“‘I tell lies better than I tell truths,’” I said. It was a quote from some poetry I had read on the side of a building with Otega on one of our excursions. I am a Shotet. I am sharp as broken glass, and just as fragile. I tell lies better than I tell truths. I see all of the galaxy and never catch a glimpse of it.
“Let us go tell some, then,” Zosita said.
CHAPTER 19: AKOS
AKOS BENT OVER THE pot, resting on a burner in his little room on the sojourn ship, and breathed in some of the yellow fumes. Everything in front of him blurred, and his head dropped, heavy, toward the countertop. Just for a tick, before he caught himself.
Strong enough, then, he thought. Good.
He’d had to ask Cyra to get him some sendes leaf to strengthen the drug, so it would work faster. And it had worked—he had tested it the night before, dropping asleep so soon after swallowing it that the book he was reading slid right out of his hands.
He turned off the flames to let the elixir cool, then jerked to attention at the sound of a knock. He checked the clock. In Thuvhe, he’d been more aware of the world’s rhythms, dark in the Deadening time and bright in the Awakening, the way the day closed like a shutting eye. Here, without the sunset and sunrise to guide him, he was always checking. It was the seventeenth hour. Time for Jorek.
The corridor guard was there when he opened the door, looking critical. Jorek was behind him.
“Kereseth,” the guard said. “This one says he’s here to see you?”
“Yes,” Akos said.
“Didn’t think you could receive visitors,” the guard said with a sneer. “Not your quarters, are they?”
“My name is Jorek Kuzar,” Jorek said, leaning hard into his surname. “So. Get out of his face.”
The guard looked over Jorek’s mechanic uniform, eyebrows raised.
“Go easy on him, Kuzar,” Akos said. “He’s got the world’s most boring job: protecting Cyra Noavek.”
Akos went back to his narrow room, which was giving off a leafy, malty smell. Medicinal. Akos dipped a finger in the mixture to test its heat. Still warm, but now cool enough to put in a vial. He wiped the potion off on his pants, not wanting it to absorb through his skin. He searched the drawers for a clean vessel.
Jorek was standing just inside the doorway. Staring. His hand hanging off the back of his neck, like always.
“What?” Akos said. He got out a dropper and touched it to the potion.
“Nothing, it’s just . . . this isn’t what I expected Cyra Noavek’s room to look like,” Jorek said.
Akos grunted a little—it wasn’t what he’d expected, either—as he squeezed the yellow elixir from the dropper into the vial.
“You really don’t sleep in the same bed,” Jorek said.
Cheeks hot, Akos scowled at him. “No. Why?”
“Rumors.” Jorek shrugged. “I mean, you do live together. Touch each other.”
“I help her with her pain,” Akos said.
“And you’re fated to die for the Noaveks.”
“Thanks for the reminder; I’d almost forgotten,” Akos snapped. “Did you want my help, or not?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Jorek cleared his throat. “So, same plan for this one?”
They had already done this once. Jorek had dosed Suzao with a sleeping potion so he would collapse in the middle of breakfast. Now Suzao was on edge, and searching for whoever had drugged him and embarrassed him in front of everybody. Akos figured it wouldn’t take much to make Suzao angry enough to challenge him to fight to the death—Suzao wasn’t exactly a reasonable man—but he didn’t want to take chances, so he was having Jorek drug his dad again, just to be sure. Hopefully this would send Suzao on a rampage, and after the scavenge, Akos could confess to being behind all the drugging, and fight him in the arena.
“Two days before the scavenge, slip it into his medicine,” Akos said. “Leave the door to his quarters cracked so it looks like someone came in from outside, or else he might suspect you.”
“Right.” Jorek took the vial from Akos, testing the cork with his thumb. “And after that . . .”
“It’s under control,” Akos said. “After the scavenge, I’ll tell him I’m the one who’s been drugging him, he’ll challenge me, and I’ll . . . end it. The first day arena challenges are legal again. Okay?”
“Okay.” Jorek bit down hard on his lip. “Good.”
“Your mom okay?”
“Um . . .” Jorek looked away, at Cyra’s rumpled sheets and the burnstone lanterns strung together over the bed. “She’ll make it, yeah.”
“Good,” Akos said. “You’d better go.”
Jorek put the vial in his pocket. It seemed to Akos like he didn’t really want to go—he dawdled by the end of the counter, skimming it with a fingertip that likely came away sticky. Neither Akos nor Cyra cared all that much for scrubbing.
When Jorek finally opened the door, Eijeh and Vas were in the hallway, about to come in.
Eijeh’s hair was long enough now to be tied back, and his face was bony—and old, like he was ten seasons Akos’s senior instead of two. At the sight of him Akos felt a powerful urge to grab him and run. No plan for what he might do after that, of course, because they were on a city-size spaceship on the galaxy’s edge, but he wanted to anyway. Wanted a lot of things he would never get, these days.