A sound behind Nassun makes her jerk around. Ten feet from where she stands, Umber and Schaffa have blurred together in hand-to-hand combat. She can’t see what’s happening. They’re both moving too fast, their strikes swift and vicious. By the time her ears process the sounds of a blow, they’ve already shifted to a different position. She can’t even tell what they’re doing—but she is afraid, so afraid, for Schaffa. The silver in Umber flows like rivers, power being steadily fed to him through that glimmering taproot. The thinner streams in Schaffa, however, are a wild chain of rapids and clogs, yanking at his nerves and muscles and flaring unpredictably in an attempt to distract him. Nassun can see by the concentration in Schaffa’s face that he is still in control, and that this is what has saved him; his movements are unpredictable, strategic, considered. Still. That he can fight at all is astonishing.
How he ends the fight, by driving his hand up to the wrist through the underside of Umber’s jaw, is horrifying.
Umber makes an awful sound, jerking to a halt—but an instant later, his hand lunges for Schaffa’s throat again, blurring in its speed. Schaffa gasps—so quickly that it might be just a breath, but Nassun hears the alarm in it—and shunts away the strike, but Umber’s still moving, even though his eyes have rolled back in his head and the movements are twitchy, clumsy. Nassun understands then: Umber’s not home anymore. Something else is, working his limbs and reflexes for as long as crucial connections remain in place. And yes: In the next breath, Schaffa flings Umber to the ground, wrenches his hand free, and stomps on his opponent’s head.
Nassun can’t look. She hears the crunch; that’s enough. She hears Umber actually continue twitching, his movements more feeble but persistent, and she hears the faint rustle of Schaffa’s clothes as he bends. Then she hears something that her mother last heard in a little room in the Guardians’ wing of the Fulcrum, some thirty years before: bone cracking and gristle tearing, as Schaffa works his fingers into the base of Umber’s broken skull.
Nassun can’t close her ears, so instead she focuses on Nida, who’s still fighting to get free from Steel’s unbreakable grip.
“I—I—” Nassun attempts. Her heart’s slowed only a little. The sapphire shakes harder in her hands. Nida still wants to kill her. Steel, who has established himself as merely a possible ally and not a definite one, need only loosen his grip, and Nassun will die. But. “I d-don’t want to kill you,” she manages. It’s even true.
Nida abruptly goes still and silent. The fury in her expression gradually fades to no expression at all. “It did what it had to do, last time,” she says.
Nassun’s skin prickles with the realization that something intangible has changed. She’s not sure what, but she doesn’t think this is quite Nida anymore. She swallows. “Did what? Who?”
Nida’s gaze falls on Steel. There is a faint grinding sound as Steel’s mouth curves into a wide, toothy smile. Then, before Nassun can think of another question to ask, Steel’s grip shifts. Not loosening; turning, with that unnaturally slow motion which perhaps is meant to imitate human movement. (Or mock it.) He draws in his arm and pivots his wrist to turn Nida around, her back to his front. The nape of her neck to his mouth.
“It’s angry,” Nida continues calmly, though now she faces away from both Steel and Nassun. “Yet even now it may be willing to compromise, to forgive. It demands justice, but—”
“It has had its justice a thousand times over,” says Steel. “I owe it no more.” Then he opens his mouth wide.
Nassun turns away, again. On a morning when she has rent her father to pieces, some things remain too obscene for her child’s eyes. At least Nida does not move again once Steel has dropped her body to the ground.
“We cannot remain here,” Schaffa says. When Nassun swallows hard and focuses on him, she sees that he stands over Umber’s corpse, holding something small and sharp in one gore-flecked hand. He gazes at this object with the same detached coldness that he turns upon those he means to kill. “Others will come.”
Through the clarity of near-death adrenaline, Nassun knows that he means other contaminated Guardians—and not half-contaminated ones like Schaffa himself, who have somehow managed to retain some measure of free will. Nassun swallows and nods, feeling calmer now that no one is actively trying to kill her anymore. “Wh-what about the other kids?”
