power vacuum. Either way, Akos imagined streets full of broken glass and blood spatter and ripped paper floating in the wind.

Cyra tipped her forehead into her hands. “And Lazmet,” she said.

Teka’s eyebrows popped up. “What?”

“Before Ryzek died …” Cyra gestured vaguely toward the other end of the ship, where Ryzek had met his end. “He told me my father is still alive.”

Cyra didn’t talk about Lazmet much, so all Akos knew was from history class, as a kid, and rumor, not that Thuvhesit rumors about the Shotet had proved to be all that accurate. The Noaveks hadn’t been in power in Shotet before the oracles spoke the fates of the family Noavek for the first time, just two generations ago. When Lazmet’s mother came of age, she had taken the throne by force, using her fate as justification for the coup. And later, when she had been sitting on the throne for at least ten seasons, she had killed off all her siblings so her own children would be guaranteed power. That was the kind of family Lazmet had come from, and he had been, by all accounts, every izit as brutal as his mother.

“Oh, honestly.” Teka groaned. “Is it some kind of rule of the universe that at least one Noavek asshole has to be alive at any given time, or what?”

Cyra swiveled to face her. “What am I, then? Not alive?”

“Not an asshole,” Teka replied. “Bicker with me much more and I’ll change my mind.”

Cyra looked faintly pleased. She wasn’t used to people not considering her just another Noavek, Akos assumed.

“Whatever the rules of the universe pertaining to Noaveks,” she said, “I don’t know how Lazmet is still alive, just that Ryzek didn’t appear to be lying when he told me. He wasn’t trying to get anything in return, he was just … warning me, maybe.”

Teka snorted. “Because, what, Ryzek loves doing favors?”

“Because he was scared of your dad,” Akos said. When Cyra did talk about Ryzek, she always talked about how afraid he was. What could scare a man like Ryzek more than the man who had made him the way he was? “Right? He’s more terrified than anyone. Or he was, anyway.”

Cyra nodded.

“If Lazmet is alive …” Her eyes fluttered closed. “That needs to be corrected. As soon as possible.”

That needs to be corrected. Like a math problem or a technical error. Akos didn’t know how you could talk about your own dad that way. It rattled him more than it would have if Cyra had seemed scared. She couldn’t even talk about him like he was a person. What had she seen him do, to make her talk about him that way?

“One problem at a time,” Teka said, a little more gently than usual.

Akos cleared his throat. “Yeah, first let’s survive getting through Ogra’s atmosphere. Then we can assassinate the most powerful man in Shotet history.”

Cyra opened her eyes, and laughed.

“Settle in for a long ride,” Teka says. “We’re bound for Ogra.”







(#ulink_024a1fa0-a519-5b83-893a-5e533b242f01)


THE ESCAPE POD IS only just big enough for the two of us pressed together. As it is, my shoulder is still jammed up against the glass wall. I fumble on the little control panel for the switch that activates the distress signal. It’s lit up pink, and it’s one of only three switches in front of me, so it’s not hard to find. I flip it up and hear a high-pitched whistling, which means the signal is transmitting, Teka said. Now all that’s left to do is wait for Isae to wake up, and try not to panic.

Being on a little transport vessel like the one we just left is nerve-wracking enough for a Hessa girl who’s only left the planet a couple times, but the escape pod is another thing. It’s more window than floor, the clear glass curving up over my head and all the way down to my toes. I don’t feel like I’m looking out at space so much as getting swallowed by it. I can’t think about it or I’ll panic.

I hope Isae wakes up soon.

She’s limp on the bench seat next to me, and her body is framed by a blackness so complete, she really does look like the only thing in the entire universe. I’ve known her only a couple years, since Ori disappeared to take care of her after her face got cut with a Shotet knife. She grew up far away from Thuvhe, on a transporter ship that took goods from one end of the galaxy to the other, whatever they could haul.

It was a good thing Ori had been around to force us to talk to each other, in the beginning. I might never have talked to her otherwise. She was intimidating even without the title, tall and slim and beautiful, scars or no scars, and radiating capability like a machine.

I don’t know how long it takes for her eyes to open. She drifts for a while, staring all bleary at what’s in front of us, which is flat nothing in between the far-off wink of stars. Then she blinks at me.

“Cee?” she says. “Where are we?”

“We’re in an escape pod, waiting for the Assembly to come get us,” I say.

“An escape pod?” She frowns. “What did we need to escape from?”

“I think it’s more that they wanted to escape from us,” I say.

“Did you drug me?” She rubs her eyes with a fist, first the left one and then the right. “You gave me that tea.”

“I didn’t know there was anything in it.” I’m a good liar, and I don’t think twice. She wouldn’t accept the truth—that I wanted to get her away from the rest of my family just as much as Akos did. Mom said Isae was going to try to kill Eijeh the same way she did Ryzek, and I wasn’t willing to risk it. I don’t want to lose Eijeh again, no matter how warped he is now. “Mom warned them you might try to hurt Eijeh, too.”

Isae curses. “Oracles! It’s a wonder we even let them have citizenship, with all the loyalty your mother shows her own chancellor.”

I have nothing to say to that. She’s frustrating, but she’s my mother.

I continue, “They put you in the pod, and I told them I was going with you.”

The scars that cross her face stay stiff while her brow furrows. She rubs them, sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking. She says it helps the scar tissue to stretch out, so one day she’ll be able to move those parts of her face again. That’s what the doctor said, anyway. I once asked her why she just let the scars form instead of getting reconstructive surgery on Othyr. It’s not like she didn’t have the resources. She told me she didn’t want to get rid of them, that she liked them.

“Why?” she finally says after a long pause. “They’re your family. Eijeh’s your brother. Why would you come with me?”

Giving an honest answer isn’t as easy as people say. There are so many answers to her question, all of them true. She’s my chancellor, and I’m not going to oppose Thuvhe, like my brother is. I care about her, as a friend, as … whatever else we are to each other. I’m worried about the wild grief I saw in her right before she killed Ryzek Noavek, and she needs help to do what’s right from now on rather than what satisfies her thirst for revenge. The list goes on, and the answer I choose is as much about what I want her to hear as it is about the truth.

“You asked me if you could trust me,” I finally say. “Well, you can. I’m with you, no matter what. Okay?”

“I thought, after what you saw me do …” I think of the knife she used to kill Ryzek dropping to the floor, and push the memory away. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.”

What she did to Ryzek didn’t disgust me, it worried me. I don’t care that he’s dead, but I do care that she was able to kill him. I don’t try to explain that to her, though.

“He killed Ori,” I say.

“So did your brother,” she whispers. “It was both of them, Cisi. There’s something wrong with Eijeh. I saw it in Ryzek’s head, right before—”

She chokes before she can finish her sentence.

“I know.” I grab her hand and hold on tight. “I know.”

She starts to cry. At first it’s dignified, but then the beast of grief takes over, and she claws at my arms to get away from it, sobbing. But I know, I know as well as anybody that there’s no escape. Grief is absolute.

“I got you,” I say, rubbing circles on her back. “I got you.”

She stops scratching after a while, stops sobbing. Just leans her face into my shoulder.

“What did you do?” she asks, voice muffled by my shirt. “After your dad died, after your brothers …”

“I … I just did things, for a long time. I ate, showered, worked, studied. But I wasn’t really there, or at least, I didn’t feel like I was. But … it was like when feeling comes back to a limb that’s gone numb. It comes back in little prickles, little pieces at a time.”

She lifts her head to look at me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was about to do. I’m sorry I asked you to come see … that,” she says. “I needed a witness, just in case it went wrong, and you were the only one I trusted.”

I sigh, and push her hair behind her ears. “I know.”

“Would you have stopped me, if you knew?”

I purse my lips. The real answer is that I don’t know, but that’s not the one I want to give her, not the one that will make her trust me. And she has to trust me, if I’m going to do any good in the war that’s coming.

“No,” I say. “I know you only do what you have to.”

It was true. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about how simple it had been to her, and the distant look in her eyes as she led me to that storage room, and the perfect hesitation she had shown Ryzek as she waited for just the right moment to stab him.

“They’re not going to take our planet,” she says to me, in a dark whisper. “I won’t let them.”

“Good,” I say.

She takes my hand. We’ve held hands before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still send a thrill through me when her skin slides over mine. She is still so capable. Smooth and strong. I want to kiss her, but this isn’t the time, not when there’s still Ryzek’s blood drying under her fingernails.

So I just let the touch of her hand be enough, and we stare out together at nothingness.







(#ulink_cadc027c-f31f-55d8-a2f6-557b96c7692a)


AKOS FUMBLED WITH THE chain around his neck. The ring of Jorek and Ara’s family was a now-familiar weight right in the hollow of his throat. When he wore armor it made an imprint in his skin, like a brand. As if the mark on his arm wasn’t enough to remind him of what he had done to Suzao Kuzar, Jorek’s father and Ara’s violent husband.

He wasn’t sure why he thought of killing Suzao in the arena now, standing outside his brother’s cell. It was time to decide if Eijeh ought to stay drugged—for how long? Until they got to Ogra? After that?—or if, now that Ryzek was dead, it was safe to risk Eijeh wandering around the ship clearheaded. Cyra and Teka had left the decision up to him and his mom.

His mom was right next to him, her head reaching just a few izits higher than his shoulder. Hair loose and messy around her shoulders, curled into knots. Sifa hadn’t been much of anywhere since Ryzek died, holing up in the belly of the ship to whisper the future to herself, barefoot, pacing. Cyra and Teka had been alarmed, but he told them that’s just how oracles were. Or at least, that was how his mother the oracle was. Sometimes sharp as a knife, sometimes half outside her own body, her own time.

“Eijeh’s not how you remember him,” he said to her. It was a useless warning. She knew it already, for one thing, and for another, she had probably seen him just the way he was now, and a hundred other ways besides.

Still, “I know” was all she said.

Akos tapped the door with his knuckles, then unlocked it with the key Teka had given him and walked in.

Eijeh sat cross-legged on the thin mattress they had thrown into the corner of the cell, an empty tray next to him with the dregs of soup left in a bowl on top of it. When he saw them he scrambled to his feet, hands held out like he might put them in fists and start pummeling. He was wan and red-eyed and shaky.

“What happened?” he said, eyes skirting Akos’s. “W—I felt something. What happened?”

“Ryzek was killed,” Akos replied. “You felt that?”

“Did you do it?” Eijeh asked with a sneer. “Wouldn’t be surprised. You killed Suzao. You killed Kalmev.”

“And Vas,” Akos said. “You’ve got Vas somewhere in that memory stew, don’t you?”

