“Where we don’t even know anyone will be,” Ast argues. “Voa’s in a state of total upheaval. The soldiers have probably gone into the city to keep order. Attack the encampment and you risk just slicing and dicing at some tents and buildings.”
Isae is still chewing that knuckle. A flash of red shows me it’s bleeding now. She’s got that same wild energy she had before she killed Ryzek, only now there’s no focus to go along with it. Ast offers her a place to put her destructive energy, but at what cost? Civilian lives? Old men and women, children, dissenters, renegades, the sick and needy?
Not to mention the cost to her, as the person who orders that kind of destruction.
Come on, think.
“Killing people isn’t the only way to be effective,” I say. “The Shotet have a few things they hold dear. Their language—” I choke as Ast’s irritation with me flares to life, and my currentgift responds, keeping me from continuing.
“Yeah, sure, let’s go after abstractions instead of concrete targets,” Ast says. “That’ll work.”
I push my gift forward again, another wave. What Isae needs right now is a little bit of calm and peace. And no matter how tied Ast and Isae are to each other, he can’t give her that.
I can.
“Shh, Ast,” Isae says, holding up a hand. “Cee, go on.”
I wait for the tight feeling in my throat to work itself loose. It takes Ast calming down for it to happen, and not just his calm, but his shame at keeping me from talking. It’s not until his expression is well and properly cowed that I can speak again.
“Their language is dear to them,” I say, “as well as the oracles—which are out of the question—and the sojourn.”
“The sojourn.” Isae nods. “You’re right.” Her eyes are alight. “We could hit the ship. They just got back, so there’s probably just a skeleton crew aboard—loss of life will be minimal, but the symbolic victory would be enormous.”
It’s not my solution, but it’s not Ast’s, either. I guess that’s better than nothing.
Ast frowns, his eyes fixed as ever on an uncertain point at middle distance. He hasn’t moved in a while, so the flying beetle that guides him with its clicking and chirping is just perched on his shoulder, its antennae shifting in the same incremental way his mechanical eyes do.
“It’s a little soft,” he says.
“It’s better to regret being too soft than being too hard,” Isae says, in a clipped voice that says the discussion is over. “I’ll contact General Then. Make sure we have surveillance images of the ship that aren’t from half a season ago.”
She smiles at me, the expression a little too fierce for my comfort. It means the Isae who killed Ryzek is still in there somewhere, waiting to strike again. I shouldn’t be so alarmed by it, really. This is what attracted me to her to begin with, after all—she’s capable, decisive. She didn’t need anybody to take care of her, least of all me. She’d never admit to needing it now.
But the thing about falling for somebody is, you want to take care of them. So that’s what I’m going to do.
We eat dinner together, Ast, Isae, and me. Since Ast doesn’t respond well to my currentgift, I have to learn how to deal with him the way everybody else does—trial and error. So this time I try to ask him about growing up on the ship with Isae, and it seems to set him at ease. He tells me about trying to teach Isae how to fix engines, which is what his dad did, and all she wanted to do was pry bolts loose. She tried to get him to join in on her etiquette lessons once, and he made her laugh so hard she snorted tea up her nose.
“It came out my eye,” she says as she laughs.
Slowly but surely, I decide: I’ll pry my way between them. Not to get in the way, but to make sure she does the right thing, the level-headed thing. Her message to General Then sounded steady enough, and she’s laughing now, as she tells stories from her past, but I’m still worried. After you’ve watched someone kill a man with a kitchen knife, there’s a lot more to worry about.
Ast leaves once the plates are cleared, and I get ready to go, too, sure she’s tired out from the day’s decisions. But she catches my hand as I rise from my chair, and says, “Would you mind staying awhile?”
“Of course,” I say.
She loses all her ease like she’s shedding clothes, pacing the length of the windows and then turning to walk back. I try to help her, but just as it did when she was on her way to Ryzek’s cell on the renegade ship, my currentgift fails me. She tugs her hair, agitated, so it curls tighter around her ears.
“My gift comes with its challenges, too,” she says to me after a few laps around the room. For a long time I thought her gift was simple, just seeing other people’s memories at a touch. But it’s more than that. She lives with the past always tugging at her, trying to carry her away on its tide. “Since Ori—” She stops, swallows, starts again. “I’ve been getting stuck in memories. Which is fine when they’re good ones, like with Ast, but they’re not always good, and they come into my dreams—”
She flinches, and shakes her head.
“We could talk about something lighter,” I say. “Until you fall asleep.”
“I’m not sure. . . . I don’t think it’ll work.” She’s still shaking her head. “I wondered if . . . it’s silly, but—”
“Whatever will help you,” I say.
“I wondered if you could let me into your memories,” she says. “If I used my currentgift to see them, maybe I could get some peace, for a little while.”
“Oh.” I hesitate. I don’t have that many good memories to choose from. The ones from my childhood are tinged with sadness, because they’re all building up to Eijeh and Akos being taken, or my father dying. The ones from after, where I’m trying to pull Mom back from constant distraction, aren’t great, either. It wasn’t until I reunited with Ori that things lightened up more often, and that was partly because I was getting to know Isae. . . .
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, it’s an invasion of privacy,” Isae says.
“No! No, it’s not that,” I say. “I was just thinking that a lot of my good memories involve you and Ori, and I wasn’t sure if that would be uncomfortable.”
“Oh.” She pauses. “No, that’s . . . fine.”
I move to her bed, and sit on the edge of it, where the blanket is still smooth and tucked under the mattress. I pat the space next to me, and she sits down, angled so she can look me in the eye.
“Give me a tick,” I say.
“A ‘tick.’” She smiles. “That’s one of my favorite Hessan words.”
I close my eyes, then, so I can remember. It’s not just about thinking of when I met her, or when I felt like I was really her friend—it’s about the details. What the air smelled like, how cold it was, what I was wearing. And that’s not so easy. I was in school, so I was always wearing my uniform the first few times we spent together, a thick robe that covered my clothes so they wouldn’t get plant dust and bark and stems all over them. . . .
“Go ahead,” I say, as I remember the smell of peeling skin from a saltfruit, green and tangy.
She’s used her currentgift on me before, when we were getting to know each other better, so I know to expect her hand on my face. Her fingers are cold and a little clammy, but they warm up fast on my cheek, and anchor at my jaw. Then we’re moving together into the past.
I stood behind a rope barrier with a crowd pressing against my back. I didn’t mind it then because it meant warmth, shelter against the wind and snow. I still had to curl my hands into fists inside my mittens to keep my fingers warm, but I didn’t feel that chill, that deep chill that makes your teeth feel brittle.