The Obelisk Gate

4 you are challenged

YOU’RE TIRED AFTER CALLING THE OBELISK. When you get back to your room and stretch out for half a moment on the bare pallet that came with the apartment, you fall asleep so fast you don’t even realize you’re doing it. In the dead of the night—or so your body clock says, since the glowing walls haven’t changed—your eyes blink open and it’s like only a moment has passed. But Hoa is curled beside you, apparently actually sleeping for once, and you can hear Tonkee snoring faintly in the room next door, and you feel much better than you did, if hungry. Well rested, for perhaps the first time in weeks.

The hunger spurs you up and into the apartment’s living room. There’s a small hempen satchel on the table, which Tonkee must’ve acquired, partially open to reveal mushrooms and a small pile of dried beans and other cachefood. That’s right: As accepted members of Castrima, you now get a share of the comm’s stores. None of it is the kind of food you can just eat for a snack, except maybe the mushrooms, but you’ve never seen those before, and some varieties of mushrooms need to be cooked to be edible. You’re tempted, but… is Castrima the sort of comm that would give dangerous foodstuffs to newcomers without warning them?

Hmm. Right. You fetch your runny-sack, rummage in it for the remaining provisions you brought to Castrima with you, and make a meal out of dried oranges, cachebread crusts, and a lump of bad-tasting jerky that you traded for at the last comm you passed, and which you suspect is hydro-pipe rat meat. Food is that which nourishes, the lorists say.

You’ve just choked the jerky down, and are sitting there sleepily pondering how merely summoning an obelisk took so much out of you—as if anything regarding the obelisks can be described with the adjective merely—when you become aware of a high, rhythmic scraping sound outside. You dismiss it immediately. Nothing about this comm makes sense; it will probably take you weeks if not months to get used to its peculiar sounds. (Months. Are you giving up on Nassun so easily?) So you ignore the sound even as it grows louder and closer, and you keep yawning, and you’re about to get up and head back to bed when it belatedly dawns on you that what you’re hearing is screaming.

Frowning, you go to the door of the apartment, pulling open the thin curtain. You’re not particularly concerned; your sessapinae haven’t even twitched, and anyway if there’s ever a shake down here in Castrima-under, everyone’s dead no matter how quickly they leave their homes. Outside there are lots of people up and about. A woman passes right by your door, carrying a big basket of the same mushrooms you almost ate; she nods at you distractedly as you come out, then almost loses her load as she tries to turn toward the noise and nearly bumps into a man pushing a covered, wheeled bin that stinks to the sky and is probably from the latrines. In a comm with no functional day-night cycle, Castrima effectively never sleeps, and you know they have six work shifts instead of the usual three because you’ve been put on one. It won’t start till midday—or twelvebell, as the Castrima folk say—when you’re supposed to look for some woman named Artith near the forge.

And none of this is relevant because through the scatter and jut of Castrima’s crystals, you can see a small cluster of people coming into the big rectangular tunnel-mouth that serves as the entrance to the geode. They’re running, and they’re carrying another person, who’s doing all the screaming.

Even then, you’re tempted to ignore it and go back to sleep. It’s a Season. People die; there’s nothing you can do about it. These aren’t even your people. There’s no reason for you to care.

Then someone shouts, “Lerna!” And the tone of it is so panicked that you twitch. You can see the squat gray crystal that houses Lerna’s apartment from your balcony, three crystals away and a little below your own. His door-curtain jerks open and he hurries out, shrugging on a shirt as he runs down the nearest set of steps. Heading for the infirmary, where the cluster of running folk seems to be going as well.

For reasons that you cannot name, you glance back at your own apartment doorway. Tonkee, who sleeps like petrified wood, hasn’t come out—but Hoa is there, statue-still and watching you. Something about his expression makes you frown. He doesn’t seem to be able to do the emotionless stoneface of his kin, maybe because he doesn’t have a face of actual stone. Regardless, the first thing you interpret of his expression is… pity.

You’re out of the apartment and running for the ground level in the next breath, almost before you’ve thought about it. (You think as you run: The pity of a disguised stone eater has galvanized you as the screams of a fellow human being haven’t. Such a monster you are.) Castrima is as frustratingly confusing as always, but this time you’re aided by the fact that other people have started running along the bridges and walkways in the direction of the trouble, so you can just go with the flow.

By the time you get there, a small crowd has formed around the infirmary, most of the people milling about in curiosity or concern or anxiety. Lerna and the cluster of people carrying their injured companion have gone inside, and the awful screech is obvious now for what it is: the throat-tearing howl of someone in appalling pain, pain beyond bearing, who nevertheless is somehow forced to bear it.

