Carve the Mark

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.