Читать книгу Carve the Mark - Вероника Рот, Veronica Roth - Страница 11

“HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE of the night,” Osno said, puffing up his chest. “I had this scrape on my knee, and it started burning. By the time I threw the blankets back, it was gone.”

The classroom had one curved wall and two straight ones. A large furnace packed with burnstones stood in the center, and their teacher always paced around it as she taught, her boots squeaking on the floor. Sometimes Akos counted how many circles she made during one class. It was never a small number.

Around the furnace were metal chairs with glass screens fixed in front of them at an angle, like tabletops. They glowed, ready to show the day’s lesson. But their teacher wasn’t there yet.

“Show us, then,” another classmate, Riha, said. She always wore scarves stitched with maps of Thuvhe, a true patriot, and she never trusted anyone at their word. When someone made a claim, she scrunched up her freckled nose until they proved it.

Osno held a small pocket blade over his thumb and dug in. Blood bubbled from the wound, and even Akos could see, sitting across the room from everyone, that his skin was already starting to close up like a zipper.

Everybody got a currentgift when they got older, after their bodies changed—which meant, judging by how small Akos still was at fourteen seasons old, he wouldn’t be getting his for awhile yet. Sometimes gifts ran in families, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they were useful, and sometimes they weren’t. Osno’s was useful.

“Amazing,” Riha said. “I can’t wait for mine to come. Did you have any idea what it would be?”

Osno was the tallest boy in their class, and he stood close to you when he talked to you so you knew it. The last time he’d talked to Akos had been a season ago, and Osno’s mother had said as she walked away, “For a fate-favored son, he’s not much, is he?”

Osno had said, “He’s nice enough.”

But Akos wasn’t “nice”; that was just what people said about quiet people.

Osno slung his arm over the back of his chair, and flicked his dark hair out of his eyes. “My dad says the better you know yourself, the less surprised you’ll be by your gift.”

Riha’s head bobbed in agreement, her braid sliding up and down her back. Akos made a bet with himself that Riha and Osno would be dating by season’s end.

And then the screen fixed next to the door flickered and switched off. All the lights in the room switched off, too, and the ones that glowed under the door, in the hallway. Whatever Riha had been about to say froze on her lips. Akos heard a loud voice coming from the hall. And the squeal of his own chair as he scooted back.

“Kereseth …!” Osno whispered in warning. But Akos wasn’t sure what was scary about peeking in the hallway. Not like something was going to jump out and bite him.

He opened the door wide enough to let his body through, and leaned into the narrow hallway just outside. The building was circular, like a lot of the buildings in Hessa, with teachers’ offices in the center, classrooms around the circumference, and a hallway separating the two. When the lights were off, it was so dark in the hall he could see only by the emergency lights burning orange at the top of every staircase.

“What’s happening?” He recognized that voice—it was Ori. She moved into the pool of orange light by the east stairwell. Standing in front of her was her aunt Badha, looking more disheveled than he’d ever seen her, pieces of hair hanging around her face, escaped from its knot, and her sweater buttons done up all wrong.

“You are in danger,” Badha said. “It is time for us to do as we have practiced.”

“Why?” Ori demanded. “You come in here, you drag me out of class, you want me to leave everything, everyone—”

“All the fate-favored are in danger, understand? You are exposed. You must go.”

“What about the Kereseths? Aren’t they in danger, too?”

“Not as much as you.” Badha grabbed Ori’s elbow and steered her toward the landing of the east stairwell. Ori’s face was shaded, so Akos couldn’t see her expression. But just before she went around a corner, she turned, hair falling across her face, sweater slipping off her shoulder so he could see her collarbone.

He was pretty sure her eyes found his then, wide and fearful. But it was hard to say. And then someone called Akos’s name.

Cisi was hustling out of one of the center offices. She was in her heavy gray dress, with black boots, and her mouth was taut.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ve been called to the headmaster’s office. Dad is coming for us now, we can wait there.”

“What—” Akos began, but as always, he talked too softly for most people to pay attention.

“Come on.” Cisi pushed through the door she had just closed. Akos’s mind was going in all different directions. Ori was fate-favored. All the lights were off. Their dad was coming to get them. Ori was in danger. He was in danger.

Cisi led the way down the dark hallway. Then: an open door, a lit lantern, Eijeh turning toward them.

The headmaster sat across from him. Akos didn’t know his name; they just called him “Headmaster,” and saw him only when he was giving an announcement or on his way someplace else. Akos didn’t pay him any mind.

