pants were twisted halfway around, and his cheek bore the red imprint of creased sheets.
“It’s just the start of the Sojourn Festival,” I said. “Relax. Untwist your pants.”
His cheeks turned faintly pink, and he righted the waistband of his pants.
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” he replied irritably. “Next time, when something that sounds remarkably like war drums is going to wake me at dawn, could you maybe warn me?”
“You’re determined to deprive me of fun.”
“That’s because apparently, your version of ‘fun’ is making me believe I’m in mortal peril.”
Smiling a little, I went to the window. The streets were flooded with people. I watched them kicking up dust as they charged toward the center of Voa to participate in the festivities. They were all dressed in blue, our favorite color, and purple, and green; armored and armed; faces painted, necks and wrists draped with fake jewels or crowns of fragile flowers. Flowers here, along the planet’s equator, didn’t have to be as hardy as iceflowers to survive. They turned to mush between a person’s fingers, and smelled sweet.
The festival would feature public challenges in the amphitheater, visitors from other planets, and reenactments of significant moments in Shotet history, all while the crew of the sojourn ship worked on cleaning and repairs. On the last day, Ryzek and I would process from Noavek manor to the transport vessel, which would take us to the sojourn ship as its first official passengers. Everyone else would board after us. It was a rhythm I knew well, and even loved, though my parents were no longer here to guide me through it.
“My family’s rule is relatively recent, you know,” I said, tilting my head. “By the time I was born, Shotet had already changed, under the reign of my father. Or so I’ve read.”
“You read a lot?” he asked me.
“Yes.” I liked to pace and read. It helped me distract myself. “I think this is when we get closest to how things were before. The festival. The sojourn ship.” There were children running along our fence line, hands linked, laughing. Other faces, blurry at this distance, turned toward Noavek manor. “We were wanderers, once, not—”
“Murderers and thieves?”
I grasped my left arm, and the armor dug into my palm.
“If you enjoy the festival so much, why don’t you go?” he asked me.
I snorted. “And stand at Ryzek’s side all day? No.”
He stood beside me, looking through the glass. An old woman shuffled down the middle of the street, wrapping a bright scarf around her head—it had come undone in the chaos, and her fingers were clumsy. As we watched her, a young man carrying an armful of flower crowns placed one on her head, atop the scarf.
“I don’t understand the wandering, the scavenge,” Akos said. “How do you decide where to go?”
The drums were still pounding out the Shotet heartbeat. Beneath them was a dull roar in the distance, and music, layered over itself.
“I can show you, if you want,” I said. “They should be starting soon.”
A little while later we ducked into the hidden passageways of the Noavek home, through the secret door in my bedroom wall. Ahead, a globe of fenzu light gave us something to walk toward, but still I stepped carefully—some of the boards were loose here, the nails jutting out at odd angles from the support beams. I paused where the tunnel split off, and felt the beam for the telltale notches. One notch on the left beam meant it led to the first floor. I reached back for Akos, finding the front of his shirt, and tugged him behind me as I followed the left path.
He touched my wrist, guiding my hand into his, so we walked with fingers clasped. I hoped the sound of creaking floorboards disguised the sound of my breaths.
We walked the tunnels to the room where the Examiners worked, near the Weapons Hall, where I had first seen Akos and Eijeh. I pressed the panel forward, then slid it just enough to let us slip out. The room was so dark the Examiners didn’t notice us—they stood among the holograms in the center of the room, measuring distances with fine beams of white light, or checking their wrist screens, calling out coordinates. Still, my pride drove me to step away from him, releasing his hand.
They were calibrating the galaxy model. After they verified the model’s accuracy, they would begin their analysis of the current. Its ebb and flow told them where the next scavenge would be.
“The galaxy model,” I said softly.
“Galaxy,” Akos repeated. “But it shows only our solar system.”
“The Shotet are wanderers,” I reminded him. “We have gone far beyond the boundaries of our system, and found only stars, no other planets. As far as we are concerned, this solar system is alone in the galaxy.”
The model was a hologram that filled the room from corner to corner, glowing sun in the center and broken moon fragments drifting around the edges. The holograms looked solid until an Examiner walked through them to measure something else, and then they shifted like they were exhaling. Our planet passed in front of me as I watched, by far the whitest of all the simulated planets, like a sphere of vapor. Floating nearest to the sun was the Assembly station, a ship even larger than our sojourn ship, the hub of our galaxy’s government.
“All calibrated once you get Othyr distal to the sun,” one of the Examiners said. He was tall, with rounded shoulders, like he was curling them in to protect his heart. “An izit or two.”
An “izit” was slang for IZ, a measurement about the width of my smallest finger. In fact, sometimes I used my fingers to measure things when I didn’t have a beamer on hand.
“Really precise measuring there,” another overseer responded, this one short, a small paunch bubbling over the top of his pants. “‘An izit or two,’ honestly. That’s like saying ‘a planet or two.’”
“1.467IZ,” the first overseer said. “Like it’ll make a difference to the current.”
“You’ve never really embraced the subtlety of this art,” a woman said, striding through the sun to measure its distance from Othyr, one of the closer planets to the galaxy’s center. Everything about her was strict, from the line of her short hair across her jaw to the starched shoulders of her jacket. For a moment she was encased in yellow-white light, standing in the middle of the sun. “And an art it is, though some would call it a science. Miss Noavek, how honored we are to have you with us. And your … companion?”
She didn’t look at me as she spoke, just bent to point the beam of light at the band of Othyr’s equator. The other Examiners jumped at the sight of me, and in unison backed up a step, though they were already across the room. If they had known how much effort it was taking me to stand in one place without fidgeting and crying, they might not have worried.
“He’s a servant,” I said. “Carry on, I’m just observing.”
They did, in a way, but their careless chatter was gone. I put my hands in fists and wedged them between my back and the wall, squeezing so tightly my fingernails bit my palms. But I forgot about the pain when the Examiners activated the hologram of the current; it wove its way through the simulated planets like a snake, but formless, ethereal. It touched every
