Page 58 of Last of Her Name

“I haven’t been home in six months,” he murmurs, sitting back to sip his own coffee, watching the streams of data flow.

“Your family will be glad to see you.”

“Hm.” He raises a hand to massage his neck. “Maybe not. I didn’t leave in the best … circumstances.”

I look up. “Don’t tell me we’re flying into more trouble.”

“You’ll be fine.” He stares into his cup, grimacing a little. “It’s just that I sort of … stole this ship, when I left.”

My eyebrows inch upward. “So there’s some rebel in you after all.”

He sighs. “Defying tensor law and leaving Diamin was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You wouldn’t have found a more devoted, obedient citizen than me. Meanwhile, Natalya would have cut off her own finger just to irritate our father.”

“What happened to your sister?”

He sighs. “She said she was going to find Zemlya.”

“Zemlya? The Motherworld? Why?”

“She’d heard stories about it, of treasure hunters who went there and returned with priceless artifacts—she obsessed over the rumors. But she never made it. Vityazes picked her up on Emerault. The last transmission I got from her, I could hear their guns going off in the background.”

“So you took off after her.”

He nods. “Against my father’s wishes. Under Union law, of course, we are not allowed to leave Diamin, but we have our own rules against it as well.” The air over his cup begins to snap and warp, and the liquid rises into a mosaic of dark triangles. His eyes harden, silver glinting in his irises. “It is feared that the Committee is trying to steal our abilities.”

“Steal them? How?”

He opens his hands, releasing the liquid, and it splashes back into the cup, not a single drop spilled. “Our ability is genetic. If the Committee figures out how to isolate the tensor gene, they could replicate it in their own soldiers.”

Stars, tensor vityazes. That’s not something I want to think about.

“Surely your people can’t be too angry with you,” I say. “You were only trying to save your sister.”

He lifts a brow, his mouth pressed into a sardonic line. “My people are … complicated. We have strict codes by which we must abide, and with good reason. I know the stories you must have heard about us, how we threaten the fabric of existence with our tessellating, how we’re unnatural and dangerous.”

“I know better now. It all seemed more like a myth, anyway.”

“There is truth to it.” He looks at me, his eyes dark. “When I attacked Pol, you saw how close I was to losing control. Tensors value self-control above all else.Imper su, imper fata.”

“I heard you say that phrase before. What does it mean?”

“It means if you control your self, you control your fate. It’s sort of our motto.” He gives a grim smile. “When you manipulate gravity as we do, you pull on threads that connect to every part of existence. Lose control of that, and the consequences are devastating.”

“What,” I joke, because his tone is making me deeply uneasy, “are you worried you’ll create a black hole or something?”

He just looks at me.

My teasing smile slides away. “Oh.Oh.”

“It’s only happened a few times in our history.” His eyes turn up, toward the fuzzy glow of the cosmos, the light tingeing his cheekbones silver. “But you can see why it’s doubly important we never let the Committee steal our secrets.”

“No kidding,” I mutter. So maybe notallthe stories I’ve heard were lies—at least, not the ones about tensors ripping apart the fabric of reality. Stars, imagine being capable of producing something as terrible and powerful as a black hole? No wonder Riyan’s so uptight all the time. If he lost control, he could not only bend space-time—he could tear it open altogether.

I hear a groan from below and whirl to see Pol shifting on the stretcher, pushing against the straps. Setting down my coffee, I hurry to the lower deck and kneel by him. He looks terrible, worse than he did yesterday. His skin is sickly gray and his lips are cracked; when I touch his face, it’s hot with fever.

“Stace?” he groans.

“Whoa.” I gently hold him down. “You’re not going anywhere fast. In case you don’t remember, Zharshotyou. You’ve been out for days. I thought you were dead.”