I WAKE WITH A sour taste in my mouth. I am not sure where I am. The last time I knew anything, I was in my bathroom with blood soaking my side, and Ast had just stabbed me. I thought I would die. But wherever I am, I don’t seem to be dead.
My tongue feels like it’s fuzzy. I cringe a little at the feeling. Someone sticks a straw between my lips, and I drink. Water fills my mouth, and I swish it around before swallowing.
And oh—swallowing hurts. Not my throat, but my stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen.
I open my eyes. I’m not sure why I expect to see the big crack that’s above my bed at home. When I was sick as a kid I used to think about what it was shaped like. A floater? A bird? I could never decide.
There’s no crack in this ceiling, though. The ceiling here is a moving image, like the ones in the walls at Assembly Headquarters. It shows a blue sky with puffy clouds drifting across it.
I lift a hand. There’s a patch of tech just under my knuckles. I can feel it, stinging a little as I wiggle my fingers. It’s probably monitoring my vitals, heart rate and temperature and blood sugar. There’s a little exit point on top of it, attached now to a tube with clear liquid running through it. Keeping me hydrated, I assume, though it’s not doing anything for the taste in my mouth.
“Miss Kereseth?”
I blink away the film covering my eyes and see a woman dressed in a crisp white uniform—shirt and pants—with a dark blue apron over the top of it. Her hair is tied back and secured with pins. She wears rubber gloves.
I feel unmoored. In my mind, I list the things I know. I am not at home. Judging by the ceiling, I am in a rich place. Assembly Headquarters? No, Othyr—Othyr is where we were last. I’m hurt. My stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen. . . .
I remember his face in the mirror, right next to mine. Someone did just that.
“Ast,” I croak.
“What?” The nurse frowns. “He’s not here right now—he came yesterday to check on you, though.”
He came to check on me? No, he came to make sure I was still unconscious, or in the hope that I was dead. A shiver runs through me. He was here while I was unconscious—what if he did something else, what if he tried to finish what he started? I imagine a pillow pressed to my mouth, a vial of poison tipped down my throat, stitches pulled from the wound in my abdomen until my guts spill out—
“No,” I say, and it comes out a growl. “No—Ast did it, Ast stabbed me—”
“Miss Kereseth, I think you’re confused, you’ve been out for a couple days—”
“I am not—”
“The security footage of your room was missing,” she says softly.
Of course it was, I think, but can’t say. Ast found a way to delete the evidence—!
“But they found the weapon, wiped of fingerprints,” she continues, “in the house of a man whose currentgift allows him to put on different faces. The Othyrian police suspect he was trying to kill the chancellor and got you instead.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Of course. Ast plays at being too simple for politics, he senses currentgifts, he grew up with real-world smarts and contacts with seedy reputations, no doubt . . . of course he knew how to cover his tracks. He deleted the footage, misled the police, found a likely suspect to frame for the crime, planted the weapon. . . .
But why? Why would he take this risk? Just to be right? To get his way? Why did he even care so much about what happened to Thuvhe in this war?
“It was him,” I say with some difficulty.
Maybe, I think as I drift off again, it’s not Thuvhe he cares about, but Shotet.
Isae told me the story, once, of how she got the scars. I never asked her, because that wasn’t the sort of thing you just asked about. But she told me anyway.
We had been sitting on the old, grungy sofa in my school apartment. There were pots brewing on burners everywhere, so the corners of the room were full of vapor. We were in Shissa, so through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall, all I could see were snowdrifts far below. My room was hardly even wide enough for me to stretch out my arms in both directions, but it had a good view.
She had an embroidered pillow in her lap, one I had bought from a little shop in Hessa where a friend from primary school worked. She was wearing socks I had loaned her because hers weren’t warm enough. They were yellowish brown, or brownish yellow, I could never decide which, and had a lumpy heel where I’d gone wrong with mending them.
She told me that she hadn’t really grown up on a pirate ship. That was just what she told people to startle them. The transporter ship she was on as a kid did some shady business every now and then, she said, but nothing to get huffy about.
And trust me, she said, if there was something to get huffy about, my parents would be huffy.
