THE SOJOURN FESTIVAL BEGAN every season with the pounding of drums at sunrise. The first sounds came from the amphitheater in the middle of the city, and radiated outward as faithful participants joined in. The drumbeats were supposed to symbolize our beginnings—the first beats of our hearts, the first stirrings of life that had led us to the might we possessed today. For a week we would celebrate our beginnings, and then all our able-bodied would pile into the sojourn ship to chase the current across the galaxy. We would follow its path until the currentstream turned blue, and then we would descend on a planet to scavenge, and return home.
I had always loved the sound of the drums, because they meant we would leave soon. I always felt freer in space. But with Uzul Zetsyvis still in my dreams, this season I heard the drums as his slowing heartbeat.
Akos had appeared in my doorway, his short brown hair sticking out in all directions, leaning into the wood.
“What,” he said, eyes wide, “is that sound?”
In spite of the current’s pain shooting through me, I laughed. I had never seen him this disheveled before. His drawstring pants were twisted halfway around, and his cheek bore the red imprint of creased sheets.
“It’s just the start of the Sojourn Festival,” I said. “Relax. Untwist your pants.”
His cheeks turned faintly pink, and he righted the waistband of his pants.
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” he replied irritably. “Next time, when something that sounds remarkably like war drums is going to wake me at dawn, could you maybe warn me?”
“You’re determined to deprive me of fun.”
“That’s because apparently, your version of ‘fun’ is making me believe I’m in mortal peril.”
Smiling a little, I went to the window. The streets were flooded with people. I watched them kicking up dust as they charged toward the center of Voa to participate in the festivities. They were all dressed in blue, our favorite color, and purple, and green; armored and armed; faces painted, necks and wrists draped with fake jewels or crowns of fragile flowers. Flowers here, along the planet’s equator, didn’t have to be as hardy as iceflowers to survive. They turned to mush between a person’s fingers, and smelled sweet.
The festival would feature public challenges in the amphitheater, visitors from other planets, and reenactments of significant moments in Shotet history, all while the crew of the sojourn ship worked on cleaning and repairs. On the last day, Ryzek and I would process from Noavek manor to the transport vessel, which would take us to the sojourn ship as its first official passengers. Everyone else would board after us. It was a rhythm I knew well, and even loved, though my parents were no longer here to guide me through it.
“My family’s rule is relatively recent, you know,” I said, tilting my head. “By the time I was born, Shotet had already changed, under the reign of my father. Or so I’ve read.”
“You read a lot?” he asked me.
“Yes.” I liked to pace and read. It helped me distract myself. “I think this is when we get closest to how things were before. The festival. The sojourn ship.” There were children running along our fence line, hands linked, laughing. Other faces, blurry at this distance, turned toward Noavek manor. “We were wanderers, once, not—”
“Murderers and thieves?”
I grasped my left arm, and the armor dug into my palm.
“If you enjoy the festival so much, why don’t you go?” he asked me.
I snorted. “And stand at Ryzek’s side all day? No.”
He stood beside me, looking through the glass. An old woman shuffled down the middle of the street, wrapping a bright scarf around her head—it had come undone in the chaos, and her fingers were clumsy. As we watched her, a young man carrying an armful of flower crowns placed one on her head, atop the scarf.
“I don’t understand the wandering, the scavenge,” Akos said. “How do you decide where to go?”
The drums were still pounding out the Shotet heartbeat. Beneath them was a dull roar in the distance, and music, layered over itself.
“I can show you, if you want,” I said. “They should be starting soon.”
A little while later we ducked into the hidden passageways of the Noavek home, through the secret door in my bedroom wall. Ahead, a globe of fenzu light gave us something to walk toward, but still I stepped carefully—some of the boards were loose here, the nails jutting out at odd angles from the support beams. I paused where the tunnel split off, and felt the beam for the telltale notches. One notch on the left beam meant it led to the first floor. I reached back for Akos, finding the front of his shirt, and tugged him behind me as I followed the left path.
