(Later, lying in bed and considering the day’s errors, you will think belatedly, I am as crazy now as Alabaster was back then.)
A moment later Alabaster stirs, lifting his head and uttering a soft groan that throws your thoughts and your heart ten years away before they circle back. He blinks at you in disorientation for a moment, and you realize he doesn’t recognize you with your hair twice as long and your skin weathered and your clothes Season-faded. Then he blinks again, and you take a deep breath, and you’re both back in the here and now.
“The onyx,” he says, his voice hoarse with sleep. Of course he knows. “Always biting off more than you can chew, Syen.”
You don’t bother to correct him on the name. “You said an obelisk.”
“I said the rusting topaz. But if you could call the onyx, I’ve underestimated your development.” His head cocks, his expression thoughtful. “What have you been doing, these last few years, to have refined your control so much?”
You can’t think of anything at first, and then you can. “I had two children.” Keeping an orogene child from destroying everything in its vicinity took a lot of your energy, in those earliest years. You learned to sleep with one eye open, your sessapinae primed for the slightest twitch of infant fear or toddler pique—or, worse, a local shake that might prompt either child to react. You quelled a dozen disasters a night.
He nods, and belatedly you remember waking up during the night in Meov sometimes to find Alabaster blearily awake and watching Corundum. You remember teasing him, in fact, on his worrying, when Coru was clearly no threat to anyone.
Earth burn it, you hate figuring out all this stuff after the fact.
“They left me with my mother for a few years after I was born,” he says, almost to himself. You’d guessed this already, given that he speaks a Coaster language. How his Fulcrum-bred mother had known it, though, is a mystery that will never be solved. “They took me away once I was old enough to be threatened effectively, but before that, she apparently prevented me from icing Yumenes a few times. I don’t think we’re meant to be raised by stills.” He paused, his gaze distant. “I met her years later by chance. Didn’t know her, though she somehow recognized me. I think she’s—she was—on the senior advisory board. Topped out at nine rings, if I recall.” He falls silent for a moment. Perhaps he’s contemplating the fact that he killed his mother, too. Or maybe he’s trying to remember something of her other than a hurried meeting between two strangers in a corridor.
His focus sharpens abruptly, back to the present and you. “I think you might be a nine-ringer now.”
You can’t help surprise and pleasure, though you cover both with the appearance of nonchalance. “I thought things like that didn’t matter anymore.”
“They don’t. I was careful to wipe out the Fulcrum when I tore Yumenes apart. There are still buildings where the city was, perched on the edges of the maw, unless they’ve fallen in since. But the obsidian walls are rubble, and I made sure Main went into the pit first.” There’s a deep, vicious satisfaction in his voice. He sounds like you a moment ago, as you imagined murdering stone eaters.
(You glance at Antimony. She’s gone back to watching Alabaster, her hand still supporting his back. You could almost think of her as doing it out of devotion or kindness, if you didn’t know his hands and feet and forearm were in whatever passes for her stomach.)
“I only mention rings so you can have a point of reference.” Alabaster stirs, sitting up carefully and then, as if he heard your thought, extending his stubby, stone-capped right arm. “Look inside this. Tell me what you see.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Alabaster?” But he doesn’t answer, just looking at you, and you sigh. All right.
You look at his arm, which stops at the elbow now, and wonder what he means by look inside. Then, unbidden, you remember a night when he willed poison out of the cells of his own body. But he had help for that. You frown, impulsively glancing at the strangely shaped pink object behind him—the thing that looks like an overly long, big-handled knife, and which is actually, somehow, an obelisk. The spinel, he called it.
You glance at him; he must have seen you eye it. He doesn’t move: not a twitch of his burned and stone-crusted face, not a flicker of his nonexistent eyelashes. All right, then. Anything goes, as long as you do what he says.
So you stare down at his arm. You don’t want to chance the spinel. No telling what it will do. Instead, first you try letting your awareness go into the arm. This feels absurd; you’ve spent your life sessing layers of earth miles underground. To your surprise, however, your perception can grasp his arm. It’s small and strange, too close and almost too tiny, but it’s there, because at least the outermost layer of him is rock. Calcium and carbon and flecks of oxidized iron that must have once been blood, and—
You pause, frowning, and open your eyes. (You don’t remember closing them.) “What is that?”
“What is that?” The side of his mouth that hasn’t been seamed by a burn lifts in a sardonic smile.
You scowl. “There’s something in this stuff that you’re—” Becoming. “—this stone stuff. It’s not, I don’t know. It’s rock, and not.”
“Can you sess the flesh further down the arm?”
You shouldn’t be able to. But when you narrow your focus to the limit that you can, when you squint and press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and wrinkle your nose, it’s there, too. Big sticky globules all bouncing against one another—You withdraw at once, revolted. At least stone is clean.
“Look again, Syen. Don’t be a coward.”
You could be annoyed, but you’re too old for this shit now. Setting your jaw, you try again, taking a deep breath so you won’t feel queasy. Everything’s so wet inside him, and the water isn’t even sequestered away between layers of clay or—
You pause. Narrow your focus still further. Between the gelidity, moving, too, but in a slower and less organic way, you suddenly sess the same thing you found in the stone of him. Something else, neither flesh nor stone. Something immaterial, and yet it is there for you to perceive. It glimmers in threads strung between the bits of him, crossing itself in lattices, shifting constantly. A… tension? An energy, shiny and streaming. Potential. Intention.
You shake your head, pulling back so you can focus on him. “What is that?”
This time he answers. “The stuff of orogeny.” He makes his voice dramatic, since his facial expressions can’t change much. “I’ve told you before that what we do isn’t logical. To make the earth move we put something of ourselves into the system and make completely unrelated things come out. There’s always been something else involved, connecting the two. This.” You frown. He sits forward, growing more animated with his excitement, just the way he used to in the old days—but then something creaks on him, and he flinches with pain. Carefully he sits back against Antimony’s hand again.
But you’re hearing him. And he’s right. It hasn’t ever really made sense, has it, the way orogeny works? It shouldn’t work at all, that willpower and concentration and perception should shift mountains. Nothing else in the world works this way. People cannot stop avalanches by dancing well, or make storms happen by refining their hearing. And on some level, you’ve always known that this was there, making your will manifest. This… whatever it is.
Alabaster has always been able to read you like a book. “The civilization that made the obelisks had a word for this,” he says, nodding at your epiphany. “I think there’s a reason we don’t. It’s because no one for countless generations has wanted orogenes to understand what we do. They’ve just wanted us to do it.”