Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(59)
“The oracles prohibit outside intervention in their sessions, but this footage was submitted by a local child as the last ships arrived,” a voice-over said in Othyrian. Most of the Assembly broadcasts were in Othyrian, since most people outside Shotet understood it. “Inside sources suggest that the oracles will be discussing another set of legal restrictions imposed by the Assembly last week, as the Assembly moves closer to requiring all oracle discussions be publicized.”
It was an old complaint of his mother’s, that the Assembly was always trying to interfere with the oracles, that they couldn’t stand that there was one thing left in the galaxy they couldn’t regulate. And no trifling thing, he knew, the fates of the favored families, the futures of the planets in their endless variety. Maybe a little regulation wouldn’t hurt the oracles, Akos thought, and it felt like a betrayal.
Akos couldn’t read most of the Shotet characters at the bottom of the screen, translating the voice-over. Just the ones for oracle and Assembly. Cyra said that something about the Shotet character for Assembly expressed Shotet bitterness at not being acknowledged by the Assembly. Decisions about the planet Thuvhe and Shotet shared—about trade, or aid, or travel—were made by Thuvhe and Thuvhe alone, leaving Shotet at the mercy of their enemies. They had reason enough to be bitter, Akos supposed.
He heard water running. Cyra was showering.
The Tepes footage showed two ships. The first one clearly wasn’t a Thuvhesit ship—too sleek for that, all swooping shapes and perfect plates. But the other one looked like it could have been a Thuvhesit vessel, its fuel burners armed for cold instead of heat with a system of vents. Like gills, he’d always thought.
The hatch on that ship opened, and a spry woman in a reflective suit hopped down. When no others joined her, he knew it had to be the Thuvhesit ship. Every nation-planet had three oracles, after all, except Thuvhe. With Eijeh in captivity and the falling oracle dying in the Shotet invasion, only Akos’s mother was left.
The sun on Tepes filled the sky like the whole planet was on fire, full and rich with color. Heat came off the planet’s surface in ripples. He knew his mom’s gait as she led the way to the monastery where the oracles were meeting. Then she disappeared behind a door and the footage cut off, the feed moving to a famine on one of the outer moons.
He didn’t know how to feel. It was his first real glimpse of home in a long time. But it was also a glimpse of the woman who hadn’t so much as warned her own family about what she knew was coming to them. Who hadn’t shown up for it, even. She had let her husband die, let the falling oracle sacrifice herself, let a son—now Ryzek’s very best weapon—be kidnapped, instead of offering herself in his place. Fates be damned, Akos thought. She was supposed to be their mother.
Cyra opened the bathroom door to let out the steam, and pulled her hair over one shoulder. She was dressed, this time in dark training clothes.
“What is it?” she asked. She followed his gaze to the screen. “Oh, you—you saw her?”
“I think so,” Akos replied.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you try to avoid feeling homesick.”
Homesick was the wrong word. Lost was the right one—lost out in the nothingness, among people he didn’t understand, with no hope of getting his brother home except murdering Suzao Kuzar as soon as it was legal again.
Instead of telling her all that, he said, “How do you know that?”
“We never speak Thuvhesit, even though you know I could.” She lifted a shoulder. “It’s the same reason I don’t keep any likenesses of my mother around. Better, sometimes, to just . . . keep moving forward.”
Cyra ducked back into the bathroom. He watched her lean close to the mirror to poke at a pimple on her chin. Dab water from her forehead and neck. The same thing she always did, only now he noticed—noticed that he knew it, that was; knew her routines, knew her.
And liked her.
CHAPTER 18: CYRA
“FOLLOW ME,” OTEGA SAID when I met her outside the kitchens that evening. Clutched in her fist was the renegade’s knife, the white tape showing between her fingers. She had found my renegade.
I put up my hood, and walked in her footsteps. I was well covered—pants tucked into boots, jacket sleeves covering my hands, hood shading my face—so that I wouldn’t be recognized. Not every Shotet knew what I looked like, since my face was not plastered in every public building and important room the way Ryzek’s was, but once they saw a currentshadow pool in my cheek or the crook of my arm, they knew me. Today I did not want to be known.
We walked from the Noavek wing, past the public practice arenas and the swimming pool—there so younger Shotet could learn to swim in preparation for sojourns to the water planet—past a cafeteria that smelled of burnt bread, and several janitor’s closets. By the time Otega’s walk slowed and her grip tightened on the renegade’s knife, we had walked all the way to the engine deck.
It was so loud from the proximity to the engines that if we had tried to speak to each other, we would have had to shout to be heard. Everything smelled like oil.
Otega took me away from the noise somewhat to the technicians’ living quarters, near the loading bay. What faced us was a long, narrow hallway with a doorway every few feet on either side, marked with a name. Some were decorated with strings of fenzu lights or little burnstone lanterns in all different colors, or collages of comic sketches drawn on engine schematic pages, or grainy pictures of family or friends. I felt like I had entered another world, one completely separate from what I knew to be Shotet. I wished Akos was here to see it. He would have liked it here.