AKOS WADED THROUGH THE cutlery that was all over the galley floor. The water was already heating, and the vial of sedative was ready to dump into the tea, he just had to get some dried herbs into the strainer. The ship bumped along, and he stepped on a fork, flattening the tines with his heel.
He cursed his stupid head, which couldn’t stop telling him that there was still hope for Eijeh. There are so many people across the galaxy, with so many gifts. Somebody will know how to put him right. Truth was, Akos was tired of hanging on to hope. He’d been clawing at it since he first got to Shotet, and now he was ready to let go and just let fate take him where it wanted him to go. To death, and Noaveks, and Shotet.
All he’d promised his dad was that he would get Eijeh home. Maybe here—floating in space—was the best he could do. Maybe that would just have to be enough.
But—
“Shut up,” he said to himself, and he dumped the herbs from the galley cabinet into a strainer. There weren’t any iceflowers, but he’d learned enough about Shotet plants to make a simple calming blend. At this point, though, there was no artistry in it. He was just going through the motions, folding bits of garok root into powdered fenzu shell and squeezing a little nectar on top of it all, for taste. He didn’t even know what to call the plants that made up the nectar—he’d taken to calling the little fragile flowers “mushflowers” while he was at the army training camp outside Voa, because of how easily they fell apart, but he’d never learned the right name for them. They tasted sweet, and that seemed to be their only use.
When the water was hot, he poured it through the strainer. The extract it left behind was a murky brown, perfect for hiding the yellow of the sedative. His mom had told him to drug Isae and he hadn’t even asked why. He didn’t care, as long as it got her out of his sight. He couldn’t quite escape the image of her standing there watching Ryzek Noavek gush blood like it was some kind of show. Isae Benesit may have worn Ori’s face, but she wasn’t anything like her. He couldn’t imagine Ori just standing there and watching someone die, no matter how much she hated them.
Once the extract was brewed and mixed with the drug, he brought it to Cisi, who was sitting alone on the bench just outside the galley.
“You waiting for me?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Mom told me to.”
“Good,” he said. “Will you take this to Isae? It’s just to calm her down.”
Cisi raised an eyebrow at him.
“Don’t drink any of it yourself,” he added.
She reached for it, but instead of taking the mug, she put her hand on his wrist. The look in her eyes changed—sharpened—like it always did when his currentgift dampened her own.
“What’s left of Eijeh?” she asked.
Akos’s whole body clenched up. He didn’t want to think about what was left of Eijeh.
“Someone who served Ryzek Noavek,” he said, with venom. “Who hated me, and Dad, and probably you and Mom, too.”
“How is that possible?” She frowned. “He can’t hate us just because someone put different memories into his head.”
“You think I know?” Akos all but growled.
“Then, maybe—”
“He held me down while someone tortured me.” Akos shoved the mug into her hands.
Some of the hot tea spilled on both their hands. Cisi jerked away, wiping her knuckles on her pants.
“Did I burn you?” he said, nodding to her hand.
“No,” she said. The softness her currentgift brought to her expression was back. Akos didn’t want tenderness of any kind, so he turned away.
“This won’t hurt her, will it?” Cisi said, tapping a fingernail on the mug so he would hear the ting ting ting.
“No,” he said. “It’s to keep from having to hurt her.”
“Then I’ll give it to her,” Cisi said.
Akos grunted a little. There was some more sedative in his pack, maybe he ought to take it. He’d never been so worn, like a half-finished weaving, light showing between all the threads. It would be easier just to sleep.
Instead of drugging himself to oblivion, though, he just took a dried hushflower petal from his pocket and stuck it between his cheek and his teeth. It wouldn’t knock him out, but it would dull him some. Better than nothing.
Akos was coasting on hushflower an hour later when Cisi came back.
“It’s done,” she said. “She’s out.”
“All right,” he said. “Then let’s get her into the escape pod.”
“I’m going with her,” Cisi said. “If Mom’s right, and we’re headed into war—”
“Mom’s right.”
“Yeah,” Cisi said. “Well, in that case, whoever’s against Isae is against Thuvhe. So I’m going to stick with my chancellor.”
