A hiss. My door opens, and I stiffen. A being of galaxies steps inside my room, trailed by stars like skirts or chains. Sazlii. My heart tries to flee again. To my sight, there are no walls, simply speckled darkness stretched forever.

No matter how far my mind runs, my body will still be here, sitting on the floor of my room aboard this tiny ship. Trapped.

“No,” I say. She’s here to put me back in that box. Silvika is suspicious. She knows her vedia keeps something from her, and at random throughout the last five days, she has demanded to see me in that coffin. Each time, I’m terrified they’ll leave me in there.

Sazlii huffs something between a laugh and a grunt. “Alright, you do not want a piece of the cake. Understood.”

I turn toward her, half rising. “There’s cake?”

“No, but if there were, you would have turned it down already.”

“Don’t get my hopes up then.” I sink back to the floor and return a three-sided book to my lap. My fingers slide over the pages. If only I can feel the difference between light and dark, if the Lorsknu can help me see the letters in some form, I’ll be able to read again.

“Valon requests your presence in the forward control room.”

My brows scrunch. “What for?”

“He did not say, but I would assume it involves a task unique to you. My sister is in an herb-deepened sleep. I will watch over her until you can return to this sanctuary.”

Sanctuary. As if I should want to be in here. I am grateful for some respite, but I’d feel safer if they didn’t barge in every couple of hours demanding I pretend to be dead. What’s worse, a small, insane part of me actually looks forward to these occasions. It’s the only time I get to leave this room.

I know I should be more patient. Sojourners spend decades between the stars, stuck within the same small number of chambers like this, but maybe being able to see those walls would make a difference. To read. To study. To do something worthwhile. Every time they try to look at something, they don’t see the edge of the universe taunting them.

They’re not racing across the sea of stars to save a friend either. This is my chance to be useful.

Murmuring thanks to Sazlii for the message, I slip past her, book closed with one finger marking my place. Not that it matters. I have no idea what’s on that page. Valon brought me the volume this morning, and for all I know, it’s another embarrassing title. But who’s here to laugh? Him?

He’s not laughing now.

“/Speaking in circles wastes both our time,/” he rattles off in Ahairiki. I don’t know the language well, and while I try to piece together this first sentence, I miss the next several. They’re talking about me, though.

“/Efereodonidii is a child of my clan observing his elders in well-disciplined silence./”

I hold back a snort. From what I saw of him through his pet, we look nothing alike. No matter how I’ve been introduced, people have always taken one look at my red hair and refused to believe I’m a Lokma. Believing I’m related to Valon would be even more of a stretch.

But I get the hint and play the part. Standing straight, I rest my hands behind my back and listen.

“/Is that not a great many syllables to heap upon such a tiny thing? That vine is a vast and fruitful entity./”

If someone told me a xylophone just spoke, I’d believe it. Though the voice is a bit deeper. More like timpani disguised as a xylophone.

What am I doing gawking at the voice that just insulted me?

“/Ezezete-ki,/” Valon says, and I’m not sure about the honorific. -ki is the plainest one, I believe, acknowledging that the addressee is capable of sapient thought, but it assigns neither honor nor disrespect. “/Have you seen the vessel I seek? Yes or no./”

“/Again, this being asks what will the Sojourner give in exchange for this information?/”

“/The goodwill of this Sojourner clan, naturally./” A faint rustle accompanies Valon’s last word. Does he perform the complete Iniahara-na Stance of Goodwill? Are his fingertips aligned as if he holds a sphere, pinkies pointing at the ground?

That image is as ridiculous as the bargain he offers, and I try to hold back another laugh. River Guardian goodwill was a vague notion at the start and means very little anymore. At best, it manifests as protection from invaders. River Guardians don’t fight, though, so this usually works out as potential attackers getting talked into going elsewhere by skilled-but-arrogant negotiators.

At least Valon has the latter half of the required traits.

Ezezete seems to have the other half. “/River Guardian goodwill is far too valuable an offer. How about a more even trade? Knowledge for knowledge./”

“/Go on./”

I bite the inside of my lower lip to keep quiet. I barely know anything of Iniahara, but even I know what they want: the tech to send their own to space. To leave the shackles of their world and travel the stars like us.

“/Little knowledge in exchange for little knowledge. Valon-aya wants to know if a certain vessel has been seen, and we of this humble world wish for the designs of the ship he rides./”

My incisors sink further into my lip. No matter how many flattering -aya honorifics they tack onto Valon’s name, he will tell them “no” like the River Guardians always do. They must work through the challenges inherent in leaving their homeworld. We will welcome them. We will gently guide them, but solving one problem usually creates others. If they can’t handle the first one, it would be cruel to throw them so ill-equipped at the next set.

Valon steps forward, and his fingers whisper over glass controls. “/This button will send the desired designs. It will be pushed on the condition that, should the answer to the initial question be yes, details will be readily forthcoming./”

I stumble back. Only the wall’s flexible embrace against my shoulder blades keeps me upright. He’s not actually going to send it to them, right? I must have misunderstood. Did he say where he would send it? Maybe that’s the catch.

Ezezete accepts.

I’m too dumbfounded to catch anything other than yes, they saw the River’s End several days ago. Nearby. Between this world and its star.

A tap precedes a whoosh of the computer acknowledging a launched message.

I’m still trying to figure out which number was paired with the days. Wait, was that even the word for days, or was it weeks? How long are their days?

“/Open the message./”

Did he really send it to them, then? What right does Valon have to make that decision, to alter the space race of an entire world?

Straightening, I whisper his name, but he ignores me.

Voice low, I speak in Menyaze. “{What are you doing?}”

He retreats two paces from the console and steps firmly on my toes. I scowl but refrain from jerking my knee into his backside.

“/Betrayal./” Voice more gong than xylophone now, Ezezete snarls a whole sentence, but I only catch that one word. How much of the exoskeleton adds to that resonance?

In my mental image, metallic plates rattle over mottled green skin. I’ve only seen Iniahara-nas in photos, and I try to match the sounds of the movement to those generic models. An androgynous, curved face and narrow chin. Square pupils, pointed teeth, and ears like a fish’s fins. Two legs, four arms, and a pair of large, iridescent wings like a butterfly’s.

Valon chuckles. “/There is no mistake. The file sent does detail the plans of this ship. In Menyaze verse./”

What poor soul was bored enough to convert blueprints into poetry?

Okay, I was that bored this past week. Maybe this is what Valon was doing when he wasn’t in my room prodding me with half-answers to my ever-flowing questions. Giving them designs they can’t read is perfectly in keeping with his policy of not saying anything useful. Or at least, not useful unless you’ve turned your brain inside out thinking about it.

“/It is incentive to continue aiding this venture,/” he explains. “/For every worthwhile update on the River’s End received, one translated line will be sent. This Sojourner will await further messages./”

As background noise from the transmission fades, I flinch, still stumbling over that middle sentence. This is worse than just furnishing the tech they want.

“If you give them a translation for comparison, won’t they learn Menyaze?”

The air from his dismissive wave buffets my cheek. “They are not that intelligent.”

I wrench my foot out from under his and retreat. “Worlds are lost with such assumptions.”

“If they can do all that, then perhaps they deserve the freedom and responsibility that comes with it.” He sighs. “Eventually, they will scrape up enough to pay the Veloi-nas for what they want, and I would prefer to be their benefactor instead.”

At mention of the pirates of the stars, my nose wrinkles. Literal rodents. Venomous, too. It would be better for the Iniahara-nas to learn from us than from them, but Valon doesn’t get to decide that for a whole world.

“You didn’t even run it by our honored elders.”

“I did not ask them about keeping you alive either.” He plops in a chair, fingers flitting over glass again. “Now, tell me what the scene outside looks like to the Lorsknu.”

He’s asked me that several times in the last five days, and I haven’t gotten any better at explaining it. Especially the distance. But even if the words that dive off my tongue don’t make much sense, at least I’m starting to understand it better.

“There’s a planet,” I say, not because I see the land, but because I see the life on it. Teardrops falling in the eternal night, millions of them, separated from the rest of the glittering sea. “It’s directly beneath us, closer than all else.”

A warm notion sinks all the way to my bones. He’s impressed, but he shouldn’t be. He was speaking to someone on Iniahara with little lag. It’s an easy guess that we’re in orbit around their world.

“Where is Rose?”

This close, finding her is easy, like knowing where my hand is. I don’t even have to look. “Near. On a planet, but not this one.”

“Iniahara is the only inhabited planet in this system. There isn’t another for lightyears.”

I’m not sure of the distance, but I see another. She’s drowning in its light, one diamond in a river of molten crystal. The string that connects us is thin but shorter than my galactic arm span. I could reach out and pluck her from that hiding world.

I’m not sure what that would do. It wouldn’t teleport her to me physically. And despite Valon’s favoring the vague when I ask about the bonds, he made one thing clear this week. My transient, distant connection is unlikely to erase Rosa. Still, if I alert my brother to our rescue plans, there’s no telling what he’ll do.

“I will scan the system.” Three soft beeps acknowledge his touch on the controls. “Any plans for when you reunite with her? Will you confess your enduring love and loyalty?”

“No.” The word slips out, a rock falling on my foot. “I mean, I am her loyal mykta, and she knows that. Me coming all this way for her says that better than I ever could.”

He stands and pats my head on his way to the door. As if I’m a dapkie who just sat on command.

“A thorough scan will take half an hour. I will pass the time in my room.”

I should let him go, be a proper child and keep quiet. Conversations with him are torture. But I don’t want to be alone, and something bothers me.

My fingers dig into my palm. “What was the question you skipped?”

“From The Girly Gab?” He turns and leans against the doorframe. “Once spoken, you will have to answer it.”

My jaw locks. “You obviously didn’t think it would be that entertaining.”

He clucks, and a whole era somewhere probably passes before he quotes, “How does her kiss make you feel?”

One garbled word escapes before I initiate lockdown, and I choke on it.

The false pity dripping from his tone completely fails to hide his chuckle. “That bad, huh?”

“Dollii—” It’s more squeak than word. Clearing my throat, I try again. “Dollii’s kiss…”

None of my thoughts are clear enough to form a coherent sentence. There are no words, only feelings. Her kiss was home. Or something I wished was home.

“How telling that you mention the Lokma daughter first.”

Every inch of my skin bristles. “She’s the one I’ve actually kissed.”

“And how many points was it worth?”

Would it be possible to punch him and hide in a corner at the same time?

“Five.”

“How generous.” His amusement is akin to fire. If it were a literal fire, I wouldn’t have any eyebrows left. “Perhaps I should steal a perfect-scoring kiss from the Lokma daughter sometime.”

“Don’t you dare.” My hand is tangled in his shirt front. When did that happen?

He shakes with laughter. He doesn’t mean what he said. I can’t let it get to me.

Forcing my fingers to uncurl, I shove away from him. “Sure, tease me, but Dollii?” My cheeks blaze, and I run my hands along them, then through my web of braids. “Dollii’s kiss made a blind man see what he never thought he would.”

He places a hand atop my head. “Someday, when it matters, choose her.”

It matters now. My feelings are no less real because I’m young. I’m inexperienced but not stupid. If I say this, he’ll make another joke at my expense, though. My head understands what he said before. I have to hide from Rosa’s family. Anything between us will always have to remain secret. But my heart doesn’t want to let go.

Feed impossible to the flames. I want to give this a chance.

I straighten so I’m almost as tall as him. If he wants to twist words, I can play that game, too. “Rosa’s kiss set off fireworks in my soul, one emotion after another. I didn’t understand half of them.”

He remains silent for several seconds, probably blinking at me. His amusement cools like lava, heat replaced with rock I’m not sure I can identify.

“You have kissed the sarquant?”

No, but she accidently shared that memory of her kissing Grenswa’s prince, and that was exactly how it made me feel.

Before he can ask me to rank it, I step past him. After years of pretending, I want easy answers. I want Rosa to just talk to me honestly.

If I tell her that I kissed Dollii, that I love them both, what will she say?

As I enter the corridor, my arm slides along the wall, keeping my bearings. My galactic fingers stretch toward Rosa and the sea of light around her. They shake. The moment I touch her, she’ll flinch away. I know this, so why am I still reaching?

I’m close enough to feel her warmth. It flutters like breath. My fingers wrap around a shoulder, but it’s like a balloon. It’ll pop. I pull back, but strands stretch between us. Wet glue. She is yanked after my retreating hand.

I freeze. ‘Say something, Rosa? You feel this, right?’

‘Fredo?’

Her hope flows to me as a spring breeze, then congeals into something softer than down feathers. As if it’s a blanket, I bundle her in it, and my arms barely reach around this Rosa taco. A smile pulls across both of us.

‘I’m close,’ I murmur into the top of her head, ‘but I need you to show me exactly where you are.’

Like a dying flame, her smile flickers and vanishes. Her hope transmutes into fear and shatters, leaving my embrace empty and lacerated.

‘I won’t fall for it.’ Her words tumble back to me, brittle like autumn leaves as she flees.

The glue between us stretches. Strands snap and pelt my skin—whips made of my own loyalty. Despite my wish to keep close and the elastic pull of the bond, I can’t move. Fog constricts around me with the chill of midnight winter, and wherever it touches, my stars fizzle and fade.

‘How many do you think he can lose?’ The evil vedia, Alaysq. The fog is her. It stings even more than the fraying bond. How do I fight something like this?

‘It’s a trick. You haven’t captured my Fredo.’ She shakes her head, but her confidence in the statement is thin and cracked. The Rosa of a few weeks ago believed me invincible. She has since seen me nearly killed.

Still, ‘My Fredo.’ My heart swells at the claim.

Alaysq laughs a whisper in my ear. ‘Prove yourself to her. You need to know where she is.’

I won’t be bait, though. If she wants Rosa to reveal her location, it can only mean this evil vedia doesn’t know where she is. They don’t have her. That should be a good thing, but knowing my Rosa, she’s probably gotten herself into a worse predicament.

I don’t need her to tell me and risk Alaysq overhearing, not if I can directly see what she sees. The sting persists, but I shove it to the recesses of my mind, staring at the galactic version of Rosa. My goal.

They’re speaking. I hear the sounds but comprehend none of it. My body of stars becomes a river. Some remain in the fog. Others flow toward Rosa and merge with the edges of her galaxies. I am her fingertips.

Slowly, a scene fills in. Red sand. Round buildings. A pool. A plaza. A tree.

Memorize every line, Fredo. Any detail could be a clue Valon can match to a map.

A part of me doubts, though. It’s not enough. Valon’s maps don’t show another inhabited world anywhere near here. I need more. Are there signs, written language? What do they say? To see that much, I need to go deeper.

My stars burrow further—her arm, her chest. There’s a symbol on the tree.

‘Fredo, what are you doing?’

It’s too far away. We have to get closer. As I will the carving into focus, her foot lifts.

Warm droplets of awe rain around me, collecting in puddles of wonder.

‘Everything is stars. Fredo, what is this?’

I still can’t answer, though not for lack of a passive try. My own mental voice does not respond to the command. Instead, Rosa’s mouth opens, and it takes so much effort. Lifting her hand is easier. Someone yells at her. An adolescent with the fuzzy ears of a Shlykrii-na and gaudy orange paint striped across his face. I can’t bother answering him either.

Rosa’s fingers touch the carving.

“Lily!”

The cry is a bullet through my brain. Images flash. This tree, huge. Then a sapling. Times in between. A girl stands beside it, sometimes suited up for a spacewalk. Sometimes her long curls fly in the wind. They’re the amethyst hue of my eyes, a hair color only vedia possess. She smiles at me, fascination and joy sparking in a gaze even pinker than Rosa’s.

I’m on the floor, frigid tiles flat against my palms and knees. Retching. The ground is wet.

Solid hands pat my back, wrap my shoulders, my chest, and pull me away from my mess.

“What happened?” Valon drags me through the narrow hall.

A door hisses closed. Right, I’m on his ship, not on a rapidly changing, half-designed world.

“There was a tree.” My words are more cough than anything else, but Valon manages to understand.

“Trees are not known for attacking people in spaceship hallways.”

The images keep flipping faster and faster. I’m dizzy. Stop. Make sense. Balance. Which way is supposed to be up?

Lily was my sister’s name.

That realization is a pin. The images slow. They’re memories. They belong to someone who knew my sister. Someone who saw her buried beneath this tree.

Rosa is wherever my sister died, but wasn’t that supposed to be on Shlykrii? A world with a violet sky and fierce, cold wind. Rosa’s surroundings look nothing like that. Red sky, red sand, red walls. Tepid breeze. Harsh sun.

“Valon, what is in that syringe?” Sazlii’s voice, faint with distance. Is she really as far away as she sounds?

“His heart races in a way it cannot handle. This should sedate him.”

“No.” I intend it as a shout, but what escapes can’t even qualify as a whisper.

Yol’s voice echoes in my memory. The doctor’s hand trails down my arm. Pokes the wound on my leg. The void beckons me into its embrace.

I won’t return to it. Ever.

“Red. Sky. A tree. My sister.”

The images flip too fast. Why is it so hard to form a simple sentence?

Warmth on my shoulders. Solid hands.

“What about your sister, child?” Sazlii’s stars surround me. The images still whirl and jump, but I barely see them beyond her. With a sweeping gesture, she gathers me back to myself, away from Rosa, away from the evil vedia.

No, I can’t just leave them like this.

The words die before I can say them, withered by the blazing arrow of her attention. I am not its focus. Alaysq is. Recognition burns as cobalt, intertwined with wariness and doubt in the various hues of sunset.

Like a baby bird hiding beneath its mother’s wing, I tuck closer into Sazlii’s side. ‘You know her?’

‘It cannot be whom I think. Come.’

As she tows me away, I shift through the scrambled pieces of myself. Alaysq does not know where Rosa is. Finding the River’s End will not help in finding her anymore. I’ve seen her surroundings. I don’t have anything of my own experience to match them to. But if for once my being this cursed thing can come in handy, please let it be now.

The box Sjaealam gave me slides onto my mental lap. The lid won’t open.

Far away from Alaysq now, Sazlii shrinks and sits knee-to-knee with me. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Fastening a handle on this blade of ignorance.’

‘Sjaealam gave you truth sealed away. You might hate knowing it.’

I ignore her and continue trying to pry the lid off. If only I had a real blade.

I have Lorsknu. They swarm around me, flickering with each rapid heartbeat. At my will, they converge on the box and nibble at it. Flickers turn to studders and sparks. Some scream. Some flee. I can’t tell where one heartbeat ends and another begins.

The box appears undamaged.

I claw at it. ‘Why give me a gift I can’t open?’

‘Calm, child.’ Sazlii’s hands cover mine and still them. Color pours into the specks that form her, a glass pitcher filling with ink. She stares at me with eyes of the purest blue. ‘Sjaealam did not mean for you to learn of these things in desperation.’

At first, the tranquility she offers crashes over me like frigid waves. I jump, dreading the next slap, but once fully immersed, the world becomes weightless. I float, but this isn’t the void. There’s no notion of falling or spinning. As the box rises, I catch it. I can move. I can feel its polished sides.

The Lorsknu hover around me. Waiting. Expectant. They no longer flicker. As I exhale, my heartbeat reverts to a gentle throb at the edge of my awareness.

‘There you go. Now you may lift the lid and draw out one item.’

Panic flashes. ‘One? What if it’s not the knowledge I need?’ I plummet, but like a mother dapkie, Sazlii catches the scruff of my neck.

‘Trust your subconscious. The one piece you need will come.’

Trust the deeper, never-seen part of myself. The part that insists on reliving the fire island over and over. The part that can throw a knife and hit the target every time.

With a nod, I banish doubt and fear to my periphery again. Sazlii releases her hold, but I remain in place, weightless. My fingers fold over the edge of the box and slip into the thinnest crack. The lid swings up to reveal a wavering glow. With one last glance at Sazlii, I thrust my hand into the container’s luminous pool.

Laughter. Red hair full of braids and flowers. Two nearly identical young women stand in the center of a crowd. They are adults now, Asaqrin and Asafrán. The older sister barely notices me, but the younger’s gaze lingers.

A hallway, white and glaring. She is its only splash of color, staring with amethyst eyes that outshine any sun. “Kel?”

My knees shake with an urge to flee.

No, these are not my legs, though they feel connected to me. I will them to straighten, to step forward with all the grace of a river.

‘You are braver than that.’

The encouragement begets determination.

She still stares.

Our legs freeze, and our mouth opens. “I fancy you, Asafrán, and I need to know if you feel the same.”

With that sentiment finally free, pride unfurls, crowding my chest. Kel has been trying to say this for months.

Asafrán huffs a laugh. “You need to know if I fancy myself?”

The background blurs and morphs. Blue sky and white, puffy clouds. Palm trees, mountains, and sand. Salty air. Seagulls caw and dive. The wind blows through her twisted hair as she continues to laugh.

I hold two tiny bundles. ‘Do you see them, Sjaealam?’

I do more than see. In this moment, I am Kel, a father cradling his daughters in his arms, inhaling their powdery scent. Such sweet faces. The elastic walls of my heart bulge with love.

‘They are perfect.’

“What an expression, Kel. Here.” Asafrán straightens a violet curl on each head and weaves it around a petal, naming each flower in turn. “Wisteria. And Lily.”

The bundles stretch and grow into preteen girls sitting across a table from one another. One pokes at florescent sand while the other takes notes on a screen. They blur at the edges of my vision, but I keep glancing at them.

My eyes burn, but my fingers do not slow, rapidly flicking through menus on a tablet.

‘Kel, stop altering Wisteria’s medical records.’

‘She cut her finger. I need to ensure none of the blood analytics reflect what she is.’

Concern is a tiny worm writhing in the chambers of my heart. ‘Was she badly injured?’

‘No, but they always test for infection when we have been in contact with a foreign world. Especially Earth. Beautiful land but lots of microbes.’

The worm poofs into a cloud of relief, and I cannot help a frustrated sigh. ‘You fail to convince me, Kel. If there truly is nothing wrong with a keilan, why hide it? We should be honest and rely on logic to safeguard her.’

Our hands freeze. ‘Because the girls seem to have a bond?’

‘Exactly. If Wisteria dies, so will Lily as her bonded vedia. Lily is an eteriq. They will not risk losing her.’

On the screen, the box waiting for us to input updated data blurs into a flashing blob. The device hits our knees and slides onto the floor with a clatter. ‘The Abaeyoi were reluctant to take me in the first place. Our honored elders warned me against pursuing Asafrán, that our genes would not mix well.’

They hate that Lily is both a vedia and an eteriq. I cannot deny that. Yet, there is something more lurking beneath the surface of his mental sea. Something dark and prickly.

‘What do you hide from me?’

‘Did you see what happened yesterday?’ Kel’s voice is an ember crumbling to ash.

I have pushed him aside too often lately. By necessity, my mind is rearranging, the dynamic between my bonds restructuring. In the place reserved for my primary mykta, there now stands a gaping black hole vacuuming up everything that gets close. I mourn her loss, but I wish to spare my entourage this pain.

‘Show me now.’

Yet, he does not. He holds the experience at a distance like an adult holding an open flame away from a child.

‘Sparrow is in a comatose state. No one knows what happened, but Wisteria told me the boy was teasing Lily. After repeated warnings, he would not stop, so Wisteria said she “made him understand.”’

The worm in my heart is back, but this time it has teeth. ‘You will keep this secret?’

‘Sparrow’s parents are already beside themselves. They lost their other child when on Earth to an acidic red fruit.’

‘This is dangerous, Kel. Perhaps you should send her to me. If I meet her in person, something can be worked out through the bond.’

I no longer see what he sees. Either he has blocked me or closed his eyes. It takes him much too long to answer. ‘Lily would be lost without Wisteria.’

Time disconnects and jolts, yanked by a thick cord of pride. It has been years since Kel spoke to me. Occasionally, I watch the universe through him, but it irritates him. He cannot shut me out completely, but I do not like asserting our imbalance of power.

Now, he freely shows me the scene, and I forget to breathe. An infant rests in the crook of his arm, swaddled in scarlet cloth. The color of Asafrán’s hair. Has he fathered another child? Is it like Wisteria?

‘It was a silly notion. An indulgence,’ he says as he pushes the blanket away from the top of the baby’s head. Its hair is dark, and its ears are lupine.

‘Surra-na.’ I gasp. ‘You did not.’

‘No, this child is of no relation to me genetically. But Lily crafted him. She wanted to take what was good of Surra and Seallaii and make something even better. I never thought anything would come of it, but she is a young eteriq, so we let her experiment, and she has taken a barren world and made it live.’

The worm is back, fatter and more feral than ever. ‘Live? With one life form?’

‘Hundreds of species of flora and fauna all tangled in a web of symbiosis. This is the crowning touch, a sapient race. This infant is one of twenty that live, each of a different ethnicity.’ He shakes his head, smile so wide it hurts. ‘I have to hold him. Otherwise, I begin to doubt he is real.’

Kel’s walls are fabric stretched taut, but for the first time in decades, they slacken. He wants to share everything about this novelty. The child’s solidarity in our hands—heavier than a Seallaii-na his size should be. His faintly iron scent.

Like rolling fog, my curiosity spreads over our surroundings. Gravity claws at every part of our being, staved off by shaky, sore muscles. The air clings, dry and charged, a storm poised for release, yet no cloud blocks the scene above. The sky stretches wide, a brighter scarlet than the Abaeyoi’s famous hair.

Kel holds none of it back. This is his daughter’s masterpiece, a network of pieces he barely understands, but he knows it is beautiful. The notion bleeds into me, stains my fear, and erases the part of me that considers this wrong.

Maps brand themselves into my subconscious. The Inihiri system. An inner world ravaged by the elderly star’s fits. Arabala. Lily calls it Rablah.

I shut the lid. This is enough. I have what I need. I push the box away. Like sunken treasure, it’ll wait here until I’m ready to see more.

It doesn’t move, but I do, like a rising diver. Sensations greet me gradually as if light filtered through a wavering sea. Sazlii’s hands rest on my cheeks. I lie on a soft bed of vines, surrounded by the syrupy scent of night flowers. Something cold rests above my heart, softly echoing every beat. A medical scanner?

I reach for the arm that holds it, fingers tangling in a loose sleeve. “Valon?”

His other hand folds over mine, and he sighs. “I thought I would have to truly put you in that coffin this time, child.”

He thought I was dying?

My body must have thought the same. Despite the weak gravity aboard this ship, I weigh more than a million stars. Just drawing one more breath is exhausting.