They had landed on Essander to dump the goods from their most recent job, and it just happened to be the planet where the Shotet were doing their seasonal scavenge. Only, scavenges weren’t supposed to include theft and murder, according to the ethical guidelines Shotet had agreed to when the Assembly was formed.
The Shotet boarded the transporter ship, much like pirates would have done. And they blew through the vessel room by room, rifling through everything to find valuables, and killing whoever they wanted. One of the scavengers threatened Isae’s mother, and when her father defended her, they both wound up dead. So Isae went at the man with a meat mallet.
A . . . meat mallet? I asked her, so shocked I couldn’t help but smile. It was all right. She smiled, too.
She cracked one of them hard in the head, she said, but meat mallets are worthless against a Shotet soldier. Actually, pretty much anything was, according to her. They were lethal. And the leader of the group, a woman, must have admired Isae’s gumption, because instead of killing her, she pinned Isae down and carved into her face, saying, “Remember me.”
She hadn’t mentioned Ast at the time, except to say that some of her friends were hurt or killed, too. Now, though, I knew that he had been there, and that a Shotet soldier had killed his father, and half of his friends.
Yeah, there were plenty of reasons for Ast to care what happened to Shotet in this war.
“Cee?”
Isae’s voice sounds strained. She looks worn, her hair lank around her face. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. I guess Ast must not have told her I tried to send a message to the Shotet exiles, then, or she would have me arrested instead of sitting at my bedside.
“Did you . . .” My voice sounds creaky as an old door. “Did you make the alliance with Othyr?”
“You don’t need to worry about that right now,” she says. “Just focus on healing, okay? We almost lost you. I almost lost you.”
“I’m fine,” I say. I tap the button to raise the top half of the bed. When I’m partially upright, pain burns all the way through to my back, but I don’t want to lie down again. “Tell me.”
“Yes, I made the alliance,” she says. “Before you say anything—we needed that weapon, Cee. The pressure to retaliate is intense.”
“Pressure from where?” I say. “Ast?”
She frowns at me.
“Everywhere,” she says. “From my own head, for one. From Shissa, Osoc, Hessa. From the Assembly Leader. Everywhere. They killed innocent people. What am I supposed to do?”
“Show mercy,” I say, and it’s enough to set her off.
“Mercy?” she demands. “Mercy? Where was Shotet mercy when they destroyed a hospital? Where was it when that woman held me down and sliced into my face? Where was it for my mother, my father—for Ori?”
“I—”
“Othyr gave us an anticurrent blast, and I’m going to use it as soon as I can,” she says. “At which point I hope you’ll tell me your brain was addled by painkillers, because there’s no way a right-minded person would call for mercy right now.”
She storms out, with a straight spine. The posture a couple seasons at the Assembly taught her, so she would fit in.
They killed innocent people, she said, almost in the same breath she talked about doing the same. And that’s the problem—because to her, no Shotet is innocent. And that is the big difference between us.
I look up at the clouds projected on my ceiling. They’re thicker now, closer together.
I’m stuck here, and out of options. Out of time.
I dream of the oracle Vara, showing me the sculptures in the Hall of Prophecy on Ogra. Each one is a member of my family, made of glass. Even Cyra is among them.
And I wake to Ast’s face, looming over mine.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says, when the beetle chirps—signaling to him, I’m sure, that I’ve moved. “Isae will be along soon. I just wanted to have a chat with you first.”
He drags the stool over to my bedside, and sits, the beetle perching on his shoulder.
“You may have noticed that I didn’t tell Isae that you tried to contact our enemies. That you tried to contact Cyra Noavek.”
My face is hot. My throat burns. I want to speak. To yell. To wrap my hands around his throat.
“I didn’t think it was wise to arouse her suspicions—you betray her, and in the same night, you’re attacked?” he says. “But you should know that if I do decide to tell her, I’m sure she will have more sympathy for me than she will for you. Attacking the woman she loves because she turned traitor to her country . . . it’s forgivable. What you did is not.”
“You—” I grit my teeth. The word comes out as a growl, forced as hard as I can past the strictures of my throat and mouth.
“So don’t step out of line, Cisi,” he says. “What’s done is done. The attack’s been ordered, and I think now we can begin to get along.”
