“They would like you better if you didn’t laugh.” I signal nuance: alignment, harmonic enmeshment, compliance, conciliation, mitigation. If she wants to be liked.
“Maybe I don’t want to be liked.” She shrugs, turning to rinse the cloth again.
“You could be. You’re like them.”
“Not enough.”
“More than me.” This is obvious. She is their kind of beautiful, their kind of normal. “If you tried—”
She laughs at me, too. It isn’t cruel, I know instinctively. It’s pitying. But underneath the laugh, her presence is suddenly as still and pent as pressurized stone in the instant before it becomes something else. Anger again. Not at me, but triggered by my words nevertheless. I always seem to make her angry.
They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing—so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.
I think at first that I don’t understand everything she just told me. But I do, don’t I? There were sixteen of us once; now we are but six. The others questioned and were decommissioned for it. Obeyed without question, and were decommissioned for it. Bargained. Gave up. Helped. Despaired. We have tried everything, done all they asked and more, and yet now there are only six of us left.
That means we’re better than the others were, I tell myself, scowling. Smarter, more adaptable, more skilled. This matters, does it not? We are components of the great machine, the pinnacle of Sylanagistine biomagestry. If some of us had to be removed from the machine because of flaws—
Tetlewha was not flawed, Remwha snaps like a slipstrike fault.
I blink and glance at him. He’s back in the alcove, waiting over near Bimniwha and Salewha; they’ve all used the fountain to strip off their own paint while Kelenli worked on me and Gaewha and Dushwha. The guards Remwha distracted are just outside, still chuckling to themselves over what he said to them. He’s glaring at me. When I frown, he repeats: Tetlewha was not flawed.
I set my jaw. If Tetlewha was not flawed, then that means he was decommissioned for no reason at all.
Yes. Remwha, who rarely looks pleased on a good day, has now curled his lip in disgust. At me. I’m so shocked by this that I forget to pretend indifference. That is precisely her point. It doesn’t matter what we do. The problem is them.
It doesn’t matter what we do. The problem is them.
When I am clean, Kelenli cups my face in her hands. “Do you know the word ‘legacy’?”
I’ve heard it and guessed its meaning from context. It’s difficult to pull my thoughts back on track after Remwha’s angry rejoinder. He and I have never much liked one another, but … I shake my head and focus on what Kelenli has asked me. “A legacy is something obsolete, but which you cannot get rid of entirely. Something no longer wanted, but still needed.”
She grimace-smiles, first at me and then at Remwha. She’s heard everything he said to me. “That will do. Remember that word today.”
Then she gets to her feet. The three of us stare at her. She’s not only taller and browner, but she moves more, breathes more. Is more. We worship what she is. We fear what she will make of us.
“Come,” she says, and we follow her out into the world.
2613: A massive underwater volcano erupted in the Tasr Straits between the Antarctic Polar Waste and the Stillness. Selis Leader Zenas, previously unknown to be an orogene, apparently quelled the volcano, although she was unable to escape the tsunami that it caused. Skies in the Antarctics darkened for five months, but cleared just before a Season could be officially declared. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, Selis Leader’s husband—the comm head at the time of the eruption, deposed by emergency election—attempted to defend their one-year-old child from a mob of survivors and was killed. Cause disputed: Some witnesses say the mob stoned him, others say the former comm head was strangled by a Guardian. Guardian took the orphaned infant to Warrant.
—Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
5
you are remembered
THE ATTACK COMES, LIKE CLOCKWORK, near dawn.
Everyone’s ready for it. The camp is about a third of the way into the stone forest, which is as far as Castrima was able to get before full darkness made further progress treacherous. The group should be able to get all the way through the forest before sunset the next day—assuming everyone lives through the night.
Restlessly you prowl the camp, and you are not the only one to do so. The Hunters are supposed to all be sleeping, since during the day they act as scouts as well as ranging afield to forage and catch game. You see quite a few of them awake, too. The Strongbacks are supposed to be sleeping in shifts, but all of them are up, as are a good number of the other castes. You spot Hjarka sitting atop a pile of baggage, her head down and eyes shut, but otherwise her legs are braced for a quick lunge and there’s a glassknife in each hand. Her fingers haven’t loosened with sleep.
It’s a stupid time to attack, given all this, but there isn’t a better one, so apparently your assailants decide to work with what they’ve got. You’re the first to sess it, and you’re pivoting on the ball of one foot and shouting a warning even as you narrow your perception and drop into that space of mind from which you can command volcanoes. A fulcrum, deep and strong, has been rooted in the earth nearby. You follow it to the midpoint of its potential torus, the center of the circle, like a hawk sighting prey. Right side of the road. Twenty feet into the stone forest, out of line of sight amid the wends and drooping greenery. “Ykka!”
She appears at once from wherever she was sitting amid the tents. “Yeah, felt it.”
“Not active yet.” By this you mean that the torus hasn’t begun to draw heat or movement from the ambient. But that fulcrum is deep as a taproot. There’s not much seismic potential gathered in this region—and indeed, much of the pressure on the lower-level strata has been absorbed by the creation of the stone forest. Still, there’s always heat if you go deep enough, and this is deep. Solid. Fulcrum-precise.