“What do you want?” he demanded.
“I . . .” I paused. I didn’t know what I wanted, except to cover myself. “I just came to find out if you were all right.”
“Of course I’m all right,” he said. “Vas killed the two renegades who tried to enter this part of the ship before they could even scream.” He tugged one of the curtains back from the porthole—larger than most, it was almost as tall as he was—and stared out at the currentstream, which had turned dark green. Almost blue, almost time for the invasion, the scavenging, the tradition of our ancestors. “You think the childish actions of a few renegades can harm me?”
I stepped toward him, careful, like he was a wild animal. “Ryzek, it’s all right to be a little rattled when people are attacking you.”
“I am not rattled!” He shouted every word, slamming his mug down on a nearby table. The hushflower blend spilled everywhere, staining his white cuff red.
As I stared at him, I was struck by the memory of his quick, sure hands, fastening the buckles across my lap before my first sojourn, and how he had smiled as he teased me about being nervous. It wasn’t his fault that he had turned out this way, so terrified and so creative with his cruelty. Our father had conditioned him to become this person. The greatest gift Lazmet Noavek had ever given me, even greater than life itself, had been leaving me alone.
I had come at Ryzek with threats, with anger, with disdain, with fear. I had never tried kindness. While my father had relied on well-aimed threats and intimidating silence as his weapons, my mother had always wielded kindness with the deftness of a blade. After all this time, I was still more Lazmet than Ylira, but that could change.
“I’m your sister. You don’t have to be this way with me,” I said, as gently as I could.
Ryzek was staring at the stain on his cuff. He didn’t respond, which I decided was a good sign.
“Do you remember how we used to play with those little figurines in my room?” I said. “How you taught me to hold a knife? I kept making that tight fist and cutting off circulation to my fingertips, and you taught me how to fix it.”
He frowned. I wondered if he did remember—or was that one of the memories he had traded for one of Eijeh’s? Still, maybe he had taken in some of Eijeh’s gentleness when he traded away his pain.
“We weren’t always like this, you and I,” I said.
In his pause, I let myself hope—for a quiet shift in the way he regarded me, for the slow and steady change that our relationship could undergo, if he would just let go of his fear. His gaze found mine and it was almost there, I could see it, I could almost hear it. We could be as we once were.
“Then you killed our mother,” he said quietly. “And now, this is all that we can be.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, shouldn’t have marveled at the way words could hit me like a hard punch to the stomach. But hope had made me a fool.
I spent all night awake, dreading what he would do about the attack.
The answer came the next morning, when his calm, self-assured voice came from the news screen on the far wall. I rolled out of bed and crossed the room so I could turn on the video. My brother filled the screen, pale and skeletal. His armor caught the light, casting an eerie glow across his face.
“Yesterday, we experienced a . . . disruption—” His lip curled, like he thought it was amusing. It made sense—Ryzek knew not to show fear, to minimize the renegades’ actions as much as possible. “Childish though it was, the perpetrators of this stunt compromised the security of the ship by stalling its flight, which means they must be found and rooted out.” His tone had turned sinister. “People of any age will be selected at random from the ship’s database and brought in for questioning, beginning today. There will be a shipwide curfew, from the twentieth hour to the sixth hour, imposed on all of the ship’s occupants except those essential to its functioning, until such time as we have eradicated this problem. The sojourn will also be delayed until we have ensured the ship’s safety.”
“Questioning,” Akos said from behind me. “Is that code for ‘interrogation involving torture’?”
I nodded.
“If you know anything about the identities of the individuals involved in this prank, it is in your best interest to come forward,” Ryzek said. “Those who are discovered to have withheld information or lie during questioning will also be punished, for the good of the Shotet people. Rest assured, the safety of the sojourn ship, and all the people in it, is my highest concern.”
Akos snorted.
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” Ryzek said. “Let us continue to prepare to show the other planets in this galaxy our might and our unity.”
His head remained on the screen for a few moments longer, and then the news feed returned, this time in Othyrian, which I knew passably well. There was a water shortage on Tepes, in the western continent. The Shotet subtitles were accurate. For once.
“Showing our might and our unity,” I said, quoting Ryzek, more to myself than to Akos. “Is that what the sojourn is for now?”
“What else is it for?”
The Assembly was debating further requirements for the oracles on each planet, to be voted on in forty days. Shotet subtitles: “Assembly attempts to assert tyrannical control over oracles through another predatory measure, to be enacted at the end of the forty day cycle.” Accurate, but biased.