LITMIR.BIZ

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      “No,” he said. “It’s to keep from having to hurt her.”

      “Then I’ll give it to her,” Cisi said.

      Akos grunted a little. There was some more sedative in his pack, maybe he ought to take it. He’d never been so worn, like a half-finished weaving, light showing between all the threads. It would be easier just to sleep.

      Instead of drugging himself to oblivion, though, he just took a dried hushflower petal from his pocket and stuck it between his cheek and his teeth. It wouldn’t knock him out, but it would dull him some. Better than nothing.

      Akos was coasting on hushflower an hour later when Cisi came back.

      “It’s done,” she said. “She’s out.”

      “All right,” he said. “Then let’s get her into the escape pod.”

      “I’m going with her,” Cisi said. “If Mom’s right, and we’re headed into war—”

      “Mom’s right.”

      “Yeah,” Cisi said. “Well, in that case, whoever’s against Isae is against Thuvhe. So I’m going to stick with my chancellor.”

      Akos nodded.

      “I take it you won’t be,” Cisi said.

      “Fated traitor, remember?” he said.

      “Akos.” She crouched in front of him. At some point he had sat down on the bench, which was hard and cold and smelled like disinfectant. Cisi rested an arm on his knee. She had tied her hair back, messy, and a chunk of curls had come loose, falling around her face. She was pretty, his sister, her face a shade of cool brown that reminded him of Trellan pottery. A lot like Cyra’s, and Eijeh’s, and Jorek’s. Familiar.

      “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, just because Mom raised us fate-faithful and obedient to the oracles and all that,” Cisi said. “You’re a Thuvhesit. You should come with me. Leave everyone else to their war, and we’ll go home and wait it out. No one needs us here.”

      He’d thought about it. He was as torn now as he’d ever been, and not just because of his fate. When he came out of the daze of the hushflower, he would remember how nice it felt to laugh with Cyra earlier that day, and how warm she was, pressed up against him. And he would remember that as much as he wanted to just be in his house again, walk up the creaky stairs and stoke the burnstones in the courtyard and send flour up into the air as he kneaded the bread, he had to live in the real world. In the real world, Eijeh was broken, Akos spoke Shotet, and his fate was still his fate.

      “Suffer the fate,” he said. “For all else is delusion.”

      Cisi sighed. “Thought you might say that. Sometimes delusion’s nice, though.”

      “Stay safe, okay?” he said, taking her hand. “I hope you know I don’t want to leave you again. It’s pretty much the last thing I want.”

      “I know.” She squeezed his thumb. “I still have faith, you know. That one day you’ll come home, and Eijeh will be better, and Mom will stop with the oracle bullshit, and we can cobble together something again.”

      “Yeah.” He tried to smile for her. He might have halfway accomplished it.

      She helped him get Isae settled in the escape pod, and Teka told her how to send out a distress signal so the pod would be picked up by Assembly “goons,” as Teka called them. Then Cisi kissed their mom good-bye, and wrapped her arms tight around Akos’s middle until her warmth was pushed all the way through him.

      “You’re so damn tall,” she said, softly, as she pulled away. “Who told you that you could be so much taller than me?”

      “I did it just to spite you,” he replied with a grin.

      Then she got in the pod, and closed the doors. And he didn’t know when he would ever see her again.

      Teka tripped up to the captain’s chair on the nav deck and pried the cover of the control panel off with a wedge tool she kept on her belt. She did it while whistling.

      “What are you doing?” Cyra asked. “Now’s not really the time to take apart our ship.”

      “First, this is my ship, not ‘ours,’” Teka said with a roll of her blue eye. “I designed most of the features that have kept us alive so far. Second, do you really still want to go to Assembly Headquarters?”

      “No.” Cyra sat in the first officer’s chair, to Teka’s right. “The last time I went there, I overheard the representative from Trella call my mother a piece of filth. She didn’t think I could understand her, even though she was speaking Othyrian.”

      “Figures.” Teka made a scoffing sound in the back of her throat as she pulled out a handful of wires from the control panel, then ran her fingers down them like she was petting an animal. She reached under the wires, to a part of the control panel Akos couldn’t see, so far her entire arm disappeared. A projection of coordinates flashed up ahead, glowing right across the currentstream in their sights. The ship’s nose—Akos was sure there was a technical name for it, but he didn’t know it, so he called it a “nose”—drifted so they were moving toward the currentstream instead of away.

      “You going to tell us where we’re headed?” Akos said, stepping up to the nav deck. The control panel was lit up in all different colors, with levers and buttons and switches everywhere. If Teka had spread her arms wide, she still wouldn’t have been able to reach all of them from where she sat.

      “I guess I can, since we’re all stuck in this together now,” Teka said. She gathered her bright hair on top of her head, and tied it with a thick band she wore around her wrist. Swimming in a technician’s coveralls, with her legs folded up beneath her on the captain’s chair, she looked like a kid playing pretend. “We’re going to the exile colony. Which is on Ogra.”

      Ogra. The “shadow planet,” people called it. It was rare to meet an Ogran, let alone fly a ship in sight of Ogra. It was as far from Thuvhe as any planet could be without leaving the safe band of currentstream that encircled the solar system. No amount of surveillance could poke through its dense, dark atmosphere, and it was a wonder they could get any signal from the news feed. They never fed any stories into it, either, so almost no one had ever seen the planet’s surface, even in images.

      Cyra’s eyes, of course, lit up at the information. “Ogra? But how do you communicate with them?”

      “The easiest way to transmit messages without the government listening in is through people,” Teka said. “That’s why my mom was on board the sojourn ship—to represent the exiles’ interests among the renegades. We were trying to work together. Anyway, the exile colony is a good place for us to regroup, figure out what’s going on back in Voa.”

      “I have a guess,” Akos said, crossing his arms. “Chaos.”

      “And then more chaos,” Teka said with a sage nod. “With a short break in between. For chaos, of course.”

      He couldn’t imagine what Voa looked like now that—the Shotet believed—Ryzek Noavek had been assassinated by his younger sister right in front of them. That was how it had looked, anyway, when Cyra appeared to cut her brother in the arena, waiting for the sleeping elixir she had arranged for him to drink that morning to kick in and knock him flat. The standing army might have taken over, under the leadership of Vakrez Noavek, Ryzek’s older cousin, or those who lived on the outer edges of the city might have taken to the streets to fill the power vacuum. Either way, Akos imagined streets full of broken glass and blood spatter and ripped paper floating in the wind.

      Cyra tipped her forehead into her hands. “And Lazmet,” she said.

      Teka’s eyebrows popped up. “What?”

      “Before Ryzek died …” Cyra gestured vaguely toward the other end of the ship, where Ryzek had met his end. “He told me my father is

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