"Don't be so dramatic," Zenka said to it. "You had a good long life."
"You can't blame it for trying to survive," he said to her.
She didn't startle, just glanced up at him and arched an eyebrow. "It's already lost that fight. This is a liek--when it's still on the vine, it heats at a touch. Burns most of those who try to harvest it right through their gloves. So if it's here now, that means its harvest was well-earned."
"And we all accept the fates we earn?" he said.
"What kind of a question is that? You sound like some kind of Ogran mystic." She rolled her eyes, which told him how she felt about Ogran mystics.
"Or like my mom," he said. "The oracle. Maybe I'm turning into her."
"Ah, we all become our parents, eventually," Zenka said, stabbing the fruit again. "What do you want, Thuvhe?"
"I want a space to brew a painkiller," he said. "And . . . access to ingredients."
"Do you also want the moon in a jar?"
"Does Ogra have a moon?"
"Yes, and it's almost small enough to put in a jar, to be honest." She put the fruit down, and the tool she was using to scoop its flesh.
"I'm willing to work for the privilege of using your space," he added. "In case that wasn't clear."
"All right," she said. "But if you prove yourself to be lazy or useless, I reserve the right to revoke that privilege at any time."
"Agreed," he said.
She set him the task of grinding the tooth of a particularly ferocious flower into a powder. "In its powder form," she said, "it can help with circulation." Akos had a hard time focusing on the task in front of him, but his hands were capable enough, from seasons of practice.
Later that day she cupped some seeds in her hands to show him how they glowed, and what color. Hunching over her in the little shop, peeking between her fingers, made him feel like a kid again, and he ached so badly he had to pause for breath.
The only real marker of time on Ogra was the waning of the bioluminescence that supplied Ogra's only natural light, or the storms that battered the walls in the evening. He didn't know how long he spent crushing teeth before Zenka told him he could start on the painkiller. Then she stood at his shoulder, watching, as he measured out ingredients. He had brought some of his own hushflower, but the supply was getting low. Zenka dug some out of her storeroom and shook the jar at him.
"I thought you said you didn't have hushflower," he said.
"No, I said I didn't know how to use it," she said. "Besides, you don't go around admitting to strangers that you have a dangerous poison on hand."
"Fair enough," he said, and he got to work.
CHAPTER 17: AKOS
HE STARTED GOING TO Zenka's shop in the mornings, before most of the others woke up. Cyra's bed was always empty by then, the blankets rumpled near the foot of the bed, like she'd kicked them off in her sleep. If she slept at all--Akos wasn't sure she could rest much, with her currentgift acting up the way it was. He made her painkillers, but they weren't as good as they had been in Voa. He was having trouble focusing.
Zenka was always brewing when he got there. She wasn't much for chatter--she just told him what to stir, or slice, or peel, and then she'd choose an Ogran ingredient to tell him about. One day it was the pulpy flesh of a fruit that grew only in the warmest months. It looked harmless enough, but when it detected something that channeled the current--like a person--it sprouted barbs. Another day she showed him how to peel the wings off a dead beetle without provoking it to squirt poison posthumously.
Often the work he did was more practical. He spent a couple of mornings in a row painting the outside of woven baskets with something that would keep their contents fresh, and those went to Ogran harvesters so they could eat lunch at midday. Akos still wasn't sure how anyone knew what midday was, in this place, where the sun never shone.
Akos expected to feel the absence of the sun at one point or another, and from time to time he did note it, the same way he noted the temperature of the air. But he didn't suffer for the lack of it any more than he suffered from the heat. It was just another thing that pricked at his mind, drawing out new questions.
Zenka was silent for the most part, unless she was telling him what to do. But one day, she asked him the question he'd been waiting for her to ask since he first met her:
"How did you come to be among the Shotet, if you grew up in Hessa?"
Akos nearly sliced through his own finger as he said--schooling his features so they stayed neutral--"I was an enemy of Ryzek Noavek. A captive."
At that, Zenka laughed a little.
