The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3)(8)

And yet. You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too.

He lifts your hand with both his own, one positioned under your elbow, his fingers lightly braced under your closed, cracked fist. Slowly, slowly. It doesn’t hurt your shoulder this way. Halfway to his face he moves the hand that had been under your elbow, shifting it to cup the underside of your upper arm. His stone slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing.

Then your fist rests against his lips. The lips don’t move as he says, from within his chest, “Are you afraid?”

You consider this for a long moment. Shouldn’t you be? But… “No.”

“Good,” he replies. “I do this for you, Essun. Everything is for you. Do you believe that?”

You don’t know, at first. On impulse you lift your good hand, smooth fingers over his hard, cool, polished cheek. It’s hard to see him, black against the dark, but your thumb finds his brows and traces out his nose, which is longer in its adult shape. He told you once that he thinks of himself as human in spite of his strange body. You belatedly realize that you’ve chosen to see him as human, too. That makes this something other than an act of predation. You’re not sure what it is instead, but… it feels like a gift.

“Yes,” you say. “I believe you.”

His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open. Once you worried his mouth was too small; now it’s wide enough to fit a fist. And such teeth he has, small and even and diamond-clear, glinting prettily in the red evening light. There is only darkness beyond those teeth.

You shut your eyes.

***

She was in a foul mood. Old age, one of her children told me. She said it was just the stress of trying to warn people who didn’t want to hear that bad times were coming. It wasn’t a foul mood, it was the privilege that age had bought her, to dispense with the lie of politeness.

“There isn’t a villain in this story,” she said. We sat in the garden dome, which was only a dome because she’d insisted. The Syl Skeptics still claim there’s no proof things will happen the way she said, but she’s never been wrong in one of her predictions, and she’s more Syl than they are, so. She was drinking sef, as if to mark a truth in chemicals.

“There isn’t a single evil to point to, a single moment when everything changed,” she went on. “Things were bad and then terrible and then better and then bad again, and then they happened again, and again, because no one stopped it. Things can be… adjusted. Lengthen the better, predict and shorten the terrible. Sometimes prevent the terrible by settling for the merely bad. I’ve given up on trying to stop you people. Just taught my children to remember and learn and survive… until someone finally breaks the cycle for good.”

I was confused. “Are you talking about Burndown?” That was what I’d come to talk about, after all. One hundred years, she predicted, fifty years ago. What else mattered?

She only smiled.

— Transcribed interview, translated from Obelisk-Builder C, found in Tapita Plateau Ruin #723 by Shinash Innovator Dibars. Date unknown, transcriber unknown. Speculation: the first lorist? Personal: ’Baster, you should see this place. Treasures of history everywhere, most of them too degraded to decipher, but still… Wish you were here.

2
Nassun feels like busting loose

Nassun stands over the body of her father, if one can call a tumbled mass of broken jewels a body. She’s swaying a little, light-headed because the wound in her shoulder – where her father has stabbed her – is bleeding profusely. The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.

To one side of this tableau stands Schaffa, Nassun’s Guardian, who stares down at what is left of Jija Resistant Jekity in a combination of wonder and cold satisfaction. At Nassun’s other side is Steel, her stone eater. It is appropriate to call him that now, hers, because he has come in her hour of need – not to help, never that, but to provide her with something nevertheless. What he offers, and what she has finally realized she needs, is purpose. Not even Schaffa has given her this, but that’s because Schaffa loves her unconditionally. She needs that love, too, oh how she needs it, but in this moment when her heart has been most thoroughly broken, when her thoughts are at their least focused, she craves something more… solid.

She will have the solidity that she wants. She will fight for it and kill for it, because she’s had to do that again and again and it is habit now, and if she is successful she will die for it. After all, she is her mother’s daughter – and only people who think they have a future fear death.

In Nassun’s good hand thrums a three-foot-long, tapering shard of crystal, deep blue and finely faceted, though with some slight deformations near its base that have resulted in something like a hilt. Now and again this strange longknife flickers into a translucent, intangible, debatably real state. It’s very real; only Nassun’s attention keeps the thing in her hands from turning her to colored stone the way it did her father. She’s afraid of what might happen if she passes out from blood loss, so she would really like to send the sapphire back up into the sky to resume its default shape and immense size – but she can’t. Not yet.