But that’s unimportant. You focus on the plinth, even though there are other wonders to behold: a taller plinth near the back of the room, above which floats a foot-tall miniature obelisk the same emerald color as the floor; another plinth bearing an oblong hunk of rock, also floating; a series of clear squares set into one wall bearing strange diagrams of some sort of equipment; a series of panels along the wall beneath them, each bearing meters measuring something unknown in numbers that you can’t decipher.
On the big plinth, though, are the least obtrusive objects in the room: six tiny metallic shards, each needle-thin and no longer than your thumbnail. They are not the same silvery metal that makes up Castrima’s ancient structures; this metal is a smooth dark color dusted faintly with red. Iron. Amazing that it hasn’t oxidized away over all the years of Castrima’s existence. Unless—“Did you put these here?” you ask Tonkee.
She’s instantly furious. “Yes, of course I would enter the control core of a deadciv artifact, find the most dangerous device in it, and immediately throw bits of rusty metal on it!”
“Don’t be an ass, please.” Though you did sort of deserve that, you’re too intrigued to be really annoyed. “Why do you think this is the most dangerous device in here?”
Tonkee points to the beveled edge of the plinth. You look closer and blink. The material is not smooth like the rest of the crystal shaft; on the edge it has been heavily etched with symbols and writing. The writing is the same as that along the wall panels—oh. And they are glowing red, the color seeming to float and waver just over the surface of the material.
“And this,” Tonkee says. She raises a hand and moves it toward the plinth’s surface and the metal bits. Abruptly the red letters leap into the air—you don’t have a better way to describe what’s happening than that. In an instant they have enlarged and turned to face you, blazing the air at eye level with what is unmistakably some sort of warning. Red is the color of lava pools. It is the color of a lake when everything in it has died except toxic algae: one warning sign of an impending blow. Some things do not change with time or culture, you feel certain.
(You are wrong, generally speaking. But in this specific case, you’re quite right.)
Everyone’s staring. Hjarka comes close and lifts a hand to try to touch the floating letters; her fingers pass through them. Ykka moves around the plinth, fascinated despite herself. “I’ve noticed this thing before, but never really paid attention to it. The letters turn with me.”
They haven’t moved. But you lean to one side—and sure enough, as you do this the letters pivot slightly to remain facing you.
Impatiently, Tonkee pulls her hand back and waves Hjarka’s hand out of the way, and the letters flatten and shrink back into quiescence along the plinth edge. “There’s no barrier, though. Usually in a deadciv artifact—an artifact from this civilization—anything truly dangerous is sealed off in some way. There’s either a physical barrier, or evidence that there was once a barrier that’s failed with time. If they really didn’t want you to touch something, you either didn’t touch it or you’d have to work pretty damned hard to touch it. This? Just a warning. I don’t know what that means.”
“Can you actually touch those things?” You reach toward one of the bits of iron, ignoring the warning this time when it springs up. Tonkee hisses at you so sharply that you jerk back like a child caught doing something you weren’t supposed to.
“I said don’t rusting touch! What’s wrong with you?” You clench your jaw, but you deserved that, too, and you’re too much a mother to deny it.
“How long have you been coming in here?” Ykka’s crouched next to Tonkee’s sleeping pallet.
Tonkee’s staring down at the iron bits, and at first you think she hasn’t heard Ykka; she doesn’t answer for a long moment. There is a look on her face that you’re starting not to like. You can’t say you really know her any more now than you did when you were a grit, but you do know that she isn’t the grim sort. That she is grim now, the tightened muscle along her jawline making it stand out more than you know she likes, is a very bad sign. She’s up to something. She says to Ykka, “A week. But I only moved in three days ago. I think. I lost track.” She rubs her eyes. “I haven’t slept a lot.”
Ykka shakes her head and rises. “Well, at least you haven’t destroyed the rusting comm already. Tell me what you’ve figured out, then.”
Tonkee turns to eye her warily. “Those panels along the wall activate, and regulate, the water pumps and air circulation systems and cooling processes. But you knew that already.”
