"No." I thrust the empty vial back into his hands.

"It covers your kill marks." He furrowed his brow. "Why would Ryzek's Scourge want to hide her marks?"

"Don't call me that." I felt pressure inside my head, like someone was pushing my temples from both sides. "Never call me that."

A cold feeling was spreading through my body, out from my center, like my blood was turning to ice. At first I thought it was just anger, but it was too physical for that-too . . . painless. When I looked at my arms, the shadow-stains were still there, under my skin, but they were languid.

"The painkiller worked, didn't it," he said.

The pain was still there, aching and burning wherever the currentshadows traveled, but it was easier to ignore. And though I was starting to feel a little drowsy, too, I didn't mind it. Maybe I would finally get a good night's sleep.

"Somewhat," I admitted.

"Good," he said. "Because I have a deal to offer you, and it relies on the painkiller being useful to you."

"A deal?" I said. "You think you're in a position to make deals with me?"

"Yeah, I do," he said. "As much as you insist you don't need my help with your pain, you want it, I know you do. And you can either try to batter me into submission to get it, or you can treat me like a person, listen to what I have to say, and maybe get my help easily. Your choice, of course, my lady."

It was easier to think when his eyes weren't bearing down on mine, so I stared at the lines of light coming through the window coverings, showing the city in strips. Beyond the fence that kept Noavek manor separate, people would be out walking the streets, enjoying the warmth, dust floating all around them because the earthen streets were dry.

I had begun my acquaintance with Akos in a position of weakness-literally, huddled on the floor at his feet. And I had tried to force my way back to a place of strength, but it wasn't working; I couldn't erase what was so obvious to anyone who looked at me: I was covered in currentshadows, and the longer I suffered because of them, the more difficult it was for me to live a life that was worth anything to me. Maybe this was my best option.

"I'll listen," I said.

"Okay." He brought a hand to his head, touching his hair. It was brown, and clearly thick, judging by how his fingers knotted in it. "Last night, that . . . maneuver you did. You know how to fight."

"That," I said, "is an understatement."

"Would you teach me, if I asked you?"

"Why? So you can keep insulting me? So you can try-and fail-to kill my brother?"

"You just assume I want to kill him?"

"Don't you?"

He paused. "I want to get my brother home." He spoke each word with care. "And in order to do that, in order to survive here, I have to be able to fight."

I didn't know what it was to love a brother that much, not anymore. And from what I had seen of Eijeh-a flimsy wreck of a person-he didn't seem worthy of the effort. But Akos, with his soldier's posture and his still hands, seemed certain.

"You don't know how to fight already?" I said. "Why did Ryzek send you to my cousin Vakrez for two seasons, if not to teach you competency?"

"I'm competent. I want to be good."

I crossed my arms. "You haven't gotten to the part of this deal that benefits me."

"In exchange for your instruction, I could teach you to make that painkiller you just drank," he said. "You wouldn't have to rely on me. Or anyone else."

It was like he knew me, knew the one thing he could say that would tempt me the most. It wasn't relief from pain that I wanted above all, but self-reliance. And he was offering it to me in a glass vial, in a hushflower potion.

"All right," I said. "I'll do it."

Soon after that I led him down the hall, to a small room at the end with a locked door. This wing of Noavek manor wasn't updated; the locks still took keys instead of opening at a touch or the prick of a finger, like the gene locks that opened the rooms where Ryzek spent most of his time. I fished the key out of my pocket-I had put on real clothes, loose pants and a sweater.

The room held a long countertop with shelves above and below it, packed with vials, beakers, knives, spoons, and cutting boards, and a long line of white jars marked with the Shotet symbols for iceflowers-we kept a small store of them, even hushflower, though Thuvhe had not exported any goods to Shotet in over twenty seasons, so we had to import it illegally using a third party-as well as other ingredients scavenged from across the galaxy. Pots, all a shade of warm orange-red metal, hung from a rack above the burners on the right, the largest bigger than my head and the smallest, the size of my hand.

Akos took one of the larger pots down and set it on a burner.

"Why did you learn to fight, if you could hurt with a touch?" he said. He filled a beaker with water from the spout in the wall, and dumped it in the pot. Then he lit the burner beneath it and took out a cutting board and a knife.

"It's part of every Shotet education. We begin as children." I hesitated for a moment before adding, "But I continued because I enjoyed it."

"You have hushflower here?" he said, scanning the jars with his finger.

"Top right," I said.

"But the Shotet don't use it."

"'The Shotet' don't," I said stiffly. "We're the exception. We have everything here. Gloves are under the burners."

He snorted a little. "Well, Exceptional One, you should find a way to get more. We'll be needing it."

"All right." I waited a beat before asking, "No one in army training taught you to read?"

I had assumed that my cousin Vakrez had taught him more than competent fighting skills. Written language, for example. The "revelatory tongue" referred only to spoken language, not written-we all had to learn Shotet characters.

"They didn't care about things like that," he said. "They said 'go' and I went. They said 'stop' and I did. That was all."

