" What happens now?” Akos said to me softly.
“You think I know?” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t even know if you and I count as exiles. Or if Lazmet counts exiles as Shotet.”
“Maybe we’re on our own, you and me.”
He said it with a glint of hope in his eyes. If I was not an exile, if I was not even Shotet, then staying with me was not a sign of his inevitable betrayal. The family Noavek had so long been synonymous with “Shotet” in his mind that the sudden paring down of everything I was appealed to him. But I could not be made smaller, and moreover, I didn’t want to be.
“I am always a Shotet,” I said.
He looked taken aback at first, tilting away from me. But his rejoinder came quickly, and it was sharp: “Then why do you doubt me when I tell you I am always a Thuvhesit?”
It wasn’t the same. How could I explain that it wasn’t the same? “Now is not the time for this debate!”
“Cyra,” he said again, and he touched my arm, his touch light as ever. “Now is the only time for this debate. How can we talk about where we’re going now, what we’re doing now, if we haven’t talked about who--and what--we are now?”
He had a point. Akos had a way of getting to the heart of things--he was, in that way, more of a knife than I was, though I was the sharper-tongued of the two of us. His soft gray eyes focused on mine like there were not over one hundred people crowded around us. "

― Veronica Roth , The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark, #2)