"Why?" I said.
"What?"
"You've been nice to me recently." I furrowed my brow. "You're being nice to me now. Why? What's in it for you?"
"Growing up here really has warped you, hasn't it?"
"Growing up here," I clarified, "has made me see the truth about people."
He sighed, like he disagreed with me but didn't want to bother to argue. He sighed that way a lot. "We spend a lot of time together, Cyra. Being nice is a matter of survival."
"I'll be recognized. The currentshadows are memorable, even if my face is not."
"You won't have any currentshadows. You'll be with me." He cocked his head to the side. "Or are you really that uncomfortable with touching me?"
It was a challenge. And maybe a manipulation. But I imagined my skin being neutral in a dense crowd, people brushing up against me without feeling pain, smelling the sweat in the air, letting myself disappear among them. The last time I had been close to a crowd like that had been before my first sojourn, when my father hoisted me in the air. Even if Akos did have ulterior motives, maybe it was worth the risk, if I got to leave.
I put my hand in his.
A little while later we were back in the passages again, dressed in festival clothes. I wore a purple dress--not my mother's finery this time, but something cheap that I didn't mind ruining--and I had painted my face to disguise it, with a thick diagonal stripe that covered all of one eye and most of the other. I had bound my hair back tightly, painting it blue to keep it in place. Without the currentshadows, I wouldn't look like the Cyra Noavek that the city of Voa knew.
Akos was dressed in black and green, but since he wasn't recognizable, he hadn't bothered with any disguise.
When he saw me, he stared. For a long time.
I knew how I looked. My face was not a relief to the eyes, the way the faces of uncomplicated people were; it was a challenge, like the blinding color of the currentstream. How I looked wasn't important, particularly as my appearance was always obscured by the shifting veins of the current. But it was strange to see him notice at all.
"Put your eyes back in your head, Kereseth," I said. "You're embarrassing yourself."
Our arms clasped hand-to-elbow, I led him along the east edge of the house and down the stairs. I felt the beams for the carved circles that warned of secret exits. Like the one near the kitchens.
Feathergrass grew right up to the house there, and we had to push through it to reach the gate, which was locked with a code. I knew it. It was my mother's birthday. All of Ryzek's codes were related to my mother in some way--the day of her birth, the day of her death, my parents' wedding day, her favorite numbers--except closest to his rooms, where the doors were locked with Noavek blood. I didn't go near there, didn't spend more time with him than I had to.
I felt Akos's eyes on my hand as I typed in the code. But it was only the back gate.
We walked down a narrow alley that opened up to one of the main thoroughfares of Voa. My body clenched, for a moment, as a man's eyes lingered on my face. And a woman's. And a child's. Everywhere eyes caught mine and then shifted away.
I grabbed Akos's arm, and pulled him in to whisper, "They're staring. They know who I am."
"No," he said. "They're staring because you've got bright blue paint all over your face."
I touched my cheek, lightly, where the paint had dried. My skin felt rough and scaly. It hadn't occurred to me that today it meant nothing if people stared at me.
"You're kind of paranoid, you know that?" he said to me.
"And you're starting to sound kind of cocky, for someone I routinely beat up."
He laughed. "So where do we go?"
"I know a place," I said. "Come on."
I led him down a less crowded street on the left, away from the city's center. The air was full of dust, but soon the sojourn ship would launch, and we would have our storm. It would wash the city clean, stain it blue.
The official, government-sanctioned festival activities took place in and around the amphitheater in the center of Voa, but that wasn't the only place where people celebrated. As we dodged elbows on a narrow street where the buildings fell together like lovers, there were people dancing, singing. A woman adorned with fake jewels stopped me with a hand, a luxury I had never enjoyed; it almost made me shiver. She set a crown of fenzu flowers--named so because they were the same color as the insects' wings, blue gray--on my head, grinning.
We turned into a crowded marketplace. Everywhere there were low tents or booths with worn awnings, people arguing and young women touching their fingers to necklaces they couldn't afford. Weaving through the crowd were Shotet soldiers, their armor shining in the daylight. I smelled cooked meat and smoke, and turned to smile at Akos.
