And oh—swallowing hurts. Not my throat, but my stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen.
I open my eyes. I’m not sure why I expect to see the big crack that’s above my bed at home. When I was sick as a kid I used to think about what it was shaped like. A floater? A bird? I could never decide.
There’s no crack in this ceiling, though. The ceiling here is a moving image, like the ones in the walls at Assembly Headquarters. It shows a blue sky with puffy clouds drifting across it.
I lift a hand. There’s a patch of tech just under my knuckles. I can feel it, stinging a little as I wiggle my fingers. It’s probably monitoring my vitals, heart rate and temperature and blood sugar. There’s a little exit point on top of it, attached now to a tube with clear liquid running through it. Keeping me hydrated, I assume, though it’s not doing anything for the taste in my mouth.
“Miss Kereseth?”
I blink away the film covering my eyes and see a woman dressed in a crisp white uniform—shirt and pants—with a dark blue apron over the top of it. Her hair is tied back and secured with pins. She wears rubber gloves.
I feel unmoored. In my mind, I list the things I know. I am not at home. Judging by the ceiling, I am in a rich place. Assembly Headquarters? No, Othyr—Othyr is where we were last. I’m hurt. My stomach. It’s like someone tore right through my abdomen. . . .
I remember his face in the mirror, right next to mine. Someone did just that.
“Ast,” I croak.
“What?” The nurse frowns. “He’s not here right now—he came yesterday to check on you, though.”
He came to check on me? No, he came to make sure I was still unconscious, or in the hope that I was dead. A shiver runs through me. He was here while I was unconscious—what if he did something else, what if he tried to finish what he started? I imagine a pillow pressed to my mouth, a vial of poison tipped down my throat, stitches pulled from the wound in my abdomen until my guts spill out—
“No,” I say, and it comes out a growl. “No—Ast did it, Ast stabbed me—”
“Miss Kereseth, I think you’re confused, you’ve been out for a couple days—”
“I am not—”
“The security footage of your room was missing,” she says softly.
Of course it was, I think, but can’t say. Ast found a way to delete the evidence—!
“But they found the weapon, wiped of fingerprints,” she continues, “in the house of a man whose currentgift allows him to put on different faces. The Othyrian police suspect he was trying to kill the chancellor and got you instead.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Of course. Ast plays at being too simple for politics, he senses currentgifts, he grew up with real-world smarts and contacts with seedy reputations, no doubt . . . of course he knew how to cover his tracks. He deleted the footage, misled the police, found a likely suspect to frame for the crime, planted the weapon. . . .
But why? Why would he take this risk? Just to be right? To get his way? Why did he even care so much about what happened to Thuvhe in this war?
“It was him,” I say with some difficulty.
Maybe, I think as I drift off again, it’s not Thuvhe he cares about, but Shotet.
Isae told me the story, once, of how she got the scars. I never asked her, because that wasn’t the sort of thing you just asked about. But she told me anyway.
We had been sitting on the old, grungy sofa in my school apartment. There were pots brewing on burners everywhere, so the corners of the room were full of vapor. We were in Shissa, so through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall, all I could see were snowdrifts far below. My room was hardly even wide enough for me to stretch out my arms in both directions, but it had a good view.
She had an embroidered pillow in her lap, one I had bought from a little shop in Hessa where a friend from primary school worked. She was wearing socks I had loaned her because hers weren’t warm enough. They were yellowish brown, or brownish yellow, I could never decide which, and had a lumpy heel where I’d gone wrong with mending them.
She told me that she hadn’t really grown up on a pirate ship. That was just what she told people to startle them. The transporter ship she was on as a kid did some shady business every now and then, she said, but nothing to get huffy about.
And trust me, she said, if there was something to get huffy about, my parents would be huffy.
They had landed on Essander to dump the goods from their most recent job, and it just happened to be the planet where the Shotet were doing their seasonal scavenge. Only, scavenges weren’t supposed to include theft and murder, according to the ethical guidelines Shotet had agreed to when the Assembly was formed.
The Shotet boarded the transporter ship, much like pirates would have done. And they blew through the vessel room by room, rifling through everything to find valuables, and killing whoever they wanted. One of the scavengers threatened Isae’s mother, and when her father defended her, they both wound up dead. So Isae went at the man with a meat mallet.
A . . . meat mallet? I asked her, so shocked I couldn’t help but smile. It was all right. She smiled, too.
She cracked one of them hard in the head, she said, but meat mallets are worthless against a Shotet soldier. Actually, pretty much anything was, according to her. They were lethal. And the leader of the group, a woman, must have admired Isae’s gumption, because instead of killing her, she pinned Isae down and carved into her face, saying, “Remember me.”
She hadn’t mentioned Ast at the time, except to say that some of her friends were hurt or killed, too. Now, though, I knew that he had been there, and that a Shotet soldier had killed his father, and half of his friends.
Yeah, there were plenty of reasons for Ast to care what happened to Shotet in this war.
“Cee?”
Isae’s voice sounds strained. She looks worn, her hair lank around her face. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. I guess Ast must not have told her I tried to send a message to the Shotet exiles, then, or she would have me arrested instead of sitting at my bedside.
“Did you . . .” My voice sounds creaky as an old door. “Did you make the alliance with Othyr?”
“You don’t need to worry about that right now,” she says. “Just focus on healing, okay? We almost lost you. I almost lost you.”
“I’m fine,” I say. I tap the button to raise the top half of the bed. When I’m partially upright, pain burns all the way through to my back, but I don’t want to lie down again. “Tell me.”
“Yes, I made the alliance,” she says. “Before you say anything—we needed that weapon, Cee. The pressure to retaliate is intense.”
“Pressure from where?” I say. “Ast?”
She frowns at me.
“Everywhere,” she says. “From my own head, for one. From Shissa, Osoc, Hessa. From the Assembly Leader. Everywhere. They killed innocent people. What am I supposed to do?”
“Show mercy,” I say, and it’s enough to set her off.
“Mercy?” she demands. “Mercy? Where was Shotet mercy when they destroyed a hospital? Where was it when that woman held me down and sliced into my face? Where was it for my mother, my father—for Ori?”
“I—”
“Othyr gave us an anticurrent blast, and I’m going to use it as soon as I can,” she says. “At which point I hope you’ll tell me your brain was addled by painkillers, because there’s no way a right-minded person would call for mercy right now.”
She storms out, with a straight spine. The posture a couple seasons at the Assembly taught her, so she would fit in.
They killed innocent people, she said, almost in the same breath she talked about doing the same. And that’s the problem—because to her, no Shotet is innocent. And that is the big difference between us.
I look up at the clouds projected on my ceiling. They’re thicker now, closer together.
I’m stuck here, and out of options. Out of time.
I dream of the oracle Vara, showing me the sculptures in the Hall of Prophecy on Ogra. Each one is a member of my family, made of glass. Even Cyra is among them.