The Fates Divide

THE ESCAPE POD IS only just big enough for the two of us pressed together. As it is, my shoulder is still jammed up against the glass wall. I fumble on the little control panel for the switch that activates the distress signal. It’s lit up pink, and it’s one of only three switches in front of me, so it’s not hard to find. I flip it up and hear a high-pitched whistling, which means the signal is transmitting, Teka said. Now all that’s left to do is wait for Isae to wake up, and try not to panic.

Being on a little transport vessel like the one we just left is nerve-wracking enough for a Hessa girl who’s only left the planet a couple times, but the escape pod is another thing. It’s more window than floor, the clear glass curving up over my head and all the way down to my toes. I don’t feel like I’m looking out at space so much as getting swallowed by it. I can’t think about it or I’ll panic.

I hope Isae wakes up soon.

She’s limp on the bench seat next to me, and her body is framed by a blackness so complete, she really does look like the only thing in the entire universe. I’ve known her only a couple years, since Ori disappeared to take care of her after her face got cut with a Shotet knife. She grew up far away from Thuvhe, on a transporter ship that took goods from one end of the galaxy to the other, whatever they could haul.

It was a good thing Ori had been around to force us to talk to each other, in the beginning. I might never have talked to her otherwise. She was intimidating even without the title, tall and slim and beautiful, scars or no scars, and radiating capability like a machine.

I don’t know how long it takes for her eyes to open. She drifts for a while, staring all bleary at what’s in front of us, which is flat nothing in between the far-off wink of stars. Then she blinks at me.

“Cee?” she says. “Where are we?”

“We’re in an escape pod, waiting for the Assembly to come get us,” I say.

“An escape pod?” She frowns. “What did we need to escape from?”

“I think it’s more that they wanted to escape from us,” I say.

“Did you drug me?” She rubs her eyes with a fist, first the left one and then the right. “You gave me that tea.”

“I didn’t know there was anything in it.” I’m a good liar, and I don’t think twice. She wouldn’t accept the truth—that I wanted to get her away from the rest of my family just as much as Akos did. Mom said Isae was going to try to kill Eijeh the same way she did Ryzek, and I wasn’t willing to risk it. I don’t want to lose Eijeh again, no matter how warped he is now. “Mom warned them you might try to hurt Eijeh, too.”

Isae curses. “Oracles! It’s a wonder we even let them have citizenship, with all the loyalty your mother shows her own chancellor.”

I have nothing to say to that. She’s frustrating, but she’s my mother.

I continue, “They put you in the pod, and I told them I was going with you.”

The scars that cross her face stay stiff while her brow furrows. She rubs them, sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking. She says it helps the scar tissue to stretch out, so one day she’ll be able to move those parts of her face again. That’s what the doctor said, anyway. I once asked her why she just let the scars form instead of getting reconstructive surgery on Othyr. It’s not like she didn’t have the resources. She told me she didn’t want to get rid of them, that she liked them.

“Why?” she finally says after a long pause. “They’re your family. Eijeh’s your brother. Why would you come with me?”

Giving an honest answer isn’t as easy as people say. There are so many answers to her question, all of them true. She’s my chancellor, and I’m not going to oppose Thuvhe, like my brother is. I care about her, as a friend, as … whatever else we are to each other. I’m worried about the wild grief I saw in her right before she killed Ryzek Noavek, and she needs help to do what’s right from now on rather than what satisfies her thirst for revenge. The list goes on, and the answer I choose is as much about what I want her to hear as it is about the truth.

“You asked me if you could trust me,” I finally say. “Well, you can. I’m with you, no matter what. Okay?”

“I thought, after what you saw me do …” I think of the knife she used to kill Ryzek dropping to the floor, and push the memory away. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.”

What she did to Ryzek didn’t disgust me, it worried me. I don’t care that he’s dead, but I do care that she was able to kill him. I don’t try to explain that to her, though.

“He killed Ori,” I say.

“So did your brother,” she whispers. “It was both of them, Cisi. There’s something wrong with Eijeh. I saw it in Ryzek’s head, right before—”

She chokes before she can finish her sentence.

“I know.” I grab her hand and hold on tight. “I know.”

She starts to cry. At first it’s dignified, but then the beast of grief takes over, and she claws at my arms to get away from it, sobbing. But I know, I know as well as anybody that there’s no escape. Grief is absolute.

“I got you,” I say, rubbing circles on her back. “I got you.”

She stops scratching after a while, stops sobbing. Just leans her face into my shoulder.

