"The only thing I'm good for and I can't even get it right," he snapped.
He looked up at me, and flushed bright red.
"Oh," he said. "Hi."
"I'm here to--" I paused. "Your sister is here."
I stepped aside to reveal her. They stood at that distance from each other for a few long, quiet moments. He turned off the burner, and crossed the room, folding her into a hug. She squeezed him back.
"What are you doing here?" he asked her softly.
"I'm here to open peace talks with the exiles," she said.
I snorted. Not only was her mission ridiculous--how could we have peace talks with a nation that had destroyed the sojourn ship?--but she had also lied to me about it.
"I'm sorry I lied to you," she added over her shoulder to me. "I thought you were going to hit me, so I reached for the most convenient excuse to be here."
"Cyra would never hit you," Akos said.
The way he said it, without hesitation or doubt, made my chest ache. He was the only one who had ever thought so well of me.
"If you are all going to stand around chatting, do it somewhere else," the old woman said, getting to her feet. "My shop is too small and my fuse too short for such nonsense."
"I'm sorry for the waste of your ingredients, Zenka," Akos said to her.
"I learn a great deal from your failed attempts, as well as your successful ones," Zenka said to him, not unkindly. "Now go."
Her lined face turned to me, and she gave me a look of appraisal.
"Miss Noavek," she said as I retreated into the alley, by way of greeting.
I nodded back, and slipped away.
There was no room to walk side by side in the alley, so we filed down it one by one, with Yssa in the lead and Akos bringing up the rear. Over Yssa's shoulder, I saw Sifa and Eijeh waiting for us in the hard-packed street beyond the alley. Sifa pretended to be interested in the little glowing fish at the stall nearest to her, kept in tall cylinders full of water, but I wasn't fooled. She was waiting for us.
Eijeh looked nervously over his shoulder. His hair was curling behind his ears now, grown out enough to show its natural texture. There was a slim ribbon sewed into the shoulders of his shirt, and it glowed a faint blue. Most people here adopted some elements of Ogran dress, so they would be visible in the dark. Not me, though.
I knew I had no place here, at this impromptu Kereseth reunion--which was probably orchestrated by the oracles, if Sifa and Eijeh's presence meant what I thought it did. I moved to leave, meaning to disappear into the constant night, but Akos knew me too well. I felt the shock of his hand, pressing against the small of my back. It was brief, but it sent a shiver through me.
Do that again, I thought.
Never do that again, I also thought.
"Sorry," he said, in low Shotet. "But--would you stay?"
Behind him, Cisi and Sifa embraced, Sifa's hand running over Cisi's curls with a tenderness I remembered from my own mother.
Akos's gray eyes--set now in a face more sallow than it had any right to be--begged me to stay. I had distracted myself from him in the week since the attack, refusing most of the comfort he offered, unless it was in the form of a painkiller. I couldn't let myself stay close to him now, knowing that he was only here because of his own fatalism. He made me weak, though. He always had.
"Fine," I said.
"I hoped you would come," Sifa was saying to Cisi, whose eyes were on Eijeh. He held himself at a distance from the others, plucking at his cuticles. His posture and gestures were still like those of my late brother. It was . . . disconcerting.
"Eijeh thought it was likely," she continued. "He's only a beginner, but his intuition is strong. So we came to facilitate a particular path."
"Ah, you're admitting to it this time?" I said, my arms crossed to disguise the clench of my hands.
Akos's fingertips touched one of my elbows, sending the pain away. I didn't let myself look at him.
"Yes," Sifa said. Her hair was in a pile of curls on top of her head, a hatpin stuck through the middle of it so it stayed in place. The little jewels at the end of the pin glowed pale pink. "Come. We're wanted elsewhere."
"Probably," Eijeh qualified.
"Probably," Sifa repeated.
"You're not making me want to spend more time with oracles," I said.
Akos's lips twitched into a smile.
"And what a shame that is," Eijeh replied drily. "Our loss, I'm sure."
I stared at him. I had never heard Eijeh Kereseth make a joke before, particularly not at my expense.
