The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(48)
Pary settled into the captain’s chair. There was no copilot or first officer that Akos could see, just Pary and a stretch of buttons and switches and levers. Yssa took the seat beside him, though. The forward fuselage was big enough to fit all of them, on bench seats with protective straps. Given what Akos knew about the planet’s tendency to fight back against everything, everywhere, he thought they needed more than some straps to protect them, but nobody had asked him.
“Did the oracle say why she wanted us dragged to her?” Cyra said, while she was strapping herself in. She finished her own buckles and then reached over—unconsciously, it seemed like—to help Cisi with hers. Akos took the seat on her other side, at the end of the bench.
“It’s not for me to ask,” Pary said.
“The oracle is not very . . .” Yssa paused, searching out the word in Othyrian. She asked in Shotet, “How do you say, ‘forthright’?”
Akos repeated the word in Othyrian, for Cisi.
“It is not an oracle’s job to answer questions like those,” Sifa said. “We have only one job, and that is to protect this galaxy. Sorting through the inconsequential information that other people find essential is not up to us.”
“Oh, you mean inconsequential information like ‘You, my youngest son, you’re going to get kidnapped tomorrow’?” Cyra snapped. “Or ‘Isae Benesit is about to murder your brother, Cyra, so you may want to make your peace with him’?”
Akos grabbed a handful of his own leg to steady himself. He wanted to tell Cyra not to use his pain as a weapon against his own mom; he wanted to tell his mom that Cyra had a point. But he felt so heavy with the hopelessness of it that he gave up before he started.
“You demand to know things from the Ogran oracle that you will find out within the day,” Sifa snapped. “You’re angry that you aren’t told what you want to know exactly when you want to know it. What a frustrating existence you must find this, that it doesn’t meet your every need for you instantaneously!”
Cyra laughed. “As a matter of fact, I do find it frustrating.”
She had been this way since the sojourn ship attack, Akos thought. Primed for a fight, no matter what form it came in, no matter who it was with. Cyra was always prickly, and he liked that about her. But this was different. Like she kept throwing herself at a wall in the hope that one of these days, it might finally break her apart.
“Quiet on deck!” Pary announced. “Can’t focus with all of you arguing.”
Yssa joined in the dance of readying the ship, and the way they did it together, Pary and Yssa, made Akos think they had done it a hundred times before. Their arms crossed, fair and freckled against dark and unblemished, and stretched past each other without getting in each other’s way. The choreography of familiarity.
The ship lurched and shuddered as it rose from the ground. The engines roared, and the vines and plants twitched and fluttered like the wind was blowing. Akos watched the flowered vine curl more tightly around its support beam; the plant behind glass curled into itself and glowed orange in warning.
“We’ll be flying above the storms, to avoid their damage,” Pary said as the ship flew up and forward. “It will be rough.”
Akos couldn’t help his own curiosity. They’d been hiding from “the storms” whenever the alarm went off since they arrived on Ogra—almost every day, it felt like. But he’d yet to hear a good description of what the storms were, exactly.
The ship’s flight wasn’t as smooth as a Shotet ship’s. It jerked and shivered, and from what Akos could tell, it was slow. But they got up high enough that he could see the little glowing patches of villages, and then the big, bright splotch of Ogra’s capital city, Pokgo, where the buildings were tall enough to make a jagged horizon.
Their ship turned as it climbed, away from Ogran civilization and toward the stretch of dark that made up the southern forests. There were plenty of glowing things there, as there were everywhere else, but they were covered by dense greenery, so from a distance it was difficult to see anything but void.
The ship jerked up, which made Akos grab blindly for Cyra’s hand. He didn’t mean to squeeze hard, but judging by her laugh, that’s what he was doing. The clear view they’d had of Ogra’s surface was gone, replaced by the dense swirl of clouds. And then, up ahead, color and light coalescing, just like they had when the sojourn ship passed through the currentstream.
A blue line of lightning cut through the cloud layer and stretched down. The ship jostled Akos’s head from side to side so hard he could hear his own teeth clattering together. Another flash, this one yellow, seemed to happen right next to them. Pary and Yssa were shouting things at each other in Ogran. Akos heard retching as someone—Eijeh, probably, he’d always had motion sickness—threw up.
Akos watched as Ogra took the glowing colors the rest of the planet boasted so proudly and hurled them right back, brutal and relentless. As Pary promised, they moved right over the storm, which jostled them all but didn’t down the ship. The acrid smell of vomit, combined with the constant shuddering of his head, made him want to be sick himself, but he tried to keep it down. Even Cyra, who usually loved things that made other people scared out of their minds, looked like she had had enough, her teeth gritted even though he was taking care of her currentgift.