I kept chopping the hushflower. It was my family’s fault that his mother had not had access to medicine—Lazmet had begun the practice of hoarding donated medicine from Othyr, and Ryzek had only continued it. I had gotten the expensive inoculation when I was a child.
“I was in love with him, the one who taught me how to prepare hushflower,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this, except that he had shared some pain with me, and I wanted to do the same. The exchange of suffering didn’t have to be even—but it was a kind of currency, his sorrow for mine. A way toward trust. “He left me. No explanation.”
Zyt made an exaggerated disgusted noise in the back of his throat, and I smiled.
“What an idiot,” he said.
“Not really,” I said. “But it’s nice of you to say.”
We drank tea and ate warm bread for dinner. It was not the best meal I had ever had, but it wasn’t the worst. The other smugglers kept to themselves, except for Zyt, who sat beside Ettrek and told stories from their childhood for hours. They had us all laughing before long at Ettrek’s sad attempts to prank his older brother, and Zyt’s savage retaliations.
Then everyone found somewhere to sleep—not an easy task, in a room this small—and one by one, we drifted off. I had never been good at sleeping, particularly in places with which I was unfamiliar, so I soon found myself slipping out the back door to sit on the back step, facing the alley.
“Saw you get up.” Teka sat next to me on the step. “You’re not much for sleeping, are you?”
“Waste of time,” I declared.
Teka nodded. “It took me a long time to sleep again after . . .” She waved a hand over her eye patch. “Kind of a horrible memory.”
“Kind of,” I said with a short laugh. “I’m not sure what’s worse.” I paused, thinking of her mother’s public execution. “I didn’t mean—sorry.”
“You don’t have to be so careful around me,” Teka said, looking at me from the corner of her eye. “When I didn’t like you, it was because I made too many assumptions. After I let them go . . . well, I’m here on your crazy mission, aren’t I?”
I grinned.
“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”
“I am, so when I bring something up, I don’t want you to take it too personally,” she said, guarded. “Akos.”
“Yeah?” I frowned. “What about him?”
“Honestly?” She sighed. “I’m a little worried that when push comes to shove, you’ll prioritize saving him over killing Lazmet, now that you know he’s here, and alive. I’ve been worried about it since I told you about him.”
I sat for a moment, listening to the night air. It was loud in this part of the city, despite the curfew and the aura of depression that had settled over all of Voa. People argued and laughed and played music in their apartments at all hours, or so it seemed. Even in the alley I saw the glow of lanterns still lit, defiant against the night.
“You’re worried I’ll do what I did last time, when I didn’t kill Ryzek,” I said.
“Yes,” Teka said, unflinching. “I am.”
“It’s different this time,” I said. “There’s . . . more, this time.”
“More?”
“More that I care about,” I said. “Before, all I had, the only good thing I had, was him. And now, that’s not true anymore.”
She smiled, and I bumped her with my shoulder.
Then I heard something behind me. A squeak. The pressure of a foot against an old floorboard. Turning, I saw a dark shape in the living room, the silhouette of a man—a soldier, judging by the bulk of him—holding out a currentblade. Beneath it, the space where Eijeh had been, a bump under a blanket, was empty.
Eijeh was gone. And someone else was here.
I turned, and stood, and ran, and roared, all at once. As the shape bent, blade upraised, I stepped on someone’s leg and shoved, hard, at the intruder. My hands met armor with a crack. I gritted my teeth against the pain of impact, and bent at the waist to dodge the swinging blade.
Someone had told the Shotet police to come here.
I drove my elbow low, under the bottom edge of the armored vest, and hit the man in the groin. He groaned, and I made a grab for his weapon. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Teka’s hair swinging as she leapt at the person behind the first. The smugglers, as well as Ettrek, Sifa, and Yssa, were now awake, and scrambling.
The pain of my currentgift disappeared in my adrenaline, but I didn’t forget it. As I wrenched the blade from the man’s hand, I gave in to the desire to share my pain with him, and currentshadows crept around his wrist, merging with the ones that wrapped around his currentblade. I watched the two combine, and bury themselves in his flesh, now a richer and darker black.
He screamed.
I kept going. I lunged at the next woman in uniform I saw, grabbing her face instead of her throat, pressing currentshadows toward her until she choked on my pain, until it filled her open, gasping mouth. I brought her head down to meet my knee, raised high enough for the two to collide, with as tall as I was.
I was not afraid of their numbers. I wasn’t afraid of anyone, not anymore. It was what made me a Noavek—not that I was so powerful I couldn’t be threatened, but that I had already survived enough horrors, enough pain, to be accustomed to the inevitability of both. But I was powerful—that much I knew.
I kept going, grabbing the next man I could get my hands on. They had made a mistake in invading us through that narrow hallway, because it created a funnel through which only one of them could charge at a time. So I took them on one at a time, until there were no more. Behind me was silence. I assumed the others had left.
I turned to make for the back door. I didn’t know how many of the police I had killed and how many I had simply disabled, but either way, I needed to flee. When I turned back toward the living room, though, I saw Zyt, Sifa, Ettrek, Yssa, and Teka waiting for me, each of them looking a little surprised.
“Go!” I shouted.
And we all ran.
“Well, your crew don’t waste any time fleeing, do they, Zyt?” Teka huffed, leaning against the wall.
We had decided, mid-stride, to make our way for the half-destroyed building where the renegades had made their camp, when I was last on Voa. It was the only other safe place we knew. Teka had taken the lead, navigating winding streets apparently from memory. The edges of the city were fraying like the cuffs of a shirt, more damaged and broken than closer to the center. There was graffiti scrawled on the side of every building: simple characters written in black, in some places, and in others, sprawling murals of characters as tall as a man, filled in with colors as bright as the currentstream. The graffiti covered up the cracks in the buildings, the boards where windows had been, the dirt that dusted each wall with brown. But I was most transfixed by a simple statement, written neatly beneath one windowsill: Noaveks Own Us.
“What do you expect?” Zyt replied. “They’re smugglers, they’re not particularly ambitious.”
“We don’t need them anyway,” Ettrek said. “Zyt is the one with the contacts.”
“Yes, the contacts for the smuggling of . . . fruit, apparently?” Zyt raised an eyebrow at me.
“Yes,” I said, offering no further explanation.
“Now might be a good time to explain what you need a bunch of fruit for,” Zyt said.
“It might be a good time,” I countered. “But how can we be sure?”
I took a vial of painkiller from the pack at my side and tipped it into my throat. It was one of Akos’s “subpar” batches—and he wasn’t wrong to call them that, they weren’t nearly as effective as most of his painkillers—but it was better than nothing.
The plants growing between the cracks in the broken floor had spread much farther in the time we had been away from this place. Vines were beginning to creep up the walls, and everywhere I looked, there were splashes of color from wildflowers. The kind that turn to mush, I thought, and it was an Akos thought, not one of my own.