The Obelisk Gate

13 you, amid relics

IT BEGINS TO FEEL AS though you’ve lived in Castrima all your life. It shouldn’t. Just another comm, just another name, just another new start, or at least a partial one. It will probably end the way all the others have. But… it makes a difference that here, everyone knows what you are. That is the one good thing about the Fulcrum, about Meov, about being Syenite: You could be who you were. That’s a luxury you’re learning to savor anew.

You’re topside again, in Castrima-over as they’ve been calling it, standing on what used to be the town’s token greenland. The ground around Castrima is alkaline and sandy; you heard Ykka actually hoping for a little acid rain to make the soil better. You think the ground probably needs more organic matter for that to work… and there isn’t likely to be much of that, since you saw three boilbug mounds on the way here.

The good news is that the mounds are easy to detect, even when they’re only a little higher than the ash layer that covers the ground. The insects within them tickle your awareness as a ready source of heat and pressure for your orogeny. On the walk here, you showed the children how to sess for that pent difference from the cooler, more relaxed ambient around it. The younger ones made a game of it, gasping and pointing whenever they sensed a mound and trying to outdo one another in the count.

The bad news is that there are more of the boilbug mounds this week than there were last week. That’s probably not a good thing, but you don’t let the children see your worry.

There are seventeen children altogether—the bulk of Castrima’s complement of orogenes. A couple are in the teen range, but most are younger, one only five. Most are orphans, or might as well be, and that does not surprise you at all. What does surprise you is that all of them must have relatively good self-control and quick wits, because otherwise they wouldn’t have survived the Rifting. They would’ve had to sess it coming in time enough to get to someplace isolated, let their instincts save them, recover, and then go someplace else before anybody started trying to figure out who was at the center of the circle of non-destruction. Most are Midlatter mongrels like you: lots of not-quite-Sanzed-bronze skin, not-quite-ashblow hair, eyes and bodies on a continuum from the Arctic to the Coaster. Not much different from the kids you used to teach in Tirimo’s creche. Only the subject matter, and by necessity your teaching methods, must be different.

“Sess what I do—just sess, don’t imitate yet,” you say, and then you construct a torus around yourself. You do it several times, each time a different way—sometimes spinning it high and tight, sometimes holding it steady but wide enough that its edge rolls close to them. (Half the children gasp and scramble away. That’s exactly what they should do; good. Not good that the rest just stood there stupidly. You’ll have to work on that.) “Now. Spread out. You there, you there; all of you stay about that far apart. Once you’re in place, spin a torus that looks exactly like the one I’m making now.”

It isn’t how the Fulcrum would’ve taught them. There, with years of time and safe walls and comforting blue skies overhead, the teaching could be done gently, gradually, giving the children time to get over their fears or outgrow their immaturities. There’s no time for gentleness in a Season, though, and no room for failure within Castrima’s jagged walls. You’ve heard the grumbling, seen the resentful looks when you join use-caste crews or head down to the communal bath. Ykka thinks Castrima is something special: a comm where rogga and still can live in harmony, working together to survive. You think she’s naive. These children need to be prepared for the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them.

So you demonstrate, and correct their imitations with words when you can and once with a torus-inversion slap when one of the older children spins his too wide and threatens to ice one of his comrades. “You cannot be careless!” The boy sits on the icy ground, staring at you wide-eyed. You also made the ground heave under his feet to throw him down, and you’re standing over him now, shouting, deliberately intimidating. He almost killed another child; he should be afraid. “People die when you make mistakes. Is that what you want?” A frantic headshake. “Then get up, and do it again.”

You flog them through the exercise until every one of them has demonstrated at least a basic ability to control the size of their torus. It feels wrong to teach them only this without any of the theory that will help them understand why and how their power works, or any of the stabilizing exercises designed to perfect the detachment of instinct from power. You must teach them in days what you mastered over years; where you are an artist, they will be only crude imitators at best. They are subdued when you walk them back to Castrima, and you suspect some of them hate you. Actually, you’re pretty sure they hate you. But they will be more useful to Castrima like this—and on the inevitable day that Castrima turns on them, they’ll be ready.

(This is a familiar series of thoughts. Once, as you trained Nassun, you told yourself that it did not matter if she hated you by the end of it; she would know your love by her own survival. That never felt right, though, did it? You were gentler with Uche for that reason. And you always meant to apologize to Nassun, later, when she was old enough to understand… Ah, there are so many regrets in you that they spin, heavy as compressed iron, at your core.)

“You’re right,” Alabaster says as you sit on an infirmary cot and tell him about the lesson later. “But you’re also wrong.”

It’s later than usual for you to be visiting Alabaster, and as a result he is restless and in visible pain amid his nest. The medications that Lerna usually gives him are wearing off. Being with him is always a competition of desires for you: You know there’s not much time for him to teach you this stuff, but you also want to prolong his life, and every day that you wear him down grates on you like a glacier. Urgency and despair don’t get along well. You’ve resolved to keep it brief this time, but he seems inclined to talk a lot today, as he leans against Antimony’s hand and keeps his eyes closed. You can’t help thinking of this as some kind of strength-saving gesture, as if just the sight of you is a drain.

“Wrong?” you prompt. Maybe there’s a warning note in your voice. You’ve always been protective of your students, whoever they are.

“For wasting your time, for one thing. They’ll never have the precision to be more than rock-pushers.” Alabaster’s voice is thick with contempt.

“Innon was a rock-pusher,” you snap.

A muscle flexes in his jaw, and he pauses for a moment. “So maybe it’s a good thing that you’re teaching them how to push rocks safely, even if you aren’t doing it kindly.” Now the contempt is gone from his words. It’s as close to an apology as you’re probably going to get from him. “But I stand by the rest: You’re wrong to teach them at all, because their lessons are getting in the way of your lessons.”

