The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(14)

But what is she saying? Teach us? We don’t need to be taught. We were decanted knowing nearly everything we needed to know already, and the rest we learned in the first few weeks of life with our fellow tuners. If we hadn’t, we would be in the briar patch, too.

I make sure to frown. “How can you be a tuner like us?” This is a lie spoken for our observers, who see only the surface of things and think we do, too. She is not white like us, not short or strange, but we have known her for one of ours since we felt the cataclysm of her presence. I do not disbelieve that she is one of us. I can’t disbelieve the incontrovertible.

Kelenli smiles, with a wryness that acknowledges the lie. “Not quite like you, but close enough. You’re the finished artwork, I’m the model.” Threads of magic in the earth heat and reverberate and add other meanings. Prototype. A control to our experiment, made earlier to see how we should be done. She has only one difference, instead of the many that we possess. She has our carefully designed sessapinae. Is that enough to help us accomplish the task? The certainty in her earth-presence says yes. She continues in words: “I’m not the first that was made. Just the first to survive.”



We all push a hand at the air to ward off Evil Death. But I allow myself to look like I don’t understand as I wonder if we dare trust her. I saw how the conductor relaxed around her. Pheylen is one of the nice ones, but even she never forgets what we are. She forgot with Kelenli, though. Perhaps all humans think she is one of them, until someone tells them otherwise. What is that like, being treated as human when one is not? And then there’s the fact that they’ve left her alone with us. We they treat like weapons that might misfire at any moment… but they trust her.

“How many fragments have you attuned to yourself?” I ask aloud, as if this is a thing that matters. It is also a challenge.

“Only one,” Kelenli says. But she’s still smiling. “The onyx.”



Oh. Oh, that does matter. Gaewha and I exchange a look of wonder and concern before facing her again.

“And the reason I’m here,” Kelenli continues, abruptly insistent upon delivering this important information with mere words, which somehow perversely serves to emphasize them, “is because the order has been issued. The fragments are at optimum storage capacity and are ready for the generative cycle. Corepoint and Zero Site go live in twenty-eight days. We’re finally starting up the Plutonic Engine.”

(In tens of thousands of years, after people have repeatedly forgotten what “engines” are and know the fragments as nothing but “obelisks,” there will be a different name for the thing that rules our lives now. It will be called the Obelisk Gate, which is both more poetic and quaintly primitive. I like that name better.)

In the present, while Gaewha and I stand there staring, Kelenli drops one last shocker into the vibrations between our cells:

That means I have less than a month to show you who you really are.

Gaewha frowns. I manage not to react because the conductors watch our bodies as well as our faces, but it is a narrow thing. I’m very confused, and not a little unnerved. I have no idea, in the present of this conversation, that it is the beginning of the end.

Because we tuners are not orogenes, you see. Orogeny is what the difference of us will become over generations of adaptation to a changed world. You are the shallower, more specialized, more natural distillation of our so-unnatural strangeness. Only a few of you, like Alabaster, will ever come close to the power and versatility we hold, but that is because we were constructed as intentionally and artificially as the fragments you call obelisks. We are fragments of the great machine, too – just as much a triumph of genegineering and biomagestry and geomagestry and other disciplines for which the future will have no name. By our existence we glorify the world that made us, like any statue or scepter or other precious object.

We do not resent this, for our opinions and experiences have been carefully constructed, too. We do not understand that what Kelenli has come to give us is a sense of peoplehood. We do not understand why we have been forbidden this self-concept before now… but we will.

And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.

Well. We don’t have much use for words, anyway. But that’s what this is. The beginning. You, Essun, will see the end.

3

you, imbalanced

It takes a few days for you to recover enough to walk on your own. As soon as you can, Ykka reappropriates your stretcher-bearers to perform other tasks, which leaves you to hobble along, weak and made clumsy by the loss of your arm. The first few days you lag well behind the bulk of the group, catching up to camp with them only hours after they’ve settled for the night. There isn’t much left of the communal food by the time you go to take your share. Good thing you don’t feel hunger anymore. There aren’t many spaces left to lay out your bedroll, either – though they did at least give you a basic pack and supplies to make up for your lost runny-sack. What spaces there are aren’t good, located near the edges of the camp or off the road altogether, where the danger of attack by wildlife or commless is greater. You sleep there anyway because you’re exhausted. You suppose that if there’s any real danger, Hoa will carry you off again; he seems able to transport you for short distances through the earth with no trouble. Still, Ykka’s anger is a hard thing to bear, in more ways than one.