The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(85)

“You don’t mind Yssa poking around at your nav center?” I said to Teka, nudging her with my shoulder. We were on the nav deck—it was safe to walk around now that we were through the atmosphere—looking out at the depthless darkness in our path.

I sometimes referred to it as “nothingness,” like most people did, but most of the time, I didn’t think of it that way. Space was not a finite container, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the currentstream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds; this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing; it was everything.

“What? Oh, no, I definitely want to smack her pokey little hands away,” Teka said, narrowing her eye at Yssa, who was still busy with the controls. “But the ship likes her, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

I laughed a little.

It took me a few moments to realize the source of my sudden relief: my currentshadows, which had burrowed under my skin again when we landed on Ogra, now coasted on top of it. Their ache and sting were still present, but so diminished that I was nearly giddy with it. To one who is in pain all the time, even minor differences can be miracles, of a sort.

“We just got pinged by an Assembly patrol,” Yssa announced.

Teka and I exchanged an alarmed look.

“They say they have an old warrant on a craft matching this description,” Yssa said, reading from the nav screen.

“Warrant for what? Being Shotet?” Ettrek asked.

“Could be for drugging and spacing Isae Benesit when we didn’t want to go with her to Assembly Headquarters,” Teka suggested.

“You did what to Isae Benesit?” Yssa said.

“She had just murdered my brother in the hold, what else was I supposed to do?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know . . . give her a medal!” Ettrek said, waving his arms.

I glanced at Eijeh. He was eyeing Ettrek like he was about to reach out and smack him.

It was getting easier to think of Eijeh as two people in one body—or one new, blended person—since I saw so much of my brother, yet so little of him at once. It was Ryzek’s pride that made him chafe against Ettrek cheering his murder, but it was Eijeh’s passivity that tempered his reaction. They had, together, become something . . . else. New, but not necessarily better.

Time would tell.

“Tell them the Ograns lent us this craft and we don’t know about the original crew,” Teka said to Yssa. “Should be convincing if you record your image on the sights. You don’t sound Shotet at all.”

“Okay,” Yssa said. “The rest of you get out of range.”

We stood back while Yssa activated the sights in the nav screen to record her message, in fitful Othyrian. She was a talented liar, for an Ogran.

It would take days to get from Ogra to Urek. I spent most of my time leaning over the table in the galley, drawing a map of Noavek manor, floor by floor. I went through the servants’ passages in my memory, again and again, feeling in the dark for notches and circles and false panels. I told myself it would be useful for the mission ahead of us, as well as a good way to avoid Sifa, but those weren’t the only reasons I did it. I felt like re-creating the place on paper was a way of purging myself of it, room by room. When I was done with this, that place would no longer exist to me.

At least, that was the theory.

When I was finished, I ordered Eijeh—I had taken to referring to him by that name, because that was the body he was in, and he hadn’t yet objected—into the galley. The others had been confused by my inclusion of Eijeh in our little group, but I just told them I wanted to bring the oracles along, and no one asked any further questions.

He stepped into the room with a wariness to his expression that made me think, unexpectedly, of Akos. Ignoring the sharp feeling that brought to my throat, I pointed at the drawings of Noavek manor, labeled by floor in my jagged, unsteady handwriting.

“I want you to check these for accuracy,” I said. “It’s difficult to re-create a place from memory.”

“Maybe you want to spend your days wading through memories of Noavek manor,” Eijeh said, sounding more like Ryzek in that moment, “but we do not.”

“I do not give a shit what you want,” I snapped. “This is the problem you have, the problem you’ve always had. You think you have hurt worse than anyone else in the galaxy. Well, no one cares about your story of woe! There is a war going on. Now check! The damn! Drawings!”

He stared at me for a few moments, then stepped toward the table and bent over the drawings. He surveyed the first one briefly, then reached for the pen I had left at the edge of the table, and started redrawing the lines around the trophy room.

“I don’t know Lazmet nearly as well as you do,” I said, when I had calmed somewhat. “Is there anything you can recall about him that might help us get to him? Strange habits, particular proclivities . . . ?”

Eijeh was silent for a while, stepping to the right to look at the next drawing. I wondered if I would have to bully him into answering my question the way I had bullied him into checking my maps, but then he spoke.

“He reads mostly history,” he said, in a strange, soft voice I had not heard from him before. “He’s obsessed with texture—all his rugs and clothes have to be soft. I heard him scolding one of the staff for starching his shirts too much once. She made them too stiff.” He gulped, and scratched out one of the doorways I had marked, drawing it on the other side of a bedroom. “And he loves fruit. He used to have one of his transports smuggle in a particular variety from Trella—altos arva. It’s often boiled down and used in smaller quantities as a sweetener, because most people can’t handle how sweet it is raw. The rest of this looks fine.”