Carve the Mark

  CHAPTER 25: CYRA

  "I SEE YOU'VE MADE some updates to the prison," I said to Ryzek.

  My mother and father had taken me here, to the row of cells beneath the amphitheater, when I was young. It wasn't the official Voa prison, but a special, hidden compound in the city's center, made only for enemies of the Noavek family. It had been stone and metal, like something out of a history textbook, the last time I saw it.

  Now the floors were dark, made of a material like glass, but harder. There was no furniture in my cell except for a metal bench and a toilet and sink, hidden behind a screen. The wall that separated me from my brother was made of thick glass, with a slot for food, now open so we could hear each other speak.

  I was on the bench now, wedged in the corner with my legs sprawled in front of me. I was heavy with exhaustion and dark with pain, bruised from where Vas had grabbed me in the hidden hallways, to stop me from hurting more of his guards. A lump on the back of my head--from where he had slammed me into the wall to knock me out--throbbed.

  "When did you turn traitor?" Ryzek was in the hallway, dressed in his armor. The pale overhead lights tinted his skin blue. He put his arm against the glass that separated us, and leaned in.

  It was an interesting question. I didn't feel like I had "turned" so much as finally moved in the direction I had already been facing. I stood, and my head pounded, but it was nothing compared to the pain of the currentshadows, which had gone haywire, moving so fast I couldn't keep track of them. Ryzek's eyes followed them over my arms and legs and face like they were all he could see. They were all he had ever been able to see.

  "You know, you never actually had my loyalty to begin with," I said, walking toward the glass. We were just feet apart, but I felt untouchable, for the moment. Finally, I could say whatever I wanted to him. "But I probably wouldn't have acted against you if you had just left us alone, like I told you to. When you went after Akos, just to control me, though . . . well. It was more than I could accept."

  "You are a fool."

  "I'm not nearly as foolish as you believe."

  "Yes, you've certainly proved that." He laughed, gesturing wide, to the prison all around us. "This is clearly the result of your brilliant mind."

  He leaned into the barrier again, and hunched so he was closer to my face, his breath fogging the glass.

  "Did you know," Ryzek said, "that your beloved Kereseth knows the Thuvhesit chancellor?"

  I felt a pang of fear. I did know. Akos had told me about Orieve Benesit when we watched the footage of the chancellor declaring herself. Ryzek didn't know that, of course, but he also wouldn't have brought it up to begin with if Akos had made it out of Noavek manor with the renegades. So what had happened to him? Where was he now?

  "No," I said, my throat dry.

  "Yes, it's very inconvenient that the Benesit sisters are twins--it means I don't know which one to strike at first, and Eijeh's visions have made it very clear that I must kill them in a particular order for the most desirable outcome," Ryzek said, smiling. "His visions have also made it clear that Akos knows the information I need to accomplish my goal."

  "So you still haven't taken Eijeh's currentgift," I said, hoping to stall him. I didn't know what there was to gain from stalling him, just that I wanted time, as much time as I could get before I had to face what had happened to Akos and the renegades.

  "I will remedy that soon enough," Ryzek said, smiling. "I have been proceeding with caution, a concept you have never quite understood."

  Well, he had me there.

  "Why didn't my blood work in the gene lock?" I said.

  Ryzek only continued to smile.

  Then he said, "I should have mentioned this earlier, but we caught one of your renegade friends, Tos. He told us, with some encouragement, that you were participating in an attempt on my life. He's dead now. I'm afraid I got a little carried away." Ryzek smiled still wider, but his eyes were a little unfocused, like he was on hushflower. As much as Ryzek acted like he was callous, I knew what had really happened: He had killed Tos because he believed it was necessary, but he had not been able to stand it. He had taken hushflower to calm himself down afterward.

  "What," I said flatly, finding it difficult to breathe, "have you done with Akos?"

  "You don't seem to have any regret," Ryzek continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "Perhaps if you had begged for forgiveness, I would have been lenient with you. Or with him, if you chose. And yet . . . here we are."

