Someone’s brought Lerna his pack, which he dons quietly, watching you. Tonkee curses and starts rushing to get herself together, while Hjarka patiently helps. Danel uses a rag to mop sweat from her face.
You go over to Hoa, who has shaped his expression into one of wry amusement, and stand beside him to sigh at the mess. “Can you bring this many?”
“As long as they remain in contact with me or someone who’s touching me, yes.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Weren’t you?”
You look at him, but then Tonkee—still chewing something and shouldering her pack with her good arm—grabs his upraised hand, though she pauses to blatantly stare at it in fascination. The moment passes.
“So how’s this supposed to work?” Ykka paces the room, watching everyone and folding her arms. She’s noticeably more restless than usual. “You get there, grab the Moon, shove it into position, and then what? Will we see any sign of the change?”
“The Rifting will go cold,” you say. “That won’t change much in the short term because there’s too much ash in the air already. This Season will have to play itself out, and it’s going to be bad no matter what. The Moon might even make things worse.” You can sess it pulling on the world already; yeah, you’re pretty sure it’ll make things worse. Ykka nods, though. She can sess it, too.
But there’s a long-term loose end that you haven’t been able to figure out yourself. “If I can do it, though, restore the Moon …” You shrug helplessly and look at Hoa.
“It opens room for negotiation,” he says in his hollow voice. Everyone pauses to stare at him. By the flinches, you can tell who’s used to stone eaters and who isn’t. “And perhaps, a truce.”
Ykka grimaces. “‘Perhaps’? So we’ve gone through all this and you can’t even be sure it will stop the Seasons? Evil Earth.”
“No,” you admit. “But it will stop this Season.” That much you’re sure of. That much, alone, is worth it.
Ykka subsides, but she keeps muttering to herself now and again. This is how you know she wants to go, too—but you’re very glad she seems to have talked herself out of it. Castrima needs her. You need to know that Castrima will be here after you’re gone.
Finally everyone is ready. You take Hoa’s right hand with your left. You’ve got no other arm to spare for Lerna, so he wraps an arm around your waist; when you glance at him he nods, steady, determined. On Hoa’s other side are Tonkee and Hjarka and Danel, chain-linked hand to hand.
“This is going to blow, isn’t it?” Hjarka asks. She alone looks nervous, of the set. Danel’s radiating calm, at peace with herself at last. Tonkee’s so excited she can’t stop grinning. Lerna’s just leaning on you, rock-steady the way he always is.
“Probably!” Tonkee says, bouncing a little.
“This seems like a spectacularly bad idea,” Ykka says. She’s leaned against a wall of the room, arms folded, watching the group assemble. “Essie’s got to go, I mean, but the rest of you …” She shakes her head.
“Would you be coming, if you weren’t headwoman?” Lerna asks. It’s quiet. He always drops his biggest rocks like that, quietly and out of nowhere.
She scowls and glares at him. Then throws you a look that’s wary and maybe a little embarrassed, before she sighs and pushes away from the wall. You saw, though. The lump is back in your throat.
“Hey,” you say, before she can flee. “Yeek.”
She glares at you. “I hate that rusting nickname.”
You ignore this. “You told me a while back that you had a stash of seredis. We were supposed to get drunk after I beat the Rennanis army. Remember?”
Ykka blinks, and then a slow smile spreads across her face. “You were in a coma or something. I drank it all myself.”
You glare at her, surprised to find yourself honestly annoyed. She laughs in your face. So much for tender farewells.
But … well. It feels good anyway.
“Close your eyes,” Hoa says.
“He’s not joking,” you add, in warning. You keep yours open, though, as the world goes dark and strange. You feel no fear. You are not alone.
It’s nighttime. Nassun stands on what she thinks of as Corepoint’s town green. It isn’t; a city built before the Seasons would have no need of such a thing. It’s just a place near the enormous hole that is Corepoint’s heart. Around the hole are strangely slanted buildings, like the pylons she saw in Syl Anagist—but these ones are huge, stories high and a block wide apiece. She’s learned that when she gets too near these buildings, which don’t have any doors or windows that she can see, it sets off warnings composed of bright red words and symbols, several feet high apiece, which blaze in the air over the city. Worse are the low, blatting alarm-sounds that echo through the streets—not loud, but insistent, and they make her teeth feel loose and itchy.
(She’s looked into the hole, despite all this. It’s enormous compared to the one that was in the underground city—many times that one’s circumference, so big that it would take her an hour or more to walk all the way around it. Yet for all its grandeur, despite the evidence it offers of feats of geneering long lost to humankind, Nassun cannot bring herself to be impressed by it. The hole feeds no one, provides no shelter against ash or assault. It doesn’t even scare her—though that is meaningless. After her journey through the underground city and the core of the world, after losing Schaffa, nothing will ever frighten her again.)
The spot Nassun has found is a perfectly circular patch of ground just beyond the hole’s warning radius. It’s odd ground, slightly soft to the touch and springy beneath her feet, not like any material she’s ever touched before—but here in Corepoint, that sort of experience isn’t rare. There’s no actual soil in this circle, aside from a bit of windblown stuff piled up along the edges of the circle; a few seagrasses have taken root here, and there’s the desiccated, spindly trunk of a dead sapling that did its best before being blown over, many years before. That’s all.
A number of stone eaters have appeared around the circle, she notes as she takes up position at its center. No sign of Steel, but there must be twenty or thirty others on street corners or in the street, sitting on stairs, leaning against walls. A few turned their heads or eyes to watch as she passed, but she ignored and ignores them. Perhaps they have come to witness history. Maybe some are like Steel, hoping for an end to their horrifyingly endless existence; maybe the ones who’ve helped her have done so because of that. Maybe they’re just bored. Not the most exciting town, Corepoint.
Nothing matters, right now, except the night sky. And in that sky, the Moon is beginning to rise.
It sits low on the horizon, seemingly bigger than it was the night before and made oblong by the distortions of the air. White and strange and round, it hardly seems worth all the pain and struggle that its absence has symbolized for the world. And yet—it pulls on everything within Nassun that is orogene. It pulls on the whole world.