Some of the children in question are standing on the porch of the dormitory, awakened by the concussion of the sapphire when Nassun summoned it into longknife form. They have witnessed everything, Nassun sees. A couple are weeping at the sight of their Guardians dead, but most just stare at her and Schaffa in silent shock. One of the smaller children is vomiting off the side of the steps.
Schaffa gazes at them for a long moment, and then glances sidelong at her. Some of the coldness is still there, saying what his voice does not. “They’ll need to leave Jekity, quickly. Without Guardians, the commfolk are unlikely to tolerate their presence.” Or Schaffa can kill them. That’s what he’s done with every other orogene they’ve met who isn’t under his control. They are either his, or they are a threat.
“No,” Nassun blurts. Speaking to that silent coldness, not to what he’s said. The coldness increases fractionally. Schaffa never likes it when she says no. She takes a deep breath, marshaling a little more calm, and corrects herself. “Please, Schaffa. I just … I can’t take any more.”
This is rank hypocrisy. The decision Nassun has recently made, a silent promise over her father’s corpse, belies it. Schaffa cannot know what she has chosen, but at the corner of her vision, she is painfully aware of Steel’s lingering, blood-painted smile.
She presses her lips together and means it anyway. It isn’t a lie. She can’t take the cruelty, the endless suffering; that’s the whole point. What she means to do will be, if nothing else, quick and merciful.
Schaffa regards her for a moment. Then he twitch-winces a little, as she has seen him do often in the past few weeks. When the spasm passes, he puts on a smile and comes over to her, though first he closes his hand firmly around the metal bit he’s taken from Umber. “How is your shoulder?”
She reaches up to touch it. The cloth of her sleep-shirt is wet with blood, but not sodden, and she can still use the arm. “It hurts.”
“That will last for a time, I’m afraid.” He looks around, then rises and goes to Umber’s corpse. Ripping off one of Umber’s shirtsleeves—one that isn’t as splattered with blood as the other, Nassun notes with distant relief—he comes over and pushes up her sleeve, then helps her tie the strip of cloth around her shoulder. He ties it tight. Nassun knows this is good and will possibly prevent her from needing to have the wound sewn up, but for a moment the pain is worse and she leans against him briefly. He allows this, stroking her hair with his free hand. The gore-flecked other hand, Nassun notes, stays clenched tight around that metal shard.
“What will you do with it?” Nassun asks, staring at the clenched hand. She cannot help imagining something malevolent there, snaking its tendrils forth and looking for another person to infect with the Evil Earth’s will.
“I don’t know,” Schaffa says in a heavy voice. “It’s no danger to me, but I remember that in …” He frowns for a moment, visibly groping for a memory that is gone. “That once, elsewhere, we simply recycled them. Here, I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere isolated to drop it, and hope no one stumbles across it anytime soon. What will you do with that?”
Nassun follows his gaze to where the sapphire longknife, untended, has floated around behind her and positioned itself in the air, hovering precisely a foot away from her back. It moves slightly with her movements, humming faintly. She doesn’t understand why it’s doing that, though she takes some comfort from its looming, quiescent strength. “I guess I should put it back.”
“How did you …?”
“I just needed it. It knew what I needed and changed for me.” Nassun shrugs a little. It’s so hard to explain these things in words. Then she clutches at his
shirt with her uninjured hand, because she knows that when Schaffa doesn’t answer a question, it isn’t a good thing. “The others, Schaffa.”
He sighs finally. “I’ll help them prepare packs. Can you walk?”
Nassun’s so relieved that for the moment she feels like she can fly. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Schaffa!”
He shakes his head, clearly rueful, though he smiles again. “Go to your father’s house and take anything useful and portable, little one. I’ll meet you there.”
She hesitates. If Schaffa decides to kill the other children of Found Moon … He won’t, will he? He’s said he won’t.
Schaffa pauses, raising an eyebrow above his smile, the picture of polite, calm inquiry. It’s an illusion. The silver is still a lashing whip within Schaffa, trying to goad him into killing her. He must be in astonishing pain. He resists the goad, however, as he has for weeks. He does not kill her, because he loves her. And she can trust nothing, no one, if she does not trust him.
