I helped him fasten the straps across his chest and legs that would keep him steady during launch, and handed him a paper bag in case the ship’s movement made him sick. Then I strapped myself in. All through the ship, the rest of the Shotet would be doing the same thing, gathering in the hallways to pull jump seats from the walls and buckling each other in.
Together we waited for the ship to launch, listening to the countdown on the intercom. When the voice reached “ten,” Akos reached for my hand, and I squeezed, hard, until the voice said “one.”
The Shotet clouds rushed past us, and the force bore down on us, crushing us into our seats. Akos groaned, but I just watched as the clouds moved away and the blue atmosphere faded into the blackness of space. All around us was the starry sky.
“See?” I said, lacing my fingers with his. “It’s beautiful.”
CHAPTER 14: CYRA
A KNOCK CAME AT my door that night as I was lying in bed in my sojourn ship quarters, face buried in a pillow. I dragged myself up one limb at a time to answer it. There were two soldiers waiting in the hallway, one male and one female, both slim. Sometimes a person’s school of combat was obvious just from a glance—these were students of zivatahak, fast and deadly. And they were afraid of me. No wonder.
Akos stumbled into the kitchen to stand beside me. The two soldiers exchanged a knowing look, and I remembered what Otega had said about Shotet mouths loving to chatter. There was no avoiding it: Akos and I lived in close proximity, so there was bound to be talk about what we were, and what we did behind closed doors. I didn’t care enough to discourage it. Better to be talked about for that than for murdering and torturing, anyway.
“We are sorry to disturb you, Miss Noavek. The sovereign needs to speak to you right away,” the woman said. “Alone.”
Ryzek’s office on the sojourn ship was like his office in Voa, in miniature. The dark wood that comprised the floor and wall panels, polished to perfection, was native to Shotet—it grew in dense forests across our planet’s equator, dividing us from the Thuvhesits who had invaded the north centuries ago. In the wild, the fenzu we now kept trapped in the orb chandelier hummed in the treetops, but because most older Shotet houses used them for light, the Zetsyvis family—now helmed by Yma alone—ensured that farmed fenzu were available in large numbers for those willing to pay the high price for them. And Ryzek was—he insisted their glow was more pleasant than burnstones, though I didn’t see much of a difference.
When I walked in, Ryzek was standing in front of a large screen he usually kept hidden behind a sliding panel. It displayed a dense paragraph of text; it took me a few beats to realize that he was reading a transcript of the Assembly Leader’s announcement of the fates. Nine lines of nine families, spread across the galaxy, their members’ paths predetermined and unalterable. Ryzek usually avoided all references to his “weakness,” as my father had called it, the fate that had haunted him since his birth: that he would fall to the family Benesit. It was illegal in Shotet to speak of it or to read it, punishable by imprisonment or even execution.
If he was reading the fates, he was not in a good mood, and most of the time, that meant I should tread lightly. But tonight, I wondered why I should bother.
Ryzek folded his arms, and tilted his head, and spoke.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, that your fate is so ambiguous,” he said. “‘The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide.’ For what purpose will you cross the Divide to Thuvhe?” He lifted a shoulder. “No one knows or cares. Lucky, lucky.”
I laughed. “Am I?”
“That is why it’s so important that you help me,” Ryzek went on, like he hadn’t heard me. “You can afford to. You don’t need to fight so hard against what the world expects from you.”
Ryzek had been weighing his life against mine since I was a child. That I was in constant pain, that I could not get close to anyone, that I had experienced deep loss just as he had, didn’t seem to register in his mind. All he saw was that our father had ignored me rather than subjecting me to horrors, and that my fate didn’t make the Shotet doubt my strength. To him, I was the lucky child, and there was no point in arguing about it.
“What happened, Ryzek?”
“You mean aside from all of Shotet being reminded of my ridiculous fate by Lety Zetsyvis?”
At the mention of her, I shuddered involuntarily, remembering how warm her skin had been as she died. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them from trembling. Akos’s painkiller didn’t suppress the shadows completely; they moved, sluggish now, beneath my skin, bringing with them a sharp ache.
“But you were ready for that,” I said, fixing my eyes on his chin. “No one would dare repeat what she said now.”
“It’s not just that,” Ryzek said, and I heard in his voice a reminder of what he had sounded like when he was younger, before my father sank in his teeth. “I followed the trail from Uzul Zetsyvis’s confession to an actual source. There is a colony of exiles somewhere out there. Maybe more than one. And they have contacts among us.”
I felt a thrill in my chest. So the rumor of the exile colony had been confirmed. For the first time, the colony represented to me not a threat, but something like . . . hope.
“One display of strength is good, but we need more. We need there to be no doubt that I am in command, and that we will return from this sojourn even more powerful than before.” He let his hand hover over my shoulder. “I will need your help now more than ever, Cyra.”