“Sorry,” he said, in low Shotet. “But—would you stay?”
Behind him, Cisi and Sifa embraced, Sifa’s hand running over Cisi’s curls with a tenderness I remembered from my own mother.
Akos’s gray eyes—set now in a face more sallow than it had any right to be—begged me to stay. I had distracted myself from him in the week since the attack, refusing most of the comfort he offered, unless it was in the form of a painkiller. I couldn’t let myself stay close to him now, knowing that he was only here because of his own fatalism. He made me weak, though. He always had.
“Fine,” I said.
“I hoped you would come,” Sifa was saying to Cisi, whose eyes were on Eijeh. He held himself at a distance from the others, plucking at his cuticles. His posture and gestures were still like those of my late brother. It was . . . disconcerting.
“Eijeh thought it was likely,” she continued. “He’s only a beginner, but his intuition is strong. So we came to facilitate a particular path.”
“Ah, you’re admitting to it this time?” I said, my arms crossed to disguise the clench of my hands.
Akos’s fingertips touched one of my elbows, sending the pain away. I didn’t let myself look at him.
“Yes,” Sifa said. Her hair was in a pile of curls on top of her head, a hatpin stuck through the middle of it so it stayed in place. The little jewels at the end of the pin glowed pale pink. “Come. We’re wanted elsewhere.”
“Probably,” Eijeh qualified.
“Probably,” Sifa repeated.
“You’re not making me want to spend more time with oracles,” I said.
Akos’s lips twitched into a smile.
“And what a shame that is,” Eijeh replied drily. “Our loss, I’m sure.”
I stared at him. I had never heard Eijeh Kereseth make a joke before, particularly not at my expense.
There was no time to retort, because I turned and saw a menacing sight: the outline of an Ogran transport vessel. Its edges were lined with white tubes of light, but the persistent dark flattened them, making the whole thing look like the face of a beast, hanging in the air. Tucked-back wings became ears, a vent beneath the forward fuselage was a mouth, and the tail was a single horn.
An Ogran in a flight suit came toward us. His skin was dark brown, but his eyes were iridescent, like the scales of a fish. They caught all the light around them and tossed it back, silvery-bright. A manifestation of his currentgift, I was certain, though what it did was as yet a mystery.
Somewhere to my right, Yssa uttered what sounded like an Ogran curse word under her breath.
CHAPTER 23: AKOS
AKOS TRIED TO GET a sense of the Ogran ship in the dark, but it was difficult. When they first landed on Ogra, he thought the sky was always the same, but that wasn’t the case—sometimes it was velvet black, sometimes worn black, sometimes almost blue. And now, with the sky at its darkest, the ship all but disappeared, but for the light they had used to mark its shape.
Yssa stepped forward. “Pary. Hello.”
She didn’t sound cold, exactly, just as she never really sounded warm. But something had changed in her. She knew this person.
“Yssa,” the Ogran said. “I’m surprised to find you here.”
“I was sent to be an ambassador from our people to the Shotet,” she said. There was definitely something off about the two of them, Akos decided. There was too much familiarity in the way they spoke to each other. Ex-lovers, maybe? “And you’re surprised to find me among them?”
“I meant here, with . . . two oracles of Thuvhe,” the man called Pary said. “But maybe that was foolish of me.”
Akos felt Cyra shift under his hand, getting restless. Sure enough, she was already opening her mouth.
“State your business, would you?” she said. “We’ve got a family reunion happening here.”
“Miss Noavek. You are just as anticipated,” Pary said with a wide smile. “My business is that of the oracle of Ogra. You have—all of you—been summoned by her, and I am tasked with taking you to her immediately. She is on the other side of Ogra, on the edge of the wilderness, so we must fly there to make it on time.”
Of course, Akos thought, with no small amount of scorn. His mom and Eijeh had come into the village—where they almost never went—for just this reason. He hated the feeling of it, all the threads of fate coming together and tangling in a knot. The only other times in his life he had felt it happen, his dad had ended up killed, or he had killed Vas—
Vas, his face shining with sweat, a bruise at the corner of his eye from who knows what—
“And if we don’t want to go?” Cyra said.
“That would be unwise,” Pary said. “According to Ogran law, the oracles’ summons must be obeyed. And as a Shotet exile, you are obligated to obey our highest laws, unless you want to compromise your own refugee status.”
Cyra glanced at Akos.
“Oracles,” he said with a shrug, because there wasn’t much more to say.
The inside of the Ogran ship was downright startling.
It was alive in a way Akos had never seen, didn’t think a ship could be. The structure was metal, but there were plants growing everywhere, some behind glass, some out in the open. He recognized a couple of them from what Zenka had taught him, though he’d only seen them shriveled or sketched or chopped up. One of the plants behind glass looked like a perfect globe until its thick, jagged petals peeled apart, revealing the same teeth he had learned to grind into a powder. It snapped at him as he walked by.
Cisi went to one of the others—a flowered vine that twisted around one of the ship’s support beams—like she was pulled there by a magnet. A dark green tendril reached for her finger and wrapped around it, gentle. Akos rushed to her side and flicked it to make it back off.
“Apparently they start off friendly and turn fierce,” he said to her. “But if you ignore them they don’t usually do anything.”
“Do all the plants here try to kill you?” Cisi said.
“Almost all,” he said. “Some try to befriend you so you’ll defend them against other plants.”
“You’ll notice there are almost no animal species on Ogra,” Pary said as he walked past them. “That is because the plants are so highly developed. There is a wide variety of insect species, for the propagation of plant life, but we are the only warm-blooded beasts that walk this planet.”
Pary settled into the captain’s chair. There was no copilot or first officer that Akos could see, just Pary and a stretch of buttons and switches and levers. Yssa took the seat beside him, though. The forward fuselage was big enough to fit all of them, on bench seats with protective straps. Given what Akos knew about the planet’s tendency to fight back against everything, everywhere, he thought they needed more than some straps to protect them, but nobody had asked him.
“Did the oracle say why she wanted us dragged to her?” Cyra said, while she was strapping herself in. She finished her own buckles and then reached over—unconsciously, it seemed like—to help Cisi with hers. Akos took the seat on her other side, at the end of the bench.
“It’s not for me to ask,” Pary said.
“The oracle is not very . . .” Yssa paused, searching out the word in Othyrian. She asked in Shotet, “How do you say, ‘forthright’?”
Akos repeated the word in Othyrian, for Cisi.
“It is not an oracle’s job to answer questions like those,” Sifa said. “We have only one job, and that is to protect this galaxy. Sorting through the inconsequential information that other people find essential is not up to us.”
“Oh, you mean inconsequential information like ‘You, my youngest son, you’re going to get kidnapped tomorrow’?” Cyra snapped. “Or ‘Isae Benesit is about to murder your brother, Cyra, so you may want to make your peace with him’?”