The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(106)

I locked eyes with Sifa, standing in the center of the arena. Eijeh had decided the time of his vision based on the color of the light, he said. Well, with this ship shielding Voa from the sun, it looked very much like dusk.

The attack was happening now.

“I wouldn’t bother with the control room,” I said, surprised by how remote my own voice sounded to me.

The soldiers who had shown Sifa into the arena fled, as if they could outrun a ship that large before the anticurrent blast hit. And perhaps there was no shame in that, in dying with hope.

I hoisted myself over the barrier that separated me from the arena, and dropped neatly to the packed earth below. I didn’t know why, except that I didn’t want to be standing above the arena when the anticurrent blast hit. I wanted to be where I belonged: here, with grit in the soles of my boots, where people who loved to fight stood.

And I loved to fight.

But I also loved to live.

I wouldn’t say I had never thought of dying as some kind of relief, when the pain was at its worst, when I lost my true mother to the darkness I didn’t yet understand. And I wouldn’t say that living was always, or even often, a pleasant experience for me. But the discovery and rediscovery of other worlds, the burn and ache of muscles building strength, the feeling of Akos’s warm, strong body against mine, the glint of my mother’s decorative armor at night in the sojourn ship—I loved them all.

I stopped in the middle of the arena, within grasp of Sifa and Yma, but not touching them. I heard Teka’s light footfalls behind me.

“Well,” Teka said. “I suppose it could be worse.”

I would have laughed, if it had been any further from the truth. But for Teka and Yma and me, who had come so close to other, far more horrible ways of dying, I supposed dissolving into an anticurrent blast was not so bad.

“Anticurrent,” I murmured, because the word seemed so strange to me.

I looked at Sifa—at my mother, in whatever way she still was that—and for the first time, she looked genuinely surprised.

“I don’t understand. Anticurrent blasts are light,” I said. “The sojourn ship . . . it was so bright when it was destroyed. How can anticurrent be bright?”

“The current is both visible and invisible,” Sifa said. “It doesn’t always appear to us in a way that we understand.”

I frowned down at my spread palms, where the currentshadows had collected, winding again and again around my fingers like stacks of rings.

The doctor I had seen as a child had suggested that my currentgift came about because I thought I deserved pain, and that everyone else deserved it, too. My mother, Ylira Noavek, had chafed at the mere suggestion. This is not her fault, she had said, before dragging me out of the office.

And Akos—when he had seen the way I kept track of what I had done on my arm, now covered, as always, by armor, he had simply asked me, How old were you?

He had not thought this gift was what I deserved, and neither had my mother. And maybe they were both right—maybe the doctor was the one who had been wrong, the man whose words had been echoing in my mind all my life. Maybe pain was not my currentgift, not at all. Maybe pain was just a by-product of something else.

If the anticurrent was light—

And I was plagued by dark—

Maybe current was my gift.

She is herself a small Ogra, the Ogran dancers had said to me, when they saw my currentgift displayed.

“Does anyone know what the word ‘Ogra’ actually means, in Ogran?” I said.

“It means ‘the living dark,’” Sifa replied.

I laughed, a little, and as a narrow hatch opened on the underside of the ship above us, I raised my shadow-stained hands to the sky.

I pushed my currentshadows up, up, up.

Over the sizzle of the amphitheater’s force field, which Akos had disabled at a touch as he lifted us to safety. His arm had been strong across my back, tightly coiled as a rope.

Over the center of Voa, where I had lived all my life, contained in spotless wood paneling and the glow of fenzu. I felt Ryzek’s hands, a little sweaty as they pressed over my ears, to shield me from the screams of whoever my father was tormenting.

And higher over Voa, over even the fringes of the city where the Storyteller and his sweet purple tea lived, where the renegades had cobbled together a dinner table made of half a dozen other dinner tables.

I didn’t suffer from a lack of fuel. The currentshadows had been so strong all my life, strong enough to render me incapable of attending a simple dinner party, strong enough to bow my back and force tears from my eyes, strong enough to keep me awake and pacing all through the night. Strong enough to kill, but now I understood why they killed. It wasn’t because they drained the life from a person, but because they overwhelmed it. It was like gravity—we needed it to stay grounded, alive, but if it was too strong, it formed a black hole, from which even light could not escape.

Yes, the force of the current was too fierce for one body to contain—

Unless that body was mine.

My body, battered again and again by soldiers and brothers and enemies, but still working its way upright—

My body, a channel for the pure force of current, the hum-buzz of life that brought others to their knees—

Life is full of pain, I had told Akos, trying to draw him back from depression. Your capacity for bearing it is greater than you believe. And I had been right.