The Fates Divide Page 13

  "Are they deploying ships?" we demand, though we know the man behind us has no answer.

  Something falls from the rectangle, something big and heavy and glinting in the sun.

  And then brilliant, blinding light.

  We are the child on the rooftop again, watching as light so white, so scorching, envelops the sojourn ship and radiates out like rays from the sun. But the rays are curled, like roots, like veins, like the dark fingers that cradled the traitor Cyra Noavek's face as she killed our sovereign.

  The brightness sprawls across the ocean, sending water scattering away so it swells, huge, toward the shores of Voa. The brightness burns through clouds, reaching as high as the atmosphere, or so it seems. It is a wall of light that collapses all at once, like two hands clapping together.

  And then wind--wind so strong it roars in our ears and makes them ring, wind so strong it knocks us, not just over, but a few feet forward, slamming into the clay of the roof. It rushes over us, and we lose consciousness.

  We are hundreds

  of slowing hearts.

  CHAPTER 19: CYRA

  I STOOD WITH THE Shotet exiles around the screens in the mess hall, all of us pressed together. Enemies, friends, lovers, strangers, we were shoulder to shoulder, watching as the sojourn ship was ripped to shreds.

  It was a hundred things, the sojourn ship. Our history. Our freedom. A sacred vessel. A workplace. A symbol. A project. An escape.

  A home.

  As I watched the footage play again and again, I thought of clearing my mother's closet of all her clothes and shoes, too small and dainty for me to wear myself, for the most part. I had found secrets tucked away in her pockets and shoeboxes: love letters from my father, when he was a gentler man; labels from bottles of pain medication and wrappers from the drugs she took to escape; another woman's lip paint, smeared on a scarf, from an affair. The story of her imperfect life, told in stains and scraps of paper.

  And I had filled that space with my own story, my splattered stove, the suits of armor that glinted when the lights I strung over my bed struck them, and the rows upon rows of footage from other worlds, dancing and fighting and building and fixing. They were not just objects, but escapes when pain made it hard for me to stay in my own body. My comforts in despair.

  It had also been the place where I fell in love.

  And now it was gone.

  The fourth time the footage played, I felt fingers against mine. I pulled away instinctively, not wanting to transfer my currentgift to someone else, but the hand found mine, insistent. I turned to see Teka at my side, her eye welling up with tears. Maybe she wanted my pain, or maybe she wanted to offer me comfort; either way, I held on to her, keeping most of my currentgift to myself, as much of it as I could.

  Her grip lasted only for a moment or two, but it was enough.

  We stood and watched the footage play again, and we did not look away.

  Later, I pressed my face to my pillow and sobbed.

  Akos climbed into my bunk and curled his body around mine, and I allowed it.

  "I told them to evacuate," I said. "I'm the reason there were so many people on that ship--"

  "You tried to help," Akos said. "All you did was try to help."

  It wasn't reassuring. What a person tried to do didn't matter--what mattered was the result. And the deaths of hundreds were the result here. That loss was my responsibility.

  In a fair world I would have marked every single life on my arm, to carry them around forever. But I did not have enough skin for that.

  Akos held me tighter, so I could feel his heartbeat against my spine, as I began to sob again.

  I fell asleep with the press of wet fabric against my face.

  CHAPTER 20: CISI

  "CONFIRMED, CODE 05032011. PROCEED."

  Some moments you put into a little file in your mind because you know they're important, and what Isae Benesit says to signal the attack on Voa is one of those. She says it clearly, every consonant crisp, and she doesn't hesitate. When she's done she pushes back from the desk where she was speaking to General Then, stands up, and walks away, brushing off Ast's outstretched hand.

  It doesn't take long for the attack to start. For the anticurrent blast Pitha loaned us to fly toward Thuvhe on a special ship designed for just this purpose. The crew of the ship is Pithar, but it's General Then, the commander of Thuvhe's armed forces, who actually presses the button, per Thuvhesit law.

  I imagine the hatch doors opening at his touch, and the weapon--long and narrow, with squared edges--falling, falling, falling. There's poetry in it, in that poetry can be raw, and cruel, and strange, like this.

