THE AWAKENING IN HESSA had never been Akos’s favorite—he liked the quiet dark of the Deadening, with its warm ovens and bright, Bloomed hushflowers—but it had certain charms. At the very start, in the weeks before the hushflowers lost their blooms, a swarm of deadbirds flew over Hessa every morning and evening in a big cloud, whistling in unison. Their song was bright and sweet, and the undersides of their wings were pink, like Akos’s blush.
They were called deadbirds because they hibernated all winter, and the first person to come across a flock during hibernation had thought they were all dead. They hardly even had heartbeats then. But when the Awakening came around, they flew all the time, dropping pink feathers everywhere. His dad collected them for his mom, and stuck them in a jar on the kitchen table for decoration.
When Lazmet Noavek’s ship landed just past the feathergrass north of Hessa, it sent up a cloud of pink feathers.
At least they aren’t going past the house, Akos thought. His family’s home was far from where they landed, though along the same strip of feathergrass. They would approach Hessa hill from behind, where there were no houses, and steps carved from rock would lead them to the temple’s back gate.
The Shotet groaned and shivered when the hatch of the ship opened. Even Lazmet seemed to brace himself. But Akos drank in the frozen air like it was the finest thing he’d ever tasted. The soldiers had laughed at him when he first came on board, stuffed into half a dozen sweaters and jackets, incapable of lowering his arms. But none of them were laughing now.
Akos pulled the strip he had torn from his blanket over his face, so only his eyes showed. He spotted the handle of a currentblade on a careless soldier’s hip, and wondered if he could grab it, stab Lazmet right now before anyone attacked Hessa. But the soldier turned away, the opportunity disappearing.
Lazmet beckoned, and Akos went to the front of the pack that had come together, the soldiers drawing closer in the cold. Vakrez and Lazmet, at least, had put on more than one layer.
Akos went to the front of the group, and looked up at Hessa hill. He had told Lazmet to fly in from as far north as he could stand to go, to glide low next to the feathergrass and land, going in on foot. Sure enough, he didn’t hear the sirens that would have sounded all throughout the town if somebody had seen Shotet soldiers. It was strange, how he hoped that he would succeed, and hoped that he would fail, all at once.
There were two paths to the bottom of the hill, one that went into a dip in the land and would protect them from rough wind, and another that wouldn’t. Akos chose the latter. He hoped half of the soldiers froze to death on their way in, or at least got such cold fingers they couldn’t handle their currentblades right.
Akos pointed his nose across the bare plains and started walking.
It wasn’t a long enough walk for any of the Shotet soldiers to freeze to death, unfortunately. But by the time they got to the bottom of the hill, the people behind him had come up with their own strategies for staying warm, some better than others. They were chewing on their fingertips—not the best idea—or wrapping their hands and faces in handkerchiefs and cloths. They were huddled in groups, rotating so one person took the brunt of the wind at a time. Akos’s eyelashes were frosted, and the skin around his eyes was numb, but he felt all right otherwise. The trick to walking in the cold was to just let the chill happen, trusting that your body would take care of itself. When the will to live failed, the body still fought.
The wind died down. They were shielded now by huge crags made by avalanches, and natural promontories, since this was the jagged side of Hessa hill. Still, finding the steps wasn’t easy—you had to know where they were, and Akos’s memory, dulled though it was by everything he’d done, held strong. He went around one of the bigger rock formations and there they were, faint indentations only as long as the ball of his foot.
“I thought you said there were steps,” Vakrez said to him.
“I thought you said the Shotet were adaptable,” Akos retorted, his voice muffled by fabric, and he started up the slope.
Lazmet insisted that Akos lead the way, which ruled out shoving him over the edge. Akos started the quick hop that made the steps easier to climb, only he couldn’t do it. He had been deprived of food for too long to do so much as a single bounce. He slumped against the side of the hill—more of a mountain to the Shotet, he realized—to keep him balanced as he went.
“You starve him for weeks and now you want him to lead us up a mountain?” Vakrez said to Lazmet.
“Get up there and help him, then, if you’re so concerned,” Lazmet said.
Vakrez stepped past Lazmet and, avoiding Akos’s eyes, put an arm across Akos’s back. Akos was startled by how strong Vakrez was, the older man lifting him almost to his toes as they walked together on the narrow stairs. The wind wailed so loud Akos couldn’t have heard him if he had whispered right in his ear, so the two men climbed in silence, Vakrez pausing every time he noticed Akos’s breaths getting labored.
After a while, the steps got bigger and flatter, cutting a winding path into the mountainside. They were made for oracles, not athletes, after all.
