We are a child in a hospital bed. Our body is short and slim. Our hair sticks to the back of our neck—it is hot in here. The rails are up on the side of the bed, like we’re some kind of kid, and can’t be trusted not to roll off in our sleep.
The bed jerks beneath us, and we startle, grabbing the rails. Only it’s not the bed that’s moving—it’s the floor. It’s falling out from beneath us. The city slides away, just outside the windows, and we cling to the rails, teeth gritted—
And then we’re screaming—
The Shotet woman—we—tugs at the straps of her armor as we run. We fastened them too tight, and they’re digging into our sides, keeping us from moving as fast as we’d like.
The sound as the building falls is nothing like we have ever heard. The crunching, smashing—the screaming, wailing, gasping—the rush of air around it—it is deafening. We clap our hands over our ears and keep running, toward the transport vessel, toward safety.
We see a dark shape flinging itself off the hospital roof.
Our knees are buried in the snow. The man from before is next to us, shouting something we can’t hear. Our cheeks are hot. Startled, we realize that the Shotet woman’s face is wet with tears.
This is the retribution Lazmet Noavek ordered. But it feels more like horror.
“Come on!” the other soldier is saying. “We have to go!”
But how can we go, when all those people need help?
How can we go on, when so many are lost?
How can we go on?
CHAPTER 30: CYRA
THAT EVENING, AKOS LEFT to walk the gardens, and I found myself alone. The humid Ogran air had made my cheeks damp, and I wanted to wash my face. I stumbled to the bathroom, stinging and aching, and leaned my forehead against the tile wall as I turned on the faucet. My fingers always hurt worse than the rest of my body, the currentshadows coalescing in my extremities, like they were itching to escape.
I splashed my face with water, and dried it with the front of my shirt. Cyra Kereseth, I thought, trying out the name. It felt false, like I was trying to put on someone else’s clothing. But being in this place, where the blankets were still thrown back from where Akos and I had lain tangled together, felt just as wrong. I had been someone else when we rested here, with my ear against his chest.
Suddenly I needed to get out, to move. I walked to Pary’s ship, on the far side of the hill, away from the gardens, so I wouldn’t run into Akos. The ship’s hatch opened at the touch of a button, the interior lights on, guiding me to a seat near all the restrained plants of Ogra.
I was sitting there, in front of the plant that looked like a giant mouth, my head in my hands, when the hatch opened again. I lifted my head, sure it would be Akos, that we could finally talk about what we had heard. But it wasn’t.
It was Sifa.
She didn’t close the hatch, so I could still hear the buzz of insects and the whisper of wind while she stood, staring at me. I stared back. The pain that surged through me at the sight of her, at the thought of what she had surrendered me to as a child, was startling. I stayed still to keep it contained. No flinching, no shaking, no moaning. Nothing that invited comfort. I didn’t want her to see that she could hurt me.
“You spoke to Vara,” she said to me at last.
I sat up, and pushed my braid over one shoulder.
“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way,” I said, twitching a little at a currentshadow racing across my face. “Nothing like the news of your own abandonment coming from a stranger.”
“You have to know—” she began, and then I was on my feet, boots planted on the grate floor, a line of guiding light between my feet.
“Yes, please, tell me what I have to know,” I snapped. “Is it how you felt dumping your own daughter into a family of monsters? Or lying to your son for his entire life? Is it how you did it for the good of Thuvhe, or Shotet, or the goddamn current? Because yes, that’s really all I want to know—how hard this was for you.”
I felt huge, suddenly, like a wall of muscle. She wasn’t frail—she had a certain wiry strength to her—but she was not built like me, solid through the hips and shoulders. I could have knocked her down with a punch, and part of me wanted to try. Maybe it was the part of me that was Noavek, the part that wouldn’t have existed if she had kept me safe instead of trading me away.
Sifa stayed by the hatch, silhouetted by the lights on the little runway behind her. Her hair was piled on one side of her head, scraggly, like she hadn’t combed through it in days. She looked so tired. I didn’t care.
“What did you see?” I said. “What did you see in our futures that made you trade us? What could possibly have been so bad that it was better to hand me over to the Noaveks than to let me suffer it?”
She closed her eyes, face tightening, and I felt cold creeping down my spine.
“I am not going to tell you that,” she said, opening her eyes. “I would rather you hate me than know what I saw become of you, of Akos. I chose the best path for you, the one that had the greatest potential.”
“You don’t have the right,” I said in a low voice, “to decide my path for me.”
“I would do it again,” she said.
I was thinking about that punch again.
“Get away from me,” I said.
“Cyra—”
“No,” I said. “Maybe you could determine what happened between us when I was an infant, but you have lost that power.”
I stood. As I moved toward the hatch, to pass her, her posture changed. She slumped oddly against the doorway, head angled down, hair spilling around her face.
And then raised her voice in a harrowing scream.
Another vision, then. Something horrible.
At first I stood before her, simply listening, her voice scraping at the insides of my head. And then I crouched before her as she slid down the wall to the ground, unwilling to offer comfort, but unwilling to leave without knowing what she saw.
It took some time for her to go quiet. The scream stopped with a sound like a gag. I had learned that asking Sifa direct questions rarely resulted in anything productive, so I didn’t speak. My currentshadows burning across my belly, I waited, hunched there in the dark. Behind me, the mouth-plant snapped its brittle jaws.
It took so long for her to speak that my legs went numb.
“There’s been an attack on Shissa,” she said, breathless. “Courtesy of Lazmet Noavek.”
My first thought—though it shamed me a moment later—was: So?
Thuvhe had struck us first. Alarming though it was to think of an armed force at my father’s command, this was a war, and both sides suffered in a war.
But I had not forgotten how I felt when the sojourn ship broke apart over Voa. Wherever Akos was, he was about to feel the same thing. Despite my anger at our enemies, I couldn’t wish this on someone I loved.
I left Sifa there, the woman who had given me blood and then given me away. I had no comfort to give her and no desire to give it. I sprinted down the white stone path to the gardens to find him. But that place was empty, the beetles buzzing undisturbed. So I ran, instead, to the room where we had slept. The bed was empty.
I went from room to room, searching out Cisi’s bed—empty. But in the room that would have been Sifa’s, I found Yssa instead. Her red hair clung wetly to her cheeks, as if she had just bathed.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what, the attack?” I said. It was a strange thing to apologize to me for.
“Attack?” she said. She didn’t know yet, then. “What attack?”
I shook my head. “In a moment. What are you sorry for, Yssa?” I said, impatient. “I need to find Akos, now.”
“That’s just it,” she replied. “He’s gone.”
I felt like I might burst into flames, like one of the lethal vines in Ogra’s forests, exploding at a careless touch.
“Pary left just a moment ago with Cisi and Akos. They intend to depart Ogra on the same vessel that Jorek Kuzar will be on, headed back to Voa, at the break of day,” Yssa said.
“They didn’t leave word,” I said. I wasn’t asking.
“I wish I knew more. Pary didn’t tell me anything. I know you must be confused—” she said.