“You aren’t evil,” he says firmly. “You are exactly as nature made you. And that is special, Nassun—special and powerful in ways that are atypical even for one of your kind. In the Fulcrum, you would have rings by now. Perhaps four, or even five. For one your age, that’s amazing.”
This makes Nassun happy, even though she doesn’t fully understand. “Wudeh says the Fulcrum rings go up to ten?” Wudeh has the most talkative of the three Guardians, agate-eyed Nida. Nida sometimes says things that don’t make sense, but the rest of the time she shares useful wisdom, so all the kids have learned to simply tune out the gibbering.
“Yes, ten.” For some reason, Schaffa seems displeased by this. “But this is not the Fulcrum, Nassun. Here, you must train yourself, since we have no senior orogenes to train you. And that’s good, because there are… things you can do.” His face twitches. Flicker of silver through him again, then quiescence. “Things you are needed to do, which… things that Fulcrum training cannot do.”
Nassun considers this, for the moment ignoring the silver. “Things like making my orogeny go away?” She knows her father has asked this of Schaffa.
“That would be possible, when you reach a certain point of development. But to reach that point, it is best that you learn to use your powers with no preconceptions.” He glances at her. His expression is noncommittal, but somehow she knows: He does not want her changing into a still, even if it does become possible. “You’re lucky to have been born to an orogene who was skilled enough to manage you as a child. You must have been very dangerous in your infancy and early years.”
It’s Nassun’s turn to shrug at this. She lowers her gaze and scuffs at a weed that has worked its way up between two basalt columns. “I guess.”
He glances at her, his gaze sharpening. Whatever is wrong with him—and there is something wrong with all of Found Moon’s Guardians—it vanishes whenever she tries to hide something from him. It is as if he can sess obfuscations. “Tell me more of your mother.”
Nassun does not want to talk about her mother. “She’s probably dead.” It seems likely, though she remembers feeling her mother’s effort to shunt the Rifting away from Tirimo. People would’ve noticed that, though, wouldn’t they? Mama always warned Nassun against doing orogeny during a shake, because that is how most orogenes get discovered. And Uche is what happens when orogenes get discovered.
“Perhaps.” His head cocks, like that of a bird. “I’ve seen the marks of Fulcrum training in your technique. You are… precise. It’s unusual to see in a grit—” He pauses. Looks confused again for a moment. Smiles. “A child of your age. How did she train you?”
Nassun shrugs again, thrusting her hands into her pockets. He will hate her, if she tells him. If not that, he will surely at least think less of her. Maybe he will give up.
Schaffa moves to sit on a nearby terrace wall. He also keeps watching her, smiling politely. Waiting. Which makes Nassun think of a third, worse possibility: What if she refuses to tell him, and he gets angry and kicks her and her father out of Found Moon? Then she will have nothing left but Jija.
And—she sneaks another look at Schaffa. His brow has furrowed slightly, not in displeasure but concern. The concern does not seem false. He is concerned about her. No one has shown concern for her in a year.
Thus, finally, Nassun says, “We would go out to a place near the end of the valley, away from Tirimo. She would tell Daddy she was taking me out hunting for herbs.” Schaffa nods. That is something that children are normally taught in comms outside the Equatorial node network. A useful skill, should a Season come. “She would call it ‘girl time.’ Daddy used to laugh.”
“And you practiced orogeny there?”
Nassun nodded, looking at her hands. “She would talk to me about it, when Daddy wasn’t home. ‘Girl talk.’” Discussions of wave mechanics and math. Endless quizzes. Anger when Nassun did not answer quickly, or correctly. “But at the Tip—the place she took me to—it was just practice. She had drawn circles on the ground. I had to push around a boulder, and my torus couldn’t get any wider than the fifth ring, and then the fourth, and then the third. Sometimes she would throw the boulder at me.” Terrifying to have three tons of stone rumbling along the ground toward her, and to wonder, If I can’t do it, will Mama stop?
She had done it, so that question remains unanswered.
Schaffa chuckles. “Amazing.” At Nassun’s look of confusion, he adds, “That is precisely how orogene children are—were—trained at the Fulcrum. But it seems your training was substantially accelerated.” He tilts his head again, considering. “If you had only occasional practice sessions, to conceal them from your father…”
Nassun nods. Her left hand flexes closed and then open again, as if on its own. “She said there wasn’t time to teach me the gentle way, and anyway I was too strong. She had to do what would work.”
“I see.” Yet she can feel him watching her, waiting. He knows there’s more. He prompts, “It must have been challenging, though.”
Nassun nods. Shrugs. “I hated it. I yelled at her once. Told her she was mean. I told her I hated her and she couldn’t make me do it.”
Schaffa’s breathing is, when the silver light is not stuttering or flickering within him, remarkably even. She has thought before that he sounds like a sleeping person, so steady is it. She listens to him breathe, not asleep, but calming nevertheless.
“She got really quiet. Then she said, ‘Are you sure you can control yourself?’ And she took my hand.” She bites her lip then. “She broke it.”