The sun was setting, and the snow sparkled in the light, glinting as it blew across the stone. It was a simple enough sight, and one Akos had seen thousands of times, growing up. But he’d never loved it as much as he did then, at the helm of a group of invading soldiers, on the verge of murder.
It was over too soon. They made it to the top, where a few sparse trees covered their approach, bent and curled from the constant wind. Akos had to stop at the top step, and Lazmet waved the others toward the door as Vakrez held him upright.
He was just standing on his own again when Vakrez pivoted, his broad frame shielding Akos from Lazmet’s view.
“Whoa,” Vakrez said, “get your legs under you, boy.”
And he hiked up some of Akos’s layers, shoving a blade under the waistband of Akos’s pants and covering the handle with a sweater.
“Just in case,” Vakrez said so quietly it was almost lost to the wind.
Akos didn’t intend to use a blade, but he appreciated the gesture regardless.
The smell of Hessan incense nearly made Akos fall apart. It was herbal—almost like the medicine his mom had force-fed him for his chronic cough when he was a kid, but not quite—and spicy, stinging his nose once it wasn’t numb from the cold anymore. It smelled like a dozen Bloomings, and handfuls of after-school visits spent waiting for Sifa to be done meeting with someone in the Hall of Prophecy, and afternoons of snickering at the youngest oblates, who stared at Eijeh and blushed right after he grew from a child to a teenager. It smelled like home.
Akos joined the soldiers in shedding some of his outer layers, though he was careful to protect the blade Vakrez had given him every time he raised his arms. He wound up in just one sweater, dark blue and soft, and kept his multiple pairs of socks on. They were keeping his too-large boots where they were. Sweat dotted the back of his neck; he felt warm air on it when he took off his hat. His legs still felt like jelly from the climb, or maybe that was anticipation of what was next.
“You’ll want to disable the power in the building before you do anything else,” he said to Lazmet. “There’s the main power source and a backup generator. Take the bulk of your soldiers to the main source, it’s on the other side of the building and you’ll run into temple guards that way. The backup generator is close, and nobody guards it.”
He took out the crude map he’d drawn of the temple—just the path from the back door to the maintenance room in the basement was marked on it—and stuffed it into Lazmet’s hand.
“You only labeled one of those two on here,” Lazmet said, looking the map over.
“Yeah,” Akos said. “I have to keep some things back, or I can’t hold you to your end of the deal. I’ll take you to the backup generator myself.”
He wasn’t surprised when Lazmet didn’t get angry. That would have been a normal response—you get in a person’s way at a crucial moment, and they get angry. But Lazmet wasn’t normal. He wanted his world to interest him. And Akos thinking two steps ahead clearly did.
This must have been how he crafted Ryzek, Akos thought. His disapproval came in the form of horror after horror, eyeballs in jars and people lying on their own blades. But when a person did finally make him proud, even if the reason disgusted them, they wanted to do it again. And again. And again.
“Commander Noavek, you’ll take the platoon to the main power source. You and you—” He pointed to two soldiers—one dark-skinned, his coarse hair pulled back, and the other slim and yellow-haired, her skin almost as pale as Akos’s. “You’ll come with us.”
It wouldn’t be easy to get this done with two soldiers with them, Akos knew, but there was nothing he could do about it, no way he could insist that Lazmet come with him alone without making the man suspicious. If he had to get them all killed, he would. He had already gone crashing through his own ethics in every possible way. What was another mark on his arm?
The cool metal of Vakrez’s blade pressed to Akos’s back as he walked. He led the small group down a stone hallway, past the memorial of oracles past, where a long line of names were etched into a flat slab of stone. His mother wouldn’t write her own until she foresaw her own death, which was the curse all oracles had to bear.
At the end of the hallway was a lantern that glowed faint pink, the result of faded hushflower powder. He turned right there, guiding them away from the Hall of Prophecy. He thought it was safe, leading them through the dormitories of the oblates who lived at the temple, but he had miscalculated—at the end of the row of doors was a young woman with her hair piled high on her head, yawning as she tugged her sweater back over her shoulder.
Their eyes met. Akos shook his head, but he was too late—Lazmet had already seen her.
“Don’t let her run,” he said, sounding bored.
The yellow-haired soldier streaked past Akos with her blade outstretched, black strings of current wrapped around her clenched fist. She thrust with one arm and caught the girl with the other. A sick gurgling sound came out of her mouth, a scream aborted before it could even take shape.
Akos shuddered.
Tell me your mission, he repeated to himself as he tasted bile.
To kill Lazmet Noavek.
“Stay here,” Lazmet said to the soldier in a quiet voice. “Make sure she doesn’t make noise. And that no one else interferes.”
