The Fates Divide

A soft heart was a gift, whether given easily or with great reluctance. I would never take it for granted again.

Death is not the only punishment you can give a person. You can also give them nightmares.

Sometimes she still said things that wounded me. And not because they were lies.

It was ridiculous. But so was much of the galaxy.

What does Mother always say? Those who go looking for pain...' 'Find it every time,' I replied, completing the phrase.

Life is full of pain', I had told Akos, trying to draw him back from depression. 'Your capacity for bearing it is greater than you believe.' And I had been right.

Why do you have this expectation that life will make concessions for you?' She scowled. 'We are not promised ease, comfort, or fairness. Only pain and death.

Suffer the fate, for all else is delusion.

I am a Shotet. I am sharp as a blade and just as strong, I see all of the galaxy and it is all mine.

There's poetry in it, in that poetry can be raw, and cruel, and strange, like this.

It wasn't pretending I wouldn't get knocked down that protected me, but the knowledge that I would get back up as many times as I had to.

Sitting at his kitchen table--the kitchen table where he had spread his homework as a kid to work before dinner, where he had climbed up to dust the burnstones with red hushflower powder, where he had learned to chop and slice and crush ingredients for the painkiller--was Cyra. Her thick, wavy hair piled on one side of her head, the other glinting silver. Her arm wrapped in armor. Her eyes dark as space. “Hello,” she said to him in Thuvhesit. “Hello,” he replied in Shotet.

They were both people who carried every scrap of everything around, but maybe they could help each other set things down, piece by piece.

I tipped my chin up and kissed him, gently. He responded by wrapping an arm across my back and lifting me into him, strong and warm and certain. It took a while for us to break apart. “We pass through the currentstream today,” I said. “Will you come with me?” “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he said, “I’ll pretty much go with you anywhere.” He tapped my nose with a gray-stained finger, leaving a mark that even I could see out of the corner of my eye. “Did you just stain my nose right before I have to go out in public?” He grinned, and nodded. “I hate you,” I said. “And I love you,” he replied.

So we were tangled in a web together, cause and effect and choice and fate all intermingling.

Space was not a finite container, but that didn't mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the current stream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds; this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing, it was everything.

I paused. I was tempted to call Akos a friend, but it seemed too simple for what he had been to me, too small a word.

We see-- Them. Older. The silverskin shining on one side of her head. His gray eyes crinkled at the corners as he looks at her. They stand in a crowd beneath a mammoth ship. It towers, in patchwork metals, over the other ships on the loading bay. A new sojourn ship. He takes her hand. They walk toward the ship together.

When the will to live failed, the body still fought.

Can I offer you a bracing slap on the back? A gruff reassurance, maybe?' 'Do you have candy? I would take candy,

What does it matter what the 'before' is, when you're controlling the 'after'?

They were not just objects, but escapes when pain made it hard for me to stay in my own body. My comforts in despair.

We didn’t always have a planet,” she said. “The currentstream was home, more than a piece of rock. Or our ship. But as a people, we are maybe more closely tied than most to our identity, because we have always had to struggle against disappearing completely. We fight for you, for your belonging, because we fight for our existence. We will surrender the one only when we surrender the other.

Stand up straight. Speak clearly. Don’t be afraid to think about your answer—the pause feels longer to you than it does to them.

Akos watched her carefully as she spoke, as she pulled him closer and touched her forehead to his, so they could still look at each other, breathing the same air. “What I did,” he said, “cut out a piece of me.” “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m all hacked up and stitched back together, too.” She pulled away. “For now,” she said, “just be my friend again, okay? And we can talk about the whole ‘I’m still in love with you, what the hell do we do about it’ question later.” Akos smiled. “Show me your house,” she said. “Are there embarrassing pictures of you? On the journey, your sister told me you were very particular about your socks.” And so Akos took her upstairs, his fingers laced with hers, and opened all his drawers, letting himself be thoroughly mocked.

You’ve only ever cared about yourself, for your entire life. So what’s gotten into you? Brain parasite?

Lazmet smiled. “And you have more than one mark on your arm. How encouraging, to realize that you are not a complete idiot. Congratulations, Akos Noavek. You are not boring.

You don’t need to dedicate so much time to painkillers,” I said. “I’m managing just fine with the ones I have.” “I enjoy making them,” he said. “It’s not all about you, you know.” “I love it when you talk sweet to me.

I had accepted the likelihood of death when I decided to kill my father, but now that I had my life, I wanted to keep it again. Even without Akos, even without family, even with most of Shotet hating me, what I had told Teka before was right. I had more now. I had friends. Hope for my own future, and for myself. But I also had love for my people, broken though some of them may have been. Their stubborn will to survive. The way they looked at discarded objects, not as garbage, but as possibilities. They crash-landed through hostile atmospheres. They coasted alongside the currentstream. They were explorers, innovators, warriors, wanderers. And I belonged to them.