“THIS CYRA NOAVEK,” AST says as he turns a smooth stone in his left hand. I had noticed that Ast was always moving, whether bouncing his knees or chewing on the pliable edge of his comb or fidgeting with something between his fingers. “There any chance she’ll agree to the terms?”
I laugh. The idea of Cyra Noavek, who’d kept fighting in the arena even after her own brother peeled skin from her head, handing over her country to Thuvhe without so much as an argument is downright ridiculous.
“Well it’s not like I’ve met her,” Ast says, defensive.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you,” I say, “it’s just, she’d fight with a wall if it got in her way.”
“I don’t anticipate her surrender, no.” Isae gives her response like she’s sitting far away instead of right across the room. She’s at a little table next to the window. We’re on the side of the Assembly satellite facing away from the sun, so the window shows stars and space and currentstream, instead of an image of Thuvhe. It makes Isae look smaller and younger than she usually does. “They aren’t built for surrender, the Shotet. The Assembly Leader was right—they’re like . . . an infestation. You think they’re small, so they’ll be easy to deal with, but they just keep coming and coming. . . .”
I go cold at the word infestation. That’s not a way to talk about people, even if they are on the other side of a war. That’s not the way Isae talks about people, either, not even when she’s angry.
She straightens up, and clasps her hands in her lap.
“I need to decide my next move,” she says. “Assuming the war declaration will go out as planned.”
Ast runs the pad of his thumb over the stone. It’s from his home planet, some brim rock that has a number instead of a name, with air you can’t breathe without a gasper, the slang term for whatever the actual device is called. He spent most of his life with a bulky thing strapped to his face just so he could survive, he told me. You gotta make whatever time you’ve got worth it, he said to me, like he’d said it dozens of times before, like it wasn’t closer to a manifesto than casual conversation.
“I think you need to strike hard,” he says, after a few circles of his thumb. “The Shotet don’t respect anything less. Hit ’em hard or you may as well not hit ’em at all.”
Isae’s head lowers like she’s disappointed, only I know it’s not that, it’s just that she’s bearing a lot of weight. She’s fighting her own war, as well as the war the Assembly planets want, as well as the one against the grief that surges up inside her right where I can see it, making her say and do things she wouldn’t usually say or do.
“I could hit the center of Voa,” she says. “That’s where most of the Noavek supporters live.”
The center of Voa was where we walked to get to the amphitheater. Where I got a cup of tea from one of the vendors, and his eyes crinkled at the corners when he passed it to me. She can’t just—hit the center of Voa.
“You’d take out Ryzek’s lackeys as well as make a statement,” Ast points out. “It’s a good idea.”
“That’s not a military target,” I say.
Ast shakes his head. “There aren’t any Shotet civilians, not really. They all know how to kill. Isae and I know that better than most.”
The attack that took his father was the same one that gave Isae her scars, I’ve learned. And the same one that claimed her parents’ and friends’ lives. Their ship, the ship that had housed Isae most of her life, was boarded by Shotet sojourners who interpreted “scavenging” as “theft and murder.” It made both of them biased in the same way, as well as tying them together in a way I couldn’t quite grasp.
“What weapon will you use?” he says. “A foot army wouldn’t be good strategy against the Shotet, given the skill level of their average citizen.”
“They aren’t citizens of Shotet,” Isae says tautly. “They are in active rebellion against my rightful governance.”
Ast replies quietly, “I know.”
Isae chews on a knuckle, her teeth digging hard into the skin. I want to tug her hand away from her mouth. “I still have to confirm with the Pithar leadership, but it’s their technology we’ll be using. They call it an anticurrent blast. It’s . . . effective. I could aim it at the amphitheater where Ori was killed, and the destruction would radiate outward from there. It would level the building completely.”
My breaths come shallow. This is why I came here, to stop Isae from doing something she’ll regret, to make sure Thuvhe stays on the right path. So I have to calm her down. I have to stop both of them while they’re still building momentum. I push my gift forward in a rolling wave, hitting them both at once. Ast flinches at it, like he always seems to, but Isae doesn’t seem to notice it. I imagine the currentgift water lifting the weight from her body away so she floats, then dragging at her limbs, gentle, as it pulls back to me.
“There are laws against striking at civilian targets unnecessarily,” I say softly.
Isae looks at me lazily, like she’s half-asleep. Her lower lip is streaked red.
