Empress of a Thousand Skies(31)

He held up the newly sharpened knife and examined its edge. The silence stretched. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” he said eventually. “Every time it’s for the worst.”

He handed it back to her. In the reflection of the blade she saw the damage done by the octoerces: a plum-colored scar that covered half her face, and burst blood vessels that made her entire right eye red. It gave her speckled, hazel iris a dark brown color.

“Do you think of those moments?” she asked. “The moments that changed you?”

“The order does not encourage recall. It’s the reason we turn off our cubes, as part of our vows. Even our fellow Fontisians don’t seem to understand that memories cloud judgment. They make one . . . weak.”

Rhee wondered what he could possibly mean. Memories were the foundations for people’s lives. Who would she be without her memories? Without the crystal clear moments with her family, preserved forever in her cube?

“What was it like? Growing up the way you did?”

“You’re not asking what it was like. You’re asking what made me this way.” Dahlen almost smiled; his mouth moved as if it had been touched by something bitter. “Erawae was a territory to which we did not belong. But there was no place for fear or sadness when Vodhan walked beside you. He knew every move, every intention of my heart.”

“How do you know he exists?” Rhee asked. “How can you be sure?”

“You do not doubt your ancestors. I do not doubt my god.” Rhee could tell by the way Dahlen’s eyes went cold that there would be no more conversation. “We should not delay any longer,” he said.

They gathered along the chain-link fence that surrounded the site: dozens of large, jagged crystals arranged in a semicircle atop a grass knoll. They were easily three times Dahlen’s height, some of them even taller—but all of them had a beautiful cloudy quality to them, and reflected the light in such a way that all the colors of the spectrum were trapped in the crystal formations. No one knew how they’d got here; early civilizations couldn’t have had the technology to move something so impossibly heavy. It was thought to be a religious site for an ancient species, perhaps one that had retreated to another planet.

Rhee saw the image of her own face projected above the crystals. Hundreds of people had gathered, possibly to mourn Rhiannon, possibly just because they hoped to tell future generations that they had been there. So many witnesses, she thought, as the gates swung open, and from here she could see the crowd surge. The smell of incense hung in the air.

She moved to join them, but Dahlen stopped her. “You won’t be dissuaded.”

He spoke flatly, but she knew it was a question. She shook her head.

Something moved behind his eyes, an expression gone too quickly for her to decipher. It was as if a sigh had moved through him in the form of a shadow. “Grip the knife in your hand and drive the blade up, here, into his kidney,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it against the spot just under his rib cage. His stomach was hard; he was breathing heavily. “He won’t survive. Do not wait to check.”

Rhee pulled back. Stunned. Confused. The same hand that was close to Dahlen’s vibrant body was about to take a man’s life.

A life for a life. For all the lives, of her mother and sister and father.

“Let’s go,” he said, then led her toward the entrance. The crowd made a path as it caught on that she was Marked, not knowing the disfigurement was on account of the octoerces. Some were polite in trying to conceal their horror, but others turned or shrank away from her. During the Great War, Fontis had dropped its biological weapon first, though Kalu retaliated—and the result was a mass die-off from radiation and cancer near all the drop sites. Those who survived were changed, and they passed the mutations down through their lineage. And their children, if they had children, would be Marked—scars, boils, health problems—each generation worse off than the last. They saw the ugliness of war when they saw her.

She didn’t miss the way they looked at Dahlen, and how their eyes lingered over his tattoos.

At the entrance, the stream of people narrowed, but she moved freely after the crowd gave her a wide berth. A Tasinn, his face wide and the shape of a mooncake, nodded at her to enter. Dahlen forked to the right, around to the other side of the wrought iron fence where the rest of the crowd stood. She was pushed forward by the force of people behind her, but she kept her eyes on Dahlen until he was swallowed by the masses.

Around her, people were chattering in languages she couldn’t understand. Now she was too hot; it was so crowded she could almost imagine that she was back on Nau Fruma pushing her way toward the marketplace. But the mood wasn’t happy or carefree. There was nothing to celebrate.

Instead of families and merchants, the crowd was made up of children, many younger than her, all of them pushing forward like a single living organism. Hundreds of people were weeping, and Rhee felt as moved as she was disturbed. Did they truly mourn her? Or were they here to partake in spectacle, to say they had been at the vigil for the Rose of the Galaxy?

These were her people—the ones she would serve, dedicate her life to, just like her father had—but she didn’t know them, didn’t know what they were thinking or what they feared. When this was all behind her, she would think of them, always. But not a moment sooner. Not until Andrés Seotra took his last breath.