chair. You know the most about flying.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Currentgifts go haywire on Ogra,” Teka said to me. “We’re not sure how yours will do, so you sit in the back. Keep the Kereseth boys in line.”
Sifa had escorted Eijeh to a landing seat already. He was strapped in and staring at the floor. I sighed, and made my way down to the main deck. Akos and I sat across from Eijeh, and I pulled the straps across my chest and lap. Akos fumbled with his own, but I didn’t help him—he knew how to do it, he just needed to practice.
I watched Teka and Sifa as they prepared for landing, poking buttons and flicking switches. It seemed routine for Teka. That was reassuring, at least. I didn’t want to free-fall through a hostile atmosphere with a captain who was panicking.
“Here we go!” Teka shouted, and with only that warning, all the lights in the ship switched off. The engine stopped its whirring and humming. Dark atmosphere struck the nav window like a wave of Pithar rain, and for a few long moments I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to scream.
Ogra’s gravity caught us, and it was worse, much worse than feeling nothing. My stomach and my body felt suddenly separate, one floating up and the other pulling hard to the ground. The craft shuddered, metal plates squeaking against their screws, the steps to the nav deck rattling. My teeth clacked together. It was still too dark to see anything, even the currentshadows that twisted around my arms.
Next to me, Akos let out a litany of curses under his breath, in three languages. I couldn’t speak. My flesh weighed too heavily on my bones.
A slamming sound, then, and the engine whirred again. Before the lights turned on, though, the planet lit up beneath us. It was still dark—neither sun nor currentstream could possibly penetrate Ogra’s atmosphere—but it was dotted with light, veined with it. The ship’s control panel glowed, and the horrible, heavy falling sensation disappeared as the ship moved forward instead of down, down, down.
And then, hot and sharp and strong: pain.
CYRA WAS SCREAMING.
Akos’s hands were shaking from the landing, but still undoing the straps that held him in place, almost without his permission. Right when Akos was free he launched himself from his seat and slid to his knees in front of Cyra. The shadows had pulled away from her body in a dark cloud, the same way they had when Vas forced her to touch him, down in the amphitheater’s prison where she had almost lost her life. Her hands were buried in her hair, clenched. She looked up at him, and a strange smile twisted her face.
He put his hands on hers. The shadows looked like smoke, in the air, but they pulled back into Cyra’s body like dozens of strings yanked at once.
Cyra’s odd smile was gone, and she was staring at their joined hands.
“What will happen when you let go?” she said quietly.
“You’ll be just fine,” he said. “You’ll learn to control it. You can do that now, remember?”
She let out an airy laugh.
“I can hang on as long as you like,” he said.
Her eyes hardened. When she spoke, it was with gritted teeth. “Let go.”
Akos couldn’t help but think back to something he’d read in one of the books Cyra had put in his room on the sojourn ship. He’d had to read it through a translator, because it was written in Shotet, and it had been called Tenets of Shotet Culture and Belief.
It said: The most marked characteristic of the Shotet people is directly translated as “armored,” but outsiders might call it “mettle.” It refers not to courageous acts in difficult situations—though the Shotet certainly hold valor in high regard—but to an inherent quality that cannot be learned or imitated; it is in the blood as surely as their revelatory language. Mettle is bearing up again and again under assaults. It is perseverance, acceptance of risk, and the unwillingness to surrender.
That paragraph had never made more sense to him than it did right now.
Akos obeyed. At first, when the currentshadows reappeared, they formed the smoky cloud around her body again, but Cyra set her jaw.
“Can’t meet the Ograns with a death cloud around me,” she said.
Her eyes held his as she breathed deeply. The shadows began to worm their way beneath her skin, traveling down her fingers, wriggling up her throat. She screamed again, right into her teeth, half a dozen izits from his face. But then the breath hissed out, same as it had come in, and she straightened. The cloud was gone.
“They’re back to how they were before,” he said to her. “Like they were when I met you.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s this planet. My gift is stronger here.”
“You’ve been here before?”
She shook her head. “No. But I can feel it.”
“Do you need a painkiller?” he said.
Another headshake. “Not yet. I have to readjust sometime. May as well be now.”
Teka was talking on the nav deck, in Othyrian. “Ship ID Renegade Transport, Captain Surukta requesting permission to land.”
“Captain Surukta, permission granted to landing area thirty-two. Congratulations on your safe arrival,” a voice responded over the intercom.
Teka snorted as she switched off the communicator. “I bet that’s standard practice, congratulating people on surviving.”
“I’ve been here before,” Sifa said, wry. “It is indeed standard practice.”
Teka guided them to landing area 32, somewhere between the veins of light that had greeted them once they passed the atmosphere. Akos felt a bump as they touched down, and then they were there. On a new planet. On Ogra.
Ogra was a mystery to most of the galaxy. It had become the subject of a lot of rumors, from as silly as “Ograns live in holes underground” to as dangerous as “Ograns are shielding their own atmosphere so we won’t find out they’re making deadly weapons.” So when Akos stepped out of the ship, he didn’t know what would greet him, if anything. For all he knew, Ogra was barren.
His hold on Cyra’s hand loosened as he paused at the bottom of the steps to stare. They were in a city of sorts, but it was like no city he’d ever seen. Small buildings, glowing with green and blue lights of all shapes and sizes, rose up all around them, dark shapes against a dark sky. Growing around and between them were trees without leaves to absorb the sun—their branches twisted around pillars, folding whole towers into their arms. The trees were tall, too, taller than anything else around, and the contrast of the clean lines of buildings and the organic curves of growing things was strange to him.
The glowing, though—that