He touched my wrist, guiding my hand into his, so we walked with fingers clasped. I hoped the sound of creaking floorboards disguised the sound of my breaths.
We walked the tunnels to the room where the Examiners worked, near the Weapons Hall, where I had first seen Akos and Eijeh. I pressed the panel forward, then slid it just enough to let us slip out. The room was so dark the Examiners didn’t notice us—they stood among the holograms in the center of the room, measuring distances with fine beams of white light, or checking their wrist screens, calling out coordinates. Still, my pride drove me to step away from him, releasing his hand.
They were calibrating the galaxy model. After they verified the model’s accuracy, they would begin their analysis of the current. Its ebb and flow told them where the next scavenge would be.
“The galaxy model,” I said softly.
“Galaxy,” Akos repeated. “But it shows only our solar system.”
“The Shotet are wanderers,” I reminded him. “We have gone far beyond the boundaries of our system, and found only stars, no other planets. As far as we are concerned, this solar system is alone in the galaxy.”
The model was a hologram that filled the room from corner to corner, glowing sun in the center and broken moon fragments drifting around the edges. The holograms looked solid until an Examiner walked through them to measure something else, and then they shifted like they were exhaling. Our planet passed in front of me as I watched, by far the whitest of all the simulated planets, like a sphere of vapor. Floating nearest to the sun was the Assembly station, a ship even larger than our sojourn ship, the hub of our galaxy’s government.
“All calibrated once you get Othyr distal to the sun,” one of the Examiners said. He was tall, with rounded shoulders, like he was curling them in to protect his heart. “An izit or two.”
An “izit” was slang for IZ, a measurement about the width of my smallest finger. In fact, sometimes I used my fingers to measure things when I didn’t have a beamer on hand.
“Really precise measuring there,” another overseer responded, this one short, a small paunch bubbling over the top of his pants. “‘An izit or two,’ honestly. That’s like saying ‘a planet or two.’”
“1.467IZ,” the first overseer said. “Like it’ll make a difference to the current.”
“You’ve never really embraced the subtlety of this art,” a woman said, striding through the sun to measure its distance from Othyr, one of the closer planets to the galaxy’s center. Everything about her was strict, from the line of her short hair across her jaw to the starched shoulders of her jacket. For a moment she was encased in yellow-white light, standing in the middle of the sun. “And an art it is, though some would call it a science. Miss Noavek, how honored we are to have you with us. And your . . . companion?”
She didn’t look at me as she spoke, just bent to point the beam of light at the band of Othyr’s equator. The other Examiners jumped at the sight of me, and in unison backed up a step, though they were already across the room. If they had known how much effort it was taking me to stand in one place without fidgeting and crying, they might not have worried.
“He’s a servant,” I said. “Carry on, I’m just observing.”
They did, in a way, but their careless chatter was gone. I put my hands in fists and wedged them between my back and the wall, squeezing so tightly my fingernails bit my palms. But I forgot about the pain when the Examiners activated the hologram of the current; it wove its way through the simulated planets like a snake, but formless, ethereal. It touched every planet in the galaxy, Assembly-governed and brim alike, and then formed a strong band around the edge of the room like a strap holding the planets in. Its light shifted always, so rich in some places it hurt my eyes to stare at it, and so dim in others it was only a wisp.
Otega had taken me here as a child, to teach me how the scavenge worked. These Examiners would spend days observing the flow of the current.
“The current’s light and color is always strongest over our planet,” I said to Akos in a low voice. “Wrapped three times around it, Shotet legend says—which is why our Shotet ancestors chose to settle here. But its intensity fluctuates around the other planets, anointing one after another, with no discernible pattern. Every season we follow its leading, then we land, and scavenge.”
“Why?” Akos murmured back.
We cull each planet’s wisdom and take it for our own, Otega had said, crouched down beside me at one of our lessons. And when we do that, we show them what about them is worthy of their appreciation. We reveal them to themselves.