“There’s a soldier encampment outside Voa,” I suggest.
“Where we don’t even know anyone will be,” Ast argues. “Voa’s in a state of total upheaval. The soldiers have probably gone into the city to keep order. Attack the encampment and you risk just slicing and dicing at some tents and buildings.”
Isae is still chewing that knuckle. A flash of red shows me it’s bleeding now. She’s got that same wild energy she had before she killed Ryzek, only now there’s no focus to go along with it. Ast offers her a place to put her destructive energy, but at what cost? Civilian lives? Old men and women, children, dissenters, renegades, the sick and needy?
Not to mention the cost to her, as the person who orders that kind of destruction.
Come on, think.
“Killing people isn’t the only way to be effective,” I say. “The Shotet have a few things they hold dear. Their language—” I choke as Ast’s irritation with me flares to life, and my currentgift responds, keeping me from continuing.
“Yeah, sure, let’s go after abstractions instead of concrete targets,” Ast says. “That’ll work.”
I push my gift forward again, another wave. What Isae needs right now is a little bit of calm and peace. And no matter how tied Ast and Isae are to each other, he can’t give her that.
I can.
“Shh, Ast,” Isae says, holding up a hand. “Cee, go on.”
I wait for the tight feeling in my throat to work itself loose. It takes Ast calming down for it to happen, and not just his calm, but his shame at keeping me from talking. It’s not until his expression is well and properly cowed that I can speak again.
“Their language is dear to them,” I say, “as well as the oracles—which are out of the question—and the sojourn.”
“The sojourn.” Isae nods. “You’re right.” Her eyes are alight. “We could hit the ship. They just got back, so there’s probably just a skeleton crew aboard—loss of life will be minimal, but the symbolic victory would be enormous.”
It’s not my solution, but it’s not Ast’s, either. I guess that’s better than nothing.
Ast frowns, his eyes fixed as ever on an uncertain point at middle distance. He hasn’t moved in a while, so the flying beetle that guides him with its clicking and chirping is just perched on his shoulder, its antennae shifting in the same incremental way his mechanical eyes do.
“It’s a little soft,” he says.
“It’s better to regret being too soft than being too hard,” Isae says, in a clipped voice that says the discussion is over. “I’ll contact General Then. Make sure we have surveillance images of the ship that aren’t from half a season ago.”
She smiles at me, the expression a little too fierce for my comfort. It means the Isae who killed Ryzek is still in there somewhere, waiting to strike again. I shouldn’t be so alarmed by it, really. This is what attracted me to her to begin with, after all—she’s capable, decisive. She didn’t need anybody to take care of her, least of all me. She’d never admit to needing it now.
But the thing about falling for somebody is, you want to take care of them. So that’s what I’m going to do.
We eat dinner together, Ast, Isae, and me. Since Ast doesn’t respond well to my currentgift, I have to learn how to deal with him the way everybody else does—trial and error. So this time I try to ask him about growing up on the ship with Isae, and it seems to set him at ease. He tells me about trying to teach Isae how to fix engines, which is what his dad did, and all she wanted to do was pry bolts loose. She tried to get him to join in on her etiquette lessons once, and he made her laugh so hard she snorted tea up her nose.
“It came out my eye,” she says as she laughs.
Slowly but surely, I decide: I’ll pry my way between them. Not to get in the way, but to make sure she does the right thing, the level-headed thing. Her message to General Then sounded steady enough, and she’s laughing now, as she tells stories from her past, but I’m still worried. After you’ve watched someone kill a man with a kitchen knife, there’s a lot more to worry about.
Ast leaves once the plates are cleared, and I get ready to go, too, sure she’s tired out from the day’s decisions. But she catches my hand as I rise from my chair, and says, “Would you mind staying awhile?”
“Of course,” I say.
She loses all her ease like she’s shedding clothes, pacing the length of the windows and then turning to walk back. I try to help her, but just as it did when she was on her way to Ryzek’s cell on the renegade ship, my currentgift fails me. She tugs her hair, agitated, so it curls tighter around her ears.
“My gift comes with its challenges, too,” she says to me after a few laps around the room. For a long time I thought her gift was simple, just seeing other people’s memories at a touch. But it’s more than that. She lives with the past always tugging at her, trying to carry her away on its tide. “Since Ori—” She stops, swallows, starts again. “I’ve been getting stuck in memories. Which is fine when they’re good ones, like with Ast, but they’re not always good, and they come into my dreams—”
She flinches, and shakes her head.
