Alizhan was careful not to get any dirt or blood on the pages when she opened it. She saw what Mar had seen: the first pages revealed nothing. It was simply volume eleven of A Natural History. There was nothing distinguishing about it all. Identically neat characters crowding every page. The opening pages were a very dry account of the quake that had happened between Nalitzva and Estva in 579, and the wave that had hit Laalvur shortly after.
She ran her fingers over the pages, as though they might reveal something her eyes couldn’t see.
Shit! Her hands were bare. She’d left her gloves on the floor of Solor House. She’d have to get another pair from her room before delivering the book to Iriyat.
It wasn’t a book worth stealing. In Alizhan’s opinion, it was hardly even a book worth reading—it was no Sunrise Chronicles—but Iriyat had infinite patience for dull histories. The book’s spine wasn’t stiff, and the thin pages turned easily. Iriyat had obviously read this more than once.
Alizhan flipped to the back of the book, where she discovered a list of dates handwritten on the flyleaf. It was an index of significant natural events—volcanic eruptions, waves, quakes—and it was as boring as the rest of the book. Except that it was in Iriyat’s hand.
Alizhan studied the list, but nothing about it made the book worth stealing. Mar ha-Solora had jeopardized his friendship and political alliance with Iriyat over a list of dates?
Alizhan closed the book and then closed her eyes. The world was still flickering and shifting in her vision.
Her skin stung with remembered pain, and she retched again, her throat raw. She could still feel Kasrik’s panic, churning with her own. Someone had hurt him very badly. Then Alizhan had come along and hurt him again.
There was nothing to be done. Alizhan took a breath and forced herself to stand. Carefully, quietly, she went inside. She avoided the other servants. People were so complicated, always overflowing with feelings. Alizhan couldn’t take any more. She hated showing up in front of Iriyat shaking and sickly.
At least she wouldn’t be empty-handed.
Iriyat was in her study, but unlike Mar, she wasn’t bent over a book in frustration. The closed door muffled her conversation, but Alizhan—her senses ill-used and tingling—recognized that the man in the room was Vatik, the captain of the guard. He was distressed. Resistant. Even horrified.
Iriyat, as always, was unreadable.
Blank.
All hells. Why hadn’t Alizhan made that connection before? If Kasrik was blank, and he was like Alizhan, then what did that make Iriyat?
Or had Alizhan made this connection before—and then been hit on the head? Maybe it had disappeared from her memory along with those missing few hours.
Alizhan crept out of the house. The Nightward side of Varenx House wasn’t a solid stone wall. Certain rooms, like Iriyat’s study, had perforated stone screens for decoration and air circulation. The screen would hide Alizhan while she tried to discern what was happening inside.
She wasn’t betraying Iriyat, the only person who’d ever taken care of her. The only person in the whole world who liked to touch her. She wasn’t. It was curiosity, a whim, an absurd hunch that would lead nowhere. Alizhan only felt sick because of her earlier misadventure.
Alizhan was careful not to rustle her clothes when she crouched down. Inside, Iriyat was sighing. Squinting through the elaborately carved stone, Alizhan could make out that Iriyat was standing with her back to the screen, and Vatik was facing it. She knew Vatik was a big man with a beard, from the way everyone else thought of him, but she recognized him from the way he crackled and sparked with rage at everything around him. Now, in Iriyat’s study, Vatik was even angrier and more disgusted than he had been.
“It’s very tiresome, the way you protest every time,” Iriyat said.
“Every time? What do you mean, every time? This is the only time this has ever happened. I am loyal to you, my lady, I always do what you ask, but this—”
“Yes, yes, I know, you always do what I ask, except when you don’t,” Iriyat said. She sighed with irritation again. Then she cupped her bare hand around Vatik’s face. It was an intimacy that neither Alizhan nor Vatik expected. Vatik and Iriyat were not lovers; Alizhan would have known. The gesture wasn’t affectionate, but abrupt.
And Iriyat was barehanded. Where were her usual gloves?
“I’m sorry,” Iriyat said in a very different tone. Vatik’s eyes were wide. “Forget that.”
For just a moment, he went blank.