“He was a friend,” Eijeh said.

“He was the man who killed our father,” Akos spat.

Eijeh squinted, and said nothing.

“What about me?” Sifa said, voice flat. “Do you remember me, Eijeh?”

He looked at her like he had only just noticed she was there. “You’re Sifa.” He frowned. “You’re Mom. I don’t—there’s gaps.”

He stepped toward her and said, “Did I love you?”

Akos had never seen Sifa look hurt before, not even when they were younger and told her they hated her because she wouldn’t let them go out with friends, or scolded them for bad scores on tests. He knew she got hurt, because she was a person as well as an oracle, and all people got hurt sometimes. But he wasn’t quite ready for how the look pierced him, when it came, the furrowed brow and downturned mouth.

Did I love you? Akos knew, hearing those words, that he had definitely failed. He hadn’t gotten Eijeh out of Shotet, as he had promised his father before he died. This wasn’t really Eijeh, and what might have restored him was gone, now that Ryzek was dead.

Eijeh was gone. Akos’s throat got tight.

“Only you can know,” Sifa said. “Do you love me now?”

Eijeh twitched, made an aborted hand gesture. “I—maybe.”

“Maybe.” Sifa nodded. “Okay.”

“You knew, didn’t you. That I was the next oracle,” he said. “You knew I would be kidnapped. You didn’t warn me. You didn’t get me ready.”

“There are reasons for that,” she said. “I doubt you would find any of them comforting.”

“Comfort.” Eijeh snorted. “I have no need for comfort.”

He sounded like Ryzek then—that Shotet diction, put into Thuvhesit.

“But you do,” Sifa said. “Everybody does.”

Another snort, but no answer.

“Come here to drug me again, did you?” He nodded to Akos. “That’s what you’re good for, right? You’re a poison-maker. And Cyra’s whore.”

Then Akos’s hands were in fists in Eijeh’s worn shirt, lifting him up, so his toes were just brushing the floor. He was heavy, but not too heavy for Akos, with the energy that burned inside him, energy that had nothing to do with the current.

Akos slammed him into the wall and growled, “Shut. Your. Mouth.”

“Stop, both of you,” Sifa said, her hand on Akos’s shoulder. “Put him down. Now. If you can’t stay calm, you’ll have to leave.”

Akos dropped Eijeh and stepped back. His ears were ringing. He hadn’t meant to do that. Eijeh slid to the floor, and ran his hands over his buzzed head.

“I am not sure what Ryzek Noavek dumping his memories into your skull has to do with being so cruel to your brother,” Sifa said to Eijeh. “Unless it’s just the only way you know how to be, now. But I suggest you learn another way, and quickly, or I will devise a very creative punishment for you, as your mother and your superior, the sitting oracle. Understand?”

Eijeh looked her over for a few ticks, then his chin shifted, up and down, just a little.

“We are going to land in a few days,” Sifa said. “We will keep you locked in here until our descent, at which point we will ensure you are safely strapped in with the rest of us. When we land, you will be my charge. You will do as I say. If you don’t, I will have Akos drug you again. Our situation is too tenuous to risk you wreaking havoc.” She turned to Akos. “How does that plan sound to you?”

“Fine,” he said, teeth gritted.

“Good.” She forced a smile that was completely without feeling. “Would you like anything to read while you’re in here, Eijeh? Something to pass the time?”

“Okay,” Eijeh said with a half shrug.

“I’ll see what I can find.”

She stepped toward him, making Akos tense up in case she needed his help. But Eijeh didn’t stir as she picked up his empty tray, and he didn’t look up at either of them when they left the room. Akos locked it behind him, and checked the handle twice to make sure the lock held. He was breathing fast. That was the Eijeh he remembered from Shotet, the one who walked around with Vas Kuzar like they were born friends instead of born enemies, and the one who held him down while Vas forced Cyra to torture him.

His eyes burned. He shut them.

“Had you seen him that way?” he said. “In visions, I mean.”

“Yes,” Sifa said, quiet.

“Did it help? To know it was coming?”

“It’s not as straightforward as you think,” she said. “I see so many paths, so many versions of people … I’m always surprised to discover which future has come to pass. I am still not sure which Akos I am speaking to, for example. There are many that you could be.”

She lapsed into quiet, and sighed.

“No,” she said, finally. “It didn’t help.”

“I—” He gulped, and opened his eyes, not looking at his mother, but at the wall opposite him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I—I failed him.”

“Akos—” She gripped his shoulder, and he let himself feel the warmth and the strength of her hand for a tick.

The cell that had held Ryzek was scrubbed clean, like nothing had ever happened. In some secret part of himself, he wished Eijeh had died, too. It would be easier than this, the constant reminder of how he’d messed it all up, and couldn’t fix it.

“There’s nothing you—”

“Don’t,” he said, more harshly than he meant to. “He’s gone. And now there’s nothing left to do but—bear it.”

He turned, and left her standing there, caught between two sons who weren’t quite the same as they used to be.

They took turns sitting on the nav deck to make sure the ship didn’t steer straight into an asteroid or another spaceship or some other piece of debris. Sifa had the first shift, since Teka was exhausted from reprogramming the ship in the first place, and Cyra had spent the last several hours mopping up her own brother’s blood. Akos cleared the floor of the galley and rolled out a blanket in the corner, near the medical supplies.

Cyra came to join him, her face scrubbed shiny and her hair in a braid over one shoulder. She lay shoulder to shoulder with him, and for a time neither of them said anything at all, just breathed in time together. It reminded him of being in her quarters on the sojourn ship, how he could always hear when she was up because the tossing and turning stopped and all he could hear were her breaths.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Cyra said.

He turned to face her, propping himself up on one elbow. She had trimmed the hair neatly around the silverskin. He’d gotten used to it now, shining on one side of her head like a mirror. It suited her, really, even if he hated what had happened to her.

Her jaw was set. She started on the straps of the armor that covered her arm, working them back and forth until they were loose. When she shucked it, there was a new cut on her arm, right near her elbow, with a hash through it. He touched it, lightly, with a fingertip.

“You didn’t kill him,” he said to her.

“I know,” she said. “But the chancellor isn’t going to take note of him, and …” She sighed. “I guess I could have gotten some revenge from beyond death, if I had let him go unmarked. Dishonored him by pretending he never existed.”

“But you couldn’t do that,” Akos supplied.

“I couldn’t,” Cyra agreed. “He’s still my brother. His life is still … notable.”

“And you’re upset that you couldn’t punish him.”

“Sort of.”

“Well, if my opinion counts for anything, I don’t think you need to regret showing some mercy,” he said. “I’m just sorry you went to all the trouble of sparing him for me, and then … it didn’t even matter.”

With a heavy sigh, he slumped to the ground again. Just another way that he’d failed.

She laid a hand on him, right over his sternum, right over his heart, with the scarred arm that said so much and so little about her at once.

“I’m not,” she said. “Sorry, I mean.”

“Well.” He covered her hand with one of his own. “I’m not sorry you’ve got Ryzek’s loss marked on your arm, even though I hated him.”

The corners of her mouth twitched up. He was surprised to find that she had chipped off a little piece of his guilt, and he wondered if he’d done the same for her, in his way. They were both people who carried every scrap of everything around, but maybe they could help each other set things down, piece by piece.

It was good he felt this way, he thought. With Eijeh gone, all that he had left to do was meet his fate, and Cyra and his fate were inextricable. He would die for the family Noavek, and she was the last of them. She was a happy inevitability, brilliant and unavoidable.

Acting on impulse, Akos turned and kissed her. She stuck her fingers in one of his belt loops and pulled him tight against her, the way they had been earlier, when they were interrupted. But the door was closed, now, and Teka was fast asleep in some other part of the ship.

They were alone. Finally.

The chemical-floral smell of the ship was replaced with the smell of her, of the herbal shampoo she’d last used in the ship’s shower, and sweat and sendes leaf. He ran potion-stained fingertips down the side of her throat and across the faint curve of her collarbone.

She pushed him over, so she was straddling him, and pinned his hips down for a tick, just to tug his shirt out from under his waistband. Her hands were so warm against him he could hardly breathe. They found the soft give of flesh around his middle, the taut muscle wrapped around his ribs. She undid buttons all the way up to his throat.

He’d thought of this when he helped her take her clothes off before that bath in the renegade safehouse, how it might be to take off their clothes when they weren’t injured and fighting for their lives. He’d imagined something frantic, but she was taking her time, running her fingers over the bumps of his ribs, the tendons on the inside of his wrists as she freed the buttons on his cuffs, the bones that stuck out of his shoulders.

When he tried to touch her back, she pressed him away. That wasn’t how she wanted it just then, it seemed like, and he was happy to give her what she wanted. She was the girl who couldn’t touch people, after all. It sparked something inside him to know that he was the only one she’d done this with—not excitement, but something softer. Tender.

She was his only—and fate said she would be his last.

She pulled back to look at him, and he tugged at the hem of her shirt.

“May I?” he said. She nodded.

He felt suddenly tentative as he started undoing her shirt buttons, from throat to waist. He sat up just enough to kiss the skin he revealed, izit by izit. Soft skin, for someone so strong, soft over hard muscle and bone and steely nerve.

He tipped them over, so he was leaning over her, leaving just enough space between them to feel her warmth without touching her. He stripped his shirt from his shoulders, and kissed her stomach again. He’d run out of shirt to unbutton.

He touched his nose to the inside of her hip and looked up at her.

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes,” she said roughly.

His hands closed over her waistband, and he ran parted lips over the skin he exposed, izit by izit.







(#ulink_1a35b3fe-ab76-55d3-b60f-2038062a3177)


THE ASSEMBLY SHIP IS the size of a small planet, wide and round as a floater but so much bigger it’s downright alarming. It fills the windows of the little patrol ship that picked up our escape pod, made of glass and smooth, pale metal.

“You’ve never seen it before?” Isae asks me.

“Only images,” I say.

Its clear glass panels reflect the currentstream where it burns pink, and emptiness where it doesn’t. Little red lights along the ship’s borders blink on and off like inhales and exhales. Its movements around the sun are so slight it looks still.

“It’s different in images,” I say. “Much less impressive.”

“I spent three seasons here as a child.” Isae’s knuckles skim the glass. “Learning how to be proper. I had that brim accent—they didn’t like that.”

I smile. “You still do, sometimes, when you forget to care. I like it.”

“You like it because the brim accent is so much like your Hessan one.” She pokes her fingertip into my dimple, and I smack it away.

“Come on,” she says. “Time to dock.”

