Stories about them frothing at the mouth, or keeping enemies’ eyeballs in jars, or lines of kill marks from wrist to shoulder. Maybe that one didn’t sound so ridiculous.
“Sometimes it is easy to see why people become what they are,” his mom said softly. “Ryzek and Cyra, children of a tyrant. Their father, Lazmet, child of a woman who murdered her own brothers and sisters. The violence infects each generation.” She bobbed her head, and her body went with it, rocking back and forth. “And I see it. I see all of it.”
Akos grabbed her hand and held on.
“I’m sorry, Akos,” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was saying sorry for saying too much, or for something else, but it didn’t really matter.
They both stood there for a while, listening to the mutter of the news feed, the darkest night somehow even darker than before.
“HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE of the night,” Osno said, puffing up his chest. “I had this scrape on my knee, and it started burning. By the time I threw the blankets back, it was gone.”
The classroom had one curved wall and two straight ones. A large furnace packed with burnstones stood in the center, and their teacher always paced around it as she taught, her boots squeaking on the floor. Sometimes Akos counted how many circles she made during one class. It was never a small number.
Around the furnace were metal chairs with glass screens fixed in front of them at an angle, like tabletops. They glowed, ready to show the day’s lesson. But their teacher wasn’t there yet.
“Show us, then,” another classmate, Riha, said. She always wore scarves stitched with maps of Thuvhe, a true patriot, and she never trusted anyone at their word. When someone made a claim, she scrunched up her freckled nose until they proved it.
Osno held a small pocket blade over his thumb and dug in. Blood bubbled from the wound, and even Akos could see, sitting across the room from everyone, that his skin was already starting to close up like a zipper.
Everybody got a currentgift when they got older, after their bodies changed—which meant, judging by how small Akos still was at fourteen seasons old, he wouldn’t be getting his for awhile yet. Sometimes gifts ran in families, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were useful, and sometimes they weren’t. Osno’s was useful.
“Amazing,” Riha said. “I can’t wait for mine to come. Did you have any idea what it would be?”
Osno was the tallest boy in their class, and he stood close to you when he talked to you so you knew it. The last time he’d talked to Akos had been a season ago, and Osno’s mother had said as she walked away, “For a fate-favored son, he’s not much, is he?”
Osno had said, “He’s nice enough.”
But Akos wasn’t “nice”; that was just what people said about quiet people.
Osno slung his arm over the back of his chair, and flicked his dark hair out of his eyes. “My dad says the better you know yourself, the less surprised you’ll be by your gift.”
Riha’s head bobbed in agreement, her braid sliding up and down her back. Akos made a bet with himself that Riha and Osno would be dating by season’s end.
And then the screen fixed next to the door flickered and switched off. All the lights in the room switched off, too, and the ones that glowed under the door, in the hallway. Whatever Riha had been about to say froze on her lips. Akos heard a loud voice coming from the hall. And the squeal of his own chair as he scooted back.
“Kereseth …!” Osno whispered in warning. But Akos wasn’t sure what was scary about peeking in the hallway. Not like something was going to jump out and bite him.
He opened the door wide enough to let his body through, and leaned into the narrow hallway just outside. The building was circular, like a lot of the buildings in Hessa, with teachers’ offices in the center, classrooms around the circumference, and a hallway separating the two. When the lights were off, it was so dark in the hall he could see only by the emergency lights burning orange at the top of every staircase.
“What’s happening?” He recognized that voice—it was Ori. She moved into the pool of orange light by the east stairwell. Standing in front of her was her aunt Badha, looking more disheveled than he’d ever seen her, pieces of hair hanging around her face, escaped from its knot, and her sweater buttons done up all wrong.
“You are in danger,” Badha said. “It is time for us to do as we have practiced.”
“Why?” Ori demanded. “You come in here, you drag me out of class, you want me to leave everything, everyone—”
“All the fate-favored are in danger, understand? You are exposed. You must go.”
“What about the Kereseths? Aren’t they in danger, too?”
“Not as much as you.” Badha grabbed Ori’s elbow and steered her toward the landing of the east stairwell. Ori’s face was shaded, so Akos couldn’t see her expression. But just before she went around a corner, she turned, hair falling across her face, sweater slipping off her shoulder so he could see her collarbone.
He was pretty sure her eyes found his then, wide and fearful. But it was hard to say. And then someone called Akos’s name.
Cisi was hustling out of one of the center offices. She was in her heavy gray dress, with black boots, and her mouth was taut.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve been called to the headmaster’s office. Dad is coming for us now, we can wait there.”
“What—” Akos began, but as always, he talked too softly for most people to pay attention.
“Come on.” Cisi pushed through the door she had just closed. Akos’s mind was going in all different directions. Ori was fate-favored. All the lights were off. Their dad was coming to get them. Ori was in danger. He was in danger.
Cisi led the way down the dark hallway. Then: an open door, a lit lantern, Eijeh turning toward them.
The headmaster sat across from him. Akos didn’t know his name; they just called him “Headmaster,” and saw him only when he was giving an announcement or on his way someplace else. Akos didn’t pay him any mind.
“What’s going on?” he asked Eijeh.
“Nobody will say,” Eijeh said, eyes flicking over to the headmaster.
“It is the policy of this school to leave this sort of situation to the parents’ discretion,” the headmaster said. Sometimes kids joked that the headmaster had machine parts instead of flesh, that if you cut him open, wires would come tumbling out. He talked like it, anyway.
“And you can’t say what sort of situation it is?” Eijeh said to him, in much the way their mom would have, if she’d been there. Where is Mom, anyway? Akos thought. Their dad was coming for them, but nobody had said anything about their mom.