But I don’t let go, and I have to say this. “I know where Rosa is.”

Continued in chapter 60

Thank you for reading!

If given time, Lul would have accepted my challenge. I would not have given up my advantageous position, so no matter what I did, things would have ended the same. I told myself this again and again over the next several days, but still, the scene haunted me.

Lul hesitated, probably scheming how to defeat a woman standing on the head of a giapro. Shooting would have been an excellent strategy, but the crowd might have frowned upon it. Conversely, they might have thought it clever. I didn’t know enough about these people to predict their tactics. So, I stood and stared and just breathed, hopefully cutting an intimidating figure.

The uncle broke our stalemate with a loud accusation of cowardice. Lul should concede to my claim of Grr’s worth or accept my offer of combat. The crowd hummed their agreement.

He stood so very close to the dais’ unprotected edge, all it took was a push. Unlike on Grenswa, gravity was faithful here. It did the rest.

No soft bed of feathers broke his fall, though they could have. I could have caught him, had I wanted to badly enough. My need to save him would have compelled the giapro forward. But I wasn’t that chivalrous.

Despite the blood darkening the sand around his crumpled form, I believed him still alive at that point, but the beasts had smelled his leaking fluids. I had already denied them one meal. This was the web of life. A mother had to fill the bellies of her young, and with injuries so grave, Lul would not have healed anyway.

With a roar, the mother claimed her prey, foot crushing, talons piercing. As she held the body still, the young ones bit and tore, and I looked away. I covered my ears, held my breath, and sunk into myself.

‘Fredo, this is awful. I’m so alone, and I need you.’

He was a phantom floating within his sector of my mind, back turned to me. Beneath him, flames danced upon the ice.

He knew I was there. He heard me, but he didn’t answer. Instead, rustling sounded from Ishiyae’s corner, and I remembered why I shouldn’t contact Fredo. Did he know? Was that why he ignored me?

The thought was barbed with doubt and betrayal. I swallowed it, but it stung all the way down.

As I pushed back into the outside world with its iron smell and harsh light, someone stared at me. I shouldn’t have taken particular note of it—a whole crowd watched the goings-on of this arena—but this one bored into my forehead. As if a net pulled ashore, my gaze was towed to the dais where Lul had stood.

Another balanced on the very edge, an old man with eyes so wrinkled and droopy, I would have questioned whether he could see at all if I hadn’t felt the pin of his focus. Silver caked his chest because apparently he and the twelve equally buff giants flanking him considered paint to be an acceptable form of shirt.

“Claim be you goddess-kin, and obey giapro to you.”

His words reeked of challenge. I shouldn’t have expected any less. This was the city that chased out Alaysq, someone who knew a lot more about this world. She had no doubt made a show of her descent from the sky and her wonderous technology. What had I done to prove my distant relation to their absent creator? Led a teen into a trap, then saved him with tenuous sway over these beasts. Gotten a healthy young man eaten.

I didn’t even have a plan for how to get off this giapro’s head, let alone after that. The man on the dais was a Silver Crumb, same as the village leader that had sunk her teeth into my shoulder.

I stood as tall and steady as I could and fixed a narrowed stare on him. “Your hospitality is unmatched. I’ll be sure to tell all my friends.”

His mouth twitched, indecisive between a smirk and a frown. “Gift you to us to giapro as feast?”

This grammar was impossible. Did he ask if I would give them to the giapro or the other way around?

It didn’t matter. My answer was the same either way. One death was already too many.

“No.”

His brows billowed briefly as if lifted by a light breeze. “Neither would Kel.” He held out a hand, but I was a story too short to reach it. “Come.”

“And give up this comfy seat? You come to me instead.”

At a flick of his gaze, darts shot from lower windows and sunk into the neck of each giapro. The first note of another roar shredded the air, but the sedative worked quickly. She wobbled, outrage fizzling into fading mews. As our perch collapsed, I dove onto Grr and desperately grasped every feather within my reach.

The world stilled, but I barely had time to notice the sound of beastly snores before the burly men of the crumb’s posse ripped me from this downy haven. Ropes striped the wall—presumably their method of safe passage down here—and with me over one’s shoulder and Grr over another’s, they scurried back up to the dais.

Without a word, they set me in front of their leader, still tangled in long feathers. Before I could even register the stone beneath my thin shoes, he grabbed my face, fingers hooked behind my ears and thumbs pressing into the hinge of my jaw. Releasing an indignant squeak, my mouth fell open.

“Are the teeth and ears correct.” He hauled me closer to clouded, nearly buried eyes. My toes could only brush the ground. “Are the eyes paler and not the same shape as Kel. Have these eyes more passion and less wisdom.”

“Excuse me for being a child.”

With a smirk, he lowered me and asked my age. How much time had passed since I left Seallaii? I had told Queen Jianthy I was nearly eighteen. Surely the anniversary of my birth had come and gone by this point.

The Silver Crumb introduced himself as Pol. He had just turned three hundred—too young for a Seallaii-na to have such wrinkles, and too old for a Shlykrii-na at all.

***

Pol had known Kel, the father of Lily. That made Kel Ishiyae’s father, too, and Fredo’s. I gobbled every scrap he could tell me about Fredo’s family. He saw more similarities to them in me than in Alaysq, and while that was worth a small measure of relief, guilt kept its claws in my chest.

Lul’s death was my fault, though none of these people blamed me. None of that would have happened had I not manipulated Grr, yet they rewarded me. They treated me as an idol, gave me anything I asked for and beyond.

My first task that night was to map the constellations and figure out where this world was. The next day, I measured time. The Rablah-nas did not count hours, only positions of the sun. So, I rigged a straw to drip water into a bucket at a constant rate and calculated how much had fallen by sunset, then again at sunrise. Nine hours of daylight, seven of darkness.

Like us, they slept on beds of yewn. This proper rest combined with potent medicine healed my wounds at a miraculous rate. When I questioned how they knew what to give me, they could not spell out the differences between us, but this was the oldest city on Rablah. Fredo’s family had lived here, and the procedures regarding how to care for the needs of goddess-kin were well documented, even if they were written in script I could not read.

Grr could, and he stuck near me constantly, even sleeping curled at my feet. He was mine, Pol said, and Grr repeated his words every time I denied it.

“Use you to me as choose you.”

So, I had him read aloud their laws and procedures. I told him to explain everything about each random item in the house and on the street. I challenged him to question how and why things worked. Because no one else did. These Rablah-nas lacked Seallaii-na curiosity. They didn’t wonder how things happened or explore what could be.

At first, Grr’s every explanation amounted to: because this is the way it is done. Yet slowly, he anticipated the kinds of answers I wanted. He mimicked my speech patterns, and I sometimes found myself slipping into theirs.

As I collected the materials I would need to build a transmitter, I was often distracted just watching them. While they were swift to pick up on steps I showed them, they rarely understood my explanations, no matter how basic. They followed my instructions and crafted the requested items with more skill than I could have hoped for. Yet, they could not grasp how two materials melted, combined, and cooled in such a way could become something stronger. Even when I drew out the shapes of molecules, they did not see why it had to be these ingredients and not others.

Was this a strike against the makeup of their mind or a result of my poor teaching ability?

At first, I thought it was curiosity that gathered large crowds behind me every time I left Pol’s residence. Then Grr read aloud that someone should always be within hearing distance to cater to my whims and protect me from danger. A position like his was an honor. The masses didn’t follow me because they wondered what I was up to. They wanted me to ask them to do something.

After that, I made it a point to request a lot of favors.

I caught myself building things I didn’t need, tools to make their daily tasks easier. Their delight at receiving such gifts wrapped my heart in glee. It was addicting and occasionally frustrating because they still never bothered to wonder how things could be done better. I served as their curiosity, as their conduit for progress. I was a missing component they needed.

A thought slithered through my mind, feasting on these interactions.

I could stay here. I should stay here.

I had a place on Rablah, a purpose. I was not expected to be a visible but silent sarquant. I had real value. Fredo could come live here, too, and learn more about his family. I would invite Dollii, and she would have a whole plan whipped up for this world in no time.

But what about Hent and the other abducted Grenswa-nas? Much as I wanted to say I could take down the River’s End and care for its prisoners, in this gravity, Hent would die within an hour. Bringing him here would be the last step in a string of impossible hopes. As if I would be able to fight that ship and win.

It was thoughts of Hent that kept my head in the clouds, though. He needed me more than these Rablah-nas. Even if I said I would transmit a call for help and trust the Sojourners to save him, it wasn’t enough. The thought of leaving it entirely in their hands frightened me.

Here I was on a world designed by a Sojourner eteriq, proof that their experiments were imperfect and sometimes cruel. I saw Hent in the kayak on the day we met, claiming a Seallaii-na’s beauty was a trap and a lie. His brilliant orange as he told of limbs severed for the sake of what-if. Inky black spilling over his scales and pooling in his eyes when he learned I, too, was River Guardian.

He wouldn’t trust them. Frankly, I didn’t either. Which would they value more: the title hero when they returned the lost prince? Or a chance to have all their questions answered about a rare Opal they could say died in the rescue attempt?

My reasoning wasn’t entirely selfless either. I wanted that title to wash away all the stupid decisions I had made. I wanted to be able to say, “Yes, I messed up, but I came through in the end. I didn’t give up on you.” Everything else could be swept under that statement and never seen again.

Deeper even than that logic was an unwillingness to let go. I had to see Hent again. That kiss, his misinterpretation of my charisma, him collapsed in my arms—that could not be the end of our tale.

The more I thought of him, the more I spoke of him. I told Grr all about Grenswa, how different it was to this planet. Endless description bubbled off my tongue—forests and oceans, underwater cities, the moving palace, the pair of princes and the older one’s Silver wife. He listened patiently, but I don’t think he believed it real.

One realization struck me into silence. Grr would have taken one look at Niiq and known she was meant to be queen.

Would the crowds have tried to touch her scales as often as they reached for any part of me that was different? I tied my hair in a pair of buns to resemble their lupine ears, letting the loose ends conceal the alien sides of my head, but strangers still tried to pet me. They only stopped when Grr, sharp teeth visible and ears back, warned them that I didn’t like it.

He wouldn’t be able to fight all my battles for me. Sooner or later, I would have to confront the River’s End, and I needed to be stronger. At set times each day, I practiced moving like Ishiyae, and gradually, my muscles hardened. In time, I could run in this gravity, jump a little, and kick hard enough to make a hole in the wall—which was an accident, and I did apologize.

Little things like that made this place feel like home. “Experts” were in charge of my wardrobe here, too. While I appreciated the regular baths and fresh clothes, I questioned their fashion sense.

The loose leggings were nice. They weighed nothing, hung just past my knees, and came in a variety of colors. The black bodice and belt, however, were stiff, didn’t breathe at all, and failed to cover my midsection. The giapro feathers that had tangled me when I met Pol were turned into something like a grass skirt, intermixed with Lul’s silver rings. These were a symbol of his status within the leader’s family, but they just made me sound like a wind chime.

On the seventh afternoon, Pol announced it was Drinking Day, and I had unpleasant flashbacks of my lalakrii stupor during the Harvest Festival on Grenswa. This rite had nothing to do with alcohol, though. They would make it rain.

Said to be the first planted by Lily, a tree grew in the center of the city. Its branches defined a diameter almost as wide as it was tall, and no structures had been built anywhere near its reach. I recognized the gnarly bark and thick, winding structure of a baffble tree, but the wood wept scarlet, and a silvery sheen glazed the azure leaves. Probably a gene-spliced relative, then, like these people were to mine.

Pol straddled a large drum nestled within a tangle of roots and beat it with a pair of rods. He offered me a turn, but I could barely lift even one rod, so I stood to the side and watched. Grr hovered just behind me as always.

The crowd surrounding the tree was difficult to see through the iridescent feathers my experts had affixed to my eyelashes. It didn’t help that with every blink, these dipped into the silver and black cream on my cheeks. Like I said, questionable fashion choices.

As Pol drummed, the assembly marched a long circuit, one step for every beat. The longer this went on, the more Grr fidgeted, and I understood. I felt it, too. The air held a restless energy as if the sky weighed more than the ground and they were about to switch places.

I turned toward him as smoothly as I could, but the silver rings on my belt and hair still chimed.

His ears folded against his head, and he tried to look small. “Walk we also?”

We didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything by standing there, so why not?

At my nod, his ears popped forward, and he towed me into the stomping crowd. My black shoes—more like socks really—did nothing to block out the sand’s heat, nor did the rest of my outfit, and yes, it was sweltering. Everyone carried fire on some form of stick. An auntie handed Grr a sputtering star on a thin metal string, and he joined other boys in swinging it around with gusto.

It was probably for the best that no one offered me any of these sparking trinkets. I would have caught something on fire—probably my own hair or pants. But it was enough to be among them, laughing, skipping, constantly moving. Our feet were one with the drum. Our rhythm shook the ground and shimmied through my bones.

As our toes pressed into the path over and over, a wide trench formed, lined by packed sand. Wind swirled around us, and an electric charge stood our hair on end. Clouds shielded the sun, and the crowd launched great, flaming missiles at them. The sky answered with thunder, then a deluge.

The rain was cold and fell hard, and I ran for the shelter of the tree. As I watched Grr and his friends dance at the edge of the quickly-filling gulch, I wondered how much of this was coincidence and how much was science. If only I had a tablet and access to a database.

I did have access to people who could look up the information I wanted. Inshiyae. Alaysq. Fredo, depending on where he was. If I reached out to him, would he ignore me again?

Perhaps my whim summoned him. Maybe we were so in sync that he thought of me in the same moment I thought of him. Possibly, this was a natural effect of our bond, but with that thought, I felt him as if his arms wrapped me from behind.

He whispered something too faint for me to hear.

‘Fredo?’ I sank into his embrace, his incredible warmth. He was more solid than he had ever been in my mind, almost exactly like his brother.

Doubt sprouted in that thought.

He murmured, ‘I’m close, but I need you to show me exactly where you are.’

What if this wasn’t Fredo? I hadn’t told Ishiyae of my connection to his twin, but what if he found out anyway? Hent could have told him. Or Alaysq. My own dreams could have betrayed me.

You know what, it was probably Paqo. I’m going to destroy that robot.

I didn’t know if it was possible to disguise oneself while in a mindscape, but if impersonating his brother would trap me, Ishiyae would find a way to do it.

‘I won’t fall for it.’ I shoved away from him, and Alaysq was there.

She threatened him, but surely it was all part of their plan.

‘It’s a trick. You haven’t captured my Fredo.’

They couldn’t have. Unless he ran into the trap first. If he came to rescue me, and I wasn’t there. It was my fault again.

‘Alaysq.’ My voice was the edge of a knife. ‘If that really is Fredo, and you hurt him, I’ll hate you for all eternity.’

Her fog slithered around me, vaporous hands more slimy than wet. ‘I would rather feel fire than nothing.’

‘Then burn.’

Before, I pushed her away with the wind of my will. This time, I made that wind hot. As a gale full of flickering embers pushed her back into her corner, she laughed.

My head turned, eyes scouring every line of my surroundings, not at my command. It continued to do so against my command. As when Ishiyae had controlled my limbs, I sat behind my own gaze, a prisoner in a body that whispered its sensations and moved at the will of another.

It wasn’t Ishiyae this time. This mind fit to me with more familiarity, like a shoe already broken in, conforming to every curve of my sole. This was one who had known me for years, with whom a bond had grown as we ourselves grew.

‘Fredo, what are you doing?’

I trusted him always. Surely he had a reason, but soon, Ishiyae would notice, if he hadn’t already. He or Alaysq would use this interaction to trace me.

That didn’t matter if Fredo was closer and could get here first, if he had brought backup, someone strong and wise enough to fight the River’s End and win.

He walked me toward the tree’s trunk. Though the rain pelted my skin, I no longer felt it. All I saw were stars. My mouth opened, and my hand rose. As if from a great distance, Grr called after me, a warning not to touch the tree.

Then, I was someone else. I was short and frail, unsure of these pudgy limbs, but I would not let others see my weakness. Magma boiled in my core and frothed on the back of my tongue.

My voice had a metallic growl. “Wisteria told you I was not dead, and you assumed her mad. You killed her.”

The man to whom I spoke was nowhere in sight of my beloved first tree, my founding city on Rablah, now in crumbling ruins a mere hundred years after I had left it. Yet, he would hear me, no matter the distance. My vedia? No, my father.

His disapproval is smoke clogging the space between us. “You are not Lily. I should never have allowed her to create you.”

“I am half of her. I gave the Surra-nas ships so I could travel the sea of stars and return to you, but now I discover your second sin, Father. You abandoned my worlds, and they are ruined, but I will make it up to my Rablah-nas. I will give them a planet already complete and beautiful. I will give them Grenswa. Conquering it will serve as practice for when I destroy Seallaii.”

***

A soft, damp cloth dabbed at my neck, and I opened my eyes. Grr’s silhouette hovered beneath twisted branches and the brilliant spackling of the night sky.

“Forgive you to me, goddess-kin.” He tilted his head and spoke slowly as he formulated a sentence with a facsimile of my grammar. “Your lunch returned, so Grr cleaned to it.”

I tasted that once he mentioned it. With a pained swallow, I forced myself to sit up. “Why are we still outside?”

“Said Grand Silver Crumb move not to you. Gave the tree to you a vision. Can see only goddess-kin to them.”

Not just any goddess-kin either, I was willing to bet. It was another memory echo, drawing in those capable of forming a bond. How different this Lily had been from the curious girl Wisteria had watched impatiently press against the window as this world gained breathable air. This was a dark, angry creature.

I gasped, bile burning my throat. Whatever that being was, it claimed to have given Shlykrii the technology to travel the stars. It vowed to give Grenswa to the Rablah-nas.

Was this half-Lily behind Shlykrii’s initial attack on Grenswa?

An image of Hent flashed behind my eyes, scales teal pierced with electrum when he read my warning note.

“Nearly two centuries’ve passed since we’ve heard anythin’ from Shlykrii, since they nearly wiped us out. They never told us what they wanted.”

As they had then, hot tears pooled along my lashes, but I felt them deeper this time.

Oh Hent, they wanted your people to die, to be out of the way so they could give your land to others.

Grr sat on his knees in silence, ears erect and tail twitching. He wanted the tale of what I saw. How many of them knew of this half-Lily’s promise to give them a complete world? Did they know it already belonged to someone else? Would they still want it?

Though the night air was as warm as it had ever been, a chill sunk into my joints, and I stiffened. I wrapped my arms around myself. “Grr, you don’t actually worship your goddess, do you? She’s dead.”

His ears swiveled in opposite directions, and he shifted closer to me. “Create not she to us?”

“She did.”

“Then owe we to her respect.”

That made sense, but it wasn’t the answer I wanted. I knew how they treated me. They thought of Lily as fragile, mortal, and because of that, something to be protected. But they needed to realize she was fallible, same as me. She made mistakes.

She was probably wrong in giving them life on this world, and if she offered them a better one, that was just as likely wrong, too. They should question it.

“If she or a goddess-kin ever told you—”

I never finished that sentence. A streak of white lit up the sky, then the ground. A pill-shaped transport set down on the choppy lake the rain had left behind. Before the doors unfolded, I knew exactly who was on it.

Continued in chapter 61

Thank you for reading!

Grr thought the transport carried Veloi-nas, a sapient race of rodents from a very distant world. The males weren’t so bad. At least they weren’t venomous, but the chances of encountering a male in a raiding party were next to nil. While no larger than my foot, a Veloi-na raider took whatever she wanted and felt no guilt for killing a silly primate.

As Grr rushed off to sound the alarm, I wished it was Veloi-nas. Instead, once the ship maneuvered close enough to the shore, the doors folded back to reveal a company garbed in the interlocking armor of soldiers from the River’s End.

They were Rablah-nas stolen from this world and turned into warriors. Had they been lured away by Alaysq’s sweet promises to deliver where half-Lily had failed? Did they truly want Grenswa?

By the time their boots touched the sand, a crowd had gathered around me. Grr had returned to my side along with Pol. I should have run and hid, but I couldn’t move, and the one in the lead, the shortest, would have found me anyway.

Red braids flowed out of a notch in his new helmet and waved in the stiff breeze as he told the Silver Crumb he came for me and nothing else. He made it sound like a rescue, but I did not accept the hand he offered, and Pol was discerning. He stepped between us, and Grr followed his lead. Their backs formed a wall, concealing Ishiyae from my sight, but I still felt his gaze.

“Rose, get on the shuttle.”

What options did I have? Flee. Where to? I wouldn’t get far. Fight? I had broken his helmet once, and now I had a mob to battle at my side. Yet, I had witnessed Ishiyae destroy Rablah-na opponents, and he did it in my ungainly body. As himself, he could best this whole city.

He stepped closer with an order for my shields to move away, but they stood their ground. Teeth visible, Grr said I did not have to go with this trespasser if I did not wish it. They were loyal to me as goddess-kin. They would protect me with their full power.

“As goddess-kin?” With a muted chuckle, Ishiyae pulled off his helmet.

Pol gasped and stumbled back a step.

The molten color of Ishiyae’s hair glowed in the aurora light, flowing from a thick, high tail and over either shoulder. There was no longer a possibility of it being simply a decorative part of his armor. His eyes, one amethyst and one glazed paler, raked the crowd before landing on me.

Pol’s voice shook. “Have you shapes like Kel and colors like Asafrán.”

Ishiyae’s eyes did not leave me. “Were Kel and Asafrán parents to me. Was Lily sister to me.”

Pol dropped his forehead to the ground, and most of the crowd did likewise. Grr remained standing, but his knees and tail quivered, and instead of being between us, he was the peak of an obtuse triangle, gaze flicking from one end to the other.

Ishiyae grinned. “If you’re related to Lily at all, goddess-kin, it’s a distant relation.”

Now I didn’t even have the crowd to fight for me. I still couldn’t hide from or outrun him. Even if I refused to move, he would carry me. Unless…

“Did you know that if a vedia touches their bonded royal, they will be drained to the brink of death?” Within our shared mindspace, I added, ‘Or do you think you’ll be spared if you pretend our bond does not exist?’

Mismatched eyes narrowed and arms crossed, he tilted his head. “Does it hurt to pull such sizable lies out of your butt?”

“If you don’t believe me, ask Alaysq.”

With as much as he hated her, I doubted he would, but to my surprise, Alaysq’s voice echoed like thunder in the mountains. ‘She speaks truth, Ishi. Do not risk touching her, skin to skin, or you will be as you were when she kept you in control of her limbs.’

He grimaced, and I blinked.

This time, her words came to me alone, soft as the hiss of fog slithering through the grass. ‘This is an amusing game you two play. Now it is Ishi’s move.’

Within the space of another blink, a shooter occupied his hand, and before I could think of moving, it fired. Grr fell. Orange streamed from his thigh. He hissed, wined, and growled as I and several others packed around him, trying to stop the bleeding. The wound was large, his face quickly losing all color.

As we ripped fabric for bandages and applied pressure, Ishiyae’s presence nudged at me. Why had he done this? Grr had done nothing to him. How could he stand there motionless, watching his victim bleed out?

I wanted to say Ishiyae cared. I searched for remorse or guilt and found nothing. Indifference was a blanket wrapped around me so tight, it melted into me and formed a second skin.

My hands slowed. This Rablah-na boy was insignificant to the universe. He would die sooner or later. Did it matter when?

I squirmed. Grr’s life absolutely mattered. He had saved me. If he hadn’t existed, things would have turned out differently. Even if he didn’t matter to the universe, he mattered to me, and wasn’t that enough?

This wasn’t my apathy, it was Ishiyae’s, and if he could influence me, I should have been able to influence him.

Retreating from Grr and those who could do more to help him, I stood and faced my foe, pouring all my feelings into one word. “Why?”

His brows lifted. “Get on the shuttle or look back and give me my next target.”

“These are people, Ishiyae. In some sense, your family.”

“I don’t remember my family.” He said it so casually, even the warm wind felt like ice against my prickling shoulders.

The shooter rose again, fired, and this time Pol lay on the ground, a gaping hole in his chest.

Screaming, I charged at Ishiyae, both hands in front of me, unsure if I meant to grab or punch him. He avoided me, and the shooter lifted once more.

“Stop! I’ll go with you,” I cried, face wet and sticky with tears. My fists clenched. “I’m getting in the shuttle. Just stop this. I know you’re better than this.”

He had to be. He was Fredo’s family, his brother, his twin.

He swiveled toward me, weapon returned to his side but still unholstered. “You don’t know me at all.”

“We share a portion of our minds. I only wish I didn’t know you,” I hissed as my socked toes met the chilled metal tiles of the transport’s entryway.

“Pretend I’m good if it makes you feel better.” Ishiyae was right behind me. “I killed your mother. I killed the ruler of Seallaii, and I was just a toddler.” The words rang in the close quarters, and beneath them, within us, I heard other lines.

You will destroy Seallaii and change the universe. The tyranny of River will end.

I halted, and he glided around me to avoid a collision.

How would a toddler kill the ruler of the most powerful planet in the universe? I knew he had been there when she died. In his and Fredo’s dreams, I watched as my mother fell with Fredo in her arms. I assumed that fall killed her, but what did that have to do with Ishiyae? How did the fire start, and why were they there?

Half-Lily had wanted to destroy Seallaii, too, and this was Lily’s brother.

As I turned toward the hatch, Rablah’s fire-lit sky was replaced with white metal.

My hand tangled in the silver rings over my stiff shirt. I couldn’t breathe. “Ishiyae, why are you with the River’s End? Do you believe in their cause?”

He heard me. I felt that, but he did not answer. Instead, he gave orders to the armored Rablah-nas as they took their positions in the transport’s deeper rooms, leaving me standing alone in front of the closed door.

I pressed my forehead against it. ‘Alaysq, please give me answers.’

‘Poor girl.’ Her ethereal arms wrapped me in a tight embrace. ‘When the time is right, Ishi will bare his soul to you.’

The side of my fist hit the door. ‘I don’t want him to bare his soul.’

Why would I want to see the rotten thing I was now connected to, shriveled and viscous, a natural cruelty fed by the suffering of others?

My hand flattened against the cold metal and slowly slid down. ‘I just want to know he’s not evil.’

‘Tears on your cheeks are embers on his.’ She wiped my eyes, but she could only touch what was in my mind. My real tears continued to overflow. They glittered against the door’s white matte. ‘Your anguish hurts him twice as much. Look at him.’

