"You want to know what Ryzek is holding over me?" I laughed again, this time through tears. I tugged the last strap of my chest armor loose, yanked it over my head, and hurled it at the wall with both hands. When it collided with the metal, the sound was deafening in the small anteroom.

The armor dropped to the floor, unharmed. It hadn't even lost its shape.

"My mother. My beloved, revered mother was taken from him, from Shotet," I spat at him. Loud, my voice was loud. "I took her. I took her from myself."

It would have been easier if he had looked at me with loathing or disgust. He didn't. He reached for me, his hands carrying relief, and I walked out of the anteroom and into the arena. I didn't want relief. I had earned this pain.

The crowd roared when I walked out. The black floor of the arena shone like glass; it had likely just been polished for the occasion. I saw my boots reflected in it, the buckles undone. Rising up all around me were rows of metal benches, packed with observers, their faces too dark to see clearly. Lety was already there, dressed in her Shotet armor, wearing heavy shoes with metal toes, shaking out her hands.

I assessed her right away, according to the teachings of elmetahak: she was a head shorter than I was, but muscular. Her blond hair was tied in a tight knot at the back of her head to keep it out of the way. She was a student of zivatahak, so she would be fast, nimble, in the seconds before she lost.

"Didn't even bother to put on your armor?" Lety sneered at me. "This will be easy."

Yes, it would.

She drew her currentblade, her hand wrapped in dark current-like my currentshadows in color, but not in form. For her, though they wrapped around her wrist, they never touched her skin. But my current was buried inside me. She paused, waiting for me to draw.

"Go on," I said, and I beckoned to her.

The crowd roared again, and then I couldn't hear them anymore. I was focused on Lety, the way she was inching toward me, trying to read strategy into my actions. But I was just standing there, my arms limp at my sides, letting my currentgift's strength build along with my fear.

Finally she decided to make her first move. I saw it in her arms and legs before she budged, and stepped aside when she lunged, arching away from her like an Ogra dancer. The move startled her; she stumbled forward, catching herself on the arena wall.

My currentshadows were so dense now, so painful, that I could hardly see straight. Pain roared through me, and I welcomed it. I remembered Uzul Zetsyvis's contorted face between my stained hands, and I saw him in his daughter, her brow furrowed with concentration.

She lunged again, this time driving her blade toward my ribs, and I batted her aside with my forearm, then reached over her to grab her wrist. I twisted, hard, and forced her head down. I kneed her in the face. Blood spilled over her lips, and she screamed. But not from the wound. From my touch.

The currentblade fell between us. Keeping my hand on one of her arms, I pushed her to her knees with the other, and moved to stand behind her. I found Ryzek in the crowd, sitting on the raised platform with his legs crossed, like he was watching a lecture or a speech instead of a murder.

I waited until his eyes found mine, and then I pushed. I pushed all the shadow, all the pain, into Lety Zetsyvis's body, keeping none of it for myself. It was easy, so easy, and quick. I closed my eyes as she screamed and shuddered, and then she was gone.

For a moment, everything was dim. I released her limp body, then turned to walk into the anteroom again. The entire crowd was silent. As I passed through the doorway to the anteroom, I was, for once, clear of shadows. It was only temporary. They would return soon.

Just out of sight, Akos reached for me, pulling me against him. He pressed me to his chest in something like an embrace, and said something to me in the language of my enemies.

"It's over," he said, in whispered Thuvhesit. "It's over now."

Later that night, I barred the door to my quarters so no one could come in. Akos sterilized a knife over the burners in his room, and cooled it with water from the faucet. I rested my arm on the table, then undid the fasteners on my forearm guard, one by one, beginning at the wrist and ending at the elbow. The guard was stiff and hard, and despite its lining, made my skin moist with sweat by the end of the day.

Akos sat across from me, sterilized knife in hand, and watched me peel the edges of the wrist guard back to reveal the bare skin beneath. I didn't ask him what he imagined. He had probably assumed, like most people, that the guard covered row after row of kill marks. That I had chosen to cover them because, somehow, fostering the mystery around them made me more menacing. I had never discouraged that rumor. The truth was so much worse.

