The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(96)

That strange presence that has attacked us pulls hard against the Plutonic Engine, trying to dislodge our control once more. I shout at it in wordless geyserboil magmacrack fury. Get out of here! I rage. Leave us alone!

You started this, it hisses into the strata, trying again. When this fails, however, it snarls in frustration – and then locks, instead, into those twenty-seven fragments that have gone so mysteriously offline. Dushwha senses the hostile entity’s intent and tries to grasp some of the twenty-seven, but the fragments slip through their grasp as if coated with oil. This is true enough, figuratively speaking; something has contaminated these fragments, leaving them fouled and nearly impossible to grasp. We might manage it with concerted effort, one by one – but there is no time. And until then, the enemy holds the twenty-seven.

Stalemate. We still hold the onyx. We hold the other two hundred and twenty-nine fragments, which are ready to fire the feedback pulse that will destroy Syl Anagist – and ourselves. We’ve postponed that, however, because we cannot leave matters like this. Where did this entity, so angry and phenomenally powerful, come from? What will it do with the obelisks that it holds? Long moments pass in pent silence. I cannot speak for the others, but I, at least, begin to think there will be no further attacks. I have always been such a fool.

Into the silence comes the amused, malicious challenge of our enemy, ground forth in magic and iron and stone.

Burn for me, says Father Earth.

***

I must speculate on some of what follows, even after all these ages spent seeking answers.

I can narrate no more because in the moment everything was nigh-instantaneous, and confusing, and devastating. The Earth changes only gradually, until it doesn’t. And when it fights back, it does so decisively.

Here is the context. That first test bore that initiated the Geoarcanity project also alerted the Earth to humanity’s efforts to take control of it. Over the decades that followed, it studied its enemy and began to understand what we meant to do. Metal was its instrument and ally; never trust metal for this reason. It sent splinters of itself to the surface to examine the fragments in their sockets – for here, at least, was life stored in crystal, comprehensible to an entity of inorganic matter in a way that mere flesh was not. Only gradually did it learn how to take control of individual human lives, though it required the medium of the corestones to do so. We are such small, hard-to-grasp creatures, otherwise. Such insignificant vermin, apart from our unfortunate tendency to sometimes make ourselves dangerously significant. The obelisks, though, were a more useful tool. Easy to turn back on us, like any carelessly held weapon.

Burndown.

Remember Allia? Imagine that disaster times two hundred and fifty-six. Imagine the Stillness perforated at every nodal point and seismically active site, and the ocean, too – hundreds of hot spots and gas pockets and oil reservoirs breached, and the entire plate-tectonic system destabilized. There is no word for such a catastrophe. It would liquefy the surface of the planet, vaporizing the oceans and sterilizing everything from the mantle up. The world, for us and any possible creature that might ever evolve in the future to hurt the Earth, would end. The Earth itself would be fine, however.

We could stop it. If we wanted to.

I will not say we weren’t tempted, when faced with the choice between permitting the destruction of a civilization, or of all life on the planet. Syl Anagist’s fate was sealed. Make no mistake: We had meant to seal it. The difference between what the Earth wanted and what we wanted was merely a matter of scale. But which is the way the world ends? We tuners would be dead; the distinction mattered little to me in that moment. It’s never wise to ask such a question of people who have nothing to lose.

Except. I did have something to lose. In those eternal instants, I thought of Kelenli, and her child.

Thus it was that my will took precedence within the network. If you have any doubt, I’ll say it plainly now: I am the one who chose the way the world ended.

I am the one who took control of the Plutonic Engine. We could not stop Burndown, but we could insert a delay into the sequence and redirect the worst of its energy. After the Earth’s tampering, the power was too volatile to simply pour back into Syl Anagist as we’d originally planned; that would have done the Earth’s work for us. That much kinetic force had to be expended somewhere. Nowhere on the planet, if I meant for humanity to survive – but here were the Moon and the moonstone, ready and waiting.

I was in a hurry. There was no time to second-guess. The power could not reflect from the moonstone, as it was meant to; that would only increase the power of Burndown. Instead, with a snarl as I grabbed the others and forced them to help me – they were willing, just slow – we shattered the moonstone cabochon.

In the next instant, the power struck the broken stone, failed to reflect, and began to chew its way through the Moon. Even with this to mitigate the blow, the force of impact was devastating in itself. More than enough to slam the Moon out of orbit.

The backlash of misusing the Engine this way should have simply killed us, but the Earth was still there, the ghost in the machine. As we writhed in our death throes, all of Zero Site crumbling apart around us, it took control again.

I have said that it held us responsible for the attempt on its life, and it did – but somehow, perhaps through its years of study, it understood that we were tools of others, not actors of our own volition. Remember, too, that the Earth does not fully understand us. It looks upon human beings and sees short-lived, fragile creatures, puzzlingly detached in substance and awareness from the planet on which their lives depend, who do not understand the harm they tried to do – perhaps because they are so short-lived and fragile and detached. And so it chose for us what seemed, to it, a punishment leavened with meaning: It made us part of it. In my wire chair, I screamed as wave upon wave of alchemy worked over me, changing my flesh into raw, living, solidified magic that looks like stone.