Schaffa’s breath pauses, just for an instant. “Your hand?”
Nassun nods. She draws a finger across her palm, where each of the long bones connecting wrist to knuckle still ache sometimes, when it is cold. After he says nothing more, she can continue. “She said it didn’t m-matter if I hated her. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to be good at orogeny. Then she took my hand and said don’t ice anything. She had a round rock, and she hit my, my… my hand with it.” The sound of stone striking flesh. Wet popping sounds as her mother set the bones. Her own voice screaming. Her mother’s voice cutting through the pounding of blood in her ears: You’re fire, Nassun. You’re lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. But if you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe. “I didn’t ice anything.”
After that, her mother had taken her home and told Jija that Nassun had fallen and caught herself badly. True to her word, she’d never made Nassun go to the Tip with her again. Jija had remarked, later, on how quiet Nassun had become that year. Just something that happens when girls start to grow up, Mama had said.
No. If Daddy was Jija, then Mama had to be Essun.
Schaffa is very quiet. He knows what she is now, though: a child so willful that her own mother broke her hand to make her mind. A girl whose mother never loved her, only refined her, and whose father will only love her again if she can do the impossible and become something she is not.
“That was wrong,” Schaffa says. His voice is so soft she can barely hear it. She turns to look at him in surprise. He is staring at the ground, and there is a strange look on his face. Not the usual wandering, confused look that he gets sometimes. This is something he actually remembers, and his expression is… guilty? Rueful. Sad. “It’s wrong to hurt someone you love, Nassun.”
Nassun stares at him. Her own breath catches, and she doesn’t notice until her chest aches and she is forced to suck in air. It’s wrong to hurt someone you love. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It has always been wrong.
Then Schaffa lifts a hand to her. She takes it. He pulls, and she falls willingly, and then she is in his arms and they are very tight and strong around her the way her father’s have not been since before he killed Uche. In that moment, she does not care that Schaffa cannot possibly love her, when he has known her for only a few weeks. She loves him. She needs him. She will do anything for him.
With her face pressed into Schaffa’s shoulder, Nassun s
esses it when the silver flicker happens again. This time, in contact with him, she also feels the slight flinch of his muscles. It is barely a fluctuation, and might be anything: a bug bite, a shiver in the cooling evening breeze. Somehow, though, she realizes that it is actually pain. Frowning against his uniform, Nassun cautiously reaches toward that strange place at the back of Schaffa’s head, where the silver threads come from. They are hungry, the threads, somehow; as she gets closer to them, they lick at her, seeking something. Curious, Nassun touches them, and sesses… what? A faint tug. Then she is tired.
Schaffa flinches again and pulls back, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you doing?”
She shrugs awkwardly. “You needed it. You were hurting.”
Schaffa turns his head from side to side slowly, not in negation, but as if checking for something he expects to be there, which is now gone. “I am always hurting, little one. It’s part of what Guardians are. But…” His expression is wondering. By this, Nassun knows the pain is gone, at least for now.
“You’re always hurting?” She frowns. “Is it that thing in your head?”
His gaze snaps back to her immediately. She has never been afraid of his icewhite eyes, even now as they turn very cold. “What?”
She points at the back of her own skull. It is where the sessapinae are located, she knows from lectures on biomestry in creche. “There’s a little thing in you. Here. I don’t know what it is, but I sessed it when I met you. When you touched my neck.” She blinks, understanding. “You took something then to make it bother you less.”
“Yes. I did.” He reaches around her head now, and sets two of his fingers just at the top of her spine, beneath the back edge of her skull. This touch is not as relaxed as other times he has touched her. The two fingers are stiffened, held as if he’s pantomiming a knife.
Only he isn’t pantomiming, she realizes. She remembers that day in the forest when they reached Found Moon and the bandits attacked them. Schaffa is very, very strong—easily strong enough to push two fingers through bone and muscle like paper. He wouldn’t have needed a rock to break her hand.
Schaffa’s gaze searches hers and finds that she understands precisely what he’s thinking about doing. “You aren’t afraid.”
She shrugs.
“Tell me why you aren’t.” His voice brooks no disobedience.
“Just…” She cannot help shrugging again. She can’t really figure out how to say it. “I don’t… I mean, if you have a good reason?”
“You have no inkling of my reasons, little one.”
“I know.” She scowls, more out of frustration with herself than anything else. Then an explanation occurs to her. “Daddy didn’t have a reason when he killed my little brother.” Or when he knocked her off the wagon. Or any of the half-dozen times he’s looked at Nassun and thought about killing her so obviously that even a ten-year-old can figure it out.
An icewhite blink. What happens then is fascinating to watch: Slowly Schaffa’s expression thaws from the contemplation of her murder into wonder again, and a sorrow so deep that it makes a lump come to Nassun’s throat. “And you have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”
He’s so much better at talking. She nods emphatically.