There were marks up and down my arm, from elbow to wrist, row after row. Little dark lines, perfectly spaced, each one the same length. And through each one, a small diagonal hash mark, negating it under Shotet law.

Akos's brow furrowed, and he took my arm in both hands, holding me with just his fingertips. He turned my arm over, running his fingers down one of the rows. When he reached the end, he touched his index finger to one of the hashes, turning his arm to compare it to his own. I shivered to see our skin side by side, mine tawny and his pale.

"These aren't kills," he said quietly.

"I only marked my mother's passing," I said, just as quietly. "Make no mistake, I am responsible for more deaths, but I stopped recording them after her. Until Zetsyvis, anyway."

"And instead, you record . . . what?" He squeezed my arm. "What are all these marks for?"

"Death is a mercy compared to the agony I have caused. So I keep a record of pain, not kills. Each mark is someone I have hurt because Ryzek told me to." I had counted the marks, at first, always sure of their number. I had not known, then, exactly how long Ryzek would put me to use as his interrogator. Over time, though, I had just stopped keeping track. Knowing the number only made it worse.

"How old were you, when he first asked you to do this?"

I didn't understand the tone of his voice, with all its softness. I had just shown him proof of my own monstrousness, and still his eyes fixed on mine with sympathy instead of judgment. He couldn't possibly understand what I was telling him, to look at me like that. Or he thought I was lying, or exaggerating.

"Old enough to know it was wrong," I snapped.

"Cyra." Soft again. "How old?"

I sat back in my chair. "Ten," I admitted. "And it was my father, not Ryzek, who first asked."

His head bobbed. He touched the point of the knife to the table and spun the handle in quick circles, marking the wood.

Finally, he said, "When I was ten, I didn't know my fate yet. So I wanted to be a Hessa soldier, like the ones that patrolled my father's iceflower fields. He was a farmer." Akos balanced his chin on a hand as he looked me over. "But one day criminals went into the fields while he was working, to steal some of the harvest, and Dad tried to stop them before the soldiers got there. He came home with this huge gash across his cheek. Mom just started screaming at him." He laughed a little. "Doesn't make much sense, does it, yelling at someone for getting hurt?"

"Well, she was afraid for him," I said.

"Yeah. I was scared, too, I guess, because that night I decided I never wanted to be a soldier, if my job would be to get cut up like that."

I couldn't help but laugh a little.

"I know," he said, his lip curling at the corner. "Little did I know how I would be spending my days now."

He tapped the table, and I noticed, for the first time, how jagged his nails were, and all the cuts along his cuticles. I would have to break him of the habit of chewing on his own hands.

"My point is," he continued, "that when I was ten I was so scared of even seeing pain that I could hardly stand it. Meanwhile, when you were ten, you were being told to cause it, over and over again, by someone much more powerful than you were. Someone who was supposed to be taking care of you."

For a moment I ached at the thought. But only for a moment.

"Don't try to absolve me of guilt." I meant to sound sharp, like I was scolding him, but instead I sounded like I was pleading with him. I cleared my throat. "Okay? It doesn't make it better."

"Okay," he said.

"You were taught this ritual?" I asked him.

He nodded.

"Carve the mark," I said, my throat tight.

I extended my arm, pointing to a square of bare skin on the back of my wrist, beneath the knobby bone. He touched the knifepoint there, adjusted it so it was at the same interval as the other marks, then dug in. Not too deep, but enough that the feathergrass extract could settle.

Tears came to my eyes, unwelcome, and blood bubbled up from the wound. It dripped down the side of my arm as I fumbled in one of the kitchen drawers for the right bottle. He took out the cork, and I dipped the little brush I kept with it. I spoke Lety Zetsyvis's name as I painted the line he had carved with dark fluid.

It burned. Every time, I thought I would be used to how much it burned, and every time, I was wrong. It was supposed to burn, supposed to remind you that it was no trifling thing, to take a life, to carve a loss.

"You don't say the other words?" Akos said. He was referring to the prayer, the end of the ritual. I shook my head.

"I don't either," he said.

As the burning subsided, Akos wrapped the bandage around my arm, once, twice, three times, and secured it with a piece of tape. Neither of us bothered to clean up the blood on the table. It would probably dry there, and I would have to scrape it off with a knife later, but I didn't care.

