“I don’t believe you.” Akos closed his eyes. “I think you’ll take the food away the second I tell you what you want to know.”
“I won’t,” Lazmet said. He stepped away from the plate. “Here, I’ll even back away. Trust me in this simple thing, Akos. I do not delight in pain. I want to see what you will do, and it doesn’t serve me to withhold something from you once you’ve done as I asked. Surely you see the logic in that.”
Akos’s eyes pricked with tears. He was so hungry. He was so tired. He needed to do as Yma said.
Is your mission to be loyal to your family, your friends, your nation?
No.
That was not his mission.
“Kuzar,” he choked out. “Jorek Kuzar.”
Lazmet nodded. He walked away from the table and took his seat in the armchair, leaving Akos to his meal.
The feathergrass had turned sour in his stomach. It kept coming back up in burps, the flavor rising in the back of his throat. Reminding him.
Akos touched the hollow of his throat, where the ring of Ara’s family had once pressed. He wouldn’t see it again. That didn’t bother him so much—he never felt like he had earned it in the first place. Killing a man wasn’t something that should get you welcomed into a family, he knew. But the thought of how Ara would look at him, if he ever got out of here . . .
He pressed his hand over his mouth as another burp came up.
There came a tap at the wall panel next to the fireplace. It slid back to let Yma in. She looked more casual than usual, her white hair tied back, dressed in dark training clothes and soft shoes. Her eerie blue eyes fixed on him.
“Tell me,” he said, voice wavering.
“You did what was necessary,” she said.
“Tell me what happened,” he snapped.
She sighed. “Jorek has been arrested,” she said.
Akos tasted bile, and bolted toward the bathroom. He had just made it to the toilet when he started heaving, throwing up everything he had eaten in Lazmet’s sitting room. He waited out the stomach spasms with his forehead against the seat, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes.
Something cool pressed to the back of his neck. Yma drew him back and pressed the flusher. She took the wet cloth from his neck and used it to wipe his face, kneeling beside him. Her usually passive face looked weary now, the lines in her forehead and around her eyes more apparent than usual. It wasn’t a bad thing.
“The night my husband, Uzul, and I decided that I would turn him in to Ryzek, thus prematurely ending his life for the good of our cause, I sobbed so hard I pulled a muscle in my abdomen. It hurt to stand up straight for a week,” she said. “He had only months to live, you see, but those months . . .”
She closed her eyes.
“I wanted those months,” she said, a few ticks later.
She dabbed at the corner of Akos’s mouth.
“I loved him,” she added simply, and she tossed the cloth into the sink.
He expected her to get up, now that she had cleaned his face, but she didn’t. Yma sat down on the floor, right next to the toilet, her shoulder leaning into the seat. After a tick she put a hand on his shoulder, and the weight, and her silent presence, were comfort enough.
CHAPTER 44: CYRA
MY LAST VIEW OF Ogra from above was one of glittering light.
Then Yssa ordered us to ready ourselves. Sifa and Ettrek sat closest to the exit hatch. Yssa and Teka were on the nav deck, and I was with Eijeh—Ryzek—whoever he was now—closest to them. I glanced at Eijeh to make sure that he had strapped himself in properly, and the straps were crossed over his chest, right over the sternum, where they should be. Launching through Ogra’s atmosphere required a sharp burst of energy, followed by a quick shutdown, to break through the dense layer of shadow from beneath. Yssa guided the ship down to the right elevation, angled us appropriately, and punched the button on the nav panel.
We shot forward, the sudden force making my body slam into the straps that held me in. I gritted my teeth against the pressure. Yssa switched off the ship’s power, and we were swallowed by a darkness so complete, we may as well have disappeared.
And then everything—the darkness, the pressure, the terror, and even some of my pain—fell away at once as Yssa turned the ship’s power back on, and we drifted among the stars.
I had thought that Teka, who last flew me across the galaxy, was a good pilot, but Yssa was an artist. Her long fingers danced over the nav center, making small adjustments to Teka’s settings, and she guided us with unprecedented smoothness toward the currentstream, so we could travel alongside it. It was a cool yellow now, touched with green, a sign that more time had passed than I realized since I first landed on Ogra.
“You don’t mind Yssa poking around at your nav center?” I said to Teka, nudging her with my shoulder. We were on the nav deck—it was safe to walk around now that we were through the atmosphere—looking out at the depthless darkness in our path.
I sometimes referred to it as “nothingness,” like most people did, but most of the time, I didn’t think of it that way. Space was not a finite container, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the currentstream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds; this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing; it was everything.
“What? Oh, no, I definitely want to smack her pokey little hands away,” Teka said, narrowing her eye at Yssa, who was still busy with the controls. “But the ship likes her, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
I laughed a little.
It took me a few moments to realize the source of my sudden relief: my currentshadows, which had burrowed under my skin again when we landed on Ogra, now coasted on top of it. Their ache and sting were still present, but so diminished that I was nearly giddy with it. To one who is in pain all the time, even minor differences can be miracles, of a sort.
“We just got pinged by an Assembly patrol,” Yssa announced.
Teka and I exchanged an alarmed look.
“They say they have an old warrant on a craft matching this description,” Yssa said, reading from the nav screen.
“Warrant for what? Being Shotet?” Ettrek asked.
“Could be for drugging and spacing Isae Benesit when we didn’t want to go with her to Assembly Headquarters,” Teka suggested.
“You did what to Isae Benesit?” Yssa said.
“She had just murdered my brother in the hold, what else was I supposed to do?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know . . . give her a medal!” Ettrek said, waving his arms.
I glanced at Eijeh. He was eyeing Ettrek like he was about to reach out and smack him.
It was getting easier to think of Eijeh as two people in one body—or one new, blended person—since I saw so much of my brother, yet so little of him at once. It was Ryzek’s pride that made him chafe against Ettrek cheering his murder, but it was Eijeh’s passivity that tempered his reaction. They had, together, become something . . . else. New, but not necessarily better.
Time would tell.
“Tell them the Ograns lent us this craft and we don’t know about the original crew,” Teka said to Yssa. “Should be convincing if you record your image on the sights. You don’t sound Shotet at all.”
“Okay,” Yssa said. “The rest of you get out of range.”
We stood back while Yssa activated the sights in the nav screen to record her message, in fitful Othyrian. She was a talented liar, for an Ogran.
It would take days to get from Ogra to Urek. I spent most of my time leaning over the table in the galley, drawing a map of Noavek manor, floor by floor. I went through the servants’ passages in my memory, again and again, feeling in the dark for notches and circles and false panels. I told myself it would be useful for the mission ahead of us, as well as a good way to avoid Sifa, but those weren’t the only reasons I did it. I felt like re-creating the place on paper was a way of purging myself of it, room by room. When I was done with this, that place would no longer exist to me.