“We could talk about something lighter,” I say. “Until you fall asleep.”
“I’m not sure. . . . I don’t think it’ll work.” She’s still shaking her head. “I wondered if . . . it’s silly, but—”
“Whatever will help you,” I say.
“I wondered if you could let me into your memories,” she says. “If I used my currentgift to see them, maybe I could get some peace, for a little while.”
“Oh.” I hesitate. I don’t have that many good memories to choose from. The ones from my childhood are tinged with sadness, because they’re all building up to Eijeh and Akos being taken, or my father dying. The ones from after, where I’m trying to pull Mom back from constant distraction, aren’t great, either. It wasn’t until I reunited with Ori that things lightened up more often, and that was partly because I was getting to know Isae. . . .
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, it’s an invasion of privacy,” Isae says.
“No! No, it’s not that,” I say. “I was just thinking that a lot of my good memories involve you and Ori, and I wasn’t sure if that would be uncomfortable.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “No, that’s . . . fine.”
I move to her bed, and sit on the edge of it, where the blanket is still smooth and tucked under the mattress. I pat the space next to me, and she sits down, angled so she can look me in the eye.
“Give me a tick,” I say.
“A ‘tick.’” She smiles. “That’s one of my favorite Hessan words.”
I close my eyes, then, so I can remember. It’s not just about thinking of when I met her, or when I felt like I was really her friend—it’s about the details. What the air smelled like, how cold it was, what I was wearing. And that’s not so easy. I was in school, so I was always wearing my uniform the first few times we spent together, a thick robe that covered my clothes so they wouldn’t get plant dust and bark and stems all over them. . . .
“Go ahead,” I say, as I remember the smell of peeling skin from a saltfruit, green and tangy.
She’s used her currentgift on me before, when we were getting to know each other better, so I know to expect her hand on my face. Her fingers are cold and a little clammy, but they warm up fast on my cheek, and anchor at my jaw. Then we’re moving together into the past.
I stood behind a rope barrier with a crowd pressing against my back. I didn’t mind it then because it meant warmth, shelter against the wind and snow. I still had to curl my hands into fists inside my mittens to keep my fingers warm, but I didn’t feel that chill, that deep chill that makes your teeth feel brittle.
We stood there for a long time before the ship appeared above us, lowering without swerving to the landing pad. The ship was small and humble, a Hessa transport. The people around me gasped when they recognized it, the battered metal, the heat vents that keep the engine from freezing. To me it seemed like a message: I am one of you, just a simple Thuvhesit. It was a manipulation.
The Hessa ship landed, and the door opened, and a woman in black stepped out. Her face was covered, of course, from nose on down. But she wasn’t wearing goggles, like the rest of us were, so I could see her dark eyes, with their narrow slope, eyelashes pressed up into the skin above them.
At the sight of her, everybody cheered. Not me, though, I was trying to figure out if I was seeing things. Those were Ori’s eyes, but I hadn’t seen her in years, and she was . . . well, she was Ori.
A tick later, another woman stepped out behind the first—the chancellor’s sister, I assumed, only I could have sworn I was seeing double. She was the same—same height, same coat, same face covering. Same eyes that scanned the crowd without feeling.
The women walked shoulder to shoulder toward the building. They didn’t stop to grasp hands. They lifted gloved hands to wave; their eyes crinkled in smiles that we couldn’t see. One’s gait was smooth, like she was rolling over the ground on wheels. The other’s was buoyant, making her head bob up and down as she moved. When they passed me, I couldn’t help it; I pulled my goggles down so I could see their faces better, see for myself if this was Ori or not.
One set of eyes found mine. Her steps faltered, just a little. And then they were gone.
Later that day, I heard a knock.
I lived in the dormitory just next to the hospital, connected to it by a covered bridge. Sometimes I leaned my forehead against the glass and stared down at the iceflower fields from there. I could only see smudges of color from up here, where the buildings of Osoc dangled in the sky like chandeliers.
