The End and Other Beginnings Read online

  “Yes, sir,” Dony said.

  Akos didn’t sleep. He didn’t really expect to. Instead he went to the kitchens—where he was sometimes sent to peel mezzit roots or wash dishes—and took out the leather packet he kept under his pillow. He stood at the wide wooden counter where the cook sliced meat, and unrolled the leather.

  Inside it was a small knife and a dried currentflower. It was whole, with some of the stem still attached to it, though shriveled now from drying. Even dried, the currentflower was more dangerous than any other plant in the galaxy—to anyone but him, that was. His currentgift made him resistant to its power. He had cut it last season, after he killed Kalmev Radix, in the few minutes before Vas’s men found him and beat him senseless. And he had saved it since then, knowing it would be useful, even if he didn’t know how.

  He walked the perimeter of the kitchen. Along each wall was a countertop like the one that held the currentflower, and along the wall, atop each counter, a line of small wooden boxes marked with Shotet characters he couldn’t read. So he opened each box instead, sniffing the contents if he couldn’t identify them on sight, until he found what he needed.

  Then he set water to boiling, and started to brew a poison.

  Akos was so nervous by the time dawn came around that he couldn’t even look his witnesses in the eye. There were, as the rite required, three of them. Two women and one sema, a person who was neither man nor woman. All three wore their own armor—they were supposed to be familiar with the rite, having gone through it themselves. The commander stood with them, trading quiet conversation, when Akos arrived.

  They were in the main arena, right in the middle of all the barracks, where most training happened. When Akos first got to the camp, the lieutenant had made him run so many laps around that arena that he had dreamed in laps for weeks.

  When a Shotet citizen did the Rite of Armor, a crowd gathered, people played music, someone gave a speech to rally them. But for Akos, it was just the three witnesses and hints of sunlight along the horizon.

  The commander waved, and a sight drifted over with a hum and a buzz. “This will be recording your movements live for us to see. If you try to flee across the Divide, we will come find you and kill you. So don’t try to flee.”

  Akos didn’t intend to flee. Not without his brother. But he didn’t respond. He just faced the horizon and started to run.

  The sight buzzed above his head at first, and then moved up, so he almost forgot it was following him. He kept his pace slow but steady, and his breaths even. Stretching in every direction was the low, golden grass between the Divide and the city of Voa, where Akos and Eijeh had first been taken to meet Ryzek, and to hear their fates. Growing among the grasses were small, fragile flowers, some blue, some purple, and occasionally, a rare orange blossom. Akos resisted the urge to stop when he spotted those. He had to stay focused.

  All he had to do was put some distance between himself and the soldier camp, and then he might be able to find an Armored One. They looked for remote areas to chew grass. They didn’t really eat it for nutrition, they just chewed it. None of the soldiers Akos had asked really understood why. In fact, nobody really seemed to know much about the Armored Ones, despite their reverence for them.

  When he couldn’t see the soldier camp behind him anymore, he slowed to a walk and looked for water. He was breathless and sweaty, so he would need it soon, and besides, the Armored Ones drank water, like every living thing, so if he found it, he might find one.

  He kept the soldier camp behind him so he wouldn’t start wandering in circles. It would be easy to do, here. Everywhere he looked was the same grass, knee-high, soft as hair to the touch. It was dizzying.

  Finally he stumbled across a brook. It was the blue flowers that tipped him off—they were growing in clusters, close to the water. He knelt beside the little stream and rinsed his hands in it, splashed water on his neck to cool himself, then drank from it. He sat back to check his pocket for the vial of poison he had made the night before, then leaned forward to wash his face.

  Akos closed his eyes, just for a moment, his head throbbing. He needed to find an Armored One soon, or he would get too tired from sleep deprivation to focus. And he couldn’t fail now—couldn’t creep back to the soldier camp with his head down, showing them he was just as useless as they thought he was.

  He opened his eyes, spotted movement in the grasses to his left, and froze. Clicking seemed to reach his ears from every direction as a dark shape crept closer. He turned to look, just a little, and there it was. An Armored One.

