You don’t expect that to work. You figure it’ll only whet the crowd’s bloodthirst… but shows how much you know. People mill a little, mutter a little more, but then begin to disperse. A grieving man’s quiet sobs follow them all away.
That’s midnight, the time-keeper calls. Eight hours till the vote in the morning.
“I had to do it,” Ykka murmurs. You’re in her apartment again, sort of, standing beside her. The curtain’s open so she can see her people, so they can see her, but she’s leaning against the doorsill and she’s trembling. It’s only a little. No one would see it from afar. “I had to.”
You offer her the respect of honesty. “Yes. You did.”
It’s two o’clock.
By five o’clock, you’re thinking about sleeping. It’s been quieter than you expected. Lerna and Hjarka have come to join you at Ykka’s. No one says you’re keeping vigil, commiserating in silence, mourning Cutter, waiting for the world to end (again), but that’s what you’re doing. Ykka’s sitting on a divan with her arms wrapped around her knees and her head propped against the wall, gaze weary and empty of thought.
When you hear shouts again, you close your eyes and think about ignoring them. It’s the high-pitched screams of children that drag you out of this complete failure of empathy. The others get up and you do, too, and all of you go out onto the balcony. People are running toward one of the wide platforms that surround a crystal shaft too small to hold any apartments. You and the others head that way, too. The comm uses such platforms for storage, so this one is stacked with barrels and crates and clay jars. One of the clay jars is rolling around but looks intact; you see this as you and the others reach the platform. Which does not at all explain what else you’re seeing.
It’s the rogga kids again. Penty’s gang. Two of them are doing all the screaming, tugging and hitting at a woman who has pinned Penty down and is shouting at her, gripping her throat. Another woman stands by, yelling at the kids, too, but no one’s paying any attention to her. Her slurred voice is just the goad.
You know the woman that’s got Penty down, sort of. She’s maybe ten years younger than you, with a heavier build and longer hair: Waineen, one of the Resistants. She’s been nice enough when you’ve done shifts in the fungus flats or latrines, but you’ve heard the others gossip behind her back. Waineen makes the mellows that Lerna periodically smokes, and the moonshine that a few people in the comm drink. Sometime back before the Season she had quite a lucrative sideline helping the native Castrimans perk up their lives of tedious mining and trading, and she stored the product down in Castrima-under to keep the quartent tax inspectors from ever finding it. Convenient, now that the world has ended. But she’s her own biggest customer, and it’s not unusual to find her stumbling about the comm, red-faced and too loud, emitting more fumes than a fresh blow.
Waineen’s not usually a mean drunk, and she shares freely, and she never misses a shift, which is why nobody really cares what she does with her stuff. Everybody handles the Season in their own way. Still, something’s set her off now. Penty is aggravating. Hjarka and some of the other Castrimans are striding forward to pull the woman off the girl, and you’re telling yourself it’s a good thing Penty has enough self-control to not ice the whole damned platform, when the woman lifts an arm and makes a fist.
a fist that
you’ve seen the imprint of Jija’s fist, a bruise with four parallel marks, on Uche’s belly and face
a fist that
that
that
no
You’re in the topaz and between the woman’s cells in almost the same instant. There is no thought in this. Your mind falls, dives, into the upward wash of yellow light as if it belongs there. Your sessapinae flex around the silver threads and you draw them together, you are part of both obelisk and woman and you will not let this happen, not again, not again, you could not stop Jija but—
“Not one more child,” you whisper, and your companions all look at you in surprise and confusion. Then they stop looking at you, because the woman who was egging on the fight is suddenly screaming, and the kids are screaming louder. Even Penty is screaming now, because the woman on top of her has turned to glittering, multicolored stone.
