MY LAST VIEW OF Ogra from above was one of glittering light.
Then Yssa ordered us to ready ourselves. Sifa and Ettrek sat closest to the exit hatch. Yssa and Teka were on the nav deck, and I was with Eijeh—Ryzek—whoever he was now—closest to them. I glanced at Eijeh to make sure that he had strapped himself in properly, and the straps were crossed over his chest, right over the sternum, where they should be. Launching through Ogra’s atmosphere required a sharp burst of energy, followed by a quick shutdown, to break through the dense layer of shadow from beneath. Yssa guided the ship down to the right elevation, angled us appropriately, and punched the button on the nav panel.
We shot forward, the sudden force making my body slam into the straps that held me in. I gritted my teeth against the pressure. Yssa switched off the ship’s power, and we were swallowed by a darkness so complete, we may as well have disappeared.
And then everything—the darkness, the pressure, the terror, and even some of my pain—fell away at once as Yssa turned the ship’s power back on, and we drifted among the stars.
I had thought that Teka, who last flew me across the galaxy, was a good pilot, but Yssa was an artist. Her long fingers danced over the nav center, making small adjustments to Teka’s settings, and she guided us with unprecedented smoothness toward the currentstream, so we could travel alongside it. It was a cool yellow now, touched with green, a sign that more time had passed than I realized since I first landed on Ogra.
“You don’t mind Yssa poking around at your nav center?” I said to Teka, nudging her with my shoulder. We were on the nav deck—it was safe to walk around now that we were through the atmosphere—looking out at the depthless darkness in our path.
I sometimes referred to it as “nothingness,” like most people did, but most of the time, I didn’t think of it that way. Space was not a finite container, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the currentstream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds; this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing; it was everything.
“What? Oh, no, I definitely want to smack her pokey little hands away,” Teka said, narrowing her eye at Yssa, who was still busy with the controls. “But the ship likes her, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
I laughed a little.
It took me a few moments to realize the source of my sudden relief: my currentshadows, which had burrowed under my skin again when we landed on Ogra, now coasted on top of it. Their ache and sting were still present, but so diminished that I was nearly giddy with it. To one who is in pain all the time, even minor differences can be miracles, of a sort.
“We just got pinged by an Assembly patrol,” Yssa announced.
Teka and I exchanged an alarmed look.
“They say they have an old warrant on a craft matching this description,” Yssa said, reading from the nav screen.
“Warrant for what? Being Shotet?” Ettrek asked.
“Could be for drugging and spacing Isae Benesit when we didn’t want to go with her to Assembly Headquarters,” Teka suggested.
“You did what to Isae Benesit?” Yssa said.
“She had just murdered my brother in the hold, what else was I supposed to do?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know . . . give her a medal!” Ettrek said, waving his arms.
I glanced at Eijeh. He was eyeing Ettrek like he was about to reach out and smack him.
It was getting easier to think of Eijeh as two people in one body—or one new, blended person—since I saw so much of my brother, yet so little of him at once. It was Ryzek’s pride that made him chafe against Ettrek cheering his murder, but it was Eijeh’s passivity that tempered his reaction. They had, together, become something . . . else. New, but not necessarily better.
Time would tell.
“Tell them the Ograns lent us this craft and we don’t know about the original crew,” Teka said to Yssa. “Should be convincing if you record your image on the sights. You don’t sound Shotet at all.”
“Okay,” Yssa said. “The rest of you get out of range.”
We stood back while Yssa activated the sights in the nav screen to record her message, in fitful Othyrian. She was a talented liar, for an Ogran.
It would take days to get from Ogra to Urek. I spent most of my time leaning over the table in the galley, drawing a map of Noavek manor, floor by floor. I went through the servants’ passages in my memory, again and again, feeling in the dark for notches and circles and false panels. I told myself it would be useful for the mission ahead of us, as well as a good way to avoid Sifa, but those weren’t the only reasons I did it. I felt like re-creating the place on paper was a way of purging myself of it, room by room. When I was done with this, that place would no longer exist to me.
At least, that was the theory.
When I was finished, I ordered Eijeh—I had taken to referring to him by that name, because that was the body he was in, and he hadn’t yet objected—into the galley. The others had been confused by my inclusion of Eijeh in our little group, but I just told them I wanted to bring the oracles along, and no one asked any further questions.
He stepped into the room with a wariness to his expression that made me think, unexpectedly, of Akos. Ignoring the sharp feeling that brought to my throat, I pointed at the drawings of Noavek manor, labeled by floor in my jagged, unsteady handwriting.
“I want you to check these for accuracy,” I said. “It’s difficult to re-create a place from memory.”
“Maybe you want to spend your days wading through memories of Noavek manor,” Eijeh said, sounding more like Ryzek in that moment, “but we do not.”
“I do not give a shit what you want,” I snapped. “This is the problem you have, the problem you’ve always had. You think you have hurt worse than anyone else in the galaxy. Well, no one cares about your story of woe! There is a war going on. Now check! The damn! Drawings!”