Akos nodded.
“I take it you won’t be,” Cisi said.
“Fated traitor, remember?” he said.
“Akos.” She crouched in front of him. At some point he had sat down on the bench, which was hard and cold and smelled like disinfectant. Cisi rested an arm on his knee. She had tied her hair back, messy, and a chunk of curls had come loose, falling around her face. She was pretty, his sister, her face a shade of cool brown that reminded him of Trellan pottery. A lot like Cyra’s, and Eijeh’s, and Jorek’s. Familiar.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, just because Mom raised us fate-faithful and obedient to the oracles and all that,” Cisi said. “You’re a Thuvhesit. You should come with me. Leave everyone else to their war, and we’ll go home and wait it out. No one needs us here.”
He’d thought about it. He was as torn now as he’d ever been, and not just because of his fate. When he came out of the daze of the hushflower, he would remember how nice it felt to laugh with Cyra earlier that day, and how warm she was, pressed up against him. And he would remember that as much as he wanted to just be in his house again, walk up the creaky stairs and stoke the burnstones in the courtyard and send flour up into the air as he kneaded the bread, he had to live in the real world. In the real world, Eijeh was broken, Akos spoke Shotet, and his fate was still his fate.
“Suffer the fate,” he said. “For all else is delusion.”
Cisi sighed. “Thought you might say that. Sometimes delusion’s nice, though.”
“Stay safe, okay?” he said, taking her hand. “I hope you know I don’t want to leave you again. It’s pretty much the last thing I want.”
“I know.” She squeezed his thumb. “I still have faith, you know. That one day you’ll come home, and Eijeh will be better, and Mom will stop with the oracle bullshit, and we can cobble together something again.”
“Yeah.” He tried to smile for her. He might have halfway accomplished it.
She helped him get Isae settled in the escape pod, and Teka told her how to send out a distress signal so the pod would be picked up by Assembly “goons,” as Teka called them. Then Cisi kissed their mom good-bye, and wrapped her arms tight around Akos’s middle until her warmth was pushed all the way through him.
“You’re so damn tall,” she said, softly, as she pulled away. “Who told you that you could be so much taller than me?”
“I did it just to spite you,” he replied with a grin.
Then she got in the pod, and closed the doors. And he didn’t know when he would ever see her again.
Teka tripped up to the captain’s chair on the nav deck and pried the cover of the control panel off with a wedge tool she kept on her belt. She did it while whistling.
“What are you doing?” Cyra asked. “Now’s not really the time to take apart our ship.”
“First, this is my ship, not ‘ours,’” Teka said with a roll of her blue eye. “I designed most of the features that have kept us alive so far. Second, do you really still want to go to Assembly Headquarters?”
“No.” Cyra sat in the first officer’s chair, to Teka’s right. “The last time I went there, I overheard the representative from Trella call my mother a piece of filth. She didn’t think I could understand her, even though she was speaking Othyrian.”
“Figures.” Teka made a scoffing sound in the back of her throat as she pulled out a handful of wires from the control panel, then ran her fingers down them like she was petting an animal. She reached under the wires, to a part of the control panel Akos couldn’t see, so far her entire arm disappeared. A projection of coordinates flashed up ahead, glowing right across the currentstream in their sights. The ship’s nose—Akos was sure there was a technical name for it, but he didn’t know it, so he called it a “nose”—drifted so they were moving toward the currentstream instead of away.
“You going to tell us where we’re headed?” Akos said, stepping up to the nav deck. The control panel was lit up in all different colors, with levers and buttons and switches everywhere. If Teka had spread her arms wide, she still wouldn’t have been able to reach all of them from where she sat.
“I guess I can, since we’re all stuck in this together now,” Teka said. She gathered her bright hair on top of her head, and tied it with a thick band she wore around her wrist. Swimming in a technician’s coveralls, with her legs folded up beneath her on the captain’s chair, she looked like a kid playing pretend. “We’re going to the exile colony. Which is on Ogra.”
