The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(56)

There is a thing Nassun has resisted doing since entering the cavern of the glass column; some things she doesn’t quite want to know. Now, however, she closes her eyes and reaches inside the vine with her sense of the silver.

At first it’s hard. The cells of the thing – because it is alive, more like a fungus than a plant, but there is also something artificial and mechanical about the way it has been made to function – press together so tightly that she doesn’t expect to see any silver between them. More dense than the stuff in people’s bodies. The arrangement of its substance is almost crystalline, in fact, cells lined up in neat little matrices, which she’s never seen in a living thing before.

And now that Nassun has seen down into the interstices of the vine’s substance, she can see that it doesn’t have any silver in it. What it has instead are… She isn’t sure how to describe it. Negative spaces? Where silver should be, but isn’t. Spaces that can be filled with silver. And as she gingerly explores them, fascinated, she begins to notice the way they pull at her perception, more and more, until – with a gasp, Nassun jerks her perception free.

You’ll see what to do, Steel has said. It should be obvious.

Schaffa, who has crouched to peer at the bit of rope, pauses and glances at her, frowning. “What is it?”



She stares back at him, but she doesn’t have the words to say what needs to be done. The words do not exist. She knows, however, what she needs to do. Nassun takes a step closer to the living vine.

“Nassun,” Schaffa says, his voice tight and warning with sudden alarm.

“I have to, Schaffa,” she says. She’s already lifting her hands. This is where all the silver of the outer cavern has been going, she realizes now; these vines have been eating it up. Why? She knows why, in the deepest and most ancient design of her flesh. “I have to, um, power the system.”



Then, before Schaffa can stop her, Nassun wraps both hands around the vine.

It does not hurt. That’s the trap of it. The sensation that spreads throughout her body is pleasant, in fact. Relaxing. If she could not perceive the silver, or the way the vine instantly starts dragging every bit of silver out of the spaces between her cells, she would think it was doing something good for her. As it is, it will kill her in moments.

She has access to more silver than just her own, though. Lazily, through the languor, Nassun reaches for the sapphire – and the sapphire responds instantly, easily.

Amplifiers, Alabaster called them, long before Nassun was ever born. Batteries is how you think of them, and how you once explained them to Ykka.

What Nassun understands the obelisks to be is simply engines. She’s seen engines at work – the simple pump-and-turbine things that regulated geo and hydro back in Tirimo, and occasionally more complex things like grain elevators. What she understands about engines would fill less than a thimble, but this much is clear even to a ten-year-old: To work, engines need fuel.

So she flows with the blue, and the sapphire’s power flows through her. The vine in her hands seems to gasp at the sudden influx, though this is just her imagination, she’s sure. Then it hums in her hands, and she sees how the empty, yawning spaces of its matrices fill and flow with glimmering silver light, and something immediately shunts that light away to somewhere else —



A loud clack echoes through the cavern. This is followed by other, fainter clacks, ramping up to a rhythm, and then a rising, low hum. The cavern brightens suddenly as the blue pylons turn white and blaze brighter, as do the tired yellow lights that they followed down the mosaic tunnel. Nassun flinches even in the depths of the sapphire, and in half a breath Schaffa has grabbed her away from the vine. His hands shake as he holds her close, but he doesn’t say anything, his relief palpable as he lets Nassun flop against him. She’s suddenly so drained that only his grip holds her up.

And in the meantime, something is coming along the track.

It is a ghostly thing, iridescent beetle green, graceful and sleek and nearly silent as it emerges from somewhere behind the glass column. Nothing of it makes sense to Nassun’s eyes. The bulk of it is roughly teardrop-shaped, though its narrower, pointy end is asymmetrical, the tip curving high off the ground in a way that makes her think of a crow’s beak. It’s huge, easily the size of a house, and yet it floats a few inches above the track, unsupported. The substance of it is impossible to guess, though it seems to have… skin? Yes; up close, Nassun can see that the surface of the thing has the same finely wrinkled texture as thick, well-worked leather. Here and there on that skin she glimpses odd, irregular lumps, each perhaps the size of a fist; they seem to have no visible purpose.

It blurs and flickers, though, the thing. From solidity to translucence and back, just like an obelisk.

“Very good,” says Steel, who is suddenly in front of them and to one side of the thing.

Nassun is too drained to flinch, though she’s recovering. Schaffa’s hands tighten on her shoulders in reflex, then relax. Steel ignores them both. One of the stone eater’s hands is upraised toward the strange floating thing, like a proud artist displaying his latest creation. He says, “You gave the system rather more power than absolutely necessary. The overflow has gone into lighting, as you can see, and other systems such as environmental controls. Pointless, but I suppose it does no harm. They’ll run down again in a few months, without any source to provide additional power.”