The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(27)

“I expected her to be the one to do this, is all.” Steel doesn’t shrug, but something in his voice suggests nonchalance. “I threatened her comm. Her friends, the people she cares about now. I thought they would turn on her, and then this choice would seem more palatable to her.”

The people she cares about now. “She’s not in Tirimo anymore?”

“No. She has joined another comm.”

“And they… didn’t turn on her?”

“No. Surprisingly.” Steel’s eyes slide over to meet Nassun’s. “She knows where you are now. The Gate told her. But she isn’t coming, or at least not yet. She wants to see her friends safely settled first.”

Nassun sets her jaw. “I’m not in Jekity anymore, anyway. And soon she won’t have the Gate, either, so she won’t be able to find me again.”

Steel turns fully to face her, this movement too slow and human-smooth to be human, though his astonishment seems genuine. She hates it when he moves slowly. It makes her get goose bumps.

“Nothing lasts forever, indeed,” he says.

“What’s that mean?”

“Only that I’ve underestimated you, little Nassun.” Nassun instantly dislikes this term of address. He shifts again to the thoughtful pose, fast this time, to her relief. “I think I’d better not do so again.”

With that, he vanishes. Nassun frowns at Schaffa, who shakes his head. They shoulder their packs and head west.

2400: Eastern Equatorials (check if node network was thin in this area, because…), unknown comm. Old local song about a nurse who stopped a sudden eruption and pyroclastic flow by turning it to ice. One of her patients threw himself in front of a crossbow bolt to protect her from the mob. Mob let her go; she vanished.

— Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars

Syl Anagist: Four

All energy is the same, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.

This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. The great machine called the Plutonic Engine is the instrument. We are its tuners.

And this is the goal: Geoarcanity. Geoarcanity seeks to establish an energetic cycle of infinite efficiency. If we are successful, the world will never know want or strife again… or so we are told. The conductors explain little beyond what we must know to fulfill our roles. It is enough to know that we – small, unimportant we – will help to set humanity on a new path toward an unimaginably bright future. We may be tools, but we are fine ones, put to a magnificent purpose. It is easy to find pride in that.

We are attuned enough to each other that the loss of Tetlewha causes trouble for a time. When we join to form our initializing network, it’s imbalanced. Tetlewha was our countertenor, the half wavelengths of the spectrum; without him I am closest, but my natural resonance is a little high. The resulting network is weaker than it should be. Our feeder threads keep trying to reach for Tetlewha’s empty middle range.

Gaewha is able to compensate for the loss, finally. She reaches deeper, resonates more powerfully, and this plugs the gap. We must spend several days reforging all the network’s connections to create new harmony, but it isn’t difficult to do this, just time-consuming. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to do it.

Kelenli joins us in the network only occasionally. This is frustrating, because her voice – deep and powerful and foot-tingling in its sharpness – is perfect. Better than Tetlewha’s, wider ranging than all of us together. But we are told by the conductors not to get used to her. “She’ll serve during the actual start-up of the Engine,” one of them says when I ask, “but only if she can’t manage to teach you how to do what she does. Conductor Gallat wants her on standby only, come Launch Day.”

This seems sensible, on the surface.

When Kelenli is part of us, she takes point. This is simply natural, because her presence is so much greater than ours. Why? Something in the way she is made? Something else. There is a… held note. A perpetual hollow burn at the midpoint of her balanced lines, at their fulcrum, which none of us understand. A similar burn rests in each of us, but ours is faint and intermittent, occasionally flaring only to quickly fade back to quiescence. Hers blazes steadily, its fuel apparently limitless.

Whatever this held-note burn is, the conductors have discovered, it meshes beautifully with the devouring chaos of the onyx. The onyx is the control cabochon of the whole Plutonic Engine, and while there are other ways to start up the Engine – cruder ways, workarounds involving subnetworks or the moonstone – on Launch Day we will absolutely need the onyx’s precision and control. Without it, our chances of successfully initiating Geoarcanity diminish greatly… but none of us, thus far, has had the strength to hold the onyx for more than a few minutes. We observe in awe, however, as Kelenli rides it for a solid hour, then actually seems unfazed when she disengages from it. When we engage the onyx, it punishes us, stripping everything we can spare and leaving us in a shutdown sleep for hours or days – but not her. Its threads caress rather than rip at her. The onyx likes her. This explanation is irrational, but it occurs to all of us, so that’s how we begin to think of it. Now she must teach us to be more likable to the onyx, in her stead.