"That doesn't say much, does it? We are all enemies of the family Noavek here. Kidnapped, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured. A colony of the bereaved." Her teeth clicked like she was snarling. "It makes you more Shotet than not, to have made an enemy of a Noavek."
"I try to understand," he said, "why you all insist that being Shotet is something other than it is. I was born in Thuvhe; I'm Thuvhesit. How is it not that simple?" He paused. "And if you say something about the revelatory tongue, I will mangle these urestae."
"It's always more complicated than that, Shotet or not," Zenka said, with a strange softness in her voice he hadn't heard before. "You think being Thuvhesit is only about being born on one side of an imaginary line on the ground or another?"
"No, but--"
"We didn't always have a planet," she said. "The currentstream was home, more than a piece of rock. Or our ship. But as a people, we are maybe more closely tied than most to our identity, because we have always had to struggle against disappearing completely. We fight for you, for your belonging, because we fight for our existence. We will surrender the one only when we surrender the other."
Akos stood still. He felt like he was standing inside her words, for a tick. Isae had said something similar not a few weeks ago, had touched his face and told him that he belonged to her, to Thuvhe. But her claim to him had been shaken by Ori's death. The same could not be said of the Shotet. They had claimed him without knowing him, without needing him to even accept it. All they had needed were however many drops of Shotet blood he had in his veins.
He drew a sharp breath.
"Come," she said. "Let me show you something."
She led him out of the shop--which she left open, with everything boiling just as it was--and into the room next door. The door was on a swinging hinge, so it hit Akos in the butt after he walked in, startling him. The room beyond was Zenka's living space, clearly, since it looked just like the shop, with all its clutter and jars of ingredients and bundles of herbs hanging from the low ceiling. There was a bed in one corner with the sheets rumpled, and a desk along the far wall with a book open on it.
Zenka picked the book up and held it out to him. It was so stuffed with pages it didn't close right; it fell open in Akos's palms. On the page in front of him was a sketch of a plant, roots to flower. Next to it, in her tight little script, were Shotet characters he couldn't read. There hadn't been time to learn more of them.
"What is it?" he said.
"This is my journal," she said. "I keep track of all the plants I find--I've been doing it since I was young. Sometimes you can dry them and fix them to the pages, but most of the time I sketch. I did it for every sojourn we went on, so I have plants from every planet in there. That's a softwillow--they grow sparsely on the peaks of Trella. They aren't much good for medicines, but their tufts smell sweet, so they're good for stuffing in your shoes."
Akos smiled, and turned one of the thick, sturdy pages. On the next page was an Ogran plant he recognized--it produced a bulbous fruit that looked like a person with puffed cheeks, and its main roots grew straight down, deep, much bigger than the plant itself.
"That one's a voma," she said. "Its juice is the most powerful strengthening agent I've ever encountered--even better than harva or sendes from your country. You should keep one of these journals. The two planets you've been to are widely regarded as having the most interesting plant life in th
e system. You should keep track. Here."
She took the book from him and set it down, then hunted in a pile of books next to the desk. When she didn't find what she was looking for, she crouched next to the bed and pulled out another box of books. She found a red one, about the size of his hand, from heel to fingertip, and offered it to him.
It was a simple thing, but he felt a thrill of fear as he took it from her and ran his fingers down the cover. For a long time he had not dared to own much of anything, because it might be taken away. And this--every page was a place he might go, a thing he might see. It should have been exciting, all the new possibilities, the complete freedom. But it was overwhelming.
"Blank," she said. "Fill it. It'll give you something to do other than mope."
"I'm not moping," he said, frowning.
Zenka laughed. "Then maybe you mope so often you've forgotten what not moping is like. But you're especially downtrodden today."
He opened his mouth to explain, and she held up a hand.
"I'm not asking," she said. "Just observing."
