THE DESCENT TO OGRA almost kills me.
It took some doing—and some careful use of my currentgift—but I convinced Isae to let me go to the Shotet exiles to start peace talks. We can work together to unseat Lazmet. The exiles are not our enemies. Their goals are aligned with ours. It took a while for my words to take root, and even now, she’s still skeptical, but she did agree to let me suss out the situation, at least.
Seven days after the attack on Voa, she secures me a spot on a transport carrying food to Ogra. I squeeze into a seat between a massive crate of fruit engineered in an Othyr lab and a refrigerator packed with bird meat from Trella. The crew is Trellan—a language I don’t speak—so I can’t join in when they joke with each other. And Trellan is spoken in a monotone, so I can’t even pretend I’m listening to music. They smile at me every now and then, so I know they don’t mind me, but that’s no surprise. No one minds me, even if they haven’t quite figured out why.
Then the ship’s captain, who is thick through the legs and shoulders, with a tuft of chest hair poking out the top of his shirt, tells me in broken Othyrian, “Buckle! Now!”
It’s lucky, maybe, that no one told me what to expect, because I might have made them turn back.
All the lights on the ship go off at the same time, and then I’m screaming and it’s dark and I’m screaming. I can’t breathe and I’m sure, then, that the ship is running out of air and I’m going to die here in a pile of meat. I’m clinging so hard to the straps covering my chest that my hands go numb, or maybe that’s from terror. The last thing I think is that I never even got to speak to Mom again.
Then the lights come back on, and gravity catches me, and the crew are all staring at me like I sprouted a third eye. They laugh, and I try to join them, but really I’m just focused on breathing.
It’s not long before we’re standing on Ogran soil.
An Ogran woman named Yssa—“Ee-sah,” she says to me, slowly, when I don’t get it the first time around—takes me to the exiles in a little boat that cuts like a knife through the light-streaked water. She speaks Othyrian like she’s counting beans, dropping words one by one, but it’s the only language we have in common, so we trade nonsense until we reach solid ground again.
She walks me through the uneven streets of a village where Shotet and Ograns live side by side. Yssa points things out to me—a stall of polished stones she likes, the place where she buys her groceries, the tiny carved dolls that gave her nightmares as a child. She doesn’t explain how they know what “night” is here, and when she gestures, the glowing bracelets around her wrist clatter together.
“Which one is your brother?” she asks me.
“Very tall, fair-skinned, like you,” I say. “He came with Cyra Noavek.”
“Oh! The heavy one,” she says.
“Heavy?” I say, confused. “No, he’s thin.”
“No, no. Not heavy in body. He carries a weight,” she says. “I don’t know the word.”
“Oh.” I’ve never thought of my brother that way. The tall, deadly man who fought his way out of a Shissa hospital and into an amphitheater prison didn’t seem weighed down by anything—if anything, he seemed faster and lighter than everyone around him. But maybe I just can’t really see him. There is a special kind of sight that comes with not knowing someone your whole life, and Yssa has it.
“I will take you to where they gather,” Yssa says. “He may be there, and he may not.”
“That’s fine, thank you,” I say.
She leads me to an old warehouse with cracks climbing up the outer walls. There’s a sign fixed above the door with some characters on it I can’t read. They look Shotet.
We walk in, and it definitely feels like a Shotet place, in all the ways I’ve been taught to expect. All the tables have been pushed back against the walls, and people are either sitting at them or perched on top of them, in a kind of ring.
As we walk in, people are pounding on the tables in a rolling rhythm, so loud it’s all I can focus on at first. Then I look at what’s happening in the middle.
Cyra Noavek, her hair in a long tail behind her, is throwing her body at a giant of a man. She is graceful and strong, like a knife thrown by a skilled hand. The large man—and he must be large, to make a woman of her stature look so dainty—catches her, wrestles her over his shoulder, and hurls her away.
I gasp as she topples to the floor, which is covered with mats, but still looks hard enough to hurt. But she’s already rolling over like her body is made of rubber, grinning, a ferocity in her eyes I recognize. It’s the way she looked at Ryzek Noavek before he peeled the skin from her skull. And it’s the way Isae looked right before she committed murder.
With a yell, she throws herself at him again, and the crowd roars.
It goes on this way for a while, with Cyra building speed and determination before my eyes. It’s the speed that seems to unsettle her opponent—he doesn’t know where to look, or how to block what she throws his way, though it doesn’t do much damage. She tries to tackle him, and he catches her, trapping her, only for her to twist her body around him like a necklace. She locks her legs around his neck, and he chokes.
He taps one of her legs with one hand, and she releases him, sliding to the ground. The crowd roars, and she moves to the side to chug water from a spout near the windowsill.
“They do this all the time now,” Yssa says. “I am not sure what the goal is. Do they intend to fight the Thuvhesits one-on-one?”
Cyra spots me across the room. The spark in her eyes dies.
She comes toward me, and when she’s closer I see bruises and scratches up and down her bare arms, probably from other fights. Yssa edges closer to me, putting a shoulder in front of me.
“I was asked to ensure Miss Kereseth’s safety among you,” Yssa says to her. “Please don’t make that task difficult for me.”
Cyra stops right around spitting distance, and for a tick, I think that’s what she’s going to do: spit at me. Instead she demands, “What are you doing here?” She holds up a hand. “Don’t pull that currentgift shit on me; I’ve got no use for ease right now.”
It’s so automatic I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I pull back as much as I can. Her currentshadows have buried themselves under her skin again, and they cover her in dark webs. She grits her teeth.
“I’m here to—” I pause. I don’t want to give myself away. “I’m here to see my family, all right?”
“You’re not welcome,” she says. “Or did the declaration of war escape your attention?”
I wish—not for the first time—that I could turn my own gift on myself, set myself at ease, just for a little while. But I can’t soothe away the lump in my throat or ease off the weight of guilt. I helped Isae pick her target. Before I got here I felt confident that I did something good, considering the options I had—I talked her down from hitting Voa head-on, didn’t I? I had saved quite a few lives with nothing but a clever tongue and my currentgift.
But right now I’m standing among people who lost something. Friends, family. A place that was special to them, maybe even sacred. So how can I feel like I did something good? How can I think that these people are any different from my own, any more worthy of violence or loss?
I can’t. I don’t.
But I’ll do what I have to, just like anybody.
“Just tell me where to find Akos,” I say.
“Akos.” She snorts. “You mean my faithful servant, determined to die for me?” Her eyes close for a tick. “Yeah, I know where to find him. It’s just down the road.”