Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(49)

This was the cost of the same softness that had made him look at me with sympathy earlier that day instead of disgust: madness. To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.

“You don’t make any sense to me,” I said to him. “It’s like the more terrible things you find out about a person, or the more terrible a person is to you, the kinder you are to them. It’s masochism.”

“Says the person who’s been scarring herself for things she was coerced into doing,” he said wryly.

It wasn’t funny, what either of us was saying. And then it was. I grinned, and after a moment, so did he. A new grin—not the one that told me he was proud of himself, or the one that he forced when he felt like he needed to be polite, but a thirsty, crazed kind of smile.

“You really don’t hate me for this,” I said, lifting up my left arm.

“No, I don’t.”

I had experienced only a few different reactions to what I was, what I could do. Hatred, from those who had suffered at my hand; fear, from those who hadn’t but might; and glee, from those capable of using me for it. I had never seen this before. It was almost like he understood.

“You don’t hate me at all,” I said in almost a whisper, afraid to hear the answer.

But his answer came steadily, like it was obvious to him: “No.”

I found, then, that I wasn’t angry anymore about what he had done to me, to get Eijeh out. He had done it because of the same quality, in him, that made him so accepting of me now. How could I fault him for it?

“All right.” I sighed. “Be up early tomorrow, because we’ll need to train harder if you expect to get your brother out of here.”

His water glass was marked with fingerprints around the base. I took it from him.

He frowned at me. “You’ll help me? Even after what I did to you?”

“Yeah.” I drained the water glass, and set it back down. “I guess I will.”





CHAPTER 15: AKOS


AKOS RAN THROUGH THE memory of his almost-escape with Eijeh over and over again:

He’d run through the corridors in the walls of the Noavek house, stopping where the walls joined to peek through cracks and figure out where he was. He had spent a long time in the dark, gulping dust and catching splinters in his fingers.

Finally he got to the room where Eijeh was kept—triggering some sensor without meaning to, as Ryzek told him later. But at the time he hadn’t known. He had just stuck his fingers in the lock that held Eijeh’s door shut. Most doors these days were locked by the current, and his touch could unlock them. Wrist cuffs, too. That was how he had gotten free to kill Kalmev Radix in the feathergrass.

Eijeh had stood by a barred window, high over the manor’s back gate. There was feathergrass there, too, tufts swaying in the wind. Akos wondered what Eijeh saw there—their dad? He didn’t know how feathergrass worked for other people, since it didn’t do anything to him anymore.

Eijeh had turned to him, taking him in bit by bit. It had only been two seasons since they had seen each other, but they had both changed—Akos was taller, thicker, and Eijeh had gone ashen and thin, curly hair matted in places. He wobbled a little, and Akos caught him by the elbows.

“Akos,” Eijeh had whispered. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t—”

“It’s okay,” Akos said. “It’s okay, I’ll get us out of here, you don’t need to do anything.”

“You . . . you killed that man, that man who was in our house—”

“Yeah.” Akos knew the man’s name: Kalmev Radix, now just a scar on his arm.

“Why did this happen?” Eijeh’s voice broke. Akos’s heart broke. “Why didn’t Mom see it coming?”

Akos didn’t remind him that she probably had. No point to it, really.

“Don’t know,” he had said. “But I’m getting you out if it kills me.”

Akos put his arm around his brother, holding him mostly upright as they walked out of the room together. His hand found the top of Eijeh’s head as they ducked into the passage, to keep him from hitting it. Eijeh had heavy footsteps, and Akos had been sure that someone would hear them through the walls.

“It’s s’posed to be me saving you,” Eijeh whispered at one point. Or the closest to a whisper as he could get; he’d always been terrible at sneaking.

“Who says? Some kind of manual on brotherly conduct?”

Eijeh had laughed. “You didn’t read yours? Typical.”

Also laughing, Akos had pushed open the door at the end of the passage. Waiting for them in the kitchens, cracking his knuckles, was Vas Kuzar.

A week after the sojourn ship launched and sailed for the currentstream, Akos went to the public training room to practice. He could have used the empty room above Cyra’s quarters, but lately she’d taken to watching footage up there. Mostly it was of people from other planets fighting, but a week ago he caught her imitating an Othyrian dancer, all pointed toes and fingers fluttering. She’d gotten so grouchy with him after that, he didn’t want to risk it again.

He didn’t even need to check the crumpled map Cyra had drawn for him on their second night. The training room was dim and near empty, just a few others lifting weights at the far end. Good, he thought. People knew him in Shotet as the kidnapped Thuvhesit, the one who Ryzek’s Scourge couldn’t hurt. Nobody gave him any grief—probably because they were afraid of Cyra—but he didn’t enjoy the staring.