“What?”

He makes you sess one of his stumps again, and—oh. Ohhhh. Suddenly it’s harder to grasp the stuff between his cells. It takes longer for your perception to adjust, and when it does, you keep having to reflexively jerk yourself out of a tendency to notice only the heat and jittering movement of the small particles. One afternoon of teaching has set your learning back by a week or more.

“There’s a reason the Fulcrum taught you the way it did,” he explains finally, when you sit back and rub your eyes and fight down frustration. He’s opened his eyes now; they are hooded as they watch you. “The Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic. The torus isn’t even necessary—you can gather ambient energy in any number of ways. But that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up. Nothing above you matters. Only your immediate surroundings, never farther.” He shakes his head to the degree that he can. “It’s amazing, when you think about it. Everyone in the Stillness is like this. Never mind what’s in the oceans, never mind what’s in the sky; never look at your own horizon and wonder what’s beyond it. We’ve spent centuries making fun of the astronomests for their crackpot theories, but what we really found incredible was that they ever bothered to look up to formulate them.”

You’d almost forgotten this part of him: the dreamer, the rebel, always reconsidering the way things have always been because maybe they should never have been that way in the first place. He’s right, too. Life in the Stillness discourages reconsideration, reorientation. Wisdom is set in stone, after all; that’s why no one trusts the mutability of metal. There’s a reason Alabaster was the magnetic core of your little family, back when you were together.

Damn, you’re nostalgic today. It prompts you to say, “I think you’re not just a ten-ringer.” He blinks in surprise. “You’re always thinking. You’re a genius, too—it’s just that your genius is in a subject area that no one respects.”

Alabaster stares at you for a moment. His eyes narrow. “Are you drunk?”

“No I’m not—” Evil Earth, so much for your fond memories. “Go on with the rusting lesson.”

He seems more relieved by the change of subject than you. “So that’s what Fulcrum training does to you. You learn to think of orogeny as a matter of effort, when it’s really… perspective. And perception.”

An Allia-shaped trauma tells you why the Fulcrum wouldn’t have wanted every two-shard feral reaching for any obelisks nearby. But you spend a moment trying to understand the distinction he’s explaining. It’s true that using energy is something entirely different from using magic. The Fulcrum’s method makes orogeny feel like what it is: straining to shove around heavy objects, just with will instead of hands or levers. Magic, though, feels effortless—at least while one is using it. The exhaustion comes later. In the moment, though, it is simply about knowing it’s there. Training yourself to see it.

“I don’t understand why they did this,” you say, tapping your fingers on the mattress in thought. The Fulcrum was built by orogenes. At least some of them, at some point in the past, must have sessed magic. But… you shiver as you understand. Ah, yes. The most powerful orogenes, the ones who detect magic most easily and perhaps have trouble mastering energy redistribution as a result, are the ones who end up in the nodes.

Alabaster thinks in bigger pictures than just the Fulcrum. “I think,” he says, “they understood the danger. Not just that roggas who lacked the necessary fine control would connect to obelisks and die, but that some might do it successfully—for the wrong reasons.”

You try to think of a right reason to activate a network of ancient death machines. Alabaster reads your face. “I doubt I’m the first rogga who’s wanted to tip the Fulcrum into a lava pit.”

“Good point.”

“And the war. Don’t ever forget that. The Guardians who work with the Fulcrum are one of the factions I told you about, so to speak. They’re the ones who want the status quo: roggas made safe and useful, stills doing all the work and thinking they run the place, Guardians actually in charge of everything. Controlling the people who can control natural disasters.”

You’re surprised by this. No, you’re surprised you didn’t think of it yourself. But then you haven’t spent much time thinking about Guardians, when you weren’t in the immediate vicinity of one. Maybe this is another kind of thought aversion you’ve been conditioned to: Don’t look up, and don’t think about those damned smiles.

You decide to make yourself think about them now. “But Guardians die during a Season…” Shit. “They say they die…” Shit. “Of course they don’t.”

Alabaster lets out a rusty sound that might be a laugh. “I’m a bad influence.”

He always has been. You can’t help smiling, though the feeling doesn’t last, because of the conversation. “They don’t join comms, though. They must go somewhere else to ride it out.”

“Maybe. Maybe this ‘Warrant’ place. No one seems to know where it is.” He pauses, grows thoughtful. “I suppose I should have asked mine about that before I left her.”

No one just leaves their Guardian. “You said you didn’t kill her.”

He blinks, out of memory. “No. I cured her. Sort of. You know about the thing in their heads.” Yes. Blood, and the sting of your palm. Schaffa handing something tiny and bloody to another Guardian, with great care. You nod. “It gives them their abilities, but it also taints them, twists them. The seniors at the Fulcrum used to speak of it in whispers. There are degrees of contamination…” He sets his jaw, visibly steering himself away from that topic. You can guess why. Somewhere along the way, it lands on the shirtless Guardians who kill with a touch. “Anyway, I took that thing out of mine.”

You swallow. “I saw a Guardian kill another once, taking it out.”

“Yes. When the contamination becomes too great. Then they’re dangerous even to other Guardians, and must be purged. I’d heard they weren’t gentle about it. Brutes even to their own.”

It’s angry, Guardian Timay had said, right before Schaffa killed her. Readying for the time of return. You inhale. The memory is vivid in your mind because that was the day that you and Tonkee—Binof—found the socket. The day of your first ring test, early and with your life in the balance. You’ll never forget anything of that day. And now—“It’s the Earth.”

“What?”

“The thing that’s in Guardians. The… contaminant.” It changed those who would control it. Chained them fate to fate. “She started speaking for the Earth!”

You can tell you’ve actually surprised him, for once. “Then…” He considers for a moment. “I see. That’s when they switch teams. Stop working for the status quo and Guardian interests, and start working for the Earth’s interests instead. No wonder the others kill them.”