His expression was strange. Confused, almost, like this was not a Shotet he had ever imagined.
We walked hand in hand down the aisle between the booths. I paused at a table of plain knives--their blades weren't made of channeling material, so the current wouldn't flow around them--with carved handles.
"Does the lady know how to handle a plain knife?" the old man at the booth asked me in Shotet. He wore the heavy gray robes of a Zoldan religious leader, with long, loose sleeves. Religious Zoldans used plain knives because they believed currentblades were a frivolous use of the current, which deserved more respect--the same basic belief as the most religious Shotet. But unlike a Shotet religious leader, this man would not find his religious practice in the everyday, reworking the world around him. He was likely an ascetic; he withdrew, instead.
"Better than you," I said to him in Zoldan. I spoke Zoldan poorly--a generous way of putting it--but I was happy to practice.
"That right?" He laughed. "Your accent is horrible."
"Hey!" A Shotet soldier approached us, and tapped the tip of his currentblade against the old man's table. The Zoldan man regarded the weapon with disgust. "Shotet language only. If she talks back in your tongue . . ." The soldier grunted a little. "It would not turn out well for her."
I ducked my head so the soldier wouldn't look too carefully at my face.
The Zoldan man said in clumsy Shotet, "I'm sorry. The fault was mine."
The soldier held his knife there for a moment, puffing up his chest like he was displaying mating feathers. Then he sheathed his weapon, and kept walking through the crowd.
The old man turned back to me, his tone now more businesslike: "These are the best weighted ones you'll find in the square--"
He talked to me about how the knives were made--from metal forged in the northern pole of Zold, and reclaimed wood from old houses in Zoldia City--and part of me was listening, but the other part was with Akos as he stared out at the square.
I bought a dagger from the old man, a sturdy one with a dark blade and a handle built for long fingers. I offered it to Akos.
"From Zold," I said. "It's a strange place, half covered in gray dust from fields of flowers. Takes some getting used to. But the metal is strangely flexible, despite being so strong . . . what? What is it?"
"All of this stuff," he said, gesturing to the square itself. "It's from other planets?"
"Yeah." My palm was sweaty where it pressed against his. "Extraplanetary vendors are allowed to sell in Voa during the Sojourn Festival. Some of it is scavenged, of course--or we wouldn't be Shotet. Repurposing the discarded, and all that."
He had stopped in the middle of everything and turned toward me.
"Do you know where it's all from just by looking at it? Have you been to all these places?" he said.
I scanned the market, once. Some of the vendors were covered head to toe in fabric, some bright and some dull; some wore tall headpieces to draw attention to themselves, or spoke in loud, chattering Shotet I hardly understood, because of the accents. Lights erupted from a booth at the end, showering the air in sparks that disappeared as quickly as they came. The woman standing behind it almost glowed for all the fair skin she showed. Another stand was surrounded by a
cloud of insects so dense I could hardly see the man sitting at it. What use did anyone have for a swarm of insects, I wondered.
"All nine Assembly nation-planets," I said with a nod. "But no, I can't tell where it's all from. Some of it, though, is obvious. Look at this--"
Standing on a nearby counter was a delicate instrument. It was an abstract shape, different from every angle, composed of tiny panes of an iridescent material that felt like something between glass and stone.
"Synthetic," I said. "Everything from Pitha is, since it's covered in water. They import materials from their neighbors and combine them. . . ."
I tapped one of the tiny panes, and a sound like thunder came from the belly of the instrument. I ran my fingers over the rest, and they left music in their wake like waves. The melody was light, like my touch had been, but when I flicked one of the glass panels, drums sounded. Each panel seemed to glow with some kind of internal light.
"It's supposed to simulate the sound of water for homesick travelers," I said.
When I looked at him again, he was smiling at me hesitantly.
"You love them," he said. "All these places, all these things."
"Yeah," I said. I had never thought of it that way. "I guess I do."
"What about Thuvhe?" he said. "Do you love it, too?"
