Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(53)

The backup announcer on the ship crackled to life as soon as I finished the question. It was old, a relic from our early sojourns, and it made voices sound tinny and warped.

“The first child of the family Noavek will fall to the family Benesit,” it said. “The truth can be suppressed, but it can never be erased.”

I waited for the voice to continue, but the crackling went dead, the announcer switching off. The ship began to hum again. The woman whose throat was captive to my arm and my blade moaned softly.

“I should arrest you,” I whispered. “Arrest you, and bring you in for questioning.” I tilted my head. “Do you know how my brother interrogates people? He uses me. He uses this.” I pushed more of the shadows toward her, so they collected around my forearm. She screamed.

For a moment, she sounded just like Lety Zetsyvis.

I released her, pulling away from the wall.

The lights on the floor had come to life, making us both glow from beneath. I could see a single bright eye in her head, fixed on me. The overhead lights clicked on, and she sprinted down the hallway, disappearing around a corner.

I had let her go.

I put my hands in fists to keep them from trembling. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. If Ryzek ever found out . . .

I picked up her knife—if it could be called that; it was a jagged metal rod, sharpened by hand, with tape wrapped around the bottom to make a handle—and I started to walk. I wasn’t sure what direction I was going, just that I needed to keep moving. I had no injuries, no evidence that the attack had ever occurred. Hopefully it had been too dark for the security footage to show that I had just let a renegade go free.

What have you done?

I ran through the ship’s hallways, my footsteps echoing for just a few seconds before I dove into a crowd, into chaos. Everything was loud and hurried, like my heart. I stuffed my hands into my sleeves so I wouldn’t touch anyone by accident. I wasn’t going to my quarters. I needed to see Ryzek before anyone else did—I needed to make sure he believed I had not been a part of this. It was one thing to refuse to torture people, but it was another to participate in a revolt. I put the renegade’s knife in my pocket, out of sight.

The soldiers stepped back for me when I reached Ryzek’s rooms on the far side of the ship, the one closest to the currentstream. They directed me to his office, and when I reached the door I wasn’t sure that he would let me in, but he shouted the command right away.

Ryzek stood barefoot in his office, facing the wall. He was alone, a mug of diluted hushflower extract—I recognized it on sight, these days—clutched in one hand. He wasn’t wearing his armor, and when he looked at me, there was chaos in his eyes.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“I . . .” I paused. I didn’t know what I wanted, except to cover myself. “I just came to find out if you were all right.”

“Of course I’m all right,” he said. “Vas killed the two renegades who tried to enter this part of the ship before they could even scream.” He tugged one of the curtains back from the porthole—larger than most, it was almost as tall as he was—and stared out at the currentstream, which had turned dark green. Almost blue, almost time for the invasion, the scavenging, the tradition of our ancestors. “You think the childish actions of a few renegades can harm me?”

I stepped toward him, careful, like he was a wild animal. “Ryzek, it’s all right to be a little rattled when people are attacking you.”

“I am not rattled!” He shouted every word, slamming his mug down on a nearby table. The hushflower blend spilled everywhere, staining his white cuff red.

As I stared at him, I was struck by the memory of his quick, sure hands, fastening the buckles across my lap before my first sojourn, and how he had smiled as he teased me about being nervous. It wasn’t his fault that he had turned out this way, so terrified and so creative with his cruelty. Our father had conditioned him to become this person. The greatest gift Lazmet Noavek had ever given me, even greater than life itself, had been leaving me alone.

I had come at Ryzek with threats, with anger, with disdain, with fear. I had never tried kindness. While my father had relied on well-aimed threats and intimidating silence as his weapons, my mother had always wielded kindness with the deftness of a blade. After all this time, I was still more Lazmet than Ylira, but that could change.

“I’m your sister. You don’t have to be this way with me,” I said, as gently as I could.

Ryzek was staring at the stain on his cuff. He didn’t respond, which I decided was a good sign.

“Do you remember how we used to play with those little figurines in my room?” I said. “How you taught me to hold a knife? I kept making that tight fist and cutting off circulation to my fingertips, and you taught me how to fix it.”

He frowned. I wondered if he did remember—or was that one of the memories he had traded for one of Eijeh’s? Still, maybe he had taken in some of Eijeh’s gentleness when he traded away his pain.

“We weren’t always like this, you and I,” I said.

In his pause, I let myself hope—for a quiet shift in the way he regarded me, for the slow and steady change that our relationship could undergo, if he would just let go of his fear. His gaze found mine and it was almost there, I could see it, I could almost hear it. We could be as we once were.