For a moment I ached at the thought. But only for a moment.
"Don't try to absolve me of guilt." I meant to sound sharp, like I was scolding him, but instead I sounded like I was pleading with him. I cleared my throat. "Okay? It doesn't make it better."
"Okay," he said.
"You were taught this ritual?" I asked him.
He nodded.
"Carve the mark," I said, my throat tight.
I extended my arm, pointing to a square of bare skin on the back of my wrist, beneath the knobby bone. He touched the knifepoint there, adjusted it so it was at the same interval as the other marks, then dug in. Not too deep, but enough that the feathergrass extract could settle.
Tears came to my eyes, unwelcome, and blood bubbled up from the wound. It dripped down the side of my arm as I fumbled in one of the kitchen drawers for the right bottle. He took out the cork, and I dipped the little brush I kept with it. I spoke Lety Zetsyvis's name as I painted the line he had carved with dark fluid.
It burned. Every time, I thought I would be used to how much it burned, and every time, I was wrong. It was supposed to burn, supposed to remind you that it was no trifling thing, to take a life, to carve a loss.
"You don't say the other words?" Akos said. He was referring to the prayer, the end of the ritual. I shook my head.
"I don't either," he said.
As the burning subsided, Akos wrapped the bandage around my arm, once, twice, three times, and secured it with a piece of tape. Neither of us bothered to clean up the blood on the table. It would probably dry there, and I would have to scrape it off with a knife later, but I didn't care.
I climbed the rope to the room above us, past the plants preserved in resin and the mechanical beetles perched among them, recharging for the moment. Akos followed me.
The sojourn ship was shuddering, its engines preparing to launch into the atmosphere. The ceiling of the room above us was covered with screens that showed whatever was above us--in this case, the Shotet sky. Pipes and vents crowded the space from all sides--it was only big enough for one person to move around in, really, but along the back wall were emergency jump seats, folded into the wall. I pulled them out, and Akos and I sat.
I helped him fasten the straps across his chest and legs that would keep him steady during launch, and handed him a paper bag in case the ship's movement made him sick. Then I strapped myself in. All through the ship, the rest of the Shotet would be doing the same thing, gathering in the hallways to pull jump seats from the walls and buckling each other in.
Together we waited for the ship to launch, listening to the countdown on the intercom. When the voice reached "ten," Akos reached for my hand, and I squeezed, hard, until the voice said "one."
The Shotet clouds rushed past us, and the force bore down on us, crushing us into our seats. Akos groaned, but I just watched as the clouds moved away and the blue atmosphere faded into the blackness of space. All around us was the starry sky.
"See?" I said, lacing my fingers with his. "It's beautiful."
CHAPTER 14: CYRA
A KNOCK CAME AT my door that night as I was lying in bed in my sojourn ship quarters, face buried in a pillow. I dragged myself up one limb at a time to answer it. There were two soldiers waiting in the hallway, one male and one female, both slim. Sometimes a person's school of combat was obvious just from a glance--these were students of zivatahak, fast and deadly. And they were afraid of me. No wonder.
Akos stumbled into the kitchen to stand beside me. The two soldiers exchanged a knowing look, and I remembered what Otega had said about Shotet mouths loving to chatter. There was no avoiding it: Akos and I lived in close proximity, so there was bound to be talk about what we were, and what we did behind closed doors. I didn't care enough to discourage it. Better to be talked about for that than for murdering and torturing, anyway.
"We are sorry to disturb you, Miss Noavek. The sovereign needs to speak to you right away," the woman said. "Alone."
Ryzek's office on the sojourn ship was like his office in Voa, in miniature. The dark wood that comprised the floor and wall panels, polished to perfection, was native to Shotet--it grew in dense forests across our planet's equator, dividing us from the Thuvhesits who had invaded the north centuries ago. In the wild, the fenzu we now kept trapped in the orb chandelier hummed in the treetops, but because most older Shotet houses used them for light, the Zetsyvis family--now helmed by Yma alone--ensured that farmed fenzu were available in large numbers for those willing to pay the high price for them. And Ryzek was--he insisted their glow was more pleasant than burnstones, though I didn't see much of a difference.
