THE ESCAPE POD IS only just big enough for the two of us pressed together. As it is, my shoulder is still jammed up against the glass wall. I fumble on the little control panel for the switch that activates the distress signal. It’s lit up pink, and it’s one of only three switches in front of me, so it’s not hard to find. I flip it up and hear a high-pitched whistling, which means the signal is transmitting, Teka said. Now all that’s left to do is wait for Isae to wake up, and try not to panic.
Being on a little transport vessel like the one we just left is nerve-wracking enough for a Hessa girl who’s only left the planet a couple times, but the escape pod is another thing. It’s more window than floor, the clear glass curving up over my head and all the way down to my toes. I don’t feel like I’m looking out at space so much as getting swallowed by it. I can’t think about it or I’ll panic.
I hope Isae wakes up soon.
She’s limp on the bench seat next to me, and her body is framed by a blackness so complete, she really does look like the only thing in the entire universe. I’ve known her only a couple years, since Ori disappeared to take care of her after her face got cut with a Shotet knife. She grew up far away from Thuvhe, on a transporter ship that took goods from one end of the galaxy to the other, whatever they could haul.
It was a good thing Ori had been around to force us to talk to each other, in the beginning. I might never have talked to her otherwise. She was intimidating even without the title, tall and slim and beautiful, scars or no scars, and radiating capability like a machine.
I don’t know how long it takes for her eyes to open. She drifts for a while, staring all bleary at what’s in front of us, which is flat nothing in between the far-off wink of stars. Then she blinks at me.
“Cee?” she says. “Where are we?”
“We’re in an escape pod, waiting for the Assembly to come get us,” I say.
“An escape pod?” She frowns. “What did we need to escape from?”
“I think it’s more that they wanted to escape from us,” I say.
“Did you drug me?” She rubs her eyes with a fist, first the left one and then the right. “You gave me that tea.”
“I didn’t know there was anything in it.” I’m a good liar, and I don’t think twice. She wouldn’t accept the truth—that I wanted to get her away from the rest of my family just as much as Akos did. Mom said Isae was going to try to kill Eijeh the same way she did Ryzek, and I wasn’t willing to risk it. I don’t want to lose Eijeh again, no matter how warped he is now. “Mom warned them you might try to hurt Eijeh, too.”
Isae curses. “Oracles! It’s a wonder we even let them have citizenship, with all the loyalty your mother shows her own chancellor.”
I have nothing to say to that. She’s frustrating, but she’s my mother.
I continue, “They put you in the pod, and I told them I was going with you.”
The scars that cross her face stay stiff while her brow furrows. She rubs them, sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking. She says it helps the scar tissue to stretch out, so one day she’ll be able to move those parts of her face again. That’s what the doctor said, anyway. I once asked her why she just let the scars form instead of getting reconstructive surgery on Othyr. It’s not like she didn’t have the resources. She told me she didn’t want to get rid of them, that she liked them.
“Why?” she finally says after a long pause. “They’re your family. Eijeh’s your brother. Why would you come with me?”
Giving an honest answer isn’t as easy as people say. There are so many answers to her question, all of them true. She’s my chancellor, and I’m not going to oppose Thuvhe, like my brother is. I care about her, as a friend, as . . . whatever else we are to each other. I’m worried about the wild grief I saw in her right before she killed Ryzek Noavek, and she needs help to do what’s right from now on rather than what satisfies her thirst for revenge. The list goes on, and the answer I choose is as much about what I want her to hear as it is about the truth.
“You asked me if you could trust me,” I finally say. “Well, you can. I’m with you, no matter what. Okay?”
“I thought, after what you saw me do . . .” I think of the knife she used to kill Ryzek dropping to the floor, and push the memory away. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.”
What she did to Ryzek didn’t disgust me, it worried me. I don’t care that he’s dead, but I do care that she was able to kill him. I don’t try to explain that to her, though.
“He killed Ori,” I say.
“So did your brother,” she whispers. “It was both of them, Cisi. There’s something wrong with Eijeh. I saw it in Ryzek’s head, right before—”
She chokes before she can finish her sentence.
“I know.” I grab her hand and hold on tight. “I know.”
She starts to cry. At first it’s dignified, but then the beast of grief takes over, and she claws at my arms to get away from it, sobbing. But I know, I know as well as anybody that there’s no escape. Grief is absolute.
“I got you,” I say, rubbing circles on her back. “I got you.”
She stops scratching after a while, stops sobbing. Just leans her face into my shoulder.
“What did you do?” she asks, voice muffled by my shirt. “After your dad died, after your brothers . . .”
“I . . . I just did things, for a long time. I ate, showered, worked, studied. But I wasn’t really there, or at least, I didn’t feel like I was. But . . . it was like when feeling comes back to a limb that’s gone numb. It comes back in little prickles, little pieces at a time.”
She lifts her head to look at me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was about to do. I’m sorry I asked you to come see . . . that,” she says. “I needed a witness, just in case it went wrong, and you were the only one I trusted.”
I sigh, and push her hair behind her ears. “I know.”
“Would you have stopped me, if you knew?”
I purse my lips. The real answer is that I don’t know, but that’s not the one I want to give her, not the one that will make her trust me. And she has to trust me, if I’m going to do any good in the war that’s coming.
“No,” I say. “I know you only do what you have to.”
It was true. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about how simple it had been to her, and the distant look in her eyes as she led me to that storage room, and the perfect hesitation she had shown Ryzek as she waited for just the right moment to stab him.
“They’re not going to take our planet,” she says to me, in a dark whisper. “I won’t let them.”
“Good,” I say.
She takes my hand. We’ve held hands before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still send a thrill through me when her skin slides over mine. She is still so capable. Smooth and strong. I want to kiss her, but this isn’t the time, not when there’s still Ryzek’s blood drying under her fingernails.
So I just let the touch of her hand be enough, and we stare out together at nothingness.