I climbed the rope to the room above us, past the plants preserved in resin and the mechanical beetles perched among them, recharging for the moment. Akos followed me.

The sojourn ship was shuddering, its engines preparing to launch into the atmosphere. The ceiling of the room above us was covered with screens that showed whatever was above us-in this case, the Shotet sky. Pipes and vents crowded the space from all sides-it was only big enough for one person to move around in, really, but along the back wall were emergency jump seats, folded into the wall. I pulled them out, and Akos and I sat.

I helped him fasten the straps across his chest and legs that would keep him steady during launch, and handed him a paper bag in case the ship's movement made him sick. Then I strapped myself in. All through the ship, the rest of the Shotet would be doing the same thing, gathering in the hallways to pull jump seats from the walls and buckling each other in.

Together we waited for the ship to launch, listening to the countdown on the intercom. When the voice reached "ten," Akos reached for my hand, and I squeezed, hard, until the voice said "one."

The Shotet clouds rushed past us, and the force bore down on us, crushing us into our seats. Akos groaned, but I just watched as the clouds moved away and the blue atmosphere faded into the blackness of space. All around us was the starry sky.

"See?" I said, lacing my fingers with his. "It's beautiful."

CHAPTER 14: CYRA.

A KNOCK CAME AT my door that night as I was lying in bed in my sojourn ship quarters, face buried in a pillow. I dragged myself up one limb at a time to answer it. There were two soldiers waiting in the hallway, one male and one female, both slim. Sometimes a person's school of combat was obvious just from a glance-these were students of zivatahak, fast and deadly. And they were afraid of me. No wonder.

Akos stumbled into the kitchen to stand beside me. The two soldiers exchanged a knowing look, and I remembered what Otega had said about Shotet mouths loving to chatter. There was no avoiding it: Akos and I lived in close proximity, so there was bound to be talk about what we were, and what we did behind closed doors. I didn't care enough to discourage it. Better to be talked about for that than for murdering and torturing, anyway.

"We are sorry to disturb you, Miss Noavek. The sovereign needs to speak to you right away," the woman said. "Alone."

Ryzek's office on the sojourn ship was like his office in Voa, in miniature. The dark wood that comprised the floor and wall panels, polished to perfection, was native to Shotet-it grew in dense forests across our planet's equator, dividing us from the Thuvhesits who had invaded the north centuries ago. In the wild, the fenzu we now kept trapped in the orb chandelier hummed in the treetops, but because most older Shotet houses used them for light, the Zetsyvis family-now helmed by Yma alone-ensured that farmed fenzu were available in large numbers for those willing to pay the high price for them. And Ryzek was-he insisted their glow was more pleasant than burnstones, though I didn't see much of a difference.

When I walked in, Ryzek was standing in front of a large screen he usually kept hidden behind a sliding panel. It displayed a dense paragraph of text; it took me a few beats to realize that he was reading a transcript of the Assembly Leader's announcement of the fates. Nine lines of nine families, spread across the galaxy, their members' paths predetermined and unalterable. Ryzek usually avoided all references to his "weakness," as my father had called it, the fate that had haunted him since his birth: that he would fall to the family Benesit. It was illegal in Shotet to speak of it or to read it, punishable by imprisonment or even execution.

If he was reading the fates, he was not in a good mood, and most of the time, that meant I should tread lightly. But tonight, I wondered why I should bother.

Ryzek folded his arms, and tilted his head, and spoke.

"You don't know how lucky you are, that your fate is so ambiguous," he said. "'The second child of the family Noavek will cross the Divide.' For what purpose will you cross the Divide to Thuvhe?" He lifted a shoulder. "No one knows or cares. Lucky, lucky."

I laughed. "Am I?"

"That is why it's so important that you help me," Ryzek went on, like he hadn't heard me. "You can afford to. You don't need to fight so hard against what the world expects from you."

Ryzek had been weighing his life against mine since I was a child. That I was in constant pain, that I could not get close to anyone, that I had experienced deep loss just as he had, didn't seem to register in his mind. All he saw was that our father had ignored me rather than subjecting me to horrors, and that my fate didn't make the Shotet doubt my strength. To him, I was the lucky child, and there was no point in arguing about it.

