All the others were asleep. Even Akos, lying a few feet away from me on the ground near the ships. I, however, was wide awake with only my racing thoughts as company. I propped myself up on my elbow, and looked out at the bumps of renegades under blankets, the dying light from the furnace. Jorek was curled in a tight ball, his blankets drawn over his head. Teka was in a beam of moonlight that turned her blond hair silver-white.
I frowned. Just as a few memories began to surface, I saw Sifa Kereseth crossing the room. She slipped out the back door, and before I knew what I was doing—or why—I had shoved my feet into my boots and followed her.
She was standing just outside, her clasped hands resting on the small of her back.
“Hello,” she said.
We were in a rough part of Voa. All around us were low buildings with flaking paint, windows with bars twisted into decorative patterns to distract from their true purpose, doors hanging off their hinges. The streets were packed dirt instead of stone. Floating among the buildings, though, were dozens of wild fenzu, glowing with Shotet blue. The other colors had been bred out of existence decades ago.
“Of all the many futures I have seen, this is one of the stranger ones,” Sifa said. “And the one with the most potential for good and evil in equal measure.”
“You know,” I said, “it might help if you would just tell me what to do.”
“I can’t, because I honestly don’t know. We are at a murky place,” she said. “Full of confusing visions. Hundreds of murky futures spread out as far as I can see. So to speak. Only the fates are clear.”
“What’s the difference?” I said. “Fates, futures . . .”
“A fate is something that happens no matter what version of the future I see,” she said. “Your brother would not have wasted his time in trying to evade his fate if he had known that to be true, undoubtedly. But we prefer to keep our work mysterious, at the risk of it being too rigorously controlled.”
I tried to picture it. Hundreds of twisting paths unfolding in front of me, the same destination at the end of each one. It made my own fate seem even stranger—no matter where I went, and no matter what I did, I would cross the Divide. So what? What did it matter?
I didn’t ask her. Even if I thought she would tell me—she wouldn’t—I didn’t want to know.
“The oracles of the planets meet yearly to discuss our visions,” Sifa said. “We mutually agree on what future is most crucial for each planet. For this planet, my job—my only job, aside from recording visions—is to ensure that Ryzek leads Shotet for as little time as possible.”
I said, “Even at the expense of your son?”
I wasn’t sure which son I was referring to: Akos or Eijeh. Maybe both.
“I am a servant of fate,” she said. “I do not have the luxury of partiality.”
The thought brought a chill to my bones. I understood doing things for “the greater good” in theory, but in practice, I didn’t have any interest in it. I had always protected myself, and now I protected Akos, when I could. Beyond that, there weren’t many I wasn’t willing to cast out of my path. And maybe it meant I was evil, but it was true regardless.
“It is not easy to be a mother and an oracle, or a wife and an oracle,” she said, not sounding quite as steady now as she had before. “I have been . . . tempted many times. To protect my family at the expense of the greater good. But . . .” She shook her head. “I must stay the course. I must have faith.”
Or what? I wanted to ask. What was so bad about snatching up your loved ones and fleeing, refusing to shoulder a responsibility you never wanted?
“I have a question you might be able to answer,” I said. “Do you know the name Yma Zetsyvis?”
Sifa tilted her head so her thick hair spilled over one shoulder. “I do.”
“Do you know what her name was before she married Uzul Zetsyvis?” I said. “Was her fate favored?”
“No,” Sifa said. She took a breath of the cool night air. “Their marriage was a kind of aberration, unlikely enough to register in the oracles’ visions of Shotet. Uzul married far beneath himself, for love, apparently. A common woman, with a common name. Yma Surukta.”
Surukta. It was Teka’s name, and Zosita’s. Women of pale hair and bright eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I would stay and talk, but I have something I need to do.”
Sifa shook her head. “It’s strange for me not to know what someone is deciding.”
“Embrace the uncertainty,” I said.
If Voa was a wheel, I was walking its circumference. The Zetsyvis family lived across the city, their house on a cliff overlooking Voa. I could see the light glittering inside their estate from far off, when the streets were still broken under my feet.
The currentstream, winding around the sky above me, was deep purple, transitioning to red. It almost looked like blood. Fitting, given our plans for tomorrow.
I felt comfortable in the poor, discarded district where the renegades had chosen their safe house. More often than not, the windows were dark, but sometimes I saw shadowed figures hunched over small lanterns. In one house I spotted a family of four crowded around playing cards scavenged from Zold. They were laughing. There had been a time when I would not have dared to walk these streets, as Ryzek’s sister, but now I was disgraced, and no friend of the regime. I was as safe as I could be, here.