The Stone Sky

  You grope forward for a bit, hand out in front of you in case it is some kind of illusion, but if so, it’s at least an accurate one. While it’s strange to put your foot down on a lattice of silver, after a while you get used to it.

  The orogene’s distinctive lattice and that still-held torus aren’t far, but he’s somewhere higher up than the ground. Maybe ten feet above where you stand. This is explained somewhat when the ground abruptly slopes upward and your hand touches stone. Your regular vision has adapted enough that you can see there’s a pillar here, crooked and probably climbable, at least by someone who’s got more than one arm. So you stop at the foot of it and say, “Hey.”

  No response. You become aware of breathing: quick, shallow, pent. Like someone who’s trying not to be heard breathing.

  “Hey.” Squinting in the dark, you finally make out some kind of structure of stacked branches and old boards and debris. A blind, maybe. From up there in the blind, it must be possible to see the road. Sight doesn’t matter for the average orogene; untrained ones can’t direct their power at all. A Fulcrum-trained orogene, though, needs line of sight to be able to distinguish between freezing useful supplies, or just freezing the people defending same.

  Something shifts in the blind above you. Has there been a catch in the breathing? You try to think of something to say, but all that’s in your head is a question: What’s a Fulcrum-trained orogene doing among the commless? Must have been out on an assignment when the Rifting occurred. Without a Guardian—or he’d be dead—so that means he’s fifth ring or higher, or maybe a three-or four-ringer who’s lost their higher-ranked partner. You envision yourself, if you’d been on the road to Allia when the Rifting struck. Knowing your Guardian might come for you, but gambling that he might instead write you off for dead … no. That ends the imagining right there. Schaffa would have come for you. Schaffa did come for you.

  But that was between Seasons. Guardians supposedly do not join comms when Seasons come, which means they die—and, in fact, the only Guardian you’ve seen since the Rifting was that one with Danel and the Rennanis army. She died in the boilbug storm that you invoked, and you’re glad of it, since she was one of the bare-skin killers and there’s more than the usual wrong with that kind. Either way, here’s another ex-blackjacket out here alone, and maybe afraid, and maybe hair-triggered to kill. You know what that’s like, don’t you? But this one hasn’t attacked yet. You have to find some way to make a connection.

  “I remember,” you say. It’s soft, a murmur. Like you don’t want to hear even yourself. “I remember the crucibles. The instructors, killing us to save us. Did they m-make you have children, too?” Corundum. Your thoughts jerk away from memories. “Did they—shit.” The hand that Schaffa once broke, your right hand, is somewhere in whatever passes for Hoa’s belly. You still feel it, though. Phantom ache across phantom bones. “I know they broke you. Your hand. All of us. They broke us so they could—”

  You hear, very clearly, a soft, horrified inhalation from within the blind.

  The torus whips into a blurring, blistering spin, and explodes outward. You’re so close that it almost catches you. That gasp was enough warning, though, and so you’ve braced yourself orogenically, even if you couldn’t do so physically. Physically you flinch and it’s too much for your precarious, one-armed balance. You fall backward, landing hard on your ass—but you’ve been drilled since childhood in how to retain control on one level even as you lose it in another, so in the same instant you flex your sessapinae and simply slap his fulcrum out of the earth, inverting it. You’re much stronger; it’s easy. You react magically, too, grabbing those whipping tendrils of silver that the torus has stirred—and belatedly you realize orogeny affects magic, but isn’t magic itself, in fact the magic flinches away from it; that’s why you can’t work high-level orogeny without negatively impacting your ability to deploy magic, how nice to finally understand! Regardless, you tamp the wild threads of magic back down, and quell everything at once, so that nothing worse than a rime of frost dusts your body. It’s cold, but only on your skin. You’ll live.

  Then you let go—and all the orogeny and magic snaps away from you like stretched rubber. Everything in you seems to twang in response, in resonance, and—oh—oh no—you feel the amplitude of the resonance rise as your cells begin to align … and compress into stone.