“What’s going on?” he asked Eijeh.

“Nobody will say,” Eijeh said, eyes flicking over to the headmaster.

“It is the policy of this school to leave this sort of situation to the parents’ discretion,” the headmaster said. Sometimes kids joked that the headmaster had machine parts instead of flesh, that if you cut him open, wires would come tumbling out. He talked like it, anyway.

“And you can’t say what sort of situation it is?” Eijeh said to him, in much the way their mom would have, if she’d been there. Where is Mom, anyway? Akos thought. Their dad was coming for them, but nobody had said anything about their mom.

“Eijeh,” Cisi said, and her whispered voice steadied Akos, too. It was almost like she spoke into the hum of the current inside him, leveling it just enough. The spell lasted awhile, the headmaster, Eijeh, Cisi, and Akos quiet, waiting.

“It’s getting cold,” Eijeh said eventually, and there was a draft creeping under the door, chilling Akos’s ankles.

“I know. I had to shut off the power,” the headmaster said. “I intend to wait until you are safely on your way before turning it back on.”

“You shut off the power for us? Why?” Cisi said sweetly. The same wheedling voice she used when she wanted to stay up later or have an extra candy for dessert. It didn’t work on their parents, but the headmaster melted like a candle. Akos half expected there to be a puddle of wax spreading under his desk.

“The only way the screens can be turned off during emergency alerts from the Assembly,” the headmaster said softly, “is if the power is shut down.”

“So there was an emergency alert,” Cisi said, still wheedling.

“Yes. It was issued by the Assembly Leader just this morning.”

Eijeh and Akos traded looks. Cisi was smiling, calm, her hands folded over her knees. In this light, with her curly hair framing her face, she was Aoseh’s daughter, pure and simple. Their dad could get what he wanted, too, with smiles and laughs, always soothing people, hearts, situations.

A heavy fist pounded on the headmaster’s door, sparing the wax man from melting further. Akos knew it was his dad because the doorknob fell out at the last knock, the plate that held it fast to the wood cracking right down the middle. He couldn’t control his temper, and his currentgift made that pretty clear. Their dad was always fixing things, but half the time it was because he himself had broken them.

“Sorry,” Aoseh mumbled when he came into the room. He shoved the doorknob back in place and traced the crack with his fingertip. The plate came together a little jagged, but mostly good as new. Their mom insisted he didn’t always fix things right, and they had the uneven dinner plates and jagged mug handles to prove it.

“Mr. Kereseth,” the headmaster began.

“Thank you, Headmaster, for reacting so quickly,” their dad said to him. He wasn’t smiling even a little. More than the dark hallways or Ori’s shouting aunt or Cisi’s pressed-line mouth, his serious face scared Akos. Their dad was always smiling, even when the situation didn’t call for it. Their mom called it his very best armor.

“Come on, Small Child, Smaller Child, Smallest Child,” Aoseh said halfheartedly. “Let’s go home.”

They were up on their feet and marching toward the school entrance as soon as he said “home.” They went straight to the coatracks to search the identical gray furballs for the ones with their names stitched into the collars: Kereseth, Kereseth, Kereseth. Cisi and Akos confused theirs for a tick and had to switch, Akos’s just a little too small for her arms, hers just a little too long for his short frame.

The floater waited just outside, the door still thrown open. It was a little bigger than most, still squat and circular, the dark metal outsides streaked with dirt. The news feed, usually playing in a stream of words around the inside of the floater, wasn’t on. The nav screen wasn’t on, either, so it was just Aoseh poking at buttons and levers and controls without the floater telling them what he was doing. They didn’t buckle themselves in; Akos felt like it was stupid to waste the time.

“Dad,” Eijeh started.

“The Assembly took it upon itself to announce the fates of the favored lines this morning,” their dad said. “The oracles shared the fates with the Assembly seasons ago, in confidence, as a gesture of trust. Usually a person’s fate isn’t made public until after they die, known only to them and their families, but now …” His eyes raked over each of them in turn. “Now everyone knows your fates.”

“What are they?” Akos asked in a whisper, just as Cisi asked, “Why is that dangerous?”

Dad answered her, not him. “It’s not dangerous for everyone with a fate. But some are more … revealing than others.”

Akos thought of Ori’s aunt dragging her by the elbow to the stairwell. You are exposed. You must go.

