I HAD TO LEAVE the relative safety of Shotet-exile-occupied Galo and return to Pokgo for the conversation with Isae Benesit. The one I had promised the Ogran leaders I would have, in exchange for them delaying our deportation. The immediate future of Shotet, in other words, was resting on my shoulders.
Not that I felt any pressure, or anything.
In Pokgo, in the forest just outside the city limits, was a high tower built into the trunk of a massive tree, the only place where a person could broadcast off-planet. On the journey, I pestered Lusha’s assistant for information about why that was possible, why at that location and nowhere else, and all he knew was that there was a “soft spot” in Ogra’s atmosphere there.
“That a scientific term?” I asked. “‘Soft spot’?”
“Obviously not,” the man retorted. “Do I look like an atmospheric scientist to you?”
“You look like a person with a brain who lives on this planet,” I said. “How is it you aren’t curious?”
He didn’t have an answer to that, so I got up and walked the perimeter of the ship, pausing at each plant behind glass to scrutinize it. There was the rippled, brain-like fruit that hung heavy from sturdy vines; the cluster of beakish purple leaves that had two rows of teeth just past their edges; the tiny, starburst-shaped fungi that glowed purple and stuck to your skin if you touched it, leeching nutrients from your body. I wondered if, deep in the jungles here, there were plants that had not yet been discovered—how many possibilities were there on this unexplored planet, packed to the brim with the grotesque and the fierce alike?
We reached the tower within the day, the ship touching down on a landing pad cradled between two huge branches. I stood just outside the ship, staring at the wide tree with the tower built into its hollowed trunk. I had never seen a plant so large in my life—it was as large in circumference as the taller buildings in Voa, but those had been constructed by our hands, not the buzz of natural life that some said came from the current.
I crossed the platform that led from the landing pad to the tower. It swayed a little under my weight, two wires the only things keeping me from toppling over the side. My mouth grew drier with each step, but I forced myself to keep moving. Lusha’s assistant gave me a knowing smile as he checked in with the guard by the door.
In order to get into the broadcasting room, I had to submit to a brief search—the guard seemed unwilling to touch me, and I didn’t reassure her—and climb several flights of stairs. At the top of the steps, I paused to dab my hairline—now moist with sweat—with the inside of a sleeve, and followed Lusha’s assistant in.
The broadcast room was abuzz with people—standing at monitors, bent over panels of switches and buttons, plucking pieces of fuzz from the round rug in the middle of the room. Fixed sights, like eyeballs attached to stalks, hung upside down from the ceiling right in the center of the space. The rug was dark and didn’t have a pattern—I assumed it was there to dampen the sound, as any reflective surface might have echoed. This was the top floor of the tower, so its windows looked out over the top of the tree, where the huge leaves—bigger than I was—flapped against the glass. They were dark purple, almost black, and trapped in mossy vines.
“Ah, there you are,” a long-haired sema with what looked like a wad of cloud in hand said to me. It was the sort of thing a person said to someone they already knew, but I didn’t know them, so I stared quizzically until they offered an explanation.
“Wasn’t sure whether you knew how to paint your face or not,” they said, in Othyrian. “Looks like all you need is some dust so you don’t shine. Good.”
They brought the white puffy thing down on my face, and pale dust erupted in a cloud around me, making me sneeze. They held up a mirror so I could see that the powder had made my face matte and even.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Stand on the X,” they said. “They’re hailing the Assembly ship now.”
“Good,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed it was good at all. I was about to talk to a woman who thought I was complicit in the murder of her twin sister, after all. And I was going to ask her to cooperate? Compromise?
This was not going to go well.
Still, I made my way to the little X on the rug marked with iridescent tape, and looked up at the sights. Someone near the wall tapped a button a few times to lower them, so the sights were at my eye level. A screen lowered in front of me, to show me Isae Benesit, when she appeared. For now, the screen was a blank white, waiting to be filled with an image.
Soon enough, Lusha’s assistant was announcing that they had made the connection with Othyr, and were about to broadcast. He counted down in Othyrian, and then Isae Benesit’s scarred face flickered to life in front of me. Pain coursed through my hands, intensifying in my knuckles, which felt like they were breaking. I blinked away tears.
For a moment, she just stared at me, and I stared back.
She looked . . . unwell. She was thinner than she had been when I last saw her, and the skin under her eyes had purpled, even through the layer of makeup she was surely wearing to cover it. Beyond those obvious signs, though, there was something . . . off. There was a wildness to her gaze that hadn’t been there the last time she looked at me, like she was about to fly apart.