There was no time to retort, because I turned and saw a menacing sight: the outline of an Ogran transport vessel. Its edges were lined with white tubes of light, but the persistent dark flattened them, making the whole thing look like the face of a beast, hanging in the air. Tucked-back wings became ears, a vent beneath the forward fuselage was a mouth, and the tail was a single horn.
An Ogran in a flight suit came toward us. His skin was dark brown, but his eyes were iridescent, like the scales of a fish. They caught all the light around them and tossed it back, silvery-bright. A manifestation of his currentgift, I was certain, though what it did was as yet a mystery.
Somewhere to my right, Yssa uttered what sounded like an Ogran curse word under her breath.
CHAPTER 23: AKOS
AKOS TRIED TO GET a sense of the Ogran ship in the dark, but it was difficult. When they first landed on Ogra, he thought the sky was always the same, but that wasn't the case--sometimes it was velvet black, sometimes worn black, sometimes almost blue. And now, with the sky at its darkest, the ship all but disappeared, but for the light they had used to mark its shape.
Yssa stepped forward. "Pary. Hello."
She didn't sound cold, exactly, just as she never really sounded warm. But something had changed in her. She knew this person.
"Yssa," the Ogran said. "I'm surprised to find you here."
"I was sent to be an ambassador from our people to the Shotet," she said. There was definitely something off about the two of them, Akos decided. There was too much familiarity in the way they spoke to each other. Ex-lovers, maybe? "And you're surprised to find me among them?"
"I meant here, with . . . two oracles of Thuvhe," the man called Pary said. "But maybe that was foolish of me."
Akos felt Cyra shift under his hand, getting restless. Sure enough, she was already opening her mouth.
"State your business, would you?" she said. "We've got a family reunion happening here."
"Miss Noavek. You are just as anticipated," Pary said with a wide smile. "My business is that of the oracle of Ogra. You have--all of you--been summoned by her, and I am tasked with taking you to her immediately. She is on the other side of Ogra, on the edge of the wilderness, so we must fly there to make it on time."
Of course, Akos thought, with no small amount of scorn. His mom and Eijeh had come into the village--where they almost never went--for just this reason. He hated the feeling of it, all the threads of fate coming together and tangling in a knot. The only other times in his life he had felt it happen, his dad had ended up killed, or he had killed Vas--
Vas, his face shining with sweat, a bruise at the corner of his eye from who knows what--
"And if we don't want to go?" Cyra said.
"That would be unwise," Pary said. "According to Ogran law, the oracles' summons must be obeyed. And as a Shotet exile, you are obligated to obey our highest laws, unless you want to compromise your own refugee status."
Cyra glanced at Akos.
"Oracles," he said with a shrug, because there wasn't much more to say.
The inside of the Ogran ship was downright startling.
It was alive in a way Akos had never seen, didn't think a ship could be. The structure was metal, but there were plants growing everywhere, some behind glass, some out in the open. He recognized a couple of them from what Zenka had taught him, though he'd only seen them shriveled or sketched or chopped up. One of the plan
ts behind glass looked like a perfect globe until its thick, jagged petals peeled apart, revealing the same teeth he had learned to grind into a powder. It snapped at him as he walked by.
Cisi went to one of the others--a flowered vine that twisted around one of the ship's support beams--like she was pulled there by a magnet. A dark green tendril reached for her finger and wrapped around it, gentle. Akos rushed to her side and flicked it to make it back off.
"Apparently they start off friendly and turn fierce," he said to her. "But if you ignore them they don't usually do anything."
"Do all the plants here try to kill you?" Cisi said.
"Almost all," he said. "Some try to befriend you so you'll defend them against other plants."
"You'll notice there are almost no animal species on Ogra," Pary said as he walked past them. "That is because the plants are so highly developed. There is a wide variety of insect species, for the propagation of plant life, but we are the only warm-blooded beasts that walk this planet."