Ori had a fate—a dangerous one. But as far as Akos could remember, there wasn’t any “Rednalis” family in the list of favored lines. It must not have been her real name.

“What are our fates?” Eijeh asked, and Akos envied him for his loud, clear voice. Sometimes when they stayed up later than they were supposed to, Eijeh tried to whisper, but one of their parents always ended up at their door to shush them before long. Not like Akos; he kept secrets closer than his own skin, which was why he wasn’t telling the others about Ori just yet.

The floater zoomed over the iceflower fields their dad managed. They stretched out for miles in every direction, divided by low wire fences: yellow jealousy flowers, white purities, green harva vines, brown sendes leaves, and last, protected by a cage of wire with current running through it, red hushflower. Before they put up the wire cage, people used to take their lives by running straight into the hushflower fields and dying there among the bright petals, the poison putting them to sleepy death in a few breaths. It didn’t seem like a bad way to go, really, Akos thought. Drifting off with flowers all around you and the white sky above.

“I’ll tell you when we’re safe and sound,” their dad said, trying to sound cheery.

“Where’s Mom?” Akos said, and this time, Aoseh heard him.

“Your mother …” Aoseh clenched his teeth, and a huge gash opened up in the seat under him, like the top of a loaf of bread splitting in the oven. He swore, and ran his hand over it to mend it. Akos blinked at him, afraid. What had gotten him so angry?

“I don’t know where your mother is,” he finished. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

“She didn’t warn you about this?” Akos said.

“Maybe she didn’t know,” Cisi whispered.

But they all knew how wrong that was. Sifa always, always knew.

“Your mother has her reasons for everything she does. Sometimes we don’t get to know them,” Aoseh said, a little calmer now. “But we have to trust her, even when it’s difficult.”

Akos wasn’t sure their dad believed it. Like maybe he was just saying it to remind himself.

Aoseh guided the floater down in their front lawn, crushing the tufts and speckled stalks of feathergrass under them. Behind their house, the feathergrass went on as far as Akos could see. Strange things sometimes happened to people in the grasses. They heard whispers, or they saw dark shapes among the stems; they waded through the snow, away from the path, and were swallowed by the earth. Every so often they heard stories about it, or someone spotted a full skeleton from their floater. Living as close to the tall grass as Akos did, he’d gotten used to ignoring the faces that surged toward him from all directions, whispering his name. Sometimes they were crisp enough to identify: dead grandparents; his mom or dad with warped, corpse faces; kids who were mean to him at school, taunting.

But when Akos got out of the floater and reached up to touch the tufts above him, he realized, with a start, that he wasn’t seeing or hearing anything anymore.

He stopped, and hunted the grasses for a sign of the hallucinations anywhere. But there weren’t any.

“Akos!” Eijeh hissed.

Strange.

He chased Eijeh’s heels to the front door. Aoseh unlocked it, and they all piled into the foyer to take off their coats. As he breathed the inside air, though, Akos realized something didn’t smell right. Their house always smelled spicy, like the breakfast bread their dad liked to make in the colder months, but now it smelled like engine grease and sweat. Akos’s insides were a rope, twisting tight.

“Dad,” he said as Aoseh turned on the lights with the touch of a button.

Eijeh yelled. Cisi choked. And Akos went stock-still.

There were three men standing in their living room. One was tall and slim, one taller and broad, and the third, short and thick. All three wore armor that shone in the yellowish burnstone light, so dark it almost looked black, except it was actually dark, dark blue. They held currentblades, the metal clasped in their fists and the black tendrils of current wrapping around their hands, binding the weapons to them. Akos had seen blades like that before, but only in the hands of the soldiers that patrolled Hessa. They had no need of currentblades in their house, the house of a farmer and an oracle.

Akos knew it without really knowing it: These men were Shotet. Enemies of Thuvhe, enemies of theirs. People like this were responsible for every candle lit in the memorial of the Shotet invasion; they had scarred Hessa’s buildings, busted its glass so it showed fractured images; they had culled the bravest, the strongest, the fiercest, and left their families to weeping. Akos’s grandmother and her bread knife among them, so said their dad.

“What are you doing here?” Aoseh said, tense. The living room looked untouched, the cushions still arranged around the low table, the fur blanket curled by the fire where Cisi had left it when she was reading. The fire was embers, still glowing, and the air was cold. Their dad took a wider stance, so his body covered all three of them.

“No woman,” one of the men said to one of the others. “Wonder where she is?”