I had to turn to do that, shoulders against the door now as I blinked the inner room into focus. He stood at the ship’s helm, fingers toying with hovering holograms. Menus filled with tiny text flickered at each subtle movement, warning of conditions outside as he piloted the craft. A sour grimace sat on his face, and he blinked too frequently. His breaths were shallow and quick, though when he addressed his underlings, nothing but authority rode in his voice.

‘He is supposed to crave your happiness, yet he does not trust you, and how can he when you do not trust him? You are a knife in his chest, my precious.’

I scowled. ‘I still don’t appreciate you calling me that.’

‘But you are precious to me.’ Her tone carried a pang that hooked into my heart, a tiny, curved needle. I didn’t care about her feelings. So, why did it hurt?

I threw her analogy back at her. ‘You so value a knife in your chest?’

‘You are what I need.’

‘So, I’m precious like a comb when your hair is tangled.’

She clucked, vaporous arms coiling tighter around me. They didn’t feel as incorporeal as before. ‘My attachment to you has deeper reasons beyond that.’

‘It’s time you explained those reasons. Do you share the goal of that ship you’re on? Why do you want to destroy your own homeworld?’

She sighed, but her arms didn’t loosen. ‘I do not necessarily want Seallaii destroyed, but I do not care if it is. Su’s plots are entertaining, so I support him.’

Something in how she worded that prodded at me, and I straightened, shoulders leaving the door. She had borne a child to the ruler of the River’s End, a concept that still twisted my gut, but she could have done it for love. For such silly attachment, she could have sided against her own people.

I could understand that. Even with the vague, confusing things I felt for Hent, given time and the right conditions, I could see myself doing something similar.

But that wasn’t what she said.

‘Do you know what happens when a vedia dies?’

The shift in topic hit me like a hurricane’s gust and drew my attention back to Ishiyae, my vedia, even if neither of us wanted this bond. He had almost died when he controlled my body to save me from that hungry mob. Within our mindscape, he had become an empty, motionless shell, stars fading.

Stars. Just like when Fredo moved me a few hours before. Did those stars have something to do with the bond? If he had died, would they have turned into something like a supernova within me?

‘Those stars are how your mind interprets the Lorsknu.’

‘Wait, there are Lorsknu within vedia?’ My eyelids fluttered as if trying to refresh the scene, hoping one of these times the pieces would fit in place.

‘Lorsknu dwell within royals capable of forming a bond and apparently within keilan. A vedia is a shell like a shirt or a sock. The core of your Lorsknu remain in you, but their limbs wear the members of your entourage.’

‘That’s how distance makes no difference.’ Some overly righteous part of myself was aghast. Were the Lorsknu using us, or us them? Why had no one told me this? How had I not figured it out? It made so much sense. ‘Space as we perceive it is different for them. Communicating with my vedia would be like communicating with my own hand.’

When I had believed Fredo dead, it felt like I lost a limb.

Alaysq’s ghostly fog formed a wan smile. ‘The Lorsknu are energy, and that is what they understand. When a limb is lost, they devour it to heal the wound. When the core is in danger, it takes all it needs from the limbs, but if the core’s shell dies, nothing the entourage has will be enough. The Lorsknu will take it all.’

‘If a royal dies, so do all in their entourage,’ I whispered, spine sliding along the door. ‘But you somehow survived that.’

Her hold slackened, and an odd sensation shivered through me. I didn’t see what she saw, but I felt her gaze run along her prosthetic arm. I had never accepted a proper bond with her, so how was that possible?

‘The Lorsknu had begun to consume me, but these Shlykrii-nas stopped them. They left me as empty within as I was without, everything I loved, lost. My child—’ She swallowed, and again I felt it as if it were my own throat tight with grief. ‘I am broken, incapable of love. It fit that I be the mate of the highest-ranked of the Shlykrii-nas, nothing more. All these years, the only thing I have wanted from Seallaii is you.’

‘To refill the void where the Lorsknu were.’ My eyebrows bunched together. ‘But I won’t.’

‘Have you any idea how much that vacuum ached? Now it is finally gone, and your anger or hate are nothing compared to it.’

Dread coated my tongue and made it slow, imprecise. I could barely form the thought. ‘How?’

‘Whenever we were close, your Lorsknu reached out to prod my emptiness, and I welcomed them, but your mistrust kept them from staying. I needed that connection to save Ishi when you drained him, and with that, I found a backdoor. Once I discovered that, there was only so long he could hold out.’

‘You bonded with me through Ishiyae?’ Again, my focus flew to him. This time, he returned the look. ‘Can he overhear us?’

Alaysq shrugged. ‘No more than a shoulder understands orders given to a thumb.’

Yet, he looked at me like he knew everything we had said. I should have expected that. How many times had he interrupted my private thoughts? He was the closest one to me in this bond, even closer than Fredo, much as that irked me.

His hands still directed the ship, but his eyes were locked on mine.

‘What did Alaysq do to you?’

His lip curled in a snarl, revealing his deformed tooth—not deformed for a Shlykrii-na. It revealed where his loyalty lay.

I averted my gaze, but he continued to stare.

***

When the hatch reopened, walls of faint purple greeted me, and a crew of Shlykrii-nas swarmed around our transport, inspecting it for damage.

I refused to step out into the belly of the River’s End, partly because I feared any attempt to walk in this weaker gravity would launch me through the roof. Mostly though, I didn’t want to cooperate with Ishiyae.

“There’s no longer an innocent village for you to threaten me with,” I told him.

He released a long breath. “Your idiocy is exhausting.”

He had the Rablah-nas carry me, and they wouldn’t let go no matter how I squirmed, kicked, slapped, or clawed.

“Let me down. I can walk.”

He shook his head, red braids trailing as if floating in water. “You’ll try to take off the moment they do.”

Held sideways beneath a Rablah-na’s arm, I narrowed my eyes on his back and hoped he felt it like a dagger between his ribs. ‘I hate that you’re in my mind.’

He paused by a slender door, and it swished aside, revealing a long, cramped corridor. At his gesture, my ride set me down within the frame and backed away. My gaze cut to Ishiyae leaning against the wall to my left, then to his henchmen standing attentively behind him, and finally to the open hallway on my right.

I darted that way, but Ishiyae’s arm appeared across my path and shoved me deep into the tight corridor. Before I found my footing, his hand tangled in my hair and pinned me against the wall.

Like wildfire, Alaysq’s anger tore through my skull. ‘You are supposed to bring her to my room.’

Surely it was just as loud for him, but where I curled in, palms over my ears, his wince barely creased the corners of his eyes.

‘I’m not a pet that plays fetch.’

‘Then stay, and I will come for her.’

‘Too bad the ship doesn’t listen to you.’ His free hand brushed the wall on the other side of my head, and he murmured two words aloud in Menyaze. “{Door lock.}”

Behind him, it slid closed with a note of finality. With bated breath, I waited for Alaysq’s response, but it never came. Even her ardor vanished, her mountains in my mind dark as if seen through a tinted window.

Ishiyae’s grip tightened in my hair. “This contact at least doesn’t seem to drain me.”

Doubt dripped in him, slow and nearly solid like curing sap. Fear still kept his touch from my skin, yet some reckless portion of his soul dared him to cup my cheek and see what happened. A whole parade of emotions flitted between us, most too swift for me to identify, but they were all either his, mine, or some blend of ours.

“You can block Alaysq,” I whispered.

He nodded. “I outrank her somehow in the bond.”

Did he truly not listen in earlier then? Did he not know Alaysq was connected to me only through him?

Face tilted and wearing a smirk, he looked so very much like Fredo—same high cheekbones, full lips, strong chin. His right eye held the same amethyst gleam. Short threads of red escaped from his braids, too, and hung over his brow and temples. He posed with the unnatural stillness Fredo often did. Debate still raged within him whether to touch me or not.

I cleared my throat. “You’re protecting me from her, not just in our minds, but by bringing me here.”

He chewed on the inside of his lip. “Alaysq never only wants part of someone.”

“And you?” I lifted my hand, ready to grab his exposed wrist. Could I really drain him if I wanted? I had to make him hurt so he would believe my lie. “Will you tell me what you want?”

“Su is king because he is Caste One. By that merit, I could rule.” His smirk flattened, and his gaze dropped to my rising hand. “Even more than him, I would deserve a Caste Zero mate.” His fingers hovered level with mine.

“Touch me, and you die.” I needed to have the venom of a scyuen, but instead, I squeaked like a geunda. Like them, I should have thrown something at him, too.

“Not right away, apparently. I could learn to work around that.” He hovered closer, cheek nearly touching mine as he whispered in my ear, “Crave it, even.”

This masochist was really asking for it, but as my hand curled into a fist, the supposedly locked door rushed open, and Togdy announced, “[This is awkward.]”

Awkward was a mild term for it. My cheeks were on fire.

As if recoiling from these flames, Ishiyae was instantly an arm’s length away from me, hand swiping the opposite wall as he gave the ship another command. “{Don’t open locked doors for Togdy anymore.}”

“[Hey!]” the Dossie barked, jumping at his back. “[It’s not Togdy’s fault. Put up a sign next time.]”

He was an orange blob behind the blur of my tears as I sunk to the floor. Crying some garbled version of his name, I threw my arms around him.

“[Yes, yes, Togdy is happy to see you, too, and all that, but you reek.]” He wriggled free of my grasp. “[You’re also scary with paint leaking down your face.]”

Sniffling, I stood and wiped my cheeks with my forearms. “Any better?”

“[No.]” Ishiyae’s eyes flashed, then flicked toward a doorway further along the passage. “[Go clean up in the washroom, and this is a ship of Surra. We speak Laysis.]”

Says the guy who just spoke to the ship in Menyaze.

If he heard this thought, he didn’t respond to it, and I obediently plodded into the washroom, grateful for its existence. I expected warm water, soft towels, and some time away from Ishiyae. Grass cushioned my first steps into the space, and the lights took a few seconds to respond to my presence. Gradually, they brightened, revealing a large sink beneath a larger mirror, a curtained area, a vacuum tube for waste, and storage compartments everywhere between.

Ishiyae passed the doorway. “[Don’t look in the shower.]”

Oh, sure. How was I supposed to fix my odor problem without looking in the shower?

Hands on hips, I stomped up to the sink, eyes repeatedly sliding to the curtain’s cobalt folds. There wasn’t a caveat on anything else, so what exactly did it hide? A search through the cabinets produced towels, soaps, and a million things I had no labels for, and these did nothing to sate my curiosity.

If I looked, Ishiyae would know, and I couldn’t say how that stopped me, but it did. My emotions were a jumble of sharp edges and hidden sides—gratitude for the buffer between myself and Alaysq. Rage at what he had done on Rablah. Fear at his behavior in the hallway. Resignation that he was my vedia, that was my fault, and did I really want him as my enemy?

I couldn’t look, but I had other senses. The room had a faint, fishy smell, but I didn’t know if that was normal, and my nose wasn’t that reliable anyway. I listened, but only the hum of the air circulators fought the silence.

With a sigh, I turned on the tap and scrubbed away. I considered stripping, but Togdy apparently had a habit of entering rooms with no warning, and where I actually wanted to be was in the shower. Perhaps if I kept my eyes closed the whole time?

Finished, I switched off the water and patted dry. A plopping sound caught my ears, like a large droplet striking a hard surface, and I paused. After several seconds, it came again, and I whirled toward the curtain. The shower probably leaked. Maybe there was mold, and Ishiyae was embarrassed by his poor maintenance of it.

Despite the spicy fragrance of the soaps, the fishy stench persisted, and something deep within told me the curtain didn’t hide simple mold.

Breath held, I closed my eyes and flung the blue fabric aside.

Continued in chapter 62: Keep Your Useless Civility

Thank you for reading!

It was so much worse than mold, and the dripping wasn’t water, though I immediately pressed my hand to the wall and ordered the shower on. It obeyed, but Nyen remained motionless as the stream pelted him.

Black blood soaked the floor. Its path left dried rivulets across his chest and arms, tracing back to the sword driven through his forearms and deep into the wall. He hung, eyes half-open and nearly devoid of color. The scales on his hands shown pearlescent white.

I pulled the weapon free and caught him before his head could hit the tile. How long had he been like this? Ishiyae knew, so this must have happened before he left.

“Please, Nyen, show me you’re alive.”

His stuff muscles resisted movement as I separated his arms and wrapped them in towels. With the softest of these, I massaged water into the scales on his ears and temples, willing him to breathe.

Eventually, his eyes closed, and slowly, his tail approached where my hand kept pressure on his wrists. Its tip wrapped my finger but didn’t have the strength for anything more.

“[Togdy doesn’t like repeating this so often, but this is again awkward.]”

I twisted toward the Dossie in the doorway. “Call for medical help.”

He lowered his head, nose twitching. “[They won’t help him.]”

“Call anyway.”

As I positioned Nyen more directly within the stream of water, I noted his feet had retained some of his neon hues. Even so, they were nicked and bruised. He had likely tried to use them and his tail to pry the sword free but couldn’t get proper leverage.

Togdy shook, ears loudly slapping his head, then sat. “[You should leave this room. Let Togdy take him where it is best.]”

I paused in scrubbing the dried trails from Nyen’s arms. “Where is that?”

Togdy’s tail tucked around his hindquarters, end tapping the floor in an unsteady rhythm. He wouldn’t answer because he knew I wouldn’t like it.

Bile filled my throat, and I choked out a guess. “The kitchens?”

“[Ishi said he was a gift. Togdy hasn’t tried this kind yet, and he smells de—]”

“You can’t! Even—” I gathered as much of Nyen onto my lap as I could. “I know you eat meat. Your body needs to, but you know Nyen.”

He tilted his chin. “[Is that his name?]”

Again, I paused. No, we didn’t know Nyen’s real name. We had yet to hear him make any sound at all, but that didn’t make him fodder.

Togdy stood and stretched. “[In space, you can’t waste like on a planet with infinite resources.]”

“Planets have finite resources, too,” I grumbled.

“[Then act like you know some restraint. At least turn off the water.]” From the hallway, he added, “[Come out where there are soft things to sit on. Togdy won’t take him until he’s dead.]”

That wouldn’t be anytime soon if I had any say in it. I stopped the water, bundled my patient in towels, and stormed out after the slinking Dossie.

The corridor led to a generously sized room lined by bookshelves and vases of databeads. Togdy claimed a pile of pillows in a corner. In the opposite corner, a raised bed of yewn had bloomed for the night, and their menthol perfume beckoned me.

With a snort, I banished their lure of peaceful sleep and stomped over to a third corner, where Ishiyae lounged cross-legged at a low table, now dressed in a flowing poncho and loose slacks.

“What. Happened.”

He looked at me over the rim of a steaming mug and answered within us. ‘That thing goes around trying to stab people. I solved that problem.’

I opened my mouth to argue, but another scene forced out my perception of our surroundings. In the shower, hair full of soap. Nyen flew out of nowhere, jagged sword choked in his grasp. Capturing that arm was easy, slamming it and him into the wall. He released the weapon, but I caught it before his other hand could.

His first arm slipped free, and I now had soap in my eyes. Closing them, I let his vacuum of heat tell me how he moved and where to strike. An elbow to the side of his neck. A knee to his spine. Both hands captive in mine, lined up against the wall. The sword slid between the ulna and radius bones.

As abruptly as it appeared, the memory left. At some point, I had sunk to my knees, eye-level with Ishiyae, Nyen clutched in my arms.

Something close to a frown decorated my vedia’s expression. “[A gift of the truth. It’s easier than explaining it.]”

“D-don’t show me memories of you naked!”

Lips twitching, he leaned forward. “[If that’s the part that most disturbed you, you’re more jaded than you seem.]”

“I need supplies to treat him.”

He reclined, picked up a tablet, and read.

I huffed. ‘Do not ignore me.’

‘What language were you told to speak?’

Nyen didn’t have time for me to be stubborn, so I bit my cheek and repeated my request in Laysis.

With a nod, Ishiyae gestured toward the entrance wall, where the shelving stopped short in deference to a screen. “[Order whatever you wish on the console, and someone will deliver it.]”

Skeptical, I rose. “[It doesn’t need a password?]”

“[You are River Guardian, no?]”

Behind me, Togdy had lain out a fluffy blanket, and I warily set Nyen down. “[I am.]”

“[Then your existence is the password.]

It worked like my citadel home, then. Ishiyae touched the walls when he issued instructions so the ship could confirm he had the genetic right to do so. My River Guardian status gave me the authority to command both the citadel and the River’s End. Even if he had never been to Menyaze, Ishiyae’s heritage granted him the same privilege.

A heritage he shared with Fredo.

As I scrolled through the console’s list of offerings, I chided myself for not realizing this sooner. Even before any mention was made of Fredo being a Sojourner, how had I been so blind to the clues? I may have never seen the citadel respond to his orders, but I had also never seen him try to give one. There were times when he had to have used the passages on his own.

Why would he keep that secret from me? Did he know what that power meant? Despite our friendship, despite the dreams and thoughts we shared and how much I told him, he kept these big things from me.

Inner me scoffed. What exactly would you have done had you known?

My fingers stilled on the screen. I probably wouldn’t have done anything that helped.

As tears collected along my lower lids, I blinked this nonsense aside and concentrated on the listings. They extended beyond medical supplies. Even if they didn’t, I could send messages in Ishiyae’s name, and if he was the one asking, the denizens of this ship would do everything they could to give it to him.

“I could rule,” he had said.

Are you not already?

Alaysq claimed to have punished him after he tried to kill me. Soldiers speculating about his breakdown on Grenswa believed Su hated him when not in his presence. He was not all-powerful here, but neither was he powerless.

Not wanting him to sense my intentions as I typed, I distracted him with conversation. “[Ishiyae, could you have stopped the attack on Grenswa?]”

“[The wise man picks his battles.]”

Order confirmed and separate message sent, I whirled toward him. “[You were the one who chose to target them?]”

Without taking his eyes from his reading, he produced a small, sealed bag from a drawer beneath the table and opened it. “[More like chose not to argue with Su over it.]”

“[You didn’t deem a whole planet of lives to be worth a little discomfort between you and the king of this ship who hates you anyway?]”

He winced at that last part, pulled a strip of spice-coated meat from the package, and bit down on it. “[No.]”

My bones turned molten, and my step toward him bent in a blend of stumble and kneel. “[How can you be so nonchalant about such horrible things?]”

“[Perspective.]” He swallowed the morsel and ripped off another.

“You’re Seallaii-na!” I forced myself to stand despite the liquid lead sloshing in my stomach. When I spoke again, at least my voice was pitched a smidgen lower than a geunda’s squeak. “[Eating that will make you sick.]”

I brought his nightmares to the front of my mind, hoping he saw it, too—the fire on Seallaii, the flames on Grenswa.

With a grimace, he shoved the rest of the meat in his mouth. ‘Does a scyuen apologize when it takes its prey?’

‘Hunting is a matter of survival for the scyuen. You’re—’

A buzz shook the room, and Ishiyae stood. ‘I do what I must to survive.’ On his way to the door, he paused much too close to me. ‘Keep your useless civility.’

I trailed him, unsure which of my requests had been delivered. It was the medical supplies.

As I grabbed them and rushed back to Nyen, I called back, “Civility is the difference between living and thriving.”

He didn’t return for a while.

From his throne of pillows, Togdy watched in reticence as I mixed Shlykrii-native ingredients into ointments, pastes, and syrups—some to stave off infection, others to encourage blood production, one to raise sugar levels—and administered them to Nyen. I gave attention to every cut and contusion, eventually concealing the worst wounds on his arms and hands beneath thin, durable bandages soaked in a saltwater solution.

As I worked, doubts and indecision riddled my thoughts. The door would unlock at my touch, and Togdy wasn’t a guard. If I picked up Nyen and left, would he let me go? I could find my way to a shuttle, though I didn’t know how well those were equipped for independent travel. It might barely make it out of this solar system, and it might take a hundred years to get that far.

Ishiyae’s memories told of a vessel I could use, hiding in the bowels of the River’s End—the Star’s Serenade, the home of the Abaeyoi clan. Yet, I had to wait for my second delivery. Unless Ishiyae had already intercepted it.

I had just finished tending to Nyen when he returned.

“[Where did you go?]”

“[Nothing of it leaked to you?]” The question emerged slurred and slow as if it had fought to be released, and he plopped onto the yewn bed.

I shook my head and spoke in Menyaze, the language that should have been closer to his heart, that should have meant more to him. “{Are you alright?}”

He copied the switch easily enough. “{It’s better if you do not know then, what I had to do to say no.}”

A deep ache, more than simply physical, eked into our mindscape, darkening the sea beneath our feet. His eyes closed, and I decided not to press him on it, despite my myriad of questions. If their ship was somewhere within this one, where was the rest of his clan? He claimed he didn’t remember them, but he clearly remembered Fredo. He said he killed my mother.

When neither of us moved for several minutes, Togdy dimmed the lights, and I stretched out alongside Nyen, arm pressed against his to lend him my warmth. He curled into me, scales glistening marginally brighter with each heartbeat.

Ishiyae leaned over the side of the bed. “{Why are you sleeping on the floor like some inferior creature?}” His arm hung over the edge, deliberately tangled in vines to keep it from reaching out to me. He might as well have given in. I felt it anyway, a caress of my jawline. “{You must be exhausted so long without yewn flowers.}”

“{Nyen needs me more.}” I crossed my arms and scooted closer to my patient. “{Besides, if I get in that bed, I might accidently drain you, remember?}”

“{I looked something up,}” he said, and I stiffened, sure my lie was over and he would grab me. “{Despite the closeness the bond creates, no royal has ever married a vedia or mykta. Is this why? Because it would kill me? Or because the bond would break?}”

Fear warred with defiance—self-preservation versus freedom—and it tasted of vinegar. I wasn’t sure whose it was. As his touch met my hair, I closed my eyes and braced for him to yank it again, but his wily fingers gently combed through the loose strands over my ears. I waited for them to get stuck. Mine would have, but his proved mutinous even in that. He reached the ends and began a second stroke. It felt nice.

It would have been nicer if he weren’t a monster. I had to remember that. He attacked Grenswa. He tortured Hent, left Nyen impaled to a shower wall, shot Grr and Pol, and he’d probably done countless more horrid things. More than that, he didn’t regret any of it.

Or did he? The sea within held a biting chill, and its ripples rivaled a blade’s edge. If this was regret, was it his or my own?

I opened my eyes to find he still stared at me, scar camouflaged by the dimness, left eye brighter than his right but in a way I could fool myself was only a trick of the light. Why did he have to look so very much like his brother?

Thoughts of him freed my voice. “{Tell me about Fredo.}”

Ishiyae scowled and rolled away. “{Don’t spy on my thoughts.}”

I hadn’t, but I would if I didn’t get answers. Why had they been on that island? Where were their parents? How had he killed my mother, and for what?

In the space where his face had hovered, the faraway ceiling taunted me with a display of swords, or at least one sword. Empty hooks outlined where a second blade was meant to cross the first, but it lay on the bathroom floor now, stained with Grenswa-na blood.

Perhaps that was where Togdy had vanished to, cleaning that up.

I stood, but it remained at least a story above me. In this gravity, I could jump that high, but what would Ishiyae do? Even if I got it, I had witnessed him turn a matching weapon on Nyen. He would do the same or worse to me.

Words would have to be my blade.

“{You were named after flora of Iniahara.}” My knee pressed into the spongy soil at the edge of the yewn bed, and a moment later, my other knee joined it. “{Ishiyae, the vine that wanders, always in search of the best ground. Efereodonidii, the vine that thrives wherever and strengthens all around it.}”

He sneered. “{Iniahara. They betrayed us.}”

I crawled until I sat back to back with him, not touching, but close enough to feel the pulse of his heat. “{You hate them. But not just them.}”

“{I didn’t understand it then.}” He sounded small, like the toddler of his memories. “{It took a long time to collect all the pieces.}”

He hesitated, but I didn’t fill the silence. It was a vacuum drawing the story out of him.

“{They learned the River’s End desired Sojourners. We had two newborns, and in our celebration, we let our guard down. They bought modified Veloi-na venom and used it to incapacitate us. They sold us, a whole clan, and all the River’s End paid was broken, useless scraps.}”

I tsked. “{You say us, but you were one of those infants.}”

He leaned against my back, too warm, a fire. “{Some of us never woke up. Others didn’t survive the years of experiments.}”

This he had experienced firsthand. Screams echoed. Needles dug into my arms.

You will destroy Seallaii.

Unmoving bodies.

The tyranny of River will end.

“{They used my father’s identity to send a message to the ruler of Seallaii. They told her that her brother plotted against her but his vedia had betrayed him. Kel would give her the evidence at a secret meeting.}”

The story he spoke aloud didn’t match what I heard giant shadows of Shlykrii-nas telling his younger self.

She is evil.

She wants to hurt you.

If you defeat her, your father will wake up.

If you are good and do exactly as we say, Fredo will get the medicine he needs.

He was smarter than they thought. As the transport descended, he knew they wouldn’t bring him back. He had promised to do what they said if they kept Fredo safe on the River’s End.

The hatch opened. He stepped onto a planet’s surface for the first time, and he knew he would die.

The gravity made it hard to walk.

“{I knew what they intended because Fredo did. He always knew what they really meant, and he could communicate it to me without saying a word. Father said not to tell anyone.}” With a sigh, he turned toward me. “{But I didn’t want to die, so I hoped that I would live. I had to defeat the evil queen as they said. I was supposed to wait until she was close enough to hear me even if I whispered. Then I would speak my brother’s name. I thought it would scare her away somehow. I didn’t know it was the trigger.}”

Sobs jarred his words, leaving them broken and uneven, but each one played out around and within us. His family were positioned like mannequins atop a silver pyramid, unconscious but rigged to stand, veils in place as proper River Guardians. From a distance, they would look attentive and in well-disciplined formation.

The last Shlykrii-na to retreat instructed Ishiyae to remain by his father’s side, to be a good Sojourner child and stay quiet until the moment planned for him to speak.

His legs, so unused to this gravity, were exhausted by the time the woman appeared upon the steps. Ishiyae’s heart stopped. His brother walked alongside her. Father had always told him he had to protect Fredo, and he would, even if she or the scary giants with her killed him.

Charging, he cried a warning to get away from the evil lady. As she gripped Fredo’s hand tighter, Ishiyae called out for him, and as the O of that name tore through his throat, everything exploded.