Swallowing hard, Akos kept going, past the girl, wheezing now with what was left of her life, and the soldier, wiping her bloody blade on the seat of her pants.
It was a clear night, so the moon, still rising to its full height, glowed through the narrow windows they passed. There were still scars in the stone walls from the Shotet siege that happened before Akos was born. He remembered running his fingers over them when he was a kid, stretching high over his head to touch the violence he hadn’t yet seen.
That violence lived in his blood, not because he was a Shotet, but because he was a Noavek. The great-grandfather who had been a mediocre blacksmith and a vicious killer. The grandmother who had murdered her own siblings. The father who put a vise around the city of Voa. The brother who twisted and warped Eijeh.
It would end here. Now.
Akos reached the door he was looking for, had been looking for since they first landed. It didn’t lead to a backup generator. There was no backup generator for the temple, a fact that had caused trouble during more than one snowstorm, forcing them to host a small pack of oblates in their house until the wind died down.
No, this door led to the courtyard where the hushflowers grew. A small field of deadly poison, right there in the temple.
Akos opened it, gesturing Lazmet inside.
“After you,” he said.
Akos stepped in front of the soldier before he could follow Lazmet into the courtyard, bringing the door swinging behind him. The move had surprised the man; he didn’t even object as Akos slammed the door between them, and turned the bolt so he couldn’t get in.
“If your intention was to trick me into poisoning myself, your timing is off,” Lazmet said.
Akos turned. The hushflowers—the ones he had been counting on to make this easier, their poison blooms capable of felling Lazmet even if he, Akos, couldn’t—weren’t there. Their stalks were empty. The flowers had already been harvested.
The knife was still cool against Akos’s back. If Vakrez hadn’t given it to him, he would be as good as dead right now.
Lazmet spread his hands, gesturing to all the dying leaves that surrounded him. He stood in the middle of the narrow path of stone that ran through the courtyard, to keep the caretakers away from the death-giving blossoms. Hushflower leaves died off in the peak of the Awakening, when the weather was warmest, though the roots stayed viable for a lifetime, if cared for properly. So all the greenery around Akos’s father was limp and smelled like rot and dirt, ready to lie fallow until the next Blooming. There was no poison left to kill Lazmet with.
“That’s inconvenient,” Akos said. “But I do have a backup plan.”
He lifted his shirt, and drew Vakrez’s currentblade.
“Vakrez. Now, that’s a surprise. I didn’t think his heart had gone that soft in my absence,” Lazmet said.
His voice had lost the unctuous quality it usually had when he spoke to Akos, like he was resorting to singsong with a stubborn kid. This was not the Lazmet who found him amusing. It was the one who forced people to cut out their own eyes.
“I will have to punish him as soon as I am finished with you.” He was folding the cuffs of his sleeves over, one turn after another, so they stayed up by his elbows.
“Tell me, Akos,” Lazmet said. “How do you believe this will go for you? You are starved, exhausted, and picking a fight with a man who can control every movement of your body. There is no chance you will emerge from this place alive.”
“Well,” Akos said, “get on with killing me, then.”
He felt the squeeze around his head that meant Lazmet’s currentgift was trying to worm its way in, searching out weak points. But Akos was the Armored One, and there was no getting past his currentgift.
He started toward Lazmet, crushing leaves under his boots as he went. He knew better than to delay any longer. Before the full weight of the situation could hit Lazmet, Akos swung.
His arm collided with Lazmet’s armored wrist. Akos gasped from the pain of the collision, but didn’t relent. He was back in the arena, only there was no jeering crowd this time, no Suzao Kuzar thirsting for his blood. Just the grit of Lazmet’s teeth in the dark, and Cyra’s lessons echoing in his head, telling him to think. To abandon thoughts of honor. To survive.
He felt the pressure of Lazmet’s currentgift again, bearing down harder on both sides of his skull.
They broke apart. Lazmet wore armor on both wrists, chest, back. He would have to aim low, or high.
Akos bent, rushing at his father like he meant to tackle him, and stabbing low, at his legs. He felt a line of heat across the back of his neck as his own knife carved into Lazmet’s thigh. Lazmet had cut him.
He ignored the blood coursing down his back, soaking his shirt, and the pulse of pain. Lazmet was groaning, clutching his leg with one hand.
“How?” the man growled.
Akos didn’t answer. He felt unsteady, the weeks of limited food catching up with him. Not everything could be buried under adrenaline. He followed, stumbling toward Lazmet again, using the unpredictability of his movement to his advantage, the way Cyra had when, suffering from severe blood loss, she had to fight Eijeh in the arena. As his world tilted, so did he, and he thrust up, at Lazmet’s throat.