This is what you need to understand. “What does the Earth want?”

Alabaster’s gaze is heavy, heavy. “What does any living thing want, facing an enemy so cruel that it stole away a child?”

Your jaw tightens. Vengeance.

You shift down from the cot to the floor, leaning against the cot’s frame. “Tell me about the Obelisk Gate.”

“Yes. I thought that would get you interested.” Alabaster’s voice has gone soft again, but there is a look on his face that makes you think, This is what he looked like on the day he made the Rift. “You remember the basic principle. Parallel scaling. Yoking two oxen together instead of one. Two roggas together can do more than each individually. It works for obelisks, too, just… exponential. A matrix, not a yoke. Dynamic.”

Okay, you’re following so far. “So I need to figure out how to chain all of them together.”

He nods back minutely. “And you’ll need a buffer, at least initially. When I opened the Gate at Yumenes, I used several dozen node maintainers.”

Several dozen stunted, twisted roggas turned into mindless weapons… and Alabaster somehow turned them against their owners. How like him, and how perfect. “Buffer?”

“To cushion the impact. To… smooth out the connection flow…” He falters, sighs. “I don’t know how to explain it. You’ll know when you try it.”

When. He assumes so much. “What you did killed the node maintainers?”

“Not precisely. I used them to open the Gate and create the Rift… and then they tried to do what they were made to do: Stop the shake. Stabilize the land.” You grimace, understanding. Even you, in your extremity, weren’t foolish enough to try to stop the shockwave, when it reached Tirimo. The only safe thing to do was divert its force elsewhere. But node maintainers lack the mind or control to do the safe thing.

“I didn’t use all of them,” Alabaster says thoughtfully. “The ones far to the west and in the Arctics and Antarctics were out of my reach. Most have died since. No one to keep them alive. But I can still sess active nodes in a few places. Remnants of the network: south, near the Antarctic Fulcrum, and north, near Rennanis.”

Of course he can sess active nodes all the way in the Antarctics. You can barely sess a hundred miles from Castrima, and you have to work to stretch that far. And maybe the roggas of the Antarctic Fulcrum have survived somehow, and chosen to care for their less fortunate brethren in the nodes, but… “Rennanis?” That can’t be. It’s an Equatorial city. More southerly and westerly than most; people in Yumenes thought it was only a step above any other Somidlats backwater. But Rennanis was Equatorial enough that it should be gone.

“The Rift wends northwesterly, along an ancient fault line that I found. It swung a few hundred miles wide of Rennanis… I suppose that was enough to let the node maintainers actually do something. Should’ve killed most of them, and the rest should’ve died of neglect when their staffs abandoned them, but I don’t know.”

He falls silent, perhaps weary. His voice is hoarse today, and his eyes are bloodshot. Another infection. He keeps getting them because some of the burned patches on his body aren’t healing, Lerna says. The lack of pain meds isn’t helping.

You try to digest what he’s told you, what Antimony has told you, what you’ve learned through trial and suffering. Maybe the numbers matter. Two hundred and sixteen obelisks, some incalculable number of other orogenes as a buffer, and you. Magic to tie the three together… somehow. All of it together forging a net, to catch the Earthfires-damned Moon.

Alabaster says nothing while you ponder, and eventually you glance at him to see if he’s fallen asleep. But he’s awake, his eyes slits, watching you. “What?” You frown, defensive as always.

He quarter-smiles with the half of his mouth that hasn’t been burned. “You never change. If I ask you for help, you tell me to flake off and die. If I don’t say a rusting word, you work miracles for me.” He sighs. “Evil Earth, how I’ve missed you.”

This… hurts, unexpectedly. You realize why at once: because it’s been so long since anyone said anything like this to you. Jija could be affectionate, but he wasn’t much given to sentimentality. Innon used sex and jokes to show his tenderness. But Alabaster… this has always been his way. The surprise gesture, the backhanded compliment that you could choose to take for teasing or an insult. You’ve hardened so much without this. Without him. You seem strong, healthy, but inside you feel like he looks: nothing but brittle stone and scars, prone to cracking if you bend too much.

You try to smile, and fail. He doesn’t try. You just look at each other. It’s nothing and everything at once.

Of course it doesn’t last. Someone walks into the infirmary and comes over and surprises you by being Ykka. Hjarka’s behind her, slouching along and looking very Sanzedly bored: picking her sharp-filed teeth with a bit of polished wood, one hand on her well-curved hip, her ashblow hair a worse mess than usual and noticeably flatter on one side where she’s just woken up.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Ykka says, not sounding especially sorry, “but we’ve got a problem.”

You’re beginning to hate those words. Still, it’s time to end the lesson, so you nod to Alabaster and get up. “What now?”

“Your friend. The slacker.” Tonkee, who hasn’t joined the Innovators’ work crews, doesn’t bother to pick up your household share when it’s her turn, and who conveniently disappears whenever it’s time for a caste meeting. In another comm they’d have already kicked her out for that kind of thing, but she gets extra leeway for being one of the companions of the second-most-powerful orogene in Castrima. It only goes so far, though, and Ykka looks especially pissed off.

“She’s found the control room,” Ykka says. “Locked herself inside.”

“The—” What. “The control room for what?”

“Castrima.” Ykka looks annoyed to have to explain. “I told you when you got here: There are mechanisms that make this place function, the light and the air and so on. We keep the room secret because if somebody loses it and wants to smash things, they could kill us all. But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.”

“She won’t be able to affect anything important,” Alabaster says. It startles you both, you because you aren’t used to seeing him interact with anyone else, and Ykka because she probably thinks of him as a waste of medicines and not a person. He doesn’t think much of her, either; his eyes are closed again. “More likely to hurt herself than anything else.”