The ship’s captain, a squat little man with sweat dotting his forehead, noses his little ship toward the massive Assembly one—to secure entrance B, I’d heard him say. The letter was painted above the doors, reflective. Two metal panels pull apart under the B, and an enclosed walkway reaches for our ship’s hatch. Hatch and walkway lock together with a hiss. Another crew member seals the connection with the pull of a lever.

We all stand by the hatch doors as they open, making way for Isae to stand at the fore. It’s a skeleton patrol crew that picked us up, meant to cruise around the middle band of the solar system in case someone’s in trouble—or making it. There’s just a captain, a first officer, and two others on board with us, and they don’t talk much. Likely because their Othyrian isn’t strong—they sound like Trellans to me when they do speak.

I skip ahead into the bright tunnel beyond the hatch doors to catch up to Isae. The glass walls are so clean. I feel like I’m floating in nothingness for a tick, but the floor holds firm.

I just make it to Isae’s side when a group of official-looking people in pale gray uniforms greets us. At their sides are nonlethal channeling rods, designed to stun, not kill. The sight is reassuring. This is how things should be—controlled but not dangerous.

The one in front, with a row of medals on his chest, bows to Isae.

“Hello, Chancellor,” he says in crisp Othyrian. “I am Captain Morel. The Assembly Leader has been informed of your arrival, and your quarters have been prepared, as well as those of your … guest.”

Isae smooths her sweater down like that’s going to get the folds out of it.

“Thank you, Captain Morel,” she says, all traces of brim accent gone. “May I introduce Cisi Kereseth, a family friend from the nation-planet of Thuvhe.”

“A pleasure,” Captain Morel says to me.

I let my gift unfold right away. It’s just instinct, at this point. Most people react well when I think of my currentgift as a blanket falling over their shoulders, and Captain Morel is no exception—he relaxes right in front of me, and his smile softens, like he actually means it. I think it works on Isae, too, for the first time in days. She looks a little softer around the eyes.

“Captain Morel,” I say. “Thank you for the welcome.”

“Allow me to escort you to your quarters,” he says. “Thank you for delivering Chancellor Benesit safely here, sir,” he adds to the captain who brought us here.

The man grunts a little, and nods at Isae and me as we turn to go.

Captain Morel’s shoes snap when he walks, and when he turns corners, they slide a little as the balls of his feet twist into the floor. If he’s here, it’s because he was born into a rich family on whatever his home planet is, but doesn’t have the disposition—or the stomach—for actual military service. He’s just right for tasks like these, which require manners and diplomacy and polish.

When the captain delivers me to my room—right next to Isae’s, for convenience—I sigh with relief. After the door shuts behind me, I let my jacket slide off my shoulders and fall to my feet.

The rooms have been set for us, clearly. That’s the only explanation for the field of feathergrass, twitching in the wind, on the far wall. It’s footage of Thuvhe. Right in front of it is a narrow bed with a thick brown blanket tucked around the mattress.

I put a hand on the touch panel near the door, flicking images and text forward until I find the one I want. Wall footage. I scroll until I find one of Hessa in the snow. The top of the hill sparkles red from the domed roof of the temple. I follow the bumps of house roofs all the way to the bottom of the hill, watching weather vanes spin as I do. All the buildings are hidden behind a white haze of snowflakes.

Sometimes I forget how beautiful my home is.

I see just the corner of the fields my dad farmed, and the image cuts off. Somewhere past them is the empty spot where we held Eijeh’s and Akos’s funerals. It wasn’t my idea—Mom was the one who stacked the wood and burnstones, who said the prayer and lit it up. I just stood close by in my kutyah coat, the face shield on so I could cry without anyone seeing.

I hadn’t thought of Eijeh and Akos as lost, truly lost, until then. If Mom was burning the pyres, I thought, that must mean she knew they were dead, in the way only an oracle could know things. But she hadn’t known nearly as much as I thought.

I fall to the bed and stare up at the snow.

Maybe it wasn’t smart to come here, to contend with a chancellor instead of following my own family. I don’t know much about politics or government—I’m Hessa-born, so far out of my realm of knowledge it’s almost funny. But I know Thuvhe. I know people.

And someone needs to look out for Isae before she loses herself in grief.

Isae’s wall just looks like a window to space. Stars all glinting, little pricks of light, and the bend and swell of the currentstream. It reminds me of a fight we had, early on, before I knew her better.

You know nothing about my planet and its people, I said to her then. It was after she had gone public as chancellor. She and Ori had shown up at my apartment at school, and she had been rude to me for being so familiar with her sister. And for some reason, my currentgift had let me be rude back. This is only your first season on its soil.

The broken look she gave me then is a lot like the one she’s giving me now, as I walk into her quarters—twice the size of the ones given to me, but that’s not surprising. She sits on the end of her bed in an undershirt and underwear that’s really just a pair of shorts clinging to her long, skinny legs. It’s more casual than I’ve ever seen her before, and more vulnerable, somehow, like letting me see her right after waking ripped her open somehow.

All my life I have loved this planet, more fervently than my family or my friends or even myself, she had replied back then. you have walked all your seasons on its skin, but I have buried myself deep in its guts, so don’t you dare tell me that I don’t know it.

The thing about Isae is, her outer shell is so thick I don’t always believe there’s something under it. She’s not like Cyra Noavek, who lets you see everything writhing just out of reach, or like Akos, whose emotions glitter in his eyes like precious metal caught in the bottom of a pan. Isae is just blank.

“My friend—the one I told you about—will be here soon,” she says, her voice rough. “He wasn’t far from here when I called.”

She’d commandeered the nav deck for a while when the patrol ship first picked us up, saying she needed to make a call to an old friend, one she grew up with. Ast was his name. She said she could use someone’s help, someone who wasn’t tied to the Assembly or Thuvhe or Shotet. Ast was “brim spawn,” as some people liked to call it, born out on some broken moon beyond the currentstream barrier.

“I’m glad,” I say.

I try one of my favorite feelings on her now, to calm her—water, which is odd, since I don’t know much about water, having grown up on an ice planet. But there was a hot spring in the basement of the temple in Hessa, to enhance the visions of the oracle, and Mom had taken me there once to learn to tread water. It was dark as a tomb down there, but the hot water had surrounded me, all soft, like silk, only heavier. I let that heavy silk fold around Isae now, watch that tension in her shoulders ebb away. I’m learning her, slowly, and it’s easier, now that we’re not on that little Shotet ship anymore.

“He was the mechanic’s son, on the ship where I was raised,” she says, rubbing her eyes with the back of a hand. Her trade vessel was always adrift, never staying anywhere for long. The perfect place for someone who needed to stay hidden. “He was there, too, during the attack. He lost his father. Some of his friends, too.”

“What does he do now? Still a mechanic?”

“Yeah,” she says. “He was just finishing up a job on a fueling station near here, though. Good timing.”

Maybe it’s the idea that she needs somebody else, even though I’m here, or maybe it’s just plain jealousy, but I don’t feel good about Ast. And I don’t know what he’ll make of me.

It’s like thinking about him summons him, because the door buzzes right then. When Isae opens it, there’s an Assembly-type standing right there, his eyes sliding down her bare legs. Behind him is a broad-shouldered man holding two big canvas bags. He puts the side of his hand against the Assembly man’s shoulder, and what looks like a flying beetle whizzes out of his sleeve.

“Pazha!” Isae exclaims as the beetle lands on her outstretched hand. It’s not a real bug—it’s made of metal, and emits a constant clicking. It’s a guide bot, meant to help the blind maneuver. Ast tilts his head toward it, following the sound, and drops his bags just inside the doorway. Isae, with the beetle perched on her knuckles, throws her arms around him.

Her currentgift is tied to memory—she can’t take a person’s memories, the way Ryzek could, but she can see their memories. Sometimes she sees them even when she doesn’t want to. So I understand when she tucks her nose into his shoulder, taking a sniff of him. She told me once that because smells are so tied to memory, they’re special to her; they turn the tide of memory she sees when she touches somebody into a little trickle. Controlled, for once.

It’s not until Ast blinks that I notice his eyes. His irises are ringed with pale green light, and his pupils are circled with white. They’re mechanical implants. They only move by shifting, incremental. I know they likely don’t show him much—enough to help him, maybe, but they’re just supplements, like the beetle Isae called Pazha.

“Nice new tech,” Isae says to him.

“Yeah, they’re the new fashion in Othyr,” he drawls in a brim lilt. “Everybody who’s anybody is cutting out their eyes with butter knives and replacing them with tech.”

“Always with the sarcasm,” Isae says. “Do they actually help?”

“Some. Depends on the light.” Ast shrugs. “Seems like a nice setup in here.” He flicks his fingers, sending Pazha away from Isae’s fist and into the room. It flies the perimeter of the room, whistling at each corner. “Big. Smells clean. Surprised you’re not wearing a crown, Chancellor.”

“Didn’t go with my outfit,” Isae says. “Come on, meet my friend Cisi.”

The beetle is whizzing toward me now, turning fast circles around my head, shoulders, stomach, legs. I try to hear the clicking like he does, how it reveals the shape and size of me to him, but my ears aren’t trained for it.

He’s dressed in so many layers I don’t know what piece of clothing is what. Does the hood belong to his jacket, or the sweatshirt under it? How many T-shirts is he wearing, two or three? There’s a screwdriver at his hip where a knife ought to be.

“Ast,” he says to me, in almost a grunt. He holds out his hand, waiting for me to step forward and take it, and I do.

“Cisi,” I say. His skin is warm, and he has a good grip, not too tight. By instinct I pick a currentgift feeling for him—waves of warmth, like ripples in the air.

Most of my textures work for people who aren’t in some kind of turmoil, at least a little, but the ones I like to use are the ones people don’t detect. But judging by his little frown, he knows something isn’t right.

“Whoa,” he says to me. “What’s that all about?”

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “My currentgift is hard for me to control.”

I always lie about that. Makes people less wary.

“Cisi is the daughter of the oracle of Thuvhe,” Isae says.

“Sitting oracle,” I correct automatically.

“There are different kinds?” Ast shrugs. “Didn’t know that. We don’t have oracles out there in the brim. Or fated nobility.”

“Fated families aren’t nobility on Thuvhe,” I say. “Just unlucky.”

“Unlucky.” Ast raises his eyebrows. “I take it your fate doesn’t meet with your approval?”

“No, it doesn’t,” I say softly.

He fusses at his lower lip. One of his fingernails is so bruised it looks painted.

“Sorry,” he says after a beat. “Didn’t mean to touch on a sore subject.”

“It’s fine.”

It’s not true, and I get the sense we both know that, but he doesn’t press me.

