The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(85)

And near the edge of the city, down by one of the strange spokelike things that jut out into the water from its edge – not piers, really, just straight pieces of metal that make no sense – another stone eater stands every day with one hand upraised. Nassun just happens to be around when the stone eater blurs and there is a splash and suddenly his upraised hand holds by the tail a huge, wriggling fish that is as long as his body. His marble skin is sheened with wet. Nassun has nowhere in particular to be, so she sits down to watch. After a time, an ocean mammal – Nassun has read of these, creatures that look like fish but breathe air – sidles up to the city’s edge. It is gray-skinned, tube-shaped; there are sharp teeth along its jaw, but these are small. When it pushes up out of the water, Nassun sees that it is very old, and something about the questing movements of its head makes her realize it has gone blind. There’s old scarring on its forehead as well; something has injured the creature’s head badly. The creature nudges the stone eater, who of course does not move, and then nips at the fish in its hand, tearing off chunks and swallowing them until the stone eater releases the tail. When it is done, the creature utters a complex, high-pitched sound, like a… chitter? Or a laugh. Then it slides further into the water and swims away.

The stone eater flickers and faces Nassun. Curious, Nassun gets to her feet to go over and speak to him. By the time she’s standing, though, he has vanished.

This is what she comes to understand: There is life here, among these people. It isn’t life as she knows it, or a life she would choose, but life nevertheless. That gives her comfort, when she no longer has Schaffa to tell her that she is good and safe. That, and the silence, give her time to mourn. She did not understand before now that she needed this.

***

I’ve decided.

It’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. Some things are so broken that they can’t be fixed. You just have to finish them off, sweep away the rubble, and start over. Antimony agrees. Some of the other SEs do, too. Some don’t.

Rust those. They killed my life to make me their weapon, so that’s what I’m going to be. My choice. My commandment. We’ll do it in Yumenes. A commandment is set in stone.

I asked after Syen today. Don’t know why I care anymore. Antimony’s been keeping tabs, though. (For me?) Syenite is living in some little shithole comm in the Somidlats, I forget the name, playing creche teacher. Playing the happy little still. Married with two new children. How about that. Not sure about the daughter but the boy is pulling on the aquamarine.

Amazing. No wonder the Fulcrum bred you to me. And we did make a beautiful child in spite of everything, didn’t we? My boy.

I won’t let them find your boy, Syen. I won’t let them take him, and burn his brain, and put him in the wire chair. I won’t let them find your girl, either, if she’s one of us, or even if she’s Guardian-potential. There won’t be a Fulcrum left by the time I’m done. What follows won’t be good, but it’ll be bad for everyone – rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they’ll all know. Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change.

Then I’ll shut it down and put the Moon back. (It shouldn’t stone me, the first trajectory adjustment. Unless I underestimate Shouldn’t.) All I’m rusting good for anyway.

After that… it’ll be up to you, Syen. Make it better. I know I told you it wasn’t possible, that there was no way to make the world better, but I was wrong. I’m breaking it because I was wrong. Start it over, you were right, change it. Make it better for the children you have left. Make a world Corundum could have been happy in. Make a world where people like us, you and me and Innon and our sweet boy, our beautiful boy, could have stayed whole.

Antimony says I might get to see that world. Guess we’ll see. Rust it. I’m procrastinating. She’s waiting. Back to Yumenes today.

For you, Innon. For you, Coru. For you, Syen.

***

At night, Nassun can see the Moon.

This was terrifying, on the first night that she looked outside and noticed a strange pale whiteness outlining the streets and trees of the city, and then looked up to see a great white sphere in the sky. It is enormous, to her – bigger than the sun, far larger than the stars, trailed by a faint streak of luminescence that she does not know is the off-gassing of ice that has adhered to the lunar surface over the course of its travels. The white of it is the true surprise. She knows very little of the Moon – only what Schaffa told her. It is a satellite, he said, Father Earth’s lost child, a thing whose light reflects the sun. She expected it to be yellow, given that. It disturbs her to have been so wrong.

It disturbs her more that there is a hole in the thing, at nearly its dead center: a great, yawning darkness like the pinpoint pupil of an eye. It’s too small to tell for now, but Nassun thinks that maybe if she stares at it long enough, she will see stars on the other side of the Moon, through this hole.

Somehow it’s fitting. Whatever happened ages ago to cause the Moon’s loss was surely cataclysmic on multiple levels. If the Earth suffered the Shattering, then the fact that the Moon also bears scars feels normal and right. With a thumb, Nassun rubs the palm of her hand where her mother broke the bones, a lifetime ago.