He touched a hand flat to the cover of the empty journal. He wanted to fill it--or really, he wanted to want to. Wanted to remember having goals in life, the way he had before he was kidnapped. Or even after--he'd wanted to save Eijeh, to get home, to help Cyra. But the space that had been filled with fire, the space that knew desire and drive and perseverance, was empty now, the flame gone out.
When Akos wasn't toiling away in Zenka's shop, he was with Jorek. At meals, mostly, because it seemed like Jorek was always at meals--not eating, necessarily, but holding court. Sometimes he was there for hours at a time, telling stories and prompting other people to tell them, drumming with spoons, shouting teasing insults at whoever had just come in. After a couple days, though, Akos realized that wedged between the jokes and the drumming and the stories were other conversations, about Ogra, or Voa, or the Assembly. This was how Jorek gleaned information--by making himself available for people to talk to.
It was easy to be with him, though, because he didn't ask for anything, even Akos's attention. He seemed to know that his constant chatter was soothing, even if Akos didn't give anything back. He kept waiting for Jorek to run out of patience for his "moping," as Zenka called it, but it hadn't happened yet.
"Well, Kereseth, you gave me a great idea," Jorek said, sliding his tray into place next to Akos.
"Not sure how that's possible," Akos said. "I haven't had a great idea in seasons."
"Normally I'd argue with you, but you're the one who wanted to hoist Cyra Noavek out of a packed amphitheater with nothing but a rope and some hope--" He paused, so that the full effect of the rhyme could be felt--Akos groaned--and then continued, "So I believe that you're not an idea man. But you did spark one!"
"Do tell."
"You said we should look for a wall of soldiers to figure out where Lazmet is," Jorek said. "So I sent a message to my mother, who observed a larger-than-usual concentration of soldiers around Noavek manor. And she figured maybe we should get someone we know in there, just in case we need that intel." He raised his eyebrows once, twice, three times. "Guess who's going to Voa?"
Akos felt the weight in his stomach get, if possible, even heavier.
"You're leaving?" he said.
"Yeah." Jorek's expression softened a little. "With my name, I was maybe the only exile who had an 'in' with Vakrez Noavek."
"Sure." Akos nodded. "And you'll be with your mom in Voa, too."
"There is that." Jorek elbowed him. "I'll be back, though. This war thing can't last forever, can it?"
Akos didn't point out that the reason wars didn't last forever was because too many people ended up dead.
"It's a good idea," Akos said. "When do you go?"
Jorek shrugged. "A week or so. Gotta wait for an Ogran transport. Do you know they export dead bugs to Othyr? This place is weird."
Zenka had told Akos that Ogra's primary export was extracts of various poisons and excretions to Othyr. Some were for medicinal purposes, but most were for various Othyrian vanities--skin cream, cosmetics, spa treatments. Zenka rolled her eyes at it.
"The oracle's coming," Jorek said in a low voice. "It's too late for you to bolt, sorry."
Akos sighed.
"You've been avoiding me," Sifa said matter-of-factly, as she plunked herself down in the seat across from his.
His first instinct was to deny it, but that never worked with his mom. Once she decided she knew something, there was no point in arguing with her about it, even if she was wrong. Being an oracle doesn't mean you know everything, he sometimes wanted to tell her. But that was something a child said.
"That's because you're spending all your time with Eijeh doling out prophetic wisdom to the exiles," he said. "And I've heard about all I can take from him. And prophecy. And wisdom in general."
Jorek snorted into his food.
"The exiles may have given us a little apartment to use as a makeshift temple, but they are too awed to consult us as often as I expected, so we are far from busy. As for Eijeh, well . . . I convinced him to begin again with me, as if we had just met," she said, stirring the grainy mush in her bowl. If it was possible to stir a spoon thoughtfully, she was doing it. "You might try doing the same."
"I'm no good at games of pretend," Akos snapped.
"Nor am I," she said. "Though I guess I have the added benefit of having seen possible futures in which he and I really hadn't met. Where he was taken from me sooner, or had his memory entirely erased instead of just altered."