“Yes. Since we’re not dead.” Ykka dusts off her hands from where she touched the floor, sidling toward Tonkee in a way that is somehow simultaneously thoughtful and subtly menacing. She’s not as big as most Sanzed women—a good foot shorter than Hjarka. Her dangerousness is not as obvious as it is with others, but you sense the slow readying of her orogeny now. She was fully prepared to smash or ice her way into this place. The Strongbacks shift and edge a little closer, too, reinforcing her unspoken threat.
“What I want to know,” she continues, “is how you knew that.” She stops, facing Tonkee. “We figured it out, in those early days, through trial and error. Touch one thing and it gets cooler, touch another and the communal pool water gets hotter. But nothing’s changed in the past week.”
Tonkee sighs a little. “I’ve learned how to decipher some of the symbols over the years. Spend enough time in these kinds of ruins and you see the same things repeated over and over.”
Ykka considers this, then nods toward the warning text around the plinth rim. “What’s that say?”
“No idea. I said decipher, not read. Symbols, not language.” Tonkee walks over to one of the wall panels and points to a prominent design in its top right corner. It’s nothing intuitive: something green and arrow-like but squiggly, sort of, pointed downward. “I see that one wherever there were water gardens. I think it’s about the quality and intensity of the light that the gardens get.” She eyes Ykka. “Actually, I know it’s about the light the gardens get.”
Ykka lifts her chin a little, just enough that you know Tonkee has guessed right. “So this place is no different from other ruins you’ve seen? The others had crystals in them, like this?”
“No. I’ve never seen anything like Castrima before. Except—” She glances at you, once and away. “Well. Not exactly like Castrima.”
“That thing in the Fulcrum wasn’t anything like this,” you blurt. It’s been more than twenty years, but you haven’t forgotten a detail about the place. That was a pit, and Castrima is a rock with a hole in it. If both were made by the same kinds of people, to do similar things, there’s no evidence of that anywhere.
“It was, actually.” Tonkee comes back to the plinth and waves up the warning. This time she points at a symbol within the glowing red text: a solid black circle surrounded by a white octagon. You don’t know how you missed it before; it stands out from the red.
“I saw that mark in the Fulcrum, painted onto some of the light panels. You were too busy staring into the pit; I don’t think you saw. But I’ve been in maybe half a dozen obelisk-builder sites since, and that mark is always near something dangerous.” She’s watching you intently. “I find dead people near it sometimes.”
Inadvertently you think of Guardian Timay. Not found dead, but dead nevertheless, and you almost joined her that day. Then you remember a moment in the room without doors, near the edge of the yawning pit. You remember small needlelike protrusions from the walls of the pit… exactly like these bits of iron.
“The socket,” you murmur. That was what the Guardian called it. “A contaminant.” A prickle dances across the nape of your neck. Tonkee looks sharply at you.
“‘Something dangerous’ can mean any rusting thing,” says Hjarka, annoyed, as you stand there staring at the bits of rust.
“No, in this case it means a specific rusting thing.” Tonkee glares Hjarka down, which is impressive in itself. ?
??It was the mark of their enemy.”
Fuck, you realize. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“What?” asks Ykka. “What in the Evil Earth are you talking about?”
“Their enemy.” Tonkee leans against the edge of the plinth—carefully, you note, but emphatically. “They were at war, don’t you understand? Toward the end, just before their civilization vanished into the dust. All their ruins, anything that’s left from that time, are defensive, survival-oriented. Like the comms of today—except they had a lot more than stone walls to help protect them. Things like giant rusting underground geodes. They hid in those places, and studied their enemy, and maybe built weapons to fight back.” She pivots and points up, at the upper half of the plinth crystal. It flickers just as she does so, obelisk-like.
“No,” you say automatically. Everyone turns to look at you, and you twitch. “I mean…” Shit. But you’ve said it now. “The obelisks aren’t…” You don’t know how to say it without telling the whole damned story, and you’re reluctant to do that. You’re not sure why. Maybe for the same reason that Antimony said, when Alabaster started to tell you: They aren’t ready. Now you need to finish in a way that won’t invite further comment. “I don’t think they’re defensive, or any sort of… weapon.”