“What did you do?” she asks, voice muffled by my shirt. “After your dad died, after your brothers …”

“I … I just did things, for a long time. I ate, showered, worked, studied. But I wasn’t really there, or at least, I didn’t feel like I was. But … it was like when feeling comes back to a limb that’s gone numb. It comes back in little prickles, little pieces at a time.”

She lifts her head to look at me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was about to do. I’m sorry I asked you to come see … that,” she says. “I needed a witness, just in case it went wrong, and you were the only one I trusted.”

I sigh, and push her hair behind her ears. “I know.”

“Would you have stopped me, if you knew?”

I purse my lips. The real answer is that I don’t know, but that’s not the one I want to give her, not the one that will make her trust me. And she has to trust me, if I’m going to do any good in the war that’s coming.

“No,” I say. “I know you only do what you have to.”

It was true. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about how simple it had been to her, and the distant look in her eyes as she led me to that storage room, and the perfect hesitation she had shown Ryzek as she waited for just the right moment to stab him.

“They’re not going to take our planet,” she says to me, in a dark whisper. “I won’t let them.”

“Good,” I say.

She takes my hand. We’ve held hands before, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still send a thrill through me when her skin slides over mine. She is still so capable. Smooth and strong. I want to kiss her, but this isn’t the time, not when there’s still Ryzek’s blood drying under her fingernails.

So I just let the touch of her hand be enough, and we stare out together at nothingness.

AKOS FUMBLED WITH THE chain around his neck. The ring of Jorek and Ara’s family was a now-familiar weight right in the hollow of his throat. When he wore armor it made an imprint in his skin, like a brand. As if the mark on his arm wasn’t enough to remind him of what he had done to Suzao Kuzar, Jorek’s father and Ara’s violent husband.

He wasn’t sure why he thought of killing Suzao in the arena now, standing outside his brother’s cell. It was time to decide if Eijeh ought to stay drugged—for how long? Until they got to Ogra? After that?—or if, now that Ryzek was dead, it was safe to risk Eijeh wandering around the ship clearheaded. Cyra and Teka had left the decision up to him and his mom.

His mom was right next to him, her head reaching just a few izits higher than his shoulder. Hair loose and messy around her shoulders, curled into knots. Sifa hadn’t been much of anywhere since Ryzek died, holing up in the belly of the ship to whisper the future to herself, barefoot, pacing. Cyra and Teka had been alarmed, but he told them that’s just how oracles were. Or at least, that was how his mother the oracle was. Sometimes sharp as a knife, sometimes half outside her own body, her own time.

“Eijeh’s not how you remember him,” he said to her. It was a useless warning. She knew it already, for one thing, and for another, she had probably seen him just the way he was now, and a hundred other ways besides.

Still, “I know” was all she said.

Akos tapped the door with his knuckles, then unlocked it with the key Teka had given him and walked in.

Eijeh sat cross-legged on the thin mattress they had thrown into the corner of the cell, an empty tray next to him with the dregs of soup left in a bowl on top of it. When he saw them he scrambled to his feet, hands held out like he might put them in fists and start pummeling. He was wan and red-eyed and shaky.

“What happened?” he said, eyes skirting Akos’s. “W—I felt something. What happened?”

“Ryzek was killed,” Akos replied. “You felt that?”

“Did you do it?” Eijeh asked with a sneer. “Wouldn’t be surprised. You killed Suzao. You killed Kalmev.”

“And Vas,” Akos said. “You’ve got Vas somewhere in that memory stew, don’t you?”

“He was a friend,” Eijeh said.

“He was the man who killed our father,” Akos spat.

Eijeh squinted, and said nothing.

“What about me?” Sifa said, voice flat. “Do you remember me, Eijeh?”

He looked at her like he had only just noticed she was there. “You’re Sifa.” He frowned. “You’re Mom. I don’t—there’s gaps.”

He stepped toward her and said, “Did I love you?”

Akos had never seen Sifa look hurt before, not even when they were younger and told her they hated her because she wouldn’t let them go out with friends, or scolded them for bad scores on tests. He knew she got hurt, because she was a person as well as an oracle, and all people got hurt sometimes. But he wasn’t quite ready for how the look pierced him, when it came, the furrowed brow and downturned mouth.

Did I love you? Akos knew, hearing those words, that he had definitely failed. He hadn’t gotten Eijeh out of Shotet, as he had promised his father before he died. This wasn’t really Eijeh, and what might have restored him was gone, now that Ryzek was dead.