Pary settled into the captain's chair. There was no copilot or first officer that Akos could see, just Pary and a stretch of buttons and switches and levers. Yssa took the seat beside him, though. The forward fuselage was big enough to fit all of them, on bench seats with protective straps. Given what Akos knew about the planet's tendency to fight back against everything, everywhere, he thought they needed more than some straps to protect them, but nobody had asked him.
"Did the oracle say why she wanted us dragged to her?" Cyra said, while she was strapping herself in. She finished her own buckles and then reached over--unconsciously, it seemed like--to help Cisi with hers. Akos took the seat on her other side, at the end of the bench.
"It's not for me to ask," Pary said.
"The oracle is not very . . ." Yssa paused, searching out the word in Othyrian. She asked in Shotet, "How do you say, 'forthright'?"
Akos repeated the word in Othyrian, for Cisi.
"It is not an oracle's job to answer questions like those," Sifa said. "We have only one job, and that is to protect this galaxy. Sorting through the inconsequential information that other people find essential is not up to us."
"Oh, you mean inconsequential information like 'You, my youngest son, you're going to get kidnapped tomorrow'?" Cyra snapped. "Or 'Isae Benesit is about to murder your brother, Cyra, so you may want to make your peace with him'?"
Akos grabbed a handful of his own leg to steady himself. He wanted to tell Cyra not to use his pain as a weapon against his own mom; he wanted to tell his mom that Cyra had a point. But he felt so heavy with the hopelessness of it that he gave up before he started.
"You demand to know things from the Ogran oracle that you will find out within the day," Sifa snapped. "You're angry that you aren't told what you want to know exactly when you want to know it. What a frustrating existence you must find this, that it doesn't meet your every need for you instantaneously!"
Cyra laughed. "As a matter of fact, I do find it frustrating."
She had been this way since the sojourn ship attack, Akos thought. Primed for a fight, no matter what form it came in, no matter who it was with. Cyra was always prickly, and he liked that about her. But this was different. Like she kept throwing herself at a wall in the hope that one of these days, it might finally break her apart.
"Quiet on deck!" Pary announced. "Can't focus with all of you arguing."
Yssa joined in the dance of readying the ship, and the way they did it together, Pary and Yssa, made Akos think they had done it a hundred times before. Their arms crossed, fair and freckled against dark and unblemished, and stretched past each other without getting in each other's way. The choreography of familiarity.
The ship lurched and shuddered as it rose from the ground. The engines roared, and the vines and plants twitched and fluttered like the wind was blowing. Akos watched the flowered vine curl more tightly around its support beam; the plant behind glass curled into itself and glowed orange in warning.
"We'll be flying above the storms, to avoid their damage," Pary said as the ship flew up and forward. "It will be rough."
Akos couldn't help his own curiosity. They'd been hiding from "the storms" whenever the alarm went off since they arrived on Ogra--almost every day, it felt like. But he'd yet to hear a good description of what the storms were, exactly.
The ship's flight wasn't as smooth as a Shotet ship's. It jerked and shivered, and from what Akos could tell, it was slow. But they got up high enough that he could see the little glowing patches of villages, and then the big, bright splotch of Ogra's capital city, Pokgo, where the buildings were tall enough to make a jagged horizon.
Their ship turned as it climbed, away from Ogran civilization and toward the stretch of dark that made up the southern forests. There were plenty of glowing things there, as there were everywhere else, but they were covered by dense greenery, so from a distance it was difficult to see anything but void.
The ship jerked up, which made Akos grab blindly for Cyra's hand. He didn't mean to squeeze hard, but judging by her laugh, that's what he was doing. The clear view they'd had of Ogra's surface was gone, replaced by the dense swirl of clouds. And then, up ahead, color and light coalescing, just like they had when the sojourn ship passed through the currentstream.
A blue line of lightning cut through the cloud layer and stretched down. The ship jostled Akos's head from side to side so hard he could hear his own teeth clattering together. Another flash, this one yellow, seemed to happen right next to them. Pary and Yssa were shouting things at each other in Ogran. Akos heard retching as someone--Eijeh, probably, he'd always had motion sickness--threw up.