“Oracle,” one of the others replied. “Not an easy one to catch.”

“I know you speak our language,” Aoseh said, sterner this time. “Stop jabbering away like you don’t understand me.”

Akos frowned. Hadn’t his dad heard them talking about their mom?

“He is quite demanding, this one,” the tallest one said. He had golden eyes, Akos noticed, like melted metal. “What is the name again?”

“Aoseh,” the shortest one said. He had scars all over his face, little slashes going every direction. The skin around the longest one, next to his eye, was puckered. Their dad’s name sounded clumsy in his mouth.

“Aoseh Kereseth,” the golden-eyed one said, and this time he sounded … different. Like he was suddenly speaking with a thick accent. Only he hadn’t had one before, so how could that be? “My name is Vas Kuzar.”

“I know who you are,” Aoseh said. “I don’t live with my head in a hole.”

“Grab him,” the man called Vas said, and the shortest one lunged at their dad. Cisi and Akos jumped back as their dad and the Shotet soldier scuffled, their arms locked together. Aoseh’s teeth gritted. The mirror in the living room shattered, the pieces flying everywhere, and then the picture frame on the mantel, the one from their parents’ wedding day, cracked in half. But still the Shotet soldier got a hold on Aoseh, wrestling him into the living room and leaving the three of them, Eijeh, Cisi, and Akos, exposed.

The shortest soldier forced their dad to his knees, and pointed a currentblade at his throat.

“Make sure the children don’t leave,” Vas said to the slim one. Just then Akos remembered the door behind him. He seized the knob, twisted it. But by the time he was pulling it, a rough hand had closed around his shoulder, and the Shotet lifted him up with one arm. Akos’s shoulder ached; he kicked the man hard in the leg. The Shotet just laughed.

“Little thin-skinned boy,” the soldier spat. “You, as well as the rest of your pathetic kind, would do better to surrender now.”

“We are not pathetic!” Akos said. It was a stupid thing to say—something a little kid said when he didn’t know how to win an argument. But for some reason, it stopped everyone in their tracks. Not just the man with his hand clamped around Akos’s arm, but Cisi and Eijeh and Aoseh, too. Everyone stared at Akos, and—damn it all—heat was rushing into his face, the most ill-timed blush he had ever felt in all his life, which was saying something.

Then Vas Kuzar laughed.

“Your youngest child, I presume,” Vas said to Aoseh. “Did you know he speaks Shotet?”

“I don’t speak Shotet,” Akos said weakly.

“You just did,” Vas said. “So how did the family Kereseth find itself with a Shotet-blooded son, I wonder?”

“Akos,” Eijeh whispered wonderingly. Like he was asking Akos a question.

“I do not have Shotet blood!” Akos snapped, and all three of the Shotet soldiers laughed at once. It was only then that Akos heard it—he heard the words coming out of his mouth, with their sure meaning, and he also heard harsh syllables, with sudden stops and closed vowels. He heard Shotet, a language he had never learned. So unlike graceful Thuvhesit, which was like wind catching snowflakes in its updraft.

He was speaking Shotet. He sounded just like the soldiers. But how—how could he speak a language he had never learned?

“Where is your wife, Aoseh?” Vas said, turning his attention back to their dad. He turned the currentblade in his fist, so the black tendrils shifted over his skin. “We could ask her if she had a dalliance with a Shotet man, or if she shares our fine ancestry and never saw fit to tell you about it. Surely the oracle knows how her youngest son came to be fluent in the revelatory tongue.”

“She’s not here,” Aoseh said, terse. “As you may have observed.”

“The Thuvhesit thinks he is clever?” Vas said. “I think that cleverness with enemies gets a man killed.”

“I’m sure you think many foolish things,” Aoseh said, and somehow, he stared Vas down, despite being on the ground at his feet. “Servant of the Noaveks. You’re like the dirt I remove from under my fingernails.”

Vas swung at their dad, striking his face so hard he fell to the side. Eijeh yelled, fighting to get closer but intercepted by the Shotet who still held Akos’s arm. Held both brothers without effort, in fact, like it cost him nothing at all, though Eijeh, at sixteen seasons, was almost man-size.

The low table in the living room cracked right down the middle, from end to end, splitting in half and falling to each side. All the little things that had been on top of it—an old mug, a book, a few scraps of wood from their dad’s whittling—scattered across the floor.

“If I were you,” Vas said, low, “I would keep that currentgift under control, Aoseh.”

