I WATCH OUR DESCENT through Othyr’s puffy clouds like I’m even farther away than I am, drifting through space and looking down at the entire planet at once. I’ve felt like this since Akos and I parted ways, halfway between Ogra and Thuvhe. He didn’t want to come with me back to Assembly Headquarters, and I didn’t much blame him, so I’d hitched myself to the next Assembly freighter at some moon outpost and let him take the autonav back home. Truth be told, I am jealous of him, puttering around our warm kitchen, stoking the burnstones in our courtyard stove.
Ast comes to stand next to me, arms folded.
We’re on a big Assembly craft, the nice, sleek kind they save for chancellors and regents and sovereigns. You can’t see any of the ship’s guts—they’re all hidden behind panels made of a pale metal that looks almost white. I tripped earlier and when I smacked my hand against a wall to steady myself, I left a handprint. Whose job is it to polish all the walls? I wonder.
Ast and I are both dressed up, or as “up” as Isae could get us to go. I wear a dress with long sleeves—so I look Thuvhesit, I figure, because Othyrians aren’t as determined to button everything up to the throat as we are—in a soft gray. Ast is in trousers and a shirt with a collar. The guide bot whizzes around his head, clicking so he can hear its location.
“Isae’s doing it again,” he says. “Go fix her.”
“I can’t stop her all the time,” I say. “It’s wearing me out.”
Since the attack on Shissa, Isae’s been going over every single person who died in the attack on her screen. She keeps spitting facts at me, too. Shep Uldoth, thirty-four. He was a father of two, Cisi. His wife died, too, so now the kids are orphans. As much as I told her she couldn’t dwell on the lives lost forever, she didn’t pull herself away. She said she liked the anger going through the names gave her. It reminded her of what she had to do.
I’m pretty sure she’s just tired of grieving for Ori, and needs something else to focus on, but I don’t say so.
“I don’t really care if you’re worn out,” Ast says coolly. “You don’t think this is wearing her out? It’s more important that she be rested than you, you know.”
I want to curse him out, but my currentgift stops me. So I just ignore him until he storms off.
The ship passes through the cloud layer, and I can’t keep myself from stepping closer to the glass. I’ve never been to Othyr before.
Most of the planet’s surface is covered with cities. There are a couple of big parks that cultivate the planet’s wildlife—feeble, most of it, which was why Othyrians hadn’t much bothered with it—but the rest is glass and metal and stone. Glass walkways stretch this way and that, connecting the buildings, and sleek little floaters, much nicer than the ones we flew in Thuvhe, dart in and out of metal tubes that control traffic.
So it’s hard to explain to myself, given all that synthetic chaos, why Othyr is pretty. Maybe it comes down to the big blue sky, the sunlight gleaming on the buildings in gold, green, blue, and orange. Maybe it’s the neat little parks that show all different colored flowers and trees, the best-looking plants from every other planet but this one. But there is something nice in how busy it is, a kind of cheerful productivity.
I clasp my hands in front of me as I walk down the hall, so I don’t brush any of the walls. Isae is sitting in a waiting room, perched on the edge of a gray sofa. A view of Othyr shows through the floor-to-ceiling window, but she’s not even glancing at it. Her eyes are fixed on the portable screen in her hands.
“Arthe Semenes. Fifty years old. She was visiting her kid in the hospital after surgery. Both of them are dead now.” She shakes her head. “A hospital, Cisi. Why did they have to target a hospital?”
“Because Lazmet Noavek is evil,” I say. “We knew that before, and we know it now, and we’ll never forget it.”
I am filling the room with calming water. Letting it lap up against her ankles, tap against her toes.
“He’s not the only one who made it happen,” she says. “Every Shotet who went along with him and didn’t stop it is to blame.”
“We’re landing,” I say. She’s not wrong, but the heat she says it with makes me nervous. I imagine wading up to my waist, dragging my fingers through the soft weight of water.
“When’s the meeting?”
“It’s over dinner,” I say. “They don’t like strict business meetings here, apparently.”
“Wouldn’t want to let a person focus on the issues at hand,” she says. “Gotta dazzle them into doing whatever you say instead.”
“Exactly,” I say. She sounds more like herself already. She gets up, sets the screen down, and crosses the little room to stand in front of me.
“Did Ast yell at you again?” she says, brushing her fingers over my face. “He seemed upset when he left. I don’t know why he takes it out on you.”
I shrug. It’s the best I can manage.
“I’ll talk to him again,” she promises. “I trust you, and so should he, even if he doesn’t like your currentgift. It’s not like I don’t know when you’re using it.”
I smile. She doesn’t, of course, always know when I’m using it. But it’s good that she thinks so.