"Get her out," Ryzek said, typing in the code so the cell door opened. "Let's see if Kereseth is weak enough for this to work yet."

I pushed off the wall, throwing myself as hard as I could at Vas as soon as he entered the cell. I slammed my shoulder into his gut, knocking him flat. He had grabbed my shoulders, but my arms were still mobile enough for me to claw at his face, drawing blood from the skin just under his eye. Ryzek stepped in, hitting me in the jaw, and I fell to the side, dizzy.

Vas dragged me over to Akos, so we knelt across from each other, barely an arm's length of space between us.

"I'm sorry" was all I could think to say to him. That he was here was my fault, after all. If I hadn't fallen in with the renegades . . . but it was too late for thoughts like that.

Everything inside me slowed as his eyes met mine, like I had stopped time. I looked him over carefully, like a caress, his tousled brown hair, the dusting of freckles on his nose, and his gray eyes, unguarded for the first time I could remember. I didn't see the bruises or the blood that marked him. I listened to his breaths. I had heard them in my ear just after I kissed him, every exhale bursting a little, like he didn't want to let it go.

"I always thought my fate meant I would die a traitor to my country." Akos's voice was rough, like he had worn away at it by screaming. "But you made it so I won't."

He gave me a small, wild smile.

I knew, then, that Akos wouldn't give up information about his chancellor no matter what happened. I had never realized how deeply he felt his fate. Dying for the Noavek family had been a curse to him, as surely as falling to the Benesit family was to Ryzek. But because I had sided against my brother, if Akos died for me now, it meant he had never betrayed his home. So maybe it was all right that I had cost us both our lives by helping the renegades. Maybe it still meant something.

With that thought, it was very simple. We would be in pain, and then we would die. I settled into the inevitability of it.

"Let me be clear about what I want to happen here." Ryzek crouched beside us, balancing his elbows on his knees. His shoes were polished-he had taken time to polish his shoes before torturing his sister?

I swallowed a weird little laugh.

"Both of you are going to suffer. If you give in first, Kereseth, you will tell me what you know about the fated chancellor of Thuv-he. And if you give in first, Cyra, you will tell me what you know about the renegades, and their connections to the exile colony." Ryzek glanced at Vas. "Go ahead."

I braced myself for a blow, but it didn't come. Instead, Vas grabbed my wrist, and forced my hand toward Akos. At first I let it happen, sure my touch wouldn't affect him. But then I remembered-Ryzek had said to see if Akos was "weak enough." That meant they had been starving him for the days I had been in the prison; they had weakened his body, and his gift.

I strained against Vas's vise-hand, but I wasn't strong enough. My knuckles brushed Akos's face. The shadows crept toward him, even as I silently begged them not to move. But I was not their master. I never had been. Akos moaned, his own brother holding him in place as he tried to flinch away.

"Excellent. It worked," Ryzek said, coming to his feet. "The chancellor of Thuvhe, Kereseth. Tell me about her."

I pulled my elbow back as hard as I could, twisting and thrashing in Vas's grip. The shadows grew richer and more numerous the more I struggled, like they were mocking me. Vas was strong, and there was nothing I could do to him now; he held me steady with one hand and pushed my palm forward with the other, so it lay flat against Akos's throat.

I could imagine nothing more horrible than this, Ryzek's Scourge turned against Akos Kereseth.

I felt the heat of him. The pain inside me was desperate to be shared; it moved into him, but instead of diminishing in my own body the way it usually did, it only multiplied in us both. My arm shook from the effort of trying to pull away. Akos screamed, and so did I, so did I. I was dark with the current, the center of a black hole, a shred of the starless fringe of the galaxy. Every inch of me burned, ached, begged for relief.

Akos's voice and mine met like two clasped hands. I closed my eyes.

In front of me was a wooden desk, marked with circles from water glasses. A pile of notebooks was scattered across it, and all of them bore my name, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek, Cyra Noavek. I recognized this place. It was Dr. Fadlan's office.

"The current flows through every one of us. And like liquid metal flowing into a mold, it takes a different shape in each of us," he was saying. My mother sat at my right, her posture straight and her hands folded in her lap. My memory of her was detailed and perfect, down to the loose strand of hair behind her ear and the faint blemish on her chin, covered with makeup.

"That your daughter's gift causes her to invite pain into herself, and project pain into others, suggests something about what's going on inside her," he said. "A cursory assessment says that on some level, she feels she deserves it. And she feels others deserve it as well."

