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Ravik leans forward, clasping his hands together and cocking his head to the side. While the girl at the front of the room is entirely alien, I immediately recognize the look on Ravik’s face.
It’s similar to the one I’m certain I wore the first time I met Frankie and Taraven.
“You brought her here like a…” Ravik shakes his head with a grimace. “Like a trinket to be gawked at.”
“I did not bring her here,” Jokahn scoffs. “She and her people came of their own free will. They fear that Dalphox will kill her if he learns of her gift, which he most certainly will in the wake of that attack.”
“That attackkilled three billion people onRath,” I hiss.
The words seem to slide past my lips unbidden, and I choke them back too late. Jokahn’s lips curl in a cruel smile.
“Your whole party is prickly, hm?” he says. “I expected Nixeris to send more capable negotiators.”
“We aren’t negotiators,” Frankie says, lifting her chin. Her hand is on my knee, squeezing. I exhale a harsh breath and ignore my mounting anxiety, and the heat prickling along my scales as I tune into Taraven’s persistent touch on my shoulder. “We’re here to collect information that was already agreed upon, and then to leave you to deal with our shared enemy.”
“That being?”
“Dalphox,” Frankie says. She raises her eyebrows. “Unless youwanta genocidal maniac running the Five Houses…and I really don’t think that would be lucrativeorconducive to your lifestyle.”
Jokahn chuckles, then puts a finger to his lips.
“Quiet now, little human,” he says. “We can discuss after—apparently, she only gets her visions at certain times. You are about to witness something incredible.”
We all focus our attention on the front of the room, where the cloaked Skoropi are busy connecting the oracle to a strange device. They press sensor pads into place all around the oracle’s eyes, the oracle sitting patiently in a simple chair between them. She’s removed her hood and her hair floats in a curly cloud around her, her dark skin almost black in contrast with the pearly tone of her glazed eyes.
This feels wrong—it is more like a humanmu-veethan a ceremony.
Her hand shoots out to grasp the arm of the nearest figure, and the Skoropi squats down beside her. They whisper something to each other, the oracle never looking at the Skoropi. Instead, her eyes seem to be trained onus—although that is, perhaps, an effect of her blindness.
Then she points.
At Taraven.
The Skoropi cleric beside her reaches out to lower her arm even as Ravik tries to rise. Taraven pulls him back to his seat.
“After,” Taraven says. “Don’t interfere with them; we don’t know what they might be able to tell us.”
“You just want to see the performance,” Ravik scowls.
“There’s more to it than that,” Frankie says from my other side. “We want to know what she knows. And if she’s about to warn about another attack…well, that could help, couldn’t it?”
“Let her speak, Ravik,” I say. “Please.”
He shuts his mouth and crosses his arms.
“Fine,” he says. “But I won’t stand for this again.”
The figures at the front of the room finally finish hooking up the oracle, then they step to the side and activate the device. Her eyelashes flutter and her brow furrows, her lips parting—then lights project from beneath her. I can’t make out what’s going on at first, a chaos of shapes and colors wreathing her silhouette.
I cock my head and frown.
It’s…I don’t know what it is, but it’s horrible.
Death.So much death. There’s a splash of blood, a crumbling building, figures warped and twisted. The colors flash—red, black, grey, green.
And the oracle speaks.
“They come,” she whispers. “On stellar currents, they come…they are listening. And they do not want us…”
