I strained against Vas’s vise-hand, but I wasn’t strong enough. My knuckles brushed Akos’s face. The shadows crept toward him, even as I silently begged them not to move. But I was not their master. I never had been. Akos moaned, his own brother holding him in place as he tried to flinch away.
“Excellent. It worked,” Ryzek said, coming to his feet. “The chancellor of Thuvhe, Kereseth. Tell me about her.”
I pulled my elbow back as hard as I could, twisting and thrashing in Vas’s grip. The shadows grew richer and more numerous the more I struggled, like they were mocking me. Vas was strong, and there was nothing I could do to him now; he held me steady with one hand and pushed my palm forward with the other, so it lay flat against Akos’s throat.
I could imagine nothing more horrible than this, Ryzek’s Scourge turned against Akos Kereseth.
I felt the heat of him. The pain inside me was desperate to be shared; it moved into him, but instead of diminishing in my own body the way it usually did, it only multiplied in us both. My arm shook from the effort of trying to pull away. Akos screamed, and so did I, so did I. I was dark with the current, the center of a black hole, a shred of the starless fringe of the galaxy. Every inch of me burned, ached, begged for relief.
Akos’s voice and mine met like two clasped hands. I closed my eyes.
In front of me was a wooden desk, marked with circles from water glasses. A pile of notebooks was scattered across it, and all of them bore my name, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek. I recognized this place. It was Dr. Fadlan’s office.
“The current flows through every one of us. And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us,” he was saying. My mother sat at my right, her posture straight and her hands folded in her lap. My memory of her was detailed and perfect, down to the loose strand of hair behind her ear and the faint blemish on her chin, covered with makeup.
“That your daughter’s gift causes her to invite pain into herself, and project pain into others, suggests something about what’s going on inside her,” he said. “A cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well.”
Instead of erupting the way she had at the time, my mother tilted her head. I could still see her pulse in her throat. She turned to me in the chair. She was more beautiful than I had dared to remember; even the lines at the corners of her eyes were graceful, gentle.
“What do you think, Cyra?” she said, and as she spoke, she became a dancer of Ogra, her eyes lined with chalk and her bones glowing so brightly beneath her skin I could see even the faint spaces at their joints. “Do you think this is how it works?”
“I don’t know,” I replied in my adult voice. It was my adult body sitting in the chair, too, though I had only been here as a child. “All I know is that the pain wants to be shared.”
“Does it?” The dancer smiled a little. “Even with Akos?”
“The pain isn’t me; it doesn’t discriminate,” I said. “The pain is my curse.”
“No, no,” the dancer said, her dark eyes locked on mine. But they weren’t brown anymore, as they had been when I saw her perform in the dining room; they were gray, and wary. Akos’s eyes, familiar to me even in a dream.
He had taken her place, perched at the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight, his long body dwarfing the chair.
“Every currentgift carries a curse,” he said. “But no gift is only a curse.”
“The gift part of it is that no one can hurt me,” I said.
But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. People could still hurt me. They didn’t need to touch me to do it—they didn’t even need to torture me to do it. As long as I cared about my life, as long as I cared about Akos’s life, or the lives of renegades I barely knew, I was as vulnerable as everyone else was to hurt.
I blinked at him as a different answer came to me.
“You told me I was more than a knife, more than a weapon,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”
He smiled that small, familiar smile that creased his cheek.
“The gift,” I said, “is the strength the curse has given me.” The new answer was like a blooming hushflower, petals unfurling. “I can bear it. I can bear pain. I can bear anything.”
He reached for my cheek. He became the dancer, and my mother, and Otega, in turn.
And then I was in the prison, arm outstretched, fingers on Akos’s cheek, Vas’s hand strong around my wrist, holding me fast. Akos’s teeth were gritted. And the shadows that were usually confined beneath my skin were all around us, like smoke. So dark I couldn’t see Ryzek or Eijeh or the prison with its glass walls.
Akos’s eyes—full of tears, full of pain—found mine. Pushing the shadow toward him would have been easy. I had done it many times before, each time a mark on my left arm. All I had to do was let the connection form, let the pain pass between us like a breath, like a kiss. Let all of it flow out of me, bringing relief for us both, in death.
But he did not deserve it.
This time, I broke the connection, like slamming a door between us. I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony.
I didn’t scream. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.
CHAPTER 26: AKOS
IN THE PLACE BETWEEN sleeping and waking, he thought he saw feathergrass, tilting in the wind. He imagined he was home and could taste snow on the air, smell cold earth. He let longing pierce him all the way through, and then fell asleep again.