The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(64)
This is ridiculous. You stare at her. “You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Figured we’d settle the issue of whether I’m going first, but we can skip to the details if you want.”
“I don’t trust you,” you say, mostly in exasperation.
“I don’t trust you, either. But we don’t have to like each other to work together.” Her own plate is empty; she picks it up and waves to one of the kids on cleanup duty to come take it. “It’s not like I have a reason to kill you, anyway. This time.”
And it’s worse that Danel has said this – that she remembers siccing a shirtless Guardian on you and is unapologetic about it. Yes, it was war and, yes, you later slaughtered her army, but… “People like you don’t need a reason!”
“I don’t think you have any real idea who or what ‘people like me’ are.” She’s not angry; her statement was matter-of-fact. “But if you need more reasons, here’s another: Rennanis is shit. Sure, there’s food, water, and shelter; your headwoman’s right to lead you there if it’s true that the city is empty now. Better than commlessness, or rebuilding somewhere with no storecaches. But shit otherwise. I’d rather stay on the move.”
“Bullshit,” you say, frowning. “No comm is that bad.”
Danel just lets out a single bitter snort. It makes you uneasy.
“Just think about it,” she says finally, and gets up to leave.
***
“I agree that Danel should come with us,” Lerna says, later that night when you tell him about the conversation. “She’s a good fighter. Knows the road. And she’s right: she has no reason to betray us.”
You’re half-asleep, because of the sex. It’s an anticlimactic thing now that it’s finally happened. What you feel for Lerna will never be intense, or guilt-free. You’ll always feel too old for him. But, well. He asked you to show him the truncated breast and you did, thinking that would mark the end of his interest in you. The sandy patch is crusty and rough amid the smoother brown of your torso – like a scab, though the wrong color and texture. His hands were gentle as he examined the spot and pronounced it sound enough to need no further bandaging. You told him that it didn’t hurt. You didn’t say that you were afraid you couldn’t feel anything anymore. That you were changing, hardening in more ways than one, becoming nothing but the weapon everyone keeps trying to make of you. You didn’t say, Maybe you’re better off with unrequited love.
But even though you didn’t say any of these things, after the examination he looked at you and replied, “You’re still beautiful.” You apparently needed to hear that a lot more than you realized. And now here you are.
So you process his words slowly because he’s made you feel relaxed and boneless and human again, and it’s a good ten seconds before you blurt, “‘Us’?”
He just looks at you.
“Shit,” you say, and drape an arm over your eyes.
The next day, Castrima enters the desert.
***
There comes a time of greater hardship for you.
All Seasons are hardship, Death is the fifth, and master of all, but this time is different. This is personal. This is a thousand people trying to cross a desert that is deadly even when acid rain isn’t sheeting from the sky. This is a group force-march along a highroad that is shaky and full of holes big enough to drop a house through. Highroads are built to withstand shakes, but there’s a limit, and the Rifting definitely surpassed it. Ykka decided to take the risk because even a damaged highroad is faster to travel than the desert sand, but this takes a toll. Every orogene in the comm has to stay on alert, because anything worse than a microshake while you’re up here could spell disaster. One day Penty, too exhausted to pay attention to her own instincts, steps on a patch of cracked asphalt that’s completely unstable. One of the other rogga kids snatches her away just as a big piece simply falls through the substructure of the road. Others are less careful, and less lucky.
The acid rain was unexpected. Stonelore does not discuss the ways in which Seasons can impact weather, because such things are unpredictable at the best of times. What happens here is not entirely surprising, however. Northward, at the equator, the Rifting pumps heat and particulates into the air. Moisture-laden tropical winds coming off the sea hit this cloud-seeding, energy-infusing wall, which whips them into storm. You remember being worried about snow. No. It’s endless, miserable rain.
(The rain is not so very acid, as these things go. In the Season of Turning Soil – long before Sanze, you would not know of it – there was rain that stripped animals’ fur and peeled the skins off oranges. This is nothing compared to that, and diluted as it is by water. Like vinegar. You’ll live.)
Ykka sets a brutal pace while you’re on the highroad. On the first day everyone makes camp well after nightfall, and Lerna does not come to the tent after you wearily put it up. He’s busy tending half a dozen people who are going lame from slips or twisted ankles, and two elders who are having breathing problems, and the pregnant woman. The latter three are doing all right, he tells you when he finally crawls into your bedroll, near dawn; Ontrag the potter lives on spite, and the pregnant woman has both her household and half the Breeders taking care of her. What’s troubling are the injuries. “I have to tell Ykka,” he says as you push a slab of rain-soaked cachebread and sour sausage into his mouth, then cover him up and make him lie still. He chews and swallows almost without noticing. “We can’t keep going at this pace. We’ll start losing people if we don’t —”