Iriyat removed her hand. She wiped it on her clothes, a reflex.
A moment later, Vatik’s tumble of emotions rolled through him again, but it was tempered with puzzlement. He calmed. “What was it you needed, my lady?”
“You know how much I value you,” Iriyat said. Alizhan couldn’t see, or even imagine, the beauty of Iriyat’s face, but she knew the beauty of Iriyat’s voice. Clear, slow, sweet like honey. Alizhan focused on the sound of it even as her heart skittered against her ribs. “I need you, Vatik. I need you to protect me. Can you do that?”
“Of course, my lady.”
“It’s a difficult matter, I know. You know I’d never ask you to do something like this unless it was absolutely necessary. But I can see no other way out.” Iriyat sighed, and the rush of air conveyed none of her previous annoyance. It was the sound of despair, of resignation, of a hard decision.
It worked on Vatik.
Alizhan had spent a lifetime watching Iriyat’s craft. She knew it was only words and gestures—and the occasional mind-altering barehanded touch, though Alizhan couldn’t think of that, not now, not yet—but it was a power that Alizhan could never comprehend, let alone possess. Iriyat inspired trust, loyalty and love in almost everyone she met.
Alizhan was no exception.
Did she touch me like that? Is that why I forgot so much of the past triad? What else has she lied about? No, no, Alizhan couldn’t think of that now. She had to listen.
“Remember, he’s very clever and very dangerous,” Iriyat was saying. “Too clever and too dangerous to be taken captive, I’m afraid. There’s no saving this one. Don’t be fooled by his youth. He’s a threat to us and everything we’ve worked for. You have to find him and stop him, do you understand?”
Was Iriyat talking about Kasrik? Was Iriyat talking about killing Kasrik?
Vatik nodded. He turned as if to leave the room.
“Vatik? One more thing.”
Vatik turned back toward Iriyat. Alizhan often knew what people were about to say, but never with Iriyat. Still, she had a terrible, stomach-dropping premonition.
“Don’t let him touch you.”
Alizhan jumped up from where she was crouching and ran.
Solor House was a risk. Alizhan had been seen. She’d stolen the book. She’d attacked Mar ha-Solora himself. They’d be looking for her. But if Kasrik was Vatik’s target, then Alizhan had to find him and warn him. She scrambled away from Varenx House, down the terraced streets and across a bridge over Denandar inlet. Alizhan was breathing hard by the time she got across the city and back to the Jewelbox. Her second trip up the cliff was miserable—her scraped palms stung, her lungs screamed, and she couldn’t stop shaking. The stupid book was keeping her off balance.
Alizhan hid in the garden, watching and waiting, checking every passing guard’s mind for thoughts of Kasrik. Where was he? Didn’t he ever go outside? Maybe he’d left already. Alizhan kept an eye out for Vatik, too. Would Vatik really kill him here, on the grounds of a fellow Council member’s House? Maybe he’d wait to catch Kasrik somewhere else in the city.
She waited. And waited.
A whole shift passed. Alizhan shivered with fatigue and hunger. She couldn’t stay here. She’d have to find Kasrik some other way. But it had been long enough now that Iriyat would have noticed her absence. Iriyat would notice the absence of the book, too.
There would be guards from Solor and Varenx searching Laalvur for Alizhan. Her options were dismal. Sh
e was homeless and friendless, alone in the world.
Alizhan only knew one other person in the whole city—the girl in the market.
Ev took a deep breath.
That dream—it had been a memory. Alizhan’s memory. That was what the world looked like to Alizhan. People were a constant writhing mass of wants and needs, only half-decipherable. In stories, people talked about mind-reading, but it was nothing so clear as a book. It was sight, sound, and sensation. She could feel what other people felt.
All the faces in Alizhan’s memory had been indistinct: eyes, noses, mouths, but with none of the precision necessary to identify someone. There was a bewildering sameness to the features. Was that how Alizhan saw her?
More importantly, if Ev had seen something from Alizhan’s mind, what had Alizhan seen? Had Alizhan been able to see inside her all these years?
Ev clenched the side of the cart.