Isae searches out her gown from the floor and pulls it over her shoulders, fastening it in front so the skirt is closed, though she doesn’t bother with the dozen or so buttons that go up over her undershirt.

“You might have guessed that I didn’t ask you here to bring me my old stuff,” Isae says, folding her hands in front of her. She’s switching into her formal speech, her chancellor posture. I can tell Ast notices something’s different. He looks almost alarmed, his eyes twitching from side to side.

“I want to ask for your assistance. For a longer period,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re doing, what you’re leaving behind. But there aren’t many people left I can trust—maybe just the people in this room, and—”

He puts up a hand to stop her.

“Quit it,” he says. “Of course I’ll stay. As long as you need.”

“Really?”

He holds out his hand, and when she takes it, he shifts their grip, grasping her at the thumb, the way soldiers do. He brings their joined hands to his heart, like he’s swearing an oath, but brim spawn don’t swear oaths except by spitting, rumor has it.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” he says. “I only met her once, I know, but I liked her.”

It’s beautiful, in its way. Straightforward and honest. I can tell why she likes him. I try another feeling, for him—an embrace of arms, locked around the chest. Firm but bracing.

“Now that’s downright disconcerting, Cisi,” he says. “No way to turn it off?”

“My brother’s currentgift can, but I’ve never found anything else that does,” I say. I’ve never met someone so aware of my gift before. I would ask him what his is, if that wasn’t so impolite.

“Don’t get so twitchy about it, Ast,” Isae says. “Cisi’s been helping me a lot.”

“Well, good.” He manages a small smile in my direction. “Isae’s opinion about a person says a lot to me.”

“It says a lot to me, too,” I say. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about the ship you two grew up on.”

“She probably told you it smelled like feet,” he says.

“She did,” I say. “But she also said it was charming in its way.”

Isae reaches for my hand, sliding her fingers between mine.

“It’s the three of us against the galaxy, now,” she says. “Hope you’re both ready.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Ast says.

She purses her lips, tightens her hand on mine, and says, quietly:

“I’m not.”







(#ulink_f9aad4c8-4207-53fc-9c1a-cb986c5a09a6)


EVERY NOW AND THEN it hits me that most people don’t make friends wherever they go. I do. Assembly Headquarters is like anywhere else—people just want to be heard, even if what they have to say is boring. And boy is it boring most of the time.

I get good information from it sometimes, though. The woman behind me in the cafeteria line that morning—piling synthetic eggs high on her plate and covering them with some kind of green sauce—tells me there’s a greenhouse on the second level stocked with plants from all over the solar system, a different room for each planet. I inhale a bowl of cooked grains and head there as soon as I can. It’s been such a long time since I saw a plant.

That’s how I end up in the hallway just outside the room for Thuvhe. The corners of the windows are dusted with frost. I would need to put on protective gear to go in, so I stay just outside, crouched near the cluster of jealousies growing by the door. They’re yellow and teardrop-shaped, but if you touch one at just the right time in its growth, it spits out a cloud of bright dust. Judging by the swollen bellies of these, they’re just about ready to burst.

“You know, try as we might, we can’t seem to grow hushflowers here,” a voice says from behind me.

The man is old—deep lines frame his eyes and mouth—and bald, the top of his head shiny. He wears pale gray slacks, like all the Assembly staff do, and a thin gray sweater. His skin, too, looks almost pale gray, like he got caught downwind of the wrong field on Zold. If I think hard enough about it, I can probably figure out where he’s from by the color of his eyes, which are lavender—the only remarkable thing about him, as far as I can tell.

“Really?” I say, straightening. “What happens when you try? They die?”

“No, they just don’t bloom,” he says. “It’s as if they know where they are, and they save all their beauty for Thuvhe.”

I smile. “That’s a romantic thought.”

“Too romantic for an old man like me, I know.” His eyes sparkle a little. “You must be a Thuvhesit, to look so fondly at these plants.”

“I am,” I say. “My name is Cisi Kereseth.”

I offer him my hand. His own is dry as an old bone.

“I’m not permitted to tell you my name, as it would hint at my origins,” he says. “But I am the Assembly Leader, Miss Kereseth, and it is lovely to meet you.”

My hand goes limp in his. The Assembly Leader? I am not used to thinking of the person with that title as a real person, with a creaky voice and a wry smile. When they are selected from a pool of candidates by the representatives of all the planets, they are stripped of name and origin, so as not to show any bias. They serve the solar system in its entirety, it’s said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you,” I say. Something about the man makes me think he will like a subtle manifestation of my currentgift: the touch of a warm breeze. He smiles at me, and I think it must have worked on him, since he doesn’t look like a man given to smiling.

“I am not offended,” he says. “So you are the daughter of an oracle, then.”

I nod. “The sitting oracle of Thuvhe, yes.”

“And the sister of an oracle, too, if Eijeh Kereseth still lives,” he says. “Yes, I’ve memorized all the oracle names, though I confess I had to use a few memory techniques. It’s quite a long mnemonic device. I would share it with you if it didn’t have a few vulgarities thrown in to keep it interesting.”

I laugh.

“You have come here with Isae Benesit?” he says. “Captain Morel told me she had brought two friends with her on this visit.”

“Yes. I was close with her sister, Ori,” I say. “Orieve, I mean.”

He makes a soft, sad sound, lips closed. “I am deeply sorry for your loss, then.”

“Thank you,” I say. For now I can push the grief aside. It’s not something this man would be comfortable seeing, so it wouldn’t show even if I wanted it to, thanks to my gift.

“You must be very angry,” he says. “The Shotet have taken your father, your brothers, and now your friend?”

It’s a strange thing to say. It assumes too much.

“It’s not ‘the Shotet’ who did it,” I say. “It was Ryzek Noavek.”

“True.” He focuses on the frosty windows again. “But I can’t help but think that a people who allow themselves to be ruled by a tyrant such as Ryzek Noavek deserves to shoulder some of the blame for his behavior.”

I want to disagree with him. Supporters of the Noaveks, sure, I can blame them. But the renegades, the exiles, the poor and sick and desperate people living in the neighborhood around that building we used as a safe house? They’re just as victimized by Ryzek as I am. After visiting the country, I’m not sure I can even think of “the Shotet” as one thing anymore. They’re too varied to be lumped together. It would be like saying that the daughter of a Hessan farmer and a soft-handed Shissa doctor are the same.

I want to disagree, but I can’t. My tongue is stuck, my throat swollen with my stupid currentgift. So I just look passively at the Assembly Leader and wait for him to talk again.

“I am meeting with Miss Benesit later today,” he says at last. “I hope that you will attend. She is a bit thorny at times, and I sense your presence would soothe her.”

“That’s one of the things I like about her,” I say. “That she’s ‘thorny.’”

“I am sure in friendship it is an entertaining quality.” He smiles. “But in political discussions, it is often an impediment to progress.”

I give in to the instinct to step back from him.

“That depends on how you define ‘progress,’ I suppose,” I say, keeping my tone light.

“I hope that we will agree on a definition by the day’s end,” he says. “I will leave you to look at the plants, Miss Kereseth. Do stop by the Tepessar area—it’s too hot to go in, but you’ve never seen anything like those specimens, I promise you.”

I nod, and he takes his leave.

I remember where I’ve seen those eyes before: in pictures of the intellectual elite on Kollande. They take some kind of medicine designed to keep someone awake for longer than usual without suffering fatigue, and light-eyed people’s irises often turn purple from prolonged use. That he’s from Kollande doesn’t tell me much about him—I’ve never been there, though I know the planet is wealthy and not particularly concerned about its oracles. But those eyes do. He’s someone who values advancement over his own safety or vanity. He’s focused and smart. And he probably thinks he knows better than the rest of us.

I understand, now, what Isae meant when she said it was me, Ast, and her against the galaxy. It’s not just the Shotet we’re up against, it’s the Assembly, too.

Ast, Isae, and I sit on one side of a polished glass table, and the Assembly Leader sits on the other. It’s so clean that his water glass, and the pitcher next to it, almost look like they’re floating. I rammed my legs against the edge when I sat down, because I wasn’t sure where the table ended. If it’s supposed to disarm me, it worked.

“Let us first talk through what happened in Shotet,” the Assembly Leader says as he pours himself a glass of water.

We’re in the outer ring of the Assembly ship, which is arranged in concentric circles. All the outer walls are made of glass that turns opaque when the ship rotates to face the sun, so nobody’s corneas get burned. The walls to my left are opaque now, and the room is heating up, so there’s a ring of sweat around my collar. Ast keeps pinching the front of his shirt and pulling it away from his body to keep it from sticking.

“I am sure the footage the sights provided is more than sufficient,” Isae says, clipped.

She’s wearing chancellor clothes: a heavy Thuvhesit dress, long-sleeved, buttoned up to her throat. Tight boots that made her grimace while she laced them. Her hair is pinned to the back of her head, and shines like she lacquered it there. If she’s hot—which she must be, that dress is made for Thuvhe, not … this—she doesn’t show it. Maybe that’s why she put such a dense layer of powder on her skin before we left.

“I understand your reticence to discuss it,” the Assembly Leader says. “Perhaps Miss Kereseth can give us a summary instead? She was there, too, correct?”

Isae glances at me. I fold my hands in my lap and smile, remembering that the Assembly Leader’s preferred texture was a warm breeze. That’s how I need to be, too—all warm and casual, a layer of sweat you don’t mind, a gust of air that almost tickles.

“Of course,” I say. “Cyra Noavek challenged her brother Ryzek to a duel, and he accepted. But before either of them could hit each other, my brother Eijeh appeared—” I choke. I can’t say the rest.

“Sorry,” I say. “My currentgift isn’t being cooperative.”

“She can’t always say what she wants to say,” Isae clarifies. “Which is that Eijeh was holding a knife to my sister’s throat. He killed her. The end.”

“And Ryzek?”

“Also killed,” Isae says, and for a tick I think she’s going to tell him what she did on the ship, how she went into the storage room with a knife and teased a confession out of him and then stuck him with the blade like it was a stinger. But then she adds, “By his own sister, who then dragged the body aboard, I assume to keep it from being defiled by the mob that had erupted into chaos.”

“And now, his body is …?”

“Drifting through space, I assume,” Isae says. “That is the preferred Shotet method of burial, no?”

“I don’t familiarize myself with Shotet customs,” the Assembly Leader says, leaning back in his chair. “Very well, that is all as I expected. As far as how the rest of the galaxy has responded … well, I have been fielding messages from the other leaders and representatives since your sister’s death was broadcast. They have interpreted the killing as an act of war, and wish to know how we will proceed from here.”