Instead of erupting the way she had at the time, my mother tilted her head. I could still see her pulse in her throat. She turned to me in the chair. She was more beautiful than I had dared to remember; even the lines at the corners of her eyes were graceful, gentle.

"What do you think, Cyra?" she said, and as she spoke, she became a dancer of Ogra, her eyes lined with chalk and her bones glowing so brightly beneath her skin I could see even the faint spaces at their joints. "Do you think this is how it works?"

"I don't know," I replied in my adult voice. It was my adult body sitting in the chair, too, though I had only been here as a child. "All I know is that the pain wants to be shared."

"Does it?" The dancer smiled a little. "Even with Akos?"

"The pain isn't me; it doesn't discriminate," I said. "The pain is my curse."

"No, no," the dancer said, her dark eyes locked on mine. But they weren't brown anymore, as they had been when I saw her perform in the dining room; they were gray, and wary. Akos's eyes, familiar to me even in a dream.

He had taken her place, perched at the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight, his long body dwarfing the chair.

"Every currentgift carries a curse," he said. "But no gift is only a curse."

"The gift part of it is that no one can hurt me," I said.

But even as I said it, I knew it wasn't true. People could still hurt me. They didn't need to touch me to do it-they didn't even need to torture me to do it. As long as I cared about my life, as long as I cared about Akos's life, or the lives of renegades I barely knew, I was as vulnerable as everyone else was to hurt.

I blinked at him as a different answer came to me.

"You told me I was more than a knife, more than a weapon," I said. "Maybe you're right."

He smiled that small, familiar smile that creased his cheek.

"The gift," I said, "is the strength the curse has given me." The new answer was like a blooming hushflower, petals unfurling. "I can bear it. I can bear pain. I can bear anything."

He reached for my cheek. He became the dancer, and my mother, and Otega, in turn.

And then I was in the prison, arm outstretched, fingers on Akos's cheek, Vas's hand strong around my wrist, holding me fast. Akos's teeth were gritted. And the shadows that were usually confined beneath my skin were all around us, like smoke. So dark I couldn't see Ryzek or Eijeh or the prison with its glass walls.

Akos's eyes-full of tears, full of pain-found mine. Pushing the shadow toward him would have been easy. I had done it many times before, each time a mark on my left arm. All I had to do was let the connection form, let the pain pass between us like a breath, like a kiss. Let all of it flow out of me, bringing relief for us both, in death.

But he did not deserve it.

This time, I broke the connection, like slamming a door between us. I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony.

I didn't scream. I wasn't afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.

CHAPTER 26: AKOS.

IN THE PLACE BETWEEN sleeping and waking, he thought he saw feathergrass, tilting in the wind. He imagined he was home and could taste snow on the air, smell cold earth. He let longing pierce him all the way through, and then fell asleep again.

Oil beading on water.

He had been on his knees on the floor of the prison, watching currentshadows pull away from Cyra's skin like smoke. The haze tinted the hand on his shoulder-Eijeh's hand-dark gray. He saw Cyra through it only faintly, her chin tipped up, eyes closed like she was sleeping.

And now, lying on a thin mattress with a heater over his bare feet. A needle in his arm. His wrist cuffed to a bed frame.

The pain, and the memory of it, slipping away into numbness.

He twitched his fingers, and the IV needle shifted, sharp, under his skin. He frowned. This place was a dream; it had to be, because he was still in that tomb under Voa's amphitheater, and Ryzek was ordering him to talk about Ori Rednalis. Orieve Benesit. Whatever her name was now.

"Akos?" The woman's voice sounded real enough. Maybe it wasn't a dream after all.

She stood over him, stick-straight hair framing her face. He'd know those eyes anywhere. They had stared at him across the dinner table, crinkled at the corners when Eijeh made a joke. Her left eyelid sometimes twitched when she got nervous. She was here, like thinking about her had brought her. His own name settled him into himself, no more slipping and sliding.

"Ori?" he croaked.

A tear dropped from her eye to the bedsheets. She put her hand on his, covering the tube from the IV needle. Her sleeve, made of thick black wool, was draped over her palm, and the garment pulled tight around her throat. Signs of Thuvhe, where a person would near strangle herself to death to keep any warmth from escaping.

"Cisi's coming," Ori said. "I called her, and she's on her way. I called your mother, too, but she's across the galaxy; it will take her some time."

He was so tired.

"Don't go," he said as his eyes closed.

