him, and currentshadows crept around his wrist, merging with the ones that wrapped around his currentblade. I watched the two combine, and bury themselves in his flesh, now a richer and darker black.
He screamed.
I kept going. I lunged at the next woman in uniform I saw, grabbing her face instead of her throat, pressing currentshadows toward her until she choked on my pain, until it filled her open, gasping mouth. I brought her head down to meet my knee, raised high enough for the two to collide, with as tall as I was.
I was not afraid of their numbers. I wasn’t afraid of anyone, not anymore. It was what made me a Noavek—not that I was so powerful I couldn’t be threatened, but that I had already survived enough horrors, enough pain, to be accustomed to the inevitability of both. But I was powerful—that much I knew.
I kept going, grabbing the next man I could get my hands on. They had made a mistake in invading us through that narrow hallway, because it created a funnel through which only one of them could charge at a time. So I took them on one at a time, until there were no more. Behind me was silence. I assumed the others had left.
I turned to make for the back door. I didn’t know how many of the police I had killed and how many I had simply disabled, but either way, I needed to flee. When I turned back toward the living room, though, I saw Zyt, Sifa, Ettrek, Yssa, and Teka waiting for me, each of them looking a little surprised.
“Go!” I shouted.
And we all ran.
“Well, your crew don’t waste any time fleeing, do they, Zyt?” Teka huffed, leaning against the wall.
We had decided, mid-stride, to make our way for the half-destroyed building where the renegades had made their camp, when I was last on Voa. It was the only other safe place we knew. Teka had taken the lead, navigating winding streets apparently from memory. The edges of the city were fraying like the cuffs of a shirt, more damaged and broken than closer to the center. There was graffiti scrawled on the side of every building: simple characters written in black, in some places, and in others, sprawling murals of characters as tall as a man, filled in with colors as bright as the currentstream. The graffiti covered up the cracks in the buildings, the boards where windows had been, the dirt that dusted each wall with brown. But I was most transfixed by a simple statement, written neatly beneath one windowsill: Noaveks Own Us.
“What do you expect?” Zyt replied. “They’re smugglers, they’re not particularly ambitious.”
“We don’t need them anyway,” Ettrek said. “Zyt is the one with the contacts.”
“Yes, the contacts for the smuggling of . . . fruit, apparently?” Zyt raised an eyebrow at me.
“Yes,” I said, offering no further explanation.
“Now might be a good time to explain what you need a bunch of fruit for,” Zyt said.
“It might be a good time,” I countered. “But how can we be sure?”
I took a vial of painkiller from the pack at my side and tipped it into my throat. It was one of Akos’s “subpar” batches—and he wasn’t wrong to call them that, they weren’t nearly as effective as most of his painkillers—but it was better than nothing.
The plants growing between the cracks in the broken floor had spread much farther in the time we had been away from this place. Vines were beginning to creep up the walls, and everywhere I looked, there were splashes of color from wildflowers. The kind that turn to mush, I thought, and it was an Akos thought, not one of my own.
Suddenly I needed to be alone. I slipped away, into the stairwell where I had first showed Akos that I could control my currentgift. My back against one of the stone walls, I slid to the ground and let the tears come.
Later, Teka found a bottle of fermented fruit juice in the cabinets of someone who had lived in this place before it was destroyed, and we all took a glass together to steady ourselves before we tried for more sleep.
Sifa offered a toast, translating to Shotet from Thuvhesit: “To what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will do.”
And I drank.
CHAPTER 46: AKOS
HIS OTHER MEMORIES OF grief involved time slipping away. Oil beading on water. The sudden lack of presence in his own life, the self-protective drifting.
He