  You can’t stop it. You can, however, direct it. In the instant that you have, you decide which body part you can afford to lose. Hair! No, too many strands, too much of it distant from the live follicles; you can do it but it’ll take too long and half your scalp will be stone by the time you’re done. Toes? You need to be able to walk. Fingers? You’ve only got one hand, need to keep it intact as long as you can.

  Breasts. Well, you’re not planning on having more children anyway.

  It’s enough to channel the resonance, the stoning, into just one. Have to take it through the glands under the armpit, but you manage to keep it above the muscle layer; that might keep the damage from impairing your movement and breathing. You pick the left breast, to offset your missing right arm. The right breast is the one you always liked better, anyway. Prettier. And then you lie there when it’s done, still alive, hyperaware of the extra weight on your chest, too shocked to mourn. Yet.

  Then you’re pushing yourself up, awkwardly, grimacing, as the person in the blind utters a nervous little chuckle and says, “Oh, rust. Oh, Earth. Damaya? It really is you. Sorry about the torus, I was just—You don’t know what it’s been like. I can’t believe it. Do you know what they did to Crack?”

  Arkete, says your memory. “Maxixe,” says your mouth.

  It’s Maxixe.

  Maxixe is half the man he used to be. Physically, anyway.

  He’s got no legs below the thighs. One eye, or rather only one that works. The left one is clouded with damage, and it doesn’t track quite with the other. The left side of his head—he’s got almost nothing left of that lovely blond ashblow that you remember, just a knife-hacked bottlebrush—is a mess of pinkish scars, amid which you think the ear is healed shut. The scars have seamed his forehead and cheek, and pull his mouth a little out of true on that side.

  Yet he wriggles down from the blind nimbly, walking on his hands and lifting his torso and stumpy legs with sheer muscle as he does so. He’s too good at getting around without legs; must have been doing it for a while now. He makes it over to you before you’re able to climb to your feet. “It really is you. I thought, I heard you were only fourth ring, did you really punch through my torus? I’m a sixer. Six! But that’s how I knew, see, you still sess the same, still quiet on the outside and rusting furious on the inside, it really is you.”

  The other commless are starting to creep down from their spires and such. You tense as they appear—scarecrow figures, thin and ragged and stinking, watching you from stolen or homemade goggles and above wraparound masks that obviously used to be somebody’s clothes. They do not attack, however. They gather and watch you with Maxixe.

  You stare as he circles you, levering himself along rapidly. He’s wearing commless rags, long-sleeved and layered, but you can see how big his shoulder and arm muscles are under the tattered cloth. The rest of him is scrawny. The gauntness of his face is painful to see, but it’s clear what his body has prioritized during the long hungry months.

  “Arkete,” you say, because you remember that he always preferred the name he was born with.

  He stops circling and peers at you for a moment, head tilted. Maybe this helps him see better with one functioning eye. The look on his face tells you off, though. He’s not Arkete, any more than you are Damaya. Too much has changed. Maxixe it is, then.

  “You remembered,” he says, though. In that moment of stillness, this eye in his previous storm of words, you glimpse the thoughtful, charming boy you remember. Even though the coincidence of this is almost too much to digest. The only thing stranger would be running into … the brother you actually forgot you had, unt
il just now. What was his name? Earthfires, you’ve forgotten that, too. But you probably wouldn’t recognize him, if you saw him. The grits of the Fulcrum were your siblings, in pain if not in blood.

  You shake your head to focus, and nod. You’re on your feet now, dusting leaf litter and ash off your butt, though awkwardly around the pulling weight on your chest. “I’m surprised I remembered, too. You must have made an impression.”

  He smiles. It’s lopsided. Only half his face works the way it should. “I forgot. Tried hard to, anyway.”

  You set your jaw, steeling yourself. “I’m—sorry.” It’s pointless. He probably doesn’t even remember what you’re sorry about.