“{The needles, the chemicals, the scalpels, they had turned the adults into bombs, bodies packed with shrapnel, inextinguishable flame, and bioweapons.}”

The crumbling structure and flames folded away, something he must have practiced many times to be able to do it so neatly. The shelved walls of this room were dark in comparison as afterimages flickered in the corners of my vision.

At some point, I must have moved. I sat knee to knee with him, gazing into mismatched eyes streaming tears. I cupped his cheek, thumb sweeping aside the river of his anguish.

“{Skin against skin.}”

Menyaze was known for its idioms, and this one’s meaning eluded me. He meant it literally, I realized too late, snatching my hand away, but he caught it in a crushing grip.

“{I’m touching you, but I’m not dying.}”

I had no words, no lie, no truth, no sarcastic rebuttal. I simply saw again and again how much he had been betrayed.

He believes himself the last of his clan.

I could have told him Fredo lived, that he was near.

He hates the River’s End, yet he stays with them.

He towed me into a suffocating hug and wept into my shoulder, my chest. Slowly, my arms rose to encircle him. He needed it. In that moment, we both did.

Continued in chapter 63: Curiosity is Glue

Thank you for reading!

Rescuing Rosa from that planet would have been easy, but Valon doesn’t want to. He wants to accomplish multiple tasks at once. It’s more efficient that way.

It’s riskier, too. He wants to confront the River’s End. Rosa is back on that ship now. Her confusion comes to me like a scent on the breeze. My brother is there, so I stay downwind, far enough they can’t see me.

I can’t see them either, not with any clarity. It’s okay. In a few hours, I’ll see them in person. If things go according to plan.

When have things ever gone according to plan? I don’t even know what the whole plan is. Valon won’t tell me. He says I’ll know when I need to, but not before in case it leaks to my brother.

It’s punishment for reaching out to Rosa when he warned me not to. He claims it’s not, it’s simply a precaution. In the meantime, I have to trust him, and I’m trying, but how many days has it been? It’s hard to tell without a sun.

I wouldn’t be able to see its light anyway.

Each moment, I am ready. Time continues to drip, and with every falling droplet, I’m even more ready. I sharpen my knives. Adjust my armor. I don’t dare eat, but hunger doesn’t visit me either. I stretch and practice moving in this gravity.

When I’m sure no one is looking, I let the Lorsknu show me what they will. I don’t understand a tenth of it, and they react too fast for me to say I have any real control over them. It’s like putting a leash on something big like an Earth-na elephant or a Shlykrii-na norahn.

They drift through the walls, toward Nalquii sitting in the control room alongside Valon.

‘No, stop!’

They don’t listen. This is like when Rosa would sneak us into forbidden halls. She would keep going further than I knew we should. I always saw the patrols first. Sometimes, she was close enough I could snatch her back. On other occasions, I couldn’t alert her without giving us away. Still other times, she deliberately ignored my warning. This last usually happened when Kunai was there, and especially if Dollii wasn’t.

This is worse than that. When Kunai kept walking, I kept hiding. Even if he told, and he usually did, they never found me. I snuck from one refuge to the next until I reached safety, but leaving the Lorsknu to take the fall for their own actions now won’t work. There’s no separating their presence from mine. If they’re caught, so am I, and I can’t pull them back.

“You planted evidence that a force from Surra would attack Grenswa. How do you plead?”

I stop trying to retreat. The Apex Court within Seallaii’s capitol looms around me—peach marble columns and huge, arched windows ringing hundreds of tiered rows. I impend over it all on the high dais, focused on the center of the room, same as everyone else.

“The statement is true,” Brikla of the Bukuu says. By design, she appears tiny in a spacious, glowing circle of white. The acoustics steal the power of her voice.

At an extensive wooden desk in the front row, a councilor reads another charge. “Allying with a nomadic nation of elitists native to Surra, you placed a transmitter on the person or baggage of Sarquant Rose of the royal house Mellecallii and Menyaza to ensure said attackers found the hidden capital island of Grenswa.”

A grin pulls at the wrinkles on the elderly woman’s cheeks, though her hands shake. “This statement is also true.”

My mouth opens, and the voice that emerges is a thousand times more powerful than hers. Even the walls tremble at it. “Since you do not care to deny these actions, do you intend to defend them?”

Curiosity is glue. This is Silvika. Nalquii watches these proceedings through her, and I watch through Nalquii. I absolutely should not be here, but even if I could get the Lorsknu to disconnect us, to let me go back to my room and be a quiet Sojourner child waiting for Valon’s instructions, I want to see this.

Rosa and I went to Grenswa because of the evidence this old woman planted. It seemed like coincidence that we ran into Honored Elder Brikla at the village of Vefii. I would never have suspected her of hiding something on us. I should have seen her do it.

If I had, we could have stopped the attack. Rosa wouldn’t have been abducted. So many would still be alive, including the King of Grenswa. He would have been able to meet his grandchild.

The guilt is acid in my throat. It burns all the way to my fingers. How will this honored elder justify all that she caused?

She looks directly at me—at Silvika—fire in her periwinkle eyes. She is a frail crone, back bent and knees feeble. I should fear nothing from her, but this gaze promises danger yet unseen.

One of the four stoic guards at the edge of her circle tightens his grip on his glaive.

Silvika’s voice reverberates in every cell. ‘Wait. I will hear her words.’

The honored elder can’t have heard this inner instruction, but as if she does, she lifts her chin. “The princess plays at being queen when she’s not old enough to remember anything of significance.”

On the far left of the first-row desk, a familiar figure shoots to his feet so fast, his councilor’s apprentice bun nearly unravels. It shines platinum touched by the sun’s gold. Kunai. “Silvika of the royal house Mellecallii is now of age, and her coronation was completed three days ago. She is a full, ruling dayota with all the power accompanying and respect due that title.”

Honored Elder Brikla does not look at him. “I didn’t expect the spore to be able to speak in such long sentences. Send my congratulations to the Lokmas.”

Amusement wells in me. Kunai is definitely a fungus spore.

Silvika sighs. “Sit, Accessory Councilor. I am not the one on trial.”

“Are you not?” Brikla cackles. “Your finest credentials have everything to do with my righteous actions.”

Silvika sits forward. “Then the court listens, Elder. Impart your wisdom.”

“In an era even before my own, power belonged to the clan. A clan supported its members, and those with the strength or wisdom to best other clans stood at the top. Then, someone realized a child of two powerful clans would have twice the strength. They added a third and fourth. Meldzan. Lekatorh. Calarat. Lii Brin. Shortened to Mellecallii, the royal house.

“Yet, simply being the strongest was not enough. All must recognize the superiority of one and stop squabbling over their own power. This was when a genius offered a cornered young prince the means to make his father’s dreams of a united world come true.”

Silvika’s chin sits upon her fist. “Will you try to invoke the carte blanche my ancestor should never have given River? Or do you claim my authority invalid because of River’s means of obtaining it, for that is a very old argument your side has lost many times.”

“The winning side concedes that River’s method of crushing enemies and pawns alike was wrong. Yet, even after his condemnation, he continued without restraint. You perpetuate the last of his crimes.”

Silvika allows herself a private tsk, ignored by the mic that turns the rest of her words to thunder. “Now you would deny my entourage their right to exist?”

“These mykta surrounding me and those vedia at your back are captives within your mind, doomed to protect you or die with you, charged with always agreeing lest you hear their traitorous thoughts.”

“You know nothing of the bond.”

Still, this counter-charge has made her uncomfortable. Hidden within her flowing skirt, Silvika’s ankles cross.

The honored elder scoffs. “Don’t I? When vedia were yet a dream, my people were taken. I watched siblings and cousins devolve into dribbling insanity, failed experiments. Then others became successful experiments, prisoners forevermore, and I swore revenge. Not on River, who never understood right from wrong as many geniuses cannot. But there were those who protected him, those who allowed him to be, and those who continue to use him, even in death.”

“The matter is a magma flow within you.” Silvika waves. “Yet again, these are old arguments, ever lost.”

“I am old myself, and I have never had the vast resources of a powerful clan. It has taken me this long to find the blade that can impale the tyranny of River.”

The words echo with a different voice, a coarser accent.

The tyranny of River will end.

You will destroy Seallaii.

At the base of my skull, there’s a prick, then itch, like an insect bite.

Silvika’s lips twitch. “I will grant that there are still mistakes from that era we must cull.”

A second scene imposes over the first, as clear and immediate. The two are wholly separate as if my left and right eyes see different worlds. In one, I am Silvika, a judge upon the court dais. I rise from my chair. My dress has the weight of a small moon.

“Yet, you disappoint me, Elder. Surely, your reasons are wiser than pithy revenge against those already gone.”

In the second, I face the new ruler of my world. She wears the scales of a black scyuen, and chains stream from her back like wings, disappearing in long, sterile hallways. She is fire, a pulsing quasar.

My flesh is formed of star specks. I stumble back.

Outside, our honored elder speaks on. “When one innocent vedia, a mother with a child swaddled on her back, lay dying in my arms because her royal had perished, I begged spies of the River’s End to save her. And they did. More than this world has ever bothered to do for countless generations of vedia.”

Inside, I retreat another pace, but my calf hits a low wall. A fence rattles at my back.

Silvika looks past me. ‘Care to explain, Nalquii?’

Her vedia approaches the twisted, barbed wire at my back. ‘The boy has a revolutionary knack for not dying.’

‘Apparently.’ Silvika releases something I would call a grunt if it were any less authoritative or delicate. Somewhere unseen, a massive door squeaks open. ‘Kietyn.’

I dash left, but a chain wraps my arm, then both arms, pulling them in opposite directions. I strain against them, losing starry skin.

This is Silvika’s mindscape, a world of cages drawn by clean, perfect lines. This is how she can cope with having dozens in her entourage—strict order and boundaries. I am a kernel of dirt on her polished floor. I won’t best her here.

Outside, the councilor calls for a verdict, and Silvika gives it. “Brikla of the Bukuu, you will be executed via a quell per tradition of Grenswa, whose king your actions have killed.”

Two councilors jump like Kunai did, and the older one protests, “Milady, she is the second eldest remaining in the world. Is it not a waste to snuff out this wealth of experience?”

“Clearly, her wisdom has soured. Would you explain to the Grenswa-nas now watching why we would treasure rotten fruit?”

Inside, Silvika’s chains grow hooks and gauge into my sides. They’re not real. This body isn’t real. They can’t hurt it. But they do. Any thought of movement shimmies them deeper into my core. Warmth ekes out, and cold seeps in, biting at my vital organs.

Silvika leans in close. ‘You will remain absolutely still.’

Outside, someone explains that a quell is a place of chaotic gravity on Grenswa, where they throw the worst of criminals to be simultaneously torn and pulverized. We don’t have one on Seallaii, but we have a weapon that can recreate its effects.

The honored elder’s knees and palms hit the floor. Tears stream down her face. The councilor pleads for mercy. With a silent voice, so do I, but not for her. For me, slowly being ripped apart.

“I speak for billions,” Silvika decrees. “I cannot be lenient on one who would put those billions in peril.”

‘You’re to blame, too,’ I hiss. ‘She planted evidence, but it was true. Grenswa was attacked.’

A knife slips from its sheath, unseen in either view. The sound is from a third scene with no light. My real body. Footsteps draw near, but I can’t move.

More footsteps. A leap. A struggle.

Valon’s voice. “Nal, stop.”

“How dare you.” The words slip from Nalquii’s tongue, but I hear them louder within, synced with Silvika’s lips.

‘Do not worry about the Sojourner’s life, Kietyn. He is a traitor.’

The knife squelches into flesh. Valon screams, but he doesn’t let go.

‘Grenswa was attacked,’ I repeat. ‘You had evidence that it would be, and all you sent was your child sister.’

‘Our uncle succeeded in countless similar missions, but he may have betrayed our mother. I no longer trust him, and rightly so. You are evidence of that.’

In one version of outside, an aged voice screams on and on.

In another, Nalquii begs Valon to let go. The knife sounds again.

‘How old was Sjaealam on the first of those missions?’

‘The Grenswa-nas revere him. Regardless of Rose’s age, a sarquant had more chance of surviving than anyone else sent with so little fanfare. I would not send more and reveal my hand to Surra.’

Valon hits the floor. Fabric rips, his last attempt at holding back Nalquii—or Kietyn in Nalquii’s body.

I still can’t move. The knife rises directly over my heart and descends.

‘Please, Rosa. I don’t know what you can do, but do something.’

Within, her starry arms wrap around me, and she yanks on the chains. Our hearts beat in tandem, a drumroll, and with each staccato note, power pours into me.

Without, my hand moves on its own. It catches Nalquii’s wrist and wrenches it behind her back. The knife falls to her other hand, but I capture that one, too. A foot bends her knees. My own knee slams her lower spine with a sickening crack.

I’d never outmuscle Kietyn in his own body, but I am stronger than Nalquii. I uncurl her fingers. She launches sideways and rounds on me, but the knife transfers to my grip. They see that, and after one blocked kick, they hesitate.

Inside, Rosa’s touch slowly dissolves the chains. Another figure forms a wall between us and her sister. The pattern of his stars is as familiar as the sound of my own breath. He dodges but never gives ground, and Silvika’s chains barely miss him again and again. He grabs one and whips it back at her.

It falls limp, and she scowls. ‘Rodent. You are the last of the traitorous Abaeyoi.’

He glances back at me. ‘Not the last, apparently.’

Curiosity is still glue. I feel the simmer of his questions, and they slow him, distract him. The chains trap him, first a leg, then an arm. He twists to avoid others, but stretched as he is, he can’t evade the one aimed at his neck. He chokes out curses at her, vile words in a conglomeration of languages. I hope she understands them.

I’m free, but fear roots me in place. I’ll only make things worse.

Rosa glides to my brother’s side and presses her dissolving touch to the binding around his throat. ‘Sister, let go of my vedia.’

‘Your vedia?’ Her gaze cuts to me. ‘Your faux mykta. How did this happen?’

Fog seeps from between my Rosa and my brother. Its voice resembles an avalanche. ‘Not even the mightiest of rulers can dictate every detail of the universe.’ The cloud forms a woman with small, pointed features and a vedia’s chin-length bangs.

Silvika stiffens. ‘Mother’s favorite. Alaysq, how are you alive?’

‘Little Sil.’ Alaysq wipes at the start of tears in Silvika’s eyes and smooths her hair. ‘Your mother is disappointed to see you fight with your sister.’

‘I do not fight with Rose. I battle the evil that has attached itself to her.’

Beneath Rosa’s touch, a chain snaps, and my brother kicks at both Alaysq and Silvika. He misses, hauled back by the bonds on his arm and leg. These snake over him and constrict in one efficient twitch. A cry tinged with a grunt escapes him, then he hangs contorted and listless.

The chains might as well encircle my own chest for all I can breathe.

Rosa yelps. ‘Sister, please!’

Alaysq holds up a hand. ‘If you better knew the way of your own mind, you could protect him and keep him from misbehaving so much.’

‘Don’t lecture me while he’s dying,’ she growls. She moves with the grace of a scyuen, so different from the girl who started this adventure by tripping over an old woman.

I suppose Honored Elder Brikla did that on purpose.

Rosa cradles my brother. He’s a vedia, and the path strength travels between them is one way. She can take from him, but she can’t return the favor.

Without his influence, my body falters. Nalquii pounces. She and Kietyn require my full attention. Alaysq’s fog fills the space within anyway, concealing Rosa and my brother. She pushes me out of Silvika’s mindscape.

Probably the nicest thing she’s ever done for me.

I twist away from Nalquii not a moment too soon. She bounces off the wall behind me and comes again. I let her shoulder hit my chest, not my throat, and dance with her. The knife remains just out of her reach.

“Help Valon. If you can hear me, Nalquii, you need to help him. I know you love him.”

She chops my elbow and forces it to bend, bringing the knife closer. Its blade is long, thin, and nearly weightless. It’s not made for throwing, but I fling it anyway. It ricochets off the doorframe and clatters somewhere in the corridor.

Her weight shifts to follow, but I spin us and trap her against the wall. Valon lies motionless on the floor five paces behind me.

“If he bleeds out, we’ll have no one to pilot the ship.”

She grabs my shoulder, fingers like claws. I know the move. My collarbone will snap beneath her thumb if she has the hand strength to follow through. Before we can find out, I jam my knee beneath her ribs, and she doubles over.

“Kietyn, if I were the evil you think I am, I wouldn’t have thrown the knife away. I wouldn’t have needed it in the first place.”

My Lorsknu tiptoe over her skin. They lap up her terror and agony. Nalquii wants to run to Valon’s side. Kietyn won’t let her, but he doesn’t strike me either. He’s listening.

“We are so close to rescuing Rosa, but we can’t do that without him and without me. I can’t tell you the details of the plan, but Nalquii can. Ask her. Trust her.”

Moments grow into seconds, perhaps a whole minute with no sound but heavy breaths and heartbeats.

With a cascade of tears, Nalquii twists free and tosses herself at Valon. She calls for her sister, and they take him from the room.

There’s a lot I need to think about, but I’m exhausted. I find the bed and let the yewn flowers take my worries away.

***

The smell of antiseptic heralds Valon’s return. He stops in the middle of the room. If it were a picture, I’d say the artist wanted to imply everything should revolve around him, but I don’t think that’s what he feels. Hesitancy coats him like drying sap.

Sitting up on the bed, I greet him with, “I see you lived.”

“I am glad that remains consistent despite our different methods of physically seeing.”

“It’s an expression.” I stretch, and like a dapkie let out for a morning run, my Lorsknu scamper off to explore beyond the walls.

Brightness speckles my inner view, a multitude of lives hurdling through space. Rosa and my brother are among them. She called him her vedia. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

I leap to my feet. “The River’s End is right outside.”

“I know.” The hesitancy remains, clipping each syllable.

Vambrace half buckled, I pause and explore without moving. Several important details stand out. “Our engines are off. And the lights. I don’t feel them or hear their hum.”

“We fired at the River’s End, and they fired back.”

“I slept through that?”

“It was a brief battle.” He sighs, and the Lorsknu nibble at his resignation. It is sweet icing over something much denser. “We’re pretending to be helpless.”

I lift my brows and try to make it appear as if I’m looking at him. “Before deciding on this plan, you were absolutely sure they wouldn’t just blow us up and move on, right?”

He limps a step, two steps, three, and fidgets with the abandoned buckles on my forearm. “I made it obvious we are a Sojourner vessel.”

“Except for the part where you fired at them.”

A laugh and a wince share equal space in his tone. “Traveling the stars often does not permit one to stick as closely to an ideal as you seem to think. They have started pulling us aboard, so be ready.”

He finishes the buckles, but I catch his hand before he can pull away.

“Besides the obvious, what’s bothering you?”

“Something best not learned right before we board an enemy ship.” He sighs again, and the Lorsknu shy from the bitter exhaustion in it. Where exactly did Kietyn cut him? How bad is the wound, even now after medical treatment?

He has a hundred reasons not to trust me and a thousand he needs to.

I tighten my grip and hope it comes across as reassuring. “Ignorance is a blade. Give me its hilt before we go into battle.”

Still he lingers, mulling over how to begin.

I give him a starting point. “If it’s about what happened with Silvika, she’s already condemned me to death. How much worse could it be?”

He chuckles, but it’s parched, lacking any amusement. “She did not know of your brother’s existence. Aside from a select few, no one did.”

“So, she now wants to kill him, too?” Involuntarily, my grasp constricts even further.

With a snort, he yanks his hand free, but the sound is another façade. He’s trying to play the part of his normal, snide self, but it’s taking too much effort. “She called for an immediate trial with River Guardian elders, and they opted for a more immediate solution.”

Something more immediate but not worse than death. Why is my stomach tying in knots? I’ve handled everything that princess—queen now—has thrown at me so far. My brother seems to share that fighting spirit. When I cried for help, he came with Rosa. I’m not sure if he’s friend or foe. Probably a little of both. But he’s one hundred percent family, the only family I have left.

Slowly, Valon explains, “Children born between the stars are supposed to be brought to the homeworld to have their DNA stored in the database, but even under normal circumstances, that can take years. The River’s End, the Citadel of Menyaza, this ship, any piece of River Guardian tech, they don’t know you, but they recognize your parents and give you the same privileges. Ishiyae has access to more than any other denizen of the River’s End, and the elders fear what he can do with it.”

I see the barricade at the end of this track, and I don’t like it. “They can’t take away his rights in the database because he isn’t in it to begin with.”

He clears his throat. “Legally, revoking those rights involves banishment—a misnomer that equals death anyway.”

I nod. Banishment is a paradox. They’ll kill you if they catch you on Seallaii, but it’s not like you can leave. No devices listen to you. Ishiyae has always lived between the stars, though. He’s in a better position to survive than most.

“They cannot tell the system to banish someone who does not legally exist, so they banished Kel.” The hesitancy is back, eking through all façades like the most virulent acid. He doesn’t want to tell me this.

I reach toward him and find his shoulder. He flinches, starts to retreat, then forces himself to stay and tolerate my touch. I’m a River Guardian, too, and I need this human contact. To feel that he is real and these aren’t just voices in my head. I can guess what he means, but I need to hear him say it.

After the long gap, his answer flies too quick, words blurring into one another. “The banishment applies to all Kel’s descendants.”

The words he doesn’t say hover in the air between us. I can ever return to Seallaii, not as long as the River Guardians exist. After I rescue Rosa, I’ll have nowhere to go.

My voice is weak. “The Lokmas would adopt me.”

“The tech will read your true self. Could you manage not to touch anything lest it profiled and reported you?” As if to prove the point, he steps back, leaving my hand hovering in empty air.

“Ishiyae is working with Rosa. He might need River Guardian privileges to help her.” These words, too loud and high, are a front. Inside, they’re different: I might need River Guardian privileges to help her. Bit by bit, authorities chip at every part of me that makes me useful.

“Arguments are useless.” True steel returns to his tone, stiffer than I’ve yet heard it. “What is done is done, though so far from the homeworld, the ships might take a few days to apply the changes. Just keep moving forward.” He turns toward the door, silk robe swishing.

I catch the back of it. “You said get ready, but you still haven’t told me the plan.”

He doesn’t face me, doesn’t look at me. Of course he doesn’t. I am a shadow fading against dawn’s light. Who notices those?

“Nalquii and I will be captured by the boarding party. You, Sazlii, and my scyuen will sneak out, scout the ship, and report back to me to determine how our objective will best be accomplished.”

There’s no emotion. None. Not even to the Lorsknu. He’s hiding something.

“Our objective is still to rescue Rosa and the Grenswa-nas.” I don’t pitch it as a question, but it is. I have to make sure we’re on the same page.

He forces a smile into his answer. “Of course.”

There’s more to it than that, but instead I ask, “What if they kill you and Nalquii on the spot?”

“Then my scyuen will eat those idiots. Hurry and find a hiding spot.”

Continued in chapter 64: Asking Nothing in Return

Thank you for reading!

Alaysq was my mother’s vedia. The River’s End must have taken and healed her when they retrieved Ishiyae, fully believing, as he did, that Fredo was dead. It made perfect sense, though a part of me refused to accept it. Alaysq couldn’t have that close of a connection to me. Her royal had to have been a relative of mine, yes, but why couldn’t it have been a distant cousin many times removed?

When she shoved me out of our mindscape, I still lay on the floor, Nyen’s back lining my arm. Fredo’s cry for help had yanked me from restless sleep. Now, I stared at the shadowed ceiling and its widowed blade, trying to herd my stampeding thoughts.

Horrible coughs scattered them further, followed by a thud. I shot to my feet, barely able to discern a dark lump crumpled alongside the bed.

Scrambling over the vines, I touched the wall. “{Lights on.}”

An omnipresent glow bathed the room with a delicate touch, revealing Ishiyae in a heap on the floor, eyes squeezed shut. Blood streamed from his ears and coated his lips—Seallaii-na purple, not Shlykrii-na orange.

He wasn’t moving.

Hand still on the wall, I ordered, “{Emergency! Summon medical assistance!}” and tumbled to his side. Pressing two fingers to his throat, I counted faint, unsteady heartbeats. A shuddering sob escaped me. He was alive, but he wouldn’t be for long.

Numbness crawled outward from my core—a self-defense mechanism perhaps, so I didn’t have to feel my vedia die. I leaned closer, hoping for evidence of breath but unsure if I would be able to tell as the void swallowed my cheeks. Tiny burbles climbed into my ear.

Overlapping my palms on his chest, I pushed a rhythm for his heart as I searched for him within our mindscape. He had fallen beneath the sea, still wrapped in chains and sinking, but not fighting.

As I dove in after him, my real body slumped. Did the water’s surface represent some level of consciousness? Could I not delve this deep and remain awake? How far down did this ocean go? If there was a seafloor, did reaching it mean death? Would the fragmented vestiges of my lost entourage lay to rest there like remains of shipwrecks?

If so, it was much too early for that fate to claim Ishiyae. I caught his arm and pulled him to me, but my sister’s chains were rivers carving deep valleys in his skin. To him, they were iron, but in my hands, they snapped like grass.

All these sunk into darkness as we rose. My head breached the surface, then I rolled upon the sea as if it were a sheet of glass. To Ishiyae, though, it remained water. After two attempts to haul him out, it occurred to me that doing so might force him into consciousness, and that might not be for the best. Depending on how much pain he was in, it might even be cruel.

I knelt, submerged hands locked around his wrists so he couldn’t sink. ‘Fredo, come please! Your brother needs you.’

I glanced toward his corner, but winter’s breath engulfed the area, dim and cold, everything it touched rendered brittle. Exhaustion curled like smoke and smelled of it, too. He could have still been battling my sister, Alaysq, or both. Regardless, it didn’t seem he had any strength to spare for Ishiyae. Perhaps it was better he didn’t hear. Selfless as he was, Fredo would have given all he had and then some, even if it killed him.

The vedia description played through my head.

Giving their entire soul and asking nothing in return.

That applied to Fredo more than anyone I knew. The least I could do was distract one of his possible opponents.

‘Alaysq!’

She was there, fog raining into a liquid vessel. The sea rippled beneath her footsteps, then her knees as she bowed, a hand over her heart and a smirk on her face. ‘You cannot imagine the glee I derive from your willing summons.’

‘So glad to know my duress makes you happy. Please tell me you can help Ishiyae.’

Her eyes fell to him. ‘Sil meant to kill him. Though she is young, through her entourage, she has lived a thousand lifetimes. Still, I could teach you to surpass her.’

