LITMIR.BIZ

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      “What do you mean?” I didn’t think my mother could sit up any straighter, and then she did.

      “The current flows through every one of us,” Dr. Fadlan said gently. “And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us, showing itself in a different way. As a person develops, those changes can alter the mold the current flows through, so the gift can also shift—but people don’t generally change on such a fundamental level.”

      Dr. Fadlan had an unmarked arm, and he did not speak the revelatory tongue. There were deep lines around his mouth and eyes, and they grew even deeper as he looked at me. His skin was the same shade as my mother’s, however, suggesting a common lineage. Many Shotet had mixed blood, so it wasn’t surprising—my own skin was a medium brown, almost golden in certain lights.

      “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,” Dr. Fadlan said. “It would take further study to know exactly what that is. But a cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well.”

      “You’re saying this gift is my daughter’s fault?” The pulse in my mother’s throat moved faster. “That she wants to be this way?”

      Dr. Fadlan leaned forward and looked directly at me. “Cyra, the gift comes from you. If you change, the gift will, too.”

      My mother stood. “She is a child. This is not her fault, and it’s not what she wants for herself. I’m sorry that we wasted our time here. Cyra.”

      She held out her gloved hand, and wincing, I took it. I wasn’t used to seeing her so agitated. It made all the shadows under my skin move faster.

      “As you can see,” Dr. Fadlan said, “it gets worse when she’s emotional.”

      “Quiet,” my mother snapped. “I won’t have you poisoning her mind any more than you already have.”

      “With a family like yours, my fear is that she has already seen too much for her mind to be saved,” he retorted as we left the room.

      My mother rushed us through the hallways to the loading bay. By the time we reached the landing pad, there were Othyrian soldiers surrounding our vessel. Their weapons looked feeble to me, slim rods with dark current wrapped around them, set to stun instead of kill. Their armor, too, was pathetic, made of pillowed synthetic material that left their sides exposed.

      My mother ordered me into the ship, and paused to speak with one of them. I dawdled on my way to the door to hear what they said.

      “We are here to escort you off-world,” the soldier said.

      “I am the wife of the sovereign of Shotet. You should address me as ‘my lady,’” my mother snapped.

      “My apologies, ma’am, but the Assembly of Nine Planets recognizes no Shotet nation, and therefore no sovereign. If you leave the planet immediately, we will cause you no trouble.”

      “No Shotet nation.” My mother laughed a little. “A time will come when you will wish you hadn’t said that.”

      She clutched her skirts to lift them, and marched into the ship. I scrambled inside and found my seat, and she sat beside me. The door closed behind us, and ahead of us, the pilot gave the signal for liftoff. This time I pulled the straps across my own chest and lap, because my mother’s hands were shaking too badly to do it for me.

      I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but that was the last season I had with her. She passed away after the next sojourn, when I was nine.

      We burned a pyre for her in the center of the city of Voa, but the sojourn ship carried her ashes into space. As our family grieved, the people of Shotet grieved along with us.

      Ylira Noavek will sojourn forever after the current, the priest said as the ashes launched behind us. It will carry her on a path of wonder.

      For seasons afterward, I couldn’t even speak her name. After all, it was my fault she was gone.

      

      THE FIRST TIME I saw the Kereseth brothers, it was from the servants’ passageway that ran alongside the Weapons Hall. I was several seasons older, fast approaching adulthood.

      My father had joined my mother in the afterlife just a few seasons prior, killed in an attack during a sojourn. My brother, Ryzek, was now walking the path our father had set for him, the path toward Shotet legitimacy. Maybe even Shotet dominance.

      My former tutor, Otega, had been the first to tell me about the Kereseths, because the servants in our house were whispering the story over the pots and pans in the kitchen, and she always told me of the servants’ whispers.

      “They were taken by your brother’s steward, Vas,” she said to me as she checked my essay for grammatical errors. She still taught me literature and science, but I had outstripped her in my other subjects, and now studied on my own as she returned to managing our kitchens.

      “I thought Ryzek sent soldiers to capture the oracle. The old one,” I said.

      “He did,” Otega said. “But the oracle took her life in the struggle, to avoid capture. In any case, Vas and his men were tasked to go after the Kereseth brothers instead. Vas dragged them across the Divide kicking and screaming, to hear the others tell of it. But the younger one—Akos—escaped his bonds somehow, stole a blade, and turned it against one of Vas’s soldiers. Killed him.”

      “Which one?” I asked. I knew the men Vas traveled with. Knew how one liked candy, another had a weak left shoulder, and yet another had trained a pet bird to eat treats from his mouth. It was good to know such things about people. Just in case.

      “Kalmev Radix.”

      The candy lover, then.

      I raised my eyebrows. Kalmev Radix, one of my brother’s trusted elite, had been killed by a Thuvhesit boy? That was not an honorable death.

      “Why were the brothers taken?” I asked her.

      “Their fates.” Otega waggled her eyebrows. “Or so the story goes. And since their fates are, evidently, unknown by all but Ryzek, it is quite the story.”

      I didn’t know the fates of the Kereseth boys, or any but mine and Ryzek’s, though they had been broadcast a few days ago on the Assembly news feed. Ryzek had cut the news feed within moments of the Assembly Leader coming on screen. The Assembly Leader had given the announcement in Othyrian, and though the speaking and learning of all languages but Shotet had been banned in our country for over ten seasons, it was still better to be safe.

      My father had told me my own fate after my currentgift manifested, with little ceremony: The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide. A strange fate for a favored daughter, but only because it was so dull.

      I didn’t wander the servants’ passages that often anymore—there were things happening in this house I didn’t want to see—but to catch a glimpse of the kidnapped Kereseths … well. I had to make an exception.

      All I knew about the Thuvhesit people—apart from the fact that they were our enemies—was they had thin skin, easy to pierce with a blade, and they overindulged in iceflowers, the lifeblood of their economy. I had learned their language at my mother’s insistence—the Shotet elite were exempt from my father’s prohibitions against language learning, of course—and it was hard on my tongue, which was used to harsh, strong Shotet sounds instead of the hushed, quick Thuvhesit ones.

      I knew Ryzek would have the Kereseths taken to the Weapons Hall, so I crouched in the shadows and slid the wall panel back, leaving myself just a crack to

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