Ogra. The “shadow planet,” people called it. It was rare to meet an Ogran, let alone fly a ship in sight of Ogra. It was as far from Thuvhe as any planet could be without leaving the safe band of currentstream that encircled the solar system. No amount of surveillance could poke through its dense, dark atmosphere, and it was a wonder they could get any signal from the news feed. They never fed any stories into it, either, so almost no one had ever seen the planet’s surface, even in images.
Cyra’s eyes, of course, lit up at the information. “Ogra? But how do you communicate with them?”
“The easiest way to transmit messages without the government listening in is through people,” Teka said. “That’s why my mom was on board the sojourn ship—to represent the exiles’ interests among the renegades. We were trying to work together. Anyway, the exile colony is a good place for us to regroup, figure out what’s going on back in Voa.”
“I have a guess,” Akos said, crossing his arms. “Chaos.”
“And then more chaos,” Teka said with a sage nod. “With a short break in between. For chaos, of course.”
He couldn’t imagine what Voa looked like now that—the Shotet believed—Ryzek Noavek had been assassinated by his younger sister right in front of them. That was how it had looked, anyway, when Cyra appeared to cut her brother in the arena, waiting for the sleeping elixir she had arranged for him to drink that morning to kick in and knock him flat. The standing army might have taken over, under the leadership of Vakrez Noavek, Ryzek’s older cousin, or those who lived on the outer edges of the city might have taken to the streets to fill the power vacuum. Either way, Akos imagined streets full of broken glass and blood spatter and ripped paper floating in the wind.
Cyra tipped her forehead into her hands. “And Lazmet,” she said.
Teka’s eyebrows popped up. “What?”
“Before Ryzek died . . .” Cyra gestured vaguely toward the other end of the ship, where Ryzek had met his end. “He told me my father is still alive.”
Cyra didn’t talk about Lazmet much, so all Akos knew was from history class, as a kid, and rumor, not that Thuvhesit rumors about the Shotet had proved to be all that accurate. The Noaveks hadn’t been in power in Shotet before the oracles spoke the fates of the family Noavek for the first time, just two generations ago. When Lazmet’s mother came of age, she had taken the throne by force, using her fate as justification for the coup. And later, when she had been sitting on the throne for at least ten seasons, she had killed off all her siblings so her own children would be guaranteed power. That was the kind of family Lazmet had come from, and he had been, by all accounts, every izit as brutal as his mother.
“Oh, honestly.” Teka groaned. “Is it some kind of rule of the universe that at least one Noavek asshole has to be alive at any given time, or what?”
Cyra swiveled to face her. “What am I, then? Not alive?”
“Not an asshole,” Teka replied. “Bicker with me much more and I’ll change my mind.”
Cyra looked faintly pleased. She wasn’t used to people not considering her just another Noavek, Akos assumed.
“Whatever the rules of the universe pertaining to Noaveks,” she said, “I don’t know how Lazmet is still alive, just that Ryzek didn’t appear to be lying when he told me. He wasn’t trying to get anything in return, he was just . . . warning me, maybe.”
Teka snorted. “Because, what, Ryzek loves doing favors?”
“Because he was scared of your dad,” Akos said. When Cyra did talk about Ryzek, she always talked about how afraid he was. What could scare a man like Ryzek more than the man who had made him the way he was? “Right? He’s more terrified than anyone. Or he was, anyway.”
Cyra nodded.
“If Lazmet is alive . . .” Her eyes fluttered closed. “That needs to be corrected. As soon as possible.”
That needs to be corrected. Like a math problem or a technical error. Akos didn’t know how you could talk about your own dad that way. It rattled him more than it would have if Cyra had seemed scared. She couldn’t even talk about him like he was a person. What had she seen him do, to make her talk about him that way?
“One problem at a time,” Teka said, a little more gently than usual.
Akos cleared his throat. “Yeah, first let’s survive getting through Ogra’s atmosphere. Then we can assassinate the most powerful man in Shotet history.”
Cyra opened her eyes, and laughed.
“Settle in for a long ride,” Teka says. “We’re bound for Ogra.”