When I returned to my room, Akos sat on the bed with the book on elmetahak on his lap, the translator glowing over one of the pages. He looked up at me with furrowed eyebrows. The scar along his jaw was still dark in color, its line perfectly straight as it followed his jaw. It would pale, in time, fading into his skin.
I walked into the bathroom to splash water on my face.
“What did he do to you?” Akos said as he slumped against the bathroom wall, next to the sink.
I splashed my face again, then leaned over the sink. Water rolled down my cheeks and over my eyelids and dripped into the basin beneath me. I stared at my reflection, eyes wild, jaw tensed.
“He didn’t do anything,” I said, grabbing a cloth from the rack next to the sink and dragging it over my face. My smile was almost a grimace of fear. “He didn’t do anything, because I didn’t let him. He threatened me, and I . . . I threatened him back.”
The webs of dark color were dense on my hands and arms, like splatters of black paint. I sat in one of the kitchen chairs and laughed. I laughed from my belly, laughed until I felt warm all over. I had never stood up to Ryzek before. The cord of shame curled up in my belly unspooled a little. I was not quite as complicit anymore.
Akos sat across from me.
“What . . . what does this mean?” he said.
“It means he leaves us alone,” I said. “I . . .” My hands trembled. “I don’t know why I’m so . . .”
Akos covered my hands with his own. “You just threatened the most powerful person in the country. I think it’s okay to be a little shaken.”
His hands weren’t much larger than mine, though thicker through the knuckles, with tendons that stood out all the way to his wrists. I could see blue-green veins through his skin, which was much paler than my own. Almost like those rumors about Thuvhesits having thin skin were true, except that whatever Akos was, it wasn’t weak.
I slipped my hands out of his.
Now, with Ryzek out of the way, and Akos here, I wondered how we would both fill our days. I was used to spending sojourns alone. There was still something splattered on the side of the stove from the last sojourn, when I had cooked for myself every night, experimenting with ingredients from different planets—unsuccessfully, most of the time, since I had no talent for cooking. I had spent my nights watching footage from other places, imagining lives other than my own.
He crossed the room to get a glass from the cupboard and fill it with water from the faucet. I tilted my head back to look at the plants that hung above our heads, shining in their resin cages. Some of them glowed when the lights were out; others would decay, even in resin, withering into bright colors. I had been watching them for three sojourns already.
Akos wiped his mouth and set the glass down.
“I figured it out,” he said. “A reason to keep going, I mean.”
He flexed his left arm, where his first kill mark was etched.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” His head bobbed. “Something Ryzek said kept bothering me . . . that he would make Eijeh into someone I didn’t want to rescue. Well, I decided that’s impossible.” Days ago he had looked empty to me, and now full, an overflowing cup. “There’s no version of Eijeh that I don’t want to rescue from him.”
This was the cost of the same softness that had made him look at me with sympathy earlier that day instead of disgust: madness. To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.
“You don’t make any sense to me,” I said to him. “It’s like the more terrible things you find out about a person, or the more terrible a person is to you, the kinder you are to them. It’s masochism.”
“Says the person who’s been scarring herself for things she was coerced into doing,” he said wryly.
It wasn’t funny, what either of us was saying. And then it was. I grinned, and after a moment, so did he. A new grin—not the one that told me he was proud of himself, or the one that he forced when he felt like he needed to be polite, but a thirsty, crazed kind of smile.
“You really don’t hate me for this,” I said, lifting up my left arm.
“No, I don’t.”
I had experienced only a few different reactions to what I was, what I could do. Hatred, from those who had suffered at my hand; fear, from those who hadn’t but might; and glee, from those capable of using me for it. I had never seen this before. It was almost like he understood.
“You don’t hate me at all,” I said in almost a whisper, afraid to hear the answer.
But his answer came steadily, like it was obvious to him: “No.”
I found, then, that I wasn’t angry anymore about what he had done to me, to get Eijeh out. He had done it because of the same quality, in him, that made him so accepting of me now. How could I fault him for it?
“All right.” I sighed. “Be up early tomorrow, because we’ll need to train harder if you expect to get your brother out of here.”
His water glass was marked with fingerprints around the base. I took it from him.
He frowned at me. “You’ll help me? Even after what I did to you?”
“Yeah.” I drained the water glass, and set it back down. “I guess I will.”
CHAPTER 15: AKOS
AKOS RAN THROUGH THE memory of his almost-escape with Eijeh over and over again:
He’d run through the corridors in the walls of the Noavek house, stopping where the walls joined to peek through cracks and figure out where he was. He had spent a long time in the dark, gulping dust and catching splinters in his fingers.