“Not one more child!” You can sess the ones nearest you—the other council members, the screaming drunk, Penty and her girls, Hjarka and the rest, all of them. Everyone in Castrima. They trod upon the filaments of your nerves, tapping and jittering, and they are Jija. You focus on the drunk woman and it is almost instinctual, the urge to begin squeezing the movement and life out of her and replacing that with whatever the by-product of magical reactions really is, this stuff that looks like stone. This stuff that is killing Alabaster, the father of your other dead child, NOT ONE MORE RUSTING CHILD. For how many centuries has the world killed rogga children so that everyone else’s children can sleep easy? Everyone is Jija, the whole damned world is Schaffa, Castrima is Tirimo is the Fulcrum NOT ONE MORE and you turn with the obelisk torrenting its power through you to begin killing everyone within and beyond your sight.
Something jars your connection to the obelisk. Suddenly you have to fight for power that it so readily gave you before. You bare your teeth without thinking, growl without hearing yourself, clench your fists and shout in your mind NO I WON’T LET HIM DO IT AGAIN and you are seeing Schaffa, thinking of Jija.
But you are sessing Alabaster.
Feeling him, in blazing white tendrils that lash at your obelisk link. That is Alabaster’s strength contending against yours and… not winning. He does not shut you down the way you know he can. Or the way you thought he could. Is he weaker? No. You’re just a lot stronger than you used to be.
And suddenly the import of this slaps through the fugue of memory and horror that you’re trapped in, bringing you back to cold, shocking reality. You’ve killed a woman with magic. You’re about to wipe out Castrima with magic. You’re fighting Alabaster with magic—and Alabaster cannot bear more magic.
“Oh, uncaring Earth,” you whisper. You stop fighting at once. Alabaster dismantles your connection to the obelisk; he’s still got a more precise touch than you. But you feel his weakness when he does so. His fading strength.
You’re not even aware of running at first. It barely qualifies as running, because the contest of magic and the abrupt disconnection from the obelisk have left you so disoriented and weak that you lurch from railing to rope as if drunk, yourself. Someone’s shouting in your ear. A hand grabs your upper arm and you shake it off, snarling. Somehow you make it to the ground floor without falling to your death. Faces blur past you, irrelevant. You can’t see because you’re sobbing aloud, babbling, No, no, no. You know what you’ve done, even as you deny it with your words and body and soul.
Then you are in the infirmary.
You are in the infirmary, looking down at an incongruously small, yet finely made, stone sculpture. No color to this one, no polish, just dull sandy brown all over. It is almost abstract, archetypal: Man in His Final Moment. Truncation of the Spirit. Neverperson, Unperson. Once Found but Now Lost.
Or maybe you can just call it Alabaster.
It’s five thirty.
At seven o’clock, Lerna comes to where you huddle on the floor in front of Alabaster’s corpse. You barely hear him settle nearby, and you wonder why he’s come. He knows better. He should go, before you snap again and kill him, too.
“Ykka’s talked the comm into not killing you,” he says. “I told them about your son. It’s been, ah, mutually agreed that Waineen could’ve killed Penty, hitting her like that. Your overreaction was… understandable.” He pauses. “It helps that Ykka killed Cutter earlier. They trust her more now. They know she’s not speaking for you just out of…” He inhales, shrugs. “Kinship.”
Yes. It’s as the teachers told you back in the Fulcrum: Roggas are one and the same. The crimes of any are the crimes of all.
“No one will kill her.” That’s Hoa. Of course he’s here now
, guarding his investment.
Lerna shifts uneasily at this. But then another voice agrees, “No one will kill her,” and you flinch because it is Antimony.
You push yourself up from the huddle slowly. She sits in the same position as always—she’s been here all along—with the stone lump that was Alabaster resting against her as his living body once did. Her eyes are already on you.
“You can’t have him,” you say. Snarl. “Or me, either.”
“I don’t want you,” Antimony says. “You killed him.”
