Carve the Mark

He touched my wrist, guiding my hand into his, so we walked with fingers clasped. I hoped the sound of creaking floorboards disguised the sound of my breaths.

We walked the tunnels to the room where the Examiners worked, near the Weapons Hall, where I had first seen Akos and Eijeh. I pressed the panel forward, then slid it just enough to let us slip out. The room was so dark the Examiners didn’t notice us—they stood among the holograms in the center of the room, measuring distances with fine beams of white light, or checking their wrist screens, calling out coordinates. Still, my pride drove me to step away from him, releasing his hand.

They were calibrating the galaxy model. After they verified the model’s accuracy, they would begin their analysis of the current. Its ebb and flow told them where the next scavenge would be.

“The galaxy model,” I said softly.

“Galaxy,” Akos repeated. “But it shows only our solar system.”

“The Shotet are wanderers,” I reminded him. “We have gone far beyond the boundaries of our system, and found only stars, no other planets. As far as we are concerned, this solar system is alone in the galaxy.”

The model was a hologram that filled the room from corner to corner, glowing sun in the center and broken moon fragments drifting around the edges. The holograms looked solid until an Examiner walked through them to measure something else, and then they shifted like they were exhaling. Our planet passed in front of me as I watched, by far the whitest of all the simulated planets, like a sphere of vapor. Floating nearest to the sun was the Assembly station, a ship even larger than our sojourn ship, the hub of our galaxy’s government.

“All calibrated once you get Othyr distal to the sun,” one of the Examiners said. He was tall, with rounded shoulders, like he was curling them in to protect his heart. “An izit or two.”

An “izit” was slang for IZ, a measurement about the width of my smallest finger. In fact, sometimes I used my fingers to measure things when I didn’t have a beamer on hand.

“Really precise measuring there,” another overseer responded, this one short, a small paunch bubbling over the top of his pants. “‘An izit or two,’ honestly. That’s like saying ‘a planet or two.’”

“1.467IZ,” the first overseer said. “Like it’ll make a difference to the current.”

“You’ve never really embraced the subtlety of this art,” a woman said, striding through the sun to measure its distance from Othyr, one of the closer planets to the galaxy’s center. Everything about her was strict, from the line of her short hair across her jaw to the starched shoulders of her jacket. For a moment she was encased in yellow-white light, standing in the middle of the sun. “And an art it is, though some would call it a science. Miss Noavek, how honored we are to have you with us. And your … companion?”

She didn’t look at me as she spoke, just bent to point the beam of light at the band of Othyr’s equator. The other Examiners jumped at the sight of me, and in unison backed up a step, though they were already across the room. If they had known how much effort it was taking me to stand in one place without fidgeting and crying, they might not have worried.

“He’s a servant,” I said. “Carry on, I’m just observing.”

They did, in a way, but their careless chatter was gone. I put my hands in fists and wedged them between my back and the wall, squeezing so tightly my fingernails bit my palms. But I forgot about the pain when the Examiners activated the hologram of the current; it wove its way through the simulated planets like a snake, but formless, ethereal. It touched every planet in the galaxy, Assembly-governed and brim alike, and then formed a strong band around the edge of the room like a strap holding the planets in. Its light shifted always, so rich in some places it hurt my eyes to stare at it, and so dim in others it was only a wisp.

Otega had taken me here as a child, to teach me how the scavenge worked. These Examiners would spend days observing the flow of the current.

“The current’s light and color is always strongest over our planet,” I said to Akos in a low voice. “Wrapped three times around it, Shotet legend says—which is why our Shotet ancestors chose to settle here. But its intensity fluctuates around the other planets, anointing one after another, with no discernible pattern. Every season we follow its leading, then we land, and scavenge.”

“Why?” Akos murmured back.

We cull each planet’s wisdom and take it for our own, Otega had said, crouched down beside me at one of our lessons. And when we do that, we show them what about them is worthy of their appreciation. We reveal them to themselves.

As if in response to the memory, the currentshadows moved faster beneath my skin, surging and receding, the pain following wherever they went.

“Renewal,” I said. “The scavenge is about renewal.” I didn’t know how else to explain. I had never had to before. “We find things that other planets have discarded, and we give them a new life. It’s … what we believe in.”

“Seeing activity around P1104,” the first Examiner said, hunching even lower over one of the hunks of rock near the edge of the galaxy. His body looked almost like a dead insect, curled into a husk. He touched a section of the current where the color—green now, with hints of yellow—swirled darker.

“Like a wave about to hit shore,” the sharp-edged woman purred. “It may build or fizzle, depending. Mark it for observation. But right now my guess for the best scavenge planet is still Ogra.”

The scavenge is a kindness,Otega had whispered in my child-ear. To them as well as to us. The scavenge is one of the current’s purposes for us.

“Much good your guessingwill do,” the first overseer said. “Didn’t you say His Highness specifically requested information about current activity over Pitha? Barely a wisp there, but I doubt that matters to him.”

“His Highness has his own reasons for requesting information, and they are not ours to question,” the woman said, glancing at me.

Pitha. There were rumors about that place. That buried deep under the water planet’s oceans, where the currents were not as strong, were advanced weapons, unlike anything we had seen. And with Ryzek determined to claim not just Shotet’s nationhood, but control over the entire planet, weapons would surely be useful.

Pain was building behind my eyes. That was how it started, when my currentgift was about to hit me harder than usual. And it had been hitting me harder than usual whenever I thought about Ryzek waging war in earnest, as I stood passive at his side.