Schaffa remembers struggling, and even as a child he’s stronger than most. He gets his head and upper body almost free before the machinery reaches him. This is why the first cut goes so wrong, slicing far lower on his neck than it should and nearly killing him right there. The equipment adjusts, relentless. He feels the cold of it as the sliver of iron is inserted, feels the coldness of the other presence within him at once. Someone stitches him up. The pain is horrific and it never really ends, though he learns to mitigate it enough to function; all those who survive the implantation do. The smiling, you see. Endorphins ease pain.
… Of the Fulcrum, and a high-ceilinged chamber at the heart of Main, and familiar artificial lights that march toward and around a yawning pit from whose walls grow endless slivers of iron. He and the other Guardians gaze down at a small, shredded body crumpled at the bottom of the pit. Every now and again the children find the place; poor foolish creatures. Don’t they understand? The Earth is indeed evil, and it is cruel, and Schaffa would protect them all from it, if he could. There is a survivor: one of the children attached to Guardian Leshet. The girl cringes as Leshet approaches, but Schaffa knows Leshet will let her live. Leshet has always been softer, kinder than she should be, and her children suffer for it…
… Of the road, and the endless flinching eyes of strangers who see his icewhite irises and unchanging smiles and know that they are seeing something wrong even if they don’t know what it is. There is a woman one night, at an inn, who tries to be intrigued rather than frightened. Schaffa warns her, but she’s insistent, and he cannot help but think of how the pleasure will keep the pain at bay for hours, perhaps the whole night. It’s good to feel human for a while. But as he warned her, he circuits back in a few months. She’s got a child in her belly, which she says isn’t his, but he cannot permit the uncertainty. He uses the black-glass poniard, which is a thing made in Warrant. She was kind to him, so he targets only the child; hopefully she’ll pass its corpse, and live. But she’s furious, horrified, and she calls out for help and draws a knife of her own as they struggle. Never again, he resolves as he slaughters all of them—her whole family, a dozen bystanders, half the town as they attack him en masse. Never again can he forget that he is not, and has never been, human.
… Of Leshet again. He can barely recognize her this time: Her hair has gone white and her once-smooth face is all over lines and sagging skin. She’s smaller, her softening bones compressing her into a hunched posture, which often happens to Arctics when they grow old. But Leshet has seen more centuries even than Schaffa. Old is not supposed to mean this for them: feebleness, senescence, shrinking. (Happiness, and a smile that means something other than mere mitigation of the pain. They’re not supposed to have these either.) He stares at her broad, welcoming smile as she hobbles toward him from the cottage to which he has tracked her. He is filled with dim horror and a burgeoning disgust that he’s not even aware of until she stops before him and he reaches out to reflexively break her neck.
… Of the girl. The girl. One of dozens, hundreds; they blur together over the endless years… but not this one. He finds her in a barn, poor frightened sad thing, and she loves him instantly. He loves her, too, wishes he could be kinder to her, is as gentle as he can be while he trains her to obedience with broken bones and loving threats and chances he should not give. Has Leshet infected him with her softness? Maybe, maybe… but her face. Her eyes. There’s something about her. He is not surprised later, when he receives word that she is involved in the raising of an obelisk in Allia. His special one. He does not believe she is dead after. Indeed, he is filled with pride as he goes to reclaim her, and as he prays to the voice in his head that she will not force him to kill her. The girl…
… whose face causes him to wake with a soft cry. The girl.
The other two Guardians look at him with the Earth’s judging eyes. They are as compromised as he, more. All three of them are everything the Guardian order has warned them against. He remembers his name but they do not remember theirs. That’s the only real difference between him and them… isn’t it? Yet they seem so much less than he, somehow.
Irrelevant. He pushes himself up from the cot, rubs his face, and heads outside.
The children’s cabin. It’s time to check on them, Schaffa tells himself, though he makes a beeline to Nassun’s cot. She’s asleep as he lifts a lantern to examine her face. Yes. It has always been there in her eyes and maybe cheekbones, tickling his mind, the fragments of his memory and the solidity of her features finally coming together. His Damaya. The girl who did not die, reborn.
He remembers breaking Damaya’s hand and flinches with it. Why would he do such a thing? Why did he do any of the horrible things he did, in those days? Leshet’s neck. Timay’s. Eitz’s family. So many others, whole towns of them. Why?
Nassun stirs in her sleep, murmuring softly. Automatically Schaffa reaches out to stroke her face, and she quiets at once. There is a dull ache in his chest that perhaps might be love. He remembers loving Leshet and Damaya and others, and yet he did such things to them.
Nassun stirs a little, and half wakes, blinking in the lantern light. “Schaffa?”
“It’s nothing, little one,” he says. “I’m sorry.” Many degrees of sorry. But the fear is in him, and the dream lingers. He cannot help trying to expunge it. He finally blurts, “Nassun. Are you afraid of me?”
She blinks, barely lucid—and then she smiles. It untwists something within him. “Never.”
Never. He swallows, his throat suddenly tight. “Good. Go back to sleep.”
She drifts off at once, and perhaps she was never really awake to begin with. But he lingers near her, keeping watch until her eyelids flicker into dreaming again.
Never.
“Never again,” he whispers, and twitches with the memory of that, too. Then the feeling changes and his resolve refocuses. What happened before does not matter. That was a different Schaffa. He has another chance now. And if being less than himself means being less than the monster that he was, he cannot regret it.
There is a quicksilver lightning strike of pain along his spine, too fast for him to smile it away. Something disagrees with his resolve. Automatically his hand twitches toward the back of Nassun’s neck… and then he stops himself. No. She is more to him than just relief from pain.
Use her, commands the voice. Break her. So willful, like her mother. Train this one to obey.
No, Schaffa thinks back, and braces himself to bear the lash of retaliation. It is only pain.
So Schaffa tucks Nassun in, and kisses her forehead, and puts out the light as he leaves. He heads for the ridge that overlooks the town, and stands there for the rest of the night grinding his teeth and trying to forget the last of who he was and promising himself a better future. Eventually the other two Guardians come out onto the steps of their cabin as well, but he ignores the alien pressure of their gazes against his back.
12
Nassun, falling up
AGAIN, MUCH OF THIS IS SPECULATION. You know of Nassun, and she is part of you, but you cannot be Nassun… and I think we have established by now that you do not know her as well as you think. (Ah, but no parent does, with any child.) Another has the task of encompassing Nassun’s existence. But you love her, and that means that some part of me cannot help but do the same.
In love, then, we shall seek understanding.