Tears came to my eyes, unwelcome, and blood bubbled up from the wound. It dripped down the side of my arm as I fumbled in one of the kitchen drawers for the right bottle. He took out the cork, and I dipped the little brush I kept with it. I spoke Lety Zetsyvis’s name as I painted the line he had carved with dark fluid.
It burned. Every time, I thought I would be used to how much it burned, and every time, I was wrong. It was supposed to burn, supposed to remind you that it was no trifling thing, to take a life, to carve a loss.
“You don’t say the other words?” Akos said. He was referring to the prayer, the end of the ritual. I shook my head.
“I don’t either,” he said.
As the burning subsided, Akos wrapped the bandage around my arm, once, twice, three times, and secured it with a piece of tape. Neither of us bothered to clean up the blood on the table. It would probably dry there, and I would have to scrape it off with a knife later, but I didn’t care.
I climbed the rope to the room above us, past the plants preserved in resin and the mechanical beetles perched among them, recharging for the moment. Akos followed me.
The sojourn ship was shuddering, its engines preparing to launch into the atmosphere. The ceiling of the room above us was covered with screens that showed whatever was above us—in this case, the Shotet sky. Pipes and vents crowded the space from all sides—it was only big enough for one person to move around in, really, but along the back wall were emergency jump seats, folded into the wall. I pulled them out, and Akos and I sat.
I helped him fasten the straps across his chest and legs that would keep him steady during launch, and handed him a paper bag in case the ship’s movement made him sick. Then I strapped myself in. All through the ship, the rest of the Shotet would be doing the same thing, gathering in the hallways to pull jump seats from the walls and buckling each other in.
Together we waited for the ship to launch, listening to the countdown on the intercom. When the voice reached “ten,” Akos reached for my hand, and I squeezed, hard, until the voice said “one.”
The Shotet clouds rushed past us, and the force bore down on us, crushing us into our seats. Akos groaned, but I just watched as the clouds moved away and the blue atmosphere faded into the blackness of space. All around us was the starry sky.
“See?” I said, lacing my fingers with his. “It’s beautiful.”
CHAPTER 14: CYRA
A KNOCK CAME AT my door that night as I was lying in bed in my sojourn ship quarters, face buried in a pillow. I dragged myself up one limb at a time to answer it. There were two soldiers waiting in the hallway, one male and one female, both slim. Sometimes a person’s school of combat was obvious just from a glance—these were students of zivatahak, fast and deadly. And they were afraid of me. No wonder.
Akos stumbled into the kitchen to stand beside me. The two soldiers exchanged a knowing look, and I remembered what Otega had said about Shotet mouths loving to chatter. There was no avoiding it: Akos and I lived in close proximity, so there was bound to be talk about what we were, and what we did behind closed doors. I didn’t care enough to discourage it. Better to be talked about for that than for murdering and torturing, anyway.
“We are sorry to disturb you, Miss Noavek. The sovereign needs to speak to you right away,” the woman said. “Alone.”
Ryzek’s office on the sojourn ship was like his office in Voa, in miniature. The dark wood that comprised the floor and wall panels, polished to perfection, was native to Shotet—it grew in dense forests across our planet’s equator, dividing us from the Thuvhesits who had invaded the north centuries ago. In the wild, the fenzu we now kept trapped in the orb chandelier hummed in the treetops, but because most older Shotet houses used them for light, the Zetsyvis family—now helmed by Yma alone—ensured that farmed fenzu were available in large numbers for those willing to pay the high price for them. And Ryzek was—he insisted their glow was more pleasant than burnstones, though I didn’t see much of a difference.
When I walked in, Ryzek was standing in front of a large screen he usually kept hidden behind a sliding panel. It displayed a dense paragraph of text; it took me a few beats to realize that he was reading a transcript of the Assembly Leader’s announcement of the fates. Nine lines of nine families, spread across the galaxy, their members’ paths predetermined and unalterable. Ryzek usually avoided all references to his “weakness,” as my father had called it, the fate that had haunted him since his birth: that he would fall to the family Benesit. It was illegal in Shotet to speak of it or to read it, punishable by imprisonment or even execution.
If he was reading the fates, he was not in a good mood, and most of the time, that meant I should tread lightly. But tonight, I wondered why I should bother.
Ryzek folded his arms, and tilted his head, and spoke.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, that your fate is so ambiguous,” he said. “‘The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide.’ For what purpose will you cross the Divide to Thuvhe?” He lifted a shoulder. “No one knows or cares. Lucky, lucky.”