  He straightened as the door at the end of the cell block opened. Vas marched in first, his cheek bruised from where I had struck him with my elbow. Eijeh came in next, hoisting a sagging man at his side. I recognized the hanging head, the long, lean body that tripped beside him. Eijeh dropped Akos to the floor in the hallway, and he went down easily, spitting blood on the ground.

  I thought I saw a flicker of sympathy on Eijeh's face as he looked down at his brother, but a moment later, it was gone.

  "Ryzek." I felt wild. Desperate. "Ryzek, he didn't have anything to do with it. Please don't bring him into this--he didn't know, he didn't know anything--"

  Ryzek laughed. "I know he doesn't know anything about the renegades, Cyra. Haven't we been over this? It is what he knows about his chancellor that I am interested in."

  Both of my hands pressed to the glass, I sank to my knees. Ryzek crouched in front of me.

  "This," he said, "is why you should avoid entanglements. I can use you to find out what he knows about the chancellor, and him to find out what you know about the renegades. Very neat, very simple, don't you think?"

  I backed up, body pulsing with my heartbeat, until my spine touched the far wall. I couldn't run, I couldn't escape, but I didn't have to make this easy for them.

  "Get her out," Ryzek said, typing in the code so the cell door opened. "Let's see if Kereseth is weak enough for this to work yet."

  I pushed off the wall, throwing myself as hard as I could at Vas as soon as he entered the cell. I slammed my shoulder into his gut, knocking him flat. He had grabbed my shoulders, but my arms were still mobile enough for me to claw at his face, drawing blood from the skin just under his eye. Ryzek stepped in, hitting me in the jaw, and I fell to the side, dizzy.

  Vas dragged me over to Akos, so we knelt across from each other, barely an arm's length of space between us.

  "I'm sorry" was all I could think to say to him. That he was here was my fault, after all. If I hadn't fallen in with the renegades . . . but it was too late for thoughts like that.

  Everything inside me slowed as his eyes met mine, like I had stopped time. I looked him over carefully, like a caress, his tousled brown hair, the dusting of freckles on his nose, and his gray eyes, unguarded for the first time I could remember. I didn't see the bruises or the blood that marked him. I listened to his breaths. I had heard them in my ear just after I kissed him, every exhale bursting a little, like he didn't want to let it go.

  "I always thought my fate meant I would die a traitor to my country." Akos's voice was rough, like he had worn away at it by screaming. "But you made it so I won't."

  He gave me a small, wild smile.

  I knew, then, that Akos wouldn't give up information about his chancellor no matter what happened. I had never realized how deeply he felt his fate. Dying for the Noavek family had been a curse to him, as surely as falling to the Benesit family was to Ryzek. But because I had sided against my brother, if Akos died for me now, it meant he had never betrayed his home. So maybe it was all right that I had cost us both our lives by helping the renegades. Maybe it still meant something.

  With that thought, it was very simple. We would be in pain, and then we would die. I settled into the inevitability of it.

  "Let me be clear about what I want to happen here." Ryzek crouched beside us, balancing his elbows on his knees. His shoes were polished--he had taken time to polish his shoes before torturing his sister?

  I swallowed a weird little laugh.

  "Both of you are going to s
uffer. If you give in first, Kereseth, you will tell me what you know about the fated chancellor of Thuv-he. And if you give in first, Cyra, you will tell me what you know about the renegades, and their connections to the exile colony." Ryzek glanced at Vas. "Go ahead."

  I braced myself for a blow, but it didn't come. Instead, Vas grabbed my wrist, and forced my hand toward Akos. At first I let it happen, sure my touch wouldn't affect him. But then I remembered--Ryzek had said to see if Akos was "weak enough." That meant they had been starving him for the days I had been in the prison; they had weakened his body, and his gift.

  I strained against Vas's vise-hand, but I wasn't strong enough. My knuckles brushed Akos's face. The shadows crept toward him, even as I silently begged them not to move. But I was not their master. I never had been. Akos moaned, his own brother holding him in place as he tried to flinch away.

  "Excellent. It worked," Ryzek said, coming to his feet. "The chancellor of Thuvhe, Kereseth. Tell me about her."

