“Mind? I’ve always wanted to spend time in a garbage closet,” I said, wry, and followed her through the narrow galley to a door in the back.
The stink in the closet was so powerful it made my eyes water. From what I could tell, it came from rotten fruit skins and old meat rinds dusted with herbs. There was only enough space for two of us, standing close together. Beside us was the huge door that opened to a trash incinerator; it was hot, which only made the stench worse.
I breathed through my mouth, aware, suddenly, of how soft-palmed I looked to her, how spoiled. My fingernails always clean, my white shirt still bright. And Otega, covered in food splatter, with the look of a woman who was supposed to be stockier but hadn’t gotten enough food to become so.
“What can I do for you, Cyra?”
“How do you feel about doing me a favor?”
“Depends on the favor.”
“It would involve lying to my brother if he ever asks you about it.”
Otega crossed her arms. “What could you want that would involve lying to Ryzek?”
I sighed. I took the renegade’s knife from my pocket and held it out to her.
“During the renegade attack,” I said, “an attempt was made against my life in an isolated hallway. I overpowered her, but then I . . . let her go.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” she said. “As the current flows, girl, even your mother wasn’t that kind.”
“I don’t—it doesn’t matter.” I turned the knife in my hand. The tape that made up the handle was light and springy, bent according to its owner’s fingers. She had a much smaller hand than I did. “But I want to find her. She dropped this, and I knew you could use it to find her.”
Otega’s currentgift was one of the most mysterious I had encountered. Given an object, she could trace the person who owned it. My parents had asked her to find the owners of weapons that way. Once she had even located someone who tried to poison my father. Sometimes the trails were difficult to read, she said, like when two or three different owners called an object theirs, but she was adept at interpreting them. If anyone could find my renegade, it was her.
“And you don’t want your brother to know about it,” she said.
“You know what my brother would do to her,” I said. “And the execution would be the kindest part.”
Otega pursed her lips. I thought of her deft fingers in my hair, pulling it into braids under my mother’s supervision before my first Procession. The snap of my bloody sheets as she pulled them from my mattress, the day my cycles began and my mother was not alive to help me.
“You aren’t going to tell me why you want to find her, are you.”
“No,” I said.
“Does it involve seeking your own revenge?”
“See, answering that would be a form of telling you why I want to find her, which I just said I wouldn’t do.” I smiled. “Come on, Otega. You know I can take care of myself. I’m just not as harsh as my brother.”
“Fine, fine.” She took the knife from me. “I’ll need to spend a little time with it. Come back here right before curfew tomorrow, I’ll take you to its owner then.”
“Thank you.”
She guided a loose strand of hair behind my ear, and smiled a little, to disguise her wince at touching me.
“You’re not so scary, girl,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell my staff.”
CHAPTER 17: AKOS
NOT MANY STARS WERE out on the edge of the galaxy. Cyra loved it, he could tell by how calm the currentshadows were when she stared out the window. It made him shiver, all that space, all that dark. But they were getting close to the edge of the currentstream, so there was a little purple at the corner of the hologram in the ceiling.
Pitha wasn’t the planet the current had led them to. Cyra and Akos had seen that, the day they went to see the Examiners—who had been thinking of Ogra, or even P1104. But apparently Ryzek saw the ruling of the Examiners as a formality only. He’d picked the planet that offered him the most useful alliance, Cyra said.
She had a distinct knock, four light taps. He knew it was her in the doorway without looking up.
“We should hurry, or we’ll miss it,” she said.
“You realize you’re being intentionally vague, right?” Akos said with a smile. “You still haven’t told me what ‘it’ is.”
“I do realize that, yes.” She returned the smile.
She was wearing a muted blue dress with sleeves that stopped just above the elbow, so when Akos’s hand swung forward to grab her arm, he made sure his grip settled where the fabric stopped. The color of the dress didn’t really suit her, he thought. She’d looked more like herself in purple during the Sojourn Festival, or in dark training clothes. But then again, there wasn’t much Cyra Noavek could do to take away from her looks, and he was pretty sure she knew that.