Isae laughs. It’s the same bitter laugh she gave Ryzek before she cut him open.

“We?” she says. “Two seasons ago, I asked for support from the Assembly to declare war on Shotet in light of the killing of our falling oracle, and I was told that the ‘civil dispute’ between Shotet and Thuvhe, as you have termed it, is an intraplanetary matter. That I needed to handle it internally. And now you’re wondering what we will be doing? There is no we, Assembly Leader.”

The Assembly Leader looks to me, eyebrows raised. If he expects me to—what word did he use?—soothe her, he’s going to be disappointed. I don’t always get to control my currentgift, but I don’t want to do something just because he says so. I’m not sure, yet, whether there’s any advantage to Isae being soothed.

“Two seasons ago, Ryzek Noavek didn’t kill a chancellor’s sister,” the Assembly Leader replies, all smooth and level. “Shotet was not in a state of total upheaval. The situation has changed.”

The opaque panels on the left side of the chamber are starting to lighten up again, turning from wall to window.

“Do you know how long they’ve been attacking us?” Isae says. “Since before I was born. Over twenty seasons.”

“I am aware of the history of conflict between Thuvhe and Shotet.”

“So what was your thought process, then?” Isae says. “That we’re just a bunch of thickheaded iceflower farmers, so who cares if we get attacked, as long as the product is safe?” She laughs, harshly. “The town of Hessa is decimated by guerilla warfare, and you call it a civil dispute. My face gets carved up and my parents get killed, and no one budges an inch except to send condolences. One of my oracles dies, and another is kidnapped, and it’s my job to handle it. So why are you all hopping with excitement to help me now? What has everyone scared?”

His eye twitches a little.

“You must understand that to the rest of the galaxy, the Shotet were little more than an annoyance until the Noaveks came into power,” he says. “When you came to us two seasons ago, describing vicious warriors, we thought of the sad wrecks who once came begging at another planet’s doorstep, every season, to dig through our trash.”

“They’ve been looting hospitals and attacking fueling outposts for longer than two seasons, on their sojourns,” she replies. “This escaped the attention of every single planet’s leadership until now?”

“Not precisely,” the Assembly Leader says. “But we received information from a credible source that Lazmet Noavek is still alive, and will soon move to reclaim his place at Shotet’s helm. You have not been alive long enough to truly grasp this, but Ryzek was remarkably civil compared to his father. He inherited his mother’s desire for diplomacy, if not her ease with it. It was under Lazmet that Shotet became fearsome. It was still under his guidance—from beyond the grave, apparently—that Ryzek pursued oracles and, indeed, your sister, at all.”

“So you’re all afraid of him. This one man.” Ast frowns. “What can he do, shoot fire out of his ass?”

“Lazmet controls people—quite literally—using his currentgift,” the Assembly Leader says. “His abilities, combined with the new strength of the Shotet fighting force, are not to be underestimated. We must treat the Shotet as an infestation, a blight on land that could otherwise be used for iceflower farming—for something useful and valuable.”

His eyes glitter. I may not have grown up fancy, but I know how to speak Subtext. He wants the Shotet gone. At one point they were a husk of a people, clanking around the galaxy in their big, outdated ship, starved and sick and sagging. He wants that back. He wants more iceflowers, more valuable Thuvhesit land. More for him, and nothing for them, and he wants to use Isae to get it.

Mom used to tell me that all the galaxy once mocked the Shotet. “Dirty scavengers,” they called them, and “fleshworms.” They flew in circles around the solar system, chasing their own tails. Half the time they didn’t even sound like they were saying words. I knew all this. I’d heard it, even said some of it myself.

But the Assembly Leader isn’t just mocking the Shotet now.

“Then tell me,” Isae says, “what disciplinary action the Assembly has planned for the Pithar, given that the Pithar leadership suggested it might be amenable to a trade agreement with Shotet not long ago?”

“Don’t play the fool with me, Chancellor,” the Assembly Leader says, but not like he’s mad, more like he’s tired. “You know that we can’t act against Pitha. The galaxy cannot function without the materials Pitha provides.”

I’d never given Pitha much thought before. I’d actually never thought about politics, period, until I fell back in with the Benesit sisters after my dad died. But the Assembly Leader is right—durable materials from Pitha make up almost all the good tech in the galaxy, including ships. And in Thuvhe, especially, with our frozen air, we rely on insulated Pithar glass for our windows. We can’t afford to lose them any more than the rest of the Assembly of Nine Planets can.

“Pitha has retracted their willingness to engage with Shotet, and that will have to be enough. As for the rest of the nation-planets, they still believe the war effort should be headed up by Thuvhe, given that it is an intraplanetary matter. They are open to discussions about aid and support, however.”

“So in other words,” Ast says, “you’ll throw money at her, but she still has to give you a wall of flesh between Shotet and the rest of you.”

“My, you certainly do enjoy dramatic language, don’t you, Mr …” The Assembly Leader tilts his head. “Do you have a surname?”

“I don’t need any kind of honorific,” Ast says. “Call me Ast or don’t call me anything.”

“Ast,” the Assembly Leader says, and he softens his voice like he’s talking to a child. “Money is not the only form of aid the Assembly can offer. And if war is what confronts you, Miss Benesit, you are in no position to refuse our help.”

“Maybe I don’t want to fight a war,” she says, sitting back in her chair. “Maybe I want to broker a peace.”

“That is, of course, your prerogative,” the Assembly Leader replies. “However, I will be forced to pursue an investigation I had hoped I would be able to avoid.”

“An investigation into what?” Isae scowls.

“It would be quite simple for a person to consult the heat signatures in the Voa amphitheater at the time of Ryzek’s alleged death. And if a person did, they might see that Ryzek was alive when he was taken aboard that transport ship,” the Assembly Leader says. “Which means that if his body is adrift in space, as you say, someone else must have killed him. Not Cyra Noavek.”

“Interesting theory,” Isae says.

“I can’t think of why you would lie to me, and tell me Cyra Noavek committed the crime in the arena, unless you needed to protect yourself, Miss Benesit,” the Assembly Leader says. “And if you were to be investigated for murder—particularly premeditated murder against a self-declared sovereign—then you would not be permitted to rule Thuvhe until you were acquitted.”

“So, just to clarify,” Ast says, glowering, “you’re threatening to tie Isae up in bureaucratic nonsense if she doesn’t do as you say.”

The Assembly Leader only smiles.

“If you would like me to proofread your declaration of war before you send it to the Shotet, I will happily take a look at it,” he says. “I must now take my leave. Good day, Miss Benesit, Miss Kereseth … Ast.”

His head bobs three times, once for each of us, and then he’s gone. I glance at Isae.

“Would he really do that?” I say. “Charge you with murder?”

“I don’t doubt it.” Her mouth puckers. “Let’s go.”







(#ulink_f70e1537-76a0-54a6-84ba-996980163ab0)


“CYRA.” TEKA RAISED AN eyebrow at me outside the ship’s little bathroom when I got up for my shift. I was dressed only in underwear and my sweater from the day before. I avoided her eyes as I searched the ship’s storage room for a spare mechanic’s uniform. We were all running out of clothes. Hopefully they would provide for us on Ogra.

Teka cleared her throat. She was leaning against the wall, arms folded, a plain black eye patch covering her missing eye.

“I don’t have to worry about little Kereseth-Noavek spawn running around someday, do I?” She yawned. “Because I really don’t want to.”

“No,” I said with a snort. “Like I’d take that risk.”

“Never?” She frowned a little. “There’s this thing called ‘contraception,’ you know.”

I shook my head. “Nothing is certain.”

The little mocking expression she always wore when she was looking at me faded, leaving her serious.

“My currentgift,” I explained, holding up a hand to show her the shadows that curled around my knuckles, stinging me, “is an instrument of torture. You think I would risk inflicting that torture on something growing inside me? Even if it’s a very limited risk?” I shook my head. “No.”

She nodded. “That’s very decent of you.”

I added, “It’s not like … that is the only thing you can do with someone, anyway.”

She brought her hands up to her face, groaning.

“I did not want any information that specific!” she said, voice muffled.

“Then don’t ask probing questions, genius.”

I found a mechanic’s jumpsuit buried under a stack of towels, and stood to hold it up to my body. The legs were too long, so I would have to roll them, but it would have to do. I dove back into the pile to look for underwear.

“How long until we get to Ogra?” I said. “Because we’re going to run out of food pretty soon, you know.”

“Food and toilet paper. The recycled water is starting to smell weird, too,” Teka agreed. “I think we’ll make it, without too much snacking. A few days.”

“This ship’s upgrades are pretty brilliant,” I said. I found a pair of too-big underwear wedged into a corner of one of the shelves, and clutched the ball of clothes to my chest as pain burned across my back. “You did them all?”

“Jorek helped,” she said. Her face fell a little. “Not sure where he is right now. He was supposed to send a message from Voa once he made sure his mother was safe.”

I didn’t know Jorek well, just that he was a more virtuous soul than his father had been and was, apparently, a renegade. So I didn’t try to reassure her. My words would have been empty.

“We’ll find out about a lot of things when we get to Ogra,” I said. “Jorek’s status, among them.”

“Yeah.” Teka shrugged. “Get to the nav deck, Noavek, your break is over.”

The next few days passed in a haze. I spent most of the time sleeping, tucked in the galley near the sink, or sitting up in the first officer’s chair while Akos took his shift. Our surroundings seemed designed to drive us all mad, they yielded so little of interest. The sky was dark and, without stars, planets, or drifting ships to break it up, completely flat. I often had to check the nav map to make sure we hadn’t stalled.

I shared most of my waking time—when not in the captain’s chair—with Teka, trying to distract myself from my currentgift. She taught me a game she usually played with multicolored stones, though we used handfuls of beans from the galley and drew dots on them, to tell them apart. We spent most of the time arguing over which beans were which, but I came to see that bickering was a sign of friendship with Teka, and mostly didn’t mind it, as long as no one stormed out. Akos sometimes joined us before going to sleep, sitting too close to me and tucking his nose into my hair when he thought Teka wouldn’t notice. She always did.

My nights I spent huddled together with Akos, when I could, and finding new places to kiss. Our first fumbles at intimacy had been full of awkward laughter and uncomfortable squirming—I was learning to touch another person, as well as to touch him, in particular, and it was difficult to learn everything at once. But we were both happy to practice. Despite his constant nightmares—he didn’t wake screaming, but he often woke with a start, a sheen of sweat on his brow—and my lingering grief for the brother who had been twisted into a monster, we found snatches of happiness together, built largely on ignoring everything around us. It worked well.

