Carve the Mark

  Maybe I could change. Maybe I was changing, just by believing I could.

  I thought of the one-eyed woman I had let go, the day of the attack. Her small frame, her distinct movements. If I wanted to, I could find her, I was sure of it.

  "A small sacrifice for the good of your brother's regime." Yma bobbed her head. "We must all make sacrifices for our own good."

  I turned to her. "What kind of sacrifices have you made?"

  She seized my wrist and squeezed it hard. Harder than I thought her capable of. Though I knew my currentgift must be burning into her, she didn't let go, drawing me closer to her, so I could smell her breath.

  "I have denied myself the pleasure of watching you bleed to death," she whispered.

  She released me and moved back toward the group, sashaying as she went. Her long pale hair hung to the middle of her back, perfectly straight. She was like a pillar of white from behind, even her dress such a light blue it almost matched.

  I rubbed my wrist, my skin red from her grasp. I would bruise, I was sure of it.

  The clatter of pans stopped when I walked into the kitchens. A smaller selection of our staff worked on the sojourn ship than in Noavek manor, but I recognized some of the faces. And the gifts, too--one of the scrubbers was making the pots float, suds dripping on the backs of his hands, and one of the choppers was doing the task with her eyes closed, the knife strokes clean and even.

  Otega had her head in the coldbox. When silence fell, she straightened, and wiped her hands off on her apron.

  "Ah, Cyra," she said. "No one makes a room quiet like you."

  The other staff stared openly at her for her familiarity, but I only laughed a little. Even when I hadn't seen her in a while--I had surpassed her capacity to teach me last season; now we saw each other only rarely, in passing--she fell back into our old rhythms without trouble.

  "It's a unique talent," I replied. "Can I speak with you in private, please?"

  "You phrase it like a question when it's really an order," Otega said, waggling her eyebrows. "Follow me. I trust you don't mind chatting in the garbage closet."

  "Mind? I've always wanted to spend time in a garbage closet," I said, wry, and followed her through the narrow galley to a door in the back.

  The stink in the closet was so powerful it made my eyes water. From what I could tell, it came from rotten fruit skins and old meat rinds dusted with herbs. There was only enough space for two of us, standing close together. Beside us was the huge door that opened to a trash incinerator; it was hot, which only made the stench worse.

  I breathed through my mouth, aware, suddenly, of how soft-palmed I looked to her, how spoiled. My fingernails always clean, my white shirt still bright. And Otega, covered in food splatter, with the look of a woman who was supposed to be stockier but hadn't gotten enough food to become so.

  "What can I do for you, Cyra?"

  "How do you feel about doing me a favor?"

  "Depends on the favor."

  "It would involve lying to my brother if he ever asks you about it."

  Otega crossed her arms. "What could you want that would involve lying to Ryzek?"

  I sighed. I took the renegade's knife from my pocket and held it out to her.

  "During the renegade attack," I said, "an attempt was made against my life in an isolated hallway. I overpowered her, but then I . . . let her go."

  "Why the hell did you do that?" she said. "As the current flows, girl, even your mother wasn't that kind."

  "I don't--it doesn't matter." I turned the knife in my hand. The tape that made up the handle was light and springy, bent according to its owner's fingers. She had a much smaller hand than I did. "But I want to find her. She dropped this, and I knew you could use it to find her."

  Otega's currentgift was one of the most mysterious I had encountered. Given an object, she could trace the person who owned it. My parents had asked her to find the owners of weapons that way. Once she had even located someone who tried to poison my father. Sometimes the trails were difficult to read, she said, like when two or three different owners called an object theirs, but she was adept at interpreting them. If anyone could find my renegade, it was her.

  "And you don't want your brother to know about it," she said.

  "You know what my brother would do to her," I said. "And the execution would be the kindest part."

  Otega pursed her lips. I thought of her deft fingers in my hair, pulling it into braids under my mother's supervision before my first Procession. The snap of my bloody sheets as she pulled them from my mattress, the day my cycles began and my mother was not alive to help me.