Oh, shit. You try to maintain abject fury, try to use it to focus and reach for the power to defy her, but the fury dissolves into shame. And anyway, you only get as far as that damned obelisk-longknife of Alabaster’s. The spinel. It kicks back your flailing grab for it almost at once, as if spitting in your face. You are worthy of contempt, aren’t you? The stone eaters, the humans, the orogenes, even the flaking obelisks all know it. You are nothing. No; you are death. And you’ve killed yet another person you loved.
So you sit there on your hands and knees, bereft, rejected, so hurt that it is like a clockwork engine of pain gear-ticking at the core of you. Maybe the obelisk-builders could have invented some way to harness pain like this, but they are all dead.
There is a sound that drags you out of grief. Antimony is standing now. Her pose is imposing, straight-legged and implacable. She looks down her nose at you. In her arms is the brown lump of Alabaster’s remains. From this angle it doesn’t look like anything that used to be human. Officially, it wasn’t.
“No,” you say. No defiance this time; it is a plea. Don’t take him. Yet this is what he asked for. This is what he wanted—to be given to Antimony and not Father Earth, who took so much from him. That’s the choice here: Earth or a stone eater. You’re not on the list.
“He left you a message,” she says. Her inflectionless voice is no different, and yet. Somehow. Is that pity? “‘The onyx is the key. First a network, then the Gate. Don’t rust it up, Essun. Innon and I didn’t love you for nothing.’”
“What?” you ask, but then she flickers, becoming translucent. For the first time it occurs to you that the way stone eaters move through rock and the way obelisks shift between real and unreal states are the same.
It is a useless observation. Antimony vanishes into the Earth that hates you. With Alabaster.
You sit where she’s left you, where he’s left you. There are no thoughts in your head. But when a hand touches your arm, and a voice says your name, and a connection that is not the obelisk presents itself, you turn toward it. You can’t help it. You need something, and if it is not to be family or death, then it must be something else. So you turn and grab and Lerna is there for you, his shoulder is warm and soft, and you need it. You need him. Just for now, please. Just once, you need to feel human, never mind the official designations, and maybe with human arms around you and a human voice murmuring, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Essun,” in your ear, maybe you can feel like that. Maybe you are human, just for a little while.
At seven forty-five you sit alone again.
Lerna’s gone to speak to one of his assistants, and maybe to the Strongbacks who are watching you from the infirmary doorway. At the bottom of your runny-sack is a pocket for hiding things. It’s why you bought this particular runny-sack, years ago, from this particular leatherworker. When he showed you the pocket, you thought immediately of something that you wanted to put in it. Something that, as Essun, you didn’t let yourself think about often, because it was a thing of Syenite’s and she was dead. Yet you kept her remains.
You dig through the sack until your fingers find the pocket and wriggle inside. The bundle is still there. You tug them out, unfold the cheap linen. Six rings, polished and semiprecious, sit there.
Not enough for you, a nine-ringer, but you don’t care about the first four, anyway. They clack and roll across the floor as you discard them. The last two, the ones he made for you, you put on the index finger of each hand.
Then you get to your feet.
Eight o’clock. Representatives of the comm’s households gather at the Flat Top.
One vote per comm share is the rule. You see Ykka at the center of the circle again, her arms folded and face carefully blank, though you can sess an undertone of tension in the ambient that is mostly hers. Someone has brought out an old wooden box, and people are milling around, talking to each other, writing on scraps of paper or leather, dropping these into the box.
You walk toward the Flat Top with Lerna in tow. People don’t notice you until you’re nearly across the bridge. Nearly on top of them. Then someone sees you coming and gasps loudly. Someone else yelps an alarm: “Oh, rust, it’s her.” People scramble to get out of your way, almost tripping over themselves.
They should. In your right hand is Alabaster’s ridiculous pink longknife, the miniaturized and reshaped spinel obelisk. By now you have tapped it, resonated with it; it is yours. It rejected you before because you were unstable, floundering, but now you know what you need from it. You’ve found your focus. The spinel won’t hurt anyone as long as you don’t let it. Whether you will or not is an entirely different matter.
