“Yma?” Uzul said to his wife weakly.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Yma said. “I was looking for a network address, and I saw your contact history. I saw coordinates there, and I remembered you talking about the exile colony—”
The exile colony. When I was young, it was just a joke that people told, that a lot of Shotet who had met with my father’s displeasure had set up a home on another planet where they couldn’t be discovered. As I grew older, the joke became a rumor, and a serious one. Even now, the mention of it made Ryzek work his jaw like he was trying to tear off a bite of old meat. He considered the exiles, as enemies of my father and even my grandmother, to be one of the highest threats to his sovereignty that existed. Every Shotet had to be under his control, or he would never feel secure. If Uzul had contacted them, it was treason.
Ryzek pulled a chair from the table, and gestured to it. “Sit.”
Uzul did as he was told.
“Cyra,” Ryzek said to me. “Come here.”
At first I just stood by my place at the table, clutching the glass of fermented feathergrass. I clenched my jaw as my body filled with shadows, like black blood from broken vessels.
“Cyra,” Ryzek said quietly.
He didn’t need to threaten me. I would set my glass down and walk over to him and do whatever he told me. I would always do that, for as long as we both lived, or Ryzek would tell everyone what I had done to our mother. That knowledge was a stone in my stomach.
I put my glass down. I walked over to him. And when Ryzek told me to put my hands on Uzul Zetsyvis until he gave whatever information Ryzek needed to know, I did.
I felt the connection form between Uzul and me, and the temptation to force all the shadow into him, to stain him black as space and end my own agony. I could kill him if I wanted to, with just my touch. I had done it before. I wanted to do it again, to escape this, the horrible force that chewed through my nerves like acid.
Yma and Lety were clutched together, weeping, Yma holding Lety back when she tried to lunge at me. Our eyes met as I pushed the pain and the inky darkness into her father’s body, and all I saw in her was hate.
Uzul screamed. He screamed for so long I grew numb to the sound.
“Stop!” he wailed eventually, and at Ryzek’s nod, I took my hands from his head. I stumbled back, seeing spots, and Vas’s hands pressed to my shoulders, steadying me.
“I tried to find the exiles,” Uzul said. His face was slick with sweat. “I wanted to flee Shotet, have a life free from this . . . tyranny. I heard they were on Zold, but the contact I found there fell through. They had nothing. So I gave up, I gave up.”
Lety was sobbing, but Yma Zetsyvis was still, her arm wrapped across her daughter’s chest.
“I believe you,” Ryzek said softly. “Your honesty is noted. Cyra will now administer your punishment.”
I willed the shadows in my body to drain out like water from a wrung rag. I willed the current to leave me and never return—blasphemy. But there was a limit to my will. At Ryzek’s stare the currentshadows spread, like he controlled them more than I did. And maybe he did.
I didn’t wait for his threats. I touched my skin to Uzul Zetsyvis’s until his screams filled all the empty spaces in my body, until Ryzek said to stop.
CHAPTER 9: CYRA
I SAW WHERE I was only dimly, the smooth step beneath my foot—bare now, I must have lost a shoe in the dining room—and the shifting fenzu light reflected in the floorboards and the webs of black coursing up and down my arms. My fingers looked crooked, like I had broken them, but it was just the angle at which they were all bent, digging into the air as they sometimes dug into my own palms.
I heard a muffled scream coming from somewhere in the belly of Noavek manor, and my first thought was of Eijeh Kereseth, though I had not heard his voice in months.
I had seen Eijeh only once since his arrival. It had been in passing, in a corridor near Ryzek’s office. He had been thin, and dead in the eyes. As a soldier muscled him past me, I had stared at the hollows above his collarbone, deep trenches now empty of flesh. Either Eijeh Kereseth had an iron will, or he really didn’t know how to wield his currentgift, just as he claimed. If I had to bet on one or the other, it would be the latter.
“Send for him,” Ryzek snapped at Vas. “This is what he’s for, after all.”
The top of my foot skimmed the dark wood. Vas, the only one who could touch me, was half carrying me back to my room.
“Send for who?” I mumbled, but I didn’t listen to the answer. A wave of agony enveloped me, and I thrashed in Vas’s grip as if that would help me escape it.
It didn’t work. Obviously.
He peeled his fingers away from my arms, letting me slide to the floor. I braced myself on hands and knees in my bedroom. A drop of sweat—or tears, it was hard to say—fell from my nose.
“Who—” I rasped. “Who was screaming?”