  He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It does.”

  “No.” He looks away for a moment. “I should have talked to you, after. Shouldn’t have hated you the way I did. Shouldn’t have let her, them, change me. But I did, and now … none of that matters.”

  You know exactly which “her” he’s referring to. After that whole incident with Crack, bullying that exposed a whole network of grits just trying to survive and a larger network of adults exploiting their desperation … You remember. Maxixe, returning to the grit barracks one day with both his hands broken.

  “Better than what they did to Crack,” you murmur, before it occurs to you not to say this.

  Yet he nods, unsurprised. “Went to a node station once. It wasn’t her. Rust knows what I was thinking … But I wanted to search them all. Before the Season.” He utters a ragged, bitter chuckle. “I didn’t even like her. Just needed to know.”

  You shake your head. Not that you don’t understand the impulse; you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t thought it, too, in the years since you learned the truth. Go to all the stations. Figure out some way to restore their damaged sessapinae and set them free. Or kill them as a kindness; ah, you’d have been such a good instructor, if the Fulcrum had ever given you a chance. But of course you did nothing. And of course Maxixe didn’t do anything to save the node maintainers, either. Only Alabaster ever managed that.

  You take a deep breath. “I’m with them,” you say, jerking your head back toward the road. “You heard what the headwoman said. Orogenes welcome.”

  He sways a little, there on his stumps and arms. It’s hard to see his face in the dark. “I can sess her. She’s the headwoman?”

  “Yeah. And everyone in the comm knows it. They’re—This comm is—” And you take a deep breath. “We. Are a comm that’s trying to do something different. Orogenes and stills. Not killing each other.”

  He laughs, which sets off a few moments of coughing. The other stick figures chuckle, too, but it’s Maxixe’s cough that worries you. It’s dry, hacking, pebbly; not a good sound. He’s been breathing too much ash without a mask. It’s loud, too. If the Hunters aren’t nearby, watching and perhaps ready to shoot him and his people, you’ll eat your runny-sack.

  At the end of the coughing fit, he tilts his head up at you again, with an amused look in his eye. “I’m doing the same thing,” he drawls. With his chin, he points toward his gathered people. “These rusters stick with me because I’m not going to eat them. They don’t fuck with me because I’ll kill them. There: peaceful coexistence.”

  You look around at them and frown. Hard to see their expressions. “They didn’t attack my people, though.” Or they’d be dead.

  “Nah. That was Olemshyn.” Maxixe shrugs; it makes his whole body move. “Half-Sanzed bastard. Got kicked out of two comms for ‘anger management issues,’ he said. He would’ve gotten us all killed raiding, so I told anybody who wanted to live and could stand me to come follow me, and we did our own thing. This side of the forest is ours, that side was theirs.”

  Two commless tribes, not one. Maxixe’s hardly qualifies, though; only a handful of people besides himself? But he said it: Those who could endure living with a rogga went with him. That just didn’t turn out to be a lot of people.

  Maxixe turns and climbs halfway up to the blind again, so that he can sit down and also be on an eye level with you. He lets out another rattly cough from the effort of doing this. “I figure he was expecting me to hit you lot,” he continues, once the cough subsides. “That’s how we usually do it: I ice ’em, his group grabs what it can before I and mine can show up, we both get enough to go on a little longer. But I was all fucked up from what your headwoman said.” He looks away, shaking his head. “Olemshyn should’ve broken off once he saw I wasn’t going to ice you, but, well. I did say he was gonna get them killed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good riddance. What happened to your arm?” He’s looking at you now. He can’t see your left breast, even though you’re slouching a little to the left. It hurts, weighing on your flesh.

  You counter, “What happened to your legs?”

  He smiles, lopsidedly, and doesn’t answer. Neither do you.

  “So, not killing each other.” Maxixe shakes his head. “And that’s actually working out?”