  "You aren't going to tell me why you want to find her, are you."

  "No," I said.

  "Does it involve seeking your own revenge?"

  "See, answering that would be a form of telling you why I want to find her, which I just said I wouldn't do." I smiled. "Come on, Otega. You know I can take care of myself. I'm just not as harsh as my brother."

  "Fine, fine." She took the knife from me. "I'll need to spend a little time with it. Come back here right before curfew tomorrow, I'll take you to its owner then."

  "Thank you."

  She guided a loose strand of hair behind my ear, and smiled a little, to disguise her wince at touching me.

  "You're not so scary, girl," she said. "Don't worry. I won't tell my staff."

  CHAPTER 17: AKOS

  NOT MANY STARS WERE out on the edge of the galaxy. Cyra loved it, he could tell by how calm the currentshadows were when she stared out the window. It made him shiver, all that space, all that dark. But they were getting close to the edge of the currentstream, so there was a little purple at the corner of the hologram in the ceiling.

  Pitha wasn't the planet the current had led them to. Cyra and Akos had seen that, the day they went to see the Examiners--who had been thinking of Ogra, or even P1104. But apparently Ryzek saw the ruling of the Examiners as a formality only. He'd picked the planet that offered him the most useful alliance, Cyra said.

  She had a distinct knock, four light taps. He knew it was her in the doorway without looking up.

  "We should hurry, or we'll miss it," she said.

  "You realize you're being intentionally vague, right?" Akos said with a smile. "You still haven't told me what 'it' is."

  "I do realize that, yes." She returned the smile.

  She was wearing a muted blue dress with sleeves that stopped just above the elbow, so when Akos's hand swung forward to grab her arm, he made sure his grip settled where the fabric stopped. The color of the dress didn't really suit her, he thought. She'd looked more like herself in purple during the Sojourn Festival, or in dark training clothes. But then again, there wasn't much Cyra Noavek could do to take away from her looks, and he was pretty sure she knew that.

  No point in denying the obvious, after all.

  They walked fast through the hallways, taking a different path than Akos had ever walked before. The signs, fixed to the walls wherever the hallways broke apart, said they were going to the nav deck. They climbed some narrow stairs, and Cyra stuck her hand in a slot in the wall at the top. Two heavy doors opened. A wall of glass greeted him.

  And beyond it: space. Stars. Planets.

  And the currentstream, getting bigger and brighter by the second.

  Dozens of people worked at rows of screens just in front of the glass. Their uniforms were clean and looked a little like Shotet armor: darkest blue, bulky through the shoulders, but with flexible fabric instead of hard Armored One skin. One of the older men spotted Cyra and bowed to her.

  "Miss Noavek," he said. "I was beginning to think I wouldn't see you this time."

  "I wouldn't miss it, Navigator Zyvo," Cyra said. To Akos, she added, "I've been coming here since I was a child. Zyvo, this is Akos Kereseth."

  "Ah yes," the older man said. "I've heard one or two stories about you, Kereseth."

  Judging by his tone, Akos was sure he meant much more than "one or two" stor
ies, and it made him nervous enough to flush.

  "Shotet mouths love chatter," Cyra said to him. "Especially about the fate-favored."

  "Right," Akos managed to say. Fate-favored--he was that, wasn't he? It sounded stupid to him now.

  "You can take your usual place, Miss Noavek," Zyvo said, throwing out a hand toward the wall of glass. It dwarfed them easily, curving over their heads with the roof of the ship.

  Cyra led the way to a spot in front of all the screens. All around them the crew was shouting directions or numbers at each other. Akos had no idea what to make of any of it. Cyra sat right on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  "What are we here for, anyway?"

  "Soon the ship will pass through the currentstream," she said, grinning. "You've never seen anything like it, I promise you. Ryzek will be on the observation deck with his closest supporters, but I get to come here, instead, so I don't scream in front of his guests. It can get kind of . . . intense. You'll see."