Schaffa sighs. She feels his fingers waver. “But this is not a thing that can be known beyond my order. I let a child live once, who saw, but I should not have. And we both suffered for my compassion. I remember that.”
“I don’t want you to suffer,” Nassun says. She puts her hands on his chest, wills the silver flickers within him to take more. They begin to drift toward her. “It always hurts? That isn’t right.”
“Many things ease the pain. Smiling, for example, releases specific endorphins, which—” He jerks and takes his hand from the back of her neck, grabbing her hands and pulling them away from him just as the silver threads find her. He actually looks alarmed. “That will kill you!”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.” This seems sensible to her.
He stares. “Earth of our fathers and mothers.” But with that, slowly, the killing tension begins to bleed out of his posture. After a moment, he sighs. “Never speak of—of what you sess in me, around the others. If the other Guardians learn that you know, I may not be able to protect you.”
Nassun nods. “I won’t. Will you tell me what it is?”
“Someday, perhaps.” He gets to his feet. Nassun hangs on to his hand when he tries to pull away. He frowns at her, bemused, but she grins and swings his hand a little, and after a moment he shakes his head. Then they head back into the compound, and that is the first day Nassun thinks of it as home.
Seek the orogene in its crib. Watch for the center of the circle. There you will find [obscured]
—Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse five
10
you’ve got a big job ahead of you
YOU’VE CALLED HIM CRAZY SO many times. Told yourself that you despised him even as you grew to love him. Why? Perhaps you understood early on that he was what you could become. More likely it is that you suspected long before you lost and found him again that he wasn’t crazy. “Crazy” is what everyone thinks all roggas are, after all—addled by the time they spend in stone, by their ostensible alliance with the Evil Earth, by not being human enough.
But.
“Crazy” is also what roggas who obey choose to call roggas that don’t. You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is part of you now, because you have since grown brave.
“I fought Antimony all the way down,” Alabaster says. “It was stupid. If she’d lost her grip on me, if her concentration had faltered for an instant, I would have become part of the stone. Not even crushed, just… mixed in.” He lifts a truncated arm, and you know him well enough to realize he would have waggled his fingers. If he still had fingers. He sighs, not even noticing. “We were probably into the mantle by the time Innon died.”
His voice is soft. It’s gotten quiet in the infirmary. You look up and around; Lerna’s gone, and one of his assistants is sleeping on an unoccupied bed, snoring faintly. You speak in a soft voice, too. This is a conversation for only the two of you.
You have to ask, though even thinking the question makes you ache. “Do you know…?”
“Yes. I sessed how he died.” He falls silent for a moment. You reverberate with his grief and your own. “Couldn’t help sessing it. What they do, those Guardians, is magic, too. It’s just… wrong. Contaminated, like everything else about their kind. When they shake a person apart, if you’re attuned to that person, it feels like a niner.”
And of course you were both attuned to Innon. He was a part of you. You shiver, because he’s trying to make you more attuned, to the earth and orogeny and the obelisks and the unifying theory of magic, but you don’t ever want to experience that again. It was bad enough seeing it, knowing the horror that resulted had once been a body you held and loved. It had felt much worse than a niner. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“No. You couldn’t.” You’re sitting behind him, holding him upright with one hand. He’s been gazing away from you, somewhere into the middle distance, since he began telling this story. He does not turn to look at you now over his shoulder, possibly because he can’t do so without pain. But maybe that’s comfort in his voice.
He continues: “I don’t know how she manipulated the pressure, the heat, to keep it from killing me. I don’t know how I didn’t go mad from knowing where I was, wanting to get back to you, realizing I was helpless, feeling like I was suffocating. When I sessed what you did to Coru, I shut d
own. I don’t remember the rest of the journey, or I don’t want to. We must have… I don’t know.” He shudders, or tries to. You feel the twitch of muscles in his back.
“When I came to, I was on the surface again. In a place that…” He hesitates. His silence goes on for long enough that your skin prickles.
(I’ve been there. It’s difficult to describe. That isn’t Alabaster’s fault.)
“On the other side of the world,” Alabaster finally says, “there is a city.”
The words don’t make sense. The other side of the world is a great expanse of trackless blankness in your head. A map of nothing but ocean. “On… an island? Is there a landmass there?”
“Sort of.” He can’t really smile easily anymore. You hear it in his voice, though. “There’s a massive shield volcano there, though it’s under the ocean. Biggest one I’ve ever sessed; you could fit the Antarctics into it. The city sits directly above it, on the ocean. There’s nothing visible around it: no land for farming, no hills to break tsunami. No harbor or moorings for boats. Just… buildings. Trees and some other plants, of varieties I’ve never seen elsewhere, gone wild but not a forest—sculpted into the city, sort of. I don’t know what to call that. Infrastructures that seem to keep the whole thing stable and functioning, but all strange. Tubes and crystals and stuff that looks alive. Couldn’t tell you how a tenth of it worked. And, at the center of the city, there’s… a hole.”
“A hole.” You’re trying to imagine it. “For swimming?”