It worked well, that was, until Ogra came into view.

“Why,” Teka said, staring at the black hole of a planet we were headed toward, “would anyone ever settle here?”

Akos laughed. “You could say the same about Thuvhe.”

“Don’t call it that when we land,” I said, cocking an eyebrow. “It’s ‘Urek’ or nothing.”

“Right.”

Urek meant “empty,” but said with reverence, not like an insult. Empty, to us, meant possibility; it meant freedom.

Ogra had come into sight as a small, dark gap in the stars ahead, and then the gap had turned into a hole, like a stray ember burned through fabric. And now it loomed darkly above the nav deck, devouring every fragment of light in its vicinity. I wondered how the first settlers had even known it was a planet. It looked more like a yawn.

“I take it it’s not an easy landing,” Akos said.

“No.” Teka laughed. “No, it’s not. The only way to get through it without getting ripped to shreds is to completely disable the ship’s power and free-fall. Then I have to reactivate the ship’s power before we all liquify on impact.” She brought her hands together with a smack. “So we all need to strap in and say a prayer, or whatever makes you feel lucky.”

Akos looked paler than usual. I laughed.

Sifa came up behind us, clutching a book to her stomach. There were few books aboard the ship—what use would they have had?—but those she had been able to rummage, she had brought to Eijeh one by one, along with his food. Akos didn’t ask about him, and neither did I. I assumed his status was unchanged, and that the worst parts of my brother lived on in him. I needed no further updates.

“Luck,” Sifa said, “is simply a construct to make people believe they are in control of some aspect of their destinies.”

Teka appeared to consider this, but Akos just rolled his eyes.

“Or maybe it’s just a word for what fate looks like to the rest of us,” I said to her. I was the only one willing to argue with Sifa—Teka was too reverent, and Akos, too dismissive. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to stare at the future from this angle instead of your own.”

Sifa smirked at me. She smirked at me often. “Perhaps you are correct.”

“Everybody strap in,” Teka said. “Oracle, I need you in the first officer’s chair. You know the most about flying.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Currentgifts go haywire on Ogra,” Teka said to me. “We’re not sure how yours will do, so you sit in the back. Keep the Kereseth boys in line.”

Sifa had escorted Eijeh to a landing seat already. He was strapped in and staring at the floor. I sighed, and made my way down to the main deck. Akos and I sat across from Eijeh, and I pulled the straps across my chest and lap. Akos fumbled with his own, but I didn’t help him—he knew how to do it, he just needed to practice.

I watched Teka and Sifa as they prepared for landing, poking buttons and flicking switches. It seemed routine for Teka. That was reassuring, at least. I didn’t want to free-fall through a hostile atmosphere with a captain who was panicking.

“Here we go!” Teka shouted, and with only that warning, all the lights in the ship switched off. The engine stopped its whirring and humming. Dark atmosphere struck the nav window like a wave of Pithar rain, and for a few long moments I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to scream.

Ogra’s gravity caught us, and it was worse, much worse than feeling nothing. My stomach and my body felt suddenly separate, one floating up and the other pulling hard to the ground. The craft shuddered, metal plates squeaking against their screws, the steps to the nav deck rattling. My teeth clacked together. It was still too dark to see anything, even the currentshadows that twisted around my arms.

Next to me, Akos let out a litany of curses under his breath, in three languages. I couldn’t speak. My flesh weighed too heavily on my bones.

A slamming sound, then, and the engine whirred again. Before the lights turned on, though, the planet lit up beneath us. It was still dark—neither sun nor currentstream could possibly penetrate Ogra’s atmosphere—but it was dotted with light, veined with it. The ship’s control panel glowed, and the horrible, heavy falling sensation disappeared as the ship moved forward instead of down, down, down.

And then, hot and sharp and strong: pain.







(#ulink_f923ce5b-f724-540a-ae2d-4412a3bbac8a)


CYRA WAS SCREAMING.

Akos’s hands were shaking from the landing, but still undoing the straps that held him in place, almost without his permission. Right when Akos was free he launched himself from his seat and slid to his knees in front of Cyra. The shadows had pulled away from her body in a dark cloud, the same way they had when Vas forced her to touch him, down in the amphitheater’s prison where she had almost lost her life. Her hands were buried in her hair, clenched. She looked up at him, and a strange smile twisted her face.

He put his hands on hers. The shadows looked like smoke, in the air, but they pulled back into Cyra’s body like dozens of strings yanked at once.

Cyra’s odd smile was gone, and she was staring at their joined hands.

“What will happen when you let go?” she said quietly.

“You’ll be just fine,” he said. “You’ll learn to control it. You can do that now, remember?”

She let out an airy laugh.

“I can hang on as long as you like,” he said.

Her eyes hardened. When she spoke, it was with gritted teeth. “Let go.”

Akos couldn’t help but think back to something he’d read in one of the books Cyra had put in his room on the sojourn ship. He’d had to read it through a translator, because it was written in Shotet, and it had been called Tenets of Shotet Culture and Belief.

It said: The most marked characteristic of the Shotet people is directly translated as “armored,” but outsiders might call it “mettle.” It refers not to courageous acts in difficult situations—though the Shotet certainly hold valor in high regard—but to an inherent quality that cannot be learned or imitated; it is in the blood as surely as their revelatory language. Mettle is bearing up again and again under assaults. It is perseverance, acceptance of risk, and the unwillingness to surrender.

That paragraph had never made more sense to him than it did right now.

Akos obeyed. At first, when the currentshadows reappeared, they formed the smoky cloud around her body again, but Cyra set her jaw.

“Can’t meet the Ograns with a death cloud around me,” she said.

Her eyes held his as she breathed deeply. The shadows began to worm their way beneath her skin, traveling down her fingers, wriggling up her throat. She screamed again, right into her teeth, half a dozen izits from his face. But then the breath hissed out, same as it had come in, and she straightened. The cloud was gone.

“They’re back to how they were before,” he said to her. “Like they were when I met you.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s this planet. My gift is stronger here.”

“You’ve been here before?”

She shook her head. “No. But I can feel it.”

“Do you need a painkiller?” he said.

Another headshake. “Not yet. I have to readjust sometime. May as well be now.”

Teka was talking on the nav deck, in Othyrian. “Ship ID Renegade Transport, Captain Surukta requesting permission to land.”

“Captain Surukta, permission granted to landing area thirty-two. Congratulations on your safe arrival,” a voice responded over the intercom.

Teka snorted as she switched off the communicator. “I bet that’s standard practice, congratulating people on surviving.”

“I’ve been here before,” Sifa said, wry. “It is indeed standard practice.”

Teka guided them to landing area 32, somewhere between the veins of light that had greeted them once they passed the atmosphere. Akos felt a bump as they touched down, and then they were there. On a new planet. On Ogra.

Ogra was a mystery to most of the galaxy. It had become the subject of a lot of rumors, from as silly as “Ograns live in holes underground” to as dangerous as “Ograns are shielding their own atmosphere so we won’t find out they’re making deadly weapons.” So when Akos stepped out of the ship, he didn’t know what would greet him, if anything. For all he knew, Ogra was barren.

His hold on Cyra’s hand loosened as he paused at the bottom of the steps to stare. They were in a city of sorts, but it was like no city he’d ever seen. Small buildings, glowing with green and blue lights of all shapes and sizes, rose up all around them, dark shapes against a dark sky. Growing around and between them were trees without leaves to absorb the sun—their branches twisted around pillars, folding whole towers into their arms. The trees were tall, too, taller than anything else around, and the contrast of the clean lines of buildings and the organic curves of growing things was strange to him.

The glowing, though—that was even stranger. Faint dots that he recognized as insects wove through the air; panels of light showed dim impressions of the insides of houses; and in the narrow channels of water that replaced some of the streets, there were streaks of color, like poured dye, and the flash of movement as some creature made its way along.

“Welcome to Ogra,” an accented voice said from someplace up ahead. Akos could only see the man by the white orb that hovered around his face. As he spoke—in competent Shotet, no less—the orb attached to his chest, right under his chin, and lit his face from beneath. He was middle-aged, lined, with stark white hair that curled around his ears.

“If you’ll form a short line, we can note your presence here and then escort you to the Shotet sector,” he said. “We have only an hour before the storms begin.”

The storms? Akos raised an eyebrow at Cyra, and she shrugged. She didn’t seem to know any more than he did.

Teka was first in line, reporting her surname with a brisk tone that read as businesslike.

“Surukta,” the man repeated as he typed her name into the small device in his hand. “I knew your mother. I was sad to hear of her passing.”

Teka mumbled her way through something, maybe gratitude, though it didn’t sound like it. Then it was Cyra’s turn.

“Cyra,” she said. “Noavek.”

The man paused with his fingers over the keys. He looked menacing with that white light glowing under his face, casting shadows that filled his eye sockets and the deepest creases of his face. She stared back, letting him look her over, from silverskin to armored wrist to worn boots.

But he didn’t say anything, just typed her name into his device and waved her past. She kept her hand in Akos’s, her arm stretched out behind her until he, too, was waved along.

Teka tripped over to them, her eyes wide and shining.

“Amazing, right?” she said, smiling. “I always wanted to see it.”

“You’ve never come before?” Cyra said. “Not even to see your mother?”

“No, I was never allowed to visit her.” There was an edge to her voice. “It wasn’t safe. The exile colony has been here for over two generations, though, ever since the Noaveks came into power.”

“And the Ograns just … let you stay here?” Akos said. “They say anyone who can survive this planet has a right to be here,” Teka said.

“It doesn’t look as dangerous as I was expecting,” Cyra said. “Everyone always talks about how hard it is to survive here, but it seems peaceful enough.”

“Don’t let it fool you,” Teka said. “Everything here is ready to attack or defend—the plants, the animals, even the planet itself. They can’t eat sun, so they eat each other instead—or you.”

“The plants are carnivorous?” Akos said.

“From what I know.” She shrugged. “Or they eat the current. Which probably explains why they’ve been able to survive here—if there’s anything Ogra has a lot of, it’s the current.” She smiled, with some mischief. “And as if the constant threat of being devoured wasn’t enough … well, let’s just say he’s not talking about a little Awakening shower when he says ‘storms.’”

“Cryptic, aren’t you?” Cyra said, frowning.

“Yes!” She grinned. “It’s nice to have the upper hand for once. Come on.”

Teka led them to one of the canals. They had to go down some steps to get to the water’s edge. They were cracked from the tree roots, and uneven. Akos reached down to run his hand over the persistent roots, which were covered in a fine, dark fuzz.