‘That’s not what I’m asking,’ I snapped. My arms burned in protest of Ishiyae’s stone-like weight, and the surface of my sea grew more like foam than glass, drawing in my shins.

Alaysq’s gaze returned to my face. ‘The answer is yes, I can save him, but not as I am. You must accept the bond with me.’

I didn’t know how to do that, nor did I trust it. She was connected to me through him. If he died, would anything still link us? Or if I accepted Alaysq’s bond, would that bypass Ishiyae? Would she still help him, or was this a ploy to get rid of him?

Was the prospect of help better than nothing?

With a nod, I closed my eyes and let her do whatever this would entail, hoping it was the right choice.

Apparently, the procedure involved an embrace. She wrapped her arms around me and somehow enveloped herself in mine. I did my best to cooperate without releasing Ishiyae, all the while trying to convince myself I wanted this. I was always meant to have multiple vedia. Why not someone so sure she needed me, someone who had loved me as a mother from the moment she knew I would be born?

Something still felt off, like sliding uphill, but I shoved that sentiment aside and determined this needed to happen. Had I hugged Ishiyae to solidify our bond? I supposed I had back on Grenswa in the chaos of battle. He had pushed me away, but I had refused to let go because I thought he was Fredo. I really had forced this upon him.

When Alaysq let go, I didn’t feel any different. Through my lashes, I watched her smile grow like a moon, from a sliver to full, and she was no longer liquid. She pressed her hands to mine, smooth and solid as marble, just like Ishiyae’s. Her fingers fit between my own and met his skin. Light pulsed with an audible double note like the thump-thump of a heart and continued in a steady beat.

It was pure sugar in my veins, and it took me several seconds to realize the buzz surrounding me was not entirely imagined. Back in Ishiyae’s room, the sound meant someone waited at the door.

I sat up, found Ishiyae’s steadying pulse, and ran my other hand over my hair and face before returning it to the wall.

“{Door, open.}”

Instead of the medical personnel I expected, my second order from last night had arrived. Ferrina stepped into the room, dragging a very uncooperative Hent. Her eager-achiever expression plunged in outrage, hoop-filled ears lying flat within her russet hair. With a snarl, she lunged. I scrambled back, allowing her to take my place at Ishiyae’s side.

Her trembling hands hovered just shy of touching him. “[What have you done?]”

I kept him alive.

A more honest answer would have included how I towed him into a mental showdown with my sister, all to save his brother, who he’d believed dead. I had kept that secret from him, and I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation when he awoke. Nor did I want him questioning why Ferrina had delivered the Grenswa-na prince per a message sent in his name.

With this in mind, his condition was a convenience. I couldn’t tell Ferrina that, though.

Apparently, me gaping at her wasn’t the right response either. Rising, she reached for a weapon at her belt and faltered when her fingers closed around nothing.

Hent held the hilt she wanted, its inlaid silver vines glinting the way I would have expected a blade to, but it didn’t have one. It was just a hilt curled in Hent’s cuffed grasp as he surmounted one of the bookcases. Then he flew and bounced off the ceiling, tail wrapped around the grip of the decorative sword. He dove at them, and while the move looked dramatic, Ferrina easily flung him aside.

He struck a shelf and upset a vase, spilling its beads, but he landed on his feet, scales burning more orange than gold. He tossed the sword at me, and I couldn’t say my catch was the most graceful, but I didn’t cut myself, just the floor a little.

“I hear the monster’s heart still beating. Finish him off, Rose.”

Monster. Hent had no reason to think otherwise. He was insane if he thought we could win this, though, as crazy as Ishiyae had been when he kicked at Silvika and Alaysq. River Guardians did not fight; I was a liability with a sword. Hent’s teachers had assumed someone should always be around to protect him, and now he held an unfamiliar weapon that lacked a blade. We were paltry excuses for warriors.

Plus, for my plan to work, we had to slip away quietly.

Lugging the sword over my shoulder, I stepped in front of Hent. “[I didn’t hurt Ishiyae.]”

Ferrina’s gaze zeroed in on my neck and how close the sharpened metal was to it. “[There’s no one else. You expect me to believe his attacker vanished into the air?]”

That was technically true, but it wouldn’t have convinced her.

“[Secret passages are staples of River Guardian design, and they made this ark, no?]”

Her eyes slid around the room, catching on every sliver of shadow.

Hopefully, I’ve made her distrustful of all the walls now.

Imbuing every last drop of my desperation into the words, I said, “[Who hurt him is not as important as saving him. He needs medical attention, but I can’t leave this room. He needs you, Ferrina. Take him to those who can help.]”

She had once released Togdy at my command. This one hit her deeper. She wanted Ishiyae to need her. She wanted to help him. I simply gave her permission to follow that desire while my charisma slashed down any inhibitions that claimed she had other duties. She didn’t need to punish whoever hurt him. She didn’t need to keep Hent and I contained.

Her slit pupils devoured her irises, ears fully upright and tail straight out behind her. She scooped up Ishiyae and raced out as quickly as she could beneath his weight.

Pride at that compromise slapped a smile on my face. Ishiyae would live while we were free to escape. Then I turned and saw why Hent had been so quiet. He knelt by Nyen, scales the same as the jade that tipped the Listener’s fluorescent hair.

Slowly, I sunk to my knees opposite him and gathered Nyen into my arms. “We’re getting off this ship, and we’re taking him with us.”

As I rose, he watched me warily, every color flashing in his eyes—fear’s gold, pain’s crimson, confusion’s lavender, and others I didn’t know the meaning of. The brightest azure, pale chartreuse, a gray I would almost term silver. These told me he was a mess of emotions, but I could only guess his thoughts.

I cleared my throat. “When he stabbed you, he was trying to protect Grenswa. He’ll face whatever consequences he must back home, but I won’t leave him here.”

“I understand that.” Hent stood.

I lifted a brow at him. “And you agree?”

He nodded. “We’ve lost enough already.”

At his easy acceptance, my heart swelled. He might have once threatened to stuff me down a drain for a minor offense, but when it counted, this prince had more compassion than I had any right to expect.

“He’s in awful condition, though,” Hent whispered as I returned Nyen to the shower stream for one last therapeutic soaking. I didn’t know when he would get another, at least someone had cleaned up the gore. Hent was wise enough to wet his scales as well. “What happened to him?”

As I searched the room’s every compartment, I explained the fragments I knew of his tale. For what he had done to Hent, they had gauged his hands. Because he was pretty, Alaysq had let him decorate her transport. Rablah’s gravity had been too much.

“Yet he lived,” Hent called softly.

In a drawer in the base of the bed, I finally found what I needed. “After he got back, he attacked Ishiyae.”

“He deserves a planet’s worth of honor for that, if nothin’ else.”

I returned to the washroom and leaned against the doorframe, the rings in my hair gently tinkling.

Hent’s brow was furrowed, and as when he had spoken to me before the children’s play so long ago, his scales resembled a watermelon striped with topaz. “Listeners only observe. It must’ve taken a lot for him to act, especially to choose...” He left the sentence unfinished, a hand sliding around his back to finger the hole Nyen’s dagger had left in his vest.

I straightened. “You won’t condemn him for it, even once you’re home?”

Hent looked up, and his answer died as his widening eyes drank in my wardrobe change. Pale purple chased away all other hues, and he swallowed. “It doesn’t fit you.”

“Ishiyae and I have different body shapes,” I conceded as I took Nyen into my arms again, “but wearing his armor will grant me some legitimacy while leading two prisoners around the ship.”

I left the helmet, though, not wanting to force it over my hair. I had also fastened my feather and ring skirt over the armor to camouflage the places where it hugged me indecently tight.

As we exited Ishiyae’s room, I ran my hand along the wall and breathed a request for the ship to show me to the museum and the Star’s Serenade at its center.

“That’sn’t Laysis,” Hent noted. “Menyaze?”

Wincing at his volume, I nodded. We walked fast, though I was still readapting to the gravity and launched in a leap as often as I blinked. Each footfall crashed like a felled tree. If only I had studied Nyen’s silent movement.

“You asked the ship somethin’?”

He was a clever one to figure that out despite never having seen that done. He also spoke quieter, so either he had noticed my jumpiness or he, too, felt the restless danger in the air.

“It’s showing us to our getaway vehicle.” We passed through an octagonal intersection, and I pointed out the triangles on either side of the correct passage. “If we get separated, follow these lights until you reach a museum and wait for me.”

He soundlessly agreed, a determined set to his sharp features, scales mottled green and aqua.

My eyes tumbled to his cuffs. They fit our cover story, but I would eventually have to get them off. The looped strap Ferrina had used to drag him hung from their middle, and I wouldn’t touch it, not even for appearances. Barbs on the inside of the bracelets already hooked into his brittle and cracked scales. At least the brief soak seemed to have helped. Despite our brisk pace, he wasn’t breathing as heavily.

He wasn’t the only one whose condition had improved. Within, I no longer kept Ishiyae from sinking. I held him down.

Alaysq’s warm breath caressed my inner ears. ‘If you keep pressing him under, you will take from him again, and he has nothing to spare.’

So, I let him go and hoped our head start was enough.

Hent walked ahead of me, scanning eyes memorizing the route and any possible hiding spaces. “What did you say to Ferrina to make her run away?”

“What she wanted to hear.”

He glanced back, teal trickling through his aqua, gorgeous as ever.

“She wants to save Ishiyae because she…” The word ‘love’ weighed on my tongue but refused to sortie. Did she love him, or was it only an effect of his charisma?

Hent would term that mind-control, not love, but could love and charisma not exist in tandem, working together to form something stronger than either?

With a hard swallow, I hoped I wouldn’t regret bringing this up. “You say your feelings for me are only because of my charisma.”

The jagged corridor spilled into a wide rotunda, and Hent halted at its border. “I said I couldn’t be sure.”

Two Shlykrii-nas in brown uniforms sat at a desk in the center of the space. I held one’s eye as I adjusted my grip on Nyen and took Hent’s arm, and the watchman gave an acknowledging nod before returning to his screens.

On the far side of the rotunda, revolving doors in a wall of glass marked the museum’s entrance, and I waited until we were beyond them before resuming our conversation. “Ishiyae has the same charisma I do, and it doesn’t stop you from hating him.”

Hent snorted. “He doesn’t want me to love him.”

Again, he made me think. The stallion Lan would do as I asked if he liked me, so I had desired his affection, and Blu had been much too close on that occasion.

Even if I hadn’t consciously wished for the giapro’s good regard, they resembled the Amparth who despised me for my resemblance to River, slight as that was. Deep down, I wished they would see me instead so I wouldn’t have to fear reptilian faces hiding in the bushes beyond Menyaza’s walls.

Then there was Grr, and I wanted him to adore me. At every step, I had been unable to protect him, yet how invigorating the belief that I had power.

I slowed, staring through the exhibit to my right. Ancient, fringed armor protected headless mannequins in tidy military rows behind a velvet rope.

Consciously, I had not used charisma on Hent, but had I not wanted to change his opinion of my kind? I had liked it when he refuted Blu’s claim on me. Jealousy burned when he danced with others at the festival, and when I saw that he would kiss me, I wanted that, too. If I had been a pink Amethyst raised by River Guardians without charisma, would those things still have happened? I wanted to say yes, but like him, I couldn’t be sure.

“Is it wrong, though?” I murmured.

Hent, far ahead, turned back. His face scrunched, scales somewhere between pink and plum, as his tail swayed in slow, tight coils. “I suppose it depends on if what you want from me differs from what I want for myself.”

With a smirk, I hurried to his side, passing displays of taxidermied beasts and racks of chipped blades. “You say that like you wouldn’t be able to defy me, but I’ve yet to win an argument with you. In fact, with most of the things we’ve disagreed on, it’s you that changed my mind.”

He nudged me playfully. “You think Seallaii-nas are beautiful monsters now, too?”

Yes, but I couldn’t say it. Ishiyae, Alaysq, Lily, my sister? None fit my wise, peaceful paradigm.

I returned his teasing push and scampered on ahead, but relics of the violent past were an anchor on my heart. Curtsying mannequins lined up in gorgeous clothes on either side of me. The elite who had worn them had amassed their fortunes on the backs of the powerless. Did the injustice that allowed this art to be created make it wrong for me to appreciate it?

Slinking along the path behind this display, Hent sobered, swirling lavender and teal. His torn and bloodied vest didn’t match the exhibit’s elegance, yet his regal beauty did. He would have looked so amazing in any one of these high-colored, embroidered jackets, even a moon would have swooned.

I drew a breath to tell him this but instead choked on the musty air, and he spoke before I could. “Ishiyae looks like your Fredo.”

My gasp brought on another round of coughs.

“They’re brothers,” I eventually rasped, “though Fredo doesn’t remember him.”

“You’re sure this Fredo wasn’t involved with the attack on my home?”

My teeth cut into my cheek as I debated how much to say. I had brought the tracker, but I hadn’t known. Fredo’s sister, or some version of her, had been behind the attack two hundred years ago that nearly wiped out Hent’s people.

“Fredo had nothing to do with it,” I began, primed to launch into an explanation about how the Shlykrii-na groups differed and what they wanted, but I reached the end of the row.

Beyond a larger than life statue of a persnickety Shlykrii-na astride the shoulders of a norahn, a railing ringed a sunken space two stories deep. In the center rested the Star’s Serenade, shaped like a lily laid upon its side. The stem served as the nose, and eight petals formed the tails, colored a ghostly purple-white.

“There it is, our ride home!” I cried, tears clouding my vision. This was better than I could have hoped. A clear dome capped the space, and while it was likely sturdier than glass, the Star’s Serenade was stronger, especially if it had been absorbing the energy of this starlit view for over a decade.

Nyen stirred, tucking in closer to me. It was colder here than any part of the ship I had seen thus far.

“Hent, hurry!”

He didn’t answer, and hope’s warmth became panic’s flames.

“Hent?”

“I heard you.” His voice wobbled and broke. “How many can that vessel hold?”

I traced the sound, following the curved inner path toward him. “Dozens. We can set the air to be warm and humid and full of oxygen. We can even flood a whole room so you can swim.”

As I rounded the corner, he stepped back. His eyes and scales were red dipped in darkness. “Where are the others?”

With another stride, I hefted Nyen. “I don’t know where the other abducted are, but we have to—”

“I’lln’t leave them. I can’t.” He tried to retreat and collapsed, gaze angled too far to the right to be on me.

I tracked its line. Out of all the relics in this museum, he had encountered the worst. The white war machine’s skull-like face glowed beneath the spotlights, diode eyes scarlet but not active. It was inert, posed with a shooter aimed at where Hent had stood. It might not have been Paqo, but it looked exactly like it, right down to the crack I had put in its side.

Swallowing, I placed myself between Hent and the display. I wasn’t tall enough to block it completely, but at least my back hid the clawed left hand and its ghastly prize—Blu’s necklace stained with azure blood.

“The others won’t be abandoned, but we need to get you off this ship.”

He shook his head. “They’re the ones in danger. Stop wastin—”

“If you stay, these Shlykrii-nas will use you to break Grenswa.” I dropped and gripped his shoulder. It felt like ice. “You defeat them by leaving.”

I wasn’t sure he heard me. His unfocused gaze definitely didn’t see me. Watching a scene already past, it matched the star-speckled void beyond the dome.

His voice was just as hollow and lost. “He screamed and screamed. I begged them to stop hurtin' him. They told me to beg the camera, so I looked right at it.”

Ishiyae was on the move, though I didn’t dare check where. Heart thudding like a leempree’s hooves, I set Nyen down alongside us and cupped Hent’s cheeks. “Look at me.”

His gaze remained distant, the shine in his ebony scales erratic. “I saw my own reflection in the lens, torn and filthy, but I spoke to Blu. To Timqé, to Mother, to everyone in the world. I said to keep fightin', to claim victory like we did before.”

Hent knew the history as well as I did. Grenswa had repelled those first invaders only after they were stirred into a frenzy by the death of their beloved queen, a role he now played.

I wrapped my arms around him and hissed in his ear, “You’ll live, Hent. I’ll take you home, and you’ll hug your mother and brother. You’ll meet your nephew.”

He flinched. “They kept hittin' Blu until he couldn’t scream anymore, and I couldn’t even scream for him because they’d send the image home. I told him he'dn’t, we'dn’t be Grenswa’s downfall.” He squeezed his arms between us and buried his face in his hands. “They should've killed me instead.”

They wouldn’t, though. They would break his heart and his soul over and over until they got what they wanted, and if they killed him then, they would call it mercy.

Sobs shook him, but not as they had Ishiyae only a few hours before. My vedia’s grief was old and had grown with him. It was wild, riding the wind and just as unpredictable. He had hugged me tight enough it hurt, as if I were air and he had held his breath all this time.

There was rhythm in Hent’s raw sorrow, a song with the most heart-wrenching beat. It might have been wrong, but I wanted him to cling to me as Ishiyae had. I wanted to be what Hent needed.

As he tried to curl in on himself, I looped his connected wrists behind my neck and drew him closer, recalling times when a much smaller me had comforted Fredo like this after his nightmares. I hadn’t seen them back then. When I couldn’t be there for him, Dollii was, or Lord Lokma, murmuring a lullaby.

I hummed that same tune, but the words were different. I told Hent he could grieve, but he had to live. I said I had composed a dirge for Blu, but I would show him only after we had launched. I promised to sing for him and even play an instrument, any one he chose, but he had to get up now and board the transport.

He couldn’t. The cold, dry air and lack of oxygen had taken its toll. Each place we touched, he shivered less, but my heat was not enough to keep him conscious.

The movement of his lips against my neck felt like a caress. “That’s what it means to be a prince: You make sure everyone else’s safe first.”

Before I could argue, he slipped through hibernation’s door, body stiff as Nyen’s had been.

“Idiot prince.” Preparing to stand, I reached for the Listener and found him staring. “You didn’t hear that.”

He tilted his head and smirked.

I huffed and pulled him to his feet. “You’re even prettier without the mask, you know.”

His brows lowered, wary, but the smirk remained. He was barely awake, though, muscles too stiff to walk, so I hauled him along with one arm while balancing Hent on the other.

Out of all the things in this museum, these two were the true works of art. If I thought Hent beautiful before, it was because I hadn’t seen him asleep. His peaceful lines refused to release my gaze. Every jewel-tone pulsed through his scales as they strove to glean oxygen from the air. Because they couldn’t find enough, his small breaths ruffled the hair on the back of my neck, sending tingles all the way to my toes. I almost dropped him ten times before the hatch of the Star’s Serenade opened at my elbow’s prompt.

The scent of decaying yewn greeted us. Lights gradually brightened, leading us deeper into the stem, and I tiptoed, intrigued by everything. This was a real Sojourner ship. A clan of over a dozen had lived here once—Fredo’s family. It was probably just my imagination, but the ship seemed just as curious of me. After all this time, a River Guardian had come for it. It awaited my command.

I had it fill two tubs with warm water, then amended the request and made one of them cool. Nyen narrowed his eyes at me, but he would get the warm one.

“I’ll heat Hent’s after we’ve launched,” I told him as I gestured above the center console to pull up the holographic controls. I didn’t know how to fly a vessel like this, but the ship offered a manual when asked, and I skimmed the instructions on the screens.

Moving freer now, the Listener swam to the edge of his tub and reached for the prince.

“Nyen, don’t. He’ll be angry, but he’ll live, and that’s what matters.”

He puffed his cheeks and didn’t stop stretching toward Hent.

“When you fall in the cold tub, I don’t want to hear you comp—”

If I finished that sentence, I didn’t hear it above the stomping in the corridor.

A second later, armored Rablah-nas surrounded me, and Ishiyae’s voice was a wheeze in my head. ‘Don’t fight them. We don’t have time for that.’

‘You’re right about that last bit. Call them off.’

‘Go with them.’

Instead, I kicked at the first one to draw near. He scrambled back, and I sprang at a second. My heel struck his chest, and as he teetered, I flipped and connected with a third’s jaw. My toes tapped the floor, and I shot off again, but as my punch reached a fourth, my hand refused to form a fist. My knee bent too far as I landed, absorbing all momentum, and a gloved hand captured my wrist.

‘You barely have the strength to mind-speak, Ishiyae. Controlling my body will kill you this time.’

‘I just have to slow you, and that doesn’t take too much.’

Both of my arms and one leg were restrained now, but I jerked and writhed. Another carried Hent. I didn’t see Nyen.

“Return him to the water, and I’ll go with you,” I cried. Fragmented plans shimmied through the corners of my mind, trying to stay out of Ishiyae’s notice. If I touched a wall, could I set the autopilot and launch this ship once I was outside? I didn’t want to be exposed in the museum when the Star’s Serenade shattered the ceiling and opened this room to outer space, though. That would be a last resort.

I managed to kick off one wall and slam my shoulders into a captor’s gut. At the same time, I rounded on Ishiyae in our mindscape, sweeping his legs out from under him. He was barely standing as it was, and we landed hard on the surface of the sea. The few stars he had left flickered within the nebulous shadow that made up the rest of him as he rolled and pinned me. I kneed his back and flipped our positions, slamming him against the sea’s glass until it shattered.

Shards of it edged his voice. ‘Alaysq needs you. Veloi-na arms dealers attacked her on Rablah because I wasn’t there to stop them.’

‘I can’t save her any more than I could save you a few hours ago.’

‘At least try.’ He yanked me under the sea with him.

‘What’s to try?’ I sputtered. ‘I don’t even see her in here.’

‘She shut herself off because she doesn’t want us to experience dying with her.’ Terror surrounded him as a white-hot glow.

I stopped kicking and clawing for a second. ‘You don’t even like her.’

‘She’s like a mother I hate and love at the same time.’

I guessed he felt similarly toward me. For most of his life, Alaysq was the only other Seallaii-na he had known. He probably expected me to be just like her. She was my mother’s vedia, after all.

‘You’re a Sojourner, Ishiyae. You could go anywhere in the universe. I know you tried to run once. It’s why you fixed the Star’s Serenade.’ Slipping free of his listless grasp, I swam for the surface.

Outside, the Rablah-nas had carried me far. Flashing diodes covered dark walls. Curtains waved. Someone threw a sheet over me. I lay on a hard, mobile bed, limbs strapped down.

Ishiyae’s response was a whisper on the breeze. ‘My clan didn’t name this ship the River’s End. They called it River’s Vow, a promise to the surviving high caste Surra-nas that they would not be abandoned. I’m the last one left to live up to that promise.’

‘Shkykrii’s revolution happened long before you were born,’ I argued, tugging at my straps. ‘You owe them nothing. Get me out of this, and let’s leave.’

‘I’m a part of it, and it’s a part of me.’

‘Sounds like the civility you say you despise. You fancy yourself their hero.’

Instead of words, something else trickled through, eagerness and dread. He stood in a hanger, stores stacked against the walls, transports lined in tidy berths. He approached one shaped like a bird.

‘Is that another Sojourner ship?’

‘Thanks for returning my armor,’ he said, then put as much distance between us in our minds as the leash would allow. ‘Save Alaysq, and if I survive this, we’ll talk later.’

If he survived. What if I didn’t survive? Alaysq hadn’t wanted these doctors to know I was royal, the half of the bond they hadn’t studied. Now they attached wires to my head.

Asking nothing in return, my foot. No, this vedia asks a lot.

Continued in chapter 65: A Huge Loss

Thank you for reading!

Traitorous. Banished. The words echo as I hide with Sazlii in the neck of the ship above the control room. It’s a maintenance access point for the weapon arrays digging into my back, but if that’s all, why would this space have shielding to block our life signs from scanners? Someone intended for this to be a hiding place, probably the same one who thought it would be great to have the lasers appear to shoot out of the bird-shaped ship’s eyes and beak.

I’m not sure that someone isn’t Valon.

“You will need to be quieter once the search begins,” Sazlii whispers.

“Sorry,” I grumble, hugging my knees closer to myself. We’re crammed in here like canned vegetables, and it smells of our own breaths. I didn’t have breakfast, but she ate baffble recently. The sweet acidic fruit’s aroma isn’t bad, just very noticeable.

It’s dark, or at least, no light slithers across my skin, but I feel her gaze. Maybe it’s her curiosity. The Lorsknu perk like dapkie catching the scent of prey.

“Valon says you can see beyond the walls of the ship.”

He also told me not to tell anyone that, but I’m starting to trust Sazlii. She has protected me more than once. She explains things. She doesn’t tease me about my feelings, and she takes them seriously. If Sjaealam views himself as my father, I want to see this caring mykta as my mother.

At my nod, she continues, “How close are we to the River’s End?”

It looms, sparkles of life forming a massive beast, jaws closing around us. “Very. Why?”

“You need answers to settle you, things you should know before we board. In time, you will get more details from the memories Sjaealam gave, but I will tell you quickly. Do not interrupt.”

I play the part of a good child, motionless and attentive as the Lorsknu weigh her every word. She speaks the truth, at least as she believes it, even if she does not like the tale. Neither do I.

“Lily wanted Rablah to be the perfect blend of Surra and Seallaii, to combine the beauty of both. She loved Surra and spent many of her adolescent years studying there, befriending the elite drawn in by her charisma. She made gifts for them, creatures meant to entertain and protect. She patterned one of these after the original idea for vedia. She could bond with it, one mind in two bodies, one to remain on Surra, the other to travel the stars.

“When she was murdered, the Surra-na rebels thought they destroyed it as well, but it waited within the ruins of the largest elite palace, unable to move, plotting revenge. Wisteria claimed Lily was not dead, but no one believed her. Wisteria was a keilan, and though Sjaealam did all he could to safeguard her, she was brought to Seallaii and killed.”

I almost say something at this point, but I hold my tongue. She hasn’t gotten to the important part yet.

“Centuries passed, and Lily’s anger grew. Why did her family never come for her? Why let Wisteria die? Why abandon Rablah? She harbored three goals: Humiliate Seallaii. Ruin the name of Surra. Give a beautiful world exactly halfway between them to her Rablah-nas.

“She played the muse of countless Surra-na inventors until they crafted what she needed: a mechanical army, swift, space-faring vessels, and the means to animate her again.

“Of course, her clan came. Kel destroyed her and blamed himself for it all. That guilt bled into Sjaealam, but the damage could not be undone. Grenswa barely survived, and they named the invaders Shlykrii, slayers. Sjaealam did what he could to clean the mess, and what he could not fix, he covered up.”