Lazmet grabbed his arm and yanked it hard to the side. Pain sparked in Akos’s shoulder and spread through his entire body. He screamed, and the knife fell out of his hands and into the rotten leaves. He fell down, too, lying at Lazmet’s feet.
Tears rolled down the sides of his face. All this planning, all this lying—the betrayal of his friends, his family, his country—Cyra—and it had come to this.
“You aren’t the first son to try to kill me, you know,” Lazmet said. He lifted his foot, and pressed it to the joint of Akos’s injured shoulder. Even just the touch of the man’s boot made Akos scream again, but he stepped down, harder, slowly putting all his weight into it. Akos’s vision went black, and he fought to stay present, to stay conscious, to think.
He wished he had thought to ask Cyra how she did it, kept thinking in the midst of pain, because to him it felt impossible—all that was left of him were the white-hot sparks of agony.
Lazmet leaned closer, not moving his foot.
“Ryzek surprised me, too, while we sojourned together. Our holiest of rites, the scavenge, and he dared to attack me, imprison me—” Lazmet paused, his jaw working. “But I didn’t die then—Ryzek was too weak!—and I’m not going to die now, am I?”
He twisted his toe like he was squashing a particularly stubborn bug. Akos screamed again, tears running into his hair, wrapping around his ears. He heard a distant wail, the Hessa siren going off, summoning the army to arms. It was too late, too late for him, too late for the oblate in the hallway and the temple of Hessa.
This moment had all the heft of fate in it, the weight of inevitability, set in motion from the moment Vara the oracle told him his kyerta, his life-altering truth. The revelation of his parentage hadn’t released him from the future, it had guided him to it, pulling him to his father’s side like a fish hooked through the lip. Suffer the fate, his mother’s voice said to him, for all else is delusion.
He understood, now, how Cyra had felt when she demanded that he choose her, even though he hadn’t known, at the time, that he really could. I don’t want to be something you “suffer,” she had told him. There was something powerful in that quality of hers, her refusal to accept what she didn’t choose, the force of her want.
I don’t want, she had said, and he felt it now.
He didn’t want this to be the end, the fate he suffered.
And in the muddle of all that pain, Akos thought.
He pulled his knee high, up against his chest, and kicked hard at the wound in Lazmet’s leg. Lazmet grunted, taken by surprise, and let up just a little on Akos’s shoulder. With a yell, Akos pushed against the ground with his free leg so his back scraped against the ground, half on the leaves and half on the stone path, and he stretched his uninjured arm up, his hand searching through the stems for Vakrez’s knife.
Lazmet had stepped back, grabbing his leg with one hand. Akos felt the metal of the knife handle, and grabbed. He felt his pulse in his throat, his head, his shoulder. And, trembling and throbbing and sagging under his own weight, he pushed himself to his feet.
It wasn’t fate that had brought him here. He had chosen this. He had wanted it.
And now he wanted Lazmet dead.
The Hessa siren wailed. He and Lazmet collided, armor against flesh. They went down, falling with a thump to the frozen ground and the waxy leaves. Akos felt another burst of pain in his shoulder, and dry heaved, his stomach too empty to throw anything up. Their arms were crossed between them, both of Lazmet’s hands around his wrist, trying to push the knife away.
Honor, Akos thought, has no place in survival.
He bent his head and bit Lazmet’s arm. He clenched his teeth as hard as he could, tasting blood, tearing flesh. Lazmet screamed, low. Akos pushed the knife against the pressure that held him away, and jerked his head, ripping skin and muscle from Lazmet’s arm.
The knife went right into Lazmet’s neck.
Everything stopped.
Aoseh Kereseth had broken things with his currentgift. Floater seats. Couch cushions. Tables. Mugs. Plates. One time he broke one of Akos’s toys by mistake, and sat his smallest child in his lap to show him how he could fix it, like magic, with the same gift that had broken it. The toy had never looked right again, but Aoseh had done his best.
He had chased their mother around the kitchen with flour-dusted hands to put fingerprints on her clothes. He was the only one who could make Sifa laugh, a full belly laugh. The one who had kept her present, and grounded—at least, as much as that was possible, for an oracle.
Aoseh Kereseth had been loud, and messy, and affectionate. He had been Akos’s father.
And this man—this armored, cold, cruel man lying an arm’s length away—wasn’t.
Akos lay beside Lazmet as he died, holding the arm his father had wounded to his chest, and finally wanting again.
It was a small thing—just a slight craving for survival—but it was better than nothing.