“Good to know,” Ykka says, though she looks at him skeptically. “I’d be reassured if you weren’t talking out of your ass, seeing as you couldn’t possibly know what’s happening beyond this infirmary, but it’s a nice thought, anyway.”

He lets out a soft snort of amusement. “I knew everything I needed to know about this relic the instant I came here. And if any of you other than Essun had a chance of making it do what it’s really capable of, I wouldn’t stay here a moment longer.” As you and Ykka stare, he lets out a heavy sigh. There’s a little bit of a rattle in it, which troubles you, and you make a note to ask Lerna about it. But he says nothing more, and finally Ykka glances at you with a palpable I am really sick of your friends look, and beckons for you to follow her out.

It’s a long way up to wherever this control room is. Hjarka’s breathing hard after the first ladder, but she acclimates after that and settles into a rhythm. Ykka does better, though she’s still sweating in ten minutes. You’ve still got your road conditioning, so you handle the climb well enough, but after the first three flights of stairs, a ladder, and a spiraling balcony built round one of the fatter crystals of the comm, you’re even willing to start small talk to take your mind off the ground falling farther and farther below. “What’s your usual disciplinary process for people who shirk their caste duties?”

“The boot, what else?” Ykka shrugs. “We can’t just ash them out, though; have to kill them to maintain secrecy. But there’s a process: one warning, then a hearing. Morat—that’s the Innovator caste spokeswoman—hasn’t made a formal complaint. I asked her to, but she waffled. Said your friend gave her a portable water-testing device that may save some of our Hunters’ lives out in the field.”

Hjarka utters a rusty laugh. You shake your head, amused. “That’s a nice bribe. She’s a survivor, if nothing else.”

Ykka rolls her eyes. “Maybe. But it sends a bad message, one person not joining any work crews and going unpunished for it, even if she does invent useful things outside of work time. Others start to skive off, what do I do then?”

“Ash out the ones who haven’t invented anything,” you suggest. Then you stop, because Ykka has paused. You think it’s because she’s annoyed by what you just said, but she’s looking around, taking in the expanse of the comm. So you stop, too. This far up, you’re well above the main inhabited level of the comm. The geode echoes with calls and someone hammering something and one of the work crews singing a rhythm song. You risk a look over the nearest railing and see that someone’s made a simple rope-and-wooden-pallet cargo lift for the mid-level, but without a counterweight, the only way to get a heavy load up is to basically play tug-of-war with it. Twenty people are at it now. It looks surprisingly like fun.

“You were right about the assimilations,” Hjarka says. Her voice is soft as she, too, contemplates the bustle and life of Castrima. “We couldn’t have made this place work without more people. Thought you were full of shit, but you weren’t.”

Ykka sighs. “So far it’s working.” She eyes Hjarka. “You never said you didn’t like the idea before.”

Hjarka shrugs. “I left my home comm because I didn’t want the burden of Leadership. Didn’t want it here, either.”

“You don’t have to knife-fight me for the headwomanship to give an opinion, for Earth’s sake.”

“When a Season’s coming on and I’m the only Leader in the comm, I’d better be careful even about opinions.” She shrugs, then smiles at Ykka with an air of something like affection. “Keep figuring you’ll have me killed any minute now.”

Ykka laughs once. “Is that what you would’ve done in my place?” You hear the edge in this.

“It’s the playbook I was taught to follow, yeah—but it’d be stupid to try that here. There’s never been anything like this Season… or this comm.” Hjarka eyes you, pointedly, as the latest example of Castrima’s peculiarity. “Tradition’s just going to rust everything up, in a situation like this. Better to have a headwoman who doesn’t know how things should be, only how she wants them to be. A headwoman who’ll kick all the asses necessary to make her vision happen.”

Ykka absorbs this in silence for a few moments. Obviously whatever Tonkee’s done isn’t so urgent or terrible. Then she turns and begins climbing again, apparently deciding that the rest break is over. You and Hjarka sigh and follow.

“I think the people who originally built this place didn’t think it through,” Ykka says as the climb resumes. “Too inefficient. Too dependent on machinery that can break down or rust out. And orogeny as a power source, which is basically the least-reliable thing ever. But then sometimes I wonder if maybe they didn’t intend to build it this way. Maybe something drove them underground fast, and they found a giant geode and just made the best of what they had.” She runs a hand along a railing as you walk. This is one of the original metal structures that have been built throughout the geode. Above the inhabited levels, it’s all old metalwork. “Always makes me think they really must have been the ancestors of Castrima. They respected hard work and adapting under pressure, like us.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Except Tonkee.

“Some.” She doesn’t take the obvious bait. “I outed myself to everyone when I was fifteen. There was a forest fire somewhere to the south; drought season. The smoke alone was killing the older people and babies in the comm. We thought we’d have to leave. Finally I went to the edge of the fire, where a bunch of the other townsfolk were trying to create a firebreak. Six of them died doing that.” She shakes her head. “Wouldn’t have worked. The fire was too big. But that’s my people, for you.”

You nod. It does sound like the Castrimans you’ve gotten to know. It also sounds like the Tirimo-folk you’ve gotten to know, and the Meovites, and the Allians, and the Yumenescenes. No people in the Stillness would have survived to this point if they weren’t fearsomely tenacious. But Ykka needs to think of Castrima as special—and it is special, in its own strange ways. So you wisely keep your mouth shut.

She says, “I stopped the fire. Iced the burning part of the forest and used that to make a ridge farther south as a windbreak in case anything set off a new blaze. Everyone saw me do it. They knew exactly what I was then.”

You stop walking and stare at her. She turns back, half smiling. “I told them I’d go, if they wanted to call the Guardians and have me shipped off to the Fulcrum. Or if they wanted to just string me up, I promised not to ice anyone. Instead, they argued about the whole mess for three days. I thought they were trying to decide how to kill me.” She shrugs. “So I went home, had dinner with my parents—they both knew, and they were terrified for me, but I talked them down from smuggling me out of town in a horse cart. Went to creche the next day, same as always. At the end of it, I found out the townsfolk had been arguing about how to get me trained. Without letting the Fulcrum on, see.”

