“Or like my mom,” he said. “The oracle. Maybe I’m turning into her.”
“Ah, we all become our parents, eventually,” Zenka said, stabbing the fruit again. “What do you want, Thuvhe?”
“I want a space to brew a painkiller,” he said. “And . . . access to ingredients.”
“Do you also want the moon in a jar?”
“Does Ogra have a moon?”
“Yes, and it’s almost small enough to put in a jar, to be honest.” She put the fruit down, and the tool she was using to scoop its flesh.
“I’m willing to work for the privilege of using your space,” he added. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“All right,” she said. “But if you prove yourself to be lazy or useless, I reserve the right to revoke that privilege at any time.”
“Agreed,” he said.
She set him the task of grinding the tooth of a particularly ferocious flower into a powder. “In its powder form,” she said, “it can help with circulation.” Akos had a hard time focusing on the task in front of him, but his hands were capable enough, from seasons of practice.
Later that day she cupped some seeds in her hands to show him how they glowed, and what color. Hunching over her in the little shop, peeking between her fingers, made him feel like a kid again, and he ached so badly he had to pause for breath.
The only real marker of time on Ogra was the waning of the bioluminescence that supplied Ogra’s only natural light, or the storms that battered the walls in the evening. He didn’t know how long he spent crushing teeth before Zenka told him he could start on the painkiller. Then she stood at his shoulder, watching, as he measured out ingredients. He had brought some of his own hushflower, but the supply was getting low. Zenka dug some out of her storeroom and shook the jar at him.
“I thought you said you didn’t have hushflower,” he said.
“No, I said I didn’t know how to use it,” she said. “Besides, you don’t go around admitting to strangers that you have a dangerous poison on hand.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and he got to work.
CHAPTER 17: AKOS
HE STARTED GOING TO Zenka’s shop in the mornings, before most of the others woke up. Cyra’s bed was always empty by then, the blankets rumpled near the foot of the bed, like she’d kicked them off in her sleep. If she slept at all—Akos wasn’t sure she could rest much, with her currentgift acting up the way it was. He made her painkillers, but they weren’t as good as they had been in Voa. He was having trouble focusing.
Zenka was always brewing when he got there. She wasn’t much for chatter—she just told him what to stir, or slice, or peel, and then she’d choose an Ogran ingredient to tell him about. One day it was the pulpy flesh of a fruit that grew only in the warmest months. It looked harmless enough, but when it detected something that channeled the current—like a person—it sprouted barbs. Another day she showed him how to peel the wings off a dead beetle without provoking it to squirt poison posthumously.
Often the work he did was more practical. He spent a couple of mornings in a row painting the outside of woven baskets with something that would keep their contents fresh, and those went to Ogran harvesters so they could eat lunch at midday. Akos still wasn’t sure how anyone knew what midday was, in this place, where the sun never shone.
Akos expected to feel the absence of the sun at one point or another, and from time to time he did note it, the same way he noted the temperature of the air. But he didn’t suffer for the lack of it any more than he suffered from the heat. It was just another thing that pricked at his mind, drawing out new questions.
Zenka was silent for the most part, unless she was telling him what to do. But one day, she asked him the question he’d been waiting for her to ask since he first met her:
“How did you come to be among the Shotet, if you grew up in Hessa?”
Akos nearly sliced through his own finger as he said—schooling his features so they stayed neutral—“I was an enemy of Ryzek Noavek. A captive.”
At that, Zenka laughed a little.
“That doesn’t say much, does it? We are all enemies of the family Noavek here. Kidnapped, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured. A colony of the bereaved.” Her teeth clicked like she was snarling. “It makes you more Shotet than not, to have made an enemy of a Noavek.”
“I try to understand,” he said, “why you all insist that being Shotet is something other than it is. I was born in Thuvhe; I’m Thuvhesit. How is it not that simple?” He paused. “And if you say something about the revelatory tongue, I will mangle these urestae.”
“It’s always more complicated than that, Shotet or not,” Zenka said, with a strange softness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. “You think being Thuvhesit is only about being born on one side of an imaginary line on the ground or another?”
“No, but—”
“We didn’t always have a planet,” she said. “The currentstream was home, more than a piece of rock. Or our ship. But as a people, we are maybe more closely tied than most to our identity, because we have always had to struggle against disappearing completely. We fight for you, for your belonging, because we fight for our existence. We will surrender the one only when we surrender the other.”
Akos stood still. He felt like he was standing inside her words, for a tick. Isae had said something similar not a few weeks ago, had touched his face and told him that he belonged to her, to Thuvhe. But her claim to him had been shaken by Ori’s death. The same could not be said of the Shotet. They had claimed him without knowing him, without needing him to even accept it. All they had needed were however many drops of Shotet blood he had in his veins.
He drew a sharp breath.
“Come,” she said. “Let me show you something.”
She led him out of the shop—which she left open, with everything boiling just as it was—and into the room next door. The door was on a swinging hinge, so it hit Akos in the butt after he walked in, startling him. The room beyond was Zenka’s living space, clearly, since it looked just like the shop, with all its clutter and jars of ingredients and bundles of herbs hanging from the low ceiling. There was a bed in one corner with the sheets rumpled, and a desk along the far wall with a book open on it.
Zenka picked the book up and held it out to him. It was so stuffed with pages it didn’t close right; it fell open in Akos’s palms. On the page in front of him was a sketch of a plant, roots to flower. Next to it, in her tight little script, were Shotet characters he couldn’t read. There hadn’t been time to learn more of them.
“What is it?” he said.
“This is my journal,” she said. “I keep track of all the plants I find—I’ve been doing it since I was young. Sometimes you can dry them and fix them to the pages, but most of the time I sketch. I did it for every sojourn we went on, so I have plants from every planet in there. That’s a softwillow—they grow sparsely on the peaks of Trella. They aren’t much good for medicines, but their tufts smell sweet, so they’re good for stuffing in your shoes.”
Akos smiled, and turned one of the thick, sturdy pages. On the next page was an Ogran plant he recognized—it produced a bulbous fruit that looked like a person with puffed cheeks, and its main roots grew straight down, deep, much bigger than the plant itself.
“That one’s a voma,” she said. “Its juice is the most powerful strengthening agent I’ve ever encountered—even better than harva or sendes from your country. You should keep one of these journals. The two planets you’ve been to are widely regarded as having the most interesting plant life in the system. You should keep track. Here.”