It is not an intentional thing that you start pushing forward to get inside. You know nothing about giving medical care… but you do know pain. To your surprise, though, people glance at you in annoyance—then blink and shift aside. You notice those who look blank being pulled aside for quick whispers by those whose eyes have widened. Oh-ho. Castrima’s been talking about you.

Then you’re inside the infirmary, and you nearly get knocked down by a Sanzed woman running past with some sort of syringe in her hands. Can’t be safe to do that. You follow her over to an infirmary bed where six people hold down the person doing the screaming. You get a look at the person’s face when one of them shifts aside: no one you know. Just another Midlatter man, who has clearly been topside to judge by the gray layer of ash on his skin and clothing and hair. The woman with the syringe shoulders aside someone else and ostensibly administers the syringe’s contents. A moment later, the man shudders all over, and his mouth begins to close. His scream dies off, slowly, slowly. Slowly. He jerks once, mightily; his holders all shift with the strength of his effort. Then at last, mercifully, he subsides into unconsciousness.

The silence almost reverberates. Lerna and the Sanzed healer keep moving, though the people who have been holding the man down draw back and look at each other as if asking what to do now. In the now-silent confusion, you cannot help glancing off toward the far end of the infirmary, where Alabaster still sits unnoticed by the infirmary’s new guests. His stone eater stands where you last saw her, though her gaze is also fixed on the tableau. You can see Alabaster’s face over the beds; his eyes slide over to meet yours, but then they shift away.

Your attention is recaptured by the man on the bed as some of the people around him step back. At first you can’t tell what the problem is, other than that his pants seem oddly wet in patches, caked with muddy ash. The wetness isn’t red, it’s not blood, but there’s a smell that you’re not sure how to describe. Meat in brine. Hot fat. His boots are off, baring feet which still spasmodically twitch a little, the splayed toes relaxing only reluctantly even in unconsciousness. Lerna is cutting open one pants leg with a pair of scissors. What you notice first, as he peels away the damp cloth, are the small round blue hemispheres that dot the man’s skin here and there, each perhaps two inches in diameter and an inch of rounded height, shiny and foreign to his flesh. There are ten or fifteen of them. Each sits at the center of a patch of bloated pink-brown flesh covering perhaps a handspan of the man’s legs. You think the lumps are jewels, at first. That’s kind of what they look like, metallic over the blue, and beautiful.

“Fuck,” says someone, voice soft with shock, and someone else says, “What the rust.” Someone else pushes into the infirmary behind you after a moment’s argument with the people who’ve blocked off the door. She comes to stand beside you and you look over at Ykka, whose eyes widen in confusion and revulsion for an instant before she schools her expression to blankness. Then she says, sharply enough to jerk people out of staring, “What happened?”

(You notice, belatedly or perhaps right in time, that another stone eater is in the room, not far beyond the tableau. She’s familiar—the red-haired one who greeted you along with Ykka when you first came to Castrima. She’s watching Ykka now, avidly, but her stone gaze occasionally drifts toward you, too. You suddenly become hyperaware that Hoa did not follow you from the apartment.)

“Outer perimeter patrol,” says another ash-covered Midlatter man, to Ykka. He doesn’t look like a Strongback, too small. Maybe he’s one of the new Hunters. He comes around the bedside group and fixes his gaze on Ykka as if she is all that prevents him from staring at the injured man until his mind breaks. “We were out by the s-salt quarry, thinking it might be a good place for hunting. There was some kind of sinkhole near a stream runnel. Beled—I don’t know. He’s gone. I heard them both scream at first, but I didn’t know why. I was upstream, looking at some animal tracks. By the time I got there it was just Terteis there, looking like he was trying to climb out of the ash. I helped him out, but they were on him already, and more were crawling up his shoes so I had to cut them off—”

A hiss jerks your eyes away from the speaking man. Lerna is shaking his hand, holding out the fingers stiffly as if they hurt. “Get me the rusting forceps!” he says to another man, who twitches and turns to do so. You’ve never heard Lerna curse before.

“Some kind of boil,” says the Sanzed woman who injected the man. She sounds disbelieving; she’s speaking to Lerna, as if trying to convince him rather than herself. (Lerna just keeps grimly probing the edges of the burns with his uninjured hand, ignoring her.) “Has to be. He fell into a steam vent, a geyser, an old rusted-out geo pipe.” Which would make the bugs just a coincidence.