When I walked in, Ryzek was standing in front of a large screen he usually kept hidden behind a sliding panel. It displayed a dense paragraph of text; it took me a few beats to realize that he was reading a transcript of the Assembly Leader's announcement of the fates. Nine lines of nine families, spread across the galaxy, their members' paths predetermined and unalterable. Ryzek usually avoided all references to his "weakness," as my father had called it, the fate that had haunted him since his birth: that he would fall to the family Benesit. It was illegal in Shotet to speak of it or to read it, punishable by imprisonment or even execution.
If he was reading the fates, he was not in a good mood, and most of the time, that meant I should tread lightly. But tonight, I wondered why I should bother.
Ryzek folded his arms, and tilted his head, and spoke.
"You don't know how lucky you are, that your fate is so ambiguous," he said. "'The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide.' For what purpose will you cross the Divide to Thuvhe?" He lifted a shoulder. "No one knows or cares. Lucky, lucky."
I laughed. "Am I?"
"That is why it's so important that you help me," Ryzek went on, like he hadn't heard me. "You can afford to. You don't need to fight so hard against what the world expects from you."
Ryzek had been weighing his life against mine since I was a child. That I was in constant pain, that I could not get close to anyone, that I had experienced deep loss just as he had, didn't seem to register in his mind. All he saw was that our father had ignored me rather than subjecting me to horrors, and that my fate didn't make the Shotet doubt my strength. To him, I was the lucky child, and there was no point in arguing about it.
"What happened, Ryzek?"
"You mean aside from all of Shotet being reminded of my ridiculous fate by Lety Zetsyvis?"
At the mention of her, I shuddered involuntarily, remembering how warm her skin had been as she died. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them from trembling. Akos's painkiller didn't suppress the shadows completely; they moved, sluggish now, beneath my skin, bringing with them a sharp ache.
"But you were ready for that," I said, fixing my eyes on his chin. "No one would dare repeat what she said now."
"It's not just that," Ryzek said, and I heard in his voice a reminder of what he had sounded like when he was younger, before my father sank in his teeth. "I followed the trail from Uzul Zetsyvis's confession to an actual source. There is a colony of exiles somewhere out there. Maybe more than one. And they have contacts among us."
I felt a thrill in my chest. So the rumor of the exile colony had been confirmed. For the first time, the colony represented to me not a threat, but something like . . . hope.
"One display of strength is good, but we need more. We need there to be no doubt that I am in command, and that we will return from this sojourn even more powerful than before." He let his hand hover over my shoulder. "I will need your help now more than ever, Cyra."
I know what you want, I thought. He wanted to root out every doubt and every whisper against him and crush them. And I was supposed to be the tool he used to do that. Ryzek's Scourge.
I closed my eyes briefly as memories of Lety came to me. I stifled them.
"Please, sit." He gestured to one of the chairs set up near the screen. They were old, with stitched upholstery. I recognized them from my
father's old office. The rug beneath them was Shotet-made, of rough woven grasses. In fact, nothing in the room was scavenged--my father had hated the practice, said it made us weak and needed to be gradually abandoned, and Ryzek seemed to agree. I was the only one left with an affinity for other people's garbage.
I sat on the edge of the chair, the fates of the favored lines glowing next to my head. Ryzek didn't sit across from me. Instead, he stood behind the other chair, braced against its high back. He had rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, displaying the marks.
He tapped his crooked index finger against one of the fates on the screen, so the words grew larger.
The fates of the family Benesit are as follows:
The first child of the family Benesit will raise her double to power.
The second child of the family Benesit will reign over Thuvhe.