There were plants here. He hadn’t thought about foreign plant species on Pitha, mostly because there were no plants to be found on Pitha, at least not where he could reach them. But Ogra was thick with trees. He wondered, with a thrill of excitement, what you could make with the plants here.

A boat waited at the edge of the canal, long and narrow, with room for only four people across each row of benches. Akos guessed by its glint that it was made of metal. It was dark except for the glow of the water beneath it, a streak of rosy pink.

“What’s that light?” he asked Teka.

But Teka wasn’t the one who answered, it was the woman stationed at the front of the boat, her dark eyes lined with white paint. At first he thought maybe there was a practical reason for the paint, but the longer he looked at her, the more it seemed just decorative, like the black lines people smudged near their eyelashes at home. Here, white just showed up better.

“There are many strains of bacteria that live in Ogra’s waters,” she said. “They light up in different colors. Let them remind you that only our darkest water is safe to drink.”

Even the water could defend itself on Ogra.

Akos followed Teka down the unsteady plank that connected shore to boat, and stepped on one bench to get to another. Cyra settled herself next to him, and he put his hand on her wrist, where the armor ended. He squeezed, and leaned over the edge of the boat to look at the water. The streaks of pink were moving, lazy, with the current of the water.

He tried not to think about Sifa and Eijeh settling in behind them, Sifa’s eyes watchful so his own didn’t have to be. But the boat dipped with their weight, and his stomach sank, too. He couldn’t avoid Eijeh on Ogra like he had on the ship. They were going to be stuck together, the Thuvhesits among Shotet among Ograns.

The woman at the front sat, taking into her hands huge oars that dangled on either side of the vessel. With a sharp yank she drove them forward, her face showing no effort. She was strong.

“A useful currentgift,” Cyra commented.

“It comes in handy every now and then. Most of the time I am called upon to open stubborn jars,” the woman said, as she found a rhythm in her rowing. The ship cut through the water like a hot knife through butter. “Don’t put your hands in the water, by the way.”

“Why not?” Cyra said.

She just laughed.

Akos kept looking over the side, at the changing colors beneath the water’s surface. The pink glow clung to the shallows, near the edge of the canal. Where it was deeper, there were specks of blue, wisps of purple, and wells of deep red.

“There,” the Ogran woman said, and he followed the tilt of her head to a massive shape in the canal. At first he thought it was just more of the bacteria, finding the current. But as they slid past it, he saw it was a creature, twice as wide as their narrow boat and twice again as long. It had a bulbous head—or he assumed it was a head—and at least a dozen tentacles that tapered to feathery ends. He was able to see it only because of how the bacteria clung to it, like paint streaking its smooth sides.

It turned, tentacles twisting together like rope, and on its flank he saw a mouth as big as his own torso, framed all around by sharp, narrow teeth. He stiffened.

“The undersides of these boats are made of a current-shielding material we call ‘soju,’” the Ogran woman said. “The animal—a galansk—is drawn to the current, to devour it. If you put your hand in the water, it would be drawn to you. But it can’t sense us in this boat.”

And true to her word, with the next pull of her oars, the galansk turned again, and dove deep, becoming just a faint glow under the surface of the water. A moment later it was gone.

“You mine this metal here?” Teka asked the woman.

“No, no. There is nothing on this planet that is not current-rich,” the woman said. “We import soju from Essander.”

“Why do you live on a planet so determined to kill you?” he said.

The Ogran woman smiled at him. “I could ask the Shotet the same question.”

“I’m not Shotet,” he said.

“Are you not?” she said with a shrug, and continued to row.

His back ached by the time they got to their destination, from the stress of the landing followed by sitting on the uncomfortable bench in the boat. The Ogran woman steered them toward the edge of the canal, where there were stone steps overrun with the same velvet-soft wood he had touched earlier. Next to the steps was the yawn of a tunnel.

“We must go underground to avoid the storms,” she said. “You can explore the Shotet sector another time.”

The storms. She said it reverently, but not fondly—it was something she feared, this woman with the strength of half a dozen people, and that made Akos fear it, too.

He climbed out of the boat on unsteady legs, relieved to find solid ground. He reached back to help Cyra, his mouth drawn into a thin line.

“I thought the Shotet were fierce,” he said. “But the people here must be downright lethal.”

“A different kind of ferocity, perhaps,” she said. “They don’t hesitate, but they fight without finesse. It’s a kind of … clumsy courage. And a kind of madness, too, to live in a place like this.”

Akos knew, listening to her, that she had spent more time observing the Ograns than she would ever admit to—that she didn’t even realize there was anything to admit to, because she assumed all other people were as inquisitive as she was. She had likely watched every piece of footage of Ogran combat she could get her hands on, and half a dozen other subjects, besides. All those files were stored in her quarters on the sojourn ship, her little den of knowledge.

They walked into the tunnel, led at first by the Ogran woman’s whistling alone. But ten paces in, Akos saw light. Some of the stones in the walls of the tunnel were glowing. They were small, smaller than his fist, and set at random into the walls and ceiling.

The woman whistled louder, and the stones grew brighter. Akos pursed his lips, hiding his face as he tried a whistle of his own. The light in the stones near him went white, with the warmth of sunlight. Was this as close to sunlight as Ogra ever got?

He glanced at Cyra. She winced, the currentshadows lively across the back of her neck, but she was smiling at him.

“What?” he said.

“You’re excited,” she said. “This planet is probably going to kill us, and you love it.”

“Well,” he said, feeling defensive, “it’s fascinating, that’s all.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s just, I don’t expect other people to love the odd and dangerous things I love.”

She draped her arm around his waist, her touch light, so he didn’t feel her weight. He leaned into her, slinging his own arm over her shoulders. Her skin went blank again at his touch.

Then he heard it—the low rumble, like the planet itself was growling, and at this point, he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that it was.

“Come along, ice-dwellers,” the Ogran woman sang, her voice ringing.

She reached down and stuck her pinkie through something—a metal loop in the dark floor. With a flick of her wrist, a trapdoor pulled up from the ground, scattering dust. Akos spotted narrow stairs that disappeared into nothingness.

Well, he thought, time to summon some Shotet mettle.







(#ulink_3e20139f-262d-521f-bb5f-40628283ff4e)


THE LAST TIME I had walked into a crowd, it was to pretend to kill my own brother, and they had thirsted for my blood.

And before that, he had carved my skin from my head to the tune of hundreds of cheers. I reached up to touch the silverskin that covered me from throat to jaw to skull.

No, I did not have pleasant memories of crowds, and I was not likely to form them here, with only Ograns and Shotet exiles waiting for me.

We had walked down the dark stairs, feeling our way with the soles of our shoes and the brushes of our fingers, and turned a sharp corner, and here we were: in a dim waiting space with creaky wood floors, and the glow of Ogran clothing, most of which adorned Shotet bodies, though I only knew because of the language they spoke.

Ogran clothing—which even the Shotet wore, here—had no real distinct style, some of it tight and some flowing, some ornate and some simple, but the embrace of that ever-present glow was there, in bracelets and anklets and necklaces, shoelaces and belts and buttons. One man I passed even had stripes of red light—faint, but still, light—stitched into the back of his jacket. It gave everyone an eerie look, lit from beneath by their garments, their faces difficult to see. Those with fair skin, like Akos’s, almost gave off their own light—not an advantage on a planet as hostile as this.

There were benches for sitting, and high tables for standing around. Some held glasses with a clear substance that scattered light inside them. I watched a bottle passed through a group of people, bobbing along like their hands were waves. Children sat in a circle near my feet, playing a game with quick hand motions passed in a round. Two boys, a few seasons younger than me, play-fought near one of the massive room’s wooden pillars. This was a space for gathering and, I sensed, not much else; this was not where the Shotet lived, or worked, or ate, but just a space to wait out the storms. The Ogran woman had remained vague about what “the storms” actually were. Not surprising. Ograns seemed to trade in vague language and weighty looks.

Teka melded into the crowd right away, throwing her arms around the nearest exile she recognized. That was when people began to take notice of us—Teka, with her pale skin and even paler hair, required no introduction. Akos was a head taller than most people in the room, and drew eyes naturally.

And then there was me. Glinting silverskin and currentshadows crawling all over my body.

I tried not to tense as some people went quiet at the sight of me, and others muttered, or pointed—who had taught them manners?

I was used to this sort of reaction, I reminded myself. I was Cyra Noavek. Guards at the manor backed away from me instinctively, women held their children near at the sight of me. I drew myself up straighter, taller, and shook my head when Akos reached for me, to help me with my pain. No, better to let them see me as I was. Better to get this over with.

I pretended I was not breathing harder.

“Hey.” Teka pinched the elbow of my oddly sized mechanic’s jumpsuit and tugged. “Come on, we should introduce ourselves to the leadership.”

“You don’t know them already?” I said, as Akos searched behind him—for his mother and brother, I assumed, though he had been avoiding them since we landed.

I tried to imagine how I would have acted if my mother had returned to my life after I had accepted that I would never see her again. In my mind, it was a happy reunion, and we fell into our old rhythms of care and understanding. It certainly wasn’t that simple for Akos, with the history of betrayal and subterfuge that existed between him and Sifa, but even without that, perhaps it was never simple. Perhaps I would have avoided Ylira just as he avoided his mother.

Or maybe it was just that she spoke in riddles, and it was exhausting.

Once Akos had rounded up his family, we all followed Teka deeper into the room. I tried to keep myself from marching, though that was my instinct—scare them on purpose, so I didn’t have to watch them grow frightened by accident.

“So we’re right near the village of Galo,” Teka said. “It’s mostly full of Shotet exiles now, but there are still some Ograns who live here. Merchants, mostly. My mother said we’d integrated pretty well—oh!”

Teka threw her arms around a pale-haired man with a mug in hand, then shook hands with a woman with a shaved head, who tapped Teka’s eye patch in gentle mocking.

“I’m saving my fancy one for a special occasion,” Teka replied. “Do you know where Ettrek is? I have to introduce him to—ah.”

A man had stepped forward, tall, though not as tall as Akos, with long dark hair drawn up into a knot. I couldn’t decide, in this light, if he was my age or ten seasons older. The rumble in his voice didn’t do much to help.

“Ah, here she is,” the man said. “Ryzek’s Scourge turned Ryzek’s Executioner.”

He put an arm around me, turning as if to draw me into a group of people all holding glasses of whatever-it-was. I pulled away from him so quickly he might not have had the chance to feel my currentgift.