“—or they would’ve gotten on me, too.” The other Hunter is still talking in his hollow voice. “I thought the sinkhole was just loose ash, but it was really… I don’t know. Like an anthill.” The Hunter swallows, sets his jaw. “I couldn’t get the rest off, so I brought him here.”

Ykka’s lips press together, but she rolls up her sleeves and goes over, pushing through the other shocked people nearby. She yells, “Back up! If you don’t mean to help with this, get out of the rusting way.” Some of the milling people start pulling others away. Someone else grabs for one of the jewel-objects and tries to pull it off, then jerks their hand away, yelping as Lerna did. The object changes, two pieces of the shiny blue surface flaking away and lifting before clapping back into place—and suddenly it shifts in your head. It’s not a jewel; it’s a bug. Some kind of beetle, and the iridescent shell is its carapace. In the moment that it lifted its wing covers, you saw that its round body was translucent, with something jumping and bubbling inside. You can sess the heat of it even from where you are, hot as a boil. The man’s flesh steams around it.

Someone gives Lerna the forceps and he tries to pull one of the beetles off. Its wing covers lift again, and a thin jet of something skeets across Lerna’s fingers. He yelps and drops the forceps, jerking back. “Acid!” someone says. Someone else grabs his hand and tries to quickly wipe off the stuff, but you know what it is even before Lerna gasps, “No! Just water. Scalding water.”

“Careful,” says the other Hunter, belatedly. One of his hands bears a line of blisters, you notice. You also notice that he doesn’t look back at the infirmary table or any of the people there.

This is too horrible to watch. The rusting bugs are boiling the man to death. But when you look away, you see that Alabaster is watching you again. Alabaster, who himself is covered in burns, but who should be dead. No one stands near the epicenter of a continent-spanning fissure vent and gets only patchy third-degree burns. He should’ve been ashes scattered over Yumenes’s melted streets.

You realize this as he gazes at you, though his expression is indifferent to another man’s trial by fire. It is a familiar sort of indifference—Fulcrum-familiar. It is the indifference that comes of too many betrayals, too many friends lost for no good reason, too many “too horrible to watch” atrocities seen.

And yet. The reverberation of Alabaster’s orogeny is carelessly powerful, diamond-precise, and so achingly familiar that you have to close your eyes and fight off memories of a heaving ship deck, a lonely highroad, a windy rock island. The torus that he spins is devastatingly small—barely an inch wide, so attenuated that you cannot find its hairpin fulcrum. He’s still better than you.

Then you hear a gasp. You open your eyes to see one of the bugs shiver, hiss like a living teakettle—and then freeze over. Its legs, which had been hooked into the boiled flesh around it, pop loose. It’s dead.

But then you hear a soft groan, and the orogeny dissipates. You look over to see that Alabaster has bowed his head and hunched over. His stone eater slow-grind crouches beside him, something in her posture indicating concern even if her face is as placid as ever. The red-haired stone eater—in internal exasperation you decide to call her Ruby Hair, for now—is gazing at him, too.

That’s it, then. You look back at the man—and your gaze catches on Lerna, who’s looking at the frozen bug in fascination. His eyes lift, sweep the room, stutter across yours, stop. You see the question there, and start to shake your head: No, you did not freeze the bug. But that isn’t the right question, and maybe isn’t even the question he’s asking. He doesn’t need to know if you did. He needs to know if you can.

Lerna, Hoa, Alabaster; today you are driven by silent, meaningful gazes, it seems.

The hot points of the insects sess like geothermal vents as you step forward and focus your sessapinae. Lots of controlled pressure in their tiny bodies; that’s how they make the water boil. You lift a hand toward the man out of habit so everyone will know you’re doing something, and you hear a curse, a hiss, a scramble of feet and jostling bodies as people move back from you, away from any torus you might manifest. Fools. Don’t they know you only need a torus when you have to pull from the ambient? The bugs have plenty of what you need. The difficulty will lie in confining your draw just to them and not the man’s overheated flesh underneath.

Ykka’s stone eater takes a slow step closer. You sess her movement, rather than seeing it; it’s like a mountain shifting toward you. Then Ruby Hair stops as suddenly there is another mountain in its way: Hoa, stock-still and quietly cold. Where did he come from? You cannot spare another thought for these creatures right now.

You begin slowly, using your eyes as well as your sessapinae to determine exactly where to stop… but Alabaster has shown you the way of it. You spin the torus from their hot little bodies as he did, one by one. As