Your mouth falls open. You’ve seen Ykka’s parents, who are still hale and strong and with an air of Sanzed stubbornness about them. You can believe it of them. But everyone else, too? All right. Maybe Castrima is special.

Hjarka says, “Huh. How did you get trained, then?”

“Eh, you know what these little Midlatter comms are like. They were still arguing about it when the Rifting happened. I trained my damn self.” She laughs, and Hjarka sighs. “That’s my people, too. Complete rust-heads, but good people.”

You think, against your will, If only I had brought Uche and Nassun here as soon as they were born.

“Not all of your people like having us here,” you blurt, almost as a rebuttal to your own thought.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the chatter. Which is why I’m glad you’re training the kids, and that everyone saw you get the boilbugs off Terteis.” She sobers. “Poor Terteis. But you proved again that it’s better to have people like us around than to kill us or drive us out. Castrimans are practical people, Essie.” You hate this nickname immediately. “Too practical to just do something because everybody else says do it.”

With that, she resumes the climb. After a moment, you and Hjarka do, too.

You’ve gotten used to the unrelenting whiteness of Castrima; only a few of the building-crystals have touches of amethyst or smoky quartz about them. Here, though, the ceiling of the geode has been sealed off with a smooth, glasslike substance that is deep emeraldine green in color. The color is a bit of a shock. The final stairway that leads up into this is wide enough for five people to climb abreast, so you’re unsurprised to find two of Castrima’s Strongbacks flanking what looks like a sliding attic door made of the same green substance. One of the Strongbacks has a small wireglass utility knife in her hand; the other just has his big folded arms.

“Still nothing,” says the male Strongback as the three of you arrive. “We keep hearing sounds from inside—clicking, buzzing, and sometimes she yells things. But the door’s still jammed.”

“Yells things?” asks Hjarka.

He shrugs. “Like, ‘I knew it’ and ‘that’s why.’”

Sounds like Tonkee. “How does she have the door rigged?” you ask. The female Strongback shrugs. It’s a stereotype that Strongbacks are all muscle and no brain, but a few of them fit that description more than they should.

Ykka gives you another This is your fault look. You shake your head, then climb up to the top step and bang on the door. “Tonkee, rust it, open up.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then you hear a faint clatter. “Fuck, it’s you,” Tonkee mutters, from somewhere farther away than the door. “Hang on and don’t ice anything.”

A moment later there’s the sound of something rattling against the door material. Then the door slides open. You, Ykka, Hjarka, and the Strongbacks climb up—though all of you except Ykka stop and stare, so it’s left to her to fold her arms and give Tonkee the exasperated glare she’s earned.

The ceiling is hollow above the door. The green substance forms a floor, and the resulting chamber is molded around the usual white crystals that jut down from the geode’s rocky, grayish-green true ceiling, perhaps fifteen feet overhead. What makes you stop, your mouth falling open and your mind stuttering from annoyance into silence, is that the crystals on this side of the green barrier flicker and blink, transitioning at random from shimmering images of crystals into solidity, and back again. The shafts and tips of these crystals, which poke through the floor, weren’t doing this outside. None of the other crystals in Castrima do this. Aside from glowing—which, granted, is a warning that they aren’t just rocks—the crystals of Castrima are no different from any other quartz. Here, though… you suddenly understand what Alabaster meant about what Castrima is capable of. The truth of Castrima is suddenly, terrifyingly clear: The geode is filled with not crystals, but potential obelisks.

“Flaking rust,” one of the Strongbacks breathes. This speaks for you as well.

Tonkee’s junk is everywhere in the room: weird tools and slates and scraps of leather covered in diagrams, and a pallet in the corner that explains why she hasn’t been sleeping in the apartment much lately. (It’s been lonely without her and Hoa, but you don’t like admitting this to yourself.) She’s walking away from you now, glaring over her shoulder and looking distinctly irritated that you’ve arrived. “Don’t rusting touch anything,” she says. “No telling what an orogene of your caliber will do to this stuff.”

Ykka rolls her eyes. “You’re the one who shouldn’t be touching anything. You’re not allowed in here and you know it. Come on.”

“No.” Tonkee crouches near a strange, low plinth at the center of the room. It looks like a crystal shaft whose middle has been chopped out: You see the (flickering, unreal) base growing from the ceiling, and the plinth is its (flickering in tandem) continuation, but there’s a five-foot section in between that’s just empty space. The plinth’s surface has been cut so smoothly that it gleams like a mirror—and the surface stays solid, even as the rest of the shaft flickers.

At first you think there’s nothing on it. But Tonkee is peering at the plinth’s surface so intently that you walk over to join her. When you hunker down for a better look, she glances up to meet your eyes, and you’re shocked at the barely disguised glee in hers. Not really shocked by that; you know her by now. You’re shocked because this high gleam, plus the new undisguise of her clean, short hair and neat clothing, transforms her so obviously into an older version of Binof that you marvel again you didn’t see it at once.

But that’s unimportant. You focus on the plinth, even though there are other wonders to behold: a taller plinth near the back of the room, above which floats a foot-tall miniature obelisk the same emerald color as the floor; another plinth bearing an oblong hunk of rock, also floating; a series of clear squares set into one wall bearing strange diagrams of some sort of equipment; a series of panels along the wall beneath them, each bearing meters measuring something unknown in numbers that you can’t decipher.

On the big plinth, though, are the least obtrusive objects in the room: six tiny metallic shards, each needle-thin and no longer than your thumbnail. They are not the same silvery metal that makes up Castrima’s ancient structures; this metal is a smooth dark color dusted faintly with red. Iron. Amazing that it hasn’t oxidized away over all the years of Castrima’s existence. Unless—“Did you put these here?” you ask Tonkee.

