I RAN MY FINGERS over the silverskin on my head. It had begun to generate electrical impulses similar to those of real nerves, so I could feel a light tapping where my touch was. It was soothing, like standing under the warm rain of Pitha.
“Quit it, Plate Head,” Teka said. “You’re drawing attention.”
We stood in the square just outside the amphitheater. Under the reign of my brother, this place would have been packed with vendors, some from other planets—forbidden from instructing us in the use of their languages, of course—and some Shotet. The air would smell like smoke and charred meat and the burnt herbs from the tents of Essander, where everyone seemed particularly attuned to scents. I would tuck my hands into my sleeves to keep from touching anyone, fearing the crush of the crowd. My brother had been a tyrant as much as Lazmet was, but part of him had craved adoration, and it had inspired him to make concessions, on occasion. Lazmet had no such craving.
In light of that, the square was not packed with people shouting numbers at each other. Soldiers didn’t stroll between the stalls, hoping to catch someone speaking a word of another language so they could extort money or threaten punishment. There were a few tables set up with goods—food, mostly, marked up to high prices—and all of them were Shotet. I doubted many outsiders wanted to be in a country involved in war, profitable though it might have been.
“It’s less of a plate and more of a bowl,” I said to Teka, holding my hands in a curved shape, like that of my skull.
“What?”
“The silverskin,” I said, showing her my hands again. “If it’s any kind of serveware, it’s a bowl, not a plate.”
“I didn’t mean ‘plate’ as in ‘dinner plate,’” Teka said, scowling. “I meant it as in a metal plate, like on the side of a ship—you know what? This is ridiculous. You’re ridiculous.”
I grinned.
I thought we would suffer for the lack of a crowd to disguise us, but there were few soldiers that I could see. Guards by the usual entrances and exits, but they were easily dealt with. And not in my typical fashion, though that had been my initial suggestion.
Sifa had proposed a more peaceful path into the amphitheater. She and Yma would approach the guards at the entrance head-on, and convince them to let her tour the arena. Yma had worn the lavender dress for the occasion, so she would look wealthy, important, worth making allowances for. This would draw the guards’ attention away from us, while also giving Yma and Sifa a chance to get in themselves.
Zyt and Ettrek had pledged to create some kind of large distraction near the side door, to draw away the guards there. Teka and I had to enter through that door while the guards dealt with whatever Ettrek and Zyt did. We were too easily recognized.
“There she goes,” I said to Teka, nodding to the entrance with its grand archway. Yma’s lavender skirt fluttered in the wind. She drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders, and began walking through the square.
I had passed through the amphitheater’s arch on my way to challenge my brother. It had been simpler, then. A single enemy, a single path forward. Now, there were tyrants and chancellors and exiles and countless factions among the people who served each of them.
And there was Akos.
Whatever that meant.
“Sifa said he’s not here,” Teka said to me. Like a mind reader. “Lazmet took him wherever they went. I know that’s not all that reassuring, but . . . better for him not to be hit by the blast, right?”
It was. It meant that I could think clearly. But I didn’t want to admit to that. I shrugged.
“I asked her for you,” Teka said. “I knew you’d be too proud to do it yourself.”
“Time to go,” I said, ignoring her.
We started through the square, keeping pace with Sifa, who was doing her part to look casual and familiar. She paused at one of the tables to look over a platter of pan-fried feathergrass; Teka and I kept to the next row, watching her through the haze of smoke rising up from the smithy advertising free currentblade repairs with purchase.
I watched Sifa and Yma approach the entrance guard from a distance. I was sure Yma’s tongue could be just as quick and persuasive as she needed to get into that amphitheater. She had spent her life lying, after all.
When the guards were both engaged enough to turn away, I led the way to the side door at a brisk walk. It was set into the wall at an angle, creating a space for a guard to stand without being visible from the street. I drew my currentblade.
The soldier was young, and tall, so for a moment I saw Akos in his stead, putting on his Shotet armor for the first time and appearing, to me, as the exact image of what I might have wanted, if I had been allowed to want normal things. But in the next moment, the soldier was shorter, thinner, and lighter-haired—not Akos.
Just before I could lash out at him, I heard screaming behind me. At the edge of the square, a cloud of smoke had risen up from one of the stalls. No—not a cloud of smoke, but one of insects, all taking flight at once. The screams came from the vendor, losing all of his product at once. He lunged at Zyt, who was laughing, and punched him hard in the jaw.