"I have heard mutterings that this second child"--he tapped the second fate, his knuckle brushing the word reign--"will soon declare herself, and that she is Thuvhesit-born," Ryzek said. "I can't ignore the fates any longer--whoever this Benesit child is, the fates say she will be the ruler of Thuvhe, and responsible for my undoing." I hadn't quite put the pieces together before. Ryzek's fate was to fall to the family Benesit, and the family Benesit was fated to rule Thuvhe. Of course he was fixating on them, now that he had his oracle.
"My intention," he added, "is to kill her before that happens, with the help of our new oracle."
I stared at the fate written on the screen. All my life I had been taught that every fate would be fulfilled, no matter what anyone tried to do to stop it. But that was exactly what he was proposing: he wanted to thwart his own fate by killing the one who was supposed to bring it about. And he had Eijeh to tell him how.
"That's . . . that's impossible," I said, before I could stop myself.
"Impossible?" He raised his eyebrows. "Why? Because no one has managed to do it?" His hands clenched around the chair back. "You think that I, of all the people in the galaxy, can't be the first to defy his fate?"
"That's not what I meant," I said, trying to stay controlled in the face of his anger. "All I meant was that I've never heard of it happening, that's all."
"You soon will," he snapped, his face twisting into a scowl. "And you're going to help me."
I thought, suddenly, of Akos thanking me for the way I arranged his room, when we got to the sojourn ship. His calm expression as he took in my marked arm. The way he laughed when we chased each other through the blue sojourn rain. Those were the first moments of relief I had experienced since my mother died. And I wanted more of them. And less of . . . this.
"No," I said. "I won't."
His old threat--that if I didn't do as he said, he would tell the Shotet what I had done to my beloved mother--no longer frightened me. This time, he had made a mistake: he had confessed to needing my help.
I crossed one leg over another, and folded my hands over my knee.
"Before you threaten me, let me say this: I don't think that you would risk losing me right now," I said. "Not after trying so hard to make sure that they are terrified of me."
That was what the challenge with Lety had been, after all: a demonstration of power. His power.
But that power actually belonged to me.
Ryzek had been learning to imitate our father ever since he was a child, and my father had been excellent at hiding his reactions. He had believed that any uncontrolled expression made him vulnerable; he had been aware that he was always being watched, no matter where he was. Ryzek had gotten better at this skill since his youth, but he was still not a master of it. As I stared at him, unblinking, his face contorted. Angry. And afraid.
"I don't need you, Cyra," he said, quiet.
"That isn't true," I said, coming to my feet. "But even if it was true . . . you should remember what would happen if I decided to lay a hand on you."
I showed him my palm, willing my currentgift to surface. For once, it came at my call, rippling across my body and--for a moment--wrapping around each of my fingers like black threads. Ryzek's eyes were drawn to it, seemingly without permission.
"I will continue to play the part of your loyal sister, of this fearsome thing," I said. "But I will not cause pain for you anymore."
With that, I turned. I moved toward the door, my heart pounding, hard.
"Careful," Ryzek said as I walked away. "You may regret this moment."
"I doubt it," I said, without turning around. "After all, I'm not the one who's afraid of pain."
"I am not," he said tersely, "afraid of pain."
"Oh?" I turned back. "Come over here and take my hand, then."
I offered it to him, palm up and shadow-stained, my face twitching from the pain that still lingered. Ryzek didn't budge.
"Thought so," I said, and I left.
When I returned to my room, Akos sat on the bed with the book on elmetahak on his lap, the translator glowing over one of the pages. He looked up at me with furrowed eyebrows. The scar along his jaw was still dark in color, its line perfectly straight as it followed his jaw. It would pale, in time, fading into his skin.
I walked into the bathroom to splash water on my face.
"What did he do to you?" Akos said as he slumped against the bathroom wall, next to the sink.
I splashed my face again, then leaned over the sink. Water rolled down my cheeks and over my eyelids and dripped into the basin beneath me. I stared at my reflection, eyes wild, jaw tensed.
