The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(68)

And then the curve of the tunnel straightens out, and up ahead Nassun sees the hole for the first time.

The hole isn’t large. There’s something about it that is immediately, viscerally impressive nevertheless. It sits at the center of a vaulted cavern, surrounded by more panel lights, which have been set into the ground. As the vehimal approaches, these turn from white to bright red in a way that Nassun decides is another signal of warning. Down the hole is a yawning blackness. Instinctively she sesses, trying to grasp its dimensions – but she cannot. The circumference of the hole, yes; it’s only about twenty feet across. Perfectly circular. The depth, though… she frowns, uncurls from her chair, concentrates. The sapphire tickles at her mind, inviting use of its power, but she resists this; there are too many things in this place that respond to the silver, to magic, in ways she doesn’t understand. And anyway, she’s an orogene. Sessing the depth of a hole should be easy… but this hole stretches deep, deep, beyond her range.

And the vehimal’s track runs right up to the hole, and over its edge.

Which is as it should be, should it not? The goal is to reach Corepoint. Still, Nassun cannot help a surge of alarm that is powerful enough to edge along panic. “Schaffa!” He immediately reaches for her hand. She grips it tightly with no fear of hurting him. His strength, which has only ever been used to protect her, never in threat, is desperately needed reassurance right now.

“I have done this before,” he says, but he sounds uncertain. “I have survived it.”



But you don’t remember how, she thinks, feeling a kind of terror that she doesn’t know the word for.

(That word is premonition.)

Then the edge is there, and the vehimal tips forward. Nassun gasps and clutches at the armrests of her chair – but bizarrely, there is no vertigo. The vehimal does not speed up; its movement pauses for a moment, in fact, and Nassun catches a fleeting glimpse of a few of the thing’s cilia blurring at the edges of the view, as they somehow adjust the trajectory of the vehimal from forward to down. Something else has adjusted with this change, so that Nassun and Schaffa do not fall forward out of their seats; Nassun finds that her back and butt are just as firmly tucked into the chair now as before, even though this is impossible.

And meanwhile, a faint hum within the vehimal, which until now has been too low to be much more than subliminal, abruptly begins to grow louder. Unseen mechanisms reverberate faster in an unmistakable cycling-up pattern. As the vehimal completes its tilt, the view fills with darkness again, but this time Nassun knows it is the yawning black of the pit. There’s nothing ahead anymore. Only down.

“Launch,” says the voice within the vehimal.

Nassun gasps and clutches Schaffa’s hand harder as she is pressed back into her seat then by motion. It isn’t as much momentum as she should be feeling, however, because her every sense tells her that they have just shot forward at a tremendous rate, going much, much faster than even a running horse.

Into the dark.

At first the darkness is absolute, though broken periodically by a ring of light that blurs past as they hurtle through the tunnel. Their speed continues to increase; presently these rings pass so quickly that they are just flashes. It takes three before Nassun is able to discern what she’s seeing and sessing, and then only once she watches a ring as they pass it: windows. There are windows set into the walls of the tunnel, illuminated by the light. There’s living space down here, at least for the first few miles. Then the rings stop, and the tunnel is nothing but dark for a while.

Nassun sesses impending change an instant before the tunnel suddenly brightens. They can see a new, ruddy light that intersperses the rock walls of the tunnel. Ah, yes; they’ve gone far enough down that some of the rock has melted and glows bright red. This new light paints the vehimal’s interior bloody and makes the gold filigree along its walls seem to catch fire. The forward view is indistinct at first, just red amid gray and brown and black, but Nassun understands instinctively what she’s seeing. They have entered the mantle, and her fear finally begins to ebb amid fascination.

“The asthenosphere,” she murmurs. Schaffa frowns at her, but naming what she sees has eased her fear. Names have power. She bites her lip, then finally lets go of Schaffa’s hand to rise and approach the forward view. Up close it’s easier to tell that what she’s seeing is just an illusion of sorts – tiny diamonds of color rising on the vehimal’s inner skin, like a blush, to form a mosaic of moving images. How does it work? She can’t begin to fathom it.

Fascinated, she reaches up. The vehimal’s inner skin gives off no heat, though she knows they are already at a level underground where human flesh should burn up in an instant. When she touches the image on the forward view, it ripples ever so slightly around her finger, like waves in water. Putting her whole hand on a roil of brown-red color, she cannot help smiling. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the vehimal’s skin, is the burning earth. She’s touching the burning earth, thinly removed. She puts her other hand up, presses her cheek against the smooth plates. Here in this strange deadciv contraption, she is part of the earth, perhaps more so than any orogene before her has ever been. It is her, it is in her, she is in it.

When Nassun glances back over her shoulder at Schaffa, he’s smiling, despite the lines of pain around his eyes. It’s different from his usual smile. “What?” she asks.