She points at the back of her own skull. It is where the sessapinae are located, she knows from lectures on biomestry in creche. “There’s a little thing in you. Here. I don’t know what it is, but I sessed it when I met you. When you touched my neck.” She blinks, understanding. “You took something then to make it bother you less.”
“Yes. I did.” He reaches around her head now, and sets two of his fingers just at the top of her spine, beneath the back edge of her skull. This touch is not as relaxed as other times he has touched her. The two fingers are stiffened, held as if he’s pantomiming a knife.
Only he isn’t pantomiming, she realizes. She remembers that day in the forest when they reached Found Moon and the bandits attacked them. Schaffa is very, very strong—easily strong enough to push two fingers through bone and muscle like paper. He wouldn’t have needed a rock to break her hand.
Schaffa’s gaze searches hers and finds that she understands precisely what he’s thinking about doing. “You aren’t afraid.”
She shrugs.
“Tell me why you aren’t.” His voice brooks no disobedience.
“Just…” She cannot help shrugging again. She can’t really figure out how to say it. “I don’t… I mean, if you have a good reason?”
“You have no inkling of my reasons, little one.”
“I know.” She scowls, more out of frustration with herself than anything else. Then an explanation occurs to her. “Daddy didn’t have a reason when he killed my little brother.” Or when he knocked her off the wagon. Or any of the half-dozen times he’s looked at Nassun and thought about killing her so obviously that even a ten-year-old can figure it out.
An icewhite blink. What happens then is fascinating to watch: Slowly Schaffa’s expression thaws from the contemplation of her murder into wonder again, and a sorrow so deep that it makes a lump come to Nassun’s throat. “And you have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”
He’s so much better at talking. She nods emphatically.
Schaffa sighs. She feels his fingers waver. “But this is not a thing that can be known beyond my order. I let a child live once, who saw, but I should not have. And we both suffered for my compassion. I remember that.”
“I don’t want you to suffer,” Nassun says. She puts her hands on his chest, wills the silver flickers within him to take more. They begin to drift toward her. “It always hurts? That isn’t right.”
“Many things ease the pain. Smiling, for example, releases specific endorphins, which—” He jerks and takes his hand from the back of her neck, grabbing her hands and pulling them away from him just as the silver threads find her. He actually looks alarmed. “That will kill you!”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.” This seems sensible to her.
He stares. “Earth of our fathers and mothers.” But with that, slowly, the killing tension begins to bleed out of his posture. After a moment, he sighs. “Never speak of—of what you sess in me, around the others. If the other Guardians learn that you know, I may not be able to protect you.”
Nassun nods. “I won’t. Will you tell me what it is?”
“Someday, perhaps.” He gets to his feet. Nassun hangs on to his hand when he tries to pull away. He frowns at her, bemused, but she grins and swings his hand a little, and after a moment he shakes his head. Then they head back into the compound, and that is the first day Nassun thinks of it as home.
Seek the orogene in its crib. Watch for the center of the circle. There you will find [obscured]
—Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse five
10
you’ve got a big job ahead of you
YOU’VE CALLED HIM CRAZY SO many times. Told yourself that you despised him even as you grew to love him. Why? Perhaps you understood early on that he was what you could become. More likely it is that you suspected long before you lost and found him again that he wasn’t crazy. “Crazy” is what everyone thinks all roggas are, after all—addled by the time they spend in stone, by their ostensible alliance with the Evil Earth, by not being human enough.
But.
“Crazy” is also what roggas who obey choose to call roggas that don’t. You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is part of you now, because you have since grown brave.
“I fought Antimony all the way down,” Alabaster says. “It was stupid. If she’d lost her grip on me, if her concentration had faltered for an instant, I would have become part of the stone. Not even crushed, just… mixed in.” He lifts a truncated arm, and you know him well enough to realize he would have waggled his fingers. If he still had fingers. He sighs, not even noticing. “We were probably into the mantle by the time Innon died.”
His voice is soft. It’s gotten quiet in the infirmary. You look up and around; Lerna’s gone, and one of his assistants is sleeping on an unoccupied bed, snoring faintly. You speak in a soft voice, too. This is a conversation for only the two of you.
You have to ask, though even thinking the question makes you ache. “Do you know…?”
“Yes. I sessed how he died.” He falls silent for a moment. You reverberate with his grief and your own. “Couldn’t help sessing it. What they do, those Guardians, is magic, too. It’s just… wrong. Contaminated, like everything else about their kind. When they shake a person apart, if you’re attuned to that person, it feels like a niner.”
And of course you were both attuned to Innon. He was a part of you. You shiver, because he’s trying to make you more attuned, to the earth and orogeny and the obelisks and the unifying theory of magic, but you don’t ever want to experience that again. It was bad enough seeing it, knowing the horror that resulted had once been a body you held and loved. It had felt much worse than a niner. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“No. You couldn’t.” You’re sitting behind him, holding him upright with one hand. He’s been gazing away from you, somewhere into the middle distance, since he began telling this story. He does not turn to look at you now over his shoulder, possibly because he can’t do so without pain. But maybe that’s comfort in his voice.
He continues: “I don’t know how she manipulated the pressure, the heat, to keep it from killing me. I don’t know how I didn’t go mad from knowing where I was, wanting to get back to you, realizing I was helpless, feeling like I was suffocating. When I sessed what you did to Coru, I shut down. I don’t remember the rest of the journey, or I don’t want to. We must have… I don’t know.” He shudders, or tries to. You feel the twitch of muscles in his back.
“When I came to, I was on the surface again. In a place that…” He hesitates. His silence goes on for long enough that your skin prickles.
(I’ve been there. It’s difficult to describe. That isn’t Alabaster’s fault.)
“On the other side of the world,” Alabaster finally says, “there is a city.”
The words don’t make sense. The other side of the world is a great expanse of trackless blankness in your head. A map of nothing but ocean. “On… an island? Is there a landmass there?”
“Sort of.” He can’t really smile easily anymore. You hear it in his voice, though. “There’s a massive shield volcano there, though it’s under the ocean. Biggest one I’ve ever sessed; you could fit the Antarctics into it. The city sits directly above it, on the ocean. There’s nothing visible around it: no land for farming, no hills to break tsunami. No harbor or moorings for boats. Just… buildings. Trees and some other plants, of varieties I’ve never seen elsewhere, gone wild but not a forest—sculpted into the city, sort of. I don’t know what to call that. Infrastructures that seem to keep the whole thing stable and functioning, but all strange. Tubes and crystals and stuff that looks alive. Couldn’t tell you how a tenth of it worked. And, at the center of the city, there’s… a hole.”