"He didn't do anything," I said, grabbing a cloth from the rack next to the sink and dragging it over my face. My smile was almost a grimace of fear. "He didn't do anything, because I didn't let him. He threatened me, and I . . . I threatened him back."
The webs of dark color were dense on my hands and arms, like splatters of black paint. I sat in one of the kitchen chairs and laughed. I laughed from my belly, laughed until I felt warm all over. I had never stood up to Ryzek before. The cord of shame curled up in my belly unspooled a little. I was not quite as complicit anymore.
Akos sat across from me.
"What . . . what does this mean?" he said.
"It means he leaves us alone," I said. "I . . ." My hands trembled. "I don't know why I'm so . . ."
Akos covered my hands with his own. "You just threatened the most powerful person in the country. I think it's okay to be a little shaken."
His hands weren't much larger than mine, though thicker through the knuckles, with tendons that stood out all the way to his wrists. I could see blue-green veins through his skin, which was much paler than my own. Almost like those rumors about Thuvhesits having thin skin were true, except that whatever Akos was, it wasn't weak.
I slipped my hands out of his.
Now, with Ryzek out of the way, and Akos here, I wondered how we would both fill our days. I was used to spending sojourns alone. There was still something splattered on the side of the stove from the last sojourn, when I had cooked for myself every night, experimenting with ingredients from different planets--unsuccessfully, most of the time, since I had no talent for cooking. I had spent my nights watching footage from other places, imagining lives other than my own.
He crossed the room to get a glass from the cupboard and fill it with water from the faucet. I tilted my head back to look at the plants that hung above our heads, shining in their resin cages. Some of them glowed when the lights were out; others would decay, even in resin, withering into bright colors. I had been watching them for three sojourns already.
Akos wiped his mouth and set the glass down.
"I figured it out," he said. "A reason to keep going, I mean."
He flexed his left arm, where his first kill mark was etched.
"Oh?"
"Yeah." His head bobbed. "Something Ryzek said kept bothering me . . . that he would make Eijeh into someone I didn't want to rescue. Well, I decided that's impossible." Days ago he had looked empty to me, and now full, an overflowing cup. "There's no version of Eijeh that I don't w
ant to rescue from him."
This was the cost of the same softness that had made him look at me with sympathy earlier that day instead of disgust: madness. To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.
"You don't make any sense to me," I said to him. "It's like the more terrible things you find out about a person, or the more terrible a person is to you, the kinder you are to them. It's masochism."
"Says the person who's been scarring herself for things she was coerced into doing," he said wryly.
It wasn't funny, what either of us was saying. And then it was. I grinned, and after a moment, so did he. A new grin--not the one that told me he was proud of himself, or the one that he forced when he felt like he needed to be polite, but a thirsty, crazed kind of smile.
"You really don't hate me for this," I said, lifting up my left arm.
"No, I don't."
I had experienced only a few different reactions to what I was, what I could do. Hatred, from those who had suffered at my hand; fear, from those who hadn't but might; and glee, from those capable of using me for it. I had never seen this before. It was almost like he understood.
"You don't hate me at all," I said in almost a whisper, afraid to hear the answer.
But his answer came steadily, like it was obvious to him: "No."
I found, then, that I wasn't angry anymore about what he had done to me, to get Eijeh out. He had done it because of the same quality, in him, that made him so accepting of me now. How could I fault him for it?
"All right." I sighed. "Be up early tomorrow, because we'll need to train harder if you expect to get your brother out of here."
His water glass was marked with fingerprints around the base. I took it from him.
He frowned at me. "You'll help me? Even after what I did to you?"
"Yeah." I drained the water glass, and set it back down. "I guess I will."
CHAPTER 15: AKOS
AKOS RAN THROUGH THE memory of his almost-escape with Eijeh over and over again:
He'd run through the corridors in the walls of the Noavek house, stopping where the walls joined to peek through cracks and figure out where he was. He had spent a long time in the dark, gulping dust and catching splinters in his fingers.