AKOS TRIED TO GET a sense of the Ogran ship in the dark, but it was difficult. When they first landed on Ogra, he thought the sky was always the same, but that wasn’t the case—sometimes it was velvet black, sometimes worn black, sometimes almost blue. And now, with the sky at its darkest, the ship all but disappeared, but for the light they had used to mark its shape.
Yssa stepped forward. “Pary. Hello.”
She didn’t sound cold, exactly, just as she never really sounded warm. But something had changed in her. She knew this person.
“Yssa,” the Ogran said. “I’m surprised to find you here.”
“I was sent to be an ambassador from our people to the Shotet,” she said. There was definitely something off about the two of them, Akos decided. There was too much familiarity in the way they spoke to each other. Ex-lovers, maybe? “And you’re surprised to find me among them?”
“I meant here, with . . . two oracles of Thuvhe,” the man called Pary said. “But maybe that was foolish of me.”
Akos felt Cyra shift under his hand, getting restless. Sure enough, she was already opening her mouth.
“State your business, would you?” she said. “We’ve got a family reunion happening here.”
“Miss Noavek. You are just as anticipated,” Pary said with a wide smile. “My business is that of the oracle of Ogra. You have—all of you—been summoned by her, and I am tasked with taking you to her immediately. She is on the other side of Ogra, on the edge of the wilderness, so we must fly there to make it on time.”
Of course, Akos thought, with no small amount of scorn. His mom and Eijeh had come into the village—where they almost never went—for just this reason. He hated the feeling of it, all the threads of fate coming together and tangling in a knot. The only other times in his life he had felt it happen, his dad had ended up killed, or he had killed Vas—
Vas, his face shining with sweat, a bruise at the corner of his eye from who knows what—
“And if we don’t want to go?” Cyra said.
“That would be unwise,” Pary said. “According to Ogran law, the oracles’ summons must be obeyed. And as a Shotet exile, you are obligated to obey our highest laws, unless you want to compromise your own refugee status.”
Cyra glanced at Akos.
“Oracles,” he said with a shrug, because there wasn’t much more to say.
The inside of the Ogran ship was downright startling.
It was alive in a way Akos had never seen, didn’t think a ship could be. The structure was metal, but there were plants growing everywhere, some behind glass, some out in the open. He recognized a couple of them from what Zenka had taught him, though he’d only seen them shriveled or sketched or chopped up. One of the plants behind glass looked like a perfect globe until its thick, jagged petals peeled apart, revealing the same teeth he had learned to grind into a powder. It snapped at him as he walked by.
Cisi went to one of the others—a flowered vine that twisted around one of the ship’s support beams—like she was pulled there by a magnet. A dark green tendril reached for her finger and wrapped around it, gentle. Akos rushed to her side and flicked it to make it back off.
“Apparently they start off friendly and turn fierce,” he said to her. “But if you ignore them they don’t usually do anything.”
“Do all the plants here try to kill you?” Cisi said.
“Almost all,” he said. “Some try to befriend you so you’ll defend them against other plants.”
“You’ll notice there are almost no animal species on Ogra,” Pary said as he walked past them. “That is because the plants are so highly developed. There is a wide variety of insect species, for the propagation of plant life, but we are the only warm-blooded beasts that walk this planet.”
Pary settled into the captain’s chair. There was no copilot or first officer that Akos could see, just Pary and a stretch of buttons and switches and levers. Yssa took the seat beside him, though. The forward fuselage was big enough to fit all of them, on bench seats with protective straps. Given what Akos knew about the planet’s tendency to fight back against everything, everywhere, he thought they needed more than some straps to protect them, but nobody had asked him.
“Did the oracle say why she wanted us dragged to her?” Cyra said, while she was strapping herself in. She finished her own buckles and then reached over—unconsciously, it seemed like—to help Cisi with hers. Akos took the seat on her other side, at the end of the bench.
“It’s not for me to ask,” Pary said.
“The oracle is not very . . .” Yssa paused, searching out the word in Othyrian. She asked in Shotet, “How do you say, ‘forthright’?”
Akos repeated the word in Othyrian, for Cisi.
“It is not an oracle’s job to answer questions like those,” Sifa said. “We have only one job, and that is to protect this galaxy. Sorting through the inconsequential information that other people find essential is not up to us.”
