“What is it?” Ast says. No robotic guide beetle can help him with something on a screen, after all.
“There were people around it, did you see?” Isae says. “Why were there people around it?”
I turn up the volume on the news feed just in time to hear: “Initial reports suggest there were a few hundred Shotet around the craft, attempting to evacuate the city—”
I turn the screen off.
“A few . . .” Isae gasps. “A few hundred—”
Ast shakes his head. “Stop that, Isae. Casualties were still minimal.”
“Minimal,” I say, and it’s all I can manage. General Then’s estimates said casualties would be around three dozen. Not hundreds.
“Yeah,” Ast says, eyeballing me. “Minimal. Compared to what could have been. That’s why you suggested the sojourn ship, remember?”
There’s a flow of words in my mind—hundreds, men, women, children, old, young, middle-aged, kind, cruel, desperate, people people people—but I stop it, like two hands clapping around an insect to kill it. I am better at this than I should be, after too many tragedies poisoned my memories. It’s how I survive.
I don’t answer Ast. I am tired of the way he prods at me. I pull back on my gift as hard as I can, hoping that if Isae feels less comfortable, she’ll call him off.
She’s facing the swirls of snow, arms folded. The Shissa buildings in the footage light up green, purple, pink. They remind me of the baubles they sold at the Hessa market when the planting started, for people to hang in their windows for luck.
Isae’s shoulders shake. Shudder, really. She slaps a hand against the glass to steady herself.
Ast and I both stand, eager to comfort even though I’m sure he doesn’t know how any more than I do.
Isae is hunched, turning so I can see the side of her face.
She’s laughing.
“All those . . . people . . .” She gasps, wrapping her free arm around her stomach. “Bowled right over!”
Ast’s face goes slack with horror, but I know what this is.
“Isae,” I say. “Take a deep breath.”
“All those . . .” Isae bends at the knees. Her hand squeaks against the glass as it slides down.
I walk to the bathroom and run cold water over a washcloth to soak it all the way through. I carry it back to her, dripping all over the floor. She is crouched next to the window, laughing, sobbing.
I put the wet cloth on the back of her neck, and run a hand over her back. Ast finally seems to catch on—a bit late, I think, but he seems dense that way—and he urges Pazha forward with a whistle, so its clicking guides him to us. He crouches near us, silent but present. It’s the closest he and I have ever been to each other. Sharing air.
“All those people,” she whimpers.
I watch Ast’s reaction as I unfurl my currentgift like a banner and drape it over all three of us. For once, he doesn’t object.
“I miss her,” she whispers later, as we sit together by the window and watch the currentstream.
I take her hand, and press it to my cheek.
I show her a memory of Ori asleep at our kitchen table, slumped over a detailed sketch of an iceflower. There was ink smeared on her cheek. My father sipped his tea, smiling fondly down at her, and my mother clicked her tongue, though her eyes still smiled.
My father bent to ease his arms around her, and carried Ori to the living room. I watched her long legs bounce up and down with his footsteps.
“Well,” my mother said to me. “We do call it ‘Ori’s room,’ after all.”
Isae and I drift gently out of the memory, her hand still pressed between my cheek and my palm, and she smiles at me.
I’m holding her together, I think.
And, What happens when I can’t anymore?
CHAPTER 21: CISI
THE DESCENT TO OGRA almost kills me.
It took some doing—and some careful use of my currentgift—but I convinced Isae to let me go to the Shotet exiles to start peace talks. We can work together to unseat Lazmet. The exiles are not our enemies. Their goals are aligned with ours. It took a while for my words to take root, and even now, she’s still skeptical, but she did agree to let me suss out the situation, at least.
Seven days after the attack on Voa, she secures me a spot on a transport carrying food to Ogra. I squeeze into a seat between a massive crate of fruit engineered in an Othyr lab and a refrigerator packed with bird meat from Trella. The crew is Trellan—a language I don’t speak—so I can’t join in when they joke with each other. And Trellan is spoken in a monotone, so I can’t even pretend I’m listening to music. They smile at me every now and then, so I know they don’t mind me, but that’s no surprise. No one minds me, even if they haven’t quite figured out why.
Then the ship’s captain, who is thick through the legs and shoulders, with a tuft of chest hair poking out the top of his shirt, tells me in broken Othyrian, “Buckle! Now!”
It’s lucky, maybe, that no one told me what to expect, because I might have made them turn back.
All the lights on the ship go off at the same time, and then I’m screaming and it’s dark and I’m screaming. I can’t breathe and I’m sure, then, that the ship is running out of air and I’m going to die here in a pile of meat. I’m clinging so hard to the straps covering my chest that my hands go numb, or maybe that’s from terror. The last thing I think is that I never even got to speak to Mom again.
Then the lights come back on, and gravity catches me, and the crew are all staring at me like I sprouted a third eye. They laugh, and I try to join them, but really I’m just focused on breathing.
It’s not long before we’re standing on Ogran soil.
An Ogran woman named Yssa—“Ee-sah,” she says to me, slowly, when I don’t get it the first time around—takes me to the exiles in a little boat that cuts like a knife through the light-streaked water. She speaks Othyrian like she’s counting beans, dropping words one by one, but it’s the only language we have in common, so we trade nonsense until we reach solid ground again.
She walks me through the uneven streets of a village where Shotet and Ograns live side by side. Yssa points things out to me—a stall of polished stones she likes, the place where she buys her groceries, the tiny carved dolls that gave her nightmares as a child. She doesn’t explain how they know what “night” is here, and when she gestures, the glowing bracelets around her wrist clatter together.
“Which one is your brother?” she asks me.
“Very tall, fair-skinned, like you,” I say. “He came with Cyra Noavek.”
“Oh! The heavy one,” she says.
“Heavy?” I say, confused. “No, he’s thin.”
“No, no. Not heavy in body. He carries a weight,” she says. “I don’t know the word.”
“Oh.” I’ve never thought of my brother that way. The tall, deadly man who fought his way out of a Shissa hospital and into an amphitheater prison didn’t seem weighed down by anything—if anything, he seemed faster and lighter than everyone around him. But maybe I just can’t really see him. There is a special kind of sight that comes with not knowing someone your whole life, and Yssa has it.
“I will take you to where they gather,” Yssa says. “He may be there, and he may not.”
“That’s fine, thank you,” I say.
She leads me to an old warehouse with cracks climbing up the outer walls. There’s a sign fixed above the door with some characters on it I can’t read. They look Shotet.
We walk in, and it definitely feels like a Shotet place, in all the ways I’ve been taught to expect. All the tables have been pushed back against the walls, and people are either sitting at them or perched on top of them, in a kind of ring.
As we walk in, people are pounding on the tables in a rolling rhythm, so loud it’s all I can focus on at first. Then I look at what’s happening in the middle.