Alizhan stirred from her position on the ground. How long had they been out? An instant? A shift? A whole triad? They were too far from the city to hear the bells. Ev wasn’t hungry. The donkey, still hitched to the cart, was waiting patiently. It couldn’t have been that long.
At least the road was deserted. They needed to get somewhere safe. Ev needed to clean and bandage her cut. Alizhan needed—well, Ev hardly knew. Evidence of some kind of wrongdoing? A way to understand the importance of the book? A way to find Kasrik? Protection from everyone who was trying to kill her?
“Food.”
Even with Ev’s new understanding of how Alizhan perceived people, her comment came out of nowhere.
“I want food. But wait—you understand—you dreamed you were me?” Alizhan’s eyes lit with surprise. “That’s never happened before, at least not that I know of. Usually I get other people’s memories instead of the other way around. But I don’t touch people very often.” Alizhan pulled herself up, squinting and blinking, rolling her shoulders and shaking her head. Ev was grateful to be able to look at Alizhan’s face, to see the dark arches of her brows over her wide grey eyes and the strong, straight line of her nose, even if she had only a vague idea what was swirling behind all that. It was so much easier.
And Ev could touch and be touched by anyone she wanted.
Ev’s gaze slid toward Alizhan, but she stopped herself from looking and stared at the road instead. She had to avoid thinking about that. The walk home was going to be even more difficult and uncomfortable than she’d thought. Ev got out of the cart and set off. Alizhan followed.
“You’re afraid of me now,” Alizhan said with heart-breaking resignation. “Because we touched and I hurt you.”
Ev kept walking. That wasn’t how she would have described her inner state, but she didn’t want to discuss it with Alizhan. In truth, Ev had no idea what she was feeling—a stinging where her cut was, and an ache, a rush, a tumult inside herself—so how could anyone else possibly know? She didn’t want Alizhan to look inside her or even at her.
One thought dominated all the others in Ev’s head: there are things in my head that I don’t want her to know.
Lots of things. Everything.
Or maybe just one in particular. One that Ev hardly even allowed herself to think about. It had something to do with women, with the way they moved, with the way Ev always felt a little breathless if they smiled at her.
“Please don’t leave me yet,” Alizhan said. “I know you don’t like being around me, now that you know. No one does. But I’ve never been out of the city before and I don’t know where to go or what to do and it’s been at least two shifts since I’ve eaten anything and—well, you know the rest.”
The “rest,” presumably, being the number of men searching the city for Alizhan and her stolen book, or the discovery that Iriyat was keeping secrets. Ev didn’t want to feel Alizhan’s desperation, poorly disguised with lighthearted cheer, on top of her own mysterious feelings. It was too much.
“Alizhan,” Ev said, taking a breath. She needed the moment to think more than she needed the air. “We have a lot to talk about, like who is trying to kill you and how we can get them to stop, but I can’t have this conversation until we get this clear: you have to try not to respond to things in my head that I don’t say out loud, and you have to stop telling me how I’m feeling.” Ev took another fortifying breath. “I don’t like it.”
It was hard to be honest and gentle at the same time. But since Alizhan was some kind of visionary, or touched in the head, or both—and regardless of all that, she had recently bashed a man into unconsciousness with a judiciously aimed wooden crate to the face—Ev had to tread carefully.
“Maybe you can’t help knowing, but pretend that you don’t. For my sake.”
“Why, though?”
The answer seemed so obvious to Ev that she had trouble putting it in words. For a mind-reader, Alizhan seemed to have very little grasp of how people felt. “It makes me feel naked,” Ev said. “Vulnerable. The things in my head are supposed to be private, unless I say them out loud.”
“Everything’s going to take forever if we do it this way,” Alizhan grumbled. “No one ever wants to let me be myself.”
For one sharp, resentful instant, Ev wanted to say I rescued you without knowing your name and you haven’t even thanked me! but she wasn’t given to outbursts, and she considered her response for a moment too long, since Alizhan was already talking again.