As if in response to the memory, the currentshadows moved faster beneath my skin, surging and receding, the pain following wherever they went.
“Renewal,” I said. “The scavenge is about renewal.” I didn’t know how else to explain. I had never had to before. “We find things that other planets have discarded, and we give them a new life. It’s . . . what we believe in.”
“Seeing activity around P1104,” the first Examiner said, hunching even lower over one of the hunks of rock near the edge of the galaxy. His body looked almost like a dead insect, curled into a husk. He touched a section of the current where the color—green now, with hints of yellow—swirled darker.
“Like a wave about to hit shore,” the sharp-edged woman purred. “It may build or fizzle, depending. Mark it for observation. But right now my guess for the best scavenge planet is still Ogra.”
The scavenge is a kindness, Otega had whispered in my child-ear. To them as well as to us. The scavenge is one of the current’s purposes for us.
“Much good your guessing will do,” the first overseer said. “Didn’t you say His Highness specifically requested information about current activity over Pitha? Barely a wisp there, but I doubt that matters to him.”
“His Highness has his own reasons for requesting information, and they are not ours to question,” the woman said, glancing at me.
Pitha. There were rumors about that place. That buried deep under the water planet’s oceans, where the currents were not as strong, were advanced weapons, unlike anything we had seen. And with Ryzek determined to claim not just Shotet’s nationhood, but control over the entire planet, weapons would surely be useful.
Pain was building behind my eyes. That was how it started, when my currentgift was about to hit me harder than usual. And it had been hitting me harder than usual whenever I thought about Ryzek waging war in earnest, as I stood passive at his side.
“We should go,” I said to Akos. I turned to the Examiners. “Best wishes on your observations.” Then, on a whim, I added, “Don’t lead us astray.”
Akos was quiet as we walked back through the passages. Akos was always quiet, I realized, unless he was asking questions. I didn’t know that I could have been so curious about someone I hated, though maybe that was the point: he was trying to decide if he hated me.
Outside, the drumbeats petered out, as they always did. But the silence seemed to signal something to Akos—he stopped under one of the fenzu lights. Only one insect still drifted in the glass orb above us, glowing palest blue, a sign that it was close to death. There was a pile of dead shells beneath it, insects with their legs bent in the air.
“Let’s go to the festival,” he said. He was too thin, I thought. There were shadows under his cheekbones where flesh should have been, in a face so young. “No Ryzek. Just you and me.”
I stared down at his upturned palm. He offered touch to me so freely, without realizing how rare it was. How rare he was, to a person like me.
“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 flaking, 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.”
The Storyteller sipped his tea, set it down, and wiggled his fingers in the air. When I had first seen him do it, I had giggled, thinking he was acting strange. But now I knew what to expect: faint, hazy shapes appeared in front of him. They were smoky, not lit up like the hologram of the galaxy we had seen earlier, but the image was the same: planets arranged around a sun, a line of white current wrapping around them.
Akos’s gray eyes—the same color as most of the smoke—widened.
“Then one of the oracles had a vision, that our ruling family would lead us to a permanent home. And they did—to an uninhabited, cold planet we called ‘Urek,’ because it means ‘empty.’”
“Urek,” Akos said. “That’s the Shotet name for our planet?”
“Well, you didn’t expect us to call the whole thing ‘Thuvhe’ the way your people do, did you?” I snorted. “Thuvhe” was the official, Assembly-recognized name for our planet, which contained Thuvhesit and Shotet people both. But that didn’t mean we had to call it that.
The Storyteller’s illusion changed, focusing on a single orb of dense smoke.
“The current was stronger there than anywhere we had ever been. But we didn’t want to forget our history, our impermanence, our reclaiming of broken objects, so we began to go on the sojourn. Every season, all of us who were able would return to the ship that had carried us around the galaxy for so long, and follow the current again.”
