He falls silent, perhaps weary. His voice is hoarse today, and his eyes are bloodshot. Another infection. He keeps getting them because some of the burned patches on his body aren’t healing, Lerna says. The lack of pain meds isn’t helping.
You try to digest what he’s told you, what Antimony has told you, what you’ve learned through trial and suffering. Maybe the numbers matter. Two hundred and sixteen obelisks, some incalculable number of other orogenes as a buffer, and you. Magic to tie the three together… somehow. All of it together forging a net, to catch the Earthfires-damned Moon.
Alabaster says nothing while you ponder, and eventually you glance at him to see if he’s fallen asleep. But he’s awake, his eyes slits, watching you. “What?” You frown, defensive as always.
He quarter-smiles with the half of his mouth that hasn’t been burned. “You never change. If I ask you for help, you tell me to flake off and die. If I don’t say a rusting word, you work miracles for me.” He sighs. “Evil Earth, how I’ve missed you.”
This… hurts, unexpectedly. You realize why at once: because it’s been so long since anyone said anything like this to you. Jija could be affectionate, but he wasn’t much given to sentimentality. Innon used sex and jokes to show his tenderness. But Alabaster… this has always been his way. The surprise gesture, the backhanded compliment that you could choose to take for teasing or an insult. You’ve hardened so much without this. Without him. You seem strong, healthy, but inside you feel like he looks: nothing but brittle stone and scars, prone to cracking if you bend too much.
You try to smile, and fail. He doesn’t try. You just look at each other. It’s nothing and everything at once.
Of course it doesn’t last. Someone walks into the infirmary and comes over and surprises you by being Ykka. Hjarka’s behind her, slouching along and looking very Sanzedly bored: picking her sharp-filed teeth with a bit of polished wood, one hand on her well-curved hip, her ashblow hair a worse mess than usual and noticeably flatter on one side where she’s just woken up.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ykka says, not sounding especially sorry, “but we’ve got a problem.”
You’re beginning to hate those words. Still, it’s time to end the lesson, so you nod to Alabaster and get up. “What now?”
“Your friend. The slacker.” Tonkee, who hasn’t joined the Innovators’ work crews, doesn’t bother to pick up your household share when it’s her turn, and who conveniently disappears whenever it’s time for a caste meeting. In another comm they’d have already kicked her out for that kind of thing, but she gets extra leeway for being one of the companions of the second-most-powerful orogene in Castrima. It only goes so far, though, and Ykka looks especially pissed off.
“She’s found the control room,” Ykka says. “Locked herself inside.”
“The—” What. “The control room for what?”
“Castrima.” Ykka looks annoyed to have to explain. “I told you when you got here: There are mechanisms that make this place function, the light and the air and so on. We keep the room secret because if somebody loses it and wants to smash things, they could kill us all. But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.”
“She won’t be able to affect anything important,” Alabaster says. It startles you both, you because you aren’t used to seeing him interact with anyone else, and Ykka because she probably thinks of him as a waste of medicines and not a person. He doesn’t think much of her, either; his eyes are closed again. “More likely to hurt herself than anything else.”
“Good to know,” Ykka says, though she looks at him skeptically. “I’d be reassured if you weren’t talking out of your ass, seeing as you couldn’t possibly know what’s happening beyond this infirmary, but it’s a nice thought, anyway.”
He lets out a soft snort of amusement. “I knew everything I needed to know about this relic the instant I came here. And if any of you other than Essun had a chance of making it do what it’s really capable of, I wouldn’t stay here a moment longer.” As you and Ykka stare, he lets out a heavy sigh. There’s a little bit of a rattle in it, which troubles you, and you make a note to ask Lerna about it. But he says nothing more, and finally Ykka glances at you with a palpable I am really sick of your friends look, and beckons for you to follow her out.
It’s a long way up to wherever this control room is. Hjarka’s breathing hard after the first ladder, but she acclimates after that and settles into a rhythm. Ykka does better, though she’s still sweating in ten minutes. You’ve still got your road conditioning, so you handle the climb well enough, but after the first three flights of stairs, a ladder, and a spiraling balcony built round one of the fatter crystals of the comm, you’re even willing to start small talk to take your mind off the ground falling farther and farther below. “What’s your usual disciplinary process for people who shirk their caste duties?”
“The boot, what else?” Ykka shrugs. “We can’t just ash them out, though; have to kill them to maintain secrecy. But there’s a process: one warning, then a hearing. Morat—that’s the Innovator caste spokeswoman—hasn’t made a formal complaint. I asked her to, but she waffled. Said your friend gave her a portable water-testing device that may save some of our Hunters’ lives out in the field.”
Hjarka utters a rusty laugh. You shake your head, amused. “That’s a nice bribe. She’s a survivor, if nothing else.”
Ykka rolls her eyes. “Maybe. But it sends a bad message, one person not joining any work crews and going unpunished for it, even if she does invent useful things outside of work time. Others start to skive off, what do I do then?”
“Ash out the ones who haven’t invented anything,” you suggest. Then you stop, because Ykka has paused. You think it’s because she’s annoyed by what you just said, but she’s looking around, taking in the expanse of the comm. So you stop, too. This far up, you’re well above the main inhabited level of the comm. The geode echoes with calls and someone hammering something and one of the work crews singing a rhythm song. You risk a look over the nearest railing and see that someone’s made a simple rope-and-wooden-pallet cargo lift for the mid-level, but without a counterweight, the only way to get a heavy load up is to basically play tug-of-war with it. Twenty people are at it now. It looks surprisingly like fun.
“You were right about the assimilations,” Hjarka says. Her voice is soft as she, too, contemplates the bustle and life of Castrima. “We couldn’t have made this place work without more people. Thought you were full of shit, but you weren’t.”
Ykka sighs. “So far it’s working.” She eyes Hjarka. “You never said you didn’t like the idea before.”
Hjarka shrugs. “I left my home comm because I didn’t want the burden of Leadership. Didn’t want it here, either.”
“You don’t have to knife-fight me for the headwomanship to give an opinion, for Earth’s sake.”
“When a Season’s coming on and I’m the only Leader in the comm, I’d better be careful even about opinions.” She shrugs, then smiles at Ykka with an air of something like affection. “Keep figuring you’ll have me killed any minute now.”
Ykka laughs once. “Is that what you would’ve done in my place?” You hear the edge in this.
“It’s the playbook I was taught to follow, yeah—but it’d be stupid to try that here. There’s never been anything like this Season… or this comm.” Hjarka eyes you, pointedly, as the latest example of Castrima’s peculiarity. “Tradition’s just going to rust everything up, in a situation like this. Better to have a headwoman who doesn’t know how things should be, only how she wants them to be. A headwoman who’ll kick all the asses necessary to make her vision happen.”