He had been in danger, and his body had responded. His mind had responded. His story was the same as mine.
“You think of me the way I think of Kereseth,” Vas said. “You think I’m Ryzek’s little pet, just like Akos is yours.”
“I think we all serve my brother,” I said. “You. Me. Kereseth. We’re all the same.” I glanced at the crowd gathered around Ryzek. “Why is Yma here?”
“You mean, after she was disgraced by both husband and child?” Vas said. “She’s rumored to have gotten on hands and knees, begging for forgiveness for their transgressions. That may be a slight exaggeration, of course.”
I slipped past him, edging closer to the others. Yma’s hand was on Ryzek’s arm, sliding down to his elbow. I expected him to pull away; he nearly always did when people tried to touch him. But he permitted the caress, even leaned into it, maybe.
How could she stand to look at him, after he ordered the deaths of her daughter and husband, let alone touch him? I watched her laugh at something Ryzek had said. Her eyebrows drew in like she was in pain. Or desperate, I thought. The expressions were often the same.
“Cyra!” Yma said, drawing everyone’s attention to me. I tried to make myself look her in the eye, but it was difficult, given what I had done to Lety. I dreamt of Yma when I dreamt of her daughter, sometimes, imagined her hunched over Lety’s corpse, screaming at the top of her lungs. “It’s been a while. What have you been up to?”
I met Ryzek’s eyes, just for a moment.
“Cyra has been on a special assignment from me,” Ryzek said easily. “To stay close to Kereseth.”
He was taunting me.
“Is the younger Kereseth so valuable?” Yma asked me. She wore that peculiar smile.
“That remains to be seen,” I said. “But he is Thuvhesit-born, after all. He knows things about our enemies that we do not.”
“Ah,” Yma said lightly. “I just thought you might have made yourself useful during these interrogations, Cyra, in the way you have made yourself useful before.”
I felt like I might be sick.
“Unfortunately, the interrogations require a clever tongue and a mind skilled at the detection of subtleties,” Ryzek said. “Two things my sister has always lacked.”
Stung, I couldn’t think of a response. Maybe he was right about my tongue not being clever.
So I just let the currentshadows sprawl, and when the conversation had turned to another topic, I walked to the edge of the room to look out at the dark that enfolded us.
We were on the edge of the galaxy, so the only planets—or pieces of planets—left to see were not populous enough to participate in the Assembly. We called them “peripheral planets,” or just “the brim,” more casually. My mother had urged the Shotet to regard them as our brothers and sisters in the same struggle for legitimacy. My father had privately scoffed at that idea, saying that Shotet was greater than any brim spawn.
I saw one of those planets from this vantage point, just a spot of light ahead, too big to be one of our stars. A bright thread of the currentstream stretched toward it and wrapped around it like a belt.
“P1104,” Yma Zetsyvis said to me, sipping from her mug. “That’s the planet you’re looking at.”
“Have you been there?” I was tense, standing beside her, but I tried to keep my voice light. Behind us the others erupted into laughter at something cousin Vakrez had said.
“Of course not,” Yma said. “The last two sovereigns of Shotet have not permitted travel to brim planets. They—rightfully—want to put distance between us and them in the eyes of the Assembly. We can’t be associated with such rough company if we want to be taken seriously.”
Spoken like a Noavek loyalist. Or more accurately, a Noavek apologist. She knew the script well.
“Right,” I said. “So . . . I take it the interrogations haven’t yielded any results.”
“Some low-level renegades, yes, but none of the key players. And unfortunately, we are running out of time.”
We? I thought. She so confidently included herself as one of my brother’s close associates. Maybe she really had begged him for forgiveness. Maybe she had found another way to ingratiate herself to him.
I shuddered at the thought.
“I know. The currentstream is almost blue. Changing by the day,” I said.
“Indeed. So your brother needs to find someone. Make it public. Show strength before the sojourn. Strategy is, of course, important for unstable times like these.”
“And what’s the strategy if he doesn’t find someone in time?”
Yma turned her strange smile on me. “I would think you already know the strategy. Hasn’t your brother been filling you in, despite your special assignment?”
I got the sense we both knew that my “special assignment” was a lie.
“Of course,” I said dryly. “But you know, with a mind as dull as mine, I forget things like this all the time. I probably forgot to turn off my stove this morning.”
“I sense it will not be difficult for your brother to find a suspect in time for the scavenge,” Yma said. “All they have to do is look the part of a renegade, right?”
“He’s going to frame someone?” I said.
I felt cold at the thought of an innocent person dying because Ryzek needed a scapegoat, and I wasn’t sure why. Months ago—even weeks ago—this would not have troubled me as much. But something Akos had said was working its way through me: that the thing I was did not have to be permanent.