“The current flows through every one of us. And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us,” he was saying. My mother sat at my right, her posture straight and her hands folded in her lap. My memory of her was detailed and perfect, down to the loose strand of hair behind her ear and the faint blemish on her chin, covered with makeup.
“That your daughter’s gift causes her to invite pain into herself, and project pain into others, suggests something about what’s going on inside her,” he said. “A cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well.”
Instead of erupting the way she had at the time, my mother tilted her head. I could still see her pulse in her throat. She turned to me in the chair. She was more beautiful than I had dared to remember; even the lines at the corners of her eyes were graceful, gentle.
“What do you think, Cyra?” she said, and as she spoke, she became a dancer of Ogra, her eyes lined with chalk and her bones glowing so brightly beneath her skin I could see even the faint spaces at their joints. “Do you think this is how it works?”
“I don’t know,” I replied in my adult voice. It was my adult body sitting in the chair, too, though I had only been here as a child. “All I know is that the pain wants to be shared.”
“Does it?” The dancer smiled a little. “Even with Akos?”
“The pain isn’t me; it doesn’t discriminate,” I said. “The pain is my curse.”
“No, no,” the dancer said, her dark eyes locked on mine. But they weren’t brown anymore, as they had been when I saw her perform in the dining room; they were gray, and wary. Akos’s eyes, familiar to me even in a dream.
He had taken her place, perched at the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight, his long body dwarfing the chair.
“Every currentgift carries a curse,” he said. “But no gift is only a curse.”
“The gift part of it is that no one can hurt me,” I said.
But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. People could still hurt me. They didn’t need to touch me to do it—they didn’t even need to torture me to do it. As long as I cared about my life, as long as I cared about Akos’s life, or the lives of renegades I barely knew, I was as vulnerable as everyone else was to hurt.
I blinked at him as a different answer came to me.
“You told me I was more than a knife, more than a weapon,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
He smiled that small, familiar smile that creased his cheek.
“The gift,” I said, “is the strength the curse has given me.” The new answer was like a blooming hushflower, petals unfurling. “I can bear it. I can bear pain. I can bear anything.”
He reached for my cheek. He became the dancer, and my mother, and Otega, in turn.
And then I was in the prison, arm outstretched, fingers on Akos’s cheek, Vas’s hand strong around my wrist, holding me fast. Akos’s teeth were gritted. And the shadows that were usually confined beneath my skin were all around us, like smoke. So dark I couldn’t see Ryzek or Eijeh or the prison with its glass walls.
Akos’s eyes—full of tears, full of pain—found mine. Pushing the shadow toward him would have been easy. I had done it many times before, each time a mark on my left arm. All I had to do was let the connection form, let the pain pass between us like a breath, like a kiss. Let all of it flow out of me, bringing relief for us both, in death.
But he did not deserve it.
This time, I broke the connection, like slamming a door between us. I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony.
I didn’t scream. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.
CHAPTER 26: AKOS
IN THE PLACE BETWEEN sleeping and waking, he thought he saw feathergrass, tilting in the wind. He imagined he was home and could taste snow on the air, smell cold earth. He let longing pierce him all the way through, and then fell asleep again.
Oil beading on water.
He had been on his knees on the floor of the prison, watching currentshadows pull away from Cyra’s skin like smoke. The haze tinted the hand on his shoulder—Eijeh’s hand—dark gray. He saw Cyra through it only faintly, her chin tipped up, eyes closed like she was sleeping.
And now, lying on a thin mattress with a heater over his bare feet. A needle in his arm. His wrist cuffed to a bed frame.
The pain, and the memory of it, slipping away into numbness.
He twitched his fingers, and the IV needle shifted, sharp, under his skin. He frowned. This place was a dream; it had to be, because he was still in that tomb under Voa’s amphitheater, and Ryzek was ordering him to talk about Ori Rednalis. Orieve Benesit. Whatever her name was now.
“Akos?” The woman’s voice sounded real enough. Maybe it wasn’t a dream after all.
She stood over him, stick-straight hair framing her face. He’d know those eyes anywhere. They had stared at him across the dinner table, crinkled at the corners when Eijeh made a joke. Her left eyelid sometimes twitched when she got nervous. She was here, like thinking about her had brought her. His own name settled him into himself, no more slipping and sliding.