“Okay,” Nassun says. “I’ll see you at Daddy’s.”
As she pulls away from him, she glances at Steel, who has turned to face Schaffa as well. Somewhere in the past few breaths, Steel has gotten the blood off his lips. She doesn’t know how. But he has held out one gray hand toward them—no. Toward Schaffa. Schaffa tilts his head at this for a moment, considering, and then after a moment he deposits the bloody iron shard into Steel’s hand. Steel’s hand flicks closed, then uncurls again, slowly, as if performing a sleight-of-hand trick. But the iron shard is gone. Schaffa inclines his head in polite thanks.
Her two monstrous protectors, who must cooperate on her care. Yet is Nassun not a monster, too? Because the thing that she sensed just before Jija came to kill her—that spike of immense power, concentrated and amplified by dozens of obelisks working in tandem? Steel has called this the Obelisk Gate: a vast and complex mechanism created by the deadciv that built the obelisks, for some unfathomable purpose. Steel has also mentioned a thing called the Moon. Nassun has heard the stories; once, long ago, Father Earth had a child. That child’s loss is what angered him and brought about the Seasons.
The tales offer a message of impossible hope, and a mindless expression that lorists use to intrigue restless audiences. One day, if the Earth’s child ever returns …The implication is that, someday, Father Earth might be appeased at last. Someday, the Seasons might end and all could become right with the world.
Except fathers will still try to murder their orogene children, won’t they? Even if the Moon comes back. Nothing will ever stop that.
Bring home the Moon, Steel has said. End the world’s pain.
Some choices aren’t choices at all, really.
Nassun wills the sapphire to come hover before her again. She can sess nothing in the wake of Umber and Nida’s negation, but there are other ways to perceive the world. And amid the flickering un-water of the sapphire, as it unmakes and remakes itself from the concentrated immensity of silver light stored within its crystal lattice, there is a subtle message written in equations of force and balance that Nassun solves instinctively, with something other than math.
Far away. Across the unknown sea. Her mother may hold the Obelisk Gate’s key, but Nassun learned on the ash roads that there are other ways to open any gate—hinges to pop, ways to climb over or dig under. And far away, on the other side of the world, is a place where Essun’s control over the Gate can be subverted.
“I know where we need to go, Schaffa,” Nassun says.
He eyes her for a moment, his gaze flicking to Steel and back. “Do you, now?”
“Yes. It’s a really long way, though.” She bites her lip. “Will you go with me?”
He inclines his head, his smile wide and warm. “Anywhere, my little one.”
Nassun lets out a long breath of relief, smiling up at him tentatively. Then she deliberately turns her back on Found Moon and its corpses, and walks down the hill without ever once looking back.
2729 Imperial: Witnesses in the comm of Amand (Dibba Quartent, western Nomidlats) report an unregistered rogga female opening up a gas pocket near the town. Unclear what gas was; killed in seconds, purpling of tongue, suffocation rather than toxicity? Both? Another rogga female reportedly stopped the first one’s effort, somehow, and shunted the gas back into the vent before sealing it. Amand citizens shot both as soon as possible to prevent further incidents. Gas pocket assessed by Fulcrum as substantial—enough to have killed most people and livestock in western half of Nomidlats, with follow-up topsoil contamination. Initiating female age seventeen, reacting to reported molester of younger sister. Quelling female age seven, sister of first.
—Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Syl Anagist: Five
HOUWHA,” SAYS A VOICE BEHIND me.
(Me? Me.)
I turn from the stinging window and the garden of winking flowers. A woman stands with Gaewha and one of the conductors, and I do not know her. To the eyes, she is one of them—skin a soft allover brown, eyes gray, hair black-brown and curling in ropes, tall. There are hints of other in the breadth of her face—or perhaps, viewing this memory now through the lens of millennia, I see what I want to see. What she looks like is irrelevant. To my sessapinae, her kinship to us is as obvious as Gaewha’s puffy white hair. She exerts a pressure upon the ambient that is a churning, impossibly heavy, irresistible force. This makes her as much one of us as if she’d been decanted from the same biomagestric mix.
