didn’t have a few vulgarities thrown in to keep it interesting.”
I laugh.
“You have come here with Isae Benesit?” he says. “Captain Morel told me she had brought two friends with her on this visit.”
“Yes. I was close with her sister, Ori,” I say. “Orieve, I mean.”
He makes a soft, sad sound, lips closed. “I am deeply sorry for your loss, then.”
“Thank you,” I say. For now I can push the grief aside. It’s not something this man would be comfortable seeing, so it wouldn’t show even if I wanted it to, thanks to my gift.
“You must be very angry,” he says. “The Shotet have taken your father, your brothers, and now your friend?”
It’s a strange thing to say. It assumes too much.
“It’s not ‘the Shotet’ who did it,” I say. “It was Ryzek Noavek.”
“True.” He focuses on the frosty windows again. “But I can’t help but think that a people who allow themselves to be ruled by a tyrant such as Ryzek Noavek deserves to shoulder some of the blame for his behavior.”
I want to disagree with him. Supporters of the Noaveks, sure, I can blame them. But the renegades, the exiles, the poor and sick and desperate people living in the neighborhood around that building we used as a safe house? They’re just as victimized by Ryzek as I am. After visiting the country, I’m not sure I can even think of “the Shotet” as one thing anymore. They’re too varied to be lumped together. It would be like saying that the daughter of a Hessan farmer and a soft-handed Shissa doctor are the same.
I want to disagree, but I can’t. My tongue is stuck, my throat swollen with my stupid currentgift. So I just look passively at the Assembly Leader and wait for him to talk again.
“I am meeting with Miss Benesit later today,” he says at last. “I hope that you will attend. She is a bit thorny at times, and I sense your presence would soothe her.”
“That’s one of the things I like about her,” I say. “That she’s ‘thorny.’”
“I am sure in friendship it is an entertaining quality.” He smiles. “But in political discussions, it is often an impediment to progress.”
I give in to the instinct to step back from him.
“That depends on how you define ‘progress,’ I suppose,” I say, keeping my tone light.
“I hope that we will agree on a definition by the day’s end,” he says. “I will leave you to look at the plants, Miss Kereseth. Do stop by the Tepessar area—it’s too hot to go in, but you’ve never seen anything like those specimens, I promise you.”
I nod, and he takes his leave.
I remember where I’ve seen those eyes before: in pictures of the intellectual elite on Kollande. They take some kind of medicine designed to keep someone awake for longer than usual without suffering fatigue, and light-eyed people’s irises often turn purple from prolonged use. That he’s from Kollande doesn’t tell me much about him—I’ve never been there, though I know the planet is wealthy and not particularly concerned about its oracles. But those eyes do. He’s someone who values advancement over his own safety or vanity. He’s focused and smart. And he probably thinks he knows better than the rest of us.
I understand, now, what Isae meant when she said it was me, Ast, and her against the galaxy. It’s not just the Shotet we’re up against, it’s the Assembly, too.
Ast, Isae, and I sit on one side of a polished glass table, and the Assembly Leader sits on the other. It’s so clean that his water glass, and the pitcher next to it, almost look like they’re floating. I rammed my legs against the edge when I sat down, because I wasn’t sure where the table ended. If it’s supposed to disarm me, it worked.
“Let us first talk through what happened in Shotet,” the Assembly Leader says as he pours himself a glass of water.
We’re in the outer ring of the Assembly ship, which is arranged in concentric circles. All the outer walls are made of glass that turns opaque when the ship rotates to face the sun, so nobody’s corneas get burned. The walls to my left are opaque now, and the room is heating up, so there’s a ring of sweat around my collar. Ast keeps pinching the front of his shirt and pulling it away from his body to keep it from sticking.
“I am sure the footage the sights provided is more than sufficient,” Isae says, clipped.
She’s wearing chancellor clothes: a heavy Thuvhesit dress, long-sleeved, buttoned up to her throat. Tight boots that made her grimace while she laced them. Her hair is pinned to the back of her head, and shines like she lacquered it there. If she’s hot—which she must be, that dress is made for Thuvhe, not … this—she doesn’t show it. Maybe that’s why she put such a dense layer of powder on her skin before we left.
“I understand your reticence to discuss it,” the Assembly Leader says. “Perhaps Miss Kereseth can give us a summary instead? She was there, too, correct?”
Isae glances at me. I fold my hands in my lap and smile, remembering that the Assembly Leader’s preferred texture was a warm breeze. That’s how I need to be, too—all warm and casual, a layer of sweat you don’t mind, a gust of air that almost tickles.
“Of course,” I say. “Cyra Noavek challenged her brother Ryzek to a duel, and he accepted. But before either of them could hit each other, my brother Eijeh appeared—” I choke. I can’t say the rest.
“Sorry,” I say. “My currentgift isn’t being cooperative.”
“She can’t always say what she wants to say,” Isae clarifies. “Which is that Eijeh was holding a knife to my sister’s throat. He killed her. The end.”
“And Ryzek?”
“Also killed,” Isae says, and for a tick I think she’s going to tell him what she did on the ship, how she went into the storage room with a knife and teased a confession out of him and then stuck him with the blade like it was a stinger. But then she adds, “By his own sister, who then dragged the body aboard, I assume to keep it from being defiled by the mob that had erupted into chaos.”
“And now, his body is …?”
“Drifting through space, I assume,” Isae says. “That is the preferred Shotet method of burial, no?”
“I don’t familiarize myself with Shotet customs,” the Assembly Leader says, leaning back in his chair. “Very well, that is all as I expected. As far as how the rest of the galaxy has responded … well, I have been fielding messages from the other leaders and representatives since your sister’s death was broadcast. They have interpreted the killing as an act of war, and wish to know how we will proceed from here.”
Isae laughs. It’s the same bitter laugh she gave Ryzek before she cut him open.
“We?” she says. “Two seasons ago, I asked for support from the Assembly to declare war on Shotet in light of the killing of our falling oracle, and I was told that the ‘civil dispute’ between Shotet and Thuvhe, as you have termed it, is an intraplanetary matter. That I needed to handle it internally. And now you’re
