He brought the knife to the inside corner of his eye.
“Cyra!” hissed a voice behind me, making me jerk to attention. A young, spotted Ryzek slid to his knees beside me. He cradled my face in his hands. I had not realized, before that moment, that I was crying. As the screaming started in the next room, he pressed his palms flat to my ears, and brought my face to his chest.
I struggled, at first, but he was too strong. All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart.
At last he pulled me away, wiped the tears from my cheeks, and said, “What does Mother always say? Those who go looking for pain . . .”
“Find it every time,” I replied, completing the phrase.
Teka held me by the shoulders, and jostled me a little, saying my name. I looked at her, then, confused.
“What is it?” I said.
“Your currentshadows were . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind.”
I knew what she meant. My currentgift had likely gone haywire, sending sprawling black lines all over me. The currentshadows had changed since Ryzek tried to use me to torture Akos in the cell block beneath the amphitheater. They drifted on top of my skin now, instead of burrowing beneath it like dark veins. But they were still painful, and I could tell this episode had been worse—my vision was blurry, and there were impressions of fingernails in my palms.
Akos was kneeling in my brother’s blood, his fingers on the side of Ryzek’s throat. I watched as his hand fell away, and he slumped, bracing himself on his thighs.
“It’s done,” Akos said, sounding thick, like his throat was coated in milk. “After everything Cyra did to help me—after everything—”
“I won’t apologize,” Isae said, finally looking away from Ryzek. She scanned all our faces—Akos, surrounded by blood; Teka, wide-eyed at my shoulder; me, arms streaked black; Cisi, holding her stomach near the wall. The air was pungent with the smell of sick.
“He murdered my sister,” Isae said. “He was a tyrant and a torturer and a killer. I won’t apologize.”
“It’s not about him. You think I didn’t want him dead?” Akos lurched to his feet. Blood ran down the front of his pants, from knees to ankles. “Of course I did! He took more from me than he did from you!” He was so close to her I wondered if he would lash out, but he made a fitful motion with his hands, and that was all. “I wanted him to fix what he did first, I wanted him to set Eijeh right, I . . .”
It seemed to hit him all at once. Ryzek was—had been—my brother, but the grief was his. He had persevered, carefully orchestrated every element of his brother’s rescue, only to find himself blocked, again and again, by people more powerful than he was. And now, he had succeeded in getting his brother out of Shotet, but he had not saved him, and all the planning, all the fighting, all the trying . . . was for nothing.
Akos fell against the nearest wall to hold himself up, closed his eyes, and swallowed a moan.
I found my way out of my trance.
“Go upstairs,” I said to Isae. “Take Cisi with you.”
She looked like she might object, for a moment, but it didn’t last. Instead, she dropped the murder weapon—a simple kitchen knife—right where she stood, and went to Cisi’s side.
“Teka,” I said. “Would you get Akos upstairs, please?”
“Are you—” Teka started, and stopped. “Okay.”
Isae and Cisi, Teka and Akos, they left me there, alone, with my brother’s body. He had died next to a mop and a bottle of disinfectant. How convenient, I thought, and stifled a laugh. Or tried to. But it wouldn’t stay stifled. In moments my knees were weak with laughter, and I fumbled through my hair for the side of my head that was now silverskin, to remind myself how he had sliced and diced me for the entertainment of a crowd, how he had planted pieces of himself inside me, as if I was just a barren field to sow with pain. My entire body carried the scars Ryzek Noavek had given me.
And now, at last, I was free of him.
When I calmed, I set about cleaning up Isae Benesit’s mess.
Ryzek’s body didn’t frighten me, and neither did blood. I dragged him by his legs into the hallway, sweat tickling the back of my neck as I heaved and pulled. He was heavy, in death, as I was sure he had been in life, skeletal though he was. When Akos’s oracle mother, Sifa, appeared to help me, I didn’t say anything to her, just watched as she worked a sheet beneath him so we could wrap him in it. She produced a needle and thread from the storage room, and helped me stitch the makeshift burial sack closed.
Shotet funerals, when they took place on land, involved fire, like most cultures in our varied solar system. But it was a special honor to die in space, on the sojourn. We covered the bodies, all but the head, so the loved ones of whoever was lost could see and accept the person’s death. When Sifa pulled the sheet back, away from Ryzek’s face, I knew she had at least studied our customs.
“I see so many possibilities for how things will unfold,” Sifa said finally, dragging her arm across her forehead to catch some of the sweat. “I didn’t think this one was likely, or I might have warned you.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” I said, lifting a shoulder. “You only intervene when it suits your purposes. My comfort and ease don’t matter to you.”
“Cyra . . .”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I hated him. Just . . . don’t pretend that you care about me.”
“I am not pretending,” she replied.
I had thought, surely, that I might see some of Akos in her. And in her mannerisms, yes, perhaps he was there. Mobile eyebrows and quick, decisive hands. But her face, her light brown skin, her modest stature, they were not his.
I didn’t know how to evaluate her honesty, so I didn’t bother.
“Help me carry him to the trash chute,” I said.
I took the heavy side of his body, his head and shoulders, and she took his feet. It was lucky that the trash chute was only a few feet away, another unexpected convenience. We took it in stages, a few steps at a time. Ryzek’s head lolled around, his eyes open but sightless, but there was nothing I could do about it. I set him down next to the chute, and pressed the button to open the first set of doors, at waist height. It was fortunate that he was so narrow, or his shoulders wouldn’t have fit. Together Sifa and I folded him into the short channel, bending his legs so the inner doors would be able to close. Once they had, I pressed the button again, to open the outer doors and slide the tray in the chute forward to launch his body into space.
“I know the prayer, if you want me to say it,” Sifa said.
I shook my head.
“They said that prayer at my mother’s funeral,” I said. “No.”
“Then let us just acknowledge that he has suffered his fate,” Sifa said. “To fall to the family Benesit. He no longer needs to fear it.”
It was kind enough.
“I’m going to clean myself up,” I said. The blood on my palms was beginning to dry, making them itch.
“Before you do,” Sifa said, “I will warn you of this. Ryzek was not the only person the chancellor blamed for her sister’s death. In fact, she likely began with him because she was saving the more important piece of retribution for later. And she won’t stop there, either. I have seen enough of her to know her nature, and it is not forgiving.”
I blinked at her for a moment before it made sense to me. She was talking about Eijeh, still locked away in the other storage room. And not just Eijeh, but the rest of us—complicit, Isae believed, in Orieve’s death.
“There is an escape pod,” Sifa said. “We can put her in it, and someone from the Assembly will fetch her.”
“Tell Akos to drug her,” I said. “I don’t feel up to a fight right now.”
CHAPTER 4: AKOS