Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(32)

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.