Tonkee says nothing for a long moment. “What are they, then?”
“I don’t know.” It’s not a lie. You don’t know for sure. “A tool, maybe. Dangerous if misused, but not meant to kill.”
Tonkee seems to brace herself. “I know what happened to Allia, Essun.”
It’s an unexpected blow, and it floors you emotionally. Fortunately, you’ve spent your life training to deflect your reactions to unexpected blows in safe ways. You say, “Obelisks aren’t made to do that. That was an accident.”
“How do you—”
“Because I was connected to the rusting thing when it went into burndown!” You snap this so sharply that your voice echoes in the room and startles you into realizing how angry you are. One of the Strongbacks inhales and something in her gaze shifts and all at once you are reminded of the Strongbacks at Tirimo, who looked at you the same way when Rask asked them to let you go through the gate. Even Ykka’s watching you in a way that wordlessly says, You’re scaring the locals, calm the rust down. So you take a deep breath and fall silent.
(It is only later that you will recall the word you said during this conversation. Burndown. You will wonder why you said it, what it means, and you will have no answer.)
Tonkee lets out a deep breath, carefully, and this seems to speak for the room. “It’s possible I’ve made some wrong assumptions,” she says.
Ykka rubs a hand over her hair. It makes her head look incongruously small for a moment until it floofs back up. “All right. We already know Castrima was used as a comm before. Probably several times. If you’d asked me, instead of coming in here and acting like a rusting child, I could have told you that. I would have told you everything I knew, because I want to understand this place just as much as you do—”
Tonkee utters a single braying laugh. “None of you are smart enough for that.”
“—but by pulling this shit, you’ve made me mistrust you. I don’t let people I don’t trust do things that can hurt the people I love. So I want you out of here for good.”
Hjarka frowns. “Yeek, that’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?”
Tonkee tenses at once, her eyes going wide with horror, and hurt. “You can’t keep me out. Nobody else in this rusting comm has a clue what—”
“Nobody else in this rusting comm,” Ykka says, and now the Strongbacks look at her uneasily, because she’s nearly shouting, “would set us all on fire for the chance to study people who’ve been gone since the world was young. Somehow I’m getting the impression that you would.”
“Supervised visits!” Tonkee blurts. She looks desperate now.
Ykka steps up to her, getting right in her face, and Tonkee goes silent at once. “I would rather understand nothing about this place,” Ykka says, brutally quiet and cold now, “than risk destroying it. Can you say the same?”
Tonkee stares back at her, trembling visibly and saying nothing. But the answer’s obvious, isn’t it? Tonkee’s like Hjarka. Both were raised Leadership, raised to put the needs of others first, and both chose a more selfish path. It’s not even a question.
Which is why later, in retrospect, you really aren’t surprised at what happens next.
Tonkee turns and lunges and the red warning flashes and then one of the iron bits is in her fist. She’s already turning away by the time you register her grab. Bolting for the stair door. Hjarka gasps; Ykka’s just standing there, a little startled and mostly resigned; the two Strongbacks stare in confusion and then belatedly start after Tonkee. But then an instant later Tonkee gasps and stumbles to a halt. One of the Strongbacks grabs her arm—but drops it immediately when Tonkee yells.
You’re moving before you think. Tonkee is yours somehow—like Hoa, like Lerna, like Alabaster, as if in the absence of your children you’re trying to adopt everybody who touches you emotionally for even an instant. You don’t even like Tonkee. Still, your belly clenches when you grab her wrist and see that blood streaks her hand. “What the—”
Tonkee looks at you: quick, animal panic. Then she jerks and cries out again, and you almost let go this time because something moves under your thumb.
