rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 30: Cyra
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Epilogue: Eijeh
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Books by Veronica Roth
“WHY SO AFRAID?” WE ask ourself.
“She is coming to kill us,” we reply.
We were once alarmed by this feeling of being in two bodies at once. We have grown accustomed to it in the cycles since the shift occurred, since both our currentgifts dissolved into this new, strange one. We know how to pretend, now, that we are two people instead of one—though we prefer, when we are alone, to relax into the truth. We are one person in two bodies.
We are not on Urek, as we were the last time we knew our location. We are adrift in space, the bend of the blushing currentstream the only interruption in the blackness.
Only one of our two cells has a window. It is a narrow thing, with a thin mattress in it and a bottle of water. The other cell is a storage room that smells of disinfectant, harsh and acrid. The only light comes from the vents in the door, closed now but not fully sealed against the hallway glow.
We stretch two arms—one shorter and browner, the other long and pale—in unison. The former feels lighter, the latter clumsy and heavy. The drugs have faded from one body but not the other.
One heart pounds, hard, and the other maintains a steady rhythm.
“To kill us,” we say to ourself. “Are we sure?”
“As sure as the fates. She wants us dead.”
“The fates.” There is dissonance here. Just as a person can love and hate something at once, we love and hate the fates, we believe and do not believe in them. “What was the word our mother used—” We have two mothers, two fathers, two sisters. And yet only one brother. “Accept your fate, or bear it, or—”
“‘Suffer the fate,’ she said,” we reply. “‘For all else is delusion.’”
LAZMET NOAVEK, MY FATHER and former tyrant of Shotet, had been presumed dead for over ten seasons. We had held a funeral for him on the first sojourn after his passing, sent his old armor into space, because there was no body.
And yet my brother, Ryzek, imprisoned in the belly of this transport ship, had said, Lazmet is still alive.
My mother had called my father “Laz,” sometimes. No one else would have dared but Ylira Noavek. “Laz,” she would say, “let it go.” And he obeyed her, as long as she didn’t command him too often. He respected her, though he respected no one else, not even his own friends.
With her he had some softness, but with everyone else