My rooms were small and packed tight with objects. Fabric, mostly. Paper—and as a result, books—was a luxury on a planet without many trees, but we spun fabric out of iceflower stems, and treated it with purity petal essence to make it soft. We dyed it all kinds of colors, muted and bright, dark and light. Anything but gray, which was what we saw all the time. I hung fabric across shelves, to hide what was on them; I draped it on the walls to cover up where they peeled. Mostly my room was a kitchen; I had little burners here and there with something stewing on them, and the air was full of steam or smoke, depending on the day. They weren’t clean rooms, but they were warm.
They weren’t fit for the company I got that day, though. I wiped my hands on an apron and opened the door, sweat wetting my brow. A very tall, thick man stood right in front of me, looking gruff.
“Their Highnesses of the family Benesit request the honor of your hospitality,” the man said. He wasn’t a Thuvhesit; I could tell by how he left his shirt buttons open at the throat. He was wearing pale gray, which meant he must be from the Assembly, and his formal tone confirmed it.
“Uh,” I said, because it was all I could manage. Then my currentgift kicked in, and his posture relaxed, so I didn’t feel as nervous. “Of course. They are welcome here, as are you.”
The man gave me a little smile.
“Thank you, ma’am, but my job is to stay outside the door,” he said.
He checked my apartment to make sure it was safe, roaming through each room with his eyes on all my stuff. Even poked his head into the bathroom to make sure nobody was crouched in my shower with a knife, or so I assumed. Then he stepped out, nodded to someone out of sight, and there they were. Two tall, lean women in black dresses buttoned up to the throat, hooded, with fabric covering their faces. I stepped back to let them in, but I didn’t greet them. All I could do was stare at them.
Then one of them stepped past me to close the door, and smiled at me. I could tell by how her cheek creased.
“Cisi,” she said, and then I knew, I really knew, it was her.
“Ori,” I said, and we collided in a tight hug, squeezing little laughs out of each other.
Over her shoulder, I saw her sister walking through my little apartment, trailing her fingers over everything she passed. She paused by the shelf where I kept pictures of my family behind a gauzy hanging so I didn’t have to look at them if I thought it might hurt too bad.
I pulled away from Ori, who fumbled to pull her hood and face covering down. She looked just like I thought she would—the same, but sharper, older. Her black hair was mussed from the hood, and straight as straw, pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Her mouth, already tilted up at the corners, curled into a deeper smile.
“I can’t believe . . .” I can’t believe you’re the chancellor’s sister, I can’t believe you’re here, was what I meant to say, but I couldn’t.
“I’m so sorry.” She looked down. “If there had been another way . . .”
How could you lie to me all our lives? I thought, because I knew I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say anything at all, in fact.
I put my hand on her elbow and guided her into the room, toward the cushions I had piled around a burner and a sturdy pot with tea steeping in it. I was studying the effects of cold-steeped iceflower against the warm kind.
“Where did you go?” I said.
“The Assembly ship,” she said. “Isae was there . . . recovering.”
She looked to her sister, then, so I knew the chancellor’s name was Isae. She perched on the only chair in the room, close to her sister. Her hands were folded in her lap for a tick or two before she rolled her eyes and tugged the face covering away from her mouth and nose. The scars that bisected her face were wicked, and fresh, judging by their bright red color.
They weren’t beautiful. Scars rarely were.
“Recovering from this, is what she means.” Isae waved a hand in front of her face.
I tried a smile. “That must have been difficult.”
Isae snorted.
“So you’re the oldest Kereseth, then,” she said. “You’re the talk of the system, these days. The Kereseths—oracle, traitor, and . . . well, the one who ought to be careful around knives. ‘The first child of the family Kereseth will succumb to the blade,’ isn’t that your fate?”
I choked. My brother is not a traitor. I’ll be as careless around knives as I damn well please. Get out of my apartment. Who the hell do you think you are? I couldn’t say any of those things, though.
“Isae!” Ori said, chastising.
“I suppose I shouldn’t bring up unpleasant subjects uninvited,” she said, “but it’s the reality of who you are, and who I am, and who my sister is. And I like to face reality.”
“You’re being rude,” Ori said.
“It’s fine,” I said, my tongue finally loosening. “I’ve experienced worse.”
Isae laughed, like she knew what I was trying to say. Maybe she did. She must have been educated by the Assembly, at least for a little time, and they, better than most, must have known how to say two things at once.
“They would have loved you at the Assembly ship,” she said in a low voice.
“Good memories, I said, not ones where you’re angry with me!” Isae pulls me out of memory and into the Assembly ship again, and though she’s scolding me, she’s also laughing.