“The rust?” Ykka blurts. Hjarka’s hand claps over Tonkee’s arm, too, helping, because Tonkee’s strong in her panic. You master your inexplicable, violent revulsion enough to instead move your thumb and hold Tonkee’s wrist so that you can get a good look at it. Yes. There’s something moving just under her skin. It jumps and jitters, but moves inexorably upward, following the path of a large vein there. It’s just large enough to be the iron fragment.
“Evil Earth,” Hjarka says, throwing a quick worried look at Tonkee’s face. You fight sudden hysterical laughter at the unintentional irony of Hjarka’s oath.
“I need a knife,” you say instead. Your voice sounds remarkably calm to your own ears. Ykka leans over, sees what you’ve seen, and breathes an oath.
“Oh, fuck, rust, shit,” Tonkee moans. “Get it out! Get it out and I’ll never come in here again.” It’s a lie, but maybe she means it for the moment.
“I can bite it out.” Hjarka looks up at you. Her sharpened teeth are small razors.
“No,” you say, certain it would just go into Hjarka and do the same thing. Tongues were harder to carve than arms.
Ykka barks, “Knife!” at the Strongbacks—the one with the wireglass knife. It’s sharp but small, meant more for cutting rope than as a weapon; unless you hit a vital area right off, you’d have to stab someone a million times to kill them with it. It’s all you’ve got. You keep hold of Tonkee’s wrist because she’s flailing and growling like an animal. Someone puts the knife in your hand, fumbling and blade-first. It feels like it takes a year to get it repositioned, but you keep your gaze on that jerking, moving lump in Tonkee’s brown flesh. Where the rust is it going? You’re too quietly horrified to speculate.
But before you can put the knife in place to carve the moving thing loose, it vanishes. Tonkee screams again, her voice breaking and horrible. It’s gone into the meat of her.
You slash once, opening a deep cut just above the elbow, which should be ahead of the thing. Tonkee groans. “Deeper! I can feel it.”
Deeper and you’ll hit bone, but you set your teeth and cut deeper. There’s blood everywhere. Ignoring Tonkee’s pants and hisses, you try to probe for the thing—even though privately you’re terrified you’ll find it and it’ll go into your flesh next.
“Arterial,” Tonkee pants. She’s shaking, keening through her teeth between every word. “Like a rusting highroad to—sessa-ah! Fuck!” She claps at the lower half of her bicep. It’s farther up her arm than you expected. Moving faster now that it’s reached the larger arteries.
Sessa. You stare at Tonkee for a moment, chilled by the reali
zation that she was trying to say sessapinae. Ykka reaches over you and wraps a hand around Tonkee’s arm just below the deltoid, squeezing tight. She looks at you, but you know there’s only one thing left to do. You’re not going to be able to manage it with the tiny knife… but there are other weapons.
“Hold her arm out.” Without waiting to see whether Ykka and Hjarka comply, you grip Tonkee’s shoulder. It’s Alabaster’s trick that you’re thinking of—a tiny, fine-spun, localized torus like the ones he used to kill the boilbugs. This time you’ll use it to burrow through Tonkee’s arm and freeze the little iron shard. Hopefully. But as you extend your awareness and shut your eyes to concentrate, something shifts.
You’re deep in the heat of her, seeking the metallic lattice of the iron shard and trying to sess the difference between its structure and that of the iron in her blood, and then—yes. The silver glimmer of magic is there.
You weren’t expecting that, here amid the gelid bobble of her cells. Tonkee isn’t turning into stone like Alabaster, and you’ve never sessed magic in any other living creature. Yet here, here in Tonkee, there is something that gleams steadily, silverish and threadlike, coming up through her feet—from where? doesn’t matter—and ending at the iron shard. No wonder the thing can move so quickly, fueled as it is by something else. Using this power source, it stretches forth tendrils of its own to link into Tonkee’s flesh and drag itself along. This is why it hurts her—because every cell it touches shivers as if burned, and then dies. The tendrils get longer with every contact, too; the fucking thing is growing its way through her, feeding on her in some imperceptible way. A lead tendril feels its way along, orienting always toward Tonkee’s sessapinae, and you know instinctively that letting it get there will be Bad.