He had used his currentgift to control their bodies, to force them to do it to themselves.ĭeath is not the only punishment you can give a person. Nor had he ordered someone else to do it. My father had never carved a piece of someone with his own hands. Green and brown and gray irises, afloat, like fish bobbing to the surface of a tank for food. Before I truly understood what the jars in the Weapons Hall contained, I had gone there to look at them, on shelves high above my head, glinting in the low light. And how to store it, too, in a preservative, so it wouldn't rot. My brother-who had begun his life soft, and only later hardened into someone who would torture his own sister-had learned to cut out a person's eye from Lazmet. With her he had some softness, but with everyone else. He respected her, though he respected no one else, not even his own friends. 'Laz,' she would say, 'let it go.' And he obeyed her, as long as she didn't command him too often. No one else would have dared but Ylira Noavek. My mother had called my father 'Laz,' sometimes. We had held a funeral for him on the first sojourn after his passing, sent his old armor into space, because there was no body.Īnd yet my brother, Ryzek, imprisoned in the belly of this transport ship, had said, Lazmet is still alive. LAZMET NOAVEK, MY FATHER and former tyrant of Shotet, had been presumed dead for over ten seasons. 'What was the word our mother used-' We have two mothers, two fathers, two sisters. Just as a person can love and hate something at once, we love and hate the fates, we believe and do not believe in them. One heart pounds, hard, and the other maintains a steady rhythm. The drugs have faded from one body but not the other. The former feels lighter, the latter clumsy and heavy. We stretch two arms-one shorter and browner, the other long and pale-in unison. The only light comes from the vents in the door, closed now but not fully sealed against the hallway glow. The other cell is a storage room that smells of disinfectant, harsh and acrid. It is a narrow thing, with a thin mattress in it and a bottle of water. We are adrift in space, the bend of the blushing currentstream the only interruption in the blackness. We are not on Urek, as we were the last time we knew our location. We know how to pretend, now, that we are two people instead of one-though we prefer, when we are alone, to relax into the truth.

We have grown accustomed to it in the cycles since the shift occurred, since both our currentgifts dissolved into this new, strange one. We were once alarmed by this feeling of being in two bodies at once. We may not share blood, but I'm so lucky we're family. To my dad, Frank, my brother, Frankie, and my sister, Candice:

The fates divide