Did they break your hand yet?
This place. This… Fulcrum. Is why her mother broke her hand.
Nassun’s hand twitches in phantom pain. She sees again the rock in her mother’s hand, rising. Holding a moment. Falling.
Are you sure you can control yourself?
The Fulcrum is why her mother never loved her.
Is why her father does not love her anymore.
Is why her brother is dead.
Nassun watches Ajae wave to a thin older boy, who is busy hoeing. This place. These people, who have no right to exist.
The sapphire isn’t far off—hovering over Jekity, where it has been for the two weeks since she and Schaffa and Umber left to travel to the Antarctic Fulcrum. She can sess it in the distance, though it’s too far off to see. It seems to flicker as she reaches for it, and for an instant she marvels that she knows this somehow. Instinctively she has turned to face it. Line of sight. She doesn’t need eyes, or orogeny, to use it.
(This is an orogene’s nature, the old Schaffa might have told her, if he still existed. Nassun’s kind innately react to all threats the same way: with utterly devastating counterforce. He would have told her this, before breaking her hand to drive home the lesson of control.)
There are so many silver threads in this place. The orogenes are all connected through practice together, shared experience.
DID THEY BREAK YOUR HAND
It is over in the span of three breaths. Then Nassun lets herself fall out of the watery blue, and stands there shaking in its wake. Some while later, Nassun turns and sees Schaffa standing in front of her, with Umber.
“They weren’t supposed to be here,” she blurts. “You said.”
Schaffa isn’t smiling, and he is still in a way that Nassun knows well. “Did you do this to help us, then?”
Nassun can’t think enough to lie. She shakes her head. “This place was wrong,” she said. “The Fulcrum is wrong.”
“Is it?” It is a test, but Nassun has no idea how to pass it. “Why do you say that?”
“Mama was wrong. The Fulcrum made her that way. She should have been a, a, an, an ally to you,” like me, she thinks, reminds. “This place made her something else.” She cannot articulate it. “This place made her wrong.”
Schaffa looks at Umber. Umber tilts his head, and for an instant there is a flicker in the silver, a flicker between them. The things lodged in their sessapinae resonate in a strange way. But then Schaffa frowns, and she sees him push back against the silver. It hurts him to do this, but he does it anyway, turning to gaze at her with eyes bright and jaw tight and fresh sweat dotting his brow.
“I think you may be right, little one,” is all he says. “It follows: Put people in a cage and they will devote themselves to escaping it, not cooperating with those who caged them. What happened here was inevitable, I suppose.” He glances at Umber. “Still. Their Guardians must have been very lax, to let a group of orogenes get the drop on them. That one with the blowgun… born feral, most likely, and taught things she shouldn’t have been before being brought here. She was the impetus.”
“Lax Guardians,” says Umber, watching Schaffa. “Yes.”
Schaffa smiles at him. Nassun frowns in confusion. “We’ve destroyed the threat,” Schaffa says.
“Most of it,” Umber agrees.
Schaffa acknowledges this with an incline of his head and a faintly ironic air before turning to Nassun. He says, “You were right to do what you did, little one. Thank you for helping us.”
Umber is gazing steadily at Schaffa. At the back of Schaffa’s neck, specifically. Schaffa suddenly turns to glare back at him, smile gone fixed and body deadly still. After a moment, Umber looks away. Nassun understands then. The silver has gone quiet in Umber, or as quiet as it ever gets in any of the Guardians, but the glimmering lines within Schaffa are still alive, active, tearing at him. He fights them, though, and is prepared to fight Umber, too, if necessary.
For her? Nassun wonders, exults. For her.
Then Schaffa crouches and cups her face in his hands. “Are you well?” he asks. His eyes flick toward the sky to the east. The sapphire.
“Fine,” Nassun says, because she is. Connecting with the obelisk was much easier this time, partly because it was not a surprise, and partly because she is growing used to the sudden advent of strangeness in her life. The trick is to let yourself fall into it, and fall at the same speed, and think like a big column of light.
“Fascinating,” he says, and then gets to his feet. “Let’s go.”
So they leave the Antarctic Fulcrum behind, with new crops greening in its fields and cooling corpses in its administrative building and a collection of shining, multi-colored human statues scattered about its gardens and barracks and walls.
But in the days that follow, as they walk the road and forest trails between the Fulcrum and Jekity, sleeping each night in strangers’ barns or around their own fires… Nassun thinks.
She has nothing to do but think, after all. Umber and Schaffa do not speak to one another, and there is a new tension between them. She understands it enough to take care never to be alone in Umber’s presence, which is easy because Schaffa takes care never to let her be. This is not strictly necessary; Nassun thinks that what she did to Eitz and the people in the Antarctic Fulcrum, she can probably do to Umber. Using an obelisk is not sessing, the silver is not orogeny, and thus not even a Guardian is safe from what she can do. She sort of likes that Schaffa goes with her to the bathhouse, though, and forgoes sleep—Guardians can do that, apparently—to keep watch over her at night. It feels nice to have someone, anyone, protecting her again.
But. She thinks.
It troubles Nassun that Schaffa has damaged himself in the eyes of his fellow Guardians by choosing not to kill her. It troubles her more that he suffers, gritting his teeth and pretending that this is another smile, even as she sees the silver flex and burn within him. It never stops doing so now, and he will not let her ease his pain because this makes her slow and tired the next day. She watches him endure it, and hates the little thing in his head that hurts him so. It gives him power, but what good is power if it comes on a spiked leash?
“Why?” she asks him one night as they camp on a flat, elevated white slab of something that is neither metal nor stone and which is all that remains of some deadciv ruin. There have been some signs of raiders or commless in the area, and the tiny comm they stayed at the night before warned them to be wary, so the elevation of the slab will at least afford them plenty of advance warning of an attack. Umber is gone, off setting snares for their breakfast. Schaffa has used the opportunity to lie down on his bedroll while Nassun keeps watch, and she does not want to keep him awake. But she needs to know. “Why is that thing in your head?”
“It was put there when I was very young,” he says. He sounds weary. Fighting the silver for days on end without sleep is taking its toll. “There was no ‘why’ for me; it was simply the way things had to be.”
“But…” Nassun does not want to be annoying by asking why again. “Did it have to be? What is it for?”
He smiles, though his eyes are shut. “We are made to keep the world safe from the dangers of your kind.”
“I know that, but…” She shakes her head. “Who made you?”
“Me, specifically?” Schaffa opens one eye, then frowns a little. “I… don’t remember. But in general, Guardians are made by other Guardians. We are found, or bred, and given over to Warrant for training and… alteration.”
“And who made the Guardian before you, and the one before that? Who did it first?”