  It was such a massive creature that its nearly silent movement defied logic. It made a slippery, whispery sound in the grass, its many legs picking along with surprising care. The clicking came from its pincers, tapping together in front of its broad mouth. It was dark in color, bluish, except for the bright white of its teeth. There were layers and layers of them, each of them a needle as long as his fingers.

  And it was right there.

  When he had imagined this moment, he had seen the Armored One from a distance, and crept closer, trusting his stealth and patience. He would watch it, figure out how and what it ate. Then he would lace its food with poison and wait for it to eat.

  That was not what was happening now. The thing was slipping through the grass toward him, its mouth open in a display of jagged incisors, and its bent legs were taller than Akos was when standing. Except he was on his knees. With no weapon except a vial of poison.

  Shit.

  Akos was so still, his legs were cramping. He spoke the word of calm into his mind, and it did nothing to relax him, nothing to calm the frantic beating of his heart. It was only moments until the thing attacked him, he was sure of it. The soldiers had told him that if he got close enough to an Armored One, it would go into a frenzy and charge, and would not stop charging until he was dead.

  It crept still closer. Akos didn’t want to die on his knees. It was better to die running—better to die trying, at least. So he stood and fled, sprinting across the brook and into the grass, his legs pumping fast, listening, waiting—

  But nothing was happening.

  Akos looked over his shoulder. The Armored One was still by the brook. It had bent its head to drink from the water. It didn’t seem to know he existed, in fact.

  Odd.

  He stopped running, and turned back toward it. He didn’t want to lose this opportunity—it could be hours before he found another one, and he would not be any more alert then than he was now.

  He walked toward it, ready to turn and run again if it started to charge. Even his heavier footsteps didn’t seem to bother it, so he came closer. He stepped across the brook, to where he had been kneeling before, and kept walking. Step after step, until he was right beside it, within arm’s length of its vicious teeth.

  It lifted its head—it seemed aware of him, at least, but it wasn’t going to attack him.

  Akos raised a trembling hand, and touched it to one of the hard plates on the Armored One’s side.

  The Armored One leaned in, pressing into his hand. The clicking of its pincers stopped, and its shiny eyes closed.

  “Is it my currentgift?” he asked it. It was the only thing he could think of that would make him different from all the soldiers who had died doing this rite.

  “You don’t like the current,” he said. “Do you want to know something? Neither do I.”

  The current reminded him that there was something wrong with him. The Thuvhesit destined to betray Thuvhe. The prisoner who wasn’t really a Shotet soldier. The only person he had ever heard of who couldn’t feel the hum-buzz of the current.

  The Armored One blinked at him, almost like it understood him. Akos moved away from it, and it shadowed his movements, taking a small step with him.

  Then Akos knew what to do, so the Shotet would remember that he wasn’t some fragile thing good only for washing dishes and dying for the Noaveks.

  He would lead it back to the soldier camp alive.

/>   Akos Kereseth’s hand was outstretched, pressed lightly to the Armored One’s side, when he walked it back into the soldier camp in late morning. The witnesses were already there—they’d been watching footage from the sight, so they knew he was coming. But the other soldiers were out, too, dirtying the practice swords Akos had cleaned the day before.

  At first, nobody seemed to notice he was coming. But the Armored One was too big to ignore for long. Akos watched all movement stop. Some soldiers bolted for the barracks, as if a thin wooden door would keep them safe from a rampaging Armored One. Akos had heard rumors that they could chew right through a stone wall if they were riled up enough.

  The rest went still, the way he had, next to the brook.

  He led the Armored One to the middle of the main arena, and stopped. He knew that if he lifted his hand, the current flowing through all the other soldiers would drive it mad, and it would kill as many of them as it could reach—which might be half the people there. He had never had any power among them, so the feeling that most of their lives rested on the skin touching the Armored One’s side was a heady one.

