The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(43)

CHAPTER 19: CYRA


I STOOD WITH THE Shotet exiles around the screens in the mess hall, all of us pressed together. Enemies, friends, lovers, strangers, we were shoulder to shoulder, watching as the sojourn ship was ripped to shreds.

It was a hundred things, the sojourn ship. Our history. Our freedom. A sacred vessel. A workplace. A symbol. A project. An escape.

A home.

As I watched the footage play again and again, I thought of clearing my mother’s closet of all her clothes and shoes, too small and dainty for me to wear myself, for the most part. I had found secrets tucked away in her pockets and shoeboxes: love letters from my father, when he was a gentler man; labels from bottles of pain medication and wrappers from the drugs she took to escape; another woman’s lip paint, smeared on a scarf, from an affair. The story of her imperfect life, told in stains and scraps of paper.

And I had filled that space with my own story, my splattered stove, the suits of armor that glinted when the lights I strung over my bed struck them, and the rows upon rows of footage from other worlds, dancing and fighting and building and fixing. They were not just objects, but escapes when pain made it hard for me to stay in my own body. My comforts in despair.

It had also been the place where I fell in love.

And now it was gone.

The fourth time the footage played, I felt fingers against mine. I pulled away instinctively, not wanting to transfer my currentgift to someone else, but the hand found mine, insistent. I turned to see Teka at my side, her eye welling up with tears. Maybe she wanted my pain, or maybe she wanted to offer me comfort; either way, I held on to her, keeping most of my currentgift to myself, as much of it as I could.

Her grip lasted only for a moment or two, but it was enough.

We stood and watched the footage play again, and we did not look away.

Later, I pressed my face to my pillow and sobbed.

Akos climbed into my bunk and curled his body around mine, and I allowed it.

“I told them to evacuate,” I said. “I’m the reason there were so many people on that ship—”

“You tried to help,” Akos said. “All you did was try to help.”

It wasn’t reassuring. What a person tried to do didn’t matter—what mattered was the result. And the deaths of hundreds were the result here. That loss was my responsibility.

In a fair world I would have marked every single life on my arm, to carry them around forever. But I did not have enough skin for that.

Akos held me tighter, so I could feel his heartbeat against my spine, as I began to sob again.

I fell asleep with the press of wet fabric against my face.





CHAPTER 20: CISI


“CONFIRMED, CODE 05032011. PROCEED.”

Some moments you put into a little file in your mind because you know they’re important, and what Isae Benesit says to signal the attack on Voa is one of those. She says it clearly, every consonant crisp, and she doesn’t hesitate. When she’s done she pushes back from the desk where she was speaking to General Then, stands up, and walks away, brushing off Ast’s outstretched hand.

It doesn’t take long for the attack to start. For the anticurrent blast Pitha loaned us to fly toward Thuvhe on a special ship designed for just this purpose. The crew of the ship is Pithar, but it’s General Then, the commander of Thuvhe’s armed forces, who actually presses the button, per Thuvhesit law.

I imagine the hatch doors opening at his touch, and the weapon—long and narrow, with squared edges—falling, falling, falling. There’s poetry in it, in that poetry can be raw, and cruel, and strange, like this.

Isae, Ast, and I watch it from her quarters. The Assembly ship is facing the sun, then, so the walls are opaque, and they show an image of Shissa in the swirling snow. The little flakes get stuck to the sights that captured the footage, every now and then, so the image is blurry most of the time, white blobs right up against the dark night sky. Between them, though, I see the buildings hanging from the clouds like drops of rain suspended in time. Shissa isn’t home, but it’s where I went to school, where I found a life away from my mom and her constant prophecies, so I still love it there.

Shissa is what I’m looking at when the news footage comes up on the screens, and I see only a flash of the sojourn ship’s destruction before closing my eyes against it. Isae stifles a sharp sound.

“What is it?” Ast says. No robotic guide beetle can help him with something on a screen, after all.

“There were people around it, did you see?” Isae says. “Why were there people around it?”

I turn up the volume on the news feed just in time to hear: “Initial reports suggest there were a few hundred Shotet around the craft, attempting to evacuate the city—”

I turn the screen off.

“A few . . .” Isae gasps. “A few hundred—”

Ast shakes his head. “Stop that, Isae. Casualties were still minimal.”

“Minimal,” I say, and it’s all I can manage. General Then’s estimates said casualties would be around three dozen. Not hundreds.

“Yeah,” Ast says, eyeballing me. “Minimal. Compared to what could have been. That’s why you suggested the sojourn ship, remember?”

There’s a flow of words in my mind—hundreds, men, women, children, old, young, middle-aged, kind, cruel, desperate, people people people—but I stop it, like two hands clapping around an insect to kill it. I am better at this than I should be, after too many tragedies poisoned my memories. It’s how I survive.