fingers tore holes in the paper, though he was otherwise still. “I know what people look like when they want to die. I’ve brought many of them to that point myself. And you are still very much desperate to survive.”
Akos took a breath, and his eyes found my brother’s with new steadiness. “My brother has nothing to do with you. You have no claim to him. Let him go, and I … I won’t give you any trouble.”
“You seem to have made several incorrect assumptions about what you and your brother are doing here,” Ryzek said. “We did not, as you have assumed, cross the Divide just to speed along your fate. Your brother is not collateral damage; you are. We went in search of him.”
“You didn’t cross the Divide,” Akos snapped. “You just sat here and let your lackeys do it all for you.”
Ryzek turned and climbed to the top of the platform. The wall above it was covered with weapons of all shapes and sizes, most of them currentblades as long as my arm. He selected a large, thick knife with a sturdy handle, like a meat cleaver.
“Your brother has a particular destiny,” Ryzek said, looking the knife over. “I assume, since you did not know your own fate, that you don’t know his, either?”
Ryzek grinned the way he always did when he knew something other people didn’t.
“‘To see the future of the galaxy,’” Ryzek quoted, in Shotet this time. “In other words, to be this planet’s next oracle.”
Akos was silent.
I sat back from the crack in the wall, closing my eyes against the line of light so I could think.
For my brother and my father, every sojourn since Ryzek was young had been a search for an oracle, and every search had turned up empty. Likely because it was nearly impossible to catch someone who knew you were coming. Or someone who might lay on a blade to avoid capture, as the elder oracle had in the same invasion that had brought the Kereseths here.
But finally, it seemed Ryzek had found a solution: he had gone after two oracles at once. One had avoided being taken by dying. And the other—this Eijeh Kereseth—didn’t know what he was. He was still soft and pliable enough to be shaped by Noavek cruelty.
I sat forward again to hear Eijeh speak, his curly head tipped forward.
“Akos, what is he saying?” Eijeh asked in slippery Thuvhesit, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“He’s saying they didn’t come to Thuvhe for me,” Akos said, without looking back. It was strange to hear someone speak two languages so perfectly, without an accent. I envied him the ability. “They came for you.”
“For me?” Eijeh’s eyes were pale green. An unusual color, like iridescent insect wings, or the currentstream after the Deadening time. Against his light brown skin, so like the milky earth of the planet Zold, they almost glowed. “Why?”
“Because you are the next oracle of this planet,” Ryzek said to Eijeh in the boy’s mother tongue, stepping down from the platform with the knife in hand. “You will see the future, in all its many, many varieties. And there is one variety in particular that I wish to know about.”
A shadow darted across the back of my hand like an insect, my currentgift making my knuckles ache like they were breaking. I stifled a groan. I knew what future Ryzek wanted: to rule Thuvhe, as well as Shotet, to conquer our enemies, to be recognized as a legitimate world leader by the Assembly. But his fate hung over him as heavily as Akos’s likely now hung over him, saying that Ryzek would fall to our enemies instead of reign over them. He needed an oracle if he wanted to avoid that failure. And now he had one.
I wanted Shotet to be recognized as a nation instead of a collection of rebellious upstarts just as much as my brother did. So why was the pain of my currentgift—ever-present—mounting by the second?
“I …” Eijeh was watching the knife in Ryzek’s hand. “I’m not an oracle, I’ve never had a vision, I can’t … I can’t possibly …”
I pressed against my stomach again.
Ryzek balanced the knife on his palm and flicked it to turn it. It wobbled, moving in a slow circle. No, no, no, I found myself thinking, unsure why.
Akos shifted into the path between Ryzek and Eijeh, as if he could stop my brother with the meat of his body alone.
Ryzek watched his knife turn as he moved toward Eijeh.
“Then you must learn to see the future quickly,” Ryzek said. “Because I want you to find me the version of the future I need, and tell me what it is I must do to get to it. Why don’t we start with a version of the future in which Shotet, not Thuvhe, controls this planet—hmm?”
He nodded to Vas, who forced Eijeh to his knees. Ryzek caught the blade by its handle and touched the edge of it to Eijeh’s head, right under his ear. Eijeh whimpered.
“I can’t—” Eijeh said. “I don’t know how to summon visions, I don’t—”
And then Akos barreled into my brother from the side. He wasn’t big enough to topple Ryzek, but he had caught him off guard, and Ryzek stumbled. Akos pulled his elbow back to punch—stupid, I thought to myself—but Ryzek was too fast. He kicked up from the ground, hitting Akos in the stomach, then stood. He grabbed Akos by the hair, wrenching his head up, and sliced along Akos’s jawline, ear to chin. Akos screamed.
It was one of Ryzek’s preferred places for cutting people. When he decided to give a person a scar, he wanted it to be visible. Unavoidable.
“Please,” Eijeh said. “Please, I don’t know how to do what you ask, please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt me, please—”
Ryzek stared down at Akos, who was clutching his face, his neck streaked with blood.
“I do not know this Thuvhesit word, ‘please,’” Ryzek said.
Later that night I heard a scream echoing in the quiet hallways of Noavek manor. I knew it didn’t belong to Akos—he had been sent to our cousin Vakrez, “to grow thicker skin,” as Ryzek put it. Instead I recognized the scream as Eijeh’s voice raised in acknowledgment of pain, as my brother tried to pry the future from his head.
I dreamt of it for a long time thereafter.
I WOKE WITH A groan. Someone was knocking.
My bedroom looked like a guest room, no personal touches, all the clothes and beloved objects hidden in drawers or behind cabinet doors. This drafty house, with its polished wood floors and grand candelabras, held bad memories like too much dinner. Last night one of those memories—of Akos Kereseth’s blood trailing down his throat, two seasons earlier—had come into my dreams.
I didn’t want to take root in this place.
I sat up and dragged the heels of my hands over my cheeks to smear the tears away. To call it crying would
