The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth #2)

Is this not how love should work?

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Nassun makes herself say. It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things. “I miss her, too.” Because she does, in spite of everything.

Jija stiffens slightly, and a muscle along the curve of his jaw flexes a little. “I don’t miss her, sweetening.”

This is so obviously a lie that Nassun stares and forgets to pretend to agree with him. Forgets lots of things, apparently, including common sense, because she blurts, “But you do. You miss Uche, too. I can tell.”

Jija goes rigid, and he stares at her in something that falls between shock that she would say this out loud and horror at what she has said. And then, as Nassun has come to understand is normal for her father, the shock of the unexpected abruptly transforms into anger.

“Is that what they’re teaching you up in that… place?” he asks suddenly. “To disrespect your father?”

Suddenly Nassun is more tired. So very tired of trying to dance around his senselessness.

“I wasn’t disrespecting you,” she says. She tries to keep her voice even, inflectionless, but she can hear the frustration there. She can’t help it. “I was just saying the truth, Daddy. But I don’t mind that you—”

“It isn’t the truth. It’s an insult. I don’t like that kind of language, young lady.”

Now she is confused. “What kind of language? I didn’t say anything bad.”

“Calling someone a rogga-lover is bad!”

“I… didn’t say that.” But in a way, she did. If Jija misses Mama and Uche, then that means he loves them, and that makes him a rogga-lover. But. I’m a rogga. She knows better than to say this. But she wants to.

Jija opens his mouth to retort, then seems to catch himself. He looks away, propping his elbows on the table and steepling his hands in the way he so often does when he’s trying to rein in his temper.

“Roggas,” he says, and the word sounds like filth in his mouth, “lie, sweetening. They threaten, and manipulate, and use. They’re evil, Nassun, as evil as Father Earth himself. You aren’t like that.”

That’s a lie, too. Nassun has done what she had to do to survive, including lying and murder. She’s done some of these things in order to survive him. She hates that she’s had to, and is exasperated by the fact that he apparently never realized it. That she’s doing it now and he doesn’t see.

Why do I even love him anymore? Nassun finds herself thinking as she stares at her father.

Instead she says: “Why do you hate us so much, Daddy?”

Jija flinches, perhaps at her casual us. “I don’t hate you.”

“You hate Mama, though. You must have hated U—”

“I did not!” Jija pushes back from the table and stands. Nassun flinches despite herself, but he turns away and starts to pace in short, vicious half circles around the room. “I just—I know what they’re capable of, sweetening. You wouldn’t understand. I needed to protect you.”

In a sudden blur of understanding as powerful as magic, Nassun realizes Jija does not remember standing over Uche’s body, his shoulders and chest heaving, his teeth clenched around the words Are you one, too? Now he believes he has never threatened her. Never shoved her off a wagon seat and down a hill of sticks and stones. Something has rewritten the story of his orogene children in Jija’s head—a story that is as chiseled and unchangeable as stone in Nassun’s mind. It is perhaps the same thing that has rewritten Nassun for him as daughter and not rogga, as if the two can be fissioned from each other somehow.

“I learned about them when I was a boy. Younger than you.” Jija’s not looking at her anymore, gesticulating as he talks and paces. “Makenba’s cousin.” Nassun blinks. She remembers Miss Makenba, the quiet old lady who always smelled like tea. Lerna, the town doctor, was her son. Miss Makenba had a cousin in town? Then Nassun gets it.

“I found him behind the spadeseed silo one day. He was squatting there, shaking. I thought he was sick.” Jija’s shaking his head the whole time, still pacing. “There was another boy with me. We always used to play together, the three of us. Kirl went to shake Litisk and Litisk just—” Jija stops abruptly. He’s baring his teeth. His shoulders are heaving the same way they were on that day. “Kirl was screaming and Litisk was saying he couldn’t stop, he didn’t know how. The ice ate up Kirl’s arm and his arm broke off. The blood was in chunks on the ground. Litisk said he was sorry, he even cried, but he just kept freezing Kirl. He wouldn’t stop. By the time I ran away Kirl was reaching for me, and the only thing left of him that wasn’t frozen was his head and his chest and that arm. It was too late, though. I knew that. It was too late even before I ran away to get help.”

It does not comfort Nassun to know that there is a reason—a specific reason—for what her father has done. All she can think is, Uche never lost control like that; Mama wouldn’t have let him. It’s true. Mama had been able to sess, and still, Nassun’s orogeny from all the way across town sometimes. Which means Uche didn’t do anything to provoke Jija. Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son’s birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father’s hatred.

So Nassun is almost prepared when Jija’s gaze suddenly shifts to her, sidelong and suspicious. “Why haven’t you cured yourself yet?”

No reasoning. But she tries, because once upon a time, this man was her whole world.

“I might be able to soon. I learned how to make things happen with the silver, and how to take things out of people. I don’t know how orogeny works, or where it comes from, but if it’s something that can be taken out, then—”

“None of the other monsters in that camp have cured themselves. I’ve asked around.” Jija’s pacing has gotten noticeably faster. “They go up there and they don’t get better. They live there with those Guardians, more of them every day, and none of them have been cured! Was it a lie?”

“It isn’t a lie. If I get good enough, I’ll be able to do it.” She understands this instinctively. With enough fine control and the sapphire obelisk’s aid, she will be able to do almost anything. “But—”

“Why aren’t you good enough now? We’ve been here almost a year!”

Because this is hard, she wants to say, but she realizes he does not want to hear it. He does not want to know that the only way to use orogeny and magic to transform a thing is to become an expert in the use of orogeny and magic. She doesn’t answer because there’s no point. She cannot say what he wants to hear. It isn’t fair that he calls orogenes liars and then demands that she lie.

He stops and rounds on her, instantly suspicious of her silence. “You aren’t trying to get better, are you? Tell the truth, Nassun!”

She is so rusting tired.

“I am trying to get better, Daddy,” Nassun replies at last. “I’m trying to become a better orogene.”

Jija steps back, as if she has hit him. “That isn’t why I let you live up there.”

He isn’t letting anything; Schaffa made him. He’s even lying to himself now. But it is the lies he’s telling her—as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life—that really break her heart. He’s said that he loved her, after all, but that obviously isn’t true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene’s father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.

And she is tired. Tired and done.

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