That was why, he had said, I hadn’t been able to open the gene lock that kept his rooms secure, why I hadn’t been able to assassinate him the first time I tried.īut I didn’t know how to begin.
Ryzek seemed certain that he and I didn’t actually share blood, that I was not truly a Noavek. I meant to tell him what Ryzek had told me, that my father-if he was my father, if Ryzek was even my brother-was alive. I sat in the captain’s chair, swiveling back and forth to soothe myself. When Akos Kereseth came to find me, later, it was on the nav deck of the small transport ship that carried us away from my home planet, where my people, the Shotet, now stood on the verge of war with Akos’s home nation of Thuvhe. 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.
L AZMET N OAVEK, MY FATHER and former tyrant of Shotet, had been presumed dead for over ten seasons.
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