“What do I do now?” he asked the beetle on his hand.
“Surely that thing won’t respond to you,” Pary’s voice said from behind him. “I don’t claim to understand other people’s currentgifts, though.”
Akos whipped around fast. The beetle on his hand still didn’t stir, thankfully.
“Don’t come much closer,” he said. “Killer beetles, and all.”
“They seem to like you,” Pary said. “Whatever you are is a very strange thing.”
Akos nodded. That wasn’t up for debate.
Pary stood in front of him—at a safe distance—with his hands in his pockets. “She must have told you something difficult.”
Akos wasn’t sure difficult was the right word for it. The beetle crawled from his thumb to his sleeve, pincers clicking audibly. Hopefully that wasn’t what it did before it attacked. Akos didn’t think it was going to attack him, though.
“There are a lot of people across the solar system who think oracles are elitist, you know,” Pary said. “Only giving fates—and therefore importance—to certain families. It seems like an unnecessary display of favoritism to people who don’t understand how fates work, how they do not allow an oracle to choose anything at all. But those who have fates know better.”
Pary’s eyes glinted with the glow of a flower in the garden, reflecting orange.
“A fate is a cage,” he said. “Freed from that cage, you can choose, do, go . . . whatever, wherever you’d like. You can, in some ways, finally know who you are.”
Akos had been too busy thinking about who he was related to to think about fates, though he knew that was where Cyra’s mind had gone. Maybe he ought to be happy that he wasn’t fated to die anymore, but he’d been hanging on to that so hard that it was hard to adjust. It was like he’d been carrying a weight around for so long he forgot what it was like to be without it, and now he felt too light, like he might float away.
And his true fate? The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide.
Well, he’d already done that, crossed the stretch of feathergrass that separated Thuvhe from Shotet. He’d done it more than once. So his fate had been fulfilled, and now, Pary was right. He could choose whatever. Do whatever.
Go.
Wherever he wanted, wherever he needed to go.
A decision was just coming together in his mind when he heard the scream, high and grating. A wail joined it, and then a low shout. Three voices raised in acknowledgment of pain. Three oracles.
By now, he knew what it meant: there had been another attack.
The beetle fled from his wrist as he ran up the hill to the room where his brother slept. He ripped the sheer curtains aside to see Eijeh sitting up in bed, his fingers knotted in his curly hair as he moaned. It had been a long time since Akos had seen Eijeh so rumpled, his shirt twisted around his torso and half his face marked by the crease of a pillowcase.
Akos hesitated at the edge of the room. Why had he come here, instead of going to his mom’s room? He’d lost the parts of Eijeh he’d been so determined to save, and now he knew that what was left of Eijeh wasn’t even related to him anyway, so what kept drawing him back?
Eijeh lifted his head, eyes locking on Akos’s face.
“Our father,” Eijeh said. “He’s attacking them.”
“Eijeh,” Akos said. “You’re confused—our father is—”
“Lazmet,” Eijeh said, rocking back and forth, still clutching his head. “Shissa. He attacked Shissa.”
“How many dead?” Akos touched Eijeh’s shoulder, and his brother—his brother?—pulled away.
“No, don’t, I need to see—”
“How many?” Akos demanded, even though deep down he knew it didn’t matter whether it was a handful or dozens or—
“Hundreds,” Eijeh said. “It’s raining glass.”
Then Eijeh burst into tears, and Akos sat on the edge of the bed.
No, it didn’t matter that it was hundreds. His path forward remained the same.
CHAPTER 29: EIJEH
“YOU HAVE TO FIND ways to ground yourself,” Sifa said to us. “Or the visions will take over. You’ll get stuck in all the possibilities and you won’t be able to live a life.”
We answered, “Would it be so bad? To live a thousand different lives instead of your own?”
She narrowed her eyes at us, this woman who was our mother, an oracle, and a stranger all at once. We had ordered the death of her husband; we had suffered the loss of that man ourselves. How odd it was, to be responsible for so much pain, and to have suffered as a direct result of that responsibility, all at once. As our identities melded more and more, we felt more profoundly the contradictions inherent in our being. But there was nothing to be done about it; the contradictions existed, and had to be embraced.
“Whatever made you, made you for a purpose,” she said. “And it wasn’t to become a vessel for other people’s experiences; it was to have your own.”
We shrugged, and that’s when the images came.
We are in the body of a man—short, stocky, and standing before a cart full of books. The smell of dust and pages is in the air, and shelves tower above him. He places a heavy volume on a tray that sticks out from the shelf, and keys in a code on a device he carries. The tray zooms off to the shelf where the book is supposed to go—a story above his head, and to the left.
He sighs, and walks to the end of the aisle to look out the window. The city—which we recognize as Shissa, in Thuvhe—is full of buildings that hover so far above the ground that the iceflower fields beneath it look like mere patches of color amid the snow. The buildings appear to be hanging from the clouds themselves. Across the way is a tiered diamond-shaped structure of glass that glows green at night, lit from within. To its left, a curved mammoth lit up soft white, like the land beneath it.
It is a beautiful place. We know it.
We are not a man anymore. We are a woman, short and shivering in a stiff vest of Shotet armor.
“Why does anyone live in this damn country?” she says to the man next to her. His teeth are chattering audibly.
“Iceflowers,” the man said with a shrug.
She flexes her hands in an attempt to bring feeling back to her fingers.
“Shh,” he says.
Up ahead, a Shotet soldier has her ear pressed to a door. She closes her eyes for a moment, then pulls back, and motions the others forward. They slam a metal cylinder into the door, several times, to force it open. The lock pops off and clatters to the cement floor. Beyond the door is a control room of sorts, like the nav deck of a transport vessel.
A scream pierces the air. We rush forward.
We are standing at a window, one hand pressed to cold glass, the other pulling a curtain back. Above us is the city of Shissa, a cluster of giants that drape over us always. It has been our colorful comfort in the night ever since we were a child. The sky without buildings in it seems bare and empty, so we do not like to travel.
Since we have been staring at them, the buildings do not move, not even in the strongest wind. That is thanks to the Pithar technology that holds them upright, controlled by small towers on the ground, near the iceflower fields. We don’t understand how it works. We are a field worker. The boots—with hooks on the bottom, to catch on ice sheets—are still on our feet from the day’s labor, our shoulders still sore from hauling equipment.
As we watch, the hospital—a bright red cube right above us—shifts.
Shudders.
And drops.
It falls, pulling a gasp from our lungs. Like something dropped into a bucket of water, it seems to move slowly, though that can’t be true. It sends snowflakes up in a faint white streak as it drops. And then it collides with the ground.