Then the trees part, and before them looms something that Nassun has never seen before. A rock formation, she thinks—but one that seems to consist of dozens of long, columnar ribbons of brown-gray stone that ripple in an upslope, gradually slanting high enough to qualify as a low mountain or a tall hill. At the top of this river of stone, she can see bushy green tree canopies; the formation plateaus up there. Atop that plateau Nassun can glimpse something through the trees, which might be a rounded rooftop or storecache tower. A settlement of some kind. But unless they climb along the columnar ribbons, which looks dangerous, she’s not sure how to get up there.
Except… except. It is a scratch on her awareness, rising to a pressure, itching into certainty. Nassun glances at her father, who is staring at the river of stone, too. In the months since Uche’s death, she has come to understand Jija better now than ever before in her life, because her life depends on it. She understands that he is fragile, despite his outward strength and stolidity. The cracks in him are new but dangerous, like the edges of tectonic plates: always raw, never stable, needing only the merest brush to unleash aeons’ worth of pent-up energy and destroy everything nearby.
But earthquakes are easy to manage, if you know how.
So Nassun says, watching him carefully, “This was made by orogenes, Daddy.”
She has guessed that he will tense, and he does. She has guessed that he will need to take a deep breath to calm himself, which he also does. He reacts to even the thought of orogenes the way that Mama used to react to red wine: with fast breath and shaking hands and sometimes freezing or weak knees. Daddy could never even bring things that were burgundy-colored into the house—but sometimes he would forget and do it anyway, and once it was done there was no reasoning with Mama. Nothing to be done but wait for her shakes and rapid breathing and hand-wringing to pass.
(Hand-rubbing. Nassun did not notice the distinction, but Essun was rubbing one hand. The old ache, there in the bones.)
Once Jija is calm enough, therefore, Nassun adds, “I think only orogenes can get up that slope, too.” She’s sure of this, in fact. The stone columns are moving, imperceptibly. This whole region is a volcano in exquisitely slow eruption. Here it pushes up a steady incremental lava flow that takes years to cool and thus separates itself into these long hexagonal shafts as the stuff contracts. It would be easy for an orogene, even an untrained one, to push against that upwelling pressure, taste some of that slow-cooling heat, and raise another column. Ride it, to reach that plateau. Many of the stone ribbons before them are paler gray, fresher, sharper. Others have done this recently.
Then Daddy surprises her by nodding jerkily. “There are… there should be others like you in this place.” He never says the o-word or the r-word. It’s always like you and your kind and that sort. “It’s why I brought you here, sweetening.”
“Is this the Antarctic Fulcrum?” Maybe she was wrong about where that was.
“No.” His lip curls. The fault line trembles. “It’s better.”
It’s the first time he’s ever been willing to speak of this. He’s not breathing much faster, either, or staring at her in that way he so often does when he’s struggling to remember that she’s his daughter. Nassun decides to probe a little, testing his strata. “Better?”
“Better.” He looks at her, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he smiles at her the way he used to. The way a father should smile at his daughter. “They can cure you, Nassun. That’s what the stories say.”
Cure her of what? she almost asks. Then survival instinct kicks in and she bites her tongue before she can say the stupid thing. There is only one disease that afflicts her in his eyes, only one poison he would journey halfway across the world to have drawn out of his little girl.
A cure. A cure. For orogeny? She hardly knows what to think. Be… other than what she is? Be normal? Is that even possible?
She’s so stunned that she forgets to watch her father for a moment. When she remembers, she shivers, because he has been watching her. He nods in satisfaction at the look on her face, though. Her surprise is what he wanted to see: that or maybe wonder, or pleasure. He would have reacted poorly to dislike or fear.
“How?” she asks. Curiosity he can tolerate.
“I don’t know. But I heard about it from travelers, before.” Just as there is only one your kind that he ever means, there’s only one before that matters, for both of them. “They say it’s been around for maybe the last five or ten years.”
“But what about the Fulcrum?” She shakes her head, confused. If anywhere, she would have thought…
Daddy’s face twists. “Trained, leashed animals are still animals.” He turns back to the rise of flowing stone. “I want my little girl back.”
I haven’t gone anywhere, Nassun thinks, but knows better than to say.
There’s no path to illustrate the way to go, no signs to indicate anything nearby. Part of that could be Seasonal defenses; they’ve seen a few comms that protected themselves not just with walls but seemingly insurmountable obstacles and camouflage. Doubtless the members of the comm know some secret way to get up to the plateau, but without this knowledge, Nassun and Jija are left with a puzzle to solve. There’s also no easy way past the rise; they could go around it, see if there are steps on the other side, but that might take days.
Nassun sits down on a log nearby—after checking it carefully for insects or other creatures that might have turned aggressive since the start of the Season. (Nassun has learned to treat nature and her father with the same wary caution.) She watches Jija pace back and forth, pausing now and again to kick at one of the ribbons where it rises sharply from the ground. He mutters to himself. He’ll need time to admit what must be done.
Finally he turns to her. “Can you do it?”
She stands up. He stumbles back as if startled by the sudden movement, then stops and glowers at her. She just stands there, letting him see how much it hurts her that he fears her so.
A muscle flexes in his jaw; some of his anger fades into chagrin. (Only some.) “Will you have to kill this forest, to do it?”
Oh. She can understand some of his worry now. This is the first green place they’ve seen in a year. “No, Daddy,” she says. “There’s a volcano.” She points down under their feet. He flinches again, glaring at the ground with the same naked hatred he occasionally flashes at her. But it is as pointless to hate Father Earth as it is to wish the Seasons would end.
He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth, and Nassun is so expecting him to say all right that she is already beginning to form the smile that he will need, in reassurance. Thus they are both caught completely off guard when a loud clack resounds through the forest around them, setting off a flock of birds she didn’t know was there. Something chuffs into the ground nearby, making Nassun blink with the faint reverberations of the blow through the local strata. Something small, but striking with force. And then Jija screams.
Once, Nassun froze in reaction to being startled. Mama’s training. Some of that conditioning has slipped over the past year, and although she grows still, she sinks her awareness into the earth nevertheless—just a few feet, but still. But she freezes in two kinds of ways as she sees the heavy, huge, barbed metal bolt that has been shot through her father’s calf. “Daddy!”
Jija is down on one knee, clutching his leg and making a sound through his teeth that is less than a scream, but no less agonized. The thing is huge: several feet long, two inches in circumference. She can see the way it has pushed aside his flesh on its terrible path. The tip is buried in the ground on the other side of his calf, effectively pinning him in place. A harpoon, not a crossbow bolt. It even has a thin chain attached to the blunt end.
A chain? Nassun whirls, following it. Someone’s holding it. There are feet pounding on the strata nearby, crunching leaves as they move. Darting shadows flicker past tree trunks and vanish; she hears a call in some Arctic language she’s heard before but does not know. Bandits. Coming.
She looks at Daddy again, who is trying to take deep breaths. His face is pale. There’s so much blood. But he looks up at her with his eyes wide and white with pain, and suddenly she remembers the comm where the people attacked them, the comm she iced, and the way he looked at her afterward.