  Isae, Ast, and I watch it from her quarters. The Assembly ship is facing the sun, then, so the walls are opaque, and they show an image of Shissa in the swirling snow. The little flakes get stuck to the sights that captured the footage, every now and then, so the image is blurry most of the time, white blobs right up against the dark night sky. Between them, though, I see the buildings hanging from the clouds like drops of rain suspended in time. Shissa isn't home, but it's where I went to school, where I found a life away from my mom and her constant prophecies, so I still love it there.

  Shissa is what I'm looking at when the news footage comes up on the screens, and I see only a flash of the sojourn ship's destruction before closing my eyes against it. Isae stifles a sharp sound.

  "What is it?" Ast says. No robotic guide beetle can help him with something on a screen, after all.

  "There were people around it, did you see?" Isae says. "Why were there people around it?"

  I turn up the volume on the news feed just in time to hear: "Initial reports suggest there were a few hundred Shotet around the craft, attempting to evacuate the city--"

  I turn the screen off.

  "A few . . ." Isae gasps. "A few hundred--"

  Ast shakes his head. "Stop that, Isae. Casualties were still minimal."

  "Minimal," I say, and it's all I can manage. General Then's estimates said casualties would be around three dozen. Not hundreds.

  "Yeah," Ast says, eyeballing me. "Minimal. Compared to what could have been. That's why you suggested the sojourn ship, remember?"

  There's a flow of words in my mind--hundreds, men, women, children, old, young, middle-aged, kind, cruel, desperate, people people people--but I stop it, like two hands clapping around an insect to kill it. I am better at this than I should be, after too many tragedies poisoned my memories. It's how I survive.

  I don't answer Ast. I am tired of the way he prods at me. I pull back on my gift as hard as I can, hoping that if Isae feels less comfortable, she'll call him off.

  She's facing the swirls of snow, arms folded. The Shissa buildings in the footage light up green, purple, pink. They remind me of the baubles they sold at the Hessa market when the planting started, for people to hang in their windows for luck.

  Isae's shoulders shake. Shudder, really. She slaps a hand against the glass to steady herself.

  Ast and I both stand, eager to comfort even though I'm sure he doesn't know how any more than I do.

  Isae is hunched, turning so I can see the side of her face.

  She's laughing.

  "All those . . . people . . ." She gasps, wrapping her free arm around her stomach. "Bowled right over!"

  Ast's face goes slack with horror, but I know what this is.

  "Isae," I say. "Take a deep breath."

  "All those . . ." Isae bends at the knees. Her hand squeaks against the glass as it slides down.

  I walk to the bathroom and run cold water over a washcloth to soak it all the way through. I carry it back to her, dripping all over the floor. She is crouched next to the window, laughing, sobbing.

  I put the wet cloth on the back of her neck, and run a hand over her back. Ast finally seems to catch on--a bit late, I think, but he seems dense that way--and he urges Pazha forward with a whistle, so its clicking guides him to us. He crouches near us, silent but present. It's the closest
he and I have ever been to each other. Sharing air.

  "All those people," she whimpers.

  I watch Ast's reaction as I unfurl my currentgift like a banner and drape it over all three of us. For once, he doesn't object.

  "I miss her," she whispers later, as we sit together by the window and watch the currentstream.

  I take her hand, and press it to my cheek.

  I show her a memory of Ori asleep at our kitchen table, slumped over a detailed sketch of an iceflower. There was ink smeared on her cheek. My father sipped his tea, smiling fondly down at her, and my mother clicked her tongue, though her eyes still smiled.

  My father bent to ease his arms around her, and carried Ori to the living room. I watched her long legs bounce up and down with his footsteps.

  "Well," my mother said to me. "We do call it 'Ori's room,' after all."

  Isae and I drift gently out of the memory, her hand still pressed between my cheek and my palm, and she smiles at me.

  I'm holding her together, I think.

  And, What happens when I can't anymore?

  CHAPTER 21: CISI

  THE DESCENT TO OGRA almost kills me.

