The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(34)

You grope forward for a bit, hand out in front of you in case it is some kind of illusion, but if so, it’s at least an accurate one. While it’s strange to put your foot down on a lattice of silver, after a while you get used to it.

The orogene’s distinctive lattice and that still-held torus aren’t far, but he’s somewhere higher up than the ground. Maybe ten feet above where you stand. This is explained somewhat when the ground abruptly slopes upward and your hand touches stone. Your regular vision has adapted enough that you can see there’s a pillar here, crooked and probably climbable, at least by someone who’s got more than one arm. So you stop at the foot of it and say, “Hey.”



No response. You become aware of breathing: quick, shallow, pent. Like someone who’s trying not to be heard breathing.

“Hey.” Squinting in the dark, you finally make out some kind of structure of stacked branches and old boards and debris. A blind, maybe. From up there in the blind, it must be possible to see the road. Sight doesn’t matter for the average orogene; untrained ones can’t direct their power at all. A Fulcrum-trained orogene, though, needs line of sight to be able to distinguish between freezing useful supplies, or just freezing the people defending same.

Something shifts in the blind above you. Has there been a catch in the breathing? You try to think of something to say, but all that’s in your head is a question: What’s a Fulcrum-trained orogene doing among the commless? Must have been out on an assignment when the Rifting occurred. Without a Guardian – or he’d be dead – so that means he’s fifth ring or higher, or maybe a three-or four-ringer who’s lost their higher-ranked partner. You envision yourself, if you’d been on the road to Allia when the Rifting struck. Knowing your Guardian might come for you, but gambling that he might instead write you off for dead… no. That ends the imagining right there. Schaffa would have come for you. Schaffa did come for you.

But that was between Seasons. Guardians supposedly do not join comms when Seasons come, which means they die – and, in fact, the only Guardian you’ve seen since the Rifting was that one with Danel and the Rennanis army. She died in the boilbug storm that you invoked, and you’re glad of it, since she was one of the bare-skin killers and there’s more than the usual wrong with that kind. Either way, here’s another ex-blackjacket out here alone, and maybe afraid, and maybe hair-triggered to kill. You know what that’s like, don’t you? But this one hasn’t attacked yet. You have to find some way to make a connection.

“I remember,” you say. It’s soft, a murmur. Like you don’t want to hear even yourself. “I remember the crucibles. The instructors, killing us to save us. Did they m-make you have children, too?” Corundum. Your thoughts jerk away from memories. “Did they – shit.” The hand that Schaffa once broke, your right hand, is somewhere in whatever passes for Hoa’s belly. You still feel it, though. Phantom ache across phantom bones. “I know they broke you. Your hand. All of us. They broke us so they could —”



You hear, very clearly, a soft, horrified inhalation from within the blind.

The torus whips into a blurring, blistering spin, and explodes outward. You’re so close that it almost catches you. That gasp was enough warning, though, and so you’ve braced yourself orogenically, even if you couldn’t do so physically. Physically you flinch and it’s too much for your precarious, one-armed balance. You fall backward, landing hard on your ass – but you’ve been drilled since childhood in how to retain control on one level even as you lose it in another, so in the same instant you flex your sessapinae and simply slap his fulcrum out of the earth, inverting it. You’re much stronger; it’s easy. You react magically, too, grabbing those whipping tendrils of silver that the torus has stirred – and belatedly you realize orogeny affects magic, but isn’t magic itself, in fact the magic flinches away from it; that’s why you can’t work high-level orogeny without negatively impacting your ability to deploy magic, how nice to finally understand! Regardless, you tamp the wild threads of magic back down, and quell everything at once, so that nothing worse than a rime of frost dusts your body. It’s cold, but only on your skin. You’ll live.

Then you let go – and all the orogeny and magic snaps away from you like stretched rubber. Everything in you seems to twang in response, in resonance, and – oh – oh no – you feel the amplitude of the resonance rise as your cells begin to align… and compress into stone.

You can’t stop it. You can, however, direct it. In the instant that you have, you decide which body part you can afford to lose. Hair! No, too many strands, too much of it distant from the live follicles; you can do it but it’ll take too long and half your scalp will be stone by the time you’re done. Toes? You need to be able to walk. Fingers? You’ve only got one hand, need to keep it intact as long as you can.

Breasts. Well, you’re not planning on having more children anyway.

It’s enough to channel the resonance, the stoning, into just one. Have to take it through the glands under the armpit, but you manage to keep it above the muscle layer; that might keep the damage from impairing your movement and breathing. You pick the left breast, to offset your missing right arm. The right breast is the one you always liked better, anyway. Prettier. And then you lie there when it’s done, still alive, hyperaware of the extra weight on your chest, too shocked to mourn. Yet.