of his tongue and looked over his shoulder at Vas.
“I don’t know where she is,” Aoseh said. “You should have checked the temple. This is the last place she would come, if she knew you were on your way here.”
Vas smiled down at the blade in his hand.
“It is just as well, I suppose,” he said in Shotet, looking at the soldier who held Akos with one hand and was pressing Eijeh to the wall with the other. “Our priority is the child.”
“We know which one is youngest,” the soldier replied in the same language, jerking Akos by the arm again. “But which of the other two is the second-born?”
“Dad,” Akos said desperately. “They want to know about the Smaller Child. They want to know which one of them is younger—”
The soldier released Akos, but only to swing the back of his hand at him, hitting him right in the cheekbone. Akos stumbled, slamming into the wall, and Cisi choked on a sob, bending over him, her fingers stroking her brother’s face.
Aoseh screamed through his teeth, and lunged, plunging the stolen currentblade deep into Vas’s body, right under the armor.
Vas didn’t even flinch. He just smiled, crookedly, wrapped his hand around the blade’s handle, and tugged the knife free. Aoseh was too stunned to stop him. Blood poured from the wound, soaking Vas’s dark trousers.
“You know my name, but you don’t know my gift?” Vas said softly. “I don’t feel pain, remember?”
He grabbed Aoseh’s elbow again, and pulled his arm out from his side. He plunged the knife into the fleshy part of their dad’s arm and dragged down, making him groan like Akos had never heard before. Blood spattered on the floor. Eijeh screamed again, and thrashed, and Cisi’s face contorted, but she didn’t make a sound.
Akos couldn’t stand the sight. It had him on his feet, though his face still ached, though there was no purpose to moving and nothing he could do.
“Eijeh,” he said, quiet. “Run.”
And he threw his body at Vas, meaning to dig his fingers into the wound in the man’s side, deeper and deeper, until he could tear out his bones, tear out his heart.
Scuffling, shouting, sobbing. All the voices combined in Akos’s ears, full of horror. He punched, uselessly, at the armor that covered Vas’s side. The blow made his hand throb. The scarred soldier came at him, and threw him to the floor like a sack of flour. He put his boot on Akos’s face and pressed down. He felt the grit of dirt on his skin.
“Dad!” Eijeh was screaming. “Dad!”
Akos couldn’t move his head, but when he lifted his eyes, he saw his dad on the ground, halfway between the wall and the doorway, his elbow bent back at a strange angle. Blood spread like a halo around his head. Cisi crouched at Aoseh’s side, her shaking hands hovering over the wound in his throat. Vas stood over her with a bloody knife.
Akos went limp.
“Let him up, Suzao,” Vas said.
Suzao—the one with his boot digging into Akos’s face—lifted his foot and dragged Akos to his feet. He couldn’t take his eyes off his dad’s body, how his skin had broken open like the table in the living room, how much blood surrounded him—how can a person have that much blood?—and the color of it, the dark orange-red-brown.
Vas still held the bloodstained knife out from his side. His hands were wet.
“All clear, Kalmev?” Vas said to the tall Shotet. He grunted in reply. He had grabbed Eijeh and put a metal cuff around his wrists. If Eijeh had resisted, at first, he was finished now, staring dully at their dad, slumped on the living room floor.
“Thank you for answering my question about which of your siblings we are looking for,” Vas said to Akos. “It seems you will both be coming with us, by virtue of your fates.”
Suzao and Vas flanked Akos, and pushed him forward. At the last second he broke away, falling to his knees at his dad’s side and touching his face. Aoseh felt warm and clammy. His eyes were still open, but losing life by the second, like water going down a drain. They skipped to Eijeh, who was halfway out the front door, pressed forward by the Shotet soldiers.
“I’ll bring him home,” Akos said, jostling his dad’s head a little so he would look at him. “I will.”
Akos wasn’t there when the life finally left his dad. Akos was in the feathergrass, in the hands of his enemies.
I WAS ONLY SIX seasons old when I went on my first sojourn.
When I stepped outside, I expected it to be into sunlight. Instead, I walked into the shadow of the sojourn ship, covering the city of Voa—the capital of Shotet—like a massive cloud. It was longer than it was wide, its nose coming to a gentle point with panes of unbreakable glass above it. Its metal-plated belly was battered by over a decade of space travel, but some of the overlapping sheets were polished where they had been replaced. Soon we would be standing inside it, like masticated food inside the stomach of a great beast. Near the rear jets was the open terminal where we would soon board.
Most Shotet children were permitted to go on their first sojourn—our most significant rite—when they were eight seasons old. But as a child of the sovereign, Lazmet Noavek, I was prepared for my first journey through the galaxy two seasons earlier. We would follow the currentstream around the galaxy’s edge until it turned darkest blue, and then descend to a planet’s surface to scavenge, the second part of the rite.
It was traditional for the sovereign and his or her family to enter the sojourn ship first. Or at least, it had been traditional since my grandmother, the first Noavek leader of Shotet, had declared it to be so.
“My hair itches,” I said to my mother, tapping at the tight braids on the side of my head with my fingertip. There were only a few, pulled back and twisted together so my hair wouldn’t fall in my face. “What was wrong with my regular hair?”
My mother smiled at me. She wore a dress made of feathergrass, the stalks crossed over the bodice and extending to frame her face. Otega—my tutor, among other things—had taught me that the Shotet had planted an ocean of feathergrass between us and our enemies, the Thuvhesit, to keep them from invading our land. My mother commemorated that clever act now, with her dress. By design, everything my mother did echoed our history.
“Today,” she told me, “is the first day that most Shotet will lay eyes on you, not to mention the rest of the galaxy. The last thing we want is for them to fixate on your hair. By fixing it up, we make it invisible. Understand?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t press the issue. I was looking at my mother’s hair. It was dark, like mine, but a different texture—hers was so curly
