He did, this time imagining his coat of kutyah fur, in Thuvhe, which was another kind of armor against the cold. He felt its tickle against the back of his neck where the coat ended and his hat began. He tried this image twice more before Yma checked the delicate watch she wore around her wrist, and announced that she had to go.
“Practice,” she told him. “Vakrez will come to you later, and you need to be able to pretend.”
“I need to master this by later today?” he demanded.
“Why do you have this expectation that life will make concessions for you?” She scowled. “We are not promised ease, comfort, or fairness. Only pain and death.”
With that, she left.
Her speeches are almost as encouraging as yours, he said, to the Cyra in his mind.
He tried to practice what Yma had taught him. He did. It was just that he couldn’t get his mind to focus on one thing for more than a couple minutes at a time. So it wasn’t long before he wavered.
He walked the periphery of the room, pausing to peer out the slats in the window coverings, which were the same dark wood as the floor. They were elegant bars for a prisoner, he thought.
He hadn’t done much thinking about his dad, not since his death. Every time thoughts of him did come up, they were an intrusion, and he shifted his focus back to the greater mission of rescuing Eijeh as he had promised. But in this place, hungry and confused, he couldn’t do much to keep them out. The way Aoseh had gestured—big and unwieldy, knocking things off the table or smacking Eijeh in the head by mistake. Or how he had smelled like burnt leaves and oil from the machinery in the iceflower fields. The one time he had shouted at Akos for a bad score on a test, then broke down into tears when he realized he had made his youngest son cry.
Aoseh had been big and messy with his emotions, and Akos had always known his dad loved him. He had wondered more than once, though, why he and Aoseh didn’t seem to be anything alike. Akos held everything close, even things that didn’t need to be secret. That instinct toward restraint, he realized, made him more like the Noaveks.
And Cyra—bursting at the seams with energy, opinions, even anger—was more like his dad.
Maybe that was why it had been so hard not to love her.
Vakrez came in, and Akos wasn’t sure how long the commander had been there before he cleared his throat. Akos stood blinking at him for a few ticks, then sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He had meant to brainstorm a better image for his currentgift. He hadn’t done it. Now Vakrez would find out that Akos was getting his strength back, and he would be suspicious.
Shit, Akos thought. Yma had suggested armor, a wall—a protective barrier between Akos and the world. None of those things had felt right, when she said them, but what else was there?
“Are you all right, Kereseth?” Vakrez asked him.
“How’s your husband? Malan,” Akos said. He had to buy some time.
“He’s . . . fine,” Vakrez said, narrowing his eyes. “Why?”
“Always liked him,” Akos said with a shrug. Could ice be a protective barrier? He knew ice well enough. But it was something to be wary of, at home, not something that protected you.
“He’s nicer than I am,” Vakrez said with a grunt. “Everybody likes him.”
“Does he know you’re here?” What about a metal casing, like an escape pod or a floater? No, he didn’t really know those as well.
“He is, and he told me to be kinder to you.” Vakrez smirked. “Said it might help you open up more. Very strategic.”
“I didn’t think you needed me to open up,” Akos said darkly. “You pretty much just get to dig around in my heart no matter what I say about it, don’t you?”
“I suppose. But if you are not intentionally obfuscating your emotions, it is easier to interpret them.” Vakrez beckoned to him. “Stick out your arm, let’s get this over with.”
Akos rolled up his sleeve, exposing the blue marks he had stained into his skin with Shotet ritual. The second one had a line through the top of it, and noted the loss of the Armored One he had killed in pursuit of higher status.
He found himself returning to that place. To the fields just beyond the feathergrass, where the wildflowers were fragile and mushy, and the Armored Ones roamed, avoiding anything that transmitted too much current. The one he had killed had been relieved to find him. He had been a respite from the current.
Akos had felt a kind of kinship with it then, and he found that kinship again now. Imagining himself monstrous, with too many legs and a hard, plated side. His eyes, dark and glittering, hidden under an overhang of rigid exoskeleton.
Then, with a shock of violence, he imagined that exoskeleton riven in two. And he felt it, the second the current rang through him again, buzzing in his bones. Vakrez nodded to himself, his eyes closed, and Akos focused on keeping the wound open, so to speak.
“Yma told me she would use her gift to encourage you to dwell on your devotion to your father—Kereseth, that is, not Noavek,” Vakrez said. “I see she’s been successful.”
Akos blinked at him. Had Yma done something to him when she was there, to make him think of Aoseh? Or was it just a coincidence, that he had? Either way, it was lucky.
“You don’t seem well,” Vakrez said.
“That’s what happens when your biological father imprisons you in his house and starves you for days,” Akos snapped.
“I suppose you’re right.” Vakrez pursed his lips.
“Why do you do what he says?”
“Everyone does what he says,” Vakrez said.
“No, some people stop being cowards and leave,” Akos said. “But you’re just . . . staying. Hurting people.”
Vakrez cleared his throat. “I’ll tell him about your progress.”
“Will that be before or after you prostrate yourself before him and kiss his feet?” Akos said.
To his surprise, Vakrez didn’t say anything. Just turned and left.
Lazmet was seated at a table by the fire when Akos was escorted to his quarters again. The room looked like the one Akos had unlocked when he first came to this place: dark wood panels, reflecting shifting fenzu light, soft fabrics in dark colors, books stacked on almost every surface. A comfortable place.
Lazmet was eating. Roasted deadbird, spiced with charred feathergrass, with fried fenzu shells on the side. Akos’s gut rumbled. It wouldn’t be so difficult to snatch some of the food off the table and shove it in his mouth, would it? It would be worth it, to taste something that wasn’t pickled or dried or bland. It had been so long. . . .
“That’s a bit childish, don’t you think?” he managed to say, after swallowing a mouthful of saliva. “Taunting me with food when you’re starving me?”
Akos knew this man wasn’t really his dad. Not in the way Aoseh Kereseth had been, teaching him how to button up his coat, or how to fly a floater, or how to stitch up a boot when the sole came loose. Aoseh had called him “Smallest Child” before he knew that Akos would end up being the biggest, and he had died knowing he couldn’t keep Akos from being kidnapped, but trying—fighting—anyway.
And Lazmet just looked at him like he wanted to take him apart and put him back together again. Like he was something you dissected in a science class to see how it worked.
“I wanted to see how you would react to the presence of food,” Lazmet said, shrugging. “Whether you were animal or man.”
“You’ve brought Yma Zetsyvis in with the specific purpose of altering what I am, whatever I am,” Akos said. “What does it matter what the ‘before’ is, when you’re controlling the ‘after’?”
“I’m a curious man.”
“You’re a sadist.”
“A sadist delights in suffering,” Lazmet said, lifting a finger. His feet were bare, his toes buried in the soft rug. “I do not delight. I am a student. I find satisfaction in learning, not pain for the sake of pain.”
He covered his plate with the napkin that lay across his lap, and stepped away from the table. It was easier for Akos to deny himself the impulse to lunge at the plate when he couldn’t see it anymore.