Aoseh clutched his face for a tick, and then dove, grabbing the wrist of the short, scarred Shotet soldier standing off to the side and twisting, hard, so his grip faltered. Aoseh grabbed the blade by the handle and wrenched it free, then turned it back on its owner, his eyebrows raised.

“Go ahead and kill him,” Vas said. “There are dozens more where he came from, but you have a limited number of sons.”

Aoseh’s lip was swollen and bleeding, but he licked the blood away with the tip of his tongue and looked over his shoulder at Vas.

“I don’t know where she is,” Aoseh said. “You should have checked the temple. This is the last place she would come, if she knew you were on your way here.”

Vas smiled down at the blade in his hand.

“It is just as well, I suppose,” he said in Shotet, looking at the soldier who held Akos with one hand and was pressing Eijeh to the wall with the other. “Our priority is the child.”

“We know which one is youngest,” the soldier replied in the same language, jerking Akos by the arm again. “But which of the other two is the second-born?”

“Dad,” Akos said desperately. “They want to know about the Smaller Child. They want to know which one of them is younger—”

The soldier released Akos, but only to swing the back of his hand at him, hitting him right in the cheekbone. Akos stumbled, slamming into the wall, and Cisi choked on a sob, bending over him, her fingers stroking her brother’s face.

Aoseh screamed through his teeth, and lunged, plunging the stolen currentblade deep into Vas’s body, right under the armor.

Vas didn’t even flinch. He just smiled, crookedly, wrapped his hand around the blade’s handle, and tugged the knife free. Aoseh was too stunned to stop him. Blood poured from the wound, soaking Vas’s dark trousers.

“You know my name, but you don’t know my gift?” Vas said softly. “I don’t feel pain, remember?”

He grabbed Aoseh’s elbow again, and pulled his arm out from his side. He plunged the knife into the fleshy part of their dad’s arm and dragged down, making him groan like Akos had never heard before. Blood spattered on the floor. Eijeh screamed again, and thrashed, and Cisi’s face contorted, but she didn’t make a sound.

Akos couldn’t stand the sight. It had him on his feet, though his face still ached, though there was no purpose to moving and nothing he could do.

“Eijeh,” he said, quiet. “Run.”

And he threw his body at Vas, meaning to dig his fingers into the wound in the man’s side, deeper and deeper, until he could tear out his bones, tear out his heart.

Scuffling, shouting, sobbing. All the voices combined in Akos’s ears, full of horror. He punched, uselessly, at the armor that covered Vas’s side. The blow made his hand throb. The scarred soldier came at him, and threw him to the floor like a sack of flour. He put his boot on Akos’s face and pressed down. He felt the grit of dirt on his skin.

“Dad!” Eijeh was screaming. “Dad!”

Akos couldn’t move his head, but when he lifted his eyes, he saw his dad on the ground, halfway between the wall and the doorway, his elbow bent back at a strange angle. Blood spread like a halo around his head. Cisi crouched at Aoseh’s side, her shaking hands hovering over the wound in his throat. Vas stood over her with a bloody knife.

Akos went limp.

“Let him up, Suzao,” Vas said.

Suzao—the one with his boot digging into Akos’s face—lifted his foot and dragged Akos to his feet. He couldn’t take his eyes off his dad’s body, how his skin had broken open like the table in the living room, how much blood surrounded him—how can a person have that much blood?—and the color of it, the dark orange-red-brown.

Vas still held the bloodstained knife out from his side. His hands were wet.

“All clear, Kalmev?” Vas said to the tall Shotet. He grunted in reply. He had grabbed Eijeh and put a metal cuff around his wrists. If Eijeh had resisted, at first, he was finished now, staring dully at their dad, slumped on the living room floor.

“Thank you for answering my question about which of your siblings we are looking for,” Vas said to Akos. “It seems you will both be coming with us, by virtue of your fates.”

Suzao and Vas flanked Akos, and pushed him forward. At the last second he broke away, falling to his knees at his dad’s side and touching his face. Aoseh felt warm and clammy. His eyes were still open, but losing life by the second, like water going down a drain. They skipped to Eijeh, who was halfway out the front door, pressed forward by the Shotet soldiers.

“I’ll bring him home,” Akos said, jostling his dad’s head a little so he would look at him. “I will.”

Akos wasn’t there when the life finally left his dad. Akos was in the feathergrass, in the hands of his enemies.