She’s instantly furious. “Yes, of course I would enter the control core of a deadciv artifact, find the most dangerous device in it, and immediately throw bits of rusty metal on it!”

“Don’t be an ass, please.” Though you did sort of deserve that, you’re too intrigued to be really annoyed. “Why do you think this is the most dangerous device in here?”

Tonkee points to the beveled edge of the plinth. You look closer and blink. The material is not smooth like the rest of the crystal shaft; on the edge it has been heavily etched with symbols and writing. The writing is the same as that along the wall panels—oh. And they are glowing red, the color seeming to float and waver just over the surface of the material.

“And this,” Tonkee says. She raises a hand and moves it toward the plinth’s surface and the metal bits. Abruptly the red letters leap into the air—you don’t have a better way to describe what’s happening than that. In an instant they have enlarged and turned to face you, blazing the air at eye level with what is unmistakably some sort of warning. Red is the color of lava pools. It is the color of a lake when everything in it has died except toxic algae: one warning sign of an impending blow. Some things do not change with time or culture, you feel certain.

(You are wrong, generally speaking. But in this specific case, you’re quite right.)

Everyone’s staring. Hjarka comes close and lifts a hand to try to touch the floating letters; her fingers pass through them. Ykka moves around the plinth, fascinated despite herself. “I’ve noticed this thing before, but never really paid attention to it. The letters turn with me.”

They haven’t moved. But you lean to one side—and sure enough, as you do this the letters pivot slightly to remain facing you.

Impatiently, Tonkee pulls her hand back and waves Hjarka’s hand out of the way, and the letters flatten and shrink back into quiescence along the plinth edge. “There’s no barrier, though. Usually in a deadciv artifact—an artifact from this civilization—anything truly dangerous is sealed off in some way. There’s either a physical barrier, or evidence that there was once a barrier that’s failed with time. If they really didn’t want you to touch something, you either didn’t touch it or you’d have to work pretty damned hard to touch it. This? Just a warning. I don’t know what that means.”

“Can you actually touch those things?” You reach toward one of the bits of iron, ignoring the warning this time when it springs up. Tonkee hisses at you so sharply that you jerk back like a child caught doing something you weren’t supposed to.

“I said don’t rusting touch! What’s wrong with you?” You clench your jaw, but you deserved that, too, and you’re too much a mother to deny it.

“How long have you been coming in here?” Ykka’s crouched next to Tonkee’s sleeping pallet.

Tonkee’s staring down at the iron bits, and at first you think she hasn’t heard Ykka; she doesn’t answer for a long moment. There is a look on her face that you’re starting not to like. You can’t say you really know her any more now than you did when you were a grit, but you do know that she isn’t the grim sort. That she is grim now, the tightened muscle along her jawline making it stand out more than you know she likes, is a very bad sign. She’s up to something. She says to Ykka, “A week. But I only moved in three days ago. I think. I lost track.” She rubs her eyes. “I haven’t slept a lot.”

Ykka shakes her head and rises. “Well, at least you haven’t destroyed the rusting comm already. Tell me what you’ve figured out, then.”

Tonkee turns to eye her warily. “Those panels along the wall activate, and regulate, the water pumps and air circulation systems and cooling processes. But you knew that already.”

“Yes. Since we’re not dead.” Ykka dusts off her hands from where she touched the floor, sidling toward Tonkee in a way that is somehow simultaneously thoughtful and subtly menacing. She’s not as big as most Sanzed women—a good foot shorter than Hjarka. Her dangerousness is not as obvious as it is with others, but you sense the slow readying of her orogeny now. She was fully prepared to smash or ice her way into this place. The Strongbacks shift and edge a little closer, too, reinforcing her unspoken threat.

“What I want to know,” she continues, “is how you knew that.” She stops, facing Tonkee. “We figured it out, in those early days, through trial and error. Touch one thing and it gets cooler, touch another and the communal pool water gets hotter. But nothing’s changed in the past week.”

Tonkee sighs a little. “I’ve learned how to decipher some of the symbols over the years. Spend enough time in these kinds of ruins and you see the same things repeated over and over.”

Ykka considers this, then nods toward the warning text around the plinth rim. “What’s that say?”

“No idea. I said decipher, not read. Symbols, not language.” Tonkee walks over to one of the wall panels and points to a prominent design in its top right corner. It’s nothing intuitive: something green and arrow-like but squiggly, sort of, pointed downward. “I see that one wherever there were water gardens. I think it’s about the quality and intensity of the light that the gardens get.” She eyes Ykka. “Actually, I know it’s about the light the gardens get.”

Ykka lifts her chin a little, just enough that you know Tonkee has guessed right. “So this place is no different from other ruins you’ve seen? The others had crystals in them, like this?”

“No. I’ve never seen anything like Castrima before. Except—” She glances at you, once and away. “Well. Not exactly like Castrima.”

“That thing in the Fulcrum wasn’t anything like this,” you blurt. It’s been more than twenty years, but you haven’t forgotten a detail about the place. That was a pit, and Castrima is a rock with a hole in it. If both were made by the same kinds of people, to do similar things, there’s no evidence of that anywhere.

“It was, actually.” Tonkee comes back to the plinth and waves up the warning. This time she points at a symbol within the glowing red text: a solid black circle surrounded by a white octagon. You don’t know how you missed it before; it stands out from the red.

“I saw that mark in the Fulcrum, painted onto some of the light panels. You were too busy staring into the pit; I don’t think you saw. But I’ve been in maybe half a dozen obelisk-builder sites since, and that mark is always near something dangerous.” She’s watching you intently. “I find dead people near it sometimes.”