“That’s how he became the hero of Grenswa?” I bite every word.

Sazlii sighs. “It is not a title he takes pride in. I say this so you know he does have secrets he would die to keep. Silvika believes these secrets include past plots to assassinate his sister and steal the throne. They have a message from your father claiming exactly that, and the ruler of Seallaii died meeting with him. They believe either it was a trap and Kel killed her, or Sjaealam learned of Kel’s confession and killed them both. Kel betrayed Seallaii, or he betrayed his royal, and to Silvika, this latter is worse.”

Swallowing hard, I nod slowly. “I’m surprised we weren’t banished sooner.”

“The Abaeyoi are River’s direct descendants. To lose that line is a huge loss for the River Guardians.”

A chuckle rumbles in my chest. It shouldn’t be funny, but I can’t stop the laugh. River betrayed the world again and again as he conquered it and never lived by its rules. Why expect anything else of his descendants? Had they not taken in my father, a vedia, one of their ancestor’s creations, the clan would have never born a keilan, let alone two. My brother, assuming some version of him existed, would have remained the secret weapon of the River’s End and destroyed the River Guardians before they could banish him. The line’s impunity would have stayed intact.

The ship shudders, then falls still with a groan, and I sober. Silence and stillness fester for several seconds before voices filter through the floor. It’s scan proof but not soundproof? Sazlii’s not surprised, so apparently that’s correct.

Likely due to her being the only one not wearing a veil or helmet, Nalquii’s bell-like voice rings the clearest. “[You speak to the sovereign of Seallaii through her vedia. We demand an audience with your leader.]”

Only every third word of the reply is discernable, something about their king being interested but the River Guardian having to die. It’s a valid response. Valon can control their ship, probably. He’s also annoying.

“[You there behind the spokesman,]” Nalquii calls, “[with the scarlet braids flowing from the back of his helmet, is that your real hair?]

I hold my breath. Is it my brother? Or are the braids a trophy stolen from another member of my family when they were murdered?

If someone answers, I don’t hear it. My Lorsknu are as hard to hold back as a stream.

‘No one will notice us,’ they excuse, but Nalquii channels Silvika again, and I will not get sucked back into that underworld. If that’s really Ishiyae, I won’t pull him in.

Nalquii walks away, down a ramp maybe? Valon said he would open the hatch to this room alone and seal off any others. Sazlii and I could have hidden elsewhere if we didn’t have to worry about the ship no longer listening to me any moment now.

“[Do you think that helmet conceals you, Sojourner Child of the Stars? You can barely stand there. Your fear and pain are as Seallaii’s rings.]” She switches languages, and her voice softens. “I know exactly who you are. Your bond with my little sister is very unfortunate. Otherwise, I could have extended a second-tier connection to you.”

“I’d die before being yours.”

“You will die, true. I would keep you only as long as needed for you to accomplish my objective. Now my poor sister will have to experience the loss of a vedia when these Shlykrii-nas kill you.”

He flinches. Enough of my Lorsknu have seeped into the room, I feel everything, every breath, every blink hidden by a visor. Can I position everyone in there like dolls? End this fight before it begins?

Sazlii grabs my shoulders, thumbs pressed to my collar, and unlike her sister, she does have the strength to complete the move. “That is a knife that must never be wielded,” she hisses, “no matter how much that ridiculous princess deviates from the plan.”

It was just a thought. I wouldn’t have done it. Silvika made Nalquii stab her beloved. I won’t be like that, forcing people to do things against their innermost will.

Chaos grips the room below us. When Nalquii orders the Shlykrii-nas to attack Ishiyae, they do, but not all of those with him are susceptible to her charisma. Massive Rablah-nas mow down any target he gives them. They have Valon in their sights, but the scyuen leaps in front of him, enormous wings like a wall. The next moment, she is a needle of liquid mercury, teeth piercing armor, delivering her venom to thighs and torsos.

Nalquii moves just as fast, dodging Ishiyae’s every shot and firing back at him.

Sazlii shakes me. “If you get involved, you will only bridge them again, and Ishiyae has no chance of fighting her within.”

“Isn’t that what we want, an easy victory?”

“Could you live with being the cause of his easy defeat?”

No. My heart pinches, both at the thought of losing my brother when I’ve barely met him and at the fact that she understands this.

As she retreats, fingers toggling the latch, it hits me why she understands. Pain coats her movements, medicated into a dull, thin layer. The Lorsknu trace it to deeps slashes on her side, chest, and neck.

Below, a bullet hits Nalquii’s shooter, and it sparks. She hurls it at Ishiyae, and as he evades, she tackles him. He tumbles, twists, and slams her into the wall. It caves to cushion her, but the ship’s safety features won’t protect her from her dagger in his hand.

“When did Valon’s scyuen slash you?” I ask, but the door beneath Sazlii falls open, and she drops onto Ishiyae.

Zajal could have clawed her for any number of reasons, but it makes the most sense if she restrained the scyuen when Nalquii stabbed Valon. Back on Grenswa, when Dollii had only threatened him, I had shared Zajal’s mind. She had determined the golden-haired human must die for that. Someone actually stabbing him? More than once as he screamed? There was no way the scyuen would not have come. She would have shredded Nalquii.

Sazlii risked her life to prevent that. She did not want Nalquii to win that fight, but nor would she let her sister die.

Ishiyae scrambles away from Sazlii. His weapons lie in pieces scattered across the floor. They exchange barely blocked strikes in an endless series. Each moment of impact is a still frame, no movement or time between it and the next. Sazlii is stronger, wiser. Ishiyae is faster and more cunning. He sees where she hurts and aims accordingly.

Nalquii leaps on him from behind and tangles his limbs with her legs. Throat trapped in the crook of her elbow, he can’t breathe. A spare dagger, smaller but no less sharp, parts his armored collar as if it is made of sponge, and the blade rests against his flesh.

She whispers, but the Lorsknu hear it as if she speaks into my own ear. “Still want to die?”

No, he absolutely doesn’t. He never has. His desire to live burns hotter than a supernova in a way that is so familiar, how could I ever have forgotten it? He explodes into movement and wrenches free. With a horrible pop, his shoulder dislocates, and the knife licks his skin, drawing a line down the same arm. The Lorsknu flock to his pain, lapping it like thirsty rodents.

He has Nalquii’s wrist. He sweeps her feet from under her. A boot sinks into her gut.

I sit here, watching. Doing nothing. Sazlii is occupied dealing with the infinite flood of Rablah-nas clambering up the hatch. They surround the ship. Valon stands in a corner, protected by his scyuen.

Why have I come if I’m just going to do nothing? I’ll sneak out in this chaos. I’ll find Rosa, bring her back here, and Valon can worry about whatever other plans he has.

My knees leave my chest, toes curling over the edge of the opening. Ishiyae pauses, and so do I. He knows someone’s here, but does he know who? Will he fight me? I don’t want to fight him.

He leaps. Fingers hook around my ankle. As I start to fall, my Lorsknu scatter. All is dark, silent except for a shriek. Rosa’s voice tears through my head, and it is everything. All I see. All I hear, feel, taste, or smell.

Just as abruptly, it vanishes, and the scene slams back into me. It’s too much, like a power surge lighting the world before everything shuts down. I’m in darkness again. My Lorsknu tell me nothing. I’m not sure they’re awake.

All I have is the view as it was in that moment—me on the floor not far from Ishiyae on his knees. Rablah-nas surround us, protective but confused by how much my face looks like their commander’s beneath his helmet. If anything changes, I have to rely on my ears or the passage of air over what little of my skin is exposed.

“What happened?’

Ishiyae doesn’t answer, and I’m not sure he can. He’s Rosa’s vedia. If her cry nearly knocked me out, what did it do to him?

‘Rosa? What’s going on? Show me where you are and what I need to do.’

“This isn’t working,” Sazlii bellows as blades scrape armor with metallic cries. Her daggers are sharper and don’t scrape. They puncture and slash, clearing a path down the ramp. “Seal the ship and stay inside, Valon.”

No, we’re not here to hide. Rosa needs us now. Even if I can find the words, they won’t listen. Let them close the door. I’ll be on the other side of it.

Gulping a deep breath, I squeeze between the Rablah-nas’ knees and charge after Sazlii. The ramp rises. I keep low and roll beyond its side, bouncing off unseen obstacles. I didn’t have the Lorsknu’s sight for long, but how much of a crutch it’s become. Every unlevel surface catches me off guard, and the warmth of enemy soldiers hardly gives me enough time to swivel around them. The air whispers of their blades, and I stumble more than dance.

Something punches my chest, and I go down. A bullet. It’s not enough to pierce my woven scyuen hide armor, but it’ll leave a bruise. A moment later, I regain my footing, but a forearm pushes me back. With a thud, my shoulders hit the hull of the Nadinshé’s Peace, and I stay, unable to breathe. I’m not sure if that’s because of the pressure outside my chest or within.

I wish I could see my captor’s face, see if we really look that much alike. My eyes are broken, and he wears a helmet, but his heavy, uneven breaths wheeze through its cracks. If I weren’t trapped in this darkness, I might glimpse some of his face. I’d be able to tell if his hair is the same red as mine.

Like a hand moving after having been sat upon all night, the Lorsknu stir with an unpleasant tingle. They show me fragmented flashes. My own face, drawn with tension. Sazlii bending back under a strike, another coming at her from behind. She flings a blade through the first attacker as her braid wraps the second’s sword and pulls it from his grasp.

My brother holds Nalquii’s very sharp dagger beneath my chin, but it shakes. Because he can’t hurt me? Or because he wields it with his injured arm?

Two syllables slide off my tongue, something I used to say often. Something I had forgotten, but my muscles never did. “Ishi.”

He pushes away. “[How…? Why…?]”

Two more words, strained and small. There’s nothing physically constricting my chest anymore, only the weight of all the worlds I know. “{Help, please.}” Menyaze. Does he even understand Menyaze? I feel like I’ve said this to him before in a memory just out of reach. A dream, maybe. He lives on a Shlyk—

No, I shouldn’t call them that, not when that sullied reputation is my family’s fault. He has grown among these Surra-nas. His unfinished sentences are in Laysis, so I choose my words in that language as I grope toward him. “[Help me find her, Ishi.]”

“{Fredo, I’m so—}”

Another flash, a Surra-na and a rifle his same size taking aim at me.

Ishi steps between us. “[Stop. Protect him as if—]”

Rosa’s scream comes again. To me, it is distant, a vibration through a nearly severed rope, but Ishi teeters. I catch him and fall against the hull of the Nadinshés Peace again. He stays on his feet. Doubled over. Trembling. Hands tangled in his hair. Moisture drips on my fingers. Tears?

He started to tell me something in Menyaze before, and I’d rather stick to it, our mother tongue, even if I can’t remember our mother speaking it. “{Ishi, what’s happening?}”

Metal clatters. He dropped the dagger. “{I hate you both so much.}” He hisses. “{It doesn’t matter. Please stop. Just make it stop.}”

“{I’m trying.}” Grip firm on his arms, I shake him as much as I dare. “{Tell me where Rosa is, and I promise I’ll make this pain stop.}”

“{You don’t—}”

He rips from my grasp. A blade whooshes in front of my face, trailed by the sweet acidic scent of baffble. An explosion of fear fuels my Lorsknu just long enough to give me one frame. Ishi kneels, injured arm wrenched behind him. Sazlii’s foot presses on his back, her dagger a braid’s width from his nape and descending.

I shout. It’s a wordless, stupid cry, an infant’s wail, demanding what it can’t articulate, but the Lorsknu understand it. Groggy and hobbling and knowing nothing but my desperation, they cling to Sazlii. She stills for less than a heartbeat, but that’s all Ishi needs.

Movement of the air is not enough to paint the scene, but he moves so fast, I’m not sure I would see it all anyway. As my heart begins a thump, Ishi still kneels, and before it finishes, he faces Sazlii, her own dagger through her ribs. In the silence between heartbeats, a squelch tells of the blade’s twist. Sazlii’s gasp gurgles, and I am at her side as she crumples on the floor.

No, no, no, this can’t be happening. A nightmare. It must be. Silvika’s fabrication. Sazlii cannot die like this. I press my hand over the hole beside her sternum. Hot blood flows between my fingers. I am the blade that must never be wielded. She said that only a few minutes ago, but I interfered. If I hadn’t stalled her…

If I hadn’t stalled her, my brother would lie here instead.

Behind me, Ishi sinks to his knees and falls on his side as if her mirror image. Only he’s not bleeding out. Did the blade impale her heart? Regardless, untreated, this wound will be fatal. I have to get her to Valon. River Guardian medical treatment saved me after I burned on that island. It can fix this little hole.

I slide my arms beneath her, but she doesn’t rise with my hands. As if she is a sand sculpture, her body flakes and crumbles. I balk, but the Lorsknu don’t. They are tiny carrion birds, and I wish I could choose not to watch.

She’s gone, and the filth of it adheres to me, sinking into my skin so I can never scrub it off. It reeks of blood and everything bitter.

Rosa screams a third time, unseen somewhere on the other side of a vast sea, and I can’t move. Beneath my hand, Ishi’s chest rises in a shaky breath. Enemy soldiers surround us, murmuring, but it doesn’t even sound like words. Someone, please tell me what I’m supposed to do.

Continued in chapter 66: An Ember in the Waning Light

Thank you for reading!

The cool scent of yewn churned and blended with the spice-tinged sweetness of dasrii blossoms. Brows furrowed, I inhaled deeper, sure I was mistaken. Dasrii required coastal moisture, and I associated their warm aroma with Seallaii’s royal palace balanced on a narrow strip of land between the Northern Ocean and the Bejeweled Sea.

As I blinked the room into focus, I found that I had not misidentified their unique perfume. I lay in a sprawling bed, yewn flowers carefully sewn into the cushiest of pillows hugging every nook of my body. Dasrii vines formed a canopy, each mauve leaf larger than me.

I sat up, and a chilled, humid breeze caressed my face. A translucent ceiling lay across rows of pillars in three directions, each side framing a waterfront view. Curtains tied to those pillars danced with the breeze as much as they could.

I blinked several more times. This was my sister’s room, even if it wasn’t exactly as I remembered it from the few times I had gotten to sleep alongside her on my capital visits.

“How...?”

With a jolt, I looked down at myself, relieved to find I was not in possession of my sister’s body. However, my lacy nightgown covered about as much as a leopard’s spots did.

“Where is the key?” a masculine voice demanded, and I threw my limbs around myself in an attempt to cover what the dress did not.

“What key? What’s going on?”

My frantic glances revealed no one. The wall behind me was solid stone, and though someone could have hidden behind the pillars, I doubted I would have heard him so clearly above the rush of waves.

I was about to check beneath the bed when he repeated his line, calling my attention upward. The feet of an enormous metal bird dropped through the canopy, and I tried to roll away but couldn’t. A hand dug into my calf, arm disappearing within the mattress. With a shriek, I slapped and pried at it, dodging the chrome talon as it slashed at my chest. The harder I pulled, the further my leg sunk as if beneath a clouded sea.

Wait, a sea.

I paused. Last I knew, I had been strapped to a medical bed with wires attached all over my body. I wasn’t actually in my sister’s room, battling a giant metal bird and a disembodied hand. This was my mindscape, but why did it look like this instead of its normal expanse?

None of this was real, but each piece represented something in the physical world. The sharpness and size of the bird claws were a warning not to let them touch me, and I paid for my pause when one slashed across my back. Instead of blood, fire poured from the wound, ripping it wider. I choked on my own screams, all other sound lost to me.

To spite my desperate twirls, the grip on my leg tightened, then climbed. Thigh, hip, ribs, shoulder, neck—no part of me was sacred to its touch. It clamped down and pulled, but instead of dragging me under, a delicate figure rose.

A crumpled, black void stood in for the left side of Alaysq’s face, and what remained of her petite features sagged with fatigue. Garbed in a flowing gown of delicate chiffon, she clung to and curled around me, single hand pressed to the wound on my back. Ease spilled through that touch, dousing the fire and sewing the tear in my skin.

Tears dripped off my chin, wetting her messy, purple hair. “Alaysq, you don’t have the energy to spare.”

“Nor can I endure your pain, so do not let it happen again.”

With a nod, I acknowledged the wisdom in that and ducked the next talon swipe. Holding her tight to me, I rolled beneath a second and off the side of the bed. The wind roared, tearing at the curtains and the skirt tangled with my legs as a storm covered the sun.

“The scenery is a memory,” Alaysq explained. The mosaic of marble tiles beneath my feet was just as intangible to her as the bed had been. I couldn’t set her down, but despite her missing parts, she was heavy, every cell filled with lead.

“Distorted as memories tend to be,” I agreed, barely dodging as the talons pounced again. “I have been in a similar version of this room, but I’ve never worn anything like this.”

“The room is a memory, but you and your attire represent your mood.”

I balked and gave her an incredulous look. “Excuse me, but I’m not really in the mood to be running for my life in lingerie now or ever, thank you.”

She laughed. “Sweet child, something has invaded our mind. You feel vulnerable and exposed. That is what the dress represents.”

I didn’t like that “our mind” business, but we were bonded. She had a proper place in my mindscape. It was because of this bond that Ishiyae thought I could save her. He had told the Shlykrii-na doctors what I was and how the three of us were connected.

My heart slithered into my throat, and my voice strained past it. “When Ishiyae tried to kill me and you revealed he and I were bonded, you said the science team had their fill of vedia, that they needed to see the other side of the bond, my side. You told him not to tell them.”

She stiffened, eye like an ember in the waning light. “Did he?”

Evading the talons again, I dove under the bed, and in this planked position, it was even harder to keep Alaysq from sinking. “He thought giving me to them would save you.”

“That boy.”

Invisible chains rattled, accompanied by a yelp. The chains jerked again, and they might as well have hauled my insides out through my nose. In no condition to move when the bird tore through the bed and scooped me into its talons, I could do nothing but scream and burn.

“Where is the key?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I cried, skin curling like paper with every lick of flame.

Yet, the same question repeated as if those were the only words the voice knew.

“Alaysq! Alaysq?” The first wail was a plea for her to do something. The second expressed my surprise when she let go of me to stretch her incomplete body between the talons and shove them apart.

Still burning, I fell on snow. Bitter cold nipped at me as fiercely as the fire did. The fountain in the courtyard of my citadel home loomed over me, every stream frozen in crystalline ice.

“When—”

“It is not your memories that shape this world, then,” Alaysq whispered. She stood upon the fountain’s rim, inspecting her lone fist as it opened and closed. A ghostly outline of her other arm stroked that hand, and the left side of her face had lost some of its darkness. Most notably, the ground beneath her, while forgiving as mud, allowed her to stand.

Splayed upon a mound of snow and gnawed upon by fire and wind, I couldn’t point this out to her, but she likely didn’t need me to.

“This happened centuries before you were born, when an eteriq sarquant decided he could control the weather. He nearly killed everything in Menyaza with this blizzard, and with him among those lost, we had to scramble to undo whatever he had done. I was young then, the vedia of the crowned princess.” She turned to gaze down upon me. “Every time that thing hurts you, it rends into me, too. It is torture, and yet with it, I grow stronger.”

She knelt, and as soon as her hand lay across my stomach, the fires waned, then vanished. Smoke sashayed like thread above my flaking skin, sewing down its curling edges, and warmth radiated in my core, banishing the cold. The snow did not melt, but it felt no different than sand.

I would have thanked her, but I wasn’t in a grateful mood considering she was part of the reason for my pain. I panted, and my words would be limited anyway. “I think…they’re forcing the bond…to work backward.”

“That would kill us both, unless…no, it is absurd.” Yet she continued to ponder it, a faraway glint in her good eye. The other side of her face sunk into darkness again as she returned the energy to me.

I closed my eyes, welcoming a peaceful void. No, I did not trust Alaysq, but if she had one goal, it was to keep me alive. Distant chains jangled again, and intuition said she tried to tow Ishiyae here to take responsibility for what he had done. She would make him give me energy, too.

His pain was lightning behind my eyelids, immersing me in glimpses of his surroundings: Rablah-na soldiers, the bird-shaped ship from before, and—

‘Fredo! Fredo, can you hear me?’

Alaysq pulled me upright, and we were no longer in her memory of the citadel. This place was gray, from the thick clouds and distant hills to the lush forest and sparkling lake. White fur and woven metal formed an intricate and regal gown befitting an empress. “The claws speak to you. What do they say?”

“They’re looking for a key.” My attire had also changed, likely to represent my shift from vulnerability to confusion. The white frock was so complexly wrapped, I wasn’t sure how far I could lift my arms.

I stepped closer to a table replete with unfamiliar food—fried meats, steaming vegetables, sliced fruit. Beyond it, a thin railing warded against a fall of at least eighty stories into the lake. The building stretched taller still, and though it was difficult to tell from this angle, I pictured it as a set of gargantuan wings rising out of the forest.

“A key?” Alaysq clucked, tapping her fingers against her lips. “What was the exact wording?”

I stared at the distant, gray horizon. This was a dream, of sorts, a painting of something Alaysq had once seen. What was this place? If I hopped over that railing, would I fall, or could I make these wing-like buildings my own and fly? Alaysq didn’t know what lay between the trees. Could I flee back into my own mindscape and hide from the wires that doctors had placed on my head in the real world?

I just needed time. I could contact Fredo. He was here on the River’s End. He could come for me, punch or kick whomever he needed, and make them undo whatever they’d done. He could tear off the straps and awaken me from this nightmare. A true heroic mykta.

Distractedly, I gave Alaysq the exact Laysis words I had heard, “Nonste efelye.”

“You translate that second word as key?” She cackled. “You give it such eloquence. Toggle, switch, lever—it could be any of those mundane things.”

“But it’s still just as meaningless. What lever would be within me?” I frowned but didn’t bother looking at her, gaze locked beyond the railing. One more breath, and I would jump.

She wrapped her arm around me, her chin on my shoulder. “These Surra-na doctors already stopped the bond from consuming me once. They learned so much from their trials on Kel. A sweet boy he was, but always walking on the walls of danger.”

“They should find a way to save you that doesn’t involve ripping me apart.”

“Oh, my precious, that is why they want the toggle.” Her hand slid over my heart. “Right here.” Sharpening into talons, her fingers dug into my chest.

I clawed at her hand, kicked and jabbed, but for a woman with half a face and one arm, she was incredibly good at holding on.

She clucked again. “Hush, child, and let it happen.”

“You’re killing me,” I choked out, sinking to my knees.

“Hardly.” Her nails wiggled between my ribs, sawing at bone. “When I show them the toggle, they will give me your body as mine, and I promise to take excellent care of it.”

“How is that not killing me?” I threw us backward and fought with everything I had, elbow repeatedly thrusting into her stomach. I wished it would become a sword, but I had no idea how to make the symbolism here in my mind work to my advantage like that. Perhaps my own inhibitions limited my ability. Did I truly want to stab her, stab anyone, even in a dream?

The thought made my blows more powerful, at least, my writhing more desperate, and the instant her arm loosened, I tore free. She moved with me, scrambling to regain her hold. My foot crashed into her abdomen as my backside hit the rail. Arms flailing, I tumbled over it.

This wasn’t the brave jump I had imagined, instead a plunge head-first into unseen environs. The building did not become my wings, nor did I grow any of my own. I simply fell, watching the gray sky churn as the wind whispered a thousand lines in my ears at once.

I fell for much longer than I should have. Fog replaced the sky, a subtle but darker difference, both literally and in what it represented. Did this dive have an end, or would I plummet forever as Alaysq’s clouds leeched away every drop of my soul?

Mountains sprouted all around, hinting that the ground would find me eventually. Scenes flashed on their blackened sides to accompany a rain of whispers.

“[My child? Where is my child?]”

A stalwart Slykrii-na stood with his hands behind his back. “[Our Napix allies gave us a gift, and our king returned the favor.]”

Alaysq clawed at his shirt, and the view blurred into smudges of color. “[She is a baby! You should have given me instead.]”

“[The king in his wisdom would not give them damaged goods, for the Napix are not to be offended. Our lives balance on their goodwill.]” He pulled her hands off his front and straightened. “[Our king has other plans for you if you behave. First, he wishes for you to see the creature that was given to us in hopes that you may tame it. Second, in replacement for your child, you may care for this one. We estimate it to be of a similar age.]”

A toddler filled the scene, hair as red as a lava flow and one eye like a glittering amethyst. The other hid behind a bandage, and a freshly bloodied lip added weight to his pout. Alaysq tried to pull him into her arms, but while he stared in awe, he would not fold into her as she wanted.

“[What is his name?]”

“[If it has a name, we neither know it nor care to. We simply keep it alive as ordered.]”

What a terrible childhood Ishiyae had.

As if summoned by the thought, he was at my back, and I no longer fell. With the impact, the ground audibly cracked beneath his feet, and it was a wonder he didn’t simply drop me.

He did a moment later, when I subconsciously took from him to heal my wounds. I landed on my feet, stance unstable on the icy valley floor of Alaysq’s section of our mindscape. He could barely move for all the chains she had him wrapped in, some mounted to the cliffside, others anchored below the ice. This time, they did not break at my touch. Instead, they burned, and he hissed.

With a flutter of wings, Alaysq alighted behind him, and the chains tightened. “It would not be like this if he would just behave. Or if you had availed yourself of my lessons, precious, I would not give up on you now.”

Ishiyae’s gaze flew to me, panic in every line as she placed a palm against his cheek. As his color faded, the missing half of her face and her left arm filled in.

I dropkicked her, and she flew further than she would have in real life. This was still my domain, even if I didn’t know how to do anything right in here.

I made sure not to touch Ishiyae or the chains. “Tell me how to defeat her.”

He didn’t answer, just stared into the distance, every muscle slack.

“Ishiyae!” I barely held back from shaking him. “Ishiyae, please. You wanted to save her, but she’s trying to kill me, and the doctors are helping her. She’ll take over my body forever, and I’m not sure you’ll live through that.”

“He will live,” Alaysq purred, gown waving in the strengthening breeze. “Why would I discard a perfectly fine battery?” She draped her arms over his shoulders as she swung around him, and he winced.

I kept to his opposite side, and maybe it was shameful to use him as a shield, but this predicament was partially his fault. I could have been sailing back to Grenswa on the Star’s Serenade already.

“Though, he might be drained entirely if you keep up these theatrics. Really, precious, you will live in here, safe, I promise.” Still clinging to Ishiyae, she held out her new left hand to me.