"A soft Thuvhesit boy shouldn't complain about being made into a hard Shotet man," I said.

"I can't change into a Shotet," he said. "I am Thuvhesit, and will always be."

"That you are speaking to me in Shotet right now suggests otherwise."

"That I'm speaking Shotet right now is a quirk of genetics," he snapped. "Nothing more."

I didn't bother to argue with him. I felt certain he would change his mind, in time.

Akos reached into the jar of hushflower and took one of the blossoms out with his bare fingers. He broke a piece off one of the petals and put it in his mouth. I was too stunned to move. That amount of iceflower at that level of potency should have knocked him out instantly. He swallowed, closed his eyes for a moment, then turned back to the cutting board.

"You're immune to them, too," I said. "Like my currentgift."

"No," he said. "But their effect is not as strong, for me."

I wondered how he had discovered that.

He turned the hushflower blossom over and pressed the flat of the blade to the place where all the petals joined. The flower broke apart, separating petal by petal. He ran the tip of the knife down the center of each petal, and they uncurled, one by one, flattening. It was like magic.

I watched him as the potion bubbled, first red with hushflower, then orange when he added the honeyed saltfruit, and brown when the sendes stalks went in, stalks only, no leaves. A dusting of jealousy powder and the whole concoction turned red again, which was nonsense, impossible. He moved the mixture to the next burner to cool, and turned toward me.

"It's a complex art," he said, waving a hand to encompass the vials, beakers, iceflowers, pots, everything. "Particularly the painkiller, because it uses hushflower. Prepare one element incorrectly and you could poison yourself. I hope you know how to be precise as well as brutal."

He felt the side of the pot with the tip of his finger, just a light touch. I could not help but admire his quick movement, jerking his hand back right when the heat became too much, muscles coiling. I could already tell what school of combat he had trained in: zivatahak, school of the heart.

"You assume I'm brutal because that's what you've heard," I said. "Well, what about what I've heard about you? Are you thin-skinned, a coward, a fool?"

"You're a Noavek," he said stubbornly, folding his arms. "Brutality is in your blood."

"I didn't choose the blood that runs in my veins," I replied. "Any more than you chose your fate. You and I, we've become what we were made to become."

I knocked the back of my wrist against the door frame, so armor hit wood, as I left.

The next morning I woke when the painkiller wore off, just after sunrise, when the light was pale. I got out of bed the way I usually did, in fits and starts, pausing to take deep breaths like an old woman. I dressed in my training clothes, which were made of synthetic fabric from Tepes, light but loose. No one knew how to keep the body cool like the Tepessar people, whose planet was so hot no person had ever walked its surface bare-skinned.

I leaned my forehead against a wall as I braided my hair, eyes shut, fingers feeling for every strand. I didn't brush my thick dark hair anymore, at least not the way I had as a child, so meticulous, hoping each stroke of the bristles would coax it into perfect curls. Pain had stripped me of such indulgences.

When I finished, I took a small currentblade-turned off, so the dark tendrils of current wouldn't wrap around the sharpened metal-into the apothecary chamber down the hall where Akos had moved his bed, stood over him, and pressed the blade to his throat.

His eyes opened, then widened. He thrashed, but when I pushed harder into his skin, he went still. I smirked at him.

"Are you insane?" he said, his voice husky from sleep.

"Come now, you must have heard the rumors!" I said cheerfully. "More importantly, though: Are you insane? Here you are, sleeping heavily without even bothering to bar your door, a hallway away from one of your enemies? That is either insanity or stupidity. Pick one."

He brought his knee up sharply, aiming at my side. I bent my arm to block the strike with my elbow, pointing the blade instead at his stomach.

"You lost before you woke," I said. "First lesson: The best way to win a fight is to avoid having one. If your enemy is a heavy sleeper, cut his throat before he wakes. If he's softhearted, appeal to his compassion. If he's thirsty, poison his drink. Get it?"

"So, throw honor out the window."

"Honor," I said with a snort. "Honor has no place in survival."

The phrase, quoted from an Ogran book I had once read-translated into Shotet, of course; who could read Ogran?-appeared to scatter the sleep from his eyes in a way that even my attack had not been able to manage.

"Now get up," I said. I straightened, sheathed the knife at the small of my back, and left the room so he could change.

By the time we finished breakfast, the sun had risen and I could hear the servants in the walls, carrying clean sheets and towels to the bedrooms, through the passages that ran parallel to every east-west corridor. The house had been built to exclude the ones who ran it, just like Voa itself, with Noavek manor at the center, surrounded by the wealthy and powerful, and the rest around the edge, fighting to get in.

The gym, down the hall from my bedroom, was bright and spacious, a wall of windows on one side, a wall of mirrors on the other. A gilded chandelier dangled from the ceiling, its delicate beauty contrasting with the black synthetic floor and the stacks of pads and practice weapons along the far wall. It was the only room in the house my mother had allowed to be modernized while she lived; she had otherwise insisted on preserving the house's "historical integrity," down to the pipes that sometimes smelled like rot, and the tarnished doorknobs.