Inadvertently you think of Guardian Timay. Not found dead, but dead nevertheless, and you almost joined her that day. Then you remember a moment in the room without doors, near the edge of the yawning pit. You remember small needlelike protrusions from the walls of the pit… exactly like these bits of iron.

“The socket,” you murmur. That was what the Guardian called it. “A contaminant.” A prickle dances across the nape of your neck. Tonkee looks sharply at you.

“‘Something dangerous’ can mean any rusting thing,” says Hjarka, annoyed, as you stand there staring at the bits of rust.

“No, in this case it means a specific rusting thing.” Tonkee glares Hjarka down, which is impressive in itself. “It was the mark of their enemy.”

Fuck, you realize. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“What?” asks Ykka. “What in the Evil Earth are you talking about?”

“Their enemy.” Tonkee leans against the edge of the plinth—carefully, you note, but emphatically. “They were at war, don’t you understand? Toward the end, just before their civilization vanished into the dust. All their ruins, anything that’s left from that time, are defensive, survival-oriented. Like the comms of today—except they had a lot more than stone walls to help protect them. Things like giant rusting underground geodes. They hid in those places, and studied their enemy, and maybe built weapons to fight back.” She pivots and points up, at the upper half of the plinth crystal. It flickers just as she does so, obelisk-like.

“No,” you say automatically. Everyone turns to look at you, and you twitch. “I mean…” Shit. But you’ve said it now. “The obelisks aren’t…” You don’t know how to say it without telling the whole damned story, and you’re reluctant to do that. You’re not sure why. Maybe for the same reason that Antimony said, when Alabaster started to tell you: They aren’t ready. Now you need to finish in a way that won’t invite further comment. “I don’t think they’re defensive, or any sort of… weapon.”

Tonkee says nothing for a long moment. “What are they, then?”

“I don’t know.” It’s not a lie. You don’t know for sure. “A tool, maybe. Dangerous if misused, but not meant to kill.”

Tonkee seems to brace herself. “I know what happened to Allia, Essun.”

It’s an unexpected blow, and it floors you emotionally. Fortunately, you’ve spent your life training to deflect your reactions to unexpected blows in safe ways. You say, “Obelisks aren’t made to do that. That was an accident.”

“How do you—”

“Because I was connected to the rusting thing when it went into burndown!” You snap this so sharply that your voice echoes in the room and startles you into realizing how angry you are. One of the Strongbacks inhales and something in her gaze shifts and all at once you are reminded of the Strongbacks at Tirimo, who looked at you the same way when Rask asked them to let you go through the gate. Even Ykka’s watching you in a way that wordlessly says, You’re scaring the locals, calm the rust down. So you take a deep breath and fall silent.

(It is only later that you will recall the word you said during this conversation. Burndown. You will wonder why you said it, what it means, and you will have no answer.)

Tonkee lets out a deep breath, carefully, and this seems to speak for the room. “It’s possible I’ve made some wrong assumptions,” she says.

Ykka rubs a hand over her hair. It makes her head look incongruously small for a moment until it floofs back up. “All right. We already know Castrima was used as a comm before. Probably several times. If you’d asked me, instead of coming in here and acting like a rusting child, I could have told you that. I would have told you everything I knew, because I want to understand this place just as much as you do—”

Tonkee utters a single braying laugh. “None of you are smart enough for that.”

“—but by pulling this shit, you’ve made me mistrust you. I don’t let people I don’t trust do things that can hurt the people I love. So I want you out of here for good.”

Hjarka frowns. “Yeek, that’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?”

Tonkee tenses at once, her eyes going wide with horror, and hurt. “You can’t keep me out. Nobody else in this rusting comm has a clue what—”

“Nobody else in this rusting comm,” Ykka says, and now the Strongbacks look at her uneasily, because she’s nearly shouting, “would set us all on fire for the chance to study people who’ve been gone since the world was young. Somehow I’m getting the impression that you would.”

“Supervised visits!” Tonkee blurts. She looks desperate now.

Ykka steps up to her, getting right in her face, and Tonkee goes silent at once. “I would rather understand nothing about this place,” Ykka says, brutally quiet and cold now, “than risk destroying it. Can you say the same?”

Tonkee stares back at her, trembling visibly and saying nothing. But the answer’s obvious, isn’t it? Tonkee’s like Hjarka. Both were raised Leadership, raised to put the needs of others first, and both chose a more selfish path. It’s not even a question.

Which is why later, in retrospect, you really aren’t surprised at what happens next.

Tonkee turns and lunges and the red warning flashes and then one of the iron bits is in her fist. She’s already turning away by the time you register her grab. Bolting for the stair door. Hjarka gasps; Ykka’s just standing there, a little startled and mostly resigned; the two Strongbacks stare in confusion and then belatedly start after Tonkee. But then an instant later Tonkee gasps and stumbles to a halt. One of the Strongbacks grabs her arm—but drops it immediately when Tonkee yells.

You’re moving before you think. Tonkee is yours somehow—like Hoa, like Lerna, like Alabaster, as if in the absence of your children you’re trying to adopt everybody who touches you emotionally for even an instant. You don’t even like Tonkee. Still, your belly clenches when you grab her wrist and see that blood streaks her hand. “What the—”

Tonkee looks at you: quick, animal panic. Then she jerks and cries out again, and you almost let go this time because something moves under your thumb.

“The rust?” Ykka blurts. Hjarka’s hand claps over Tonkee’s arm, too, helping, because Tonkee’s strong in her panic. You master your inexplicable, violent revulsion enough to instead move your thumb and hold Tonkee’s wrist so that you can get a good look at it. Yes. There’s something moving just under her skin. It jumps and jitters, but moves inexorably upward, following the path of a large vein there. It’s just large enough to be the iron fragment.