"I won't." Her voice was husky, but reassuring. "I won't go."

He dreamt he was between the glass prison cells, his knees digging into the black floor, his guts rumbling with hunger.

And he woke in the hospital, with Ori slumped over at his side, her arm sprawled across his legs. Through the window behind her he saw floaters whizzing past and big buildings hanging in the sky like ripe fruit.

"Where are we?" he said.

She blinked sleep from her eyes and said, "Shissa hospital."

"Shissa? Why?"

"Because that's where you got dropped," she said. "You don't remember?"

When she first spoke to him, she had sounded different, careful with every word. But the longer she talked, the more she lapsed into their lazy Hessa rhythms, every syllable sliding into the next one. He found himself doing the same thing.

"Dropped? By who?"

"We don't know. Thought you would."

He strained for the memory, but couldn't quite reach it.

"Don't worry." She put her hand on his again. "There was so much hushflower in your system you probably should have been dead. No one expects you to remember." She smiled. So familiar, slanted mouth into curved cheek. "They must not have known you that well, to dump you in Shissa like some kind of city-dwelling snot."

He'd almost forgotten their jokes about this place. Shissa kids with their heads in the skies, couldn't even recognize an iceflower on sight because they were used to seeing them from a long ways up. Couldn't even fasten a proper coat closed. Useless glass-dwellers, all.

"'City-dwelling snot,' says the fated chancellor of Thuvhe," he said, suddenly remembering. "Or is that your twin? Which one of you is the older one, anyway?"

"I'm not the chancellor, I'm the other one. Fated to raise her sister to the throne or . . . whatever," she said. "But if I was her, you would definitely not be addressing me with the 'respect appropriate for my position.'"

"Snob," Akos said.

"Hessa trash."

"I am from the family Kereseth, you know. We're not exactly trash."

"Yes, I know." Her smile softened a little, like she was saying, How could I forget? And then Akos remembered the cuff fixing his wrist to the hospital bed. He decided not to bring it up yet.

"Ori," he said. "Am I really in Thuvhe?"

"Yeah."

He closed his eyes. There was a fire in his throat.

"Missed you, Orieve Benesit," he said. "Or whatever your name is."

Ori laughed. She was crying now. "Then what took you so long?"

The next time he woke, he didn't feel quite so numb, and though he ached, certain enough, the sharp agony that had carried him from Voa to Shissa was gone. Cyra's lingering gift had been sent away by iceflowers, no doubt.

Just thinking Cyra's name made his insides twist with fear. Where was she now? Had the people who had brought him here rescued her, too, or had they just left her with Ryzek to die?

He tasted bile, and opened his eyes.

A woman stood at the foot of his bed. Dark curly hair framed her face. Her eyes were wide. There was a little spot at the bottom of one where her pupil bled into her iris-a defect she'd had since birth. His sister, Cisi.

"Hello," she said. Her voice was all softness and light. He'd held the memory of it tight in his mind, like it was the last seed left for planting.

It was too easy to cry right now, all laid out and warm as he was. "Cisi," he croaked, blinking the tears away.

"How do you feel?"

That, he thought, is a question. He knew she was just asking after his pain, though, so he said, "Fine. I've been worse."

She moved fluidly in sturdy Hessa boots, stopping by the side of the bed and tapping something near his head. The bed moved, tilting up at his waist so he could sit up.

He winced. His ribs were hurt. He was so numb he'd almost forgotten.

She had been so careful before then, so controlled, that it startled him when she threw herself across him, hands clutching at his shoulder, his side. At first he didn't-couldn't-move. But then he brought his arms around her, and held her tight. They'd never hugged much as kids-except for their dad, they weren't an affectionate family, as a rule-but her embrace was brief. She was here, alive. And they were together again.

"I can't believe . . ." She sighed. And she started to mutter a prayer. He hadn't heard a Thuvhesit prayer in a long time. The ones for gratitude were briefest, but he couldn't bring himself to say it with her. There were too many worries crowding his head.

"Neither can I," he said, once she had finished. She pulled away, still holding one of his hands and smiling down at him. No, frowning now, staring at their joined hands. Touching her cheek, where a tear had fallen.

"I'm crying," she said. "What-I haven't been able to cry since . . . since my currentgift."

"Your currentgift keeps you from crying?"

"You didn't notice it?" She sniffed, wiping her cheeks. "I make people feel . . . at ease. But I also can't seem to do or say anything that makes them uneasy, like . . ."