  I pulled my elbow back as hard as I could, twisting and thrashing in Vas's grip. The shadows grew richer and more numerous the more I struggled, like they were mocking me. Vas was strong, and there was nothing I could do to him now; he held me steady with one hand and pushed my palm forward with the other, so it lay flat against Akos's throat.

  I could imagine nothing more horrible than this, Ryzek's Scourge turned against Akos Kereseth.

  I felt the heat of him. The pain inside me was desperate to be shared; it moved into him, but instead of diminishing in my own body the way it usually did, it only multiplied in us both. My arm shook from the effort of trying to pull away. Akos screamed, and so did I, so did I. I was dark with the current, the center of a black hole, a shred of the starless fringe of the galaxy. Every inch of me burned, ached, begged for relief.

  Akos's voice and mine met like two clasped hands. I closed my eyes.

  In front of me was a wooden desk, marked with circles from water glasses. A pile of notebooks was scattered across it, and all of them bore my name, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek. I recognized this place. It was Dr. Fadlan's office.

  "The current flows through every one of us. And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us," he was saying. My mother sat at my right, her posture straight and her hands folded in her lap. My memory of her was detailed and perfect, down to the loose strand of hair behind her ear and the faint blemish on her chin, covered with makeup.

  "That your daughter's gift causes her to invite pain into herself, and project pain into others, suggests something about what's going on inside her," he said. "A cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well."

  Instead of erupting the way she had at the time, my mother tilted her head. I could still see her pulse in her throat. She turned to me in the chair. She was more beautiful than I had dared to remember; even the lines at the corners of her eyes were graceful, gentle.

  "What do you think, Cyra?" she said, and as she spoke, she became a dancer of Ogra, her eyes lined with chalk and her bones glowing so brightly beneath her skin I could see even the faint spaces at their joints. "Do you think this is how it works?"

  "I don't know," I replied in my adult voice. It was my adult body sitting in the chair, too, though I had only been here as a child. "All I know is that the pain wants to be shared."

  "Does it?" The dancer smiled a little. "Even with Akos?"

  "The pain isn't me; it doesn't discriminate," I said. "The pain is my curse."

  "No, no," the dancer said, her dark eyes locked on mine. But they weren't brown anymore, as they had been when I saw her perform in the dining room; they were gray, and wary. Akos's eyes, familiar to me even in a dream.

  He had taken her place, perched at the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight, his long body dwarfing the chair.

  "Every currentgift carries a curse," he said. "But no gift is only a curse."

  "The gift part of it is that no one can hurt me," I said.

  But even as I said it, I knew it wasn't true. People could still hurt me. They didn't need to touch me to do it--they didn't even need to torture me to do it. As long as I cared about my life, as long as I cared about Akos's life, or the lives of renegades I barely knew, I was as vulnerable as everyone else was to hurt.

  I blinked at him as a different answer came to me.

  "You told me I was more than a knife, more than a weapon," I said. "Maybe you're right."

  He smiled that small, familiar smile that creased his cheek.

  "The gift," I said, "is the strength the curse has given me." The new answer was like a blooming hushflower, petals unfurling. "I can bear it. I can bear pain. I can bear anything."

  He reached for my cheek. He became the dancer, and my mother, and Otega, in turn.

  And then I was in the prison, arm outstretched, fingers on Akos's cheek, Vas's hand strong around my wrist, holding me fast. Akos's teeth were gritted. And the shadows that were usually confined beneath my skin were all around us, like smoke. So dark I couldn't see Ryzek or Eijeh or the prison with its glass walls.

  Akos's eyes--full of tears, full of pain--found mine. Pushing the shadow toward him would have been easy. I had done it many times before, each time a mark on my left arm. All I had to do was let the connection form, let the pain pass between us like a breath, like a kiss. Let all of it flow out of me, bringing relief for us both, in death.

  But he did not deserve it.

  This time, I broke the connection, like slamming a door between us. I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony.

  I didn't scream. I wasn't afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.