“Evil Earth,” Hjarka says, throwing a quick worried look at Tonkee’s face. You fight sudden hysterical laughter at the unintentional irony of Hjarka’s oath.

“I need a knife,” you say instead. Your voice sounds remarkably calm to your own ears. Ykka leans over, sees what you’ve seen, and breathes an oath.

“Oh, fuck, rust, shit,” Tonkee moans. “Get it out! Get it out and I’ll never come in here again.” It’s a lie, but maybe she means it for the moment.

“I can bite it out.” Hjarka looks up at you. Her sharpened teeth are small razors.

“No,” you say, certain it would just go into Hjarka and do the same thing. Tongues were harder to carve than arms.

Ykka barks, “Knife!” at the Strongbacks—the one with the wireglass knife. It’s sharp but small, meant more for cutting rope than as a weapon; unless you hit a vital area right off, you’d have to stab someone a million times to kill them with it. It’s all you’ve got. You keep hold of Tonkee’s wrist because she’s flailing and growling like an animal. Someone puts the knife in your hand, fumbling and blade-first. It feels like it takes a year to get it repositioned, but you keep your gaze on that jerking, moving lump in Tonkee’s brown flesh. Where the rust is it going? You’re too quietly horrified to speculate.

But before you can put the knife in place to carve the moving thing loose, it vanishes. Tonkee screams again, her voice breaking and horrible. It’s gone into the meat of her.

You slash once, opening a deep cut just above the elbow, which should be ahead of the thing. Tonkee groans. “Deeper! I can feel it.”

Deeper and you’ll hit bone, but you set your teeth and cut deeper. There’s blood everywhere. Ignoring Tonkee’s pants and hisses, you try to probe for the thing—even though privately you’re terrified you’ll find it and it’ll go into your flesh next.

“Arterial,” Tonkee pants. She’s shaking, keening through her teeth between every word. “Like a rusting highroad to—sessa-ah! Fuck!” She claps at the lower half of her bicep. It’s farther up her arm than you expected. Moving faster now that it’s reached the larger arteries.

Sessa. You stare at Tonkee for a moment, chilled by the realization that she was trying to say sessapinae. Ykka reaches over you and wraps a hand around Tonkee’s arm just below the deltoid, squeezing tight. She looks at you, but you know there’s only one thing left to do. You’re not going to be able to manage it with the tiny knife… but there are other weapons.

“Hold her arm out.” Without waiting to see whether Ykka and Hjarka comply, you grip Tonkee’s shoulder. It’s Alabaster’s trick that you’re thinking of—a tiny, fine-spun, localized torus like the ones he used to kill the boilbugs. This time you’ll use it to burrow through Tonkee’s arm and freeze the little iron shard. Hopefully. But as you extend your awareness and shut your eyes to concentrate, something shifts.

You’re deep in the heat of her, seeking the metallic lattice of the iron shard and trying to sess the difference between its structure and that of the iron in her blood, and then—yes. The silver glimmer of magic is there.

You weren’t expecting that, here amid the gelid bobble of her cells. Tonkee isn’t turning into stone like Alabaster, and you’ve never sessed magic in any other living creature. Yet here, here in Tonkee, there is something that gleams steadily, silverish and threadlike, coming up through her feet—from where? doesn’t matter—and ending at the iron shard. No wonder the thing can move so quickly, fueled as it is by something else. Using this power source, it stretches forth tendrils of its own to link into Tonkee’s flesh and drag itself along. This is why it hurts her—because every cell it touches shivers as if burned, and then dies. The tendrils get longer with every contact, too; the fucking thing is growing its way through her, feeding on her in some imperceptible way. A lead tendril feels its way along, orienting always toward Tonkee’s sessapinae, and you know instinctively that letting it get there will be Bad.

You try grabbing onto the root-thread, thinking maybe to stall it or starve it of strength, but

Oh

no

there is hate and

we all do what we have to do

there is anger and

ah; hello, little enemy

“Hey!” Hjarka’s voice in your ear, a shout. “Wake the fuck up!” You jerk out of the fog you weren’t aware of drifting into. Okay. You stay away from the root-tendril, lest you get another taste of whatever is driving the thing. That instant of contact was worth it, though, because now you know what to do.

You visualize scissors with edges of infinite fineness and blades of glimmering silver. Cut the lead. Cut the tendrils or they may grow again. Cut the contamination before it can set hooks any deeper in her. You’re thinking of Tonkee as you do this. Wanting to save her life. But Tonkee is not Tonkee to you right now; she is a collection of particles and substances. You make the cut.

This isn’t your fault. I know you won’t ever believe it, but… it isn’t.

And when you manage to relax your sessapinae and adjust your perception back to the macro scale and you find yourself covered, absolutely covered in blood, you’re surprised. You don’t quite understand why Tonkee is on the floor, gasping, her body surrounded by a spreading pool as Hjarka shouts at one of the Strongbacks to hand her his belt, now, now. You feel the jerk of the iron shard nearby and twitch in alarm, because you know now what those things are trying to do, and that they are evil. But when you turn to look at the iron shard, you’re confused, because all you see is smooth bronze skin streaked with blood and a scrap of familiar cloth. Then there is a sort of twitchy movement, weight making itself known in your hand, and. And. Well. You’re holding Tonkee’s severed arm.

You drop it. Fling it, more like, violent in your shock. It bounces just beyond Ykka and the two Strongbacks who are clustering around Tonkee and doing something, maybe trying to save her life, you can’t even wrap your head around that, because now you see that the cut end of Tonkee’s arm is a perfect, slightly slanted cross-section, still bleeding and twitching because you just cut it off, but wait no that is not the only reason.

From a small hole near the bone you see something wriggle forth. The hole is the cross-section of an artery. The something is the iron shard, which drops to the smooth green floor and then lies amid the splattered blood as if it is nothing more than a harmless bit of metal.

Hello, little enemy.