  From this distance, the currentstream looked like a thunderhead, swollen with color instead of rain. Everybody in the galaxy agreed it existed--pretty hard to deny something that was plainly visible from every single planet's surface--but it meant different things to different people. Akos's parents had talked about it like it was a spiritual guide they didn't fully understand, but he knew a lot of the Shotet worshipped it, or something higher that directed it, depending on the sect. Some people thought it was just a natural phenomenon, nothing spiritual about it at all. Akos had never asked Cyra what she thought.

  He was about to when somebody called out, "Prepare yourselves!"

  All around him people grabbed whatever they could hang on to. The thunderhead of currentstream filled the glass in front of him, and then, almost as one, everybody but Akos gasped. Every inch of Cyra's skin went black as space. Her teeth, which looked white against her currentgift, were gritted, but it almost looked like she was smiling. Akos reached for her, but she shook her head.

  Swirls of rich blue filled the glass. There were veins of lighter color, too, and almost-purple, and deep navy. The currentstream was huge and bright and everywhere, everywhere. Like being wrapped up in the arms of a god.

  Some people had their hands stretched out in worship; others were on their knees; still others, clutching their chests, or stomachs. One man's hands glowed as blue as the currentstream itself; small orbs, like fenzu, swam around a woman's head. Currentgifts run amok.

  Akos thought of the Blooming. Thuvhesits weren't as . . . expressive as the Shotet during their rites, but the sense of it was the same. Gathering to celebrate something that happened only to them, of all people in the galaxy, and only at a certain time. The reverence they had for it, for its particular sort of beauty.

  Everybody knew the Shotet followed the currentstream around space as an act of faith, but until then, Akos hadn't understood why, except maybe that they felt like they had to. But once you saw this up close, he thought, it was impossible to imagine a life without seeing it again.

  He felt separate, though--not just because he was Thuvhesit and they were Shotet, but because they could feel the hum-buzz of the current and he couldn't. The current didn't go through him. It was like he wasn't as real as they were, like he wasn't as alive.

  Just as he was thinking it, Cyra held out her hand. He took it, to relieve her of the shadows, and he was startled to see tears in her eyes--from the pain or from the wonder, it was hard to say.

  And then she said something strange. Breathlessly, and with reverence: "You feel like silence."

  The Assembly news feed was playing on the screen in Cyra's quarters when they returned. Cyra must have left it on by mistake, Akos thought, and while Cyra made her way to the bathroom, he moved to turn it off. Before he could flip the switch, however, he noticed the headline at the bottom of the screen: Oracles Gather on Tepes.

  Akos sank down to the edge of Cyra's bed.

  He might see his mom.

  Half the time he tried to tell himself that she and Cisi were gone. It was easier than remembering they weren't, and that he wouldn't see them again, his fate being what it was. But he couldn't make himself believe a lie. They were right there, right across the feathergrass.

  The news feed sights swooped in on Tepes. Tepes was the planet closest to the sun, the fire planet to their ice planet. You had to wear a special suit to walk around there, Akos knew, sort of like you couldn't walk outside in the Deadening time in Hessa without freezing to death. He couldn't imagine it--couldn't imagine his body burning in that way.

  "The oracles prohibit outside intervention in their sessions, but this footage was submitted by a local child as the last ships arrived," a voice-over said in Othyrian. Most of the Assembly broadcasts were in Othyrian, since most people outside Shotet understood it. "Inside sources suggest that the oracles will be discussing another set of legal restrictions imposed by the Assembly last week, as the Assembly moves closer to requiring all oracle discussions be publicized."

  It was an old complaint of his mother's, that the Assembly was always trying to interfere with the oracles, that they couldn't stand that there was one thing left in the galaxy they couldn't regulate. And no trifling thing, he knew, the fates of the favored families, the futures of the planets in their endless variety. Maybe a little regulation wouldn't hurt the oracles, Akos thought, and it felt like a betrayal.

  Akos couldn't read most of the Shotet characters at the bottom of the screen, translating the voice-over. Just the ones for oracle and Assembly. Cyra said that something about the Shotet character for Assembly expressed Shotet bitterness at not being acknowledged by the Assembly. Decisions about the planet Thuvhe and Shotet shared--about trade, or aid, or travel--were made by Thuvhe and Thuvhe alone, leaving Shotet at the mercy of their enemies. They had reason enough to be bitter, Akos supposed.

