The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(28)

CHAPTER 12: CISI


“THIS CYRA NOAVEK,” AST says as he turns a smooth stone in his left hand. I had noticed that Ast was always moving, whether bouncing his knees or chewing on the pliable edge of his comb or fidgeting with something between his fingers. “There any chance she’ll agree to the terms?”

I laugh. The idea of Cyra Noavek, who’d kept fighting in the arena even after her own brother peeled skin from her head, handing over her country to Thuvhe without so much as an argument is downright ridiculous.

“Well it’s not like I’ve met her,” Ast says, defensive.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you,” I say, “it’s just, she’d fight with a wall if it got in her way.”

“I don’t anticipate her surrender, no.” Isae gives her response like she’s sitting far away instead of right across the room. She’s at a little table next to the window. We’re on the side of the Assembly satellite facing away from the sun, so the window shows stars and space and currentstream, instead of an image of Thuvhe. It makes Isae look smaller and younger than she usually does. “They aren’t built for surrender, the Shotet. The Assembly Leader was right—they’re like . . . an infestation. You think they’re small, so they’ll be easy to deal with, but they just keep coming and coming. . . .”

I go cold at the word infestation. That’s not a way to talk about people, even if they are on the other side of a war. That’s not the way Isae talks about people, either, not even when she’s angry.

She straightens up, and clasps her hands in her lap.

“I need to decide my next move,” she says. “Assuming the war declaration will go out as planned.”

Ast runs the pad of his thumb over the stone. It’s from his home planet, some brim rock that has a number instead of a name, with air you can’t breathe without a gasper, the slang term for whatever the actual device is called. He spent most of his life with a bulky thing strapped to his face just so he could survive, he told me. You gotta make whatever time you’ve got worth it, he said to me, like he’d said it dozens of times before, like it wasn’t closer to a manifesto than casual conversation.

“I think you need to strike hard,” he says, after a few circles of his thumb. “The Shotet don’t respect anything less. Hit ’em hard or you may as well not hit ’em at all.”

Isae’s head lowers like she’s disappointed, only I know it’s not that, it’s just that she’s bearing a lot of weight. She’s fighting her own war, as well as the war the Assembly planets want, as well as the one against the grief that surges up inside her right where I can see it, making her say and do things she wouldn’t usually say or do.

“I could hit the center of Voa,” she says. “That’s where most of the Noavek supporters live.”

The center of Voa was where we walked to get to the amphitheater. Where I got a cup of tea from one of the vendors, and his eyes crinkled at the corners when he passed it to me. She can’t just—hit the center of Voa.

“You’d take out Ryzek’s lackeys as well as make a statement,” Ast points out. “It’s a good idea.”

“That’s not a military target,” I say.

Ast shakes his head. “There aren’t any Shotet civilians, not really. They all know how to kill. Isae and I know that better than most.”

The attack that took his father was the same one that gave Isae her scars, I’ve learned. And the same one that claimed her parents’ and friends’ lives. Their ship, the ship that had housed Isae most of her life, was boarded by Shotet sojourners who interpreted “scavenging” as “theft and murder.” It made both of them biased in the same way, as well as tying them together in a way I couldn’t quite grasp.

“What weapon will you use?” he says. “A foot army wouldn’t be good strategy against the Shotet, given the skill level of their average citizen.”

“They aren’t citizens of Shotet,” Isae says tautly. “They are in active rebellion against my rightful governance.”

Ast replies quietly, “I know.”

Isae chews on a knuckle, her teeth digging hard into the skin. I want to tug her hand away from her mouth. “I still have to confirm with the Pithar leadership, but it’s their technology we’ll be using. They call it an anticurrent blast. It’s . . . effective. I could aim it at the amphitheater where Ori was killed, and the destruction would radiate outward from there. It would level the building completely.”

My breaths come shallow. This is why I came here, to stop Isae from doing something she’ll regret, to make sure Thuvhe stays on the right path. So I have to calm her down. I have to stop both of them while they’re still building momentum. I push my gift forward in a rolling wave, hitting them both at once. Ast flinches at it, like he always seems to, but Isae doesn’t seem to notice it. I imagine the currentgift water lifting the weight from her body away so she floats, then dragging at her limbs, gentle, as it pulls back to me.

“There are laws against striking at civilian targets unnecessarily,” I say softly.

Isae looks at me lazily, like she’s half-asleep. Her lower lip is streaked red.

“There’s a soldier encampment outside Voa,” I suggest.