Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(107)

“My brother doesn’t inflict pain for no reason,” I said.

Isae snorted.

“I’m serious,” I said. “He is a peculiar kind of monster. He fears pain, and has never enjoyed watching it. It reminds him that he can feel it, I think. You can take comfort in that—he’s not likely to hurt her senselessly, without cause.”

Cisi wrapped her hand around Isae’s and held tightly, without looking at her. Their clasped hands rested on the floor between them, fingers interlaced so I could tell Cisi’s skin from Isae’s only by its darker shade.

“My guess is that whatever he intends to do with her—which we can reasonably assume is execution—it will be public, and it will be intended to lure you to him,” I said. “He wants to kill you, even more than her, and he wants it to be on his terms. Trust me, you don’t want to fight him on his terms.”

“We could use your help,” Akos said.

“My help is already yours,” I replied.

I set my hand on top of his, and squeezed. Like a reassurance.

“The trick will be persuading the renegades,” Akos said. “They don’t care about rescuing a Benesit child.”

“Let me handle them,” I said. “I have an idea.”

“How many of the stories I’ve heard about you are true?” Isae said. “I see how you cover your arm. I see what you can do with your gift. So I know that some of what I’ve been told must be true. How can I trust you, if that’s the case?”

I got the feeling, looking at her, that she wanted the world around her to be simple, including the people in it. Maybe she had to feel that way, carrying the fate of a nation-planet on her shoulders. But I had learned that the world did not become something just because you needed it to.

“You want to see people as extremes. Bad or good, trustworthy or not,” I said. “I understand. It’s easier that way. But that isn’t how people work.”

She looked at me for a long time. Long enough for even Cisi to fidget where she sat.

“Besides, whether you trust me or not makes no difference to me,” I said, at last. “I am going to rip my brother to pieces either way.”

At the bottom of the stairs, when we were all still cloaked in the darkness of the stairwell, I pinched Akos’s sleeve to hold him back. It wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see his look of confusion. I waited until Isae and Cisi were out of hearing distance before I stepped back, releasing him, letting the currentshadows build between us like smoke.

“Something wrong?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Just . . . give me a moment.”

I closed my eyes. Ever since I had woken up after the interrogation with shadow on top of my skin instead of beneath it, I had been thinking of Dr. Fadlan’s office, of how my gift came to be. It seemed, like most things in my life, tied to Ryzek. Ryzek feared pain, so the current had given me a gift he would fear, maybe the only gift that could truly protect me from him.

The current had not given me a curse. And I had become strong under its teaching. But there was no denying another thing Dr. Fadlan had said—that on some level, I felt like I, and everyone else, deserved pain. One thing I knew, deep in my bones, was that Akos Kereseth did not deserve it. Holding on to that thought, I reached for him, and touched my hand to his chest, feeling fabric.

I opened my eyes. The shadows were still traveling over my body, since I wasn’t touching his skin, but my entire left arm, from shoulder to the fingertips that touched him, was bare. Even if he had been able to feel my currentgift, I still would not have been hurting him.

Akos’s eyes, usually so wary, were wide with wonder.

“When I kill people with a touch, it’s because I decide to give them all the pain and keep none of it for myself. It’s because I get so tired of bearing it that all I want to do is set it down for a while,” I said. “But during the interrogation, it occurred to me that maybe I was strong enough to bear it all myself. That maybe no one else but me could. And I never would have thought of that without you.”

I blinked tears from my eyes.

“You saw me as someone better than I was,” I said. “You told me that I could choose to be different than I had been, that my condition was not permanent. And I began to believe you. Taking in all the pain nearly killed me, but when I woke up again, the gift was different. It doesn’t hurt as much. Sometimes I can control it.”

I took my hand away.

“I don’t know what you want to call it, what we are to each other now,” I said. “But I wanted you to know that your friendship has . . . quite literally altered me.”

For a few long seconds, he just stared at me. There were new things to discover in his face still, even after so long spent in close company. Faint shadows under his cheekbones. The scar that ran through his eyebrow.

“You don’t know what to call it?” he said, when he finally spoke again.

His armor hit the ground with a clatter, and he reached for me. Wrapped an arm around my waist. Pulled me against him. Whispered against my mouth: “Sivbarat. Zethetet.”

One Shotet word, one Thuvhesit. Sivbarat referred to a person’s dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb. And the Thuvhesit word, I had never heard before.

We didn’t quite know how to fit together, lips too wet, teeth where they didn’t belong. But that was all right; we tried again, and this time it was like the spark that came from friction, a jolt of energy through my body.