Akos watched as Ogra took the glowing colors the rest of the planet boasted so proudly and hurled them right back, brutal and relentless. As Pary promised, they moved right over the storm, which jostled them all but didn't down the ship. The acrid smell of vomit, combined with the constant shuddering of his head, made him want to be sick himself, but he tried to keep it down. Even Cyra, who usually loved things that made other people scared out of their minds, looked like she had had enough, her teeth gritted even though he was taking care of her currentgift.
It took a long time for Pary to announce that they were landing. Next to him, Cyra heaved a sigh of relief. Akos noted the shift of the ship toward the ground, aiming at some dense forest that looked the same to him as everywhere else.
But as they came closer, the trees seemed almost to part, making way for a cluster of buildings. They were lit from beneath by pools of glowing water--saturated by the same bacteria that made the canals around Galo light up, Akos assumed. Otherwise they were small wooden buildings with high, peaked roofs, connected by paths that looked bright against the otherwise gloomy backdrop. Spots of light moved erratically everywhere, tracing the paths of flying insects.
The ship touched down just inside a stone wall, on a landing pad.
They were at the temple of Ogra.
CHAPTER 24: CYRA
I BENT TO TOUCH the path beneath our feet. It was smooth, flat stone--white, a color uncommon to Ogra. This place was packed with glowing things, in the gardens, and pools, and flitting around in the air.
Pary led us toward one of the larger buildings. We had landed at the bottom of a hill, so it would be a climb to get anywhere, and I assumed the oracle resided at the top. The air tasted sweet after the stale panic inside the transport vessel--I never wanted to travel during an Ogran storm again--and I gulped it down, keeping pace with Pary, with the others behind me.
As we passed through one of the gardens--most of the plants were held away from us by a mesh fence that had a current running through it, I noted--Yssa spoke from behind me, with a tone of controlled fear. "Pary."
I turned back to see a large beetle, almost as long as my palm, crawling on Akos's cheek. Its wings had bright blue markings, and its antennae were bright, searching. There was another one on his throat, and a third on his arm.
"Stay still," Yssa told him. "Everyone e
lse step back from him."
"Shit," Pary said.
"I take it these insects are poisonous," Akos said. His Adam's apple bobbed with a particularly hard swallow.
"Very," Yssa said. "We keep them here because they are very bright when they fly."
"And they avoid anything that is a particularly strong conduit for the current," Pary added. "Like . . . people. Most people."
Akos's eyes closed.
Frowning a little, I stepped forward. Pary grabbed my arm to stop me, but he couldn't stand to touch me; his grip slipped, and I kept walking. Inching closer, and closer, until I was right in front of Akos, his warm breath against my temple. I lifted a hand to hover over the beetle on his face, and, for the first time, thought of my currentgift as something that might protect instead of injure.
A single black tendril unfurled from my fingers--obeying me, obeying me--and jabbed the beetle in the back. The light inside it flaring to life, it darted away from him, and the others went with it. Akos's eyes opened. We stared at each other, not touching, but close enough that I could see the freckles on his eyelids.
"Okay?" I said.
He nodded.
"Stay close to me, then," I said. "But don't touch my skin, or you'll turn us both into poisonous insect magnets."
As I turned around, I made eye contact with Sifa. She was giving me an odd look, almost like I had just struck her. I felt Akos behind me, staying close. He pinched my shirt between two fingers, right over the middle of my back.
"Well," Eijeh said. "That was exciting."
It was the sort of thing Ryzek might have said.
"Shut up," I replied, automatically.
There were beautiful, expansive rooms on the hill. Grand spaces, the furniture covered with protective cloths, the planks of the wood floors stained in different patterns, the tiles painted with geometric designs in sedate greens and muted pinks. The warm Ogran air flowed easily through each space we walked through, most of the walls built to fold back. But Pary didn't take us to any of them.
Instead, he brought us to the series of buildings where we would stay overnight. "She wants to see each of you separately, so it will take some time," he said. "This is a peaceful place, so take advantage of the opportunity to rest."