Everybody knew the Shotet followed the currentstream around space as an act of faith, but until then, Akos hadn’t understood why, except maybe that they felt like they had to. But once you saw this up close, he thought, it was impossible to imagine a life without seeing it again.
He felt separate, though—not just because he was Thuvhesit and they were Shotet, but because they could feel the hum-buzz of the current and he couldn’t. The current didn’t go through him. It was like he wasn’t as real as they were, like he wasn’t as alive.
Just as he was thinking it, Cyra held out her hand. He took it, to relieve her of the shadows, and he was startled to see tears in her eyes—from the pain or from the wonder, it was hard to say.
And then she said something strange. Breathlessly, and with reverence: “You feel like silence.”
The Assembly news feed was playing on the screen in Cyra’s quarters when they returned. Cyra must have left it on by mistake, Akos thought, and while Cyra made her way to the bathroom, he moved to turn it off. Before he could flip the switch, however, he noticed the headline at the bottom of the screen: Oracles Gather on Tepes.
Akos sank down to the edge of Cyra’s bed.
He might see his mom.
Half the time he tried to tell himself that she and Cisi were gone. It was easier than remembering they weren’t, and that he wouldn’t see them again, his fate being what it was. But he couldn’t make himself believe a lie. They were right there, right across the feathergrass.
The news feed sights swooped in on Tepes. Tepes was the planet closest to the sun, the fire planet to their ice planet. You had to wear a special suit to walk around there, Akos knew, sort of like you couldn’t walk outside in the Deadening time in Hessa without freezing to death. He couldn’t imagine it—couldn’t imagine his body burning in that way.
“The oracles prohibit outside intervention in their sessions, but this footage was submitted by a local child as the last ships arrived,” a voice-over said in Othyrian. Most of the Assembly broadcasts were in Othyrian, since most people outside Shotet understood it. “Inside sources suggest that the oracles will be discussing another set of legal restrictions imposed by the Assembly last week, as the Assembly moves closer to requiring all oracle discussions be publicized.”
It was an old complaint of his mother’s, that the Assembly was always trying to interfere with the oracles, that they couldn’t stand that there was one thing left in the galaxy they couldn’t regulate. And no trifling thing, he knew, the fates of the favored families, the futures of the planets in their endless variety. Maybe a little regulation wouldn’t hurt the oracles, Akos thought, and it felt like a betrayal.
Akos couldn’t read most of the Shotet characters at the bottom of the screen, translating the voice-over. Just the ones for oracle and Assembly. Cyra said that something about the Shotet character for Assembly expressed Shotet bitterness at not being acknowledged by the Assembly. Decisions about the planet Thuvhe and Shotet shared—about trade, or aid, or travel—were made by Thuvhe and Thuvhe alone, leaving Shotet at the mercy of their enemies. They had reason enough to be bitter, Akos supposed.
He heard water running. Cyra was showering.
The Tepes footage showed two ships. The first one clearly wasn’t a Thuvhesit ship—too sleek for that, all swooping shapes and perfect plates. But the other one looked like it could have been a Thuvhesit vessel, its fuel burners armed for cold instead of heat with a system of vents. Like gills, he’d always thought.
The hatch on that ship opened, and a spry woman in a reflective suit hopped down. When no others joined her, he knew it had to be the Thuvhesit ship. Every nation-planet had three oracles, after all, except Thuvhe. With Eijeh in captivity and the falling oracle dying in the Shotet invasion, only Akos’s mother was left.
The sun on Tepes filled the sky like the whole planet was on fire, full and rich with color. Heat came off the planet’s surface in ripples. He knew his mom’s gait as she led the way to the monastery where the oracles were meeting. Then she disappeared behind a door and the footage cut off, the feed moving to a famine on one of the outer moons.
He didn’t know how to feel. It was his first real glimpse of home in a long time. But it was also a glimpse of the woman who hadn’t so much as warned her own family about what she knew was coming to them. Who hadn’t shown up for it, even. She had let her husband die, let the falling oracle sacrifice herself, let a son—now Ryzek’s very best weapon—be kidnapped, instead of offering herself in his place. Fates be damned, Akos thought. She was supposed to be their mother.
Cyra opened the bathroom door to let out the steam, and pulled her hair over one shoulder. She was dressed, this time in dark training clothes.
“What is it?” she asked. She followed his gaze to the screen. “Oh, you—you saw her?”
“I think so,” Akos replied.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you try to avoid feeling homesick.”
Homesick was the wrong word. Lost was the right one—lost out in the nothingness, among people he didn’t understand, with no hope of getting his brother home except murdering Suzao Kuzar as soon as it was legal again.
Instead of telling her all that, he said, “How do you know that?”
“We never speak Thuvhesit, even though you know I could.” She lifted a shoulder. “It’s the same reason I don’t keep any likenesses of my mother around. Better, sometimes, to just . . . keep moving forward.”