The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(29)

“If she is some sort of troublemaker, that will show itself with time,” I say firmly. That does not end, but at least postpones, the argument.

Kelenli returns the next day. The conductors bring us together to explain. “Kelenli has asked to take you on a tuning mission,” says the man who comes to deliver the briefing. He’s much taller than us, taller even than Kelenli, and slender. He likes to dress in perfectly matched colors and ornate buttons. His hair is long and black; his skin is white, though not so much as ours. His eyes are like ours, however – white within white. White as ice. We’ve never seen another one of them with eyes like ours. He is Conductor Gallat, head of the project. I think of Gallat as a plutonic fragment – a clear one, diamond-white. He is precisely angled and cleanly faceted and beautiful in a unique way, and he is also implacably deadly if not handled with precision. We don’t let ourselves think about the fact that he’s the one who killed Tetlewha.

(He isn’t who you think he is. I want Gallat to look like him the way I want you to look like her. This is the hazard of a flawed memory.)

“A tuning… mission,” Gaewha says slowly, to show that she doesn’t understand.

Kelenli opens her mouth to speak and then stops, turning to Gallat. Gallat smiles genially at this. “Kelenli’s performance is what we were hoping for with all of you, and yet you’ve consistently underperformed,” he says. We tense, uncomfortable, hyperconscious of criticism, though he merely shrugs. “I’ve consulted with the chief biomagestre, and she’s insistent that there’s no significant difference in your relative abilities. You have the same capability that she has, but you don’t demonstrate the same skill. There are any number of alterations we could make to try to resolve the discrepancy, fine-tuning so to speak, but that’s a risk we’d rather not take so close to launch.”

We reverberate in one accord for a moment, all of us very glad for this. “She said that she was here to teach us context,” I venture, very carefully.

Gallat nods to me. “She believes the solution is outside experience. Increased exposure to stimuli, challenging your problem-solving cognition, things like that. It’s a suggestion that has merit and the benefit of being minimally invasive – but for the sake of the project, we can’t send you all out at once. What if something happened? Instead we will split you into two groups. Since there’s only one of Kelenli, that means half of you will go with her now, and half in a week.”

Outside. We’re going outside. I’m desperate to be in the first group, but we know better than to show desire before the conductors. Tools should not want to escape their box so obviously.

I say, instead, “We’ve been more than sufficiently attuned to one another without this proposed mission.” My voice is flat. A statue’s. “The simulations show that we are reliably capable of controlling the Engine, as expected.”

“And we might as well do six groups as two,” adds Remwha. By this asinine suggestion do I know his eagerness. “Will each group not have different experiences? As I understand the… outside… there’s no way to control for consistency of exposure. If we must take time away from our preparations for this, surely it should be done in a way that minimizes risk?”

“I think six wouldn’t be cost-effective or efficient,” Kelenli says, while silently signaling approval and amusement for our playacting. She glances at Gallat and shrugs, not bothering to pretend that she is emotionless; she simply seems bored. “We might as well do one group as two or six. We can plan the route, position extra guards along the way, involve the nodal police for surveillance and support. Honestly, repeated trips would just increase the chance that disaffected citizens might anticipate the route and plan… unpleasantness.”

We are all intrigued by the possibility of unpleasantness. Kelenli quells our excited tremors.

Conductor Gallat winces as she does this; that one struck home. “The potential for significant gains are why you will go,” Conductor Gallat says to us. He’s still smiling, but there’s an edge to it now. Was the word will ever so slightly emphasized? So minute, the perturbations of audible speech. What I take from this is that not only will he let us go, but he has also changed his mind about sending us in multiple groups. Some of this is because Kelenli’s suggestion was the most sensible, but the rest is because he’s irritated with us for our apparent reluctance.

Ah, Remwha wields his annoying nature like a diamond chisel as usual. Excellent work, I pulse. He returns me a polite thank-you waveform.

We are to leave that very day. Clothing suitable for travel outdoors is brought to my quarters by junior conductors. I pull on the thicker cloth and shoes carefully, fascinated by the different textures, and then sit quietly while the junior conductor plaits my hair into a single white braid. “Is this necessary for outside?” I ask. I’m genuinely curious, since the conductors wear their hair in many styles. Some of them I can’t emulate, because my hair is poufy and coarse and will not hold a curl or bear straightening. Only we have hair like this. Theirs comes in many textures.

“It might help,” says the junior. “You lot are going to stand out no matter what, but the more normal we can make you seem, the better.”

“People will know we’re part of the Engine,” I say, straightening just a little in pride.