An "izit" was slang for IZ, a measurement about the width of my smallest finger. In fact, sometimes I used my fingers to measure things when I didn't have a beamer on hand.

"Really precise measuring there," another overseer responded, this one short, a small paunch bubbling over the top of his pants. "'An izit or two,' honestly. That's like saying 'a planet or two.'"

"1.467IZ," the first overseer said. "Like it'll make a difference to the current."

"You've never really embraced the subtlety of this art," a woman said, striding through the sun to measure its distance from Othyr, one of the closer planets to the galaxy's center. Everything about her was strict, from the line of her short hair across her jaw to the starched shoulders of her jacket. For a moment she was encased in yellow-white light, standing in the middle of the sun. "And an art it is, though some would call it a science. Miss Noavek, how honored we are to have you with us. And your . . . companion?"

She didn't look at me as she spoke, just bent to point the beam of light at the band of Othyr's equator. The other Examiners jumped at the sight of me, and in unison backed up a step, though they were already across the room. If they had known how much effort it was taking me to stand in one place without fidgeting and crying, they might not have worried.

"He's a servant," I said. "Carry on, I'm just observing."

They did, in a way, but their careless chatter was gone. I put my hands in fists and wedged them between my back and the wall, squeezing so tightly my fingernails bit my palms. But I forgot about the pain when the Examiners activated the hologram of the current; it wove its way through the simulated planets like a snake, but formless, ethereal. It touched every planet in the galaxy, Assembly-governed and brim alike, and then formed a strong band around the edge of the room like a strap holding the planets in. Its light shifted always, so rich in some places it hurt my eyes to stare at it, and so dim in others it was only a wisp.

Otega had taken me here as a child, to teach me how the scavenge worked. These Examiners would spend days observing the flow of the current.

"The current's light and color is always strongest over our planet," I said to Akos in a low voice. "Wrapped three times around it, Shotet legend says-which is why our Shotet ancestors chose to settle here. But its intensity fluctuates around the other planets, anointing one after another, with no discernible pattern. Every season we follow its leading, then we land, and scavenge."

"Why?" Akos murmured back.

We cull each planet's wisdom and take it for our own, Otega had said, crouched down beside me at one of our lessons. And when we do that, we show them what about them is worthy of their appreciation. We reveal them to themselves.

As if in response to the memory, the currentshadows moved faster beneath my skin, surging and receding, the pain following wherever they went.

"Renewal," I said. "The scavenge is about renewal." I didn't know how else to explain. I had never had to before. "We find things that other planets have discarded, and we give them a new life. It's . . . what we believe in."

"Seeing activity around P1104," the first Examiner said, hunching even lower over one of the hunks of rock near the edge of the galaxy. His body looked almost like a dead insect, curled into a husk. He touched a section of the current where the color-green now, with hints of yellow-swirled darker.

"Like a wave about to hit shore," the sharp-edged woman purred. "It may build or fizzle, depending. Mark it for observation. But right now my guess for the best scavenge planet is still Ogra."

The scavenge is a kindness, Otega had whispered in my child-ear. To them as well as to us. The scavenge is one of the current's purposes for us.

"Much good your guessing will do," the first overseer said. "Didn't you say His Highness specifically requested information about current activity over Pitha? Barely a wisp there, but I doubt that matters to him."

"His Highness has his own reasons for requesting information, and they are not ours to question," the woman said, glancing at me.

Pitha. There were rumors about that place. That buried deep under the water planet's oceans, where the currents were not as strong, were advanced weapons, unlike anything we had seen. And with Ryzek determined to claim not just Shotet's nationhood, but control over the entire planet, weapons would surely be useful.

Pain was building behind my eyes. That was how it started, when my currentgift was about to hit me harder than usual. And it had been hitting me harder than usual whenever I thought about Ryzek waging war in earnest, as I stood passive at his side.

"We should go," I said to Akos. I turned to the Examiners. "Best wishes on your observations." Then, on a whim, I added, "Don't lead us astray."

Akos was quiet as we walked back through the passages. Akos was always quiet, I realized, unless he was asking questions. I didn't know that I could have been so curious about someone I hated, though maybe that was the point: he was trying to decide if he hated me.

Outside, the drumbeats petered out, as they always did. But the silence seemed to signal something to Akos-he stopped under one of the fenzu lights. Only one insect still drifted in the glass orb above us, glowing palest blue, a sign that it was close to death. There was a pile of dead shells beneath it, insects with their legs bent in the air.

"Let's go to the festival," he said. He was too thin, I thought. There were shadows under his cheekbones where flesh should have been, in a face so young. "No Ryzek. Just you and me."

I stared down at his upturned palm. He offered touch to me so freely, without realizing how rare it was. How rare he was, to a person like me.

"Why?" I said.

"What?"

"You've been nice to me recently." I furrowed my brow. "You're being nice to me now. Why? What's in it for you?"

"Growing up here really has warped you, hasn't it?"

"Growing up here," I clarified, "has made me see the truth about people."

He sighed, like he disagreed with me but didn't want to bother to argue. He sighed that way a lot. "We spend a lot of time together, Cyra. Being nice is a matter of survival."