I sheathed my currentblade, and said, “Guard!”
The sandy-haired guard stepped out of his alcove to look at me.
“There’s a fight,” I said, jabbing my thumb over my shoulder.
“Not again.” He groaned, and took off running.
Teka slipped in without ceremony, drawing the small screwdriver from its place in her pocket and addressing the lock on the door. I peered out at the square to make sure no one was watching us. There were only slumped vendors and furtive-looking Shotet making their purchases, and the growing brawl Zyt and Ettrek had fostered.
“Hello, darling,” Teka said softly in the voice she used to speak to wires. “Would you open up for me? No, not your job? Ah.”
I heard a click. The door opened, and Teka and I passed through the doorway. It locked automatically behind us, and some instinct in me told me that wasn’t good for quick escapes, but there was nothing to be done about it now. We jogged down the dark hallway with its arched stone ceiling, toward the light at the end that would admit us to the bottom level of seats.
Sifa was already walking the arena floor, cooing like a bird at how large the place was, and how it never seemed as big when she was sitting in the audience, and whatever else she could think of to say. Her voice, with its slight rough character, echoed a dozen times over even before we made it to the end of the hallway. Yma was beside her, making little hums of assent.
Teka immediately started up the steps toward the control room, which was behind the second-level seats, but I stayed at the low wall that separated the first row from the arena floor, and closed my eyes. I could hear the chanting that had accompanied the edge of Ryzek’s knife as it dug into me, the shouts of “Traitor!” that had met me when I challenged him again.
“Cyra?” Teka’s voice pulled me free from the twists and turns of my memory.
I opened my eyes as the sky darkened.
It could have been something as ordinary as a cloud passing over the sun, but it had already been cloudy when I closed my eyes, an even pale gray in every direction. Instead, when I lifted my head, I saw a vast ship, far larger than any transport vessel or floater or military craft that Shotet possessed. It was as large as the sojourn ship, but perfectly round, more like the Thuvhesit passenger floater that Sifa had guided into the renegade safe house.
The underside of the ship was smooth and polished, like it had never been flown before, never been battered by space debris and asteroids and rough atmospheres. Dotting its belly were little white lights. They marked doors and hatches, important attachment points and docking stations, and the ship’s massive outline. It was an Othyrian craft. I was sure of it. No one else would have the will and the vanity to make something so functional so beautiful.
“Cyra.” Teka’s voice again, fearful this time.
I locked eyes with Sifa, standing in the center of the arena. Eijeh had decided the time of his vision based on the color of the light, he said. Well, with this ship shielding Voa from the sun, it looked very much like dusk.
The attack was happening now.
“I wouldn’t bother with the control room,” I said, surprised by how remote my own voice sounded to me.
The soldiers who had shown Sifa into the arena fled, as if they could outrun a ship that large before the anticurrent blast hit. And perhaps there was no shame in that, in dying with hope.
I hoisted myself over the barrier that separated me from the arena, and dropped neatly to the packed earth below. I didn’t know why, except that I didn’t want to be standing above the arena when the anticurrent blast hit. I wanted to be where I belonged: here, with grit in the soles of my boots, where people who loved to fight stood.
And I loved to fight.
But I also loved to live.
I wouldn’t say I had never thought of dying as some kind of relief, when the pain was at its worst, when I lost my true mother to the darkness I didn’t yet understand. And I wouldn’t say that living was always, or even often, a pleasant experience for me. But the discovery and rediscovery of other worlds, the burn and ache of muscles building strength, the feeling of Akos’s warm, strong body against mine, the glint of my mother’s decorative armor at night in the sojourn ship—I loved them all.
I stopped in the middle of the arena, within grasp of Sifa and Yma, but not touching them. I heard Teka’s light footfalls behind me.
“Well,” Teka said. “I suppose it could be worse.”
I would have laughed, if it had been any further from the truth. But for Teka and Yma and me, who had come so close to other, far more horrible ways of dying, I supposed dissolving into an anticurrent blast was not so bad.
“Anticurrent,” I murmured, because the word seemed so strange to me.
I looked at Sifa—at my mother, in whatever way she still was that—and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised.
“I don’t understand. Anticurrent blasts are light,” I said. “The sojourn ship . . . it was so bright when it was destroyed. How can anticurrent be bright?”
“The current is both visible and invisible,” Sifa said. “It doesn’t always appear to us in a way that we understand.”
I frowned down at my spread palms, where the currentshadows had collected, winding again and again around my fingers like stacks of rings.