“Oh, you mean inconsequential information like ‘You, my youngest son, you’re going to get kidnapped tomorrow’?” Cyra snapped. “Or ‘Isae Benesit is about to murder your brother, Cyra, so you may want to make your peace with him’?”
Akos grabbed a handful of his own leg to steady himself. He wanted to tell Cyra not to use his pain as a weapon against his own mom; he wanted to tell his mom that Cyra had a point. But he felt so heavy with the hopelessness of it that he gave up before he started.
“You demand to know things from the Ogran oracle that you will find out within the day,” Sifa snapped. “You’re angry that you aren’t told what you want to know exactly when you want to know it. What a frustrating existence you must find this, that it doesn’t meet your every need for you instantaneously!”
Cyra laughed. “As a matter of fact, I do find it frustrating.”
She had been this way since the sojourn ship attack, Akos thought. Primed for a fight, no matter what form it came in, no matter who it was with. Cyra was always prickly, and he liked that about her. But this was different. Like she kept throwing herself at a wall in the hope that one of these days, it might finally break her apart.
“Quiet on deck!” Pary announced. “Can’t focus with all of you arguing.”
Yssa joined in the dance of readying the ship, and the way they did it together, Pary and Yssa, made Akos think they had done it a hundred times before. Their arms crossed, fair and freckled against dark and unblemished, and stretched past each other without getting in each other’s way. The choreography of familiarity.
The ship lurched and shuddered as it rose from the ground. The engines roared, and the vines and plants twitched and fluttered like the wind was blowing. Akos watched the flowered vine curl more tightly around its support beam; the plant behind glass curled into itself and glowed orange in warning.
“We’ll be flying above the storms, to avoid their damage,” Pary said as the ship flew up and forward. “It will be rough.”
Akos couldn’t help his own curiosity. They’d been hiding from “the storms” whenever the alarm went off since they arrived on Ogra—almost every day, it felt like. But he’d yet to hear a good description of what the storms were, exactly.
The ship’s flight wasn’t as smooth as a Shotet ship’s. It jerked and shivered, and from what Akos could tell, it was slow. But they got up high enough that he could see the little glowing patches of villages, and then the big, bright splotch of Ogra’s capital city, Pokgo, where the buildings were tall enough to make a jagged horizon.
Their ship turned as it climbed, away from Ogran civilization and toward the stretch of dark that made up the southern forests. There were plenty of glowing things there, as there were everywhere else, but they were covered by dense greenery, so from a distance it was difficult to see anything but void.
The ship jerked up, which made Akos grab blindly for Cyra’s hand. He didn’t mean to squeeze hard, but judging by her laugh, that’s what he was doing. The clear view they’d had of Ogra’s surface was gone, replaced by the dense swirl of clouds. And then, up ahead, color and light coalescing, just like they had when the sojourn ship passed through the currentstream.
A blue line of lightning cut through the cloud layer and stretched down. The ship jostled Akos’s head from side to side so hard he could hear his own teeth clattering together. Another flash, this one yellow, seemed to happen right next to them. Pary and Yssa were shouting things at each other in Ogran. Akos heard retching as someone—Eijeh, probably, he’d always had motion sickness—threw up.
Akos watched as Ogra took the glowing colors the rest of the planet boasted so proudly and hurled them right back, brutal and relentless. As Pary promised, they moved right over the storm, which jostled them all but didn’t down the ship. The acrid smell of vomit, combined with the constant shuddering of his head, made him want to be sick himself, but he tried to keep it down. Even Cyra, who usually loved things that made other people scared out of their minds, looked like she had had enough, her teeth gritted even though he was taking care of her currentgift.
It took a long time for Pary to announce that they were landing. Next to him, Cyra heaved a sigh of relief. Akos noted the shift of the ship toward the ground, aiming at some dense forest that looked the same to him as everywhere else.
But as they came closer, the trees seemed almost to part, making way for a cluster of buildings. They were lit from beneath by pools of glowing water—saturated by the same bacteria that made the canals around Galo light up, Akos assumed. Otherwise they were small wooden buildings with high, peaked roofs, connected by paths that looked bright against the otherwise gloomy backdrop. Spots of light moved erratically everywhere, tracing the paths of flying insects.
The ship touched down just inside a stone wall, on a landing pad.
They were at the temple of Ogra.