IT IS STILL STRANGE, not feeling the other heartbeat, but we are adjusting. If anything, it’s easier now with just the one body to contend with.
Still, when we wake in the middle of the night in a hole in an Ogran wall, there is a kind of loneliness.
And when we see him, this Akos, we are never sure whether he is an enemy or a brother. There are parts of us that reflect on hazy memories of chasing him through fields, or laughing with him across a dinner table, and others that see him as a catalyst for trouble, a factor of unpredictability in a plan that must remain predictable.
He did, in fact, bring about our ruination, inspiring Cyra’s betrayal, facilitating her escape, driving her toward renegades and exiles alike. But he did it for us as much as he did it to destroy us, and we are always holding those two opposing forces in tension. We are getting better at holding things in tension—two histories, two names, two minds. “We” are becoming more of an “I.”
We are watching him, the oracle’s hand covering his, a plate of fruit in front of us to appease one appetite, when it happens.
A sudden jerk, like a hook caught around a rib and pulling, inexorably. But it is not the rib cage of this body that is pulled, it is our combined being, the Eijeh and the Ryzek, the Shotet and the Thuvhesit, the very all of us.
And then we are a ship. Not a small transport vessel or a passenger floater but a warship, long and narrow, sleek at the top and bottom but craggy on the side like the face of a cliff. We descend through a dense layer of clouds—white, and cold, and vaporous. When we break through the cloud layer, much of the land beneath us is also pale, a distant stark white shifting into beige and gold and brown as the land warms along the equator.
Then we are not a ship but a child, small, standing near the edge of a packed-clay rooftop. We scream for a father as the dark shape descends, casting a shadow over the city. A city of patchwork, part of us recognizes, the city of Voa. “Is it the sojourn ship?” we ask our father, as he comes to stand beside us.
“No,” our father says, and we are gone again.
We are not a child but a maintenance worker, dressed in coveralls that are patched at the knees. We have both hands buried in an instrument panel, a tool between our teeth as we feel for the right part. Pressure around our abdomen and thighs tells us we are in a harness, and we dangle from the anchor higher up on a metal face. We are on the sojourn ship, part of us helpfully suggests, making repairs.
A shadow falls over us, and we tilt our head back to see the smooth underside of a ship. Its name is painted across its bottom in a language we do not recognize and cannot read, but we know this ship is not Shotet.
We are a woman with a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, bunched beneath her chin, and we are running toward the sojourn ship with a child’s hand clasped in ours. We carry a heavy sack over one shoulder; it is soft with clothing, but the corner of a book pierces our side with every other footstep. “Come on,” we say to the child. “We’ll be safe on the sojourn ship, come on.”
We are a younger woman with a screen in hand, standing at the loading bay doors as a crush of people fight to make their way inside the ship. We cling to a handle on the wall to stay steady as people push and push and push. We shout to a young man behind us: “How many have evacuated so far?”
“A few hundred!” the man shouts back.
We look up at the big, dark ship. A set of doors opens on its underbelly, and another. A huge section of metal pulls apart, showing an open hatch right above us. The ship has come to hover right over the sojourn ship, which is perched on a metal island across the sea from Voa so that we can repair it and improve it in time for the next sojourn.
“Are they deploying ships?” we demand, though we know the man behind us has no answer.
Something falls from the rectangle, something big and heavy and glinting in the sun.
And then brilliant, blinding light.
We are the child on the rooftop again, watching as light so white, so scorching, envelops the sojourn ship and radiates out like rays from the sun. But the rays are curled, like roots, like veins, like the dark fingers that cradled the traitor Cyra Noavek’s face as she killed our sovereign.
The brightness sprawls across the ocean, sending water scattering away so it swells, huge, toward the shores of Voa. The brightness burns through clouds, reaching as high as the atmosphere, or so it seems. It is a wall of light that collapses all at once, like two hands clapping together.
And then wind—wind so strong it roars in our ears and makes them ring, wind so strong it knocks us, not just over, but a few feet forward, slamming into the clay of the roof. It rushes over us, and we lose consciousness.
We are hundreds
of slowing hearts.