The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(59)

And I, fool that I am, watch Kelenli. I want to understand what she means us to learn, either from that art-thing at the museum or our afternoon garden idyll. Her face and sessapinae reveal nothing, but that’s all right. I also want to simply look at her face and bask in that deep, powerful orogenic presence of hers. It’s nonsensical. Probably disturbing to her, though she ignores me if so. I want her to look at me. I want to speak to her. I want to be her.

I decide that what I’m feeling is love. Even if it isn’t, the idea is novel enough to fascinate me, so I decide to follow where its impulses lead.

After a time, Kelenli rises and walks away from where we wander the garden. At the center of the garden is a small structure, like a tiny house but made of stone bricks rather than the cellulose greenstrate of most buildings. One determined ivy grows over its nearer wall. When she opens the door of this house, I am the only one who notices. By the time she’s stepped inside, all the others have stopped whatever they were doing and stood to watch her, too. She pauses, amused – I think – by our sudden silence and anxiety. Then she sighs and jerks her head in a silent Come on. We scramble to follow.

Inside – we cram carefully in after Kelenli; it’s a tight fit – the little house has a wooden floor and some furnishings. It’s nearly as bare as our cells back at the compound, but there are some important differences. Kelenli sits down on one of the chairs and we realize: This is hers. Hers. It is her… cell? No. There are peculiarities all around the space, things that offer intriguing hints as to Kelenli’s personality and past. Books on a shelf in the corner mean that someone has taught her to read. A brush on the edge of the sink suggests that she does her own hair, impatiently to judge by the amount of hair caught in its bristles. Maybe the big house is where she is supposed to be, and maybe she actually sleeps there sometimes. This little garden house, however, is… her home.

“I grew up with Conductor Gallat,” Kelenli says softly. (We’ve sat down on the floor and chairs and bed around her, rapt for her wisdom.) “Raised alongside him, the experiment to his control – just as I’m your control. He’s ordinary, except for a drop of undesirable ancestry.”



I blink my icewhite eyes, and think of Gallat’s, and suddenly I understand many new things. She smiles when my mouth drops open in an O. Her smile doesn’t last long, however.

“They – Gallat’s parents, who I thought were my parents – didn’t tell me at first what I was. I went to school, played games, did all the things a normal Sylanagistine girl does while growing up. But they didn’t treat me the same. For a long time I thought it was something I’d done.” Her gaze drifts away, weighty with old bitterness. “I wondered why I was so horrible that even my parents couldn’t seem to love me.”



Remwha crouches to rub a hand along the wooden slats of the floor. I don’t know why he does anything. Salewha is still outside, since Kelenli’s little house is too cramped for her tastes; she has gone to stare at a tiny, fast-moving bird that flits among the flowers. She listens through us, though, through the house’s open door. We all need to hear what Kelenli says, with voice and vibration and the steady, heavy weight of her gaze.

“Why did they deceive you?” Gaewha asks.

“The experiment was to see if I could be human.” Kelenli smiles to herself. She’s sitting forward in her chair, elbows braced on her knees, looking at her hands. “See if, raised among decent, natural folk, I might turn out at least decent, if not natural. And so my every achievement was counted a Sylanagistine success, while my every failure or display of poor behavior was seen as proof of genetic degeneracy.”



Gaewha and I look at each other. “Why would you be indecent?” she asks, utterly mystified.

Kelenli blinks out of her reverie and stares at us for a moment, and in that time we feel the gulf between us. She thinks of herself as one of us, which she is. She thinks of herself as a person, too, though. Those two concepts are incompatible.

“Evil Death,” she says softly, wonderingly, echoing our thoughts. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”



Our guards have taken up positions at the top of the steps leading into the garden, nowhere in earshot. This space is as private as anything we have had today. It is almost surely bugged, but Kelenli does not seem to care, and we don’t, either. She draws up her feet and wraps her arms around her knees, curiously vulnerable for someone whose presence within the strata is as deep and dense as a mountain. I reach up to touch her ankle, greatly daring, and she blinks and smiles at me, reaching down to cover my fingers with her hand. I will not understand my feelings for centuries afterward.

The contact seems to strengthen Kelenli. Her smile fades and she says, “Then I’ll tell you.”



Remwha is still studying her wooden floor. He rubs the grain of it with his fingers and manages to send along its dust molecules: Should you? I am chagrined because it’s something I should have considered.

She shakes her head, smiling. No, she shouldn’t.

But she does anyway, through the earth so we will know it’s true.

***

Remember what I have told you: The Stillness in these days is three lands, not one. Their names, if this matters, are Maecar, Kakhiarar, and Cilir. Syl Anagist started out as part of Kakhiarar, then all of it, then all of Maecar, too. All became Syl Anagist.