More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It wound across the galaxy, binding all the planets together like beads on a single string.
But Akos wasn’t “nice”; that was just what people said about quiet people.
As we dodged elbows on a narrow street where the buildings fell together like lovers, there were people dancing, singing.
“How do you keep doing this?” he said. “Keep going, when everything is so horrible?” Horrible. Was that what life was? I had never put a word to it. Pain had a way of breaking time down. I thought about the next minute, the next hour. There wasn’t enough space in my mind to put all those pieces together, to find words to summarize the whole of it. But the “keep going” part, I knew the words for. “Find another reason to go on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.”
To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.
All the better, for his gift to frighten them—fearsomeness gave a person a different kind of power. I would know.
“Carve the mark,” he said. He was so hoarse the words almost didn’t come out.
It was easier, without them, to see that she was beautiful, her hair in long, loose curls, shining in the shifting light, her eyes so dark they looked black. Her aquiline nose, with its fine bones, and the splotch next to her windpipe, a birthmark, its shape somehow elegant.
I had watched him pack some clothes and some of the books I had given him, his favorite pages folded over. Though I had already read all those books, I wanted to open them again just to search out the parts he most treasured; I wanted to read them as if immersed in his mind.
Ryzek had lived his life in a daze of cruelty, obeying the instructions of our long-dead father like the man was standing over him, and relishing none of it. Men like Ryzek Noavek were not born; they were made. But time could not move backward. Just as he had been made, he had to be unmade.
Everything inside me slowed as his eyes met mine, like I had stopped time. I looked him over carefully, like a caress, his tousled brown hair, the dusting of freckles on his nose, and his gray eyes, unguarded for the first time I could remember. I didn’t see the bruises or the blood that marked him. I listened to his breaths. I had heard them in my ear just after I kissed him, every exhale bursting a little, like he didn’t want to let it go.
He closed his eyes, just for a tick letting himself think about her again. She was lively in his memories, fighting in the training room like war was a dance, searching windows into black space like they were paintings. She made ugly things beautiful, somehow, and he would never understand it. But she was alive.
How could he describe a whole person like that? She was tough as dried meat. She loved space. She knew how to dance.
I wanted to show these people who he really was. And pain always did that, took the insides out.
FOR A TICK
Bruh she uses this phrase so much
He acted as Cisi’s hands for the rest of Cyra’s wounds, too, the gashes on her arm and side covered with stitching cloth, the bruises treated with a healing salve. It didn’t take long. Mostly they would heal on their own, and the real trick for her would be forgetting how she got them. There was no stitching cloth for the mind’s wounds, real though they were.
But she had unfurled bit by bit, showing him her wicked humor by waking him with a knife to his throat, talking about herself with unflinching honesty, for better or for worse, and loving—so deeply—every little bit of this galaxy, even the parts she was supposed to hate. She was not a rusty nail, as she had once told him, or a hot poker, or a blade in Ryzek’s hand. She was a hushflower, all power and possibility. Capable of doing good and harm in equal measure.
His armor hit the ground with a clatter, and he reached for me. Wrapped an arm around my waist. Pulled me against him. Whispered against my mouth: “Sivbarat. Zethetet.” One Shotet word, one Thuvhesit. Sivbarat referred to a person’s dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb. And the Thuvhesit word, I had never heard before. We didn’t quite know how to fit together, lips too wet, teeth where they didn’t belong. But that was all right; we tried again, and this time it was like the spark that came from friction, a jolt of energy through my body.
but this was not the absence of pain I had always craved, it was the opposite, it was pure sensation. Soft, warm, aching, heavy, everything, everything.
“What does it mean, ‘zethetet’?” He looked away, like he was embarrassed. I caught sight of that creeping blush around the collar of his shirt. “Beloved,” he said softly. He kissed me again, then picked up his armor and led the way toward the renegades. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Give me a straight answer, just this once,” he said to her. “Do I save Eijeh or not?” “I have seen futures where you do, and futures where you don’t,” she said. And, smiling, she added, “But you always, always try.”
“It’s hard to know what’s right in this life,” she said. “We do what we can, but what we really need is mercy.
fortitude,