  It took some doing--and some careful use of my currentgift--but I convinced Isae to let me go to the Shotet exiles to start peace talks. We can work together to unseat Lazmet. The exiles are not our enemies. Their goals are aligned with ours. It took a while for my words to take root, and even now, she's still skeptical, but she did agree to let me suss out the situation, at least.

  Seven days after the attack on Voa, she secures me a spot on a transport carrying food to Ogra. I squeeze into a seat between a massive crate of fruit engineered in an Othyr lab and a refrigerator packed with bird meat from Trella. The crew is Trellan--a language I don't speak--so I can't join in when they joke with each other. And Trellan is spoken in a monotone, so I can't even pretend I'm listening to music. They smile at me every now and then, so I know they don't mind me, but that's no surprise. No one minds me, even if they haven't quite figured out why.

  Then the ship's captain, who is thick through the legs and shoulders, with a tuft of chest hair poking out the top of his shirt, tells me in broken Othyrian, "Buckle! Now!"

  It's lucky, maybe, that no one told me what to expect, because I might have made them turn back.

  All the lights on the ship go off at the same time, and then I'm screaming and it's dark and I'm screaming. I can't breathe and I'm sure, then, that the ship is running out of air and I'm going to die here in a pile of meat. I'm clinging so hard to the straps covering my chest that my hands go numb, or maybe that's from terror. The last thing I think is that I never even got to speak to Mom again.

  Then the lights come back on, and gravity catches me, and the crew are all staring at me like I sprouted a third eye. They laugh, and I try to join them, but really I'm just focused on breathing.

  It's not long before we're standing on Ogran soil.

  An Ogran woman named Yssa--"Ee-sah," she says to me, slowly, when I don't get it the first time around--takes me to the exiles in a little boat that cuts like a knife through the light-streaked water. She speaks Othyrian like she's counting beans, dropping words one by one, but it's the only language we have in common, so we trade nonsense until we reach solid ground again.

  She walks me through the uneven streets of a village where Shotet and Ograns live side by side. Yssa points things out to me--a stall of polished stones she likes, the place where she buys her groceries, the tiny carved dolls that gave her nightmares as a child. She doesn't explain how they know what "night" is here, and when she gestures, the glowing bracelets around her wrist clatter together.

  "Which one is your brother?" she asks me.

  "Very tall, fair-skinned, like you," I say. "He came with Cyra Noavek."

  "Oh! The heavy one," she says.

  "Heavy?" I say, confused. "No, he's thin."

  "No, no. Not heavy in body. He carries a weight," she says. "I don't know the word."

  "Oh." I've never thought of my brother that way. The tall, deadly man who fought his way out of a Shissa hospital and into an amphitheater prison didn't seem weighed down by anything--if anything, he seemed faster and lighter than everyone around him. But maybe I just can't really see him. There is a special kind of sight that comes with not knowing someone your whole life, and Yssa has it.

  "I will take you to where they gather," Yssa says. "He may be there, and he may not."

  "That's fine, thank you," I say.

  She leads me to an old warehouse with cracks climbing up the outer walls. There's a sign fixed above the door with some characters on it I can't read. They look Shotet.

  We walk in, and it definitely feels like a Shotet place, in all the ways I've been taught to expect. All the tables have been pushed back against the walls, and people are either sitting at them or perched on top of them, in a kind of ring.

  As we walk in, people are pounding on the tables in a rolling rhythm, so loud it's all I can focus on at first. Then I look at what's happening in the middle.

  Cyra Noavek, her hair in a long tail behind her, is throwing her body at a giant of a man. She is graceful and strong, like a knife thrown by a skilled hand. The large man--and he must be large, to make a woman of her stature look so dainty--catches her, wrestles her over his shoulder, and hurls her away.

  I gasp as she topples to the floor, which is covered with mats, but still looks hard enough to hurt. But she's already rolling over like her body is made of rubber, grinning, a ferocity in her eyes I recognize. It's the way she looked at Ryzek Noavek before he peeled the skin from her skull. And it's the way Isae looked right before she committed murder.

  With a yell, she throws herself at him again, and the crowd roars.