"What happened, Ryzek?"

"You mean aside from all of Shotet being reminded of my ridiculous fate by Lety Zetsyvis?"

At the mention of her, I shuddered involuntarily, remembering how warm her skin had been as she died. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them from trembling. Akos's painkiller didn't suppress the shadows completely; they moved, sluggish now, beneath my skin, bringing with them a sharp ache.

"But you were ready for that," I said, fixing my eyes on his chin. "No one would dare repeat what she said now."

"It's not just that," Ryzek said, and I heard in his voice a reminder of what he had sounded like when he was younger, before my father sank in his teeth. "I followed the trail from Uzul Zetsyvis's confession to an actual source. There is a colony of exiles somewhere out there. Maybe more than one. And they have contacts among us."

I felt a thrill in my chest. So the rumor of the exile colony had been confirmed. For the first time, the colony represented to me not a threat, but something like . . . hope.

"One display of strength is good, but we need more. We need there to be no doubt that I am in command, and that we will return from this sojourn even more powerful than before." He let his hand hover over my shoulder. "I will need your help now more than ever, Cyra."

I know what you want, I thought. He wanted to root out every doubt and every whisper against him and crush them. And I was supposed to be the tool he used to do that. Ryzek's Scourge.

I closed my eyes briefly as memories of Lety came to me. I stifled them.

"Please, sit." He gestured to one of the chairs set up near the screen. They were old, with stitched upholstery. I recognized them from my father's old office. The rug beneath them was Shotet-made, of rough woven grasses. In fact, nothing in the room was scavenged-my father had hated the practice, said it made us weak and needed to be gradually abandoned, and Ryzek seemed to agree. I was the only one left with an affinity for other people's garbage.

I sat on the edge of the chair, the fates of the favored lines glowing next to my head. Ryzek didn't sit across from me. Instead, he stood behind the other chair, braced against its high back. He had rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, displaying the marks.

He tapped his crooked index finger against one of the fates on the screen, so the words grew larger.

The fates of the family Benesit are as follows: The first child of the family Benesit will raise her double to power.

The second child of the family Benesit will reign over Thuvhe.

"I have heard mutterings that this second child"-he tapped the second fate, his knuckle brushing the word reign-"will soon declare herself, and that she is Thuvhesit-born," Ryzek said. "I can't ignore the fates any longer-whoever this Benesit child is, the fates say she will be the ruler of Thuvhe, and responsible for my undoing." I hadn't quite put the pieces together before. Ryzek's fate was to fall to the family Benesit, and the family Benesit was fated to rule Thuvhe. Of course he was fixating on them, now that he had his oracle.

"My intention," he added, "is to kill her before that happens, with the help of our new oracle."

I stared at the fate written on the screen. All my life I had been taught that every fate would be fulfilled, no matter what anyone tried to do to stop it. But that was exactly what he was proposing: he wanted to thwart his own fate by killing the one who was supposed to bring it about. And he had Eijeh to tell him how.

"That's . . . that's impossible," I said, before I could stop myself.

"Impossible?" He raised his eyebrows. "Why? Because no one has managed to do it?" His hands clenched around the chair back. "You think that I, of all the people in the galaxy, can't be the first to defy his fate?"

"That's not what I meant," I said, trying to stay controlled in the face of his anger. "All I meant was that I've never heard of it happening, that's all."

"You soon will," he snapped, his face twisting into a scowl. "And you're going to help me."

I thought, suddenly, of Akos thanking me for the way I arranged his room, when we got to the sojourn ship. His calm expression as he took in my marked arm. The way he laughed when we chased each other through the blue sojourn rain. Those were the first moments of relief I had experienced since my mother died. And I wanted more of them. And less of . . . this.

"No," I said. "I won't."

His old threat-that if I didn't do as he said, he would tell the Shotet what I had done to my beloved mother-no longer frightened me. This time, he had made a mistake: he had confessed to needing my help.

I crossed one leg over another, and folded my hands over my knee.

"Before you threaten me, let me say this: I don't think that you would risk losing me right now," I said. "Not after trying so hard to make sure that they are terrified of me."