“What?”
“Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society.” I pause deliberately, and she blinks, perhaps remembering that orogene parents are perfectly capable of raising orogene children without disaster. “Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.”
There is such sorrow in her, your little girl. I hope Nassun learns someday that she is not alone in the world. I hope she learns how to hope again.
She lowers her gaze. “They’re not going to choose anything different.”
“They will if you make them.”
She’s wiser than you, and does not balk at the notion of forcing people to be decent to each other. Only the methodology is a problem. “I don’t have any orogeny anymore.”
“Orogeny,” I say, sharply so she will pay attention, “was never the only way to change the world.”
She stares. I feel that I have said all I can, so I leave her there to contemplate my words.
I visit the city’s station, and charge its vehimal with sufficient magic to return to the Stillness. It will still take a journey of months or more for Nassun and her companions to reach Rennanis from the Antarctics. The Season will likely get worse while they travel, because we have a Moon again. Still … they are part of you. I hope they survive.
Once they’re on their way, I come here, to the heart of the mountain beneath Corepoint. To attend to you.
There is no one true way, when we initiate this process. The Earth—for the sake of good relations I will no longer call it Evil—reordered us instantly, and by now many of us are skilled enough to replicate that reordering without a lengthy gestation. I have found that speed produces mixed results, however. Alabaster, as you would call him, may not fully remember himself for centuries—or ever. You, however, must be different.
I have brought you here, reassembled the raw arcanic substance of your being, and reactivated the lattice that should have preserved the critical essence of who you were. You’ll lose some memory. There is always loss, with change. But I have told you this story, primed what remains of you, to retain as much as possible of who you were.
Not to force you into a particular shape, mind you. From here on, you may become whomever you wish. It’s just that you need to know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going. Do you understand?
And if you should decide to leave me … I will endure. I’ve been through worse.
So I wait. Time passes. A year, a decade, a week. The length of time does not matter, though Gaewha eventually loses interest and leaves to attend her own affairs. I wait. I hope … no. I simply wait.
And then one day, deep in the fissure where I have put you, the geode splits and hisses open. You rise from its spent halves, the matter of you slowing and cooling to its natural state.
Beautiful, I think. Locs of roped jasper. Skin of striated ocher marble that suggests laugh lines at eyes and mouth, and stratified layers to your clothing. You watch me, and I watch you back.
You say, in an echo of the voice you once had, “What is it that you want?”
“Only to be with you,” I say.
“Why?”
I adjust myself to a posture of humility, with head bowed and one hand over my chest. “Because that is how one survives eternity,” I say, “or even a few years. Friends. Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.”
Do you remember when I first told you this, back when you despaired of ever repairing the harm you’d done? Perhaps. Your position adjusts, too. Arms folded, expression skeptical. Familiar. I try not to hope and fail utterly.
“Friends, family,” you say. “Which am I, to you?”
“Both and more. We are beyond such things.”
“Hmm.”
I am not anxious. “What do you want?”
You consider. I listen to the slow ongoing roar of the volcano, down here in the deep. Then you say, “I want the world to be better.”
I have never regretted more my inability to leap into the air and whoop for joy.
Instead, I transit to you, with one hand proffered. “Then let’s go make it better.”
You look amused. It’s you. It’s truly you. “Just like that?”
“It might take some time.”
“I don’t think I’m very patient.” But you take my hand.
Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.
“Neither am I,” I say. “So let’s get to it.”
Acknowledgments
Whew. That took a bit, didn’t it?
The Stone Sky marks more than just the end of another trilogy, for me. For a variety of reasons, the period in which I wrote this book has turned out to be a time of tremendous change in my life. Among other things, I quit my day job and became a full-time writer in July of 2016. Now, I liked my day job, where I got to help people make healthy decisions—or at least survive long enough to do so—at one of the most crucial transition points of adult life. I do still help people, I think, as a writer, or at least that’s the impression I get from those of you who’ve sent letters or online messages telling me how much my writing has touched you. But in my day job, the work was more direct, as were its agonies and rewards. I miss it a lot.
Oh, don’t get me wrong; this was a good and necessary life transition to make. My writing career has exploded in all the best ways, and after all, I love being a writer, too. But it’s my nature to reflect in times of change, and to acknowledge both what was lost as well as what was gained.
This change was facilitated by a Patreon (artist crowdfunding) campaign that I began in May of 2016. And on a more somber note … this Patreon funding is also what allowed me to focus wholly on my mother during the final days of her life, in late 2016 and early 2017. I don’t often talk about personal things in public, but you can perhaps see how the Broken Earth trilogy is my attempt to wrestle with motherhood, among other things. Mom had a difficult last few years. I think (so many of my novels’ underpinnings become clear in retrospect) that on some level I suspected her death was coming; maybe I was trying to prepare myself. Still wasn’t ready when it happened … but then, no one ever is.
So I’m grateful to everyone—my family, my friends, my agent, my Patrons, the folks at Orbit, including my new editor, my former coworkers, the staff of the hospice, everyone—who helped me through this.
And this is why I’ve worked so hard to get The Stone Sky out on time, despite travel and hospitalizations and stress and all the thousand bureaucratic indignities of life after a parent’s death. I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.
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