Eijeh was gone. Akos’s throat got tight.

“Only you can know,” Sifa said. “Do you love me now?”

Eijeh twitched, made an aborted hand gesture. “I—maybe.”

“Maybe.” Sifa nodded. “Okay.”

“You knew, didn’t you. That I was the next oracle,” he said. “You knew I would be kidnapped. You didn’t warn me. You didn’t get me ready.”

“There are reasons for that,” she said. “I doubt you would find any of them comforting.”

“Comfort.” Eijeh snorted. “I have no need for comfort.”

He sounded like Ryzek then—that Shotet diction, put into Thuvhesit.

“But you do,” Sifa said. “Everybody does.”

Another snort, but no answer.

“Come here to drug me again, did you?” He nodded to Akos. “That’s what you’re good for, right? You’re a poison-maker. And Cyra’s whore.”

Then Akos’s hands were in fists in Eijeh’s worn shirt, lifting him up, so his toes were just brushing the floor. He was heavy, but not too heavy for Akos, with the energy that burned inside him, energy that had nothing to do with the current.

Akos slammed him into the wall and growled, “Shut. Your. Mouth.”

“Stop, both of you,” Sifa said, her hand on Akos’s shoulder. “Put him down. Now. If you can’t stay calm, you’ll have to leave.”

Akos dropped Eijeh and stepped back. His ears were ringing. He hadn’t meant to do that. Eijeh slid to the floor, and ran his hands over his buzzed head.

“I am not sure what Ryzek Noavek dumping his memories into your skull has to do with being so cruel to your brother,” Sifa said to Eijeh. “Unless it’s just the only way you know how to be, now. But I suggest you learn another way, and quickly, or I will devise a very creative punishment for you, as your mother and your superior, the sitting oracle. Understand?”

Eijeh looked her over for a few ticks, then his chin shifted, up and down, just a little.

“We are going to land in a few days,” Sifa said. “We will keep you locked in here until our descent, at which point we will ensure you are safely strapped in with the rest of us. When we land, you will be my charge. You will do as I say. If you don’t, I will have Akos drug you again. Our situation is too tenuous to risk you wreaking havoc.” She turned to Akos. “How does that plan sound to you?”

“Fine,” he said, teeth gritted.

“Good.” She forced a smile that was completely without feeling. “Would you like anything to read while you’re in here, Eijeh? Something to pass the time?”

“Okay,” Eijeh said with a half shrug.

“I’ll see what I can find.”

She stepped toward him, making Akos tense up in case she needed his help. But Eijeh didn’t stir as she picked up his empty tray, and he didn’t look up at either of them when they left the room. Akos locked it behind him, and checked the handle twice to make sure the lock held. He was breathing fast. That was the Eijeh he remembered from Shotet, the one who walked around with Vas Kuzar like they were born friends instead of born enemies, and the one who held him down while Vas forced Cyra to torture him.

His eyes burned. He shut them.

“Had you seen him that way?” he said. “In visions, I mean.”

“Yes,” Sifa said, quiet.

“Did it help? To know it was coming?”

“It’s not as straightforward as you think,” she said. “I see so many paths, so many versions of people … I’m always surprised to discover which future has come to pass. I am still not sure which Akos I am speaking to, for example. There are many that you could be.”

She lapsed into quiet, and sighed.

“No,” she said, finally. “It didn’t help.”

“I—” He gulped, and opened his eyes, not looking at his mother, but at the wall opposite him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I—I failed him.”

“Akos—” She gripped his shoulder, and he let himself feel the warmth and the strength of her hand for a tick.

The cell that had held Ryzek was scrubbed clean, like nothing had ever happened. In some secret part of himself, he wished Eijeh had died, too. It would be easier than this, the constant reminder of how he’d messed it all up, and couldn’t fix it.

“There’s nothing you—”

“Don’t,” he said, more harshly than he meant to. “He’s gone. And now there’s nothing left to do but—bear it.”

He turned, and left her standing there, caught between two sons who weren’t quite the same as they used to be.

They took turns sitting on the nav deck to make sure the ship didn’t steer straight into an asteroid or another spaceship or some other piece of debris. Sifa had the first shift, since Teka was exhausted from reprogramming the ship in the first place, and Cyra had spent the last several hours mopping up her own brother’s blood. Akos cleared the floor of the galley and rolled out a blanket in the corner, near the medical supplies.