There wasn't much of her that wasn't oracle, he'd realized. Her currentgift had taken her over, and it was now the whole of her, inescapably. It was hard not to blame her for it, even though he had no idea what it was like to have a gift so intrusive, so constant, that it changed the way you saw every part of your existence. His was the opposite. Sometimes he forgot his currentgift was even there.
"Please don't go," Sifa said, putting her hand on his.
"What?" he said. "I wasn't going to--"
And then Eijeh set his plate down next to Sifa. All he had on it was fruit. Akos remembered Eijeh stuffing his face with everything he could find in the kitchen, getting up to cut himself two slices of bread right when dinner was over. A lot had changed.
Sifa's hand tightened.
"I'm going to need your help in a moment," she said.
And then at the same time, both her and Eijeh's eyes went unfocused at once.
Not long after, they both started screaming.
CHAPTER 18: EIJEH
IT IS STILL STRANGE, not feeling the other heartbeat, but we are adjusting. If anything, it's easier now with just the one body to contend with.
Still, when we wake in the middle of the night in a hole in an Ogran wall, there is a kind of loneliness.
And when we see him, this Akos, we are never sure whether he is an enemy or a brother. There are parts of us that reflect on hazy memories of chasing him through fields, or laughing with him across a dinner table, and others that see him as a catalyst for trouble, a factor of unpredictability in a plan that must remain predictable.
He did, in fact, bring about our ruination, inspiring Cyra's betrayal, facilitating her escape, driving her toward renegades and exiles alike. But he did it for us as much as he did it to destroy us, and we are always holding those two opposing forces in tension. We are getting better at holding things in tension--two histories, two names, two minds. "We" are becoming more of an "I."
We are watching him, the oracle's hand covering his, a plate of fruit in front of us to appease one appetite, when it happens.
A sudden jerk, like a hook caught around a rib and pulling, inexorably. But it is not the rib cage of this body that is pulled, it is our combined being, the Eijeh and the Ryzek, the Shotet and the Thuvhesit, the very all of us.
And then we are a ship. Not a small transport vessel or a passenger floater but a warship, long and narrow, sleek at the top and bottom but craggy on the side like
the face of a cliff. We descend through a dense layer of clouds--white, and cold, and vaporous. When we break through the cloud layer, much of the land beneath us is also pale, a distant stark white shifting into beige and gold and brown as the land warms along the equator.
Then we are not a ship but a child, small, standing near the edge of a packed-clay rooftop. We scream for a father as the dark shape descends, casting a shadow over the city. A city of patchwork, part of us recognizes, the city of Voa. "Is it the sojourn ship?" we ask our father, as he comes to stand beside us.
"No," our father says, and we are gone again.
We are not a child but a maintenance worker, dressed in coveralls that are patched at the knees. We have both hands buried in an instrument panel, a tool between our teeth as we feel for the right part. Pressure around our abdomen and thighs tells us we are in a harness, and we dangle from the anchor higher up on a metal face. We are on the sojourn ship, part of us helpfully suggests, making repairs.
A shadow falls over us, and we tilt our head back to see the smooth underside of a ship. Its name is painted across its bottom in a language we do not recognize and cannot read, but we know this ship is not Shotet.
We are a woman with a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, bunched beneath her chin, and we are running toward the sojourn ship with a child's hand clasped in ours. We carry a heavy sack over one shoulder; it is soft with clothing, but the corner of a book pierces our side with every other footstep. "Come on," we say to the child. "We'll be safe on the sojourn ship, come on."
We are a younger woman with a screen in hand, standing at the loading bay doors as a crush of people fight to make their way inside the ship. We cling to a handle on the wall to stay steady as people push and push and push. We shout to a young man behind us: "How many have evacuated so far?"
"A few hundred!" the man shouts back.
We look up at the big, dark ship. A set of doors opens on its underbelly, and another. A huge section of metal pulls apart, showing an open hatch right above us. The ship has come to hover right over the sojourn ship, which is perched on a metal island across the sea from Voa so that we can repair it and improve it in time for the next sojourn.
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