I close my eyes, aching as I finally, finally, understand. Kelenli is one of us in every way that matters, and she always has been.
Slowly, though, she unbends. Ducks her head, pretends reluctant capitulation, says something back. It isn’t real. The earth reverberates with her anger and fear and unwillingness. Still, some of the stiffness goes out of Gallat’s back. He smiles, gestures more broadly. Comes back to her, takes her by the arms, speaks to her gently. I marvel that she has disarmed his anger so effectively. It’s as if he doesn’t see the way her eyes drift away while he’s talking, or how she does not reciprocate when he pulls her closer. She smiles at something he says, but even from fifty feet away I can see that it is a performance. Surely he can see it, too? But I am also beginning to understand that people believe what they want to believe, not what is actually there to be seen and touched and sessed.
So, mollified, he turns to leave—thankfully via a different path out of the garden than the one Stahnyn and I currently lurk upon. His posture has changed completely; he’s visibly in a better mood. I should be glad for that, shouldn’t I? Gallat heads the project. When he’s happy, we are all safer.
Kelenli stands gazing after him until he is gone. Then her head turns and she looks right at me. Stahnyn makes a choked sound beside me, but she is a fool. Of course Kelenli will not report us. Why would she? Her performance was never for Gallat.
Then she, too, leaves the garden, following Gallat.
It was a last lesson. The one I needed most, I think. I tell Stahnyn to take me back to my cell, and she practically moans with relief. When I’m back and I have unwoven the magics of the monitoring equipment, and sent Stahnyn on her way with a gentle reminder not to be a fool, I lie down on my couch to ponder this new knowledge. It sits in me, an ember causing everything around it to smolder and smoke.
And then, several nights after we return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, the ember catches fire in all of us.
It is the first time that all of us have come together since the trip. We entwine our presences in a layer of cold coal, which is perhaps fitting as Remwha sends a hiss through all of us like sand grinding amid cracks. It’s the sound/feel/sess of the sinklines, the briar patch. It’s also an echo of the static emptiness in our network where Tetlewha—and Entiwha, and Arwha, and all the others—once existed.
This is what awaits us when we have given them Geoarcanity, he says.
Gaewha replies, Yes.
He hisses again. I have never sessed him so angry. He has spent the days since our trip getting angrier and angrier. But then, so have the rest of us—and now it’s time for us to demand the impossible. We should give them nothing, he declares, and then I feel his resolve sharpen, turn vicious. No. We should give back what they have taken.
Eerie minor-note pulses of impression and action ripple through our network: a plan, at last. A way to create the impossible, if we cannot demand it. The right sort of power surge at just the right moment, after the fragments have been launched but before the Engine has been spent. All the magic stored within the fragments—decades’ worth, a civilization’s worth, millions of lives’ worth—will flood back into the systems of Syl Anagist. First it will burn out the briar patches and their pitiful crop, letting the dead rest at last. Next the magic will blast through us, the most fragile components of the great machine. We’ll die when that happens, but death is better than what they intended for us, so we are content.
Once we’re dead, the Plutonic Engine’s magic will surge unrestricted down all the conduits of the city, frying them beyond repair. Every node of Syl Anagist will shut down—vehimals dying unless they have backup generators, lights going dark, machinery stilling, all the infinite conveniences of modern magestry erased from furnishings and appliances and cosmetics. Generations of effort spent preparing for Geoarcanity will be lost. The Engine’s crystalline fragments will become so many oversized rocks, broken and burnt and powerless.
We need not be as cruel as they. We can instruct the fragments to come down away from the most inhabited areas. We are the monsters they created, and more, but we will be the sort of monsters we wish to be, in death.
And are we agreed, then?
Yes. Remwha, furious.
Yes. Gaewha, sorrowful.
Yes. Bimniwha, resigned.
Yes. Salewha, righteous.
Yes. Dushwha, weary.
And I, heavy as lead, say, Yes.
So we are agreed.
Only to myself do I think, No, with Kelenli’s face in my mind’s eye. But sometimes, when the world is hard, love must be harder still.
Launch Day.
We are brought nourishment—protein with a side of fresh sweet fruit, and a drink that we are told is a popular delicacy: sef, which turns pretty colors when various vitamin supplements are added to it. A special drink for a special day. It’s chalky. I don’t like it. Then it is time to travel to Zero Site.
Here is how the Plutonic Engine works, briefly and simply.
First we will awaken the fragments, which have sat in their sockets for decades channeling life-energy through each node of Syl Anagist—and storing some of it for later use, including that which was force-fed to them through the briar patches. They have now reached optimum storage and generation, however, each becoming a self-contained arcane engine of its own. Now when we summon them, the fragments will rise from their sockets. We’ll join their power together in a stable network and, after bouncing it off a reflector that will amplify and concentrate the magic still further, pour this into the onyx. The onyx will direct this energy straight into the Earth’s core, causing an overflow—which the onyx will then shunt into Syl Anagist’s hungry conduits. In effect, the Earth will become a massive plutonic engine too, the dynamo that is its core churning forth far more magic than is put into it. From there, the system will become self-perpetuating. Syl Anagist will feed upon the life of the planet itself, forever.
(Ignorance is an inaccurate term for what this was. True, no one thought of the Earth as alive in those days—but we should have guessed. Magic is the by-product of life. That there was magic in the Earth to take … We should all have guessed.)
Everything we have done, up to now, has been practice. We could never have activated the full Plutonic Engine here on Earth—too many complications involving the obliqueness of angles, signal speed and resistance, the curvature of the hemisphere. So awkwardly round, planets. Our target is the Earth, after all; lines of sight, lines of force and attraction. If we stay on the planet, all we can really affect is the Moon.