"I'll be recognized. The currentshadows are memorable, even if my face is not."

"You won't have any currentshadows. You'll be with me." He cocked his head to the side. "Or are you really that uncomfortable with touching me?"

It was a challenge. And maybe a manipulation. But I imagined my skin being neutral in a dense crowd, people brushing up against me without feeling pain, smelling the sweat in the air, letting myself disappear among them. The last time I had been close to a crowd like that had been before my first sojourn, when my father hoisted me in the air. Even if Akos did have ulterior motives, maybe it was worth the risk, if I got to leave.

I put my hand in his.

A little while later we were back in the passages again, dressed in festival clothes. I wore a purple dress-not my mother's finery this time, but something cheap that I didn't mind ruining-and I had painted my face to disguise it, with a thick diagonal stripe that covered all of one eye and most of the other. I had bound my hair back tightly, painting it blue to keep it in place. Without the currentshadows, I wouldn't look like the Cyra Noavek that the city of Voa knew.

Akos was dressed in black and green, but since he wasn't recognizable, he hadn't bothered with any disguise.

When he saw me, he stared. For a long time.

I knew how I looked. My face was not a relief to the eyes, the way the faces of uncomplicated people were; it was a challenge, like the blinding color of the currentstream. How I looked wasn't important, particularly as my appearance was always obscured by the shifting veins of the current. But it was strange to see him notice at all.

"Put your eyes back in your head, Kereseth," I said. "You're embarrassing yourself."

Our arms clasped hand-to-elbow, I led him along the east edge of the house and down the stairs. I felt the beams for the carved circles that warned of secret exits. Like the one near the kitchens.

Feathergrass grew right up to the house there, and we had to push through it to reach the gate, which was locked with a code. I knew it. It was my mother's birthday. All of Ryzek's codes were related to my mother in some way-the day of her birth, the day of her death, my parents' wedding day, her favorite numbers-except closest to his rooms, where the doors were locked with Noavek blood. I didn't go near there, didn't spend more time with him than I had to.

I felt Akos's eyes on my hand as I typed in the code. But it was only the back gate.

We walked down a narrow alley that opened up to one of the main thoroughfares of Voa. My body clenched, for a moment, as a man's eyes lingered on my face. And a woman's. And a child's. Everywhere eyes caught mine and then shifted away.

I grabbed Akos's arm, and pulled him in to whisper, "They're staring. They know who I am."

"No," he said. "They're staring because you've got bright blue paint all over your face."

I touched my cheek, lightly, where the paint had dried. My skin felt rough and scaly. It hadn't occurred to me that today it meant nothing if people stared at me.

"You're kind of paranoid, you know that?" he said to me.

"And you're starting to sound kind of cocky, for someone I routinely beat up."

He laughed. "So where do we go?"

"I know a place," I said. "Come on."

I led him down a less crowded street on the left, away from the city's center. The air was full of dust, but soon the sojourn ship would launch, and we would have our storm. It would wash the city clean, stain it blue.

The official, government-sanctioned festival activities took place in and around the amphitheater in the center of Voa, but that wasn't the only place where people celebrated. As we dodged elbows on a narrow street where the buildings fell together like lovers, there were people dancing, singing. A woman adorned with fake jewels stopped me with a hand, a luxury I had never enjoyed; it almost made me shiver. She set a crown of fenzu flowers-named so because they were the same color as the insects' wings, blue gray-on my head, grinning.

We turned into a crowded marketplace. Everywhere there were low tents or booths with worn awnings, people arguing and young women touching their fingers to necklaces they couldn't afford. Weaving through the crowd were Shotet soldiers, their armor shining in the daylight. I smelled cooked meat and smoke, and turned to smile at Akos.

His expression was strange. Confused, almost, like this was not a Shotet he had ever imagined.

We walked hand in hand down the aisle between the booths. I paused at a table of plain knives-their blades weren't made of channeling material, so the current wouldn't flow around them-with carved handles.

"Does the lady know how to handle a plain knife?" the old man at the booth asked me in Shotet. He wore the heavy gray robes of a Zoldan religious leader, with long, loose sleeves. Religious Zoldans used plain knives because they believed currentblades were a frivolous use of the current, which deserved more respect-the same basic belief as the most religious Shotet. But unlike a Shotet religious leader, this man would not find his religious practice in the everyday, reworking the world around him. He was likely an ascetic; he withdrew, instead.

"Better than you," I said to him in Zoldan. I spoke Zoldan poorly-a generous way of putting it-but I was happy to practice.

"That right?" He laughed. "Your accent is horrible."

"Hey!" A Shotet soldier approached us, and tapped the tip of his currentblade against the old man's table. The Zoldan man regarded the weapon with disgust. "Shotet language only. If she talks back in your tongue . . ." The soldier grunted a little. "It would not turn out well for her."

I ducked my head so the soldier wouldn't look too carefully at my face.

The Zoldan man said in clumsy Shotet, "I'm sorry. The fault was mine."

The soldier held his knife there for a moment, puffing up his chest like he was displaying mating feathers. Then he sheathed his weapon, and kept walking through the crowd.

