“He’s moving our assets,” she said, and Jaya knew she meant Div as one, but she winced at hearing her brother be considered so coldly. “Have you finished?”
“I just have one left,” Jaya said, flashing the metal lotus tucked in her waistband.
“I’ll give it to you, Jaya. They are a masterful creation. Better than anything I’ve created. You should have come under my wing, not Akaros’s. I could have taught you more than just Ambari.”
Jaya tried not to roll her eyes. She was tired of Maya’s and Akaros’s long-running rivalry. She had kept to the edges, avoiding being subsumed unlike other poor initiates.
“You’re hovering. We’ll attract attention,” she said quickly, hoping to rid herself of Maya. “Go. I’ll recon with you—”
“What do you plan to do after all of this?”
Jaya stopped, stunned by the question. “What do you mean?”
Maya’s eyes slid to hers with a slyness that Jaya disliked. “After you have Div, what will you do?”
A cold, singular bell clanged through her as she met Maya’s calculative gaze. Did she suspect? Did she know? Jaya studied her, but the strategist revealed nothing other than a cutting curiosity.
“I—we—will continue fighting with the Arohassin,” Jaya said, her voice dry.
“Yes, Akaros said the same,” Maya mused.
“And you?”
Maya looked up at the floating seal. “I think you’ll go wherever Div does, should he survive.”
Jaya swallowed. Her fingers fluttered at her sides, as if grasping an invisible weapon. She had no killer instinct—Akaros had complained about this before—but in the moment, Jaya wished she had a pulse gun. Or a sword. She wanted to drive it into Maya’s back because it was that last part, the thinly veiled threat, that sent a surge of vicious fear and darkanger through her. Div was no chess piece. He was not someone to be manipulated like the kings in their obtuse political games. He was herbrother. Of flesh and blood, or whatever remained of it.
Jaya calmed herself, and when she spoke, her voice was steeled. “We go with the Arohassin. We are indebted to Taran, after all.”
Maya turned to her, eyes cutting down like a blade. “You’d do well to remember your debt, then.”
She owed the Arohassin more than her dreams of revenge. She owed them her brother’s life.
He had told her that his body did not feel right. That for suns, it had never felt right. And on that fateful day, when he had told their parents, she had stood, gripped with a delayed shock, as Div screamed his name, and her mother had responded with Divya.
“I don’t understand,” her mother had wailed. “You are my beautiful Divya, my darling girl. My radiance. I—I don’t see why you would want to be something else.”
“Have we done something wrong?” her father beseeched. “Did we treat you cruelly?”
“No,” Div said, his voice thick with frustration. “This is me! ME! Mama, do you remember the stories you told about the warriors who created the Unsung? How they were Yumi? How they passed their teachings on to warriors that were neither men nor women, but a divine third that—”
“Those are legends,” her mother growled. Her hair lashed and swung, agitated. “This is my fault. I should have returned to Moksh. Made you a temple attendant so you could see the beautiful lineage of what you are, Divya. You are a Yumi. Why would you clip your own hair?”
Jaya understood then that it was not Div himself that bothered her parents, or the idea of what he was, but the implication that in becoming his true self, he would relinquish the one gift their Great Mother had bestowed upon him. Hair of power. Hair of legend, of ancestry. The gift she had never been given.
“I am not less,” Div said, his voice shaking. He jabbed a finger toward Jaya. “Look at Jaya. She is clipped, but you’ve told us all our lives that she’s no less than you.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” her mother snapped, and it was this admission, this small, errant remark, that had stung Jaya the deepest. Shewasless. She was born Yumi but was not truly one, could not serve and protect like her ancestors, could not swear allegiance to their Great Mother because she had been born bereft of Her blessing. Jaya’s eyes stung. Div turned to her, and maybe it was jealousy toward her sibling, who had been born whole and did not want it, or maybe it was her anger toward her mother, but Jaya looked at him and said, quietly, “You will become less.”
Silence rang through their small home.
Tears welled in his eyes, and Jaya immediately regretted it, but he was already moving, leaving. Her parents called too, but Div had rushed up to his room, and then she was alone with them and their confusion, their ire. She had not heard the gold caps over their shouting. Did not hear the strike of a match, the flare of a flame.
By the time they noticed, it was too late.
Smoke clogged their home, trapping them inside. Her mother had roared with fury, but her voice was drowned out by the gold caps, and then they were all choking from the lack of air as the flames grew higher. The gold caps were going to burn them alive. Small mercy, then, that her family had been buried when the house caved in.
A gold cap had dragged her out by her hair, and Jaya had thrown herself on him. She had screamed until her lungs were hoarse. But nothing compared to the screech that ripped from her throat when she saw Div.