  It goes on this way for a while, with Cyra building speed and determination before my eyes. It's the speed that seems to unsettle her opponent--he doesn't know where to look, or how to block what she throws his way, though it doesn't do much damage. She tries to tackle him, and he catches her, trapping her, only for her to twist her body around him like a necklace. She locks her legs around his neck, and he chokes.

  He taps one of her legs with one hand, and she releases him, sliding to the ground. The crowd roars, and she moves to the side to chug water from a spout near the windowsill.

  "They do this all the time now," Yssa says. "I am not sure what the goal is. Do they intend to fight the Thuvhesits one-on-one?"

  Cyra spots me across the room. The spark in her eyes dies.

  She comes toward me, and when she's closer I see bruises and scratches up and down her bare arms, probably from other fights. Yssa edges closer to me, putting a shoulder in front of me.

  "I was asked to ensure Miss Kereseth's safety among you," Yssa says to her. "Please don't make that task difficult for me."

  Cyra stops right around spitting distance, and for a tick, I think that's what she's going to do: spit at me. Instead she demands, "What are you doing here?" She holds up a hand. "Don't pull that currentgift shit on me; I've got no use for ease right now."

  It's so automatic I didn't even realize I was doing it. I pull back as much as I can. Her currentshadows have buried themselves under her skin again, and they cover her in dark webs. She grits her teeth.

  "I'm here to--" I pause. I don't want to give myself away. "I'm here to see my family, all right?"

  "You're not welcome," she says. "Or did the declaration of war escape your attention?"

  I wish--not for the first time--that I could turn my own gift on myself, set myself at ease, just for a little while. But I can't soothe away the lump in my throat or ease off the weight of guilt. I helped Isae pick her target. Before I got here I felt confident that I did something good, considering the options I had--I talked her down from hitting Voa head-on, didn't I? I had saved quite a few lives with nothing but a clever tongue and my currentgift.

  But right now I'm standing among people who lost something. Friends, family. A place that was special to t
hem, maybe even sacred. So how can I feel like I did something good? How can I think that these people are any different from my own, any more worthy of violence or loss?

  I can't. I don't.

  But I'll do what I have to, just like anybody.

  "Just tell me where to find Akos," I say.

  "Akos." She snorts. "You mean my faithful servant, determined to die for me?" Her eyes close for a tick. "Yeah, I know where to find him. It's just down the road."

  CHAPTER 22: CYRA

  EVERYTHING HURT, BUT I no longer cared.

  Well, I did, because no one wanted to be in pain. It was a survival instinct. But insofar as my rational mind was capable of overcoming my physical state, I embraced the pain, I let it throw me into frantic motion. I was sweat-soaked and exhausted and ready for more. Anything to make it easier to be this burning, writhing thing I had become.

  I didn't want to take Cisi Kereseth to the quiet place Akos had claimed as his own in the wake of the attack, the old woman's shop off an alley in Galo. There was too much of him there, in the bubbling pots and tap of the knife against the cutting board.

  As Cisi, Yssa, and I exited the cafeteria, a young woman, with densely curled hair cut short, spat on the ground near my feet.

  Oruzo, she called me.

  The literal translation was "a mirror image," but the real sense of the word was that one person had become another, or was so similar to them as to be indistinguishable. So, after the attack on Voa, many of the exiles had taken to calling me "Oruzo"--successor to Ryzek, to Lazmet, to the Noavek family. It was a way to blame me for all the lives lost in the failed evacuation, because of my foolishness. If I hadn't sent that message to them, telling them to flee--

  But time could not run backward.

  I walked too fast for Yssa and Cisi to keep up, so that I wouldn't have to speak to them. Cisi had gone to be with that woman, the one who had destroyed my home, and I would not forget.

  Akos was hunched over a pot when I reached the shop, dipping a finger in whatever he was brewing--likely a painkiller, as his perceived duty to me was his only motivator these days. He sucked the fingertip, tasting what he had made, and swore, loudly, in Thuvhesit.

  "Wrong again?" the old woman asked him. She was sitting on a stool, peeling whatever-it-was into a bowl at her feet.