This was the woman who had killed hundreds of my people—a shell of a woman, with flight in her eyes.
“Chancellor Benesit,” I said finally, my jaw tense.
“Miss Noavek,” she replied, in a clipped, formal voice that didn’t quite belong to her. “I suppose I shouldn’t say ‘sovereign,’ since your own people can’t agree on one, can they?”
I decided not to tell her that even the exiles didn’t want me as a leader—that they called me oruzo, “successor”; that they blamed me for all the people she had killed; that I was only standing here to correct some of my own mistakes. But I felt those truths pulsing inside me like another heart. I was no sovereign.
I said, “My people are divided, as you would know if you regarded us with any decency at all. As for my legitimacy, I am one of two viable heirs to the sovereignty. You may feel free to deal with the other one, if you’d prefer it.”
She looked at me for a moment, almost as if she was considering it. But her resignation was evident on her face. Much as she hated me, I was the only supposed Noavek who offered either of our nations hope for peace.
Bolstered by that confidence, I straightened.
Isae cleared her throat, and said, “I agreed to this call because I was assured you had a worthwhile offer for me to consider. I suggest you make it before I decide this is not worth my time.”
“I’m not here to beg at your feet,” I snapped. “If you’d rather continue down your path of rampant destruction, there’s really nothing I can say to stop you, so—”
“My path of rampant destruction,” she said, with a mirthless laugh. And then another, longer peal of laughter. “Hundreds of my people—”
“Were killed by my father and his loyalists,” I said loudly. “Not by me. Not by any of the people here.”
“And in his place, you would have done . . . what?” she snapped. “You forget, I’ve met you, Cyra Noavek. I know your talent for diplomacy.”
“I would have selected a military target, in accordance with our galaxy’s laws,” I said. “Of course, I would also have waited to negotiate reasonable peace terms instead of hitting hundreds of fleeing refugees with advanced Pithar weaponry—”
“I didn’t know there were refugees on board,” she said, her voice suddenly hushed.
I had thought, once, that Isae reminded me of shale, hard and jagged. And she was shale now, too, easily broken into fragments. A shudder went through her before she went on, as if that broken moment hadn’t happened at all.
“I offered you terms of surrender, as you recall,” she said. “You refused them.”
“What you offered,” I said, my voice trembling with rage, “was insulting and disrespectful, and you knew full well we would not accept it.”
I stared into the sight instead of at her image on the screen, though I could see her stony expression just beyond its eye.
“Your offer, Miss Noavek,” she said finally.
“What I want is for you to drop this request for the Ograns to kick us off their planet, which would force seasons-old enemies of Lazmet Noavek to return to a war zone,” I snapped. “And in return, I will kill him.”
“Why am I not surprised that the solution you propose involves murder,” she said drily.
“The originality of your insults is truly stunning,” I said. “Without Lazmet to lead them, his faction of soldiers will be easily subdued—by us. The exiles will seize control of Shotet, and we can negotiate a peace instead of killing each other.”
She closed her eyes. She had gone to great lengths to look older than she was, I noticed, just as I had. She wore a jacket cut in the traditional Hessan style, black and buttoned diagonally across her chest, finishing at the side of her throat. Her hair was pulled back tight, throwing the angles of her face into sharp relief. The scars, too, gave her a maturity that most people at our age didn’t have. They said she had survived something, endured something she never should have had to. But despite all those things, she was young. She was young, and wanted all this to stop.
Even if she never understood what she had done to me, to my people, at least we both had that: we wanted this to stop.
“I have to take action,” she said, opening her eyes. “My advisers, my people, my allies demand it.”
“Then just give me time,” I said. “A few weeks.”
She shook her head.
“The Shissa hospital fell from the sky,” she said. “People who needed help, people who—” She choked, and stopped.
“I didn’t do that,” I said, firm. “We didn’t do that.”
I realized, too late, that maybe now wasn’t the time to insist on my own innocence. Maybe I could have gone further with some sympathy.
But she destroyed the sojourn ship. She attacked us. She deserves wrath.
But maybe I would do better with mercy.
“One week,” she said. “That gives you three days after you’ve made the journey from Ogra to Thuvhe.”
“One week,” I repeated. “To get from Ogra to Urek, plan an assassination, and carry it out. Are you mad?”
“No,” she replied simply. “That’s my offer, Miss Noavek. I suggest you take it.”
And if I had been softer, kinder, perhaps her offer would have been more generous. But I was who I was.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll send you a message when it’s done.”
And I walked right out of frame.