The doctor I had seen as a child had suggested that my currentgift came about because I thought I deserved pain, and that everyone else deserved it, too. My mother, Ylira Noavek, had chafed at the mere suggestion. This is not her fault, she had said, before dragging me out of the office.
And Akos—when he had seen the way I kept track of what I had done on my arm, now covered, as always, by armor, he had simply asked me, How old were you?
He had not thought this gift was what I deserved, and neither had my mother. And maybe they were both right—maybe the doctor was the one who had been wrong, the man whose words had been echoing in my mind all my life. Maybe pain was not my currentgift, not at all. Maybe pain was just a by-product of something else.
If the anticurrent was light—
And I was plagued by dark—
Maybe current was my gift.
She is herself a small Ogra, the Ogran dancers had said to me, when they saw my currentgift displayed.
“Does anyone know what the word ‘Ogra’ actually means, in Ogran?” I said.
“It means ‘the living dark,’” Sifa replied.
I laughed, a little, and as a narrow hatch opened on the underside of the ship above us, I raised my shadow-stained hands to the sky.
I pushed my currentshadows up, up, up.
Over the sizzle of the amphitheater’s force field, which Akos had disabled at a touch as he lifted us to safety. His arm had been strong across my back, tightly coiled as a rope.
Over the center of Voa, where I had lived all my life, contained in spotless wood paneling and the glow of fenzu. I felt Ryzek’s hands, a little sweaty as they pressed over my ears, to shield me from the screams of whoever my father was tormenting.
And higher over Voa, over even the fringes of the city where the Storyteller and his sweet purple tea lived, where the renegades had cobbled together a dinner table made of half a dozen other dinner tables.
I didn’t suffer from a lack of fuel. The currentshadows had been so strong all my life, strong enough to render me incapable of attending a simple dinner party, strong enough to bow my back and force tears from my eyes, strong enough to keep me awake and pacing all through the night. Strong enough to kill, but now I understood why they killed. It wasn’t because they drained the life from a person, but because they overwhelmed it. It was like gravity—we needed it to stay grounded, alive, but if it was too strong, it formed a black hole, from which even light could not escape.
Yes, the force of the current was too fierce for one body to contain—
Unless that body was mine.
My body, battered again and again by soldiers and brothers and enemies, but still working its way upright—
My body, a channel for the pure force of current, the hum-buzz of life that brought others to their knees—
Life is full of pain, I had told Akos, trying to draw him back from depression. Your capacity for bearing it is greater than you believe. And I had been right.
I had had every reason to become closed off, wrapped up tight, pushing everything that resembled life and growth and power as far away from myself as possible. It would have been easier that way, to refuse to let anything in. But I had let Akos in, trusting him when I had forgotten how to trust, and I had let Teka in, too, and maybe one day, Sifa—
I would let anyone in who dared draw near. I was like the planet Ogra, which welcomed anyone and anything that could survive life close to it.
Not because I deserved pain, and not because I was too strong to feel it, but because I was resilient enough to accept it as an inevitability.
My currentshadows shot up, up, up.
They spread, building from the tendrils around my fingers to a column in the sky that wrapped my entire body in shadow-dark. I couldn’t see Teka or Sifa or Yma now, but I saw the great pillar of current that passed over and through me, toward that hatch that had opened in the Othyrian ship above.
I didn’t see the anticurrent weapon, whatever its container looked like, but I did see the blast. The light spreading out from one fixed point, just as the shadow stretched upward from me.
And where they collided: agony.
I screamed, helplessly, as I had not screamed since I was too young to remember. The pain was so intense it shattered my pride, my reason, my sense of self. I heard the screaming and felt the scraping feeling of my own voice in my throat and the inferno inside me and around me, and saw the shadow and the light and the space where they met with a sharp clap.
My knees buckled, and arms wrapped around my waist, thin, bony ones. A head pressed between my shoulder blades, and I heard Teka’s voice saying, “Hold on, hold on, hold on . . .”
I had killed her uncle, her cousin, and in some ways, her mother, and still she stood behind me, keeping me upright.
Hands wrapped around my arms, warm and soft, and the smell of sendes leaf floated over to me, the scent of Sifa’s shampoo.
The dark eyes of the one who had abandoned me, and now returned for me—
And last, the strict, pale fingers of Yma Zetsyvis on my wrist.
The current moved through all of us at once, my friend, my enemy, my mother, and me, all wrapped together in the darkness that was life itself.