Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark #1)(84)

I guided my hand toward it, Teka breathing heavily over my shoulder. All around us was shouting and running, but no one had reached us yet. I felt a pinch as the sensor drew my blood, and I waited for Ryzek’s door to spring open.

It didn’t.

I withdrew my hand and tried again with my left.

The door still didn’t open.

“You can’t open it?” I said to her. “With your gift?”

“If I could, we wouldn’t have needed you!” she cried. “I can turn it on and off, not unlock it—”

“It’s not working. Let’s go!”

I grabbed Teka’s arm, too frantic to care about the pain my touch caused, and dragged her down the hallway. She screamed, “Run!” and Jorek bashed the guard he was fighting with the handle of his currentblade. He sliced another guard’s armor, then chased us into the sitting room. We ran through the passages again.

“They’re in the walls!” I heard. Lights burned through the cracks in every secret door and panel. The whole house was awake. My lungs burned from the effort of sprinting. I heard scraping behind us as one of the panels opened.

“Teka! Go find Tos and Akos!” I said. “Turn left, then right, go down the stairs, turn right again. The code for the back door is 0503. Say it back to me.”

“Left, right, down, right—0503,” Teka repeated. “Cyra—”

“Go!” I screamed, shoving her back. “I get you in, you get him out, remember? Well, you can’t get him out if you’re dead! So go!”

Slowly, Teka nodded.

I planted myself in the middle of the passage. I heard, rather than saw, Teka and Jorek run away. Guards stormed into the narrow passage, and I let the pain build inside me until I could hardly see. My body was so flush with shadows that I was darkness manifest, I was a sliver of night, utterly empty.

I screamed, and threw myself at the first guard. The burst of pain hit him as my hand did, and he yelled, collapsing at my touch. Tears streamed down my face as I ran toward the next one.

And the next one.

And the next one.

All I needed to do was buy the renegades some time. But it was too late for me.





CHAPTER 25: CYRA


“I SEE YOU’VE MADE some updates to the prison,” I said to Ryzek.

My mother and father had taken me here, to the row of cells beneath the amphitheater, when I was young. It wasn’t the official Voa prison, but a special, hidden compound in the city’s center, made only for enemies of the Noavek family. It had been stone and metal, like something out of a history textbook, the last time I saw it.

Now the floors were dark, made of a material like glass, but harder. There was no furniture in my cell except for a metal bench and a toilet and sink, hidden behind a screen. The wall that separated me from my brother was made of thick glass, with a slot for food, now open so we could hear each other speak.

I was on the bench now, wedged in the corner with my legs sprawled in front of me. I was heavy with exhaustion and dark with pain, bruised from where Vas had grabbed me in the hidden hallways, to stop me from hurting more of his guards. A lump on the back of my head—from where he had slammed me into the wall to knock me out—throbbed.

“When did you turn traitor?” Ryzek was in the hallway, dressed in his armor. The pale overhead lights tinted his skin blue. He put his arm against the glass that separated us, and leaned in.

It was an interesting question. I didn’t feel like I had “turned” so much as finally moved in the direction I had already been facing. I stood, and my head pounded, but it was nothing compared to the pain of the currentshadows, which had gone haywire, moving so fast I couldn’t keep track of them. Ryzek’s eyes followed them over my arms and legs and face like they were all he could see. They were all he had ever been able to see.

“You know, you never actually had my loyalty to begin with,” I said, walking toward the glass. We were just feet apart, but I felt untouchable, for the moment. Finally, I could say whatever I wanted to him. “But I probably wouldn’t have acted against you if you had just left us alone, like I told you to. When you went after Akos, just to control me, though . . . well. It was more than I could accept.”

“You are a fool.”

“I’m not nearly as foolish as you believe.”

“Yes, you’ve certainly proved that.” He laughed, gesturing wide, to the prison all around us. “This is clearly the result of your brilliant mind.”

He leaned into the barrier again, and hunched so he was closer to my face, his breath fogging the glass.

“Did you know,” Ryzek said, “that your beloved Kereseth knows the Thuvhesit chancellor?”

I felt a pang of fear. I did know. Akos had told me about Orieve Benesit when we watched the footage of the chancellor declaring herself. Ryzek didn’t know that, of course, but he also wouldn’t have brought it up to begin with if Akos had made it out of Noavek manor with the renegades. So what had happened to him? Where was he now?

“No,” I said, my throat dry.

“Yes, it’s very inconvenient that the Benesit sisters are twins—it means I don’t know which one to strike at first, and Eijeh’s visions have made it very clear that I must kill them in a particular order for the most desirable outcome,” Ryzek said, smiling. “His visions have also made it clear that Akos knows the information I need to accomplish my goal.”