  CHAPTER 26: AKOS

  IN THE PLACE BETWEEN sleeping and waking, he thought he saw feathergrass, tilting in the wind. He imagined he was home and could taste snow on the air, smell cold earth. He let longing pierce him all the way through, and then fell asleep again.

  Oil beading on water.

  He had been on his knees on the floor of the prison, watching currentshadows pull away from Cyra's skin like smoke. The haze tinted the hand on his shoulder--Eijeh's hand--dark gray. He saw Cyra through it only faintly, her chin tipped up, eyes closed like she was sleeping.

  And now, lying on a thin mattress with a heater over his bare feet. A needle in his arm. His wrist cuffed to a bed frame.

  The pain, and the memory of it, slipping away into numbness.

  He twitched his fingers, and the IV needle shifted, sharp, under his skin. He frowned. This place was a dream; it had to be, because he was still in that tomb under Voa's amphitheater, and Ryzek was ordering him to talk about Ori Rednalis. Orieve Benesit. Whatever her name was now.

  "Akos?" The woman's voice sounded real enough. Maybe it wasn't a dream after all.

  She stood over him, stick-straight hair framing her face. He'd know those eyes anywhere. They had stared at him across the dinner table, crinkled at the corners when Eijeh made a joke. Her left eyelid sometimes twitched when she got nervous. She was here, like thinking about her had brought her. His own name settled him into himself, no more slipping and sliding.

  "Ori?" he croaked.

  A tear dropped from her eye to the bedsheets. She put her hand on his, covering the tube from the IV needle. Her sleeve, made of thick black wool, was draped over her palm, and the garment pulled tight around her throat. Signs of Thuvhe, where a person would near strangle herself to death to keep any warmth from escaping.

  "Cisi's coming," Ori said. "I called her, and she's on her way. I called your mother, too, but she's across the galaxy; it will take her some time."

  He was so tired.

  "Don't go," he said as his eyes closed.

  "I won't." Her voice was husky, but reassuring. "I won't go."

  He dreamt he was between the glass prison cells, his knees digging into the black
floor, his guts rumbling with hunger.

  And he woke in the hospital, with Ori slumped over at his side, her arm sprawled across his legs. Through the window behind her he saw floaters whizzing past and big buildings hanging in the sky like ripe fruit.

  "Where are we?" he said.

  She blinked sleep from her eyes and said, "Shissa hospital."

  "Shissa? Why?"

  "Because that's where you got dropped," she said. "You don't remember?"

  When she first spoke to him, she had sounded different, careful with every word. But the longer she talked, the more she lapsed into their lazy Hessa rhythms, every syllable sliding into the next one. He found himself doing the same thing.

  "Dropped? By who?"

  "We don't know. Thought you would."

  He strained for the memory, but couldn't quite reach it.

  "Don't worry." She put her hand on his again. "There was so much hushflower in your system you probably should have been dead. No one expects you to remember." She smiled. So familiar, slanted mouth into curved cheek. "They must not have known you that well, to dump you in Shissa like some kind of city-dwelling snot."

  He'd almost forgotten their jokes about this place. Shissa kids with their heads in the skies, couldn't even recognize an iceflower on sight because they were used to seeing them from a long ways up. Couldn't even fasten a proper coat closed. Useless glass-dwellers, all.

  "'City-dwelling snot,' says the fated chancellor of Thuvhe," he said, suddenly remembering. "Or is that your twin? Which one of you is the older one, anyway?"

  "I'm not the chancellor, I'm the other one. Fated to raise her sister to the throne or . . . whatever," she said. "But if I was her, you would definitely not be addressing me with the 'respect appropriate for my position.'"

  "Snob," Akos said.

  "Hessa trash."

  "I am from the family Kereseth, you know. We're not exactly trash."

  "Yes, I know." Her smile softened a little, like she was saying, How could I forget? And then Akos remembered the cuff fixing his wrist to the hospital bed. He decided not to bring it up yet.

  "Ori," he said. "Am I really in Thuvhe?"

  "Yeah."

  He closed his eyes. There was a fire in his throat.