He twisted around to watch Shissa shrink behind them. Every building was lit up a different color: purple for the library, yellow for the hospital, green for the grocery. They hung—impossibly—like suspended raindrops. He watched them as the floater sped away, until the buildings were just a cluster of lights. When everything was near dark, he turned back to Cisi.
“You . . .” She gulped. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she couldn’t say it, currentgift be damned. He reached for her, setting a clean finger—the others were red and sticky—on her arm.
The words came spilling out. “You killed him.”
He cycled through a few different responses in his mind, ranging from And he wasn’t the first to I’m sorry. None of them seemed right. He didn’t want her to hate him, but he didn’t want her to think he had come away from Shotet innocent. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he didn’t want to lie.
“He saved us both,” Isae said sharply as she switched on the news scroll. A little holoscreen popped up above the autonav map, and Akos read the headlines as they spun in a circle.
Shotet invasion begins in Shissa, two hours after sunset.
Shotet invaders witnessed at Shissa hospital, eight Thuvhesit deaths reported.
“I sent Orieve away right after we left your room,” Isae said. “She should have made it out all right. I can’t send her a message now, it could be intercepted.”
He held his hands against his legs, wishing like hell that he could wash them.
A news break appeared on the holoscreen when they descended into Hessa, a few hours before dawn.
Shissa police reporting two Thuvhesit captives taken by Shotet. Footage from the invasion shows a woman dragged from Shissa hospital by Shotet soldiers. Preliminary identification efforts suggest the woman is either Isae or Orieve Benesit.
Something big and fierce shredded his insides.
Orieve Benesit. Ori. Gone.
He tried not to look at Isae, to give her a tick to react on her own, but there wasn’t much to watch. Cisi’s hand snaked out to touch Isae’s, but Isae just flicked a switch to turn the news feed off, and stared out the window.
“Well,” Isae said at last. “I’ll just have to go get her, then.”
CHAPTER 28: AKOS
WHEN THEY GOT TO Hessa, the floater moved in a wide arc around the mountain and drifted toward the feathergrass. It sank to the ground in front of his family’s house, crushing stems and tufts under it. The blood had dried on Akos’s hands.
Isae got out of the floater first, and Cisi followed. When Akos jumped out, the doors closed behind him. The feathergrass was flattened in a circle around it.
Cisi led the way to the house, which was good, because Akos didn’t have the strength. All the windows were dark reminders of the last time he’d been there. When Cisi opened the door, and the smell of spices and chopped saltfruit wafted over him, he half expected his dad’s body to be on the floor in the living room, soaked through.
Akos paused. Breathed. Kept walking.
He skimmed the wood paneling with his knuckles on the way to the kitchen. Past the wall where all the family pictures used to hang. Blank now. The living room wasn’t at all the same—it was more a study, with two desks and bookcases and not a squashy cushion in sight. But the kitchen, with its scraped-up table and rough-hewn bench, was the same.
Cisi shook the chandelier over the kitchen table to light the burnstones. Their light was still tinted red.
“Where’s Mom?” he said as an image of her popped into his mind: she was standing on a creaky stool, dusting the chandelier with hushflower.
“Oracle meeting,” Cisi said. “They meet all the time now. It’ll take her a few days.”
“Days” would be too late. He would be long gone by then.
The desire to wash his hands became a need. He went to the sink. A lump of homemade soap sat near the faucet, with little purity petals pressed inside it to pretty it up. He worked it into a lather, then rinsed his hands once, twice, three times. Dragged his fingernails along the lines in his palm. Scrubbed beneath them. By the time he was done his palms were bright pink and Cisi was setting out mugs for tea.
He hesitated with his hand over the knife drawer. He wanted to mark the loss of the Shotet soldier on his arm. There was a vial of feathergrass extract beside the other vials he carried to stain the wound. But had he really just let something so Shotet become an instinct? Clean hands, clean blade, new mark?
He closed his eyes like darkness was all he needed to clear his head. Somewhere out there, the nameless soldier he had killed had some family, some friends, who were counting on his loss to be recorded. Akos knew—though it disturbed him to know—that he wasn’t about to pretend the death hadn’t happened.
So he took out a carving knife and shoved it into the furnace flames, turning the blade to sterilize it. Crouched there by the heat, he carved a straight line into his arm with the hot blade, next to the other marks. Then he poured feathergrass extract on the tines of a fork and dragged it in a straight line down the cut. It was clumsy, but it would have to do.