Cyra came to join him, her face scrubbed shiny and her hair in a braid over one shoulder. She lay shoulder to shoulder with him, and for a time neither of them said anything at all, just breathed in time together. It reminded him of being in her quarters on the sojourn ship, how he could always hear when she was up because the tossing and turning stopped and all he could hear were her breaths.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Cyra said.

He turned to face her, propping himself up on one elbow. She had trimmed the hair neatly around the silverskin. He’d gotten used to it now, shining on one side of her head like a mirror. It suited her, really, even if he hated what had happened to her.

Her jaw was set. She started on the straps of the armor that covered her arm, working them back and forth until they were loose. When she shucked it, there was a new cut on her arm, right near her elbow, with a hash through it. He touched it, lightly, with a fingertip.

“You didn’t kill him,” he said to her.

“I know,” she said. “But the chancellor isn’t going to take note of him, and …” She sighed. “I guess I could have gotten some revenge from beyond death, if I had let him go unmarked. Dishonored him by pretending he never existed.”

“But you couldn’t do that,” Akos supplied.

“I couldn’t,” Cyra agreed. “He’s still my brother. His life is still … notable.”

“And you’re upset that you couldn’t punish him.”

“Sort of.”

“Well, if my opinion counts for anything, I don’t think you need to regret showing some mercy,” he said. “I’m just sorry you went to all the trouble of sparing him for me, and then … it didn’t even matter.”

With a heavy sigh, he slumped to the ground again. Just another way that he’d failed.

She laid a hand on him, right over his sternum, right over his heart, with the scarred arm that said so much and so little about her at once.

“I’m not,” she said. “Sorry, I mean.”

“Well.” He covered her hand with one of his own. “I’m not sorry you’ve got Ryzek’s loss marked on your arm, even though I hated him.”

The corners of her mouth twitched up. He was surprised to find that she had chipped off a little piece of his guilt, and he wondered if he’d done the same for her, in his way. They were both people who carried every scrap of everything around, but maybe they could help each other set things down, piece by piece.

It was good he felt this way, he thought. With Eijeh gone, all that he had left to do was meet his fate, and Cyra and his fate were inextricable. He would die for the family Noavek, and she was the last of them. She was a happy inevitability, brilliant and unavoidable.

Acting on impulse, Akos turned and kissed her. She stuck her fingers in one of his belt loops and pulled him tight against her, the way they had been earlier, when they were interrupted. But the door was closed, now, and Teka was fast asleep in some other part of the ship.

They were alone. Finally.

The chemical-floral smell of the ship was replaced with the smell of her, of the herbal shampoo she’d last used in the ship’s shower, and sweat and sendes leaf. He ran potion-stained fingertips down the side of her throat and across the faint curve of her collarbone.

She pushed him over, so she was straddling him, and pinned his hips down for a tick, just to tug his shirt out from under his waistband. Her hands were so warm against him he could hardly breathe. They found the soft give of flesh around his middle, the taut muscle wrapped around his ribs. She undid buttons all the way up to his throat.

He’d thought of this when he helped her take her clothes off before that bath in the renegade safehouse, how it might be to take off their clothes when they weren’t injured and fighting for their lives. He’d imagined something frantic, but she was taking her time, running her fingers over the bumps of his ribs, the tendons on the inside of his wrists as she freed the buttons on his cuffs, the bones that stuck out of his shoulders.

When he tried to touch her back, she pressed him away. That wasn’t how she wanted it just then, it seemed like, and he was happy to give her what she wanted. She was the girl who couldn’t touch people, after all. It sparked something inside him to know that he was the only one she’d done this with—not excitement, but something softer. Tender.

She was his only—and fate said she would be his last.

She pulled back to look at him, and he tugged at the hem of her shirt.

“May I?” he said. She nodded.

He felt suddenly tentative as he started undoing her shirt buttons, from throat to waist. He sat up just enough to kiss the skin he revealed, izit by izit. Soft skin, for someone so strong, soft over hard muscle and bone and steely nerve.

He tipped them over, so he was leaning over her, leaving just enough space between them to feel her warmth without touching her. He stripped his shirt from his shoulders, and kissed her stomach again. He’d run out of shirt to unbutton.

He touched his nose to the inside of her hip and looked up at her.

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes,” she said roughly.

His hands closed over her waistband, and he ran parted lips over the skin he exposed, izit by izit.

THE ASSEMBLY SHIP IS the size of a small planet, wide and round as a floater but so much bigger it’s downright alarming. It fills the windows of the little patrol ship that picked up our escape pod, made of glass and smooth, pale metal.

“You’ve never seen it before?” Isae asks me.

“Only images,” I say.