The old man turned back to me, his tone now more businesslike: "These are the best weighted ones you'll find in the square-"

He talked to me about how the knives were made-from metal forged in the northern pole of Zold, and reclaimed wood from old houses in Zoldia City-and part of me was listening, but the other part was with Akos as he stared out at the square.

I bought a dagger from the old man, a sturdy one with a dark blade and a handle built for long fingers. I offered it to Akos.

"From Zold," I said. "It's a strange place, half covered in gray dust from fields of flowers. Takes some getting used to. But the metal is strangely flexible, despite being so strong . . . what? What is it?"

"All of this stuff," he said, gesturing to the square itself. "It's from other planets?"

"Yeah." My palm was sweaty where it pressed against his. "Extraplanetary vendors are allowed to sell in Voa during the Sojourn Festival. Some of it is scavenged, of course-or we wouldn't be Shotet. Repurposing the discarded, and all that."

He had stopped in the middle of everything and turned toward me.

"Do you know where it's all from just by looking at it? Have you been to all these places?" he said.

I scanned the market, once. Some of the vendors were covered head to toe in fabric, some bright and some dull; some wore tall headpieces to draw attention to themselves, or spoke in loud, chattering Shotet I hardly understood, because of the accents. Lights erupted from a booth at the end, showering the air in sparks that disappeared as quickly as they came. The woman standing behind it almost glowed for all the fair skin she showed. Another stand was surrounded by a cloud of insects so dense I could hardly see the man sitting at it. What use did anyone have for a swarm of insects, I wondered.

"All nine Assembly nation-planets," I said with a nod. "But no, I can't tell where it's all from. Some of it, though, is obvious. Look at this-"

Standing on a nearby counter was a delicate instrument. It was an abstract shape, different from every angle, composed of tiny panes of an iridescent material that felt like something between glass and stone.

"Synthetic," I said. "Everything from Pitha is, since it's covered in water. They import materials from their neighbors and combine them. . . ."

I tapped one of the tiny panes, and a sound like thunder came from the belly of the instrument. I ran my fingers over the rest, and they left music in their wake like waves. The melody was light, like my touch had been, but when I flicked one of the glass panels, drums sounded. Each panel seemed to glow with some kind of internal light.

"It's supposed to simulate the sound of water for homesick travelers," I said.

When I looked at him again, he was smiling at me hesitantly.

"You love them," he said. "All these places, all these things."

"Yeah," I said. I had never thought of it that way. "I guess I do."

"What about Thuvhe?" he said. "Do you love it, too?"

When he said the name of his home, comfortable with the slippery syllables that I would have stumbled over, it was easier to remember that though he spoke Shotet fluently, he was not one of us, not really. He had grown up encased in frost, his house lit by burnstones. He probably still dreamt in Thuvhesit.

"Thuvhe," I repeated. I had never been to the frozen country in the north, but I had studied their language and culture. I had seen pictures and footage. "Iceflowers and buildings made of leaded glass." They were people who loved intricate, geometric patterns, and bright colors that stood out in the snow. "Floating cities and endless white. Yes, there are things I love about Thuvhe."

He looked suddenly stricken. I wondered if I had made him homesick.

He took the dagger that I had offered him and looked it over, testing the blade with his fingertip and wrapping his hand around the handle.

"You handed over this weapon so easily," he said. "But I could use this against you, Cyra."

"You could try to use it against me," I corrected him quietly. "But I don't think you will."

"I think you might be lying to yourself about what I am."

He was right. Sometimes it was too easy to forget that he was a prisoner in my house, and that when I was with him, I was serving as a kind of warden.

But if I let him escape right now, to try to get his brother home, as he wanted, I would be resigning myself to a lifetime of agony again. Even as I thought it, I couldn't bear it. It was too many seasons, too many Uzul Zetsyvises, too many veiled threats from Ryzek and half-drunk evenings at his side.

I started down the aisle again. "Time to visit the Storyteller."

While my father had been busy shaping Ryzek into a monster, my education had been in Otega's hands. Every so often she had dressed me head to toe in heavy fabric, to disguise the shadows that burned me, and taken me to parts of the city my parents would never have allowed me to go.

This place was one of them. It was deep in one of the poorer areas of Voa, where half the buildings were caving in and the others looked like they were about to. There were markets here, too, but they were more temporary, just rows of things arranged on blankets, so they could be gathered and carried away at a moment's notice.

Akos drew me in by my elbow as we walked past one of them, a purple blanket with white bottles on it. They had glue from peeled-off labels still on them, attracting purple fuzz.

"Is that medicine?" he asked me. "Those look like they're from Othyr."

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

"For what ailment?" he asked.

"Q900X," I replied. "Known more colloquially as 'chills and spills.' You know, because it affects balance."

He frowned at me. We paused there in the alley, the festival sounds far off. "That disease is preventable. You don't inoculate against it?"

"You understand that we are a poor country, right?" I frowned back at him. "We have no real exports, and hardly enough natural resources to sustain ourselves independently. Some other planets send aid-Othyr, among them-but that aid falls into the wrong hands, and is distributed based on status rather than need."