LITMIR.BIZ

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purities, green harva vines, brown sendes leaves, and last, protected by a cage of wire with current running through it, red hushflower. Before they put up the wire cage, people used to take their lives by running straight into the hushflower fields and dying there among the bright petals, the poison putting them to sleepy death in a few breaths. It didn’t seem like a bad way to go, really, Akos thought. Drifting off with flowers all around you and the white sky above.

      “I’ll tell you when we’re safe and sound,” their dad said, trying to sound cheery.

      “Where’s Mom?” Akos said, and this time, Aoseh heard him.

      “Your mother …” Aoseh clenched his teeth, and a huge gash opened up in the seat under him, like the top of a loaf of bread splitting in the oven. He swore, and ran his hand over it to mend it. Akos blinked at him, afraid. What had gotten him so angry?

      “I don’t know where your mother is,” he finished. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

      “She didn’t warn you about this?” Akos said.

      “Maybe she didn’t know,” Cisi whispered.

      But they all knew how wrong that was. Sifa always, always knew.

      “Your mother has her reasons for everything she does. Sometimes we don’t get to know them,” Aoseh said, a little calmer now. “But we have to trust her, even when it’s difficult.”

      Akos wasn’t sure their dad believed it. Like maybe he was just saying it to remind himself.

      Aoseh guided the floater down in their front lawn, crushing the tufts and speckled stalks of feathergrass under them. Behind their house, the feathergrass went on as far as Akos could see. Strange things sometimes happened to people in the grasses. They heard whispers, or they saw dark shapes among the stems; they waded through the snow, away from the path, and were swallowed by the earth. Every so often they heard stories about it, or someone spotted a full skeleton from their floater. Living as close to the tall grass as Akos did, he’d gotten used to ignoring the faces that surged toward him from all directions, whispering his name. Sometimes they were crisp enough to identify: dead grandparents; his mom or dad with warped, corpse faces; kids who were mean to him at school, taunting.

      But when Akos got out of the floater and reached up to touch the tufts above him, he realized, with a start, that he wasn’t seeing or hearing anything anymore.

      He stopped, and hunted the grasses for a sign of the hallucinations anywhere. But there weren’t any.

      “Akos!” Eijeh hissed.

      Strange.

      He chased Eijeh’s heels to the front door. Aoseh unlocked it, and they all piled into the foyer to take off their coats. As he breathed the inside air, though, Akos realized something didn’t smell right. Their house always smelled spicy, like the breakfast bread their dad liked to make in the colder months, but now it smelled like engine grease and sweat. Akos’s insides were a rope, twisting tight.

      “Dad,” he said as Aoseh turned on the lights with the touch of a button.

      Eijeh yelled. Cisi choked. And Akos went stock-still.

      There were three men standing in their living room. One was tall and slim, one taller and broad, and the third, short and thick. All three wore armor that shone in the yellowish burnstone light, so dark it almost looked black, except it was actually dark, dark blue. They held currentblades, the metal clasped in their fists and the black tendrils of current wrapping around their hands, binding the weapons to them. Akos had seen blades like that before, but only in the hands of the soldiers that patrolled Hessa. They had no need of currentblades in their house, the house of a farmer and an oracle.

      Akos knew it without really knowing it: These men were Shotet. Enemies of Thuvhe, enemies of theirs. People like this were responsible for every candle lit in the memorial of the Shotet invasion; they had scarred Hessa’s buildings, busted its glass so it showed fractured images; they had culled the bravest, the strongest, the fiercest, and left their families to weeping. Akos’s grandmother and her bread knife among them, so said their dad.

      “What are you doing here?” Aoseh said, tense. The living room looked untouched, the cushions still arranged around the low table, the fur blanket curled by the fire where Cisi had left it when she was reading. The fire was embers, still glowing, and the air was cold. Their dad took a wider stance, so his body covered all three of them.

      “No woman,” one of the men said to one of the others. “Wonder where she is?”

      “Oracle,” one of the others replied. “Not an easy one to catch.”

      “I know you speak our language,” Aoseh said, sterner this time. “Stop jabbering away like you don’t understand me.”

      Akos frowned. Hadn’t his dad heard them talking about their mom?

      “He is quite demanding, this one,” the tallest one said. He had golden eyes, Akos noticed, like melted metal. “What is the name again?”

      “Aoseh,” the shortest one said. He had scars all over his face, little slashes going every direction. The skin around the longest one, next to his eye, was puckered. Their dad’s name sounded clumsy in his mouth.

      “Aoseh Kereseth,” the golden-eyed one said, and this time he sounded … different. Like he was suddenly speaking with a thick accent. Only he hadn’t had one before, so how could that be? “My name is Vas Kuzar.”

      “I know who you are,” Aoseh said. “I don’t live with my head in a hole.”

      “Grab him,” the man called Vas said, and the shortest one lunged at their dad. Cisi and Akos jumped back as their dad and the Shotet soldier scuffled, their arms locked together. Aoseh’s teeth gritted. The mirror in the living room shattered, the pieces flying everywhere, and then the picture frame on the mantel, the one from their parents’ wedding day, cracked in half. But still the Shotet soldier got a hold on Aoseh, wrestling him into the living room and leaving the three of them, Eijeh, Cisi, and Akos, exposed.

      The shortest soldier forced their dad to his knees, and pointed a currentblade at his throat.

      “Make sure the children don’t leave,” Vas said to the slim one. Just then Akos remembered the door behind him. He seized the knob, twisted it. But by the time he was pulling it, a rough hand had closed around his shoulder, and the Shotet lifted him up with one arm. Akos’s shoulder ached; he kicked the man hard in the leg. The Shotet just laughed.

      “Little thin-skinned boy,” the soldier spat. “You, as well as the rest of your pathetic kind, would do better to surrender now.”

      “We are not pathetic!” Akos said. It was a stupid thing to say—something a little kid said when he didn’t know how to win an argument. But for some reason, it stopped everyone in their tracks. Not just the man with his hand clamped around Akos’s arm, but Cisi and Eijeh and Aoseh, too. Everyone stared at Akos, and—damn it all—heat was rushing into his face, the most ill-timed blush he had ever felt in all his life, which was saying something.

      Then Vas Kuzar laughed.

      “Your youngest child, I presume,” Vas said to Aoseh. “Did you know he speaks Shotet?”

      “I don’t speak Shotet,” Akos said weakly.

      “You just did,” Vas said. “So how did the family Kereseth find itself with a Shotet-blooded son, I wonder?”

      “Akos,” Eijeh whispered wonderingly. Like he was asking Akos a question.

      “I do not have Shotet blood!” Akos snapped, and all three of the Shotet soldiers laughed at once. It was only then that Akos heard it—he heard the words coming out of his mouth, with their sure meaning, and he also heard harsh syllables, with sudden stops and closed vowels. He heard Shotet, a language he had never learned. So unlike graceful Thuvhesit, which was like wind catching snowflakes in its updraft.

      He was speaking Shotet. He sounded just

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