There were marks up and down my arm, from elbow to wrist, row after row. Little dark lines, perfectly spaced, each one the same length. And through each one, a small diagonal hash mark, negating it under Shotet law.
Akos’s brow furrowed, and he took my arm in both hands, holding me with just his fingertips. He turned my arm over, running his fingers down one of the rows. When he reached the end, he touched his index finger to one of the hashes, turning his arm to compare it to his own. I shivered to see our skin side by side, mine tawny and his pale.
“These aren’t kills,” he said quietly.
“I only marked my mother’s passing,” I said, just as quietly. “Make no mistake, I am responsible for more deaths, but I stopped recording them after her. Until Zetsyvis, anyway.”
“And instead, you record . . . what?” He squeezed my arm. “What are all these marks for?”
“Death is a mercy compared to the agony I have caused. So I keep a record of pain, not kills. Each mark is someone I have hurt because Ryzek told me to.” I had counted the marks, at first, always sure of their number. I had not known, then, exactly how long Ryzek would put me to use as his interrogator. Over time, though, I had just stopped keeping track. Knowing the number only made it worse.
“How old were you, when he first asked you to do this?”
I didn’t understand the tone of his voice, with all its softness. I had just shown him proof of my own monstrousness, and still his eyes fixed on mine with sympathy instead of judgment. He couldn’t possibly understand what I was telling him, to look at me like that. Or he thought I was lying, or exaggerating.
“Old enough to know it was wrong,” I snapped.
“Cyra.” Soft again. “How old?”
I sat back in my chair. “Ten,” I admitted. “And it was my father, not Ryzek, who first asked.”
His head bobbed. He touched the point of the knife to the table and spun the handle in quick circles, marking the wood.
Finally, he said, “When I was ten, I didn’t know my fate yet. So I wanted to be a Hessa soldier, like the ones that patrolled my father’s iceflower fields. He was a farmer.” Akos balanced his chin on a hand as he looked me over. “But one day criminals went into the fields while he was working, to steal some of the harvest, and Dad tried to stop them before the soldiers got there. He came home with this huge gash across his cheek. Mom just started screaming at him.” He laughed a little. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it, yelling at someone for getting hurt?”
“Well, she was afraid for him,” I said.
“Yeah. I was scared, too, I guess, because that night I decided I never wanted to be a soldier, if my job would be to get cut up like that.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“I know,” he said, his lip curling at the corner. “Little did I know how I would be spending my days now.”
He tapped the table, and I noticed, for the first time, how jagged his nails were, and all the cuts along his cuticles. I would have to break him of the habit of chewing on his own hands.
“My point is,” he continued, “that when I was ten I was so scared of even seeing pain that I could hardly stand it. Meanwhile, when you were ten, you were being told to cause it, over and over again, by someone much more powerful than you were. Someone who was supposed to be taking care of you.”
For a moment I ached at the thought. But only for a moment.
“Don’t try to absolve me of guilt.” I meant to sound sharp, like I was scolding him, but instead I sounded like I was pleading with him. I cleared my throat. “Okay? It doesn’t make it better.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You were taught this ritual?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Carve the mark,” I said, my throat tight.
I extended my arm, pointing to a square of bare skin on the back of my wrist, beneath the knobby bone. He touched the knifepoint there, adjusted it so it was at the same interval as the other marks, then dug in. Not too deep, but enough that the feathergrass extract could settle.
Tears came to my eyes, unwelcome, and blood bubbled up from the wound. It dripped down the side of my arm as I fumbled in one of the kitchen drawers for the right bottle. He took out the cork, and I dipped the little brush I kept with it. I spoke Lety Zetsyvis’s name as I painted the line he had carved with dark fluid.
It burned. Every time, I thought I would be used to how much it burned, and every time, I was wrong. It was supposed to burn, supposed to remind you that it was no trifling thing, to take a life, to carve a loss.
“You don’t say the other words?” Akos said. He was referring to the prayer, the end of the ritual. I shook my head.
“I don’t either,” he said.
As the burning subsided, Akos wrapped the bandage around my arm, once, twice, three times, and secured it with a piece of tape. Neither of us bothered to clean up the blood on the table. It would probably dry there, and I would have to scrape it off with a knife later, but I didn’t care.
I climbed the rope to the room above us, past the plants preserved in resin and the mechanical beetles perched among them, recharging for the moment. Akos followed me.
The sojourn ship was shuddering, its engines preparing to launch into the atmosphere. The ceiling of the room above us was covered with screens that showed whatever was above us—in this case, the Shotet sky. Pipes and vents crowded the space from all sides—it was only big enough for one person to move around in, really, but along the back wall were emergency jump seats, folded into the wall. I pulled them out, and Akos and I sat.