A DREAM:
His knees met the floor in the underground prison. Cyra’s currentgift crept over him like sharpworms around the roots of iceflowers. And then, her harsh exhale, and the shadows burst into dark clouds around them. He had never seen them do that before, separate from her skin. Something had changed.
She fell sideways, after that, into a pool of blood. Her hands clutched at her stomach, the way his father’s had when Vas killed him in front of his children. Her fingers, bent and red, held her insides in.
The blood turned to hushflower petals, and he woke up.
He was tired of the cuff. Or more specifically, of his arm at this particular angle, and the metal-on-skin feeling, and this game where he pretended he was trapped when he wasn’t. He twisted his hand around to touch the wrist cuff’s lock. The current held cuffs like these shut, so if he pressed his skin into the cracks, he could open them. He’d first discovered the talent on the way to Shotet, right before he killed Kalmev Radix. In order to kill Kalmev Radix.
The cuff clicked as it came undone. He yanked the needle out of his other arm, and got up. His body ached, but he was steady enough, so he walked to the window, watching the Thuvhesit floater lights zipping past. Lurid pink and vibrant red and gray green, they wrapped around the squat ships like belts, not bright enough to light the way, just enough to show they were there.
He stood there for a long time, as night got deeper and deeper and traffic died down and Shissa itself went to sleep. Then a dark shape passed over the purple glow of the building across from the hospital. Another one drifted above the iceflower fields far below. A third rushed past the hospital itself, making the glass shudder under his hands. He recognized the patched-together metals. The Shotet ships were filling Shissa like a cup.
An alarm screeched in the corner of the room, and just a tick later, the door opened. Isae Benesit—shoes shining—tossed a canvas bag on the floor at his feet.
“Good to know our handcuffs don’t work on you,” she said. “Come on. You’re going to get me out of here.”
He didn’t budge. The bag bulged in weird places from stiff armor—his, he assumed. It probably held his weapons and poisons, too; if whoever had dumped him in Shissa like a sack of trash had bothered to outfit him with one thing, they had probably thrown in the whole lot.
“You know, I’d really like to be the kind of person people just listen to,” Isae said, her formal manner falling away in her frustration. “You think I should carry around a big stick, or something?”
He bent over the canvas bag and pulled his armor over his head. With one hand, he pulled the tough straps tight over his ribs, and with the other, he sorted through the bag for his knife. It was the one Cyra had given him on the street during the festival. He’d given it back to her once, in apology, but she had left it on the table on the sojourn ship before they left, and he had taken it with him.
“My sister?” he said.
“Right here.” Cisi spoke from the hallway. “You’re so tall, Akos.”
Isae grabbed his arm. He let her move him around like a puppet. For someone who asked him to get her out, she sure was acting like she was getting him out.
When they were in the hallway, all the lights went off at once, leaving just some strips of emergency light on the left edge of the tile. Isae’s hand was tight as she steered him down the hallway and around the corner. From deep in the building, he heard screams.
He reached back for Cisi’s hand, and they all started to run, skidding around a corner toward the emergency exit. But at the end of the hallway were two dark figures dressed in Shotet armor.
His steps faltered. He wrenched his arm from Isae’s grasp, and stepped back into the shadows.
“Akos!” Cisi sounded horrified.
Around the corner, Isae drew the weapon at her hip. Currentblade, not sharp, but set to a deadly density. The soldiers were moving toward her, slow, like you moved when you didn’t want to startle an animal.
“Where do you think you are going?” one of them said. In Shotet, of course—he likely couldn’t speak any other languages.
He was shorter than Isae, and sturdy—to put it kindly. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips, which were swollen from the cold. Shotet soldiers had never been this far north before, as far as Akos could remember. They probably weren’t ready for the temperature drop.
“I am leaving this hospital,” Isae said in clumsy Shotet.
Both soldiers laughed. The second one was younger, his voice cracking.
“Nice accent,” the older one said. “Where did you learn our language, from brim planet scum?”
Isae lunged, and Akos couldn’t see much, but he heard her moan when she got hit. That was when he stood, best knife in hand, armor fastened tight.