I want to scream at the unfairness of it, my silence forced by the current, which supposedly gives all life. If it’s such a good thing, why does it strangle me? Why does it torture Cyra? Why does it push away my brother, and empower dictators, and boggle my mother’s mind?
I hear the sharp, clipped tone of Isae’s voice just outside the door. I know, then, what I need to do.
If my gift can’t be overcome, then maybe it needs to be put to use instead.
I push aside my anger, my grief, my worry. I push aside my pain, too, as much as I can. I remember sinking to the bottom of the pool in the temple basement when I learned to swim. The way the water burned my eyes at first. How it lifted my hair away from my head, made it feel soft. How it caressed, and pulsed with its own rhythm. How I could hear my own heartbeat.
Isae told me Ast’s father went by “Wrench.” He maintained their little ship. So maybe it’s not comfortable things that soften Ast, but hard things: the warm metal handle of a tool his dad just put down. The vibration of the ship’s engine in the wall. The prick of a grate under his bare feet.
Ast blinks, slowly.
“Hey,” he says. “Stop.”
“No,” I say. He’s comfortable enough now that I can talk, at least. “You’ve been chastising me for the use of my currentgift since you arrived. You watch it strangle me and you don’t do anything to make sure I’m heard. Well, now I’ll watch it strangle you.”
“You’re controlling her,” Ast says. “I can’t let you.”
The rough sleeve of a maintenance worker’s coveralls, faintly frayed. Engine oil rubbed between two fingers, smooth and faintly sticky. A screw catching in place and tightening, turn after turn.
“You try to get your way, and I try to get mine,” I say, “but neither of us controls her.”
“No, you’re—” He leans back, and closes his eyes. “It’s different.”
“You’re right, my methods are far more effective,” I say softly. “You think I use my gift recklessly. You have no idea how much I hold back.”
I hit him with it again: the shudder of the seat beneath him as his ship passes through an atmosphere. The crinkle of the wrapper that comes around a prepackaged protein cake at a fuel station. I wrap the textures around him, metal and plastic and vapor and grease, until he may as well be living back in that ship.
He sags against the wall and just stares at me.
“You will not get in my way anymore,” I say. “I will guide us away from catastrophe, and you will allow me to.”
The door opens, admitting Isae, dressed in her training clothes. Her face shines with sweat. She smiles at Ast and me, likely thinking we’re making peace. As if peace is what I could have with someone who attacks me, and threatens me, and takes advantage of my inability to speak.
“What’s wrong?” she says, her face falling as she takes in the scene, me tense and upright, hands clenched into fists. Ast sagging, shoulders curled in, eyelids half-closed.
“Tell her,” I say to him. “Tell her what you did to me.”
He stares, his eyes empty.
“Tell. Her,” I say slowly.
“I attacked you,” he says to me. Then, to Isae, “It was me, I attacked her.”
“You—what?” Isae says. “Why?”
“She was interfering,” he says.
I can’t sustain this level of energy for much longer. I pull back on my currentgift with a gasp. When Ast returns to himself, his face crumples into rage. Isae looks stricken.
“I’m sorry, I . . .” I pretend to choke on the words. I let myself falter, and grab my stomach with one arm, wincing. Let her see me as weak, out of control.
“I didn’t mean to,” I say. “But I needed—I needed you to believe me.”
“She’s lying to you!” Ast snaps. “Can’t you see that? She’s using her currentgift to manipulate you, to control you! She’s been doing it this whole time!”
“Look—look at his arm,” I say. “There’s a bite mark, from where I fought back.”
Isae’s jaw tightens. She marches over to him and grabs his arm, pulling him to his feet. He goes where she directs him, maybe knowing that he can’t fight a chancellor, or that I’ve finally beat him. She pushes up his sleeve, and there it is—a perfect impression of my teeth, an uneven half circle.
She drops his arm with a soft moan.
“I—she was trying to contact the Shotet!” he says. “She tried to send a message to—”
“Shut up,” Isae says. She blinks rapidly. “I trusted you. You lied to me. You—I want you arrested. I want you gone.”
I am slipping away. Too tired to stay. But before I go, I look at Ast, and though I know he can’t see it, I smile.