Pain darted across my cheek, and followed my next swallow down my throat. “Call me that again and I will—”

“What? Hurt me?” The man smirked. “It would be interesting to see you try. Then we would see if you are as good at fighting as they say.”

“Regardless of whether I am a good fighter or not,” I snapped, “I am not Ryzek’s ‘Executioner.’”

“So humble!” an older woman across from me said, tipping some of her drink into her mouth. “We all saw what you did on the news feed, Miss Noavek. There’s no need to be shy about it.”

“I am neither shy nor humble,” I said, feeling my mouth twist into my sourest smile. My head was pounding. “I just don’t believe everything I see. You should have learned that lesson well enough, exile.”

I almost laughed, seeing all their eyebrows pop up in unison. Akos touched my shoulder, the part covered with fabric, and bent closer to my ear.

“Slow down on making enemies,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for that later.”

I stifled a laugh. He had a point, though.

At first, all I saw next was a broad smile in the dark, and then Jorek collided with Akos. Akos looked too confused to return the embrace—actually, he didn’t seem particularly affectionate, as a rule, I had noticed—but he managed to give Jorek a good-natured slap on the shoulder as he pulled away.

“Took you long enough to get here,” Jorek said. “I was beginning to think you guys got kidnapped by the chancellor.”

“No,” Akos said. “Actually, we abandoned her in an escape pod.”

“Really?” Jorek’s eyebrows popped up. “That’s sort of a shame. I liked her.”

“You liked her?” I said.

“Miss Noavek,” Jorek said, bobbing his head to me. He turned back to Akos. “Yeah, she was a little scary, and apparently I gravitate toward that quality in friends.”

My cheeks warmed as he looked from Akos to me and back again, pointedly. Jorek thought of me as a friend?

“How’s your mom?” Akos said to him. “Is she here?”

Jorek had stayed behind after our little mission to ensure that his mother made it through the chaos of Voa.

“Safe and sound, but no, she’s not here,” Jorek said. “She said if she ever manages to land on Ogra, she’s never going to try to take off again. No, she’s keeping an eye on things for us in Voa. Moved in with her brother and his children.”

“Good,” Akos said. He scratched the back of his neck, and his fingertips scraped along the thin chain he wore, the one with the ring Ara Kuzar had given him hanging from the end of it. He didn’t wear it out of affection, as Ara and Jorek had undoubtedly hoped he would, but as a burden. A reminder.

Teka had disappeared for a moment, but she returned now with a sturdy woman at her side. She was not tall or short, really, and her hair was pulled back into a tight braid. The smile she gave me was warm enough, though like the others, she didn’t even glance in Akos’s direction. Her attention was solely mine.

“Miss Noavek,” the woman said, offering your hand. “I am Aza. I sit on our council here.”

I glanced at Akos, asking a silent question. He rested his hand on the bare skin where my neck met my shoulder, extinguishing my currentshadows. I knew without trying that I was not capable of controlling my gift right now, as I had learned to in the renegade hideout in Voa. Not in Ogra’s currentgift-enhancing atmosphere, with days of limited sleep behind me. It was taking all the energy I had just to keep it contained, so it wouldn’t explode out of me as it had when we first landed.

I took the woman’s hand, and shook it. Akos may not have commanded her attention before, but his ability to extinguish my gift certainly did. In fact, everyone around us looked at him—specifically, at the hand he kept on my skin.

“Call me Cyra, please,” I said to Aza.

Aza’s gaze was curious, and sharp. When I dropped her hand, Akos dropped his, and my currentshadows returned. His cheeks were bright with color, and it was spreading to his neck.

“And you are?” Aza asked him.

“Akos Kereseth,” he said, a little too quietly. I wasn’t used to the meek side of him, but now that we weren’t constantly surrounded by the people who had kidnapped him or killed his father or otherwise tormented him—well. Perhaps this was what he was like, under somewhat more normal circumstances.

“Kereseth,” Aza repeated. “It’s funny—for the duration of this exile colony’s existence, we have never had a fated person pass through our doors. And now we have two.”

“Four, actually,” I said. “Akos’s older brother Eijeh is … somewhere. And his mother, Sifa. They’re both oracles.”

I cast a glance around for both of them. Sifa emerged from the shadows behind me, almost as if summoned by her name alone. Eijeh was a few paces behind her.

“Oracles. Two oracles,” Aza said. She was finally startled, it seemed.

“Aza,” Sifa said, nodding. She wore a smile intended, I was sure, to be inscrutable. I almost rolled my eyes.

“Thank you for sheltering us,” Sifa said. “All of you. We have walked a hard road to get here.”

“Of course,” Aza said stiffly. “The storms will be over soon, and we will be able to find a place for you to rest.” Aza stepped closer. “But I must ask, Oracle … should we be concerned?”

Sifa smiled. “Why do you ask?”

“Hosting two oracles at once seems like …” Aza frowned. “Not a good sign for the future.”

“The answer to your question is yes. Now is indeed the time for concern,” Sifa said softly. “But that would be the case whether I was here or not.”

She tilted her head, and another Ogran woman—this one fair-skinned, dotted with freckles, and wearing bracelets that lit up a gentle white—stepped forward. The bracelets helped me to see her face when she gestured to me, whispering in Ettrek’s ear.

“Miss Noavek,” the Ogran woman said then, when her whispering was finished. Her eyes—as dark as my own—followed the currentshadows that now cradled my throat like a choking hand, and felt much the same. “My name is Yssa, and I have just heard from someone in our communications tower. We have received a call for you, from Assembly Headquarters.”

“For me?” I raised my eyebrows. “Surely you’re mistaken.”

“The recording was broadcast on the Assembly-wide news feed a few hours ago. That is as quickly as we can receive them on Ogra. Unfortunately, this one has a time limit,” she said. “The message is from Isae Benesit. If you wish to respond, you must be prepared to act immediately.”

“What?” I demanded. I felt a buzzing in my chest, like the hum of the current but stronger, more visceral. “I have to respond immediately?”

“Yes,” Yssa said. “Or you will not get back to her in time. Our communications delay is regrettable, but there is no way to bypass it. We can record you from here and send the footage up to the next satellite, which departs our atmosphere in just minutes. Otherwise we must wait another hour. Come with me, please.”

I reached for Akos’s hand. He gave it, and held on tight, and we followed Yssa through the crowd.

Yssa had the message cued to a screen on the far wall. It was as large as I was with my arms outstretched. She had me stand on a mark on the floor, shooed away everyone who was standing around me—including Akos—and turned on a light that cast my face in yellow. This was for the camera that would record my message, I assumed.

I had been instructed in matters of diplomacy by my mother, but only as a child. After her death, neither my father nor my brother had bothered to continue that part of my education. They had assumed—reasonably—that I would never need to know those things, weaponized girl that I was. I tried to remember what she had told me. Stand up straight. Speak clearly. Don’t be afraid to think about your answer—the pause feels longer to you than it does to them. That was all I could remember. It would have to be enough.

Isae Benesit appeared on the screen before me, larger now than she had ever been in life. Her face was uncovered—the disguise was unnecessary now that her sister had been killed, I assumed, and the two could no longer be confused for each other. The scars stood out from her skin, prominent but not garish. Though the rest of her face was painted with makeup, the scars had been left alone. At her insistence, I assumed.

Her black hair shone, pulled back from her face, and she wore a high-collared dress—I assumed, I could only see to her waist—made of a thick, black material that looked almost liquid. An off-center button shone gold against her throat. And there was a gold band around her forehead. A crown, of sorts, though the least ornamental one I had ever seen. This was not a chancellor who wanted to be associated with the abundance and wealth of Othyr. This chancellor led Osoc, Shissa, and most important, Hessa. The very heart of Thuvhe.

She appeared to have taken great pains not to appear pretty or delicate. She was striking, eyes lined in careful black, skin left to its usual olive tone without embellishment other than powder to limit its shine.

I, meanwhile, hadn’t had a proper bath in over a week, and I was wearing an ill-fitting jumpsuit.

Wonderful.

“This is Isae Benesit, Fated Chancellor of Thuvhe, speaking on behalf of the nation-planet of Thuvhe,” she began. The room went quiet around me. I squeezed my hands into fists at my sides. Pain raced through my body, sparking in my feet and spreading through my legs and around my abdomen.

I blinked tears away, and forced myself to focus, and stand as still as I could.

“This message is addressed to the successor of the so-called throne of Shotet,” she continued. “As Ryzek Noavek has been confirmed dead, by blood succession laws obeyed by the Shotet people themselves, it must be delivered to Cyra Noavek before the common break of day, measured on this day at 6:13 a.m.”

“The past few seasons have brought with them several acts of Shotet aggression: In one invasion, our falling oracle was killed, and our rising oracle was kidnapped. And just a few days ago, my sister, Orieve Benesit, was kidnapped and murdered in a public forum.”

She had practiced this statement. She had to have, because she didn’t so much as stumble over the words, though her eyes glittered with malice. Perhaps that was just my imagination.

“The escalation of these aggressive acts has become impossible to ignore. It must be met with strength.” She cleared her throat—quietly, just a brief moment of humanity. “What I will read to you now are the terms of Shotet surrender to Thuvhe.

“Item one: Shotet will disband its standing army and surrender all weapons to the Thuvhesit state.

“Item two: Shotet will surrender its sojourn ship to the Assembly of Nine Planets, and forgo the sojourn in favor of settlement in and around the area known as Voa, immediately north of the southern seas.

“Item three: Shotet will permit Thuvhesit and Assembly troops to occupy Shotet until such time as Shotet has been restored to order and peaceful cooperation with Assembly and Thuvhesit authority.

“Item four: Shotet will desist in referring to itself as a sovereign nation, and will instead acknowledge its belonging to the nation of Thuvhe.

“Item five: Shotet will pay reparations to all public facilities and families affected by Shotet aggression of the past one hundred seasons, on the planet of Thuvhe and abroad, in an amount to be determined at a later date by a committee of Assembly and Thuvhesit authorities.

“Item six: All Shotet identifying as ‘exiles’ of the Noavek regime will return to Thuvhe and settle at a location distinct from Voa, where they will be pardoned and granted full Thuvhesit citizenship.”

I felt like my entire body was curling into a fist, one finger at a time, squeezing blood from every knuckle. I hardly noticed the pain of my currentgift, though the shadows raced along my skin, at their deepest, densest black.

“You will respond to this message accepting these terms, or I will issue a declaration of war, at which point the blood of your own people will be on your hands,” Isae continued. “A response must be received by the common daybreak, measured on this day at 6:13 a.m., or your life will be assumed forfeit, and we will proceed to the next member of your family line. Transmission complete.”





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