AKOS WAS STARING INTO the fire when the door opened the next morning.
He had expected, when Cyra fled without his help, to break down completely. Instead, he felt like all the excess of his life—the agonizing over blood and citizenship and family and fate—had been pared away, like meat cooked away from the bone. And now everything that had been muddled was clear.
He was not Thuvhesit or Shotet, Kereseth or Noavek, third child or second. He was a weapon against Lazmet Noavek.
The gnaw of hunger no longer bothered him, except that it left his mind and body fatigued, and less useful to him. Yma didn’t come to bring him more food, so he knew she had likely helped Cyra escape, and he was grateful for that, in a distant way that applied to some other life. In this life, he wanted nothing but to accomplish his goal.
“Akos?”
The voice belonged to Vakrez. Akos rose from his place by the fire, suppressing a shiver at the cold air he found away from it. Vakrez was frowning at him.
“Are you all right?” he said more kindly than usual.
“I’m fine,” Akos said, as he stuck out his arm for Vakrez to take.
“That’s not why I’m here. There wouldn’t be much point, with Yma gone,” Vakrez said. “Lazmet summoned me to discuss strategy, and he asked me to collect you on my way.”
Akos looked for his shoes, and found them tucked under the foot of the bed. He stuffed his feet in, and raised his eyebrows at the commander when he didn’t move away from the doorway.
“What?” he said.
“You seem . . .” Vakrez frowned. “Never mind.”
They walked side by side to whatever room Lazmet was using for the meeting. His office, it seemed, because they climbed up a staircase with wood-paneled walls, instead of going down to the Weapons Hall. Akos had to stop at the top to catch his breath, and Vakrez waited for him without complaint.
His father greeted him with a tilted head when he walked into the office, with its soft rug and its tomes of history stacked high. The peel of the fruit that had clued Lazmet in to Cyra’s infiltration of the manor sat curled on Lazmet’s desk.
When Lazmet gestured for Akos to sit, he did this time, at the end of the sofa closest to the fire. He looked down at his fingers. Had his knuckles gotten thicker? Or had the rest of his hand simply begun to disappear, his body devouring the last reserves of strength and energy it had?
“Akos,” Vakrez said, jostling his shoulder.
“Hmm?” Akos lifted his head.
“Pay attention,” he said, eyebrows raised.
He had scolded Akos for inattention more than once. The last time, Akos remembered, had been at the soldiers’ camp, after he had earned his armor, and maybe a small amount of respect from his commander. Vakrez had been lecturing about strategy. Something about how the soldier who was on his home ground always had the advantage, because he knew the terrain. Shotet soldiers therefore had to adapt quickly, as they would never be on their home ground. Even Voa, he said, isn’t your home. Shotet have no home.
“Oh, don’t scold him, Vakrez,” Lazmet said, leaning back in his chair with a book in his lap. Akos couldn’t see the spine. “He’s not operating at full capacity right now.”
“Why am I here?” Akos asked, blinking slowly at Lazmet.
“I was hoping you would tell me a few things about your hometown,” Lazmet said. “I understand that you come from Hessa.”
He was about to ask why Lazmet wanted to know about his hometown—his memories, after all, were the kind a kid would care about, like where the best sweets were, or which shop Eijeh liked to browse just so he could make eyes at the girl who worked behind the counter. But the answer, when he considered it a little bit more, was obvious.
“You’re going to attack it,” Akos said. The thought of Shotet swarming the steep streets of Hessa, charging into the sweet shop, maybe killing the girl who worked behind the counter, made him feel ill.
Lazmet didn’t answer.
“It’s not hard to figure out,” Akos said. He felt far away from everything. “There are only three major cities in Thuvhe. You already hit Shissa. So it’s either Osoc or Hessa next.”
“You don’t seem troubled,” Lazmet said. “Do you expect me to believe that you feel nothing for the place where you spent the majority of your life?”
He wouldn’t let himself think about the dim little spice shop that made him sneeze, or the woman who sold elaborate paper flowers in the warm months, when it didn’t snow. Or the alley that was a straight shot up the hill, the best—and most dangerous—sledding path in all of Thuvhe. He wouldn’t, or he would get swallowed up in it.
Lazmet wanted him to betray his home. Shotet have no home, Akos thought, remembering Vakrez’s lecture on strategy.
But he did have a home. He had a home ground, a place no one knew as well as he did.
“It’s not that I feel nothing,” he said, steadying himself as much as he could. “It’s that I have an offer for you.”