When he said the name of his home, comfortable with the slippery syllables that I would have stumbled over, it was easier to remember that though he spoke Shotet fluently, he was not one of us, not really. He had grown up encased in frost, his house lit by burnstones. He probably still dreamt in Thuvhesit.
"Thuvhe," I repeated. I had never been to the frozen country in the north, but I had studied their language and culture. I had seen pictures and footage. "Iceflowers and buildings made of leaded glass." They were people who loved intricate, geometric patterns, and bright colors that stood out in the snow. "Floating cities and endless white. Yes, there are things I love about Thuvhe."
He looked suddenly stricken. I wondered if I had made him homesick.
He took the dagger that I had offered him and looked it over, testing the blade with his fingertip and wrapping his hand around the handle.
"You handed over this weapon so easily," he said. "But I could use this against you, Cyra."
"You could try to use it against me," I corrected him quietly. "But I don't think you will."
"I think you might be lying to yourself about what I am."
He was right. Sometimes it was too easy to forget that he was a prisoner in my house, and that when I was with him, I was serving as a kind of warden.
But if I let him escape right now, to try to get his brother home, as he wanted, I would be resigning myself to a lifetime of agony again. Even as I thought it, I couldn't bear it. It was too many seasons, too many Uzul Zetsyvises, too many veiled threats from Ryzek and half-drunk evenings at his side.
I started down the aisle again. "Time to visit the Storyteller."
While my father had been busy shaping Ryzek into a monster, my education had been in Otega's hands. Every so often she had dressed me head to toe in heavy fabric, to disguise the shadows that burned me, and taken me to parts of the city my parents would never have allowed me to go.
This place was one of them. It was deep in one of the poorer areas of Voa, where half the buildings were caving in and the others looked like they were about to. There were markets here, too, but they were more temporary, just rows of things arranged on blankets, so they could be gathered and carried away at a moment's notice.
Akos drew me in by my elbow as we walked past one of them, a purple blanket with white bottles on it. They had glue from peeled-off labels still on them, attracting purple fuzz.
"Is that medicine?" he asked me. "Those look like they're from Othyr."
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
"For what ailment?" he asked.
"Q900X," I replied. "Known more colloquially as 'chills and spills.' You know, because it affects balance."
He frowned at me. We paused there in the alley, the festival sounds far off. "That disease is preventable. You don't inoculate against it?"
"You understand that we are a poor country, right?" I frowned back at him. "We have no real exports, and hardly enough natural resources to sustain ourselves independently. Some other planets send aid--Othyr, among them--but that aid falls into the wrong hands, and is distributed based on status rather than need."
"I never . . ." He paused. "I've never thought about it before."
"Why would you?" I said. "It's not high on Thuvhe's list of concerns."
"I grew up wealthy in a poor place, too," he said. "That's something we have in common."
He seemed surprised that we would have anything in common at all.
"There's nothing you can do for these people?" he said, gesturing to the buildings around us. "You're Ryzek's sister, can't you--"
"He doesn't listen to me," I said, defensive.
"You've tried?"
"You say that like it's easy." My face felt warm. "Just have a meeting with my brother and tell him to rearrange his whole system and he'll do it."
"I didn't say it was easy--"
"High-status Shotet are my brother's insulation against an uprising," I said, even more heated now. "And in exchange for their loyalty, he gives them medicine, food, and the trappings of wealth that the others don't get. Without them as his insulation, he will die. And with my Noavek blood, I die with him. So no . . . no, I have not embarked on some grand mission to save the sick and the poor of Shotet!"
I sounded angry, but inside I was shriveling from the shame of it. I had almost thrown up the first time Otega brought me here, from the smell of a starved body in one of the alleys. She had covered my eyes as we walked past it, so I couldn't get a close look. That was me: Ryzek's Scourge, combat virtuoso, driven to vomit by the sight of death alone.
"I shouldn't have brought it up," he said, his hand gentle on my arm. "Let's go. Let's go visit this . . . storyteller."
I nodded, and we kept walking.