“Stop,” he said, walking around the corner again.
“What do you want?” the older soldier said.
Akos moved into the light. “I want you to leave her to me. Now.”
When neither of the soldiers budged, he said, “I am a steward of the family Noavek—” It was technically true, and technically a lie. No one had ever given him a title, after all. “I was sent here by Ryzek Noavek to collect her. That will be much more challenging if I let you kill her.”
Everybody went still, even Akos. They would have a clear shot at the emergency stairs, and all they had to do was get past these two . . . obstacles. The older Shotet ran his tongue over his lips again. “And what if I kill you and complete your mission for you? How well will I be rewarded by the sovereign of Shotet?”
“Don’t.” The younger soldier was wide-eyed. “I recognize him, he—”
The older Shotet swiped with his blade, but he was big and slow, obviously low-ranking. Akos jumped back, hunching to get his gut out of harm’s way. When he swung his own knife, he struck only armor, sending sparks flying. But his other hand, his right hand, was already drawing another knife from the side of his boot. That one found flesh.
The soldier fell against him, spilling warm blood on his hands. Akos bore his weight, stunned, not by what he had done, but by the ease with which he had done it.
“You have a choice,” he said to the young soldier who was left. His voice was ragged and not quite his own. “Stay and die. Run and live.”
The young soldier with the squeaky laugh bolted down the hallway. He almost slipped as he turned the corner. Cisi was shaking, eyes shining from unshed tears. And Isae was pointing her knife at him.
He lowered the soldier to the ground. Don’t throw up, he told himself. Don’t, don’t throw up.
“Steward of the family Noavek?” Isae said.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“I still don’t trust you,” she said, but she put her knife down. “Let’s go.”
They hustled to the roof and ran into the wild, frozen air. By the time they made it to the floater—a black one, close to the edge of the landing pad—his teeth were chattering. The door opened at Cisi’s touch, and they climbed in.
The floater’s controls lit up when Cisi sat in the driver’s seat, the night-vision screen expanding in front of her in green and the nav system glowing with a welcome. She reached under the control board and switched off the floater’s outer lights, then typed in their home address and set the ship on autonav. High-speed.
It lifted from the landing pad and jerked forward, throwing Akos against the control panel. He’d forgotten to buckle himself in.
He twisted around to watch Shissa shrink behind them. Every building was lit up a different color: purple for the library, yellow for the hospital, green for the grocery. They hung—impossibly—like suspended raindrops. He watched them as the floater sped away, until the buildings were just a cluster of lights. When everything was near dark, he turned back to Cisi.
“You . . .” She gulped. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she couldn’t say it, currentgift be damned. He reached for her, setting a clean finger—the others were red and sticky—on her arm.
The words came spilling out. “You killed him.”
He cycled through a few different responses in his mind, ranging from And he wasn’t the first to I’m sorry. None of them seemed right. He didn’t want her to hate him, but he didn’t want her to think he had come away from Shotet innocent. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he didn’t want to lie.
“He saved us both,” Isae said sharply as she switched on the news scroll. A little holoscreen popped up above the autonav map, and Akos read the headlines as they spun in a circle.
Shotet invasion begins in Shissa, two hours after sunset.
Shotet invaders witnessed at Shissa hospital, eight Thuvhesit deaths reported.
“I sent Orieve away right after we left your room,” Isae said. “She should have made it out all right. I can’t send her a message now, it could be intercepted.”
He held his hands against his legs, wishing like hell that he could wash them.
A news break appeared on the holoscreen when they descended into Hessa, a few hours before dawn.
Shissa police reporting two Thuvhesit captives taken by Shotet. Footage from the invasion shows a woman dragged from Shissa hospital by Shotet soldiers. Preliminary identification efforts suggest the woman is either Isae or Orieve Benesit.
Something big and fierce shredded his insides.
Orieve Benesit. Ori. Gone.
He tried not to look at Isae, to give her a tick to react on her own, but there wasn’t much to watch. Cisi’s hand snaked out to touch Isae’s, but Isae just flicked a switch to turn the news feed off, and stared out the window.
“Well,” Isae said at last. “I’ll just have to go get her, then.”