The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(96)

“You—” I grit my teeth. The word comes out as a growl, forced as hard as I can past the strictures of my throat and mouth.

“So don’t step out of line, Cisi,” he says. “What’s done is done. The attack’s been ordered, and I think now we can begin to get along.”

I want to scream at the unfairness of it, my silence forced by the current, which supposedly gives all life. If it’s such a good thing, why does it strangle me? Why does it torture Cyra? Why does it push away my brother, and empower dictators, and boggle my mother’s mind?

I hear the sharp, clipped tone of Isae’s voice just outside the door. I know, then, what I need to do.

If my gift can’t be overcome, then maybe it needs to be put to use instead.

I push aside my anger, my grief, my worry. I push aside my pain, too, as much as I can. I remember sinking to the bottom of the pool in the temple basement when I learned to swim. The way the water burned my eyes at first. How it lifted my hair away from my head, made it feel soft. How it caressed, and pulsed with its own rhythm. How I could hear my own heartbeat.

Isae told me Ast’s father went by “Wrench.” He maintained their little ship. So maybe it’s not comfortable things that soften Ast, but hard things: the warm metal handle of a tool his dad just put down. The vibration of the ship’s engine in the wall. The prick of a grate under his bare feet.

Ast blinks, slowly.

“Hey,” he says. “Stop.”

“No,” I say. He’s comfortable enough now that I can talk, at least. “You’ve been chastising me for the use of my currentgift since you arrived. You watch it strangle me and you don’t do anything to make sure I’m heard. Well, now I’ll watch it strangle you.”

“You’re controlling her,” Ast says. “I can’t let you.”

The rough sleeve of a maintenance worker’s coveralls, faintly frayed. Engine oil rubbed between two fingers, smooth and faintly sticky. A screw catching in place and tightening, turn after turn.

“You try to get your way, and I try to get mine,” I say, “but neither of us controls her.”

“No, you’re—” He leans back, and closes his eyes. “It’s different.”

“You’re right, my methods are far more effective,” I say softly. “You think I use my gift recklessly. You have no idea how much I hold back.”

I hit him with it again: the shudder of the seat beneath him as his ship passes through an atmosphere. The crinkle of the wrapper that comes around a prepackaged protein cake at a fuel station. I wrap the textures around him, metal and plastic and vapor and grease, until he may as well be living back in that ship.

He sags against the wall and just stares at me.

“You will not get in my way anymore,” I say. “I will guide us away from catastrophe, and you will allow me to.”

The door opens, admitting Isae, dressed in her training clothes. Her face shines with sweat. She smiles at Ast and me, likely thinking we’re making peace. As if peace is what I could have with someone who attacks me, and threatens me, and takes advantage of my inability to speak.

“What’s wrong?” she says, her face falling as she takes in the scene, me tense and upright, hands clenched into fists. Ast sagging, shoulders curled in, eyelids half-closed.

“Tell her,” I say to him. “Tell her what you did to me.”

He stares, his eyes empty.

“Tell. Her,” I say slowly.

“I attacked you,” he says to me. Then, to Isae, “It was me, I attacked her.”

“You—what?” Isae says. “Why?”

“She was interfering,” he says.

I can’t sustain this level of energy for much longer. I pull back on my currentgift with a gasp. When Ast returns to himself, his face crumples into rage. Isae looks stricken.

“I’m sorry, I . . .” I pretend to choke on the words. I let myself falter, and grab my stomach with one arm, wincing. Let her see me as weak, out of control.

“I didn’t mean to,” I say. “But I needed—I needed you to believe me.”

“She’s lying to you!” Ast snaps. “Can’t you see that? She’s using her currentgift to manipulate you, to control you! She’s been doing it this whole time!”

“Look—look at his arm,” I say. “There’s a bite mark, from where I fought back.”

Isae’s jaw tightens. She marches over to him and grabs his arm, pulling him to his feet. He goes where she directs him, maybe knowing that he can’t fight a chancellor, or that I’ve finally beat him. She pushes up his sleeve, and there it is—a perfect impression of my teeth, an uneven half circle.

She drops his arm with a soft moan.

“I—she was trying to contact the Shotet!” he says. “She tried to send a message to—”

“Shut up,” Isae says. She blinks rapidly. “I trusted you. You lied to me. You—I want you arrested. I want you gone.”

I am slipping away. Too tired to stay. But before I go, I look at Ast, and though I know he can’t see it, I smile.





CHAPTER 49: AKOS


AKOS WAS STARING INTO the fire when the door opened the next morning.

He had expected, when Cyra fled without his help, to break down completely. Instead, he felt like all the excess of his life—the agonizing over blood and citizenship and family and fate—had been pared away, like meat cooked away from the bone. And now everything that had been muddled was clear.