I liked to practice-not because it made me a stronger fighter, though that was a welcome side benefit-but because I liked how it felt. The heat building, the pounding heart, the productive ache of tired muscles. The pain I chose, instead of the pain that had chosen me. I once tried to spar against the training soldiers, like Ryzek had as he was learning, but the current's ink, coursing through every part of my body, caused them too much pain, so after that I was left to my own devices.

For the past year I had been reading Shotet texts about our long-forgotten form of combat, the school of the mind, elmetahak. Like so many things in our culture, it was scavenged, taking some of Ogran ferocity and Othyrian logic and our own resourcefulness and melding them until they were inextricable. When Akos and I went to the training room, I crouched over the book I had left near the wall the day before, Principles of Elmetahak: Underlying Philosophy and Practical Exercises. I was on the chapter "Opponent-Centered Strategy."

"So in the army, you trained in zivatahak," I said, to begin.

When he gave me a blank look, I continued.

"Altetahak-school of the arm. Zivatahak-school of the heart. Elmetahak-school of the mind," I said. "The ones who trained you didn't tell you in what school you were trained?"

"They didn't care about teaching me the names for things," Akos replied. "As I already told you."

"Well, you trained in zivatahak, I can tell by the way you move."

This seemed to surprise him. "The way I move," he repeated. "How do I move?"

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a Thuvhesit hardly knows himself," I said.

"Knowing how you fight isn't knowing yourself," he retorted. "Fighting isn't important if the people you live with aren't violent."

"Oh? And what mythical people are those? Or are they imaginary?" I shook my head. "All people are violent. Some resist the impulse, and some don't. Better to acknowledge it, to use it as a point of access to the rest of your being, than to lie to yourself about it."

"I'm not lying to mysel-" He paused, and sighed. "Whatever. Point of access, you were saying?"

"You, for example." I could tell he didn't agree with me, but at least he was willing to listen. Progress. "You're quick, and not particularly strong. You're reactive, anticipating attacks from anyone, everyone. That means zivatahak, school of the heart-speed." I tapped my chest. "Speed requires endurance. Heart endurance. We took that one from the warrior-ascetics of Zold. The school of the arm, altetahak, means 'strength.' Adapted from the style of fringe mercenaries. The last, elmetahak, means 'strategy.' Most Shotet don't know it anymore. It's a patchwork of styles, of places."

"And which one did you study in?"

"I'm a student of all," I said. "Of anything." I straightened, moving away from the book. "Let's begin."

I opened a drawer in the far wall. It squeaked as old wood scraped against old wood, and the tarnished handle was loose, but inside the drawer were practice blades made of a new, synthetic material, hard but also flexible. They would bruise a person, if used effectively, but they wouldn't break skin. I tossed one to Akos, and took one for myself, holding it out from my side.

He mirrored me. I could see him adjusting, putting a bend in his knees and shifting his weight so he looked more like me. It was strange to be observed by someone so thirsty to learn, someone who knew that his survival depended on how much he took in. It made me feel useful.

This time I made the first move, swiping at his head. I pulled back before I actually made contact, and snapped, "Is there something fascinating about your hands?"

"What? No."

"Then stop staring at them and look at your opponent."

He raised his hand, fist to cheek, then swung at me from the side with the practice blade. I stepped away and turned, fast, smacking him in the ear with the flat of the knife handle. Wincing, he twisted around, trying to stab me when he was off balance. I caught his fist and held on tight, stalling him.

"I already know how to beat you," I said. "Because you know that I'm better than you are, but you're still standing right here." I waved my hand, gesturing to the area right in front of my body. "This area is the part of me that has the most potential to hurt you, the part where all my strikes will have the greatest impact and focus. You need to keep me moving so you can attack outside of this area. Step outside of my right elbow so it's hard for me to block you. Don't just stand there, letting me cut you open."

Instead of making a snide comment back to me, he nodded, and put his hands up again. This time, when I moved to "cut" him, he shuffled out of the way, dodging me. And I smiled a little.

We moved that way for a while, turning circles around each other. And when I noticed that he was breathless, I called him off.

"So tell me about your marks," I said. My book was still open to the chapter on "Opponent-Centered Strategy," after all. There was no opponent quite like one you had marked on your arm.

"Why?" He clasped his left wrist. The bandage was gone today, displaying an old kill mark near his elbow-the same one I had seen seasons ago in the Weapons Hall, but it was finished now, stained the color of the marking ritual, a blue so dark it was almost black. There was another mark beside it, still healing. Two slashes on a Thuvhesit boy's arm. A unique sight.

"Because knowing your enemies is the beginning of strategy," I said. "And apparently you have already faced some of your enemies, twice-marked as you are."

He turned his arm away from his body so he could frown at the dashes, and said, like it was a recitation, "The first was one of the men who invaded my home. I killed him while they were dragging my brother and me through the feathergrass."

"Kalmev," I said. Kalmev Radix had been one of my brother's chosen elite, a sojourn captain and a news feed translator-he had spoken four languages, including Thuvhesit.