The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(104)
(They were never meant to continue.)
But then, from the center of the vaulted room, perhaps a hundred feet farther in, she hears a sharp mechanical whirr.
She jumps and stumbles away from the cells, darting a quick, frightened look around to see if the noise has awakened any of the cells’ occupants. They don’t stir. She swallows and calls, softly, “Schaffa?”
Her answer, echoing through the high chamber, is a low, familiar groan.
Nassun stumbles forward, her breath catching. It’s him. Down the middle of the strange chamber stand contraptions, arranged in rows. Each consists of a chair attached to a complex arrangement of silver wire in loops and spars; she’s never seen anything like it. (You have.) Each contraption seems big enough to hold one person, but they’re all empty. And – Nassun leans closer for a better look, then shivers – each rests against a stone pillar that holds an obscenely complicated mechanism. It’s impossible not to notice the tiny scalpels, the delicate forcepslike attachments of varying sizes, and other instruments clearly meant for cutting and drilling…
Somewhere nearby, Schaffa groans. Nassun pushes the cutting things out of her thoughts and hurries down the row —
— to stop in front of the room’s lone occupied wire chair.
The chair has been adjusted somehow. Schaffa sits in it, but he is facedown, his body suspended by the wires, his chopped-off hair parting around his neck. The mechanism behind the chair has come alive, extending up and over his body in a way that feels predatory to her – but it is already retracting as she approaches. The bloodied instruments disappear into the mechanism; she hears more faint whirring sounds. Cleaning, maybe. One tiny, tweezer-like attachment remains, however, holding up a prize that still glistens, faintly, with Schaffa’s blood. A little metal shard, irregular and dark.
Hello, little enemy.
Schaffa isn’t moving. Nassun stares at his body, shaking. She cannot bring herself to shift her perception back to the silver threads, back to magic, to see if he is alive. The bloody wound high on the back of his neck has been neatly stitched, right over the other old scar that she has always wondered about. It’s still bleeding, but it’s clear the wound was inflicted quickly and sealed nearly as fast.
Like a child willing the monster under the bed to not exist, Nassun wills Schaffa’s back and sides to move.
They do, as he draws in a breath. “N-Nassun,” he croaks.
“Schaffa! Schaffa.” She flings herself to her knees and scooches forward to look at his face from underneath the wire contraption, heedless of the blood still dripping down the sides of his neck and face. His eyes, his beautiful white eyes, are half-open – and they are him this time! She sees that and bursts into tears herself. “Schaffa? Are you okay? Are you really okay?”
His speech is slow, slurred. Nassun will not think about why. “Nassun. I.” Even more slowly, his expression shifts, a seaquake in his brows sending a tsunami of slow realization across the rest. His eyes widen. “There’s. No pain.”
She touches his face. “The – the thing is out of you, Schaffa. That metal thing.”
He shuts his eyes and her belly clenches, but then the furrow vanishes from his brow. He smiles again – and for the first time since Nassun met him, there is nothing of tension or falsehood in it. He isn’t smiling to ease his pain or others’ fears. His mouth opens. She can see all his teeth, he’s laughing although weakly, he’s weeping, too, with relief and joy, and it is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She cups his face, mindful of the wound on the back of his neck, and presses her forehead against his, shaking with his soft laughter. She loves him. She just loves him so much.
And because she is touching him, because she loves him, because she is so attuned to his needs and his pain and making him happy, her perception slips into the silver. She doesn’t mean for it to. She just wants to use her eyes to savor the sight of him looking back at her, and her hands to touch his skin, and her ears to hear his voice.
But she is orogene, and she can no longer shut off the sesuna than she can sight or sound or touch. Which is why her smile falters, and her joy vanishes, because the instant she sees how the network of threads within him is already beginning to fade, she can no longer deny that he is dying.
It’s slow. He could last a few weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year, with what’s left. But where every other living thing churns forth its own silver almost by accident, where it flows and stutters and gums up the works between cells, there is nothing between his cells but a trickle. What’s left in him mostly runs along his nervous system, and she can see a glaring, gaping emptiness at what used to be the core of his silver network, in his sessapinae. Without his corestone, as he warned her, he will not last long.
Schaffa’s eyes have drifted shut. He’s asleep, exhausted by pushing his weakened body through the streets. But he isn’t the one who did that, is he? Nassun gets to her feet, shaking, keeping her hands on Schaffa’s shoulders. His heavy head presses against her chest. She stares at the little metal shard bitterly, understanding at once why Father Earth did this to him.
It knows she means to bring the Moon down, and that this will create a cataclysm far worse than the Shattering. It wants to live. It knows Nassun loves Schaffa, and that until now she has seen destroying the world as the only way to give him peace. Now, however, it has remade Schaffa, offering him to Nassun as a kind of living ultimatum.