  He heard water running. Cyra was showering.

  The Tepes footage showed two ships. The first one clearly wasn't a Thuvhesit ship--too sleek for that, all swooping shapes and perfect plates. But the other one looked like it could have been a Thuvhesit vessel, its fuel burners armed for cold instead of heat with a system of vents. Like gills, he'd always thought.

  The hatch on that ship opened, and a spry woman in a reflective suit hopped down. When no others joined her, he knew it had to be the Thuvhesit ship. Every nation-planet had three oracles, after all, except Thuvhe. With Eijeh in captivity and the falling oracle dying in the Shotet invasion, only Akos's mother was left.

  The sun on Tepes filled the sky like the whole planet was on fire, full and rich with color. Heat came off the planet's surface in ripples. He knew his mom's gait as she led the way to the monastery where the oracles were meeting. Then she disappeared behind a door and the footage cut off, the feed moving to a famine on one of the outer moons.

  He didn't know how to feel. It was his first real glimpse of home in a long time. But it was also a glimpse of the woman who hadn't so much as warned her own family about what she knew was coming to them. Who hadn't shown up for it, even. She had let her husband die, let the falling oracle sacrifice herself, let a son--now Ryzek's very best weapon--be kidnapped, instead of offering herself in his place. Fates be damned, Akos thought. She was supposed to be their mother.

  Cyra opened the bathroom door to let out the steam, and pulled her hair over one shoulder. She was dressed, this time in dark training clothes.

  "What is it?" she asked. She followed his gaze to the screen. "Oh, you--you saw her?"

  "I think so," Akos replied.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I know you try to avoid feeling homesick."

  Homesick was the wrong word. Lost was the right one--lost out in the nothingness, among people he didn't understand, with no hope of getting his brother home except murdering Suzao Kuzar as soon as it was legal again.

  Instead of telling her all that, he said, "How do you know that?"

  "We never speak Thuvhesit, even though you know I could." She lifted a shoulde
r. "It's the same reason I don't keep any likenesses of my mother around. Better, sometimes, to just . . . keep moving forward."

  Cyra ducked back into the bathroom. He watched her lean close to the mirror to poke at a pimple on her chin. Dab water from her forehead and neck. The same thing she always did, only now he noticed--noticed that he knew it, that was; knew her routines, knew her.

  And liked her.

  CHAPTER 18: CYRA

  "FOLLOW ME," OTEGA SAID when I met her outside the kitchens that evening. Clutched in her fist was the renegade's knife, the white tape showing between her fingers. She had found my renegade.

  I put up my hood, and walked in her footsteps. I was well covered--pants tucked into boots, jacket sleeves covering my hands, hood shading my face--so that I wouldn't be recognized. Not every Shotet knew what I looked like, since my face was not plastered in every public building and important room the way Ryzek's was, but once they saw a currentshadow pool in my cheek or the crook of my arm, they knew me. Today I did not want to be known.

  We walked from the Noavek wing, past the public practice arenas and the swimming pool--there so younger Shotet could learn to swim in preparation for sojourns to the water planet--past a cafeteria that smelled of burnt bread, and several janitor's closets. By the time Otega's walk slowed and her grip tightened on the renegade's knife, we had walked all the way to the engine deck.

  It was so loud from the proximity to the engines that if we had tried to speak to each other, we would have had to shout to be heard. Everything smelled like oil.

  Otega took me away from the noise somewhat to the technicians' living quarters, near the loading bay. What faced us was a long, narrow hallway with a doorway every few feet on either side, marked with a name. Some were decorated with strings of fenzu lights or little burnstone lanterns in all different colors, or collages of comic sketches drawn on engine schematic pages, or grainy pictures of family or friends. I felt like I had entered another world, one completely separate from what I knew to be Shotet. I wished Akos was here to see it. He would have liked it here.