It could have been something as ordinary as a cloud passing over the sun, but it had already been cloudy when I closed my eyes, an even pale gray in every direction. Instead, when I lifted my head, I saw a vast ship, far larger than any transport vessel or floater or military craft that Shotet possessed. It was as large as the sojourn ship, but perfectly round, more like the Thuvhesit passenger floater that Sifa had guided into the renegade safe house.
The underside of the ship was smooth and polished, like it had never been flown before, never been battered by space debris and asteroids and rough atmospheres. Dotting its belly were little white lights. They marked doors and hatches, important attachment points and docking stations, and the ship’s massive outline. It was an Othyrian craft. I was sure of it. No one else would have the will and the vanity to make something so functional so beautiful.
“Cyra.” Teka’s voice again, fearful this time.
I locked eyes with Sifa, standing in the center of the arena. Eijeh had decided the time of his vision based on the color of the light, he said. Well, with this ship shielding Voa from the sun, it looked very much like dusk.
The attack was happening now.
“I wouldn’t bother with the control room,” I said, surprised by how remote my own voice sounded to me.
The soldiers who had shown Sifa into the arena fled, as if they could outrun a ship that large before the anticurrent blast hit. And perhaps there was no shame in that, in dying with hope.
I hoisted myself over the barrier that separated me from the arena, and dropped neatly to the packed earth below. I didn’t know why, except that I didn’t want to be standing above the arena when the anticurrent blast hit. I wanted to be where I belonged: here, with grit in the soles of my boots, where people who loved to fight stood.
And I loved to fight.
But I also loved to live.
I wouldn’t say I had never thought of dying as some kind of relief, when the pain was at its worst, when I lost my true mother to the darkness I didn’t yet understand. And I wouldn’t say that living was always, or even often, a pleasant experience for me. But the discovery and rediscovery of other worlds, the burn and ache of muscles building strength, the feeling of Akos’s warm, strong body against mine, the glint of my mother’s decorative armor at night in the sojourn ship—I loved them all.
I stopped in the middle of the arena, within grasp of Sifa and Yma, but not touching them. I heard Teka’s light footfalls behind me.
“Well,” Teka said. “I suppose it could be worse.”
I would have laughed, if it had been any further from the truth. But for Teka and Yma and me, who had come so close to other, far more horrible ways of dying, I supposed dissolving into an anticurrent blast was not so bad.
“Anticurrent,” I murmured, because the word seemed so strange to me.
I looked at Sifa—at my mother, in whatever way she still was that—and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised.
“I don’t understand. Anticurrent blasts are light,” I said. “The sojourn ship . . . it was so bright when it was destroyed. How can anticurrent be bright?”
“The current is both visible and invisible,” Sifa said. “It doesn’t always appear to us in a way that we understand.”
I frowned down at my spread palms, where the currentshadows had collected, winding again and again around my fingers like stacks of rings.
The doctor I had seen as a child had suggested that my currentgift came about because I thought I deserved pain, and that everyone else deserved it, too. My mother, Ylira Noavek, had chafed at the mere suggestion. This is not her fault, she had said, before dragging me out of the office.
And Akos—when he had seen the way I kept track of what I had done on my arm, now covered, as always, by armor, he had simply asked me, How old were you?
He had not thought this gift was what I deserved, and neither had my mother. And maybe they were both right—maybe the doctor was the one who had been wrong, the man whose words had been echoing in my mind all my life. Maybe pain was not my currentgift, not at all. Maybe pain was just a by-product of something else.
If the anticurrent was light—
And I was plagued by dark—
Maybe current was my gift.
She is herself a small Ogra, the Ogran dancers had said to me, when they saw my currentgift displayed.
“Does anyone know what the word ‘Ogra’ actually means, in Ogran?” I said.
“It means ‘the living dark,’” Sifa replied.
I laughed, a little, and as a narrow hatch opened on the underside of the ship above us, I raised my shadow-stained hands to the sky.
I pushed my currentshadows up, up, up.
Over the sizzle of the amphitheater’s force field, which Akos had disabled at a touch as he lifted us to safety. His arm had been strong across my back, tightly coiled as a rope.
Over the center of Voa, where I had lived all my life, contained in spotless wood paneling and the glow of fenzu. I felt Ryzek’s hands, a little sweaty as they pressed over my ears, to shield me from the screams of whoever my father was tormenting.
And higher over Voa, over even the fringes of the city where the Storyteller and his sweet purple tea lived, where the renegades had cobbled together a dinner table made of half a dozen other dinner tables.
I didn’t suffer from a lack of fuel. The currentshadows had been so strong all my life, strong enough to render me incapable of attending a simple dinner party, strong enough to bow my back and force tears from my eyes, strong enough to keep me awake and pacing all through the night. Strong enough to kill, but now I understood why they killed. It wasn’t because they drained the life from a person, but because they overwhelmed it. It was like gravity—we needed it to stay grounded, alive, but if it was too strong, it formed a black hole, from which even light could not escape.
Yes, the force of the current was too fierce for one body to contain—
Unless that body was mine.
My body, battered again and again by soldiers and brothers and enemies, but still working its way upright—
My body, a channel for the pure force of current, the hum-buzz of life that brought others to their knees—
Life is full of pain, I had told Akos, trying to draw him back from depression. Your capacity for bearing it is greater than you believe. And I had been right.
I had had every reason to become closed off, wrapped up tight, pushing everything that resembled life and growth and power as far away from myself as possible. It would have been easier that way, to refuse to let anything in. But I had let Akos in, trusting him when I had forgotten how to trust, and I had let Teka in, too, and maybe one day, Sifa—
I would let anyone in who dared draw near. I was like the planet Ogra, which welcomed anyone and anything that could survive life close to it.
Not because I deserved pain, and not because I was too strong to feel it, but because I was resilient enough to accept it as an inevitability.
My currentshadows shot up, up, up.
They spread, building from the tendrils around my fingers to a column in the sky that wrapped my entire body in shadow-dark. I couldn’t see Teka or Sifa or Yma now, but I saw the great pillar of current that passed over and through me, toward that hatch that had opened in the Othyrian ship above.
I didn’t see the anticurrent weapon, whatever its container looked like, but I did see the blast. The light spreading out from one fixed point, just as the shadow stretched upward from me.
And where they collided: agony.
I screamed, helplessly, as I had not screamed since I was too young to remember. The pain was so intense it shattered my pride, my reason, my sense of self. I heard the screaming and felt the scraping feeling of my own voice in my throat and the inferno inside me and around me, and saw the shadow and the light and the space where they met with a sharp clap.
My knees buckled, and arms wrapped around my waist, thin, bony ones. A head pressed between my shoulder blades, and I heard Teka’s voice saying, “Hold on, hold on, hold on . . .”
I had killed her uncle, her cousin, and in some ways, her mother, and still she stood behind me, keeping me upright.
Hands wrapped around my arms, warm and soft, and the smell of sendes leaf floated over to me, the scent of Sifa’s shampoo.
The dark eyes of the one who had abandoned me, and now returned for me—