Akos had paused next to the door to look at the armor that decorated the wall. It was nothing like Shotet armor, bulky or unnecessarily decorated, but some of it was beautiful, made of gleaming orange metal or draped with durable black fabric. He made his way into the next room slowly.
It looked a lot like the one he had left behind in Noavek manor: all the supplies and equipment necessary to brew poisons and potions were along one wall, arranged the way he liked it. In the week before his betrayal, I had sent a picture of his setup ahead of us to be copied exactly. There was a bed with dark gray sheets—most Shotet fabric was blue, so the sheets had been hard to find. The burnstones in the lanterns above the bed had been dusted with jealousy powder, so they burned yellow. There were books on elmetahak and Shotet culture on the low bookcase next to the bed. I pressed a button next to the door, and a huge, holographic map of our location sprawled over the ceiling—right now it displayed Voa, since we were still hovering above it, but it would show our path through the galaxy as we traveled.
“I know quarters are close here,” I said. “But space on the ship is limited. I tried to make it livable for us both.”
“You made this place?” he said, turning toward me. I couldn’t read his expression. I nodded.
“Unfortunately, we’ll have to share a bathroom.” Still babbling. “But it’s not for long.”
“Cyra,” he interrupted. “Nothing is blue. Not even the clothes. And the iceflowers are labeled in Thuvhesit.”
“Your people think blue is cursed. And you can’t read Shotet,” I said quietly. My currentshadows started to move faster, sprawling under my skin and pooling beneath my cheeks. My head pounded so hard I had to blink away tears. “The books on elmetahak are in Shotet, unfortunately, but there’s a translation device next to them. Just place it over the page, and—”
“But after what I did to you . . .” he began.
“I sent the instructions before that,” I replied.
Akos sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry, about . . . everything. I just wanted to get him out. It was all I could think about.”
His brow was a straight, low line above his eyes that made it too easy to see his sadness as anger. He had cut his chin shaving.
There was a rumble in his whisper: “He was the last thing I had left.”
“I know,” I replied, but I didn’t know, not really. I had watched Ryzek do things that made my stomach turn. But it was different for me than it was for Akos. I at least knew that I was capable of similar horrors. He had no way of understanding what Eijeh had become.
“How do you keep doing this?” he said. “Keep going, when everything is so horrible?”
Horrible. Was that what life was? I had never put a word to it. Pain had a way of breaking time down. I thought about the next minute, the next hour. There wasn’t enough space in my mind to put all those pieces together, to find words to summarize the whole of it. But the “keep going” part, I knew the words for.
“Find another reason to go on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.”
I knew mine: There was a hunger inside me, and there always had been. That hunger was stronger than pain, stronger than horror. It gnawed even after everything else inside me had given up. It was not hope; it did not soar; it slithered, clawed, and dragged, and it would not let me stop.
And when I finally named it, I found it was something very simple: the desire to live.
That night was the last night of the Sojourn Festival, when the last few transport vessels landed in the loading bay and we all feasted on the sojourn ship together. The people we brought with us were supposed to be energetic by now, their confidence and determination bolstered by the celebratory events of the past week, and it seemed to me that they were. The crowd that carried Akos and me on their tide toward the loading bay was buoyant and loud. I was careful to keep my bare skin away from them; I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by causing people pain.
I walked to the platform where Ryzek stood braced against the railing, Eijeh at his right. Where was Vas?
I wore my Shotet armor, polished to perfection, over a long, sleeveless black dress. The fabric brushed the toes of my boots as I moved.
Ryzek’s kill marks were on full display; he kept his arm flexed to show them at their best. Someday he would begin a second row, like my father. When I arrived, he flashed a smile at me, which made me shudder.