  “So far. We’re trying, anyway.”

  “Won’t work.” Maxixe shifts again and darts another look at you. “How much did it cost you, to join them?”

  You don’t say nothing, because that’s not what he’s asking, anyway. You can see the bargain he’s made for survival here: his skills in exchange for the raiders’ limited food and dubious shelter. This stone forest, this death trap, is his doing. How many people did he kill for his raiders?

  How many have you killed, for Castrima?

  Not the same.

  How many people were in Rennanis’s army? How many of them did you sentence to be steam-cooked alive by insects? How many ash-mounds dot Castrima-over now, each with a hand or booted foot poking out?

  Not the rusting same. That was them or you.

  Just like Maxixe, trying to survive. Him or them.

  You set your jaw to silence this internal argument. There isn’t time for this.

  “We can’t—” you attempt, then shift. “There are other ways besides killing. Other … We don’t just have to be … this.” Ykka’s words, awkward and oily with hypocrisy from your mouth. And are those words even true anymore? Castrima no longer has the geode to force cooperation between orogene and still. Maybe it’ll all fall apart tomorrow.

  Maybe. But until then, you force yourself to finish. “We don’t have to be what they made us, Maxixe.”

  He shakes his head, staring at the leaf litter. “You remember that name, too.”

  You lick your lips. “Yeah. I’m Essun.”

  He frowns a little at this, perhaps because it isn’t a stone-themed name. That’s why you picked it. He doesn’t question it, though. At last he sighs. “Rusting look at me, Essun. Listen to the rocks in my chest. Even if your headwoman will take half a rogga, I’m not going to last much longer. Also—” Because he’s sitting, he can use his hands; he gestures around at the other scarecrow figures.

  “No comm will let us in,” says one of the smaller figures. You think that’s a woman’s voice, but it’s so hoarse and weary you can’t tell. “Don’t even play that game.”

  You shift, uncomfortable. The woman is right; Ykka might be willing to take in a commless rogga, but not the rest. Then again, you can never figure out quite what Ykka will do. “I can ask.”

  Chuckles all around, jaded and thin and tired. A few more rattly coughs in addition to Maxixe’s. These people are starved nearly to death, and half of them are sick. This is pointless. Still. To Maxixe, you say, “If you don’t come with us, you’ll die here.”

  “Olemshyn’s people had most of the supplies. We’ll go take ’em.” That sentence ends on a pause: the opening bid in a bargain. “And it’s all of us, or none of us.”

  “Up to the headwoman,” you say, refusing to commit. But you know haggling when you hear it. His Fulcrum-trained orogeny in exchange for comm membership for him and his handful, with the deal sweetened by the raiders’ supplies. And he’s fully prepared to walk away if Ykka can’t meet his
opening price. It bothers you. “I’ll also put in a good word for your character, or at least your character thirty years ago.”

  He smiles a little. Hard not to see that smile as patronizing. Look at you, trying to make this something more than it is. You’re probably projecting. “I also know a little about the area. Might be useful, since you’re obviously going somewhere.” He jerks his chin toward firelight reflecting off the crags closer to the road. “You are going somewhere?”

  “Rennanis.”

  “Assholes.”

  Which means the Rennanis army must have come through the area on its way south. You let yourself smile. “Dead assholes.”

  “Huh.” He squints his good eye. “They’ve been smashing comms all over the area. That’s why we’ve had such a hard time; no trade caravans to raid once the Rennies were done. I did sess something weird in the direction they went, though.”

  He falls silent, watching you, because of course he knows. Any rogga with rings should have sessed the activity of the Obelisk Gate when you ended the Rennanis-Castrima war so decisively. They might not have known what they were sessing, and unless they knew magic, they wouldn’t have perceived the totality of it even if they’d known, but they would have at least picked up the backwash.

  “That … was me,” you say. It’s surprisingly hard to admit.

  “Rusting Earth, Da—Essun. How?”