A sudden jerk, like a hook caught around a rib and pulling, inexorably. But it is not the rib cage of this body that is pulled, it is our combined being, the Eijeh and the Ryzek, the Shotet and the Thuvhesit, the very all of us.
And then we are a ship. Not a small transport vessel or a passenger floater but a warship, long and narrow, sleek at the top and bottom but craggy on the side like the face of a cliff. We descend through a dense layer of clouds—white, and cold, and vaporous. When we break through the cloud layer, much of the land beneath us is also pale, a distant stark white shifting into beige and gold and brown as the land warms along the equator.
Then we are not a ship but a child, small, standing near the edge of a packed-clay rooftop. We scream for a father as the dark shape descends, casting a shadow over the city. A city of patchwork, part of us recognizes, the city of Voa. “Is it the sojourn ship?” we ask our father, as he comes to stand beside us.
“No,” our father says, and we are gone again.
We are not a child but a maintenance worker, dressed in coveralls that are patched at the knees. We have both hands buried in an instrument panel, a tool between our teeth as we feel for the right part. Pressure around our abdomen and thighs tells us we are in a harness, and we dangle from the anchor higher up on a metal face. We are on the sojourn ship, part of us helpfully suggests, making repairs.
A shadow falls over us, and we tilt our head back to see the smooth underside of a ship. Its name is painted across its bottom in a language we do not recognize and cannot read, but we know this ship is not Shotet.
We are a woman with a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, bunched beneath her chin, and we are running toward the sojourn ship with a child’s hand clasped in ours. We carry a heavy sack over one shoulder; it is soft with clothing, but the corner of a book pierces our side with every other footstep. “Come on,” we say to the child. “We’ll be safe on the sojourn ship, come on.”
We are a younger woman with a screen in hand, standing at the loading bay doors as a crush of people fight to make their way inside the ship. We cling to a handle on the wall to stay steady as people push and push and push. We shout to a young man behind us: “How many have evacuated so far?”
“A few hundred!” the man shouts back.
We look up at the big, dark ship. A set of doors opens on its underbelly, and another. A huge section of metal pulls apart, showing an open hatch right above us. The ship has come to hover right over the sojourn ship, which is perched on a metal island across the sea from Voa so that we can repair it and improve it in time for the next sojourn.
“Are they deploying ships?” we demand, though we know the man behind us has no answer.
Something falls from the rectangle, something big and heavy and glinting in the sun.
And then brilliant, blinding light.
We are the child on the rooftop again, watching as light so white, so scorching, envelops the sojourn ship and radiates out like rays from the sun. But the rays are curled, like roots, like veins, like the dark fingers that cradled the traitor Cyra Noavek’s face as she killed our sovereign.
The brightness sprawls across the ocean, sending water scattering away so it swells, huge, toward the shores of Voa. The brightness burns through clouds, reaching as high as the atmosphere, or so it seems. It is a wall of light that collapses all at once, like two hands clapping together.
And then wind—wind so strong it roars in our ears and makes them ring, wind so strong it knocks us, not just over, but a few feet forward, slamming into the clay of the roof. It rushes over us, and we lose consciousness.
We are hundreds
of slowing hearts.
CHAPTER 19: CYRA
I STOOD WITH THE Shotet exiles around the screens in the mess hall, all of us pressed together. Enemies, friends, lovers, strangers, we were shoulder to shoulder, watching as the sojourn ship was ripped to shreds.
It was a hundred things, the sojourn ship. Our history. Our freedom. A sacred vessel. A workplace. A symbol. A project. An escape.
A home.
As I watched the footage play again and again, I thought of clearing my mother’s closet of all her clothes and shoes, too small and dainty for me to wear myself, for the most part. I had found secrets tucked away in her pockets and shoeboxes: love letters from my father, when he was a gentler man; labels from bottles of pain medication and wrappers from the drugs she took to escape; another woman’s lip paint, smeared on a scarf, from an affair. The story of her imperfect life, told in stains and scraps of paper.
And I had filled that space with my own story, my splattered stove, the suits of armor that glinted when the lights I strung over my bed struck them, and the rows upon rows of footage from other worlds, dancing and fighting and building and fixing. They were not just objects, but escapes when pain made it hard for me to stay in my own body. My comforts in despair.
It had also been the place where I fell in love.
And now it was gone.
The fourth time the footage played, I felt fingers against mine. I pulled away instinctively, not wanting to transfer my currentgift to someone else, but the hand found mine, insistent. I turned to see Teka at my side, her eye welling up with tears. Maybe she wanted my pain, or maybe she wanted to offer me comfort; either way, I held on to her, keeping most of my currentgift to myself, as much of it as I could.
Her grip lasted only for a moment or two, but it was enough.
We stood and watched the footage play again, and we did not look away.
Later, I pressed my face to my pillow and sobbed.
Akos climbed into my bunk and curled his body around mine, and I allowed it.
“I told them to evacuate,” I said. “I’m the reason there were so many people on that ship—”
“You tried to help,” Akos said. “All you did was try to help.”
It wasn’t reassuring. What a person tried to do didn’t matter—what mattered was the result. And the deaths of hundreds were the result here. That loss was my responsibility.
In a fair world I would have marked every single life on my arm, to carry them around forever. But I did not have enough skin for that.
Akos held me tighter, so I could feel his heartbeat against my spine, as I began to sob again.
I fell asleep with the press of wet fabric against my face.
CHAPTER 20: CISI
“CONFIRMED, CODE 05032011. PROCEED.”
Some moments you put into a little file in your mind because you know they’re important, and what Isae Benesit says to signal the attack on Voa is one of those. She says it clearly, every consonant crisp, and she doesn’t hesitate. When she’s done she pushes back from the desk where she was speaking to General Then, stands up, and walks away, brushing off Ast’s outstretched hand.
It doesn’t take long for the attack to start. For the anticurrent blast Pitha loaned us to fly toward Thuvhe on a special ship designed for just this purpose. The crew of the ship is Pithar, but it’s General Then, the commander of Thuvhe’s armed forces, who actually presses the button, per Thuvhesit law.
I imagine the hatch doors opening at his touch, and the weapon—long and narrow, with squared edges—falling, falling, falling. There’s poetry in it, in that poetry can be raw, and cruel, and strange, like this.
Isae, Ast, and I watch it from her quarters. The Assembly ship is facing the sun, then, so the walls are opaque, and they show an image of Shissa in the swirling snow. The little flakes get stuck to the sights that captured the footage, every now and then, so the image is blurry most of the time, white blobs right up against the dark night sky. Between them, though, I see the buildings hanging from the clouds like drops of rain suspended in time. Shissa isn’t home, but it’s where I went to school, where I found a life away from my mom and her constant prophecies, so I still love it there.
Shissa is what I’m looking at when the news footage comes up on the screens, and I see only a flash of the sojourn ship’s destruction before closing my eyes against it. Isae stifles a sharp sound.