“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”
Some of them shuffle or look at each other. Ykka stares at you like you are a possibly dangerous creature, which is hilarious. She should know by now that there’s no “possibly” about it. “Essun,” she starts to say, in the kind of even voice one uses with pets or the mad, “this is…” She stops because she doesn’t know what it is. But you do. It’s a fucking coup. Doesn’t matter who’s in charge, but on this one issue, you’re going to be the dictator. You will not allow Alabaster to have died saving these people from you for nothing.
“No vote,” you say again. Your voice is pitched to carry, as if they are twelve-year-olds in your old creche. “This is a community. You will be unified. You will fight for each other. Or I will rusting kill every last one of you.”
True silence this time. They don’t move. Their eyes are white and so far beyond frightened that you know they believe you.
Good. You turn and walk away.
INTERLUDE
In the turning depths, I resonate with my enemy—or attempt to. “A truce,” I say. Plead. There has been so much loss already, on all sides. A moon. A future. Hope.
Down here, it’s nearly impossible to hear a reply in words. What comes to me is furious reverberation, savage fluctuations of pressure and gravitation. I’m forced to flee after a time, lest I be crushed—and though this would be only a temporary setback, I cannot afford to be incapacitated right now. Things are changing amid your kind, quickly as your kind so often do things when you finally make real decisions. I have to be ready.
The rage was my only answer, in any case.
19
you get ready to rumble
IT HAS BEEN ONE MONTH since you last went aboveground. It has been two days since you killed Alabaster, in your folly and pain. All things change in a Season.
Castrima-over is occupied. The tunnel that you first passed through to enter the comm is blocked; one of the comm’s orogenes has pulled a big slab of stone up from the earth to effectively seal it off. Probably Ykka, or Cutter before Ykka killed him; they were the two others in the comm with the best fine control besides you and Alabaster. Now two of those four are dead, and the enemy is at the gates. The Strongbacks who are clustered in the tunnel mouth behind the stone seal jump up as you walk into the electric-light circle, and the ones who were already standing stand straighter. Xeber, Esni’s second-in-command among the Strongbacks, actually smiles at the sight of you. That’s how bad things are. That’s how worried everyone is. They’ve so lost their minds as to think of you as their champion.
“I don’t like this,” Ykka has said to you. She’s back in the comm, organizing the defense that will be necessary if the tunnels are breached. The real danger is if the Rennanis scouts discover the ventilation ducts of Castrima’s geode. They’re well hidden—one in the cavern of an underground river, others in equally out-of-the-way places, as if the people who built Castrima feared attack themselves—but the comm’s people will be forced out if those are sealed off. “And they’ve got stone eaters working with them. You’re dangerous and ruster enough to fuck up an army, Essie, I’ll give you that, but none of us can fight stone eaters. If they kill you, we lose our best weapon.”
She said this to you at Scenic Overlook, where the two of you went to work things out. It was awkward for about a day, between you. By forbidding a vote, you undercut Ykka’s authority and destroyed everyone’s illusion of having a say in the comm’s management. That was necessary, you still believe; everyone shouldn’t have a say in whose life is worth fighting for. She actually agreed, she admitted as you talked. But it damaged her.
You didn’t apologize for that, but you’ve tried to spackle the cracks. “You are Castrima’s best weapon,” you said firmly. You even meant it. That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due.
It eased the awkwardness between you. “Well, just don’t rusting die,” she told you at last. “Not sure I can keep this mess together without you, at this point.” Ykka’s good at that, making people feel like they’ve got a reason to do something. That’s why she’s the headwoman.
And that is why, now, you walk through a Castrima-over that has been turned into a camp by the soldiers of Rennanis, and you are actually afraid. It’s always harder to fight for other people than for the self.
The ash has been falling steadily for a year now, and the comm is knee-deep in the stuff. There’s been at least one rain to tamp it down recently, so you can sess a kind of damp-mud crust underneath the powdery layer on top, but even that’s substantial. Enemy soldiers crowd the porches and doorways of the once-empty houses, watching you, and the untamped ash under the eaves is halfway up most of the houses’ walls. They’ve had to dig out the windows. The soldiers look like… just people, because they don’t wear uniforms, but there is a uniformity to them nevertheless: They are all fully Sanzed or very Sanzed-looking. Where you can see color in their ash-faded travel clothing, you spot that telltale scrap of prettier, more delicate cloth tied around their upper arms or wrists or foreheads. No longer displaced Equatorials, then; they’ve found a comm. Something older and more primal than a comm: They are a tribe. And now they’re here to take what’s yours.
But beyond that they are just people. Many are your age or older. You guess that a lot of them are surplus Strongbacks or commless trying to prove their usefulness. There are slightly more men than women, but that follows, too, since most comms are quicker to kick out those who can’t produce babies than those who can—but the number of women here means that Rennanis isn’t hurting for healthy repopulators. A strong comm.
Their eyes follow you as you walk down Castrima-over’s main street. You stand out, you know, with your ashless skin and clean hair and your clothes bright with color. Just brown leather pants and unbleached white in your shirt, but these are colors that have become rare in this world of gray streets and gray dead trees and a gray, heavily clouded sky. You’re the only Midlatter that you see, too, and you’re small compared to most of them.
Doesn’t matter. Behind you floats the spinel, remaining precisely one foot behind the back of your head and turning slowly. You aren’t making it do that. You don’t know why it’s doing that, really. Unless you hold it in your hand, that’s what the thing does: You tried to set it down, but it floated back up and moved behind you like this. Should’ve asked Alabaster how to make it behave before you killed him, oh well. Now it’s flickering a little, real to translucent to real again, and you can hear—not sess, hear—the faint hum of its energies as it turns. You see people’s faces twitch as they notice. They might not know what it is, but they know a bad thing when they hear it.