“What did you do?” she asks, voice muffled by my shirt. “After your dad died, after your brothers …”
“I … I just did things, for a long time. I ate, showered, worked, studied. But I wasn’t really there, or at least, I didn’t feel like I was. But … it was like when feeling comes back to a limb that’s gone numb. It comes back in little prickles, little pieces at a time.”
She lifts her head to look at me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was about to do. I’m sorry I asked you to come see … that,” she says. “I needed a witness, just in case it went wrong, and you were the only one I trusted.”
I sigh, and push her hair behind her ears. “I know.”
“Would you have stopped me, if you knew?”
I purse my lips. The real answer is that I don’t know, but that’s not the one I want to give her, not the one that will make her trust me. And she has to trust me, if I’m going to do any good in the war that’s coming.
“No,” I say. “I know you only do what you have to.”
It was true. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about how simple it had been to her, and the distant look in her eyes as she led me to that storage room, and the perfect hesitation she had shown Ryzek as she waited for just the right moment to stab him.
“They’re not going to take our planet,” she says to me, in a dark whisper. “I won’t let them.”
“Good,” I say.
She takes my hand. We’ve held hands before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still send a thrill through me when her skin slides over mine. She is still so capable. Smooth and strong. I want to kiss her, but this isn’t the time, not when there’s still Ryzek’s blood drying under her fingernails.
So I just let the touch of her hand be enough, and we stare out together at nothingness.
AKOS FUMBLED WITH THE chain around his neck. The ring of Jorek and Ara’s family was a now-familiar weight right in the hollow of his throat. When he wore armor it made an imprint in his skin, like a brand. As if the mark on his arm wasn’t enough to remind him of what he had done to Suzao Kuzar, Jorek’s father and Ara’s violent husband.
He wasn’t sure why he thought of killing Suzao in the arena now, standing outside his brother’s cell. It was time to decide if Eijeh ought to stay drugged—for how long? Until they got to Ogra? After that?—or if, now that Ryzek was dead, it was safe to risk Eijeh wandering around the ship clearheaded. Cyra and Teka had left the decision up to him and his mom.
His mom was right next to him, her head reaching just a few izits higher than his shoulder. Hair loose and messy around her shoulders, curled into knots. Sifa hadn’t been much of anywhere since Ryzek died, holing up in the belly of the ship to whisper the future to herself, barefoot, pacing. Cyra and Teka had been alarmed, but he told them that’s just how oracles were. Or at least, that was how his mother the oracle was. Sometimes sharp as a knife, sometimes half outside her own body, her own time.
“Eijeh’s not how you remember him,” he said to her. It was a useless warning. She knew it already, for one thing, and for another, she had probably seen him just the way he was now, and a hundred other ways besides.
Still, “I know” was all she said.
Akos tapped the door with his knuckles, then unlocked it with the key Teka had given him and walked in.
Eijeh sat cross-legged on the thin mattress they had thrown into the corner of the cell, an empty tray next to him with the dregs of soup left in a bowl on top of it. When he saw them he scrambled to his feet, hands held out like he might put them in fists and start pummeling. He was wan and red-eyed and shaky.
“What happened?” he said, eyes skirting Akos’s. “W—I felt something. What happened?”
“Ryzek was killed,” Akos replied. “You felt that?”
“Did you do it?” Eijeh asked with a sneer. “Wouldn’t be surprised. You killed Suzao. You killed Kalmev.”
“And Vas,” Akos said. “You’ve got Vas somewhere in that memory stew, don’t you?”
“He was a friend,” Eijeh said.
“He was the man who killed our father,” Akos spat.
Eijeh squinted, and said nothing.
“What about me?” Sifa said, voice flat. “Do you remember me, Eijeh?”
He looked at her like he had only just noticed she was there. “You’re Sifa.” He frowned. “You’re Mom. I don’t—there’s gaps.”
He stepped toward her and said, “Did I love you?”
Akos had never seen Sifa look hurt before, not even when they were younger and told her they hated her because she wouldn’t let them go out with friends, or scolded them for bad scores on tests. He knew she got hurt, because she was a person as well as an oracle, and all people got hurt sometimes. But he wasn’t quite ready for how the look pierced him, when it came, the furrowed brow and downturned mouth.
Did I love you? Akos knew, hearing those words, that he had definitely failed. He hadn’t gotten Eijeh out of Shotet, as he had promised his father before he died. This wasn’t really Eijeh, and what might have restored him was gone, now that Ryzek was dead.
Eijeh was gone. Akos’s throat got tight.
“Only you can know,” Sifa said. “Do you love me now?”
Eijeh twitched, made an aborted hand gesture. “I—maybe.”
“Maybe.” Sifa nodded. “Okay.”
“You knew, didn’t you. That I was the next oracle,” he said. “You knew I would be kidnapped. You didn’t warn me. You didn’t get me ready.”
“There are reasons for that,” she said. “I doubt you would find any of them comforting.”
“Comfort.” Eijeh snorted. “I have no need for comfort.”
He sounded like Ryzek then—that Shotet diction, put into Thuvhesit.
“But you do,” Sifa said. “Everybody does.”
Another snort, but no answer.
“Come here to drug me again, did you?” He nodded to Akos. “That’s what you’re good for, right? You’re a poison-maker. And Cyra’s whore.”
Then Akos’s hands were in fists in Eijeh’s worn shirt, lifting him up, so his toes were just brushing the floor. He was heavy, but not too heavy for Akos, with the energy that burned inside him, energy that had nothing to do with the current.
Akos slammed him into the wall and growled, “Shut. Your. Mouth.”
“Stop, both of you,” Sifa said, her hand on Akos’s shoulder. “Put him down. Now. If you can’t stay calm, you’ll have to leave.”
Akos dropped Eijeh and stepped back. His ears were ringing. He hadn’t meant to do that. Eijeh slid to the floor, and ran his hands over his buzzed head.
“I am not sure what Ryzek Noavek dumping his memories into your skull has to do with being so cruel to your brother,” Sifa said to Eijeh. “Unless it’s just the only way you know how to be, now. But I suggest you learn another way, and quickly, or I will devise a very creative punishment for you, as your mother and your superior, the sitting oracle. Understand?”
Eijeh