Buried deep in the maze of narrow alleys was a low doorway painted with intricate blue patterns. I knocked, and it creaked open, just enough to emit a tendril of white smoke that smelled like burnt sugar.
This place felt like an exhale; it felt sacred. In a sense, maybe it was. This was where Otega had first taken me to learn our history, many seasons ago, on the first day of the Sojourn Festival.
A tall, pale man opened the door, his hair shaved so close his scalp shone. He lifted his hands and smiled.
"Ah, Little Noavek," he said. "I didn't think I would see you again. And who have you brought me?"
"This is Akos," I said. "Akos, this is the Storyteller. At least, that's what he prefers to be called."
"Hello," Akos said. I could tell he was nervous by the way his posture changed, the soldier in him disappearing. The Storyteller's smile spread, and he beckoned us in.
We stepped down into the Storyteller's living room. Akos hunched to fit under the curved ceiling, which arched to a globe of bright fenzu at its apex. There was a rusted stove with an exhaust pipe stretching to the room's only window, to let out smoke. I knew the floors were made of hard-packed dirt because I had peeked under the bland, woven rugs as a child to see what was beneath them. The hard fibers had made my legs itch.
The Storyteller directed us to a pile of cushions, where we settled, a little awkwardly, our hands gripped between us. I let go of Akos to wipe my palm on my dress, and as the currentshadows flushed back into my body, the Storyteller smiled again.
"There they are," he said. "I almost didn't recognize you without them, Little Noavek."
He set a metal pot on the table before us--really two footstools bolted together, one metal and one wood--and a pair of mismatched, glazed mugs. I poured the tea for us. It was pale purple, almost pink, and accounted for the sweet smell in the air.
The Storyteller sat across from us. The white paint on the wall above his head was flakin
g, revealing yellow paint beneath it, from another time. Yet even here was the ever-present news screen, fixed crookedly on the wall next to the stove. This place was full to bursting with scavenged objects, the dark metal teapot clearly Tepessar, the stove grate made of Pithar flooring, and the Storyteller's clothing itself silky as any of Othyr's wealthy. In the corner there was a chair, its origin unfamiliar to me, that the Storyteller was in the middle of repairing.
"Your companion--Akos, was it?--smells of hushflower," the Storyteller said, for the first time furrowing his brow.
"He is Thuvhesit," I said. "He means no disrespect."
"Disrespect?" Akos said.
"Yes, I do not permit people who have recently ingested hushflower, or any other current-altering substance, into my home," the Storyteller said. "Though they are welcome to return once it has passed through their system. I am not in the habit of rejecting visitors outright, after all."
"The Storyteller is a Shotet religious leader," I said to Akos. "We call them clerics."
"He is a Thuvhesit, truly?" The Storyteller frowned, and closed his eyes. "Surely you are mistaken, sir. You speak our sacred language like a native."
"I think I know my own home," Akos replied testily. "My own identity."
"I meant no offense," the Storyteller said. "But your name is Akos, which is a Shotet name, so you can see why I am confused. Thuvhesit parents would not give their child a name with such a hard sound in it without purpose. What are your siblings' names, for example?"
"Eijeh," Akos said breathily. Obviously he hadn't thought about this before. "And Cisi."
His hand tightened around mine. I didn't think he was aware of it.
"Well, no matter," the Storyteller said. "Obviously you have come here with a purpose, and you don't have much time before the storm for it to be accomplished, so we will move on. Little Noavek, to what do I owe this visit?"
"I thought you could tell Akos the story you told me as a child," I said. "I'm not good at telling stories, myself."
"Yes, I can see that being the case." The Storyteller picked up his own mug from the floor by his feet, which were bare. The air had been crisp outside, but in here it was warm, almost stifling. "As to the story, it doesn't really have a beginning. We didn't realize our language was revelatory, carried in the blood, because we were always together, moving as one through the galaxy as wanderers. We had no home, no permanence. We followed the current around the galaxy, wherever it saw fit to lead us. This, we believed, was our obligation, our mission."