Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(123)

“In whatever life there is to come, give your father my greetings.”

This, Akos realized, was his last chance. He put his hand on Vas’s throat. Not even grabbing, just touching, the best he could do. Vas gave him that startled look he’d given before, that pained look. He was bent, leaving a strip of skin exposed beneath his armor, right over the waistband of his pants. And while Akos was touching him—forcing him to feel pain again—he drew the knife he kept in the side of his boot, and stabbed with his left hand. Up, under the armor. Into Vas’s gut.

Vas’s eyes were so wide Akos saw the whites around his bright irises. Then he screamed. He screamed, and tears came into his eyes. His blood was hot on Akos’s hand. They were locked together, Akos’s blade in his flesh, his hands on Akos’s shoulders, their eyes meeting. Together they sank to the ground, and Vas let out a heavy sob.

It took Akos a long time to let go. He needed to make sure Vas was dead.

He thought of his dad’s button in his mom’s hand, its sheen worn away by his fingers, and pulled his knife free.

He’d dreamt of killing Vas Kuzar so many times. The need to do it had been a second heartbeat in his body. In his dreams, though, he stood over the body and raised his knife to the sky and let the blood run down his arm like it was a wisp of the currentstream itself. In his dreams, he felt triumph and victory and vengeance, and like he could finally let his dad go.

In his dreams, he didn’t huddle near the cell wall, scrubbing at his palm with a handkerchief. Shaking so badly he dropped the cloth on the glowing floor.

Vas’s body looked so much smaller now that he was dead. His eyes were still open halfway, and so was his mouth, so Akos could see Vas’s crooked teeth. He swallowed down bile at the image, determined not to throw up.

Ori, he thought. So he stumbled toward the door, and started running.





CHAPTER 37: CYRA


RYZEK TOOK HIS HAND away from his stomach. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, right by his hairline. His eyes, usually so piercing, were unfocused. But then his mouth drew down in a frown that was unexpectedly . . . vulnerable.

“It’s you who made a mistake,” he said, in a higher, softer voice than I had ever heard from him. It was a distinct voice, memorable: Eijeh’s voice. How could both Ryzek and Eijeh be living in the same body, surfacing at different times? “By forcing his hand.”

His hand?

The sound of the crowd around us had changed. No one was even looking at Ryzek anymore. All heads were turned toward the raised platform from which he had just descended, where Eijeh Kereseth now stood alone with a woman in front of him, a knife held at her throat.

I recognized her. Not just from the footage of the kidnapping that had played on screens throughout the city the day she was taken, but from the past day of watching Isae Benesit talk, laugh, eat. This was her double, Orieve Benesit, face unscarred.

“Ah yes, this is the blade I was waiting for,” Ryzek said with a laugh, his natural voice returning. “Cyra, I’d like you to meet Orieve Benesit, chancellor of Thuvhe.”

Her throat was purple with bruises. There was a deep cut in her forehead. But when our eyes locked across that substantial distance, she didn’t look like someone who was afraid for her life. She looked like someone who knew what was coming and intended to meet it with a straight back and a steady look.

Did Ryzek know she wasn’t really the chancellor? Or had she convinced him she was? Either way, it was too late. Too late.

“Ori,” I said. In Thuvhesit, I added, “She tried to come for you.”

I couldn’t tell if she heard me, she was so still.

“Thuvhe is just a playground for the Shotet,” Ryzek said. “It was easily penetrated, its chancellor effortlessly taken by my faithful servants. Soon, its chancellor will not be the only thing we take from it. This planet is ours to be claimed!”

He was rallying his supporters. Their roar was deafening. Their faces twisted with glee. The mania made the currentshadows wrap around my body, tight as ropes binding a prisoner, and I flinched.

“What do you think, Shotet?” Ryzek said, lifting his head to the crowd. “Should the chancellor die at the hand of one of her former subjects?”

Ori, still looking at me, didn’t make a sound, though the amplifier drifted so close to her head it almost hit Eijeh. The one who carried my brother’s horrors inside his head.

The chant began immediately. “Die!”

“Die!”

“Die!”

Ryzek spread his arms wide, like he was basking in the sound. He turned, slowly, beckoning more and more of it, until the thirst for Ori’s death felt like a tangible thing, a weight in the air. Then he held up his hands to quiet them, grinning.

“I think it’s Cyra who will decide when she dies,” he said. He lowered his voice a little. “If I fall—if you don’t supply me with an antidote of some kind—she will fall, too.”

I said weakly, “There is no antidote.”

I could save her. I could tell Ryzek the truth—the truth I had told no one, even Akos, as he begged me to preserve what little hope he had left for his brother—and delay her execution. I opened my mouth to see if the truth would come out, despite my paralysis.

If I told Ryzek the truth—if I saved Ori’s life—we would all be trapped in this amphitheater, surrounded by a sea of Ryzek’s supporters, with no victory to claim for the renegades.