You walk into the center of the circle, and the man holding the ballot box scrambles back from you, leaving it there. Ykka frowns and steps forward and says, “Essun—” But you ignore her. You lunge forward and it is suddenly instinctual, easy, natural, to grip the hilt of the pink longknife with both hands and turn and swivel your hips and swing. The instant the sword touches the wooden box, the box is obliterated. It isn’t cut, it isn’t smashed; it disintegrates into its component microscopic particles. The eye processes this as dust, which scatters and glitters in the light before vanishing. Turned to stone. A lot of people are gasping or crying out, which means they’re inhaling their votes. Probably won’t hurt them. Much.
Then you turn and lift the longknife, pivoting slowly to point it at each face.
“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”
Some of them shuffle or look at each other. Ykka stares at you like you are a possibly dangerous creature, which is hilarious. She should know by now that there’s no “possibly” about it. “Essun,” she starts to say, in the kind of even voice one uses with pets or the mad, “this is…” She stops because she doesn’t know what it is. But you do. It’s a fucking coup. Doesn’t matter who’s in charge, but on this one issue, you’re going to be the dictator. You will not allow Alabaster to have died saving these people from you for nothing.
“No vote,” you say again. Your voice is pitched to carry, as if they are twelve-year-olds in your old creche. “This is a community. You will be unified. You will fight for each other. Or I will rusting kill every last one of you.”
True silence this time. They don’t move. Their eyes are white and so far beyond frightened that you know they believe you.
Good. You turn and walk away.
INTERLUDE
In the turning depths, I resonate with my enemy—or attempt to. “A truce,” I say. Plead. There has been so much loss already, on all sides. A moon. A future. Hope.
Down here, it’s nearly impossible to hear a reply in words. What comes to me is furious reverberation, savage fluctuations of pressure and gravitation. I’m forced to flee after a time, lest I be crushed—and though this would be only a temporary setback, I cannot afford to be incapacitated right now. Things are changing amid your kind, quickly as your kind so often do things when you finally make real decisions. I have to be ready.
The rage was my only answer, in any case.
19
you get ready to rumble
IT HAS BEEN ONE MONTH since you last went aboveground. It has been two days since you killed Alabaster, in your f
olly and pain. All things change in a Season.
Castrima-over is occupied. The tunnel that you first passed through to enter the comm is blocked; one of the comm’s orogenes has pulled a big slab of stone up from the earth to effectively seal it off. Probably Ykka, or Cutter before Ykka killed him; they were the two others in the comm with the best fine control besides you and Alabaster. Now two of those four are dead, and the enemy is at the gates. The Strongbacks who are clustered in the tunnel mouth behind the stone seal jump up as you walk into the electric-light circle, and the ones who were already standing stand straighter. Xeber, Esni’s second-in-command among the Strongbacks, actually smiles at the sight of you. That’s how bad things are. That’s how worried everyone is. They’ve so lost their minds as to think of you as their champion.
“I don’t like this,” Ykka has said to you. She’s back in the comm, organizing the defense that will be necessary if the tunnels are breached. The real danger is if the Rennanis scouts discover the ventilation ducts of Castrima’s geode. They’re well hidden—one in the cavern of an underground river, others in equally out-of-the-way places, as if the people who built Castrima feared attack themselves—but the comm’s people will be forced out if those are sealed off. “And they’ve got stone eaters working with them. You’re dangerous and ruster enough to fuck up an army, Essie, I’ll give you that, but none of us can fight stone eaters. If they kill you, we lose our best weapon.”
She said this to you at Scenic Overlook, where the two of you went to work things out. It was awkward for about a day, between you. By forbidding a vote, you undercut Ykka’s authority and destroyed everyone’s illusion of having a say in the comm’s management. That was necessary, you still believe; everyone shouldn’t have a say in whose life is worth fighting for. She actually agreed, she admitted as you talked. But it damaged her.