Oil beading on water.
He had been on his knees on the floor of the prison, watching currentshadows pull away from Cyra’s skin like smoke. The haze tinted the hand on his shoulder—Eijeh’s hand—dark gray. He saw Cyra through it only faintly, her chin tipped up, eyes closed like she was sleeping.
And now, lying on a thin mattress with a heater over his bare feet. A needle in his arm. His wrist cuffed to a bed frame.
The pain, and the memory of it, slipping away into numbness.
He twitched his fingers, and the IV needle shifted, sharp, under his skin. He frowned. This place was a dream; it had to be, because he was still in that tomb under Voa’s amphitheater, and Ryzek was ordering him to talk about Ori Rednalis. Orieve Benesit. Whatever her name was now.
“Akos?” The woman’s voice sounded real enough. Maybe it wasn’t a dream after all.
She stood over him, stick-straight hair framing her face. He’d know those eyes anywhere. They had stared at him across the dinner table, crinkled at the corners when Eijeh made a joke. Her left eyelid sometimes twitched when she got nervous. She was here, like thinking about her had brought her. His own name settled him into himself, no more slipping and sliding.
“Ori?” he croaked.
A tear dropped from her eye to the bedsheets. She put her hand on his, covering the tube from the IV needle. Her sleeve, made of thick black wool, was draped over her palm, and the garment pulled tight around her throat. Signs of Thuvhe, where a person would near strangle herself to death to keep any warmth from escaping.
“Cisi’s coming,” Ori said. “I called her, and she’s on her way. I called your mother, too, but she’s across the galaxy; it will take her some time.”
He was so tired.
“Don’t go,” he said as his eyes closed.
“I won’t.” Her voice was husky, but reassuring. “I won’t go.”
He dreamt he was between the glass prison cells, his knees digging into the black floor, his guts rumbling with hunger.
And he woke in the hospital, with Ori slumped over at his side, her arm sprawled across his legs. Through the window behind her he saw floaters whizzing past and big buildings hanging in the sky like ripe fruit.
“Where are we?” he said.
She blinked sleep from her eyes and said, “Shissa hospital.”
“Shissa? Why?”
“Because that’s where you got dropped,” she said. “You don’t remember?”
When she first spoke to him, she had sounded different, careful with every word. But the longer she talked, the more she lapsed into their lazy Hessa rhythms, every syllable sliding into the next one. He found himself doing the same thing.
“Dropped? By who?”
“We don’t know. Thought you would.”
He strained for the memory, but couldn’t quite reach it.
“Don’t worry.” She put her hand on his again. “There was so much hushflower in your system you probably should have been dead. No one expects you to remember.” She smiled. So familiar, slanted mouth into curved cheek. “They must not have known you that well, to dump you in Shissa like some kind of city-dwelling snot.”
He’d almost forgotten their jokes about this place. Shissa kids with their heads in the skies, couldn’t even recognize an iceflower on sight because they were used to seeing them from a long ways up. Couldn’t even fasten a proper coat closed. Useless glass-dwellers, all.
“‘City-dwelling snot,’ says the fated chancellor of Thuvhe,” he said, suddenly remembering. “Or is that your twin? Which one of you is the older one, anyway?”
“I’m not the chancellor, I’m the other one. Fated to raise her sister to the throne or . . . whatever,” she said. “But if I was her, you would definitely not be addressing me with the ‘respect appropriate for my position.’”
“Snob,” Akos said.
“Hessa trash.”
“I am from the family Kereseth, you know. We’re not exactly trash.”
“Yes, I know.” Her smile softened a little, like she was saying, How could I forget? And then Akos remembered the cuff fixing his wrist to the hospital bed. He decided not to bring it up yet.
“Ori,” he said. “Am I really in Thuvhe?”
“Yeah.”
He closed his eyes. There was a fire in his throat.
“Missed you, Orieve Benesit,” he said. “Or whatever your name is.”
Ori laughed. She was crying now. “Then what took you so long?”
The next time he woke, he didn’t feel quite so numb, and though he ached, certain enough, the sharp agony that had carried him from Voa to Shissa was gone. Cyra’s lingering gift had been sent away by iceflowers, no doubt.
Just thinking Cyra’s name made his insides twist with fear. Where was she now? Had the people who had brought him here rescued her, too, or had they just left her with Ryzek to die?
He tasted bile, and opened his eyes.
A woman stood at the foot of his bed. Dark curly hair framed her face. Her eyes were wide. There was a little spot at the bottom of one where her pupil bled into her iris—a defect she’d had since birth. His sister, Cisi.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was all softness and light. He’d held the memory of it tight in his mind, like it was the last seed left for planting.
It was too easy to cry right now, all laid out and warm as he was. “Cisi,” he croaked, blinking the tears away.