The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(112)

“‘Us’?”



She sighs. “Orogenes.”



Oh. “The current Season will last for some time, even with the Rifting quelled,” I say. “Surviving it will require cooperation among many kinds of people. Cooperation presents opportunities.”



She frowns. “Opportunities… for what? You said the Seasons would end after this.”



“Yes.”



She holds up her hands, or one hand and one stump, to gesture in frustration. “People killed us and hated us when they needed us. Now we don’t even have that.”



Us. We. She still thinks of herself as orogene, though she will never again be able to do more than listen to the earth. I decide not to point this out. I do say, however, “And you won’t need them, either.”



She falls silent, perhaps in confusion. To clarify, I add, “With the end of the Seasons and the death of all the Guardians, it will now be possible for orogenes to conquer or eliminate stills, if they so choose. Previously, neither group could have survived without the other’s aid.”



Nassun gasps. “That’s horrible!”



I don’t bother to explain that just because something is horrible does not make it any less true.

“There won’t be any more Fulcrums,” she says. She looks away, troubled, perhaps remembering her destruction of the Antarctic Fulcrum. “I think… They’re wrong, but I don’t know how else…” She shakes her head.

I watch her flounder in silence for a month, or a moment. I say, “The Fulcrums are wrong.”



“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.