“Lower it straight down,” she said, and he did. He didn’t have to press it in place; the silverskin rippled like water and buried itself in Cyra’s scalp the moment it found flesh.
With Cisi’s clear voice coaching him, Akos placed the rest of the silverskin. Each piece grew together right away, no seams to speak of between the different strips.
He acted as Cisi’s hands for the rest of Cyra’s wounds, too, the gashes on her arm and side covered with stitching cloth, the bruises treated with a healing salve. It didn’t take long. Mostly they would heal on their own, and the real trick for her would be forgetting how she got them. There was no stitching cloth for the mind’s wounds, real though they were.
“That’s it,” Cisi said, stripping the gloves from her small hands. “Now you just wait for her to wake up. She’ll need to rest, but she should be fine now that she’s not losing any more blood.”
“Thank you,” Akos said.
“Never thought I would be trying to heal Cyra Noavek,” Cisi said. “On a transport vessel full of Shotet, no less.” She glanced at him. “I can see why you like her, you know.”
“I feel like . . .” Akos sighed, and sat down at the table next to Cyra’s head. “Like I just walked right into my fate without meaning to.”
“Well,” Cisi said, “if you are destined to serve the Noavek family, I think you could do worse than the woman who was willing to endure all this just to get you home.”
“So you don’t think I’m a traitor?”
“That sort of depends on what she stands for, doesn’t it?” Cisi said. She touched his shoulder. “I’m going to find Isae, okay?”
“Sure.”
“What’s that look for?”
He was suppressing a smile. “Nothing.”
Akos’s memories of the interrogation were hazy, and the edges of them, creeping into his mind, were bad enough on their own, without any of the details to make them more real. Still, he let the memory of Cyra in.
She had looked like a corpse, with the currentshadows making her face look pitted and rotted away. And she had been screaming so loud, every izit of her resisting; she didn’t want to hurt him. If he hadn’t told Ryzek what he knew about Isae and Ori, maybe she had, just to keep from killing Akos. Not like he would have blamed her.
She woke up on the galley table with a twitch and a moan. Then reached for him, touching his jaw with her fingertips.
“Am I sealed in your memory now?” she said, sluggish. “As someone who hurt you?” The words caught in her throat like she was gagging on them. “The sounds you made, I can’t forget—”
She was crying. Half-drunk, too, from the painkiller, but still, crying.
He didn’t remember the sounds he’d made when she touched him—when Vas forced her to touch him, that was, torturing them both. But he knew she had felt everything he had felt. That was how her gift worked, sending pain both ways.
“No, no,” Akos said. “What he did, he did to both of us.”
Her hand came to rest against his sternum, like she was going to push him away, and then she didn’t. She brushed her fingers over his collarbone, and even through his shirt he felt how warm she was.
“But now you know what I’ve done,” she said, staring at her hand, at his chest, anywhere but his face. “Before, you had only seen me do it to other people, but now you know the kind of pain I have caused people, so many people, just because I was too much of a coward to stand up to him.” She scowled, and lifted her hand. “Getting you out was the one good thing I’ve ever done, and now it’s not even worth anything, because here you are again, you . . . you idiot!”
She clutched at her side, wincing. She was crying again.
Akos touched her face. When he first met her, he thought she was this fearsome thing, this monster he needed to escape. But she had unfurled bit by bit, showing him her wicked humor by waking him with a knife to his throat, talking about herself with unflinching honesty, for better or for worse, and loving—so deeply—every little bit of this galaxy, even the parts she was supposed to hate.
She was not a rusty nail, as she had once told him, or a hot poker, or a blade in Ryzek’s hand. She was a hushflower, all power and possibility. Capable of doing good and harm in equal measure.
“It is not the only good thing you’ve ever done,” Akos said, in plain Thuvhesit. It felt like the right language for this moment, the language of his home, which Cyra understood but didn’t really speak when he was around, like she was afraid it would hurt his feelings.
“It’s worth everything to me, what you did,” he said, still in Thuvhesit. “It changes everything.”
He touched his forehead to hers, so they shared the same air.
“I like how you sound in your own language,” she said softly.
“Can I kiss you?” he said. “Or will it hurt?”
Her eyes went wide. Then she said breathlessly, “And if it hurts?” And smiled a little. “Life is full of hurt anyway.”
Akos’s breaths shuddered as he pressed his mouth to hers. He wasn’t sure what it would be like, kissing her this way, not because she surprised him and he didn’t think to pull away, but because he just wanted to. She tasted malty and spiced from the painkiller she had swallowed, and she was a little hesitant, like she was afraid to hurt him. But kissing her was touching match to kindling. He burned for her.