(You look like her. No. I want you to look like her. That is unfair, even if it’s true; you are like her, but in other ways than mere appearance. My apologies for reducing you in such a way.)
The conductor speaks as her kind do, in thin vibrations that only ripple the air and barely stir the ground. Words. I know this conductor’s name-word, Pheylen, and I know too that she is one of the nicer ones, but this knowledge is still and indistinct, like so much about them. For a very long time I could not tell the difference between one of their kind and another. They all look different, but they have the same non-presence within the ambient. I still have to remind myself that hair textures and eye shapes and unique body odors each have as much meaning to them as the perturbations of tectonic plates have to me.
I must be respectful of their difference. We are the deficient ones, after all, stripped of much that would’ve made us human. This was necessary and I do not mind what I am. I like being useful. But many things would be easier if I could understand our creators better.
So I stare at the new woman, the us-woman, and try to pay attention while the conductor introduces her. Introduction is a ritual that consists of explaining the sounds of names and the relationships of the … families? Professions? Honestly, I don’t know. I stand where I am supposed to and say the things I should. The conductor tells the new woman that I am Houwha and that Gaewha is Gaewha, which are the name-words they use for us. The new woman, the conductor says, is Kelenli. That’s wrong, too. Her name is actually deep stab, breach of clay sweetburst, soft silicate underlayer, reverberation, but I will try to remember “Kelenli” when I use words to speak.
The conductor seems pleased that I say “How do you do” when I’m supposed to. I’m glad; introduction is very difficult, but I’ve worked hard to become good at it. After this she starts speaking to Kelenli. When it becomes clear that the conductor has nothing more to say to me, I move behind Gaewha and begin plaiting some of her thick, poufy mane of hair. The conductors seem to like it when we do this, though I don’t really know why. One of them said that it was “cute” to see us taking care of one another, just like people. I’m not sure what cute means.
Meanwhile, I listen.
“Just doesn’t make sense,” Pheylen is saying, with a sigh. “I mean, the numbers don’t lie, but …”
“If you’d like to register an objection,” begins Kelenli. Her words fascinate me in a way that words never have before. Unlike the conductor, her voice has weight and texture, strata-deep and layered. She sends the wo
rds into the ground while she speaks, as a kind of subvocalization. It makes them feel more real. Pheylen, who doesn’t seem to notice how much deeper Kelenli’s words are—or maybe she just doesn’t care—makes an uncomfortable face in reaction to what she’s said. Kelenli repeats, “If you’d like to, I can ask Gallat to take me off the roster.”
“And listen to his shouting? Evil Death, he’d never stop. Such a savage temper he has.” Pheylen smiles. It’s not an amused smile. “It must be hard for him, wanting the project to succeed, but also wanting you kept—well. I’m fine with you on standby-only, but then I haven’t seen the simulation data.”
“I have.” Kelenli’s tone is grave. “The delay-failure risk was small, but significant.”
“Well, there you are. Even a small risk is too much, if we can do something about it. I think they must be more anxious than they’re letting on, though, to involve you—” Abruptly, Pheylen looks embarrassed. “Ah … sorry. No offense meant.”
Kelenli smiles. Both I and Gaewha can see that it is only a surface layering, not a real expression. “None taken.”
Pheylen exhales in relief. “Well, then, I’ll just withdraw to Observation and let you three get to know each other. Knock when you’re done.”
With that, Conductor Pheylen leaves the room. This is a good thing, because when conductors are not around, we can speak more easily. The door closes and I move to face Gaewha (who is actually cracked geode taste of adularescent salts, fading echo). She nods minutely because I have correctly guessed that she has something important to tell me. We are always watched. A certain amount of performance is essential.
Gaewha says with her mouth, “Coordinator Pheylen told me they’re making a change to our configuration.” With the rest of her she says, in atmospheric perturbations and anxious plucking of the silver threads, Tetlewha has been moved to the briar patch.