“I’m sorry, it’s hard to control!” I say with a giggle.
“I was horrible to you.” Isae’s eyes sparkle a little when she looks at me next. They’re a nice color, dark brown with a little warmth to it, like rich earth. “How did you ever become my friend?”
“Come back in and I’ll show you,” I say.
The smell of spice came to me first. My hands were buried in it, plunged into a wad of dough the size of my head. A cloud of flour puffed up around my face as I slammed the dough down on the counter. I didn’t visit home often, but it was the Deadening time, and I had never missed the Blooming in Hessa, so I was there for a few days.
Sitting at the table behind me was Isae Benesit. She had refused to go to the temple with Ori, who wanted to ask the oracle—Mom—about something. So Ori dropped her off here like she was a kid that needed to be watched, even though she knew we didn’t like each other much.
Isae had a full cup of tea in front of her. As far as I could tell she hadn’t even touched it since I had made it an hour before.
“So,” she said, after I had folded the dough over itself and slammed it down again. “Do you come home often?”
“No,” I said, and I was surprised by how sharp the answer came out. Normally my gift didn’t let me talk that way to people.
“Any particular reason?”
I paused. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to answer her question. Most people didn’t really want to hear about my troubles, even if they asked, which meant I literally couldn’t talk about them. Grief had a way of doing that, making people uncomfortable.
“Too many shadows in this house,” I said, inching toward the subject slowly.
“Ah,” Isae said. And then—to my surprise—she said, “Want to tell me about them?”
I laughed. “You want to hear about them?”
She shrugged. “We don’t seem to be good at talking about the more casual stuff, and I don’t have the time for that anyway. So. Yeah. I want to hear about them.”
I nodded, and slapped the dough ball down on the counter. I licked some of the raw dough off my fingers before washing them in the sink and wiping them dry on a cloth. Then I led her to the living room. The whole house smelled yeasty and spiced from the bread. My pants were still marked with flour fingerprints.
I pointed to a part of the living room floor that looked just like every other part of the floor, worn and wooden.
“There,” I said. “That’s where his body fell.”
Isae didn’t ask me who I was talking about. She knew the story—everyone in Thuvhe knew the story. Instead, she crouched next to the spot where my father died, and ran her fingers over the rough grain.
I just stood there, frozen. And then I started to talk.
“I sat with his body for hours before I cleaned it up,” I said. “Part of me expected . . . I don’t know. For him to wake up, maybe. Or for me to wake up from the nightmare.” I let out a little sound. Something small and pained. “Then I had to deal with it. Wrap up his body. Find a bucket and fill it with warm water. Get a bunch of old rags. Imagine standing there at the linen closet trying to figure out how many rags you need to clean up your father’s blood.”
I choked, but not from my currentgift this time—on tears. I hadn’t cried around another person since my currentgift developed. I had thought it was just out of the question for me now, like asking people rude questions or laughing when someone took a spill on an icy road.
Isae began to mouth a prayer. Only it wasn’t one of comfort or even the one a person said when someone died. It was a blessing, for a sacred place.
Isae thought the place where my father died was sacred.
I knelt next to her, wanting to hear her voice as it shaped the words. Her hand wrapped around mine, and it was more than strange, touching someone who I didn’t even know, didn’t even like. But she squeezed tight, so I wouldn’t let go, and finished up the prayer quietly.
I still didn’t let go.
“I’ve never been able to tell someone that before,” I said. “It makes people too uncomfortable.”
“Takes more than that to make me uncomfortable,” she said.
Her cool fingers sweep over my cheekbone, catching tears. She tucks a curl behind my ear.
“Your definition of a good memory needs work,” she says, softly, the very gentlest of jokes.
“I hadn’t cried in seasons, unless I was alone,” I say. “No one was ever there to comfort me, not even my mother. All the tragedies of my life, they’re too hard for most people to handle. But you could handle it. You could handle whatever I told you.”
Her hand is still behind my ear.
Then it’s in my hair, twisting the curls around her fingers.
And I kiss her. Once: soft, brief.
Again, harder, with her kissing me back.
Again, like we can’t stand to be apart.
My rough hands find the back of her neck, and we’re pressed together, fitted together, tangled together.
We bury ourselves as deep in this little pocket of happiness as we can get.