It flickered as I stepped back.

“That’s like saying you’ll cut off my index finger instead of my thumb. I’d prefer to keep all my digits. Wouldn’t you, Ishiyae?”

“I hate you both so much,” he growled through his teeth. “It doesn’t matter. Just stop. Make it stop.”

With a tsk, Alaysq adjusted her hold and made to kiss his cheek. “Is that any way to speak after I have cared for you so long?”

When he twisted away as much as the chain would allow, she licked him instead. I wasn’t sure if the disgust that roiled through me was his or my own. Probably both.

An object appeared in my hand, and a lingering moment later, I recognized it as the same type of blade-less hilt Hent had stolen from Ferrina. It would have been just as useless now except Ishiyae hadn’t only provided me a weapon. He bestowed the experience of using it. Hours of instruction and drills downloaded in my head in an instant.

‘Distract her,’ I pled as I stepped to the side, thumbing the handle’s sensor along its longest edge.

With another wave of revulsion and exhausted ache, he pressed into Alaysq’s caress, and she didn’t notice me circumvent her, not until I stood at her back, hilt held to her nape. Ishiyae’s direction was to aim for the heart, but he was too close. If I did, when the blade turned on, it would stab him also.

My hand shook, but nothing else happened, and she was turning.

River Guardians don’t kill!

My conscience screeched, and I recalled how awful I had felt when I thought I had killed Yol. This was a dream, but if I did this, Alaysq would die just the same. I couldn’t do this.

Her eyes found me, wide at first, then narrowing to make room for her knowing grin. I couldn’t follow through, and she knew it.

My hand fell, but Ishiyae caught it, adjusted its aim, and slid my thumb along the invisible toggle. A laser blade flashed into existence through Alaysq’s heart, shining some holy shade between white and blue.

My own heart twinged as if I was the one pierced, and I clenched my teeth, blinking through the pain and guilt as she reverted to fog.

My voice was a mere gasp, but I had to know before she was gone. “You didn’t want Su to learn the truth about me because he wants to recreate the bonds. Why? What is he planning?”

“It is too late. He has you now.” As the last of her wisps dissipated, the mountains shook with agonized growls and mocking laughs. Boulders crashed all around us.

Without thought, I cut Ishiyae free and dragged him after me. He was a silhouette, only the smallest of stars blinking with the beating of his heart, but he lived, and so did I, standing once again upon my central sea.

All fog was sucked into the abyss where Alaysq’s area had been, leaving blankness visible in the distance. It was too bright, too empty, but there was nothing else to look at aside from Alaysq’s black hole. All currents led to it, yanking and tearing, chiding me for my stillness.

I spun in countless circles in search of Fredo, but his corner was gone, too, replaced with level ocean as far as the eye could see.

I shouted, screamed, and wailed. I hadn’t done the right thing, but it was all I could have done. I couldn’t let her have my body. She should have died long ago with my mother. I had simply put nature back on its course.

It wasn’t nature that decreed a vedia should die with their royal, though. It was a cruel River Guardian design. But who was I to think I could have spared her the fate they ordained?

I shouldn’t have yelled. I should have been a quiet child and hid. The bird found me again. Over and over it dove, demanding the key, and I said nothing, hunched over Ishiyae as if I could protect him. Why was I even protecting him? The bird didn’t care about him beyond being a means to get to me, and this was his fault, all of it.

With drugs and electric shocks, the doctors still fought to save Alaysq’s body. I felt each one, losing count when they blurred into a continuous deluge of pain. Time meant nothing, but still they tried. Alaysq’s mind was gone, fragmented memories like confetti swirling in the wind and sinking into my sea.

“Ishiyae,” I called, shaking him, “come get me. Wake me from this.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “I have no sway over the doctors. I’ll have to fight them to get you back, and I’m in no condition to do that.”

I couldn’t doubt the latter statement. Through every repeated wave of hurt, he drowned alongside me. No, beyond that, he was the driftwood that kept me afloat, worn away to a final sliver. I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t vanish any moment and add a second void to my plight. Then I would be utterly alone.

Gripping him tighter, I shook him again. “No sway? What about our charisma?”

Teeth gritted, he shoved at me. “How do you think they tortured and killed my family?”

Of course. Like the Shlykrii-nas still on the homeworld, they had Equal or something like it. Their loyalty to the king was not based on pheromones and would not be overridden by a prettier scent. Otherwise, Ishiyae’s family would have taken back the ship. By now, Ishiyae would have taken the ship. Instead, he served them out of misguided allegiance to a promise that should never have involved him.

He shoved away harder and crawled feebly across the choppy surface of our shared inner sea. “Save yourself. Get up and tell them they got what they want. Tell them you’re Alaysq.”

Continued in chapter 67

Thank you for reading!

The world continues to move all around me, noisy as ever, but all I can do is breathe. I only remember to do that because of the rise and fall of Ishi’s chest beneath my hand. If I don’t breathe in, neither will he. It’s stupid and illogical, but it means I take that next inhale.

Noise crawls closer. Footsteps. People. A hand takes my bicep, and I grab it, yank and twist, flipping its owner. I will not move until I figure out what I’m supposed to do.

Weapons surround me, swords and shooters, but they still at a superior’s bark. He says Commander Ishiyae wanted me protected. Others murmur their protestations, but no one touches me.

My advocate kneels to examine Ishi, and my grip tightens. I know he needs medical attention, but if they take him from me now, will I ever find him again? I need medical attention, too. They don’t see that. I’m not cut. My bruises are minor. But an ache consumes me, and I can’t pinpoint its source.

The Surra-na speaks proper Laysis. If I concentrate, I can understand him. He drones on about how they’ll take us both to the central infirmary, where the best doctors are. Again, others argue.

I pretend to stare at him blankly. Before I go anywhere, I need to know what the plan is. Both what it was and how it has changed now that Sazlii...

No, don’t even think it. Don’t relive it again. It’s in the past. It can’t be changed. Figure out how to move forward. Start by paying better attention to the surroundings.

Some distance behind me, they’re setting something up. A cannon? A drill? They mean to break open the Nadinshé’s Peace. If they do that, we’ll have no way off this ship. They’ll kill Valon. Probably Nalquii, too, at this point. It’ll be just me. A rescue party of one with no ship and no knowledge of how to fly one anyway.

I reach out to Nalquii, imagine sinking starry fingers through her skull, but just that. No deeper. Not far enough for Silvika to have a chance of grabbing any part of me I can’t lose.

‘Tell me our plan.’

‘Sit still, child. Keep them exactly where they are.’

The words taste of poison, and everything in me says to rebel. I pull Ishi closer, feet leveling on the floor, ready to rise. ‘They’re planning to crack open the ship.’

She presses buttons, and menus flash. I wouldn’t know what they meant, but she does. She’s powering up the ship’s weapons and aiming. Not at me specifically, but at Ishi and those gathered around him. I just happen to be here, too, and she wants me to keep them here.

I impel my Lorsknu further, not deeper like a knife, but broader like a blanket. They slide beneath her skin, traveling her neural pathways and tugging at the fibers of her muscles. She wants me to be still. Fine. I’ll still her also.

‘He’s a murderer!’

It’s both a scream and a whisper in the way that only a thought can be. And it’s true. Ishi has killed. I can’t deny that or the guilt drenching me. Nalquii had to lose a sister for me to regain my brother. I didn’t want either to die. One did, and I will not lose the other. I don’t want to lose anyone.

As it stands, I won’t hurt Nalquii, and I won’t release her. The next move is hers, or it would be if the world revolved around us. Ishi’s warmth disappears from beneath my hand. I pat the floor, searching for him, though I know he’s not there. His Lorsknu call to me from an increasing interval.

My back hits the wall at the edge of the hangar, and I slide down it. A metallic click sounds, and in the same direction, a single star of life hovers, motionless, unlike the others scurrying behind it.

“[Stay.]” He’s tense, looking for any excuse to fire. My armor protected me once, but this time he aims at my exposed head.

Don’t look too alert. Don’t give him a reason to kill me. Relax. Be limber, casual but ready to outpace lightning.

“[Take me to the infirmary with Ishi.]”

The Surra-na grunts, drawing closer, shooter held high. “[You’re fine.]”

“[I’m fine like a fish in the desert.]”

“[If the fish doesn’t like the desert, wait until the sun comes out.]”

Whatever he means by that, I don’t like the sound of it, but I don’t move. I stay like he ordered. With my back against the wall, I can concentrate on keeping Nalquii restrained without fear of falling over.

“Nal, you are smarter than this.” Valon tows her away from the console. It’s dark inside, but his silver hair reflects the screens in a way his eyes do not. In the dimness, they look like sharp pieces of coal balanced atop his veil. “Silvika chose you for your intelligence, and she needs to listen to you. Look beyond quick revenge or a haphazard takeover.”

Her exhale shakes, and I allow her enough freedom to wipe her face.

He notices the stilted movement. “Silvika? Or…”

Nalquii responds through her teeth. “Fredo.”

“I do not blame him. You would have incinerated us all, firing that weapon within an atmosphere.” He somehow makes the rebuke sound kind, hand on her jaw, fingers rubbing small circles behind her ear.

Her breaths even out, and despite the veil, he gives her a grim smile.

“Your princess must understand we are not on Seallaii. This is Sojourner business, and she must trust Sojourner plans. Fredo might be the only one who can salvage this situation. Can he hear me?”

She nods. Her voice is hoarse. “He wants to know the plan.”

“He needs to at this point.” Sighing, he draws back from her a bit. While Sazlii resents the distance, I’m grateful for it, and I’m the one he speaks to now. “We were supposed to meet with their leader. Sazlii would have killed him, and we would have seen a successor installed with the understanding that their recent aggressive behavior is unacceptable.”

‘Sounds like we’re dealing with children.’

He can’t hear me, but Nalquii’s agreement flows through the Lorsknu like a frothy tide.

‘I’m out here, and they’re not sure what to do with me. Should I meet with their leader instead?’

The wall leaves my back. I’m flying. No, I’m being carried. Dragged, a giant Rablah-na on either side. I plant my feet but find no traction.

“[Where are we going?]”

They stop, knock me to my knees, and pull my arms behind me. Heat flares at my back. That Surra-na wasn’t literal when he talked about a sun, was he?

Someone steps in front of me with a tsk. A finger, cold and hard as steel, tries to lift my chin. When I refuse, he grabs my jaw and jerks my face one way, then the other. “[If it weren’t impossible, one would swear he was Abaeyoi. Do you know what happened to them, boy?]”

I put on my best glower and hope it looks like my eyes focus on him. His breath provides an easy trail, reeking of harsh spices and rotting meat.

He turns his back to me, and it doesn’t smell any better. “[To those aboard the Sojourner vessel, you are granted five seconds to open the hatch. Once this leeway expires, every moment your ship remains sealed is a moment this boy will experience the most excruciating pain we can imagine.]”

With a step back, he tangles his gloved hand in my hair and pulls as if he intends to lift me. I’m light here, so he probably could if a Rablah-na hadn’t clamped down on either of my forearms. They’re not underestimating me. They don’t trust chains not to break or slip. They know Ishi’s strength. They know he can fight.

They don’t know me. Relax, Fredo. Wait for the moment to strike. If I’m going to slip free, I have to believe I can.

I’m not sure I can. Either of my captors can snap my wrist on a whim.

He’s counting. He’s on three. Relax. Think rationally.

I extend my thoughts toward Nalquii again. ‘They only asked that Valon die. Put him in that ice coffin like you did me.’

‘No.’

“[Four]”

‘At least pass along the suggestion.’

‘We are not faking Valon’s death.’

‘You’ll just let them torture me then? For how long?’

I dive into her nervous system again, hoping to at least glimpse Valon in thought, something to give me a little hope. She does see him, but the sight is far down the path of ‘things I never wanted to see.’ They kiss, deeply, like lovers in a farewell, grabbing as if they’ll never let go. Existing at the speed of thought, I experience it in slow motion, every point of contact, doused by the waves of shared grief, longing, and comfort. I’m about to vomit.

I am beyond done. ‘I’m going to find Rosa like I came here to do. Have fun when they break open your ship.’

The Surra—no, he intends to torture me. He doesn’t deserve to be called nice things. The Shlykrii-na doesn’t bother voicing the fifth second. He turns, commands in his throat and mouth open to shout them. With every drop of malice in me, I spit. He chokes. All eyes pounce on him, and distracted hands are looser.

I yank left. The Rablah-na’s vice clamps down on my right arm before I’m free, but that’s okay. That’s not my goal yet.

With his grip redoubled on my hair, the still-retching Shlykrii-na wrenches me upright. I comply too easily, and as he reels, I throw myself right. Tangled, the two of us flop on one captor, and with a twist, my arm slips free. A kick finds the back of my other captor’s elbow, and armor cracks with a sharp, staccato note. A second kick connects with his jaw, louder, and his grip vanishes.

I hit the ground in a roll, already running, and book it for the nearest tunnel out of this hangar. Amid the thousands of stars, Rosa and Ishi are raindrops in a pond, but something tugs at my soul, and I follow it.

***

I can’t find her. I can’t see, and I can’t hide. The Lorsknu show me drunk, distorted things I barely make sense of.

I’m not lost on this enemy ship. I know how to get back to the Nadinshé’s Peace, but it’s not where I need to be, and I would crash into as many walls in retreat as I did getting here. Wherever here actually is.

Judging from the placement of life sources around me, the River’s End is a collection of spires positioned along the edges of a flat, twisting core. I am deep in that central line but between spires. Something like a hollow, faded wail guides me, but I don’t believe it’s Rosa. It’s older, though I don’t know why I have that impression or why it both scares and enraptures me. Should I find it and lay this curiosity to rest? Or should I prioritize my search for Rosa?

Except I have no idea where to start a search for her now.

No, I do. My brother is her vedia. He’ll know where she is. He won’t tell Valon. He’ll never tell Nalquii. But he might tell me.

It feels strange, hoping to use him like this. It’s only because I want what’s best for him, too. I want us to be on the same side. I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand having to share Rosa with others in an entourage. Logically, I understood that it would happen and that it should be a relief. It wouldn’t fall all on me to protect her. To strengthen her. To advise her. An entourage should do all those things, and how arrogant of me to believe myself to be all she would need.

My head knew that, but my heart didn’t. Her smile was among my first memories, and I wanted to be everything for her. The bond was something special just between the two of us. Anyone else would feel like an intruder.

Yet now, if there has to be a third connected to us, as inconvenient as it is, it feels right for it to be Ishi. He’s not an intruder. If anything, Rosa is. The bond between him and I is older, maybe even deeper.

At the tips of my starry fingers, he stirs, barely awake. I can ask him where she is.

“Ho.”

I freeze, arm against the wall I thought was between me and the speaker. Foiled by a window after I’ve come so far.

A Rablah-na steps through a doorway, voice even deeper than it was through the glass. The floor rattles at it. “[Commander Ishiyae, glad to see you! We heard you were injured by Sojourner invaders.]”

How lucky that I have my brother’s face. And how interesting that I’m called the invader when they pulled our ship aboard and demanded some of our party die. Victors get to assign the labels, I guess.

“[Your commander is still a bit unsteady,]” I say with Laysis’ proper third-person reference to myself. The corner of my lip twitches. I could also be talking about Ishi, and the statement would not be untrue. “[He needs to find Ro- his- the Seallaii-na with pink eyes.]”

“[The flower has run off again?]” With a chuckle, he wraps a stabilizing arm around my shoulders. Others gather around as we walk. “[Perhaps you should be nicer to her.]”

“[Perhaps,]” I agree. If they treat Rosa with the respect she deserves, will she cooperate with them? Will she wish to stay here? And if she stays, I’ll stay. I can’t go home anyway. “[Where are we going?]”

“[Forgive the observation, but you do not look well, Commander Ishiyae. Rest in your rooms. Trust us to carry out your search.]”

Can I? In Ishi’s room, I’ll be less likely to have a chance encounter with those who saw me in the hanger and are looking for me. They won’t think to check there, and when Ishi leaves the infirmary, he’ll return to his room. We’ll meet again, not in battle, but in a private place where we can talk.

If these Rablah-nas manage to find Rosa, though, will she come willingly?

They take my silence for a yes, but I can’t leave her rescue to chance.

My steps drag. “[Where will you look for her?]”

“[Unless you have other suggestions, we will return to where she was last known to be and track her.]

Since I’m not sure she actually has run off again, that’s likely where they’ll still find her.

I nod. “[Good plan. When you find her, tell her an urgent matter requires her presence immediately. Tell her it’s about Fredo.]”

“[Yes, Sir.]” Their agreement is sunshine upon my skin, yet shadows of doubt swirl through it. I hope it wasn’t a mistake to mention my real name.

“Commander,” another ventures in a soft, unsure tone. Oddly, he uses the Sishgil word, and the rest of his sentence is a mix. “Cut you the hair? Damaged the battle to it?”

Several beats pass. While that grammar doesn’t fit with those words, it is familiar. Instead of only detangling his meaning, I drop each term into my database of synonyms and find the vocab that suits the arrangement. It belongs to one of Seallaii’s oldest languages, Diama. Rosa hates it, but it’s Dollii’s favorite to write fantastical tales in because its way of always putting the verb first emphasizes the actions.

I stick to Laysis, though. “[Someone evil cut it, but he’s dead now. The hair will grow back eventually.]”

Despite condolences and huzzahs from the rest of the group, the one who asked only darkens with more doubt. It is an odd chill, like when a cloud hides the sun or when a breeze hits your face from below if you stand too close to the edge of a ravine.

My supporter’s grip tightens. “[Commander, why do you stare at Ponpi as if you see right through him?]”

I hold back a guffaw. That’s an accurate way of describing how I see anything.

On second thought, maybe a little teasing will clear the air. “[Just trying to figure out why he reeks.]”

A few laugh, but not the one who holds me upright. He stops. “[What’s his name?]”

From the way he says it, I’m sure “Ponpi” is the wrong answer. That was a test, then.

I cut left, but my supporter’s hold is too firm. This close, my elbow jab doesn’t have the leverage to crack his armor. My kick is caught, and so is a feinted punch, then a real one, all before I hit the ground with them on top of me, arms pinned behind my back.

My wiggling does nothing as they excitedly chatter about what to do with me. Their Diama grammar is even harder to follow with all of them talking at once. The loudest claims I must be a shapeshifter that came with the Napix envoys. Another suggests cutting my arm off because a shapeshifter’s would bleed differently. A third much more reasonably advises that a small incision would grant the same proof.

Shapeshifters are myths, as are the Napix and all their uncanny abilities. But if these Rablah-nas have met envoys from that supposedly faraway world, then maybe I’m mistaken. Me denying the existence of such creatures will hardly convince them. So, I fall still and listen, waiting to feel the sting of a blade and hoping they don’t take offense at how I bleed.

A growling voice drops from the ceiling. “[Took you idiots long enough.]”

There's a metallic squeak—a vent opening maybe—then four padded feet hit the ground.

A soft paw presses into my cheek. “[Ishi has a very noticeable scar through his left eye.]”

Whoever he is, he has very sharp claws, and in this position, he could easily give me a mark to match my brother’s.

“[Goddess-kin sometimes erase scars.]”

The newcomer snorts. From the paws, the stance, and the scent, I’m certain he’s canine. “[Oh, and have you seen Ishi erase his?]”

“[He could—]” The sentence ends in a light punch from one of the others.

“[What point are we even arguing? He’s not Commander Ishiyae, and as his pet, Togdy knows that best.]”

The canine’s foot leaves my face, but his gruff voice acquires deeper menace. “[You’ve been told enough times that Togdy is older. Ishi is Togdy’s pet.]”

A thought escapes as a whisper. “[Togdy, like the Dossea-ku bush?]”

“[It’s a very formidable bush with spikes.]” With deliberately heavy steps, he walks onto my back and sits between my shoulder blades. “[Such a shame that you don’t recall helping to pick it out. You were once Togdy’s pet, too, Fredo.]”

I don’t take that literally, but this Dossea-na probably knew us when we were small. I tear through every corner of my memory, but there’s not a trace of him, no stray hair or echo of voice. Yet, if I helped pick out his name…

“[What was your name before?]”

“Nour.”

Despite the fact that I am pinned in an unfavorable position by people who suggested cutting my arm off less than a minute ago and that Togdy’s weight is doing its best to smash my lungs into the floor, I laugh. I’m probably insane at this point. “[If I was named ‘rust’ in Menyaze, I’d have changed it, too.]” With another realization, I sober. “[Wait, do you speak Menyaze?]”

He shouldn’t, but I want him to say yes. It’ll mean Ishi trusts him enough to teach him. He’s a friend.

He stands and noisily shakes his fur into place. “[Despite Fredo’s deplorable memory and the fact that he left us behind, he is goddess-kin.]” His claws dig into the back of my neck as he steps off me. “[Even more than that, he is like Lady Wisteria.]”

Four of my six captors let go, and the other two flinch.

“[Let him up,]” the Dossea-na says, claws clicking on the hard floor as he prances away. It’s not an order, more like the granting of permission. They don’t have to, but it wouldn’t be wrong if they did. As if he doesn’t care one way or the other. Which wouldn’t be as bad if he didn’t add, “[Togdy knows what he searches for. If he follows, Togdy will show him. If not, someone less friendly will find him.]”

“[We can’t just let him wander around, even if he is goddess-kin,] the one still pinioning my arms protests. He’s the first one who spoke to me. The slightest tremor mars his stalwart grip, and the Lorsknu croon at the scent of his unease. “[Especially if he is goddess-kin. The Napix envoys will board soon.]”

Stopping, Togdy throws back the most sarcastic sigh. “[Those would be the less friendly ones Togdy referenced.]”

I should take it as a warning. Logic sees that clearer than any light, but my curious heart longs to see what creatures they’re labeling with the Napix name. If they are real, I want to see them. I want to witness them showing off everything that the legends claim. Can they really walk amid flame and not burn? Live off energy siphoned from the heat of the air. Transform one object into another.

Of course, I won’t be able to actually see it. But can the Lorsknu discern the tricks behind it?

The clicks of Togdy’s feet fade to nothing in the distance. He said he knows what I search for. He’ll show me where to find it. Her. He’ll take me to Rosa, and that’s my top priority now. It has to be.

My hands are numb. Any attempt at moving them brings an ache to my shoulders.

“[Please,]” I whisper to my captors, “[let me follow the Dossea-na.]”

***

Everything smells old in here. Stale. Slowly rotting, and I hate it.

“[Moody, aren’t you?]” By my side, Togdy snorts. “[You’ve forgotten every manner Togdy taught you.]”

With a deep breath, I place a hand on the thing he has led me to. It’s warm. I could almost fool myself into believing it breathes. “[You said you were going to take me to what I was looking for.]”

“[Togdy did, even if you didn’t know this was it. Go on inside. It won’t eat you.]”

I’m not sure about that. The Lorsknu have already dived in, and it’s too much. Like a man carrying a thousand rugs, I’m about to collapse for all the images they show me. I shouldn’t have come this far. I knew as soon as I fell in line behind him that he headed in the direction of whatever pulled at me before. Whatever had led me away from Rosa. I wanted to find it. At every turn, I also hoped we would veer away from it. Now, here we are at the open hatch of my family’s ship.

The Star’s Serenade, he calls it.

When did I walk in? I am inside, right? Or have I left my body behind completely now? No, this is solid. I can’t go through the walls.

I sit. Togdy sits next to me and licks his paw.

“{You taught me manners?}” I try in Menyaze.

He finishes cleaning his paw before he answers. “{If you know anything useful, Togdy taught it to you.}”

That’s inaccurate, but I’ll grant him the exaggeration for now. “{I need someone to help me process all of this.}”

“{Not Togdy’s job.}”

Fair, even if it’s not what I want to hear. He doesn’t leave, though. With a yawn, he noisily combs at his floppy ears with a back foot. Tentatively, I reach toward him. The touch is a tap at first, and when he doesn’t object, a pat. Then I scratch behind his ear like I might for a dapkie.

“{You used to do that when you were little.}” He leans into my hand, solid. An anchor.

I’m here on the floor, not crawling through the walls. With this one hub in place, I can figure out where all the spokes lead, how they dangle and twirl around one another. It’s not the way a wheel is supposed to work, and yet it does, too efficiently. It’s a deadly thing, and I barely understand the surface of it. The rest lurks like shadows in deep, murky water, and I’m barely managing to keep afloat.

I need to understand this ability, but the mere thought of slipping under the surface fills me with such cold, everything within me slows to nearly a standstill.

I need to at least figure out what my range is. Can I still contact Nalquii? What about Sjaealam?

Too soon, the Dossea-na stands. “{Togdy hopes you’re still a friend. If you are, you’ll stay here until Ishi and Togdy figure out what to do with you.}”

“{I don’t have time—}” I try to rise, but he places a paw on my leg, claws clicking against my armor.

“{If they see you, you’ll mess up Ishi’s plans. So, stay.}” He whirls and flees.

Without an anchor, I’m lost again, spine against the wall but also in it. Through it. Surrounding it.

Focus, Fredo. Think. Collect yourself together with reason. You’re a humanoid with two arms, two legs, a head, and a core. You can’t go through things. You can’t fly.

Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.

The word echoes, and all the impossibilities pour in. I can’t help Rosa like this. I can’t go home, even if I do rescue her. I can’t stay here. Unless…

What are Ishi’s plans?

Every plan I try to make leads back to that question. Ask him, Fredo. He’s there, less than an arm’s length for the Lorsknu.

But what if his schemes are unacceptable? What if he won’t listen to me? What if he really does hate me?

I hover, a hairsbreadth from clasping his shoulder. Surely he feels my attention, but he doesn’t respond. I must be bothering him. I should retreat.

I don’t have time to retreat. Time doesn’t stop for my woes. These Napix envoys will board and conduct whatever business they’re up to. The Shlykrii-nas will crack open Valon’s ship and kill him.

Who cares about any of that? Rescuing Rosa is all that matters. We can take this vessel, the Star’s Serenade, Rosa, Ishi, and I. Togdy, too, if he wants to come, and the Grenswa-nas if any of them are still alive. We have to return them home.

Would Dollii come with us, then? The four of us, traveling the stars, a family.

The rings on my left hand warm. “I would drop everything for you, Fredo.”

“Dollii? I hear you. Say something else, so I know it’s not a dream.”

“If it is, we’re having the same one, and there is no one else I’d rather share a dream with.”