“Oh?” Lazmet looked amused. Well, that was all right, Akos thought. Better he be amused and underestimate Akos, than be suspicious.
“You’ll take me to Hessa with you, and after your attack is over, you will leave me there, at my house,” Akos said. “After that, I won’t come after you, and you won’t come after me.”
“And in return?”
“In return, I’ll help you destroy the temple of Hessa.”
Lazmet glanced at Vakrez. The commander looked like he was working the idea between his teeth. He sat on the other end of the sofa, somehow managing to make sinking into the cushions look graceful.
“The temple of Hessa,” Lazmet said. “Why should that matter to me?”
“Judging by your Shissa attack, you want to be theatrical. Big, destructive gestures are demoralizing, as well as costing a lot of lives,” Akos said. “But Hessa doesn’t have grand, floating buildings you can knock out of the sky. It has the temple. It’s stamped on our old currency, from before the Assembly was formed. There’s nothing else to attack in Hessa except the temple.”
The odd thing was, he knew that both men already knew this. Lazmet was old enough to remember the siege his mother had led against Hessa, the one that Hessa temple still bore the busted windows and scraped-up stones from. The one Akos’s grandmother had gone into with nothing more than a meat cleaver, if the stories were true.
So Lazmet probably just wanted to see if Akos would persuade him, or bother to try. More “curiosity,” more experimentation. It never stopped.
“It’s a temple, not a labyrinth,” Lazmet said. “I don’t really need your help to attack it, now that you’ve told me that’s what I ought to do.”
Akos felt the sharp stick of panic in his chest. But he knew Hessa temple better than most Thuvhesits did, and that had to be worth something. It had to.
“By all reports, it may as well be a labyrinth for as much sense as its layout makes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a map of it, either,” Akos said. “But if you and your fighting force want to run around like a bunch of idiots, giving the oblates plenty of time to summon the whole army of Hessa—the best army in all of Thuvhe, I should add—then go right ahead.”
“So the layout is nonsensical, there are no maps, and you just happen to know how to navigate it,” Lazmet said with a sneer. “How convenient.”
“None of this is convenient,” Akos said, scowling. “You brought me here because you thought I had something useful to tell you about Hessa, and now I tell you I know something useful and you refuse to believe it?” Akos let out a short laugh. “I betrayed my country, I got my friend killed—I have nothing to go back to, nothing left in the world except for that house, where people will leave me alone. You made sure of that. So have your attack, have your war, have whatever you want, but leave me alone, and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.”
Lazmet’s eyes were fixed on his, searching, calculating. Akos imagined himself as the Armored One, tearing into his own abdomen to make a space for Lazmet to get in. He felt the wire wiggling in his head, and the involuntary twitch of his fingers that meant Lazmet was testing him. Suspicious, as always, but Akos had come to expect it.
Lazmet took in his twitching fingers. Akos felt the swoop of something like hope in his gut, and then—
“Vakrez, give me a read on him,” Lazmet said.
Akos knew it would be more suspicious to object than not, so he stuck out his arm for Vakrez to take. It was getting easier and easier to imagine himself as the Armored One, the more he wanted to be away from everything and everyone. Armored Ones were solitary, separate from everything that channeled the current. Lonely, but impenetrable, just like he was. He knew most people who killed them had to find a way to stick a knife in them right under the arm or leg joint, where there was a space between the thick plates that covered its body. They had to get in far enough to make the thing bleed to death. That was how Cyra had killed it, he was sure. It was her way—find the weakness, exploit it, be done with it. It was more honorable than the way he had done it, lulling the beast to sleep, giving it relief, like he was someone to be trusted, and then poisoning it.
But that was his way.
Except now, there was nothing he could do except let down his currentgift shield so that Vakrez could poke his way into Akos’s heart. And what he would see there was pure intention, the desire to kill Lazmet unmistakable.
Vakrez touched him, his hand cool and rough as always, and closed his eyes for a few ticks. Akos waited for the blow to fall, waited for the end of him.
“So much clearer now,” Vakrez said. He opened his eyes, and looked to Lazmet. “All he wants is to escape.”
Akos tried not to stare. It was a lie.
Vakrez was lying for him.
He didn’t dare look at the commander. He couldn’t afford to give himself away now.
“Then, my boy,” Lazmet said to him, “it seems we have a deal. You take me to Hessa. And I’ll let you go home.”
I’ll take you to my home ground, Akos thought, and that’s where you’ll die.