come to pass. I am still not sure which Akos I am speaking to, for example. There are many that you could be.”
She lapsed into quiet, and sighed.
“No,” she said, finally. “It didn’t help.”
“I—” He gulped, and opened his eyes, not looking at his mother, but at the wall opposite him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. I—I failed him.”
“Akos—” She gripped his shoulder, and he let himself feel the warmth and the strength of her hand for a tick.
The cell that had held Ryzek was scrubbed clean, like nothing had ever happened. In some secret part of himself, he wished Eijeh had died, too. It would be easier than this, the constant reminder of how he’d messed it all up, and couldn’t fix it.
“There’s nothing you—”
“Don’t,” he said, more harshly than he meant to. “He’s gone. And now there’s nothing left to do but—bear it.”
He turned, and left her standing there, caught between two sons who weren’t quite the same as they used to be.
They took turns sitting on the nav deck to make sure the ship didn’t steer straight into an asteroid or another spaceship or some other piece of debris. Sifa had the first shift, since Teka was exhausted from reprogramming the ship in the first place, and Cyra had spent the last several hours mopping up her own brother’s blood. Akos cleared the floor of the galley and rolled out a blanket in the corner, near the medical supplies.
Cyra came to join him, her face scrubbed shiny and her hair in a braid over one shoulder. She lay shoulder to shoulder with him, and for a time neither of them said anything at all, just breathed in time together. It reminded him of being in her quarters on the sojourn ship, how he could always hear when she was up because the tossing and turning stopped and all he could hear were her breaths.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Cyra said.
He turned to face her, propping himself up on one elbow. She had trimmed the hair neatly around the silverskin. He’d gotten used to it now, shining on one side of her head like a mirror. It suited her, really, even if he hated what had happened to her.
Her jaw was set. She started on the straps of the armor that covered her arm, working them back and forth until they were loose. When she shucked it, there was a new cut on her arm, right near her elbow, with a hash through it. He touched it, lightly, with a fingertip.
“You didn’t kill him,” he said to her.
“I know,” she said. “But the chancellor isn’t going to take note of him, and . . .” She sighed. “I guess I could have gotten some revenge from beyond death, if I had let him go unmarked. Dishonored him by pretending he never existed.”
“But you couldn’t do that,” Akos supplied.
“I couldn’t,” Cyra agreed. “He’s still my brother. His life is still . . . notable.”
“And you’re upset that you couldn’t punish him.”
“Sort of.”
“Well, if my opinion counts for anything, I don’t think you need to regret showing some mercy,” he said. “I’m just sorry you went to all the trouble of sparing him for me, and then . . . it didn’t even matter.”
With a heavy sigh, he slumped to the ground again. Just another way that he’d failed.
She laid a hand on him, right over his sternum, right over his heart, with the scarred arm that said so much and so little about her at once.
“I’m not,” she said. “Sorry, I mean.”
“Well.” He covered her hand with one of his own. “I’m not sorry you’ve got Ryzek’s loss marked on your arm, even though I hated him.”
The corners of her mouth twitched up. He was surprised to find that she had chipped off a little piece of his guilt, and he wondered if he’d done the same for her, in his way. They were both people who carried every scrap of everything around, but maybe they could help each other set things down, piece by piece.
It was good he felt this way, he thought. With Eijeh gone, all that he had left to do was meet his fate, and Cyra and his fate were inextricable. He would die for the family Noavek, and she was the last of them. She was a happy inevitability, brilliant and unavoidable.
Acting on impulse, Akos turned and kissed her. She stuck her fingers in one of his belt loops and pulled him tight against