  The commander seemed to understand the situation, because he showed Akos his palms, placating.

  “Kereseth,” Vakrez said. “What are you doing?”

  “The rite, sir,” Akos said.

  “The rite involves the death of an Armored One,” Vakrez said.

  “I know,” Akos replied quietly. “But I could decide not to kill it. I could take my hand away and let it devour you.” He tilted his head. “I killed a man like you before. I could do it again. And the chaos after might be enough for me to escape, and go home. The feathergrass doesn’t affect me, so it would be only two days’ journey, on foot.”

  “You could do that,” Vakrez acknowledged, nodding.

  “I won’t, though,” Akos said. He felt like he was finally standing straight. “And it’s not because of some hidden Thuvhesit morality, because I don’t have that—not when it comes to Noaveks like you.” He felt the acid of anger, that pool that never quite dried up, bubbling inside him. “It’s because you’re going to treat me as a soldier, going forward, and not as a prisoner.”

  The commander looked him over, just for a tick or two. Then he said, “I don’t respond well to threats, Kereseth.”

  “It’s not a threat,” Akos said. “I just told you I’m not going to let this thing kill you. But the fact that I could, and I’m choosing not to, means I’m deciding to stay here. Which means I am owed the same respect as the other people in this camp. I know you to be a fair man, and I’m trusting that you’ll see that.”

  Vakrez’s eyes were on his, dark and focused. He nodded.

  “Finish it,” he said.

  Akos had dreaded this moment on his walk back to the camp. This creature was innocent. It lived in a world that tormented it constantly with the current. And he had taken advantage of its trust in him. He had used his currentgift against it. It didn’t deserve to die.

  But Akos knew his own despair. The way hopelessness claimed him on nights he wasn’t quite exhausted enough to fall asleep. He was trapped here, held hostage by his own devotion to his brother. He would never see his home again.

  He needed to do this.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the vial of poison. He pulled the wax seal out of the vial with his teeth, and spit it on the ground. The Armored One’s mouth was open wide enough for him to fit his hand in past the first few layers of teeth. He tipped the vial over, pouring the poison into the Armored One’s mouth, and he saw the shifting of plates as it swallowed.

  Then he kept his palm pressed to its side, so it was soothed by his currentgift while it died.

  Vakrez granted him a reprieve for the rest of the day, telling him to get some rest. Akos had worried that basically threatening to kill the commander would make him even crueler, but it had had the opposite effect. If anything, Vakrez seemed to understand him now.

  Akos didn’t go to his bunk to rest. He went to the long, low building that housed the health clinic. He had been taken there when he first arrived, so a doctor could make sure the long gash under his jaw—courtesy of Ryzek, a reward for his attempt to fight back—was healing properly. He hadn’t gone back since then, though he’d been injured multiple times. He didn’t like the smell of antiseptic.

  The walls of the clinic were raw stone, like the other structures in the soldier camp, but the floors were wood planks instead of packed earth, for sanitary reasons, he assumed. The place was empty except for the nurse, a lean man with a shaved head and a currentblade at his side. Nurses in Shotet were a lot different from nurses in Thuvhe. Everyone Akos came across seemed to be a warrior, here.

  “Do you need something?” the man asked.

  “I need . . . vezyel.” The word for the act came to Akos without much delay, one of the peculiarities of the so-called revelatory tongue. Sometimes he knew words without really knowing them. “Please.”

  The nurse frowned, but went over to the cabinets on the far wall and took out a little white packet. Akos tore it open, and found a sterile blade, an antiseptic-soaked square of fabric, a vial of ink, and a bandage. He sat down on the edge of one of the beds.

  “Do you need help?” the nurse said. “I know you’ve never done this yourself.”

  “It’s a tattoo, just broken down into parts,” Akos said. “I can do it.”

  He wiped his left arm with the antiseptic, right next to the first mark, which was jagged, an act of violence committed by one of Kalmev’s friends. It was on the outside of his wrist, close to the vein that bulged from the back of his hand.