He stared at me for a few moments, then stepped toward the table and bent over the drawings. He surveyed the first one briefly, then reached for the pen I had left at the edge of the table, and started redrawing the lines around the trophy room.
“I don’t know Lazmet nearly as well as you do,” I said, when I had calmed somewhat. “Is there anything you can recall about him that might help us get to him? Strange habits, particular proclivities . . . ?”
Eijeh was silent for a while, stepping to the right to look at the next drawing. I wondered if I would have to bully him into answering my question the way I had bullied him into checking my maps, but then he spoke.
“He reads mostly history,” he said, in a strange, soft voice I had not heard from him before. “He’s obsessed with texture—all his rugs and clothes have to be soft. I heard him scolding one of the staff for starching his shirts too much once. She made them too stiff.” He gulped, and scratched out one of the doorways I had marked, drawing it on the other side of a bedroom. “And he loves fruit. He used to have one of his transports smuggle in a particular variety from Trella—altos arva. It’s often boiled down and used in smaller quantities as a sweetener, because most people can’t handle how sweet it is raw. The rest of this looks fine.”
He set the pen down, and straightened.
“You know you’re only going to get one chance at him, right?” Eijeh said. “Because once he knows you’re there—once he knows what you’re trying to do—”
“He’ll control me with his currentgift,” I said. “I know.”
Eijeh nodded. “Am I allowed to leave now, or are you going to threaten me with death again?”
I flapped my hand at the door. A plan was beginning to come together in my mind. I leaned back against the counter and stared at the drawings, hoping for inspiration.
We had to wait to get in touch with Jorek until we were in receiving range of Thuvhe, which was four days into the journey.
By the time we reached it, I was tired of the smell of the recycled water—chemical, from the purification process—and the canned food we had been reheating on the galley’s little stove, and the itchy fabric that covered my sleep pallet. I was also tired of the memories I had here, of lying clutched together with Akos on blankets, and bumping hands at the galley counter as we both reached for bowls, and trading sly looks over Teka’s head whenever she stood between us.
It was the first time I had considered—and only for a moment—that the destruction of the sojourn ship might have had a positive side. At least I wouldn’t be able to return to my memories of him there.
I felt sick at even the momentary deviation in my thoughts. There was nothing positive about the obliteration of my home, and the loss of life that had accompanied it. I was just going mad, trapped in this ship.
I was combing through my wet hair with my fingers when I heard thundering footsteps down the hall outside, and stuck my head out of the bathroom to see who it was. Teka was tripping toward me, barefoot and paler than usual.
“What?” I said.
“Jorek,” she said. “Jorek’s been arrested.”
“How?” I said. “Wasn’t he working as a guard at the manor? He’s a Kuzar!”
“I talked to his mother.” Teka came into the bathroom and started pacing, heedless of the puddles of water I had left while drying off. She left small footprints in her wake. “Ara said last week, they were contacted by Akos.”
I felt his name as a kick to the stomach.
“What?” I said. Akos was in Thuvhe. Akos was at home, outside of Hessa, pretending the war didn’t exist. He was—
“He persuaded Jorek to let him into Noavek manor. Jorek didn’t want to, but he owed Akos a favor.” Teka paced even faster.
“And what did he intend to do in Noavek manor?” I demanded. “Does she know?”
“She suspects the obvious,” Teka said. “That he went to do the same thing we’re about to do.”
I stepped back. Leaned against the wall.
I hated this. The moment the anger squirmed away. It was easier to boil with rage that Akos had abandoned me without a word, easier to let that act confirm what I suspected about myself, that no one could stand me for long. But knowing that he had left me like that for a reason . . .
Teka went on: “A week after Akos got to the manor, Jorek was arrested. Ara thinks—”
“Akos wouldn’t have given Jorek’s name,” I said distantly, shaking my head. “Something must have happened.”
“Everyone has a limit,” Teka said. “It doesn’t mean Akos meant to—”
“No,” I said. “You don’t know him like I do. He just—wouldn’t.”
“Fine, whatever,” Teka said, throwing up her hands. “But Jorek is probably going to be executed, because you and I both know Lazmet Noavek doesn’t just have people arrested and let them go!”
“I know, I know.” I shook my head. The thought of Akos in Noavek manor again made me feel like screaming. He couldn’t be there.
“Does she know if Akos is dead?” I asked quietly.
“One of her sources says no,” Teka said. “Says he’s being kept prisoner, but nobody knows why—what good can he do Lazmet?”
It was a measure of exactly how much I feared my father that I didn’t feel much relief. Lazmet’s reasons for wanting people alive were worse than his reasons for wanting them dead. I had watched the work he did on my brother, the slow work of destroying and rebuilding him. The way he ensured his own future, his own legacy, by constructing his son in his own image. Now that Ryzek was gone, would he do the same to Akos?
How much harm had he already done?
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, it’s not good.”
Teka stopped pacing.
We stood facing each other, the almost certain loss of two friends between us.
I expected to feel the acute pain of grief, but there was nothing. The black hole in my chest had devoured every last feeling in my body, leaving me empty, just a sack of skin held up by bone and muscle.
“Well,” Teka said. “Let’s go kill your dad, then.”