Akos grabbed a handful of his own leg to steady himself. He wanted to tell Cyra not to use his pain as a weapon against his own mom; he wanted to tell his mom that Cyra had a point. But he felt so heavy with the hopelessness of it that he gave up before he started.
“You demand to know things from the Ogran oracle that you will find out within the day,” Sifa snapped. “You’re angry that you aren’t told what you want to know exactly when you want to know it. What a frustrating existence you must find this, that it doesn’t meet your every need for you instantaneously!”
Cyra laughed. “As a matter of fact, I do find it frustrating.”
She had been this way since the sojourn ship attack, Akos thought. Primed for a fight, no matter what form it came in, no matter who it was with. Cyra was always prickly, and he liked that about her. But this was different. Like she kept throwing herself at a wall in the hope that one of these days, it might finally break her apart.
“Quiet on deck!” Pary announced. “Can’t focus with all of you arguing.”
Yssa joined in the dance of readying the ship, and the way they did it together, Pary and Yssa, made Akos think they had done it a hundred times before. Their arms crossed, fair and freckled against dark and unblemished, and stretched past each other without getting in each other’s way. The choreography of familiarity.
The ship lurched and shuddered as it rose from the ground. The engines roared, and the vines and plants twitched and fluttered like the wind was blowing. Akos watched the flowered vine curl more tightly around its support beam; the plant behind glass curled into itself and glowed orange in warning.
“We’ll be flying above the storms, to avoid their damage,” Pary said as the ship flew up and forward. “It will be rough.”
Akos couldn’t help his own curiosity. They’d been hiding from “the storms” whenever the alarm went off since they arrived on Ogra—almost every day, it felt like. But he’d yet to hear a good description of what the storms were, exactly.
The ship’s flight wasn’t as smooth as a Shotet ship’s. It jerked and shivered, and from what Akos could tell, it was slow. But they got up high enough that he could see the little glowing patches of villages, and then the big, bright splotch of Ogra’s capital city, Pokgo, where the buildings were tall enough to make a jagged horizon.
Their ship turned as it climbed, away from Ogran civilization and toward the stretch of dark that made up the southern forests. There were plenty of glowing things there, as there were everywhere else, but they were covered by dense greenery, so from a distance it was difficult to see anything but void.
The ship jerked up, which made Akos grab blindly for Cyra’s hand. He didn’t mean to squeeze hard, but judging by her laugh, that’s what he was doing. The clear view they’d had of Ogra’s surface was gone, replaced by the dense swirl of clouds. And then, up ahead, color and light coalescing, just like they had when the sojourn ship passed through the currentstream.
A blue line of lightning cut through the cloud layer and stretched down. The ship jostled Akos’s head from side to side so hard he could hear his own teeth clattering together. Another flash, this one yellow, seemed to happen right next to them. Pary and Yssa were shouting things at each other in Ogran. Akos heard retching as someone—Eijeh, probably, he’d always had motion sickness—threw up.
Akos watched as Ogra took the glowing colors the rest of the planet boasted so proudly and hurled them right back, brutal and relentless. As Pary promised, they moved right over the storm, which jostled them all but didn’t down the ship. The acrid smell of vomit, combined with the constant shuddering of his head, made him want to be sick himself, but he tried to keep it down. Even Cyra, who usually loved things that made other people scared out of their minds, looked like she had had enough, her teeth gritted even though he was taking care of her currentgift.
It took a long time for Pary to announce that they were landing. Next to him, Cyra heaved a sigh of relief. Akos noted the shift of the ship toward the ground, aiming at some dense forest that looked the same to him as everywhere else.
But as they came closer, the trees seemed almost to part, making way for a cluster of buildings. They were lit from beneath by pools of glowing water—saturated by the same bacteria that made the canals around Galo light up, Akos assumed. Otherwise they were small wooden buildings with high, peaked roofs, connected by paths that looked bright against the otherwise gloomy backdrop. Spots of light moved erratically everywhere, tracing the paths of flying insects.
The ship touched down just inside a stone wall, on a landing pad.
They were at the temple of Ogra.
CHAPTER 24: CYRA
I BENT TO TOUCH the path beneath our feet. It was smooth, flat stone—white, a color uncommon to Ogra. This place was packed with glowing things, in the gardens, and pools, and flitting around in the air.
Pary led us toward one of the larger buildings. We had landed at the bottom of a hill, so it would be a climb to get anywhere, and I assumed the oracle resided at the top. The air tasted sweet after the stale panic inside the transport vessel—I never wanted to travel during an Ogran storm again—and I gulped it down, keeping pace with Pary, with the others behind me.
As we passed through one of the gardens—most of the plants were held away from us by a mesh fence that had a current running through it, I noted—Yssa spoke from behind me, with a tone of controlled fear. “Pary.”
I turned back to see a large beetle, almost as long as my palm, crawling on Akos’s cheek. Its wings had bright blue markings, and its antennae were bright, searching. There was another one on his throat, and a third on his arm.
“Stay still,” Yssa told him. “Everyone else step back from him.”
“Shit,” Pary said.
“I take it these insects are poisonous,” Akos said. His Adam’s apple bobbed with a particularly hard swallow.
“Very,” Yssa said. “We keep them here because they are very bright when they fly.”
“And they avoid anything that is a particularly strong conduit for the current,” Pary added. “Like . . . people. Most people.”
Akos’s eyes closed.
Frowning a little, I stepped forward. Pary grabbed my arm to stop me, but he couldn’t stand to touch me; his grip slipped, and I kept walking. Inching closer, and closer, until I was right in front of Akos, his warm breath against my temple. I lifted a hand to hover over the beetle on his face, and, for the first time, thought of my currentgift as something that might protect instead of injure.
A single black tendril unfurled from my fingers—obeying me, obeying me—and jabbed the beetle in the back. The light inside it flaring to life, it darted away from him, and the others went with it. Akos’s eyes opened. We stared at each other, not touching, but close enough that I could see the freckles on his eyelids.
“Okay?” I said.
He nodded.
“Stay close to me, then,” I said. “But don’t touch my skin, or you’ll turn us both into poisonous insect magnets.”
As I turned around, I made eye contact with Sifa. She was giving me an odd look, almost like I had just struck her. I felt Akos behind me, staying close. He pinched my shirt between two fingers, right over the middle of my back.
“Well,” Eijeh said. “That was exciting.”
It was the sort of thing Ryzek might have said.
“Shut up,” I replied, automatically.
There were beautiful, expansive rooms on the hill. Grand spaces, the furniture covered with protective cloths, the planks of the wood floors stained in different patterns, the tiles painted with geometric designs in sedate greens and muted pinks. The warm Ogran air flowed easily through each space we walked through, most of the walls built to fold back. But Pary didn’t take us to any of them.
Instead, he brought us to the series of buildings where we would stay overnight. “She wants to see each of you separately, so it will take some time,” he said. “This is a peaceful place, so take advantage of the opportunity to rest.”
“Who gets to go first?” I said.