“Fine,” Alizhan said. “And sorry. Wait. Am I allowed to apologize, or is that breaking the rules? Would a normal person know that you’re frustrated? You are, right? You feel kind of… scratchy. Spiny. Like something with bristles. I don’t always know what people are feeling or thinking. Sometimes I sense something, or hear or smell something, and I just have to guess what it means, and Iriyat says I’m very bad at it because I’ve had so little human contact in my life, but I don’t see how I can get more human contact when—well, anyway, bristles. I know you don’t want me to talk about your feelings. I’m not doing a very good job apologizing.
“No, not bristles,” Alizhan interrupted herself. “Thorns. Like a thornfruit!”
Ev didn’t find this amusing.
“Are you upset because I didn’t say thank you? Because I meant to, but then you were hurt and I got distracted and then we both got knocked out—which is my fault, sort of, but also a little bit your fault, since you’re the one who touched me, but it’s okay, you didn’t know, so I forgive you, and anyway, the point is, I am grateful. Very grateful. And I also hope you’ll stop being afraid of me, because I like you, and I think you used to like me, before you found out that I’m some kind of monster, and I wish I wasn’t this way, because it was nice when you liked me. It felt good. I’ll try to follow your dumb rule if it means you’ll be friends with me. I’m not always very good at knowing what’s outside and what’s inside, but I’ll learn. I’ve never had a friend, but I’d like to. Okay. I’m done. Sorry. Thank you.”
Ev had repressed a sigh for most of this full-speed monologue, but she was overwhelmed by the end, so a little sound slipped out of her, a sigh and a laugh all at once. Resignation and recognition. Maybe a little charm, too. “Apology accepted.”
“Oh, good. I was ready to keep going, if necessary, even though—”
“Alizhan?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not a monster.”
And with that, they had reached Ev’s farm.
6
One Smoking Hell of a Mess
LONG HOURS AFTER SQUIRMING UNDERNEATH Ev’s cart in the market, Alizhan’s heart was still wild in her chest, an animal scrabbling to get free of its cage. As their walk ended and Ev’s family farm came into view, it occurred to Alizhan that her feral, frenzied heart might be trying to tell her something.
Other people’s feelings could be so overwhelming. Her own were communicated through the enigmatic code of her body. Her heart tapped out messages that her brain was slow to decipher.
That sharp, cold streak down her back and in her gut when she�
��d slipped under the cart. Had it been fear? Excitement? And what was she feeling now?
It was easier to turn her attention outward. Ev was buzzing with worries and doubts and pains as they walked up the path toward a collection of single-story buildings in brown stucco and red tile, feelings Alizhan wasn’t supposed to know, or wasn’t supposed to say she knew, and which she didn’t want to know in the first place. Ev had said you’re not a monster and that was all Alizhan wanted to think about. Just the words. Not the lingering doubts.
The tips of Alizhan’s fingers itched inside her gloves.
A large dog came bounding up to them, its coat brindled black and brown and its tongue lolling, and for a moment, Ev was brilliant with happiness, kneeling on the ground to give the animal a belly rub. “This is Tez.”
Tez jumped up and conducted a thorough and enthusiastic investigation of Alizhan with his nose. She took off her gloves for a moment to scratch behind his ears, and then in a sudden sign of trust and approval, he flopped on the ground and offered her his belly. Alizhan obliged him.
Ev was pleased.
That warmth from Ev made it all worth it. For an instant, there was nobody hunting her. There was no Iriyat, no Kasrik, no Mar, no journal, no chaos threatening to consume her world. There was just Ev and her striped dog wiggling in the red dirt.
And in truth, it had nothing to do with the dog. Alizhan liked animals just fine. She could touch them, and they made the world less lonely. But being able to touch animals was a poor substitute for the real contact and comfort she wanted.
Tez turned and loped up the hill toward the house, drawing both of their gazes.
The sight of Ev’s home brought her no calm, even though it was charming. The main farmhouse was built in traditional Laalvuri style, its rooms organized around three sides of a square courtyard with a garden and a shallow pool to catch rainwater, that rare treasure. The house was oriented so sunlight fell directly on the open side of the courtyard. Opposite the open side was a wall of stone columns, leaving the kitchen and the parlor open to the warm air. The other sides of the house were enclosed, so they must contain bedrooms. It looked like a nice place to grow up.
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