The rings are uncomfortably hot. My Lorsknu swirl around them, nipping and tugging. They probably sense the others of their kind trapped within and no longer asleep. Did I summon Dollii by thinking of her? But this isn’t the first time she’s occupied my thoughts.

“This isn’t your first call,” she confesses with a trickle of amusement and a dash of embarrassment—a sprinkle of spice amid a warm, sweet drink. “I didn’t deem my input appropriate while Valon read the Girly Gab quiz to you, however.”

“You heard all of that?” A hollow pit forms in my stomach and fills with fire.

“Most of it—only things said aloud, mind you. And I was glad to hear it.” She clears her throat. “Softer feelings aside, though, tell me what has happened. Sjaealam refuses to see anyone, and I was so worried you had died.”

“Sazlii,” I croak, but my voice only breaks that one time. The rest of the words flow as if through a broken dam. I tell her everything, and she tells me what has happened on Grenswa.

Baby Minshyal is doing well. They have proven Niiq is Chrome, and the Iodine patriarch has adopted her. Sjaealam and Lafdo have been working with scientists, doctors, and manufacturers to combat the bioweapon the Shlykrii-nas had released into the oceans, but now Dollii has taken Sjaealam’s place. It’s hard. A lot of it is beyond her understanding, and Grenswa’s days are long. But it’s fulfilling work. Because of it, many of the Essentia patriarchs have opened negotiations with the royal capital. Timqé wants things to be less segregated.

“Is he the official first prince and next king, then?”

“That is likely if his brother does not return.”

I flip that thought over in my mind several times, staring at its ugly underside before voicing it. “Would it be better if Hent doesn’t come back?”

“Better for whom? For Grenswa as a whole, perhaps yes. Better for Hent and those who love him, certainly not. Better for Seallaii, no since we have promised to do all we can to bring him home. To fail will cause a loss of face.”

“I’ll rescue him, too, then, if I can.”

The smile in her next words lights my heart aflame. “I know you can.”

Continued in Chapter 68

Thank you for reading!

As if they knew the awful sights that waited, my eyes refused to open, but eventually, my stubbornness won out over theirs. Bright rings glared in my face, eternal darkness beyond them. The wires were gone, but needles and tubes still perforated my body, and thick straps tied me down. With a bit of twisting and a lot of strain, I got one to pop before anyone noticed I was awake. Once that alerted them, though, a whole horde crowded around, pinning me and shouting technical jargon.

I fought the urge to struggle, to cave in each of their faces with a knee or an elbow. Instead, I met one’s gaze and held it until he stilled, a fresh needle hovering above my skin.

“[Is there a reason for these restraints?]”

At the sound of my voice, purposely pitched deeper like Alaysq’s, they all paused, ears erect and eyes of brown, gold, or dull orange glinting in the slanted light.

The needle-happy doctor closest to my head asked, “[With whom do we speak?]”

It was true then. They wanted to give Alaysq my body, and they weren’t sure if they had succeeded. My best hope was to make them believe they had.

“[Your queen,]” I answered, then augmented that lie with truth, “[but do not request that I prove it yet. My memories are shredded and scattered among those of the one to whom this body belonged. Grant time for that to be sorted.]”

“[Do not absorb too much of her, or you will lose yourself, Milady,]” one warned as she released the bonds across my ankles and shins.

I forced a laugh. “[Can a sea drown in a puddle? Not even a thousand children of her years could begin to dilute the vastness of my persona.]”

Maybe I laid it on a bit thick, but no one questioned it. Triumphant grins and shaky smiles surrounded me. I turned to one of these latter, shivering on the face of a girl with the palest peach eyes as she disconnected the last of my tubes.

“[What worries you?]” I asked as she applied a camouflaging bandage.

“[Does it hurt?]”

This, at least, I could answer with one hundred percent honesty. “[Yes.]”

She folded in a fast bow, ears pinned back and white-gold hair flying. “[Accept a thousand apologies, Milady. Yet, this feels like a miracle. This body is whole and beautiful, and we have given it to you.]”

“[She has no time for your gawking.]” A newcomer flowed into the room as if on a river of gold. Logic insisted she had a body, but it was lost in never-ending pleats of shiny fabric. “[The king has already demanded her presence five times.]”

She and her team gave me no time to argue. They were a whirlwind of combs, creams, and thread. I would never have chosen this woman to dress me for fear I, too, would end up a head floating atop a tsunami of glitter. Yet, before I knew it, the chaos lulled, and I stood before a mirror.

One sleeve covered my right arm, while my left prickled, bare to the cold except for the imperceptible bandages. The top hugged my curves and ended at my hips in a wide v, where another layer continued to mid-thigh. A third layer took over from there, so slanted that while the right side dragged the ground, the left appeared to have been vaporized by my knee. Hidden in the black silk, embroidered flowers shimmered through every color as I swayed, reminding me of Hent’s scales.

Before I was done admiring this absolutely gorgeous dress, an attendant slung a ribbon over my shoulder and attached a papoose to my back.

I stiffened. “[What are you doing?]”

The floating head atop the fabric blinked at me. Rings pierced every visible orifice, including her eyelids, and they clicked with the movement. “[Your child needs you.]”

I cringed. Alaysq’s child was an unnatural thing. More than that, it was the offspring of an evil vedia and a malevolent king. One parent would have killed me, and the other still would if I wasn’t careful.

He will be king of everything, Alaysq had told me, listing off every world dear to my heart. To realize that dream, they planned horrid fates for those I loved. That child was a symbol of all of it, a reminder I would never let them strap to my back.

“[No, I am no longer its mother.]”

She lifted an eyebrow at me and puckered her lower lip. It was painted as red as Fredo’s hair. “[A Seallaii-ku would now consider you a child, yes? Yet, rest assured, Milady, our doctors found this body to be mature enough to bear children of its own.]”

I held my ground as she glided through the circle of those still weaving my hair in over a dozen small braids.

“[That’s not—]”

“[The king wants another. This time, you can give him a child with royal Seallaii-ku blood and a River Guardian’s special command over this ship. You also have pink eyes now. The child may even be an eteriq.]”

Bile climbed into my throat. If he tried to touch me, I would kill him.

Maybe I should. He killed my mother. He killed the King of Grenswa. Would anyone say I was in the wrong?

My conscience would, but I would appease it with the knowledge that I had avenged Seallaii and Grenswa, that I had saved both worlds from his further machinations.

As she pulled my hair into growing twists along either side of my head and tied it in a complex tail, I contemplated how I should do it. I had Seallaii-na strength. I wouldn’t need a weapon. Would Ishiyae help me? Afterward, I would reign as queen with him at my side.

“[Is that where he has summoned me now, to his bedchambers?]”

“[After the banquet,]” she whispered as the softest brush spread glitter like stars across my cheeks, brow, and lower lip. It matched my stocking-like shoes. “[Beware the Napix-ku envoys. They have always been too interested in you as a vedia, and now you have a working bond. Do not allow them to section you off alone, and never meet the gaze of an Aylata.]”

I balked at the last word. “[Aylata? Hybrids of Napix and the mythical world Magni? They don’t exist.]”

“[They do. Unpredictable creatures they are with dangerous tempers. Our king has kept you away from them because you are precious, but he can no longer deny their requests. You must meet them, and you must be cordial. They will want to take you, but our king will refuse.]”

With how often my heart leapt into my throat, one would think it had a nest there. As she led me through the winding halls, it refused to settle. If I went with the Napix-nas, I wouldn’t have to face Su’s lust. It wouldn’t fall to me to kill him. The unknown sang to my curiosity, promising it would be better.

Yet, the stories of Aylata told of beings who could kill with a glance or a twitch of their fingers.

One to defeat ten thousand, so the ballad went. Two to best a million.

It was supposedly from a much older war, yet the Surra-nas proved it accurate when they first met and challenged Napix. Surely, time and biased historians had exaggerated the tale and invented these hybrids to explain their preposterous statistics.

Aylata powers were merely a trick meant to intimidate the enemy, and I wouldn’t fall for it.

We stopped in front of large double doors for her to adjust my gown and smooth the front of my hair one last time. Before she backed away, she dropped another bladeless knife handle into the pocket hidden in my lone, draping sleeve. “[Just in case.]”

I tilted my head. “[Can the king afford to refuse a direct request from the envoys?]”

Her mouth flattened into a thin line. “[He will give them Ishiyae instead.]”

No, he wouldn’t, not as long as I had any breath left in me. I had no idea how I would stop it, but I had a knife. I had a River Guardian education, and my pretty pink eyes were supposed to mean I was smart enough to figure it out. Surely, I could do so once in my life.

As I drew in enough breath for a year’s worth of sighs, the doors opened.

***

This was the room where I had first met Su, where he had told me the name of this ship and its purpose to destroy my people. As before, engines burned blue behind clear panels at the back of the room, and the ceiling boasted a view of space stretching on forever. This time, however, walls had folded away to make this hall even larger. The crowd packed tightly around collections of luxurious couches and at the edges of several dance floors. Everyone wore their finest. Everyone looked Shlykrii-na.

I wandered, nodding to those who greeted me but not stopping to chat, not until I realized where the music came from.

Fountains graced the corners of the room, raining up to form rivers far above the partiers, and lights flashed through them, distorting the silhouettes of the fish within. More than fish. Grenswa-nas floated with the current, but unlike at the Harvest Festival, none danced. Though they sang or played instruments, the tune carried no heart, rote and limp, like a child saying sorry because they were ordered to.

Despite that, the easy grace of every note hooked its claws into my heart. Harmonies embraced and engorged each melodic line, flowing together, then apart, like a sewing needle bobbing in and out of cloth.

How long did I stand there, gaping? The Napix-na envoys could have snuck up and felled me with a greeting. As it was, I fell all over myself at a friendly hello from a pudgy noble. If he said anything after that, I didn’t hear it, eyes affixed to the cerulean scales adorning his necklace. His mouth kept moving, and eventually, his brows dropped.

Slowly, sound returned. “[Perhaps the doctors need to reexamine their work? It can’t be denied how beautiful they sculpted you, Lady Alaysq, but can you hear at all?]”

I blinked hard and shook my head but only managed to squeak out one word. “[Scales.]”

“[Ah, this is what has you so entranced. It is beautiful, isn’t it?]” He fingered the braided chain. “[Remarkable creatures, these Grenswa-kus, art in every drop of their blood, and they don’t even appreciate it.]”

“[What’s that supposed to mean?]”

With a grunt and a sharp-toothed grin, he opted to show me the nearest ingrate. In the center of the room, the largest fountain burbled and sashayed. As we neared, my eyes traced the intricate streams, some no thicker than my finger, some wider than I was tall. More than plumbing crafted this. For it to work, hidden machines must have manipulated the gravity—another appropriated natural quirk of Grenswa.

“[Such exquisite looks.]” The nobleman spoke too loud considering I walked less than an arm’s length from him, and my sightline wasn’t alone in following his gesture toward the glass cylinder at the fountain’s core. “[We even made him the centerpiece of the show, and he sits there, glaring as if he hates the world.]”

He did hate this world. He hated every Shlykrii-na in this room, and I didn’t blame him. Hent sat on the cylinder’s floor, knees curled against his chest and chin hidden behind his folded arms, but the sulking pose was a front. He glared, yes, but those sharp eyes didn’t send benign threats. He watched and calculated, and concealed behind his arms, his lips moved.

I wanted in on the plan.

Behind me, the nobleman was distracted with a servant bearing a tray of tiny snacks. “[The king’s chefs have outdone themselves with this seafood. You must try it.]”

When he shoved the odorous morsel in my face, I had one slippered foot raised over the lip of the pool. With more grace than I considered myself capable of, I pirouetted under his arm and pushed him away.

“[I don’t eat meat.]” I also hoped it didn’t have the same origin as his suspect necklace. My stomach roiled, a condition not helped by the shock of icy water as my foot touched down.

Immersed in that temperature, how did Hent not to slip back into hibernation?

If you could bottle stubbornness, he’d be a prime source. He’d have enough for everyone in the universe.

With a slow, deep breath, I channeled my own stubborn streak and kept my foot in the water. If we were to have any chance of escaping this nightmare together, I had to be in on Hent’s plans, and that started with communication. As the Sojourner proverb said, a ship that carried only secrets as cargo was doomed to fall.

‘If only.’

My gaze flew from one end of the room to the other, hoping to spot Ishiyae. He had seen Fredo. I wasn’t sure what had happened between them. I wasn’t entirely certain what had happened between us either, but he was the one who told me to pretend Alaysq had taken over my body.

‘Help me get these Grenswa-nas out of here.’ Rather than explaining the context, I showed him, attaching a notion of where they and I were.

‘They’re fine where they are.’

He didn’t need what I had shared to know my location or my intentions. He sat on one of the couches, barely as far away as I could have thrown him, and he stared right at me. The surprise flashing through my chest had nothing to do with his presence. Where else would he be, especially if Su planned to gift him to the envoys? Yet, I never expected to see a swaddled child held so tenderly in his arms.

It was Alaysq’s child, and the realization made my already-empty stomach turn inside out.

Setting his equally empty glass on a passing tray, he stood and answered my unspoken question. ‘I have a heart, you know, and I know what it’s like to be the only one of your kind on this ship.’

My hands balled. ‘There are no others of its kind period.’

‘His kind. He’s a person.’ With equal cadence and bite to every syllable, he echoed what I had told him on Rablah about Grr and the villagers he so casually murdered.

This child was the same as them in many ways—a meld of Seallaii and Shlykrii. Alaysq had told me that, yet I could not find it within me to overlook the biggest difference. Rablah-nas were a manifestation of science. The child Ishiyae held was the product of lecherous ambition and a coupling that should never have been. A coupling that would be expected of me soon.

My skin crawled. I couldn’t feel my feet, but that probably had more to do with the fact that I still stood in frigid water.

Ishiyae caught my elbow and towed me out. It didn’t help. My sock-like shoes were soaked.

‘He has no control over how he came into the universe or who his family is. No one does, Rosa.’

The moment that address slid between us, all thoughts leapt out of my head, crashed through the windows, and burned up in some distant star. My gaze flew to his face, but that only made it worse.

‘Fredo calls you that, doesn’t he?’ His jaw set just like his brother’s did when he tried to hide the true depth of his anger. ‘Were you ever going to tell me he lived?’

I couldn’t move. He wasn’t controlling my limbs, yet I wished he was. Then I could blame this on him instead of myself. I could blame him for my shaking knees, blame him for everything. Just as he blamed me.

‘How could you keep that a secret from me?’

Finally, my muscles responded, and I retreated, toes tasting the water again. This time I welcomed the cold. That was why I shivered, not because I was afraid. I had nothing to fear. I was queen, and Ishiyae was my vedia. He would give his all to me if I demanded it.

No, these aren’t my thoughts. I am not Alaysq. She is confetti drowning in my sea.

Eyes closed, I shook my head, my hair thumping against my shoulders. ‘I thought you would hurt him.’

‘He’s my baby brother. I promised Father—’ The thought didn’t finish, and he drew a shaky breath. ‘How could you possibly believe I could hurt him?’

‘Maybe the part where you tried to run me through the moment you learned I was River Guardian.’

He reached for me again but abandoned the action and drew back, face a careful, neutral mask. ‘Fix your expression. People are staring.’

‘Let them.’ I sent the thought with all the confidence I could muster. Who cared what the silly nobleman with his meaty snacks and scaly necklace assumed? I worried even less over the opinions of his bejeweled friends. I wasn’t here as their entertainment. Yet, the one who was hovered to the forefront of my mind, and Ishiyae saw it.

His eyes slid over my shoulder and pounced on Hent. I dared not turn but knew the prince watched.

‘You fear he will perceive us as friends.’

It was more than a guess. He knew it because I did, so it was futile to deny it. How I wished I could communicate with Hent like this, to convey our plans and explanations in secret.

‘Are we friends, Ishiyae?’

‘Closer than that, I fear.’

“[Welcome, honored guests]” The bellow filled the room, and I whirled.

My eyes landed on Hent first and snagged on his gaze. He motioned with his chin toward Ishiyae in a clear question I had neither the time nor means to answer, but at least he trusted me enough to ask. His scales weren’t the ebony of betrayal, though amid the flashing lights and rippling water, I couldn’t discern what color they were.

King Su’s gong-like voice surrounded us again. “[How pleased we are to show our Napix-ku representatives genuine Surra-ku hospitality.]”

The announcement ended on a chuckle, and the crowd’s cheer filled me with foreboding. Su stood on a hovering platform on the opposite side of the central column, long robes and ridiculous tassels hanging from his rotund frame. A folded bun secured his hair, leaving little leeway for his ears.

One twisted backward, and I paused, left hand wrapped around the sleeping hilt in my sleeve.

He knocked on the column’s glass. “[As Grenswa’s youngest prince sings for us—or screams for us, whichever he chooses—watch his colors.]”

Hent flinched but didn’t turn to face him or the crowd. I doubted he understood much Laysis and even less of the ancient dialect employed on this ship. He would not sing for them, though, and I would not stand here and watch him scream.

“[My king!]” I called, a smile plastered to my lips and bare right arm raised in a delicate wave. “[Might I sing first? I have an act prepared, but I’d prefer not to follow a musician of such legendary talent.]”

‘Stop using that archaic first-person pronoun,’ Ishiyae warned. ‘No one talks like that.’

I ignored him, eyes on the king and every breath spreading my deepest desire for him to allow this ploy. I would wing the performance, and it would be just as bad as my first, but it would give Hent more time to enact whatever he planned.

With a toothy smile, Su held out a hand. “[Dearest Alaysq, one can barely believe this is true. The body of a Seallaii-na royal and River Guardian, all yours.]”

Doing my best to glide instead of slosh through the water, I accepted his hand and his help onto the hovering board. Like a boat, it rocked.

He breathed deeply, drawing in a full dose of my rewarding charisma. “[However, we will not torture our guests with your singing. They have come for a more sophisticated form of entertainment.]”

He looked meaningfully at a trio of men perched upon a couch at the fountain’s edge. While they possessed traditionally humanoid forms, everything about them was gray, just like the world I had visited in Alaysq’s nightmare. Was that Napix then? My valet said Su had kept his queen away from them. Did he not know she had been to their world? Had she gone to get her first child back?

Su again rapped on the glass. “[If he doesn’t understand, translate for him. He will sing, and for every moment it takes him to enrapture our attention, more of his people will die.]”

With a squeal, a hatch opened below each of the corner fountains, and they became drains. While the streams remained full, their current swept everything downward. Lights dimmed, and the floor grew transparent.

Hent swirled in the central column’s whirlpool, pressing against the glass for some modicum of control as he shouted. He repeated the same phrase in several tribal dialects before I recognized the words. “Break it now!”

With a pop, the gravity manipulation around the streams ceased, and water pelted the guests. The half dozen Grenswa-nas who hadn’t yet dropped down the drains landed among the crowd. They had weapons. So did the soldiers closing in from the sides of the room.

Su had been right about one thing. There was no scarcity of screams. Soldier or noble—the Grenswa-nas made no distinction and slashed at any who came too close. It was a wise, if brutal, choice considering some of the nobles drew smaller shooters of their own. This wasn’t as wise. The nobles were easier targets than the armored soldiers. Once cut down, they donated their weapons to the Grenswa-nas’ cause.

Water dripped on my head, and I surreptitiously looked up. With the gravity manipulators gone, the fountain above became a simple torrent pouring into the tank at our backs. It overflowed in an almost peaceful way—a waterfall barely visible as it clung to the glass. Hent he flipped over the cylinder’s top, scales so bright, I mistook him for an orange flame.

He pounced.

Su’s keen ears swiveled in warning, and he slid aside just enough to avoid the initial dagger slash. His shoulders took the full impact of Hent’s body, and my notion of him as a pampered weakling shattered. He caught Hent’s arm, bent knees transferring the momentum to our platform.

As Hent rolled off him, his kick connected with the king’s wrist. No effect. Su’s punch buzzed as it cut the air where Hent’s face had been. His knee sunk into Hent’s gut, and the vice of his fingers forced the prince to release the dagger. Hent twisted, tail snatching the weapon and swiping at the king’s middle.

Too quick for me to see, Su dodged again, dagger in hand and heel on the nape of Hent’s neck. Hent resisted as that foot pressed him against the platform, but he only had one arm beneath him. The soft scales of the other tore beneath Su’s nails, staining them black and chrysolite.

The dagger stabbed downward.

I grabbed the edge of the platform and threw my full weight into flipping it. The three of us splashed into the base of the fountain. While it accomplished what I wanted—Hent reclaimed the dagger and his footing while Su sputtered in the shallow water—soldiers had arrived. They surrounded their king, one by one capturing each of Hent’s limbs. A sixth held a shooter to the prince’s temple.

Like a charging norahn, I crashed into this last soldier, dropped, and swept the legs out from beneath two others. As I rose, I caught Hent, and the hilt of my knife slid into my hand. Holding him possessively at my side, I glided a thumb along the side of my weapon. It sprouted a laser blade, blue-white like the hottest star and impossibly thin. Impossibly sharp.

“[No,]” I growled at the soldiers, gaze flicking between them. “[As your queen, I forbid you from hurting him.]”

Those who had fallen climbed to their feet, but none advanced, faces turning toward their king.

Orange painted the faint line cut into his chest as he stood, teeth bared and veins bulging. “[Alaysq, what is—]”

A hand on his shoulder forestalled the rest as the tallest of the Napix-na envoys placed himself between us with an amused smirk. His gray skin shone like a moon against the ebony of his hair and attire. Pants, jacket, scarf—all of it could have competed with a black hole.

“[A brave one is your queen,]” he said, lifting a hand as if to take something offered, “[but she should not play with a weapon beyond her understanding.]”

The laser knife tore from my grasp and landed lightly on his palm. With a yelp, I groped after it. Only Hent kept me from falling, gold and silver creeping into his orange.

Deactivating the weapon, the Napix-na bowed. “[Trust that the kanaber will be put to proper use.]”

“[Is that what the knife is called? How did you—]”

I whirled as the shortest of the Napix-nas approached from behind. He didn’t stop, even at my fiercest glare. Dragging Hent with me, I shrank back.

He flicked a wave at his comrades. “[Quiet them.]”

Launched by the wind of his gesture, they shot into the skirmish between the Grenswa-nas and the soldiers. From opposite ends, they cut through it like plows tilling a field, silent bodies piled in their wake. Most didn’t see them coming. Those who did fell just as quickly.

With a wordless cry, Hent tried to run after them, but I held him back. He couldn’t help. He would only get killed, too.

“[These mere Rofylna impress you,]” the remaining Napix-na remarked.

Holding Hent tighter, I ripped my gaze from the carnage and glared at this foreign commander. Like many who flaunted their high rank, his cape flowed to the ground. His hair formed pikes pointed behind him, and a thin beard bordered his jaw.

I lifted my chin. “[Rofylna? I don’t recognize the word.]”

“[It translates to messenger, but it means much more than one who delivers information. It is the rank of the lowest caste of Aylata, the weakest with their Talents, yet look at what they can do.]”

I didn’t dare look, but Su was all too giddy over the scene. He clapped, despite the fact that those Aylata had cut down his soldiers as well.

Sunset’s final crimson claimed Hent’s scales, shot through with bolts of silver and gold as he whispered, “We can take them if we work together.”

We couldn’t, and he knew it, but he turned his attention to the nearest Napix-na, gaze sharper than a laser blade. As his muscles coiled and deep breaths increased the dazzle of his scales, I gripped his arm tighter.

The Napix-na met his glare with an unknown word, and Hent became a rigid board precariously balanced on end. With a tilted head, the man spoke again, and the prince relaxed, limp and docile as the stranger took his injured arm under inspection.

Chrysolite shined in Hent’s dark blood as a mark by the universe that he was something to be treasured. The same ethereal green-gold flashed in the Napix-na’s eyes—over the white sclera, the pale gray irises, and the agate pupils—much too vivid for a reflection. The infrared color’s presence had nothing to do with Hent. The universe had marked this man as special also.

His expression was both smile and grimace. “[Interesting blood you have.]”

“[Interesting eyes you have,]” I countered. That eerie gaze leapt to me, and with my dresser’s warning in mind, I focused on his pointed nose. “[How did you calm Hent so quickly? He didn’t even understand you.]”

The smile won the war over his countenance. “[You claim to be the Lady Alaysq recently given possession of this body? You are not.]”

My heart stuttered, but before any protestations could find their way off my tongue, he turned to Su.

“[It is a ploy to dodge giving us this prize so long sought, even after you so enjoy the present we gave you.]”

His eyes lowered, and mine followed. Far beneath the transparent floor, water churned between the thrashing limbs of the rebalo that had nearly eaten me when I had fallen through this room’s trap door. I counted two, maybe three Grenswa-nas left in the tangle. The third might have just been an arm.

On my knees, I pressed a hand to the glass tile. Perspective rendered them all so small, as if I could scoop them up and protect them forever. But I couldn’t. I could only protect Hent here alongside me, lax and unseeing. All red had drained from his scales, leaving them the same white-blue as the kanaber blade.

Closing my eyes, I forced my chin to rise and my lips to not tremble. “[What have you done to him? Why?]”

He loomed over me, vaguely reminiscent of the Tree of Everything from the Grenswa-na children’s play. Nothing about this monochrome man resembled foliage, yet he possessed the grace, power, and arrogance that actor had aspired to. Even as he crouched, he was still a tree, never a bush. “[State your name.]”

“[Rose.]”

“[Rose, you speak to Vuet K’alaqk, the one titled Ravida, leader of all Aylata, who has shown you a smidgen of Aylata power.]” He glanced at Hent, then his attention bounced back to me, heavier than before. “[Now, you will show us what you can do.]”

What was I compared to these monsters of myth? I couldn’t even speak. Forever wrapped into a never-ending moment before his stare slid elsewhere.

I hadn’t noticed the crowd form around us, but it parted at Ishiyae’s approach. A papoose strap crossed his armored chest, and his shoulder throbbed beneath its small weight, but that pain leaked only to me. It didn’t show in his face or movement.

“[This room requires cleaning, honorable sirs, and some of our brightest scientists have been waiting to show you their latest miracles.]” He gestured at the largest doors, and when the Napix-nas accepted the proffered route, he joined them.

‘Be careful, Ishiyae. Su plans to give you to them.’

He glanced back at me as the doors closed, his mouth a flat line. ‘I’m counting on that.’

Continued in chapter 69: Tears of the Heavens

Thank you for reading!