No point in denying the obvious, after all.
They walked fast through the hallways, taking a different path than Akos had ever walked before. The signs, fixed to the walls wherever the hallways broke apart, said they were going to the nav deck. They climbed some narrow stairs, and Cyra stuck her hand in a slot in the wall at the top. Two heavy doors opened. A wall of glass greeted him.
And beyond it: space. Stars. Planets.
And the currentstream, getting bigger and brighter by the second.
Dozens of people worked at rows of screens just in front of the glass. Their uniforms were clean and looked a little like Shotet armor: darkest blue, bulky through the shoulders, but with flexible fabric instead of hard Armored One skin. One of the older men spotted Cyra and bowed to her.
“Miss Noavek,” he said. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you this time.”
“I wouldn’t miss it, Navigator Zyvo,” Cyra said. To Akos, she added, “I’ve been coming here since I was a child. Zyvo, this is Akos Kereseth.”
“Ah yes,” the older man said. “I’ve heard one or two stories about you, Kereseth.”
Judging by his tone, Akos was sure he meant much more than “one or two” stories, and it made him nervous enough to flush.
“Shotet mouths love chatter,” Cyra said to him. “Especially about the fate-favored.”
“Right,” Akos managed to say. Fate-favored—he was that, wasn’t he? It sounded stupid to him now.
“You can take your usual place, Miss Noavek,” Zyvo said, throwing out a hand toward the wall of glass. It dwarfed them easily, curving over their heads with the roof of the ship.
Cyra led the way to a spot in front of all the screens. All around them the crew was shouting directions or numbers at each other. Akos had no idea what to make of any of it. Cyra sat right on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“What are we here for, anyway?”
“Soon the ship will pass through the currentstream,” she said, grinning. “You’ve never seen anything like it, I promise you. Ryzek will be on the observation deck with his closest supporters, but I get to come here, instead, so I don’t scream in front of his guests. It can get kind of . . . intense. You’ll see.”
From this distance, the currentstream looked like a thunderhead, swollen with color instead of rain. Everybody in the galaxy agreed it existed—pretty hard to deny something that was plainly visible from every single planet’s surface—but it meant different things to different people. Akos’s parents had talked about it like it was a spiritual guide they didn’t fully understand, but he knew a lot of the Shotet worshipped it, or something higher that directed it, depending on the sect. Some people thought it was just a natural phenomenon, nothing spiritual about it at all. Akos had never asked Cyra what she thought.
He was about to when somebody called out, “Prepare yourselves!”
All around him people grabbed whatever they could hang on to. The thunderhead of currentstream filled the glass in front of him, and then, almost as one, everybody but Akos gasped. Every inch of Cyra’s skin went black as space. Her teeth, which looked white against her currentgift, were gritted, but it almost looked like she was smiling. Akos reached for her, but she shook her head.
Swirls of rich blue filled the glass. There were veins of lighter color, too, and almost-purple, and deep navy. The currentstream was huge and bright and everywhere, everywhere. Like being wrapped up in the arms of a god.
Some people had their hands stretched out in worship; others were on their knees; still others, clutching their chests, or stomachs. One man’s hands glowed as blue as the currentstream itself; small orbs, like fenzu, swam around a woman’s head. Currentgifts run amok.
Akos thought of the Blooming. Thuvhesits weren’t as . . . expressive as the Shotet during their rites, but the sense of it was the same. Gathering to celebrate something that happened only to them, of all people in the galaxy, and only at a certain time. The reverence they had for it, for its particular sort of beauty.
Everybody knew the Shotet followed the currentstream around space as an act of faith, but until then, Akos hadn’t understood why, except maybe that they felt like they had to. But once you saw this up close, he thought, it was impossible to imagine a life without seeing it again.
He felt separate, though—not just because he was Thuvhesit and they were Shotet, but because they could feel the hum-buzz of the current and he couldn’t. The current didn’t go through him. It was like he wasn’t as real as they were, like he wasn’t as alive.
Just as he was thinking it, Cyra held out her hand. He took it, to relieve her of the shadows, and he was startled to see tears in her eyes—from the pain or from the wonder, it was hard to say.