If I had not been holding Akos’s hand, I would have been able to feel the current humming in my body. I didn’t always think about it, because along with that hum came pain, but it was what I had in common with every person across the galaxy. Well, every person but the one beside me.
I wondered if he ever missed it, if he remembered what it felt like.
The Storyteller’s voice became low, and dark, as he continued, “But during one of the sojourns, those who had settled north of Voa to harvest the iceflowers, who called themselves the Thuv-hesit, ventured too far south. They came into our city, and saw that we had left many of our children here, to await their parents’ return from the sojourn. And they took our children from their beds, from their kitchen tables, from their streets. They stole our young ones, and brought them north as captives and servants.”
His fingers painted a flat street, a rough figure of a person running down it, chased by a rolling cloud. At the end of the street, the running person was subsumed by the cloud.
“When our sojourners came home to find their children missing, they waged war for their return. But they were not trained for battle, only for scavenging and for wandering, and they were killed in large numbers. And so we believed those children lost forever,” he said. “But a generation later, on a sojourn, one of our number ventured alone on the planet Othyr, and there—among those who did not know our tongue—a child spoke to him in Shotet. She was a child of a Thuvhesit captive, collecting something for her masters, and she didn’t even realize that she had traded one language for another. The child was Reclaimed, brought back to us.”
He tilted his head.
“And then,” he said, “we rose, and became soldiers, so we would never be overcome again.”
As he whispered, as the smoke of his illusions disappeared, drums from the city’s center pounded louder and louder, and drums all throughout the poor sector joined in. They thudded and rumbled, and I looked to the Storyteller, mouth drifting open.
“It is the storm,” he said. “Which is all the better, because my story is done.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry to—”
“Go, Little Noavek,” the Storyteller said with a crooked smile. “Don’t miss it.”
I grabbed Akos’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He was scowling at the Storyteller. He had not touched the cup of sweet purple tea that I had poured for him. I tugged hard to get him to follow me up the steps of the Storyteller’s house and into the alley. Even from here, I could see the ship drifting toward Voa from far off. I knew its shape the way I had known my mother’s silhouette, even from a distance. How it bowed out at the belly and tapered at the nose. I knew which scavenges had yielded its uneven plates by how worn they were, or by their tints, orange and blue and black. Our patchwork craft, large enough to cast all of Voa in shadow.
All around us, all throughout the city, I heard cheers.
Out of habit, I raised my free hand up to the sky. A loud, sharp sound like the crack of a whip came from somewhere near the loading bay door of the ship, and veins of dark blue color spread from it in every direction, wrapping around the clouds themselves, or forming new ones. It was like ink dropped into water, separate at first and then mixing, blending together until the city was covered in a blanket of dark blue mist. The ship’s gift to us.
Then—as it had every season of my life—it started to rain blue.
Keeping one hand firmly in Akos’s, I turned my other palm to catch some of the blue. It was dark, and wherever it rolled across my skin, it left a faint stain. The people at the end of the alley were laughing and smiling and singing and swaying. Akos’s chin was tipped back. He gazed at the ship’s belly, and then at his hand, at the blue rolling over his knuckles. His eyes met mine. I was laughing.
“Blue is our favorite color,” I said. “The color of the currentstream when we scavenge.”
“When I was a child,” he replied wonderingly, “it was my favorite color, too, though all of Thuvhe hates it.”
I took the palmful of blue water I had collected, and smeared it into his cheek, staining it darker. Akos spluttered, spitting some of it on the ground. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for his reaction. He stuck out his hand, catching a stream of water rolling off a building’s roof, and lunged at me.
I sprinted down the alley, not fast enough to avoid the cold water rolling down my back, with a childlike shriek. I caught his arm by the elbow, and we ran together, through the singing crowd, past swaying elders, men and women dancing too close, irritable off-planet visitors trying to cover up their wares in the market. We splashed through bright blue puddles, soaking our clothes. And we were both, for once, laughing.