  He took the sterile blade and pressed it into his skin. It was more difficult than he thought, to cut himself intentionally. But he pushed himself through the pain, bringing tears to his eyes as he drew the line into his skin.

  He took the ink and, using the point of the blade, applied it to the cut. The bite of it was harsh, but not unbearable.

  Then he wrapped the bandage around the mark he had made, slumped forward over his knees, and wept.

  He now knew something he wished he didn’t know:

  When it came down to it, he could kill. And not just to save his own life, or to save his brother’s life—but to get something he needed. No—to get something he wanted.

  He would do it again, he was sure, before his time in Shotet was done.

  He was ready.

  “Come,” she said, and he obeyed.

  Together they drove to the outskirts of the city, to a dusty field and the edge of a cliff. The sheer face of rock was dark in color, almost black. The wind blew steady and harsh, and the gray particles from the Zoldan grasses soon coated his clothes like he had rolled in a pit of ash.

  She had led him to the edge of the cliff, and he feared that she would push him over. She didn’t. She crouched, so he crouched beside her. She pointed down at the birds that roosted among the rocks.

  “Their name?” she said to him.

  “Calamitas,” he answered. They were squat, white birds when fresh born, easy prey if they wandered from the hazardous place where they roosted.

  “Yes,” she said. “They begin life as weak as we do. Their skulls partially formed, their flesh fragile. The only thing about them that is strong is their beak, harder than stone.” She held out a hand to show him a V-shaped scar between her thumb and forefinger. “I was pecked by one, as a child. The force of the impact shattered my hand. It took several surgeries to repair. My father told the doctors to ensure that I scarred, so that I would not forget.”

  He had not met his grandfather, the man of whom she spoke. But he had seen photographs of him, dark-haired and so pale of eye he looked to have only a pupil, no iris. She looked just like him. He did not like to meet her eyes, but he forced himself to, so that she would not box his ears for his weakness.

  She continued, “They use those beaks to tunnel into the cliff face, and when they reach adolescence and the weather cools, they wriggle into the tunnel
they have created, if they have survived that long.”

  His legs ached from crouching, so he tipped his knees forward. Small pebbles dug into his kneecaps, and the wind screamed in his ears.

  She lay flat on her stomach, and reached over the edge of the cliff, searching the rock with her hand. When she found it, she clicked her tongue and shifted forward, plunging her arm into a cavity in the rock. She pulled out what looked like a ball of yarn. It was larger than her fist, and white.

  She dug her fingers into it, and tore at the woven-looking outside to show him what was inside it. It oozed purple-red, but there were chunky pieces, too, and flashes of beige. She pulled one of the beige things free, and showed him something spiny, with a delicate arch. It was a spine.

  He wanted to vomit. But he didn’t.

  “They create this sac by biting at their own flesh,” she said, holding the spine closer to her face so she could examine it. “Essentially creating a shell for themselves as they transform into their adult forms. The strange thing is, if you bite off your own skin to make a shell, you essentially liquefy yourself.”

  “So that—” He nodded to the woven thing in her hands. “That’s a calamita? Alive?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Or it was, until I ripped out its spine. But it would have emerged an adult. And you know what adult calamitas look like, don’t you?”

  He knew. They were small birds, with vicious talons. Their feathers were as hard and sharp as shale. Children were warned against trying to collect the feathers that fell in the fields, because the jagged edges would cut them. They ate the small creatures that lived in the grass, but often killed larger animals for sport, leaving the carcasses where they fell. Or they fought each other in the air, ramming together repeatedly until one broke apart.

  Strong, fierce birds they were, calamitas.

  He nodded.

  “We admire their strength, as adults, and pity them, as children, but do not reflect on the change.” She seized his shoulders, suddenly, gripping him hard. Her fingers smeared his shirt with viscera. “They cannot refuse to change. Everything is on a clock in this universe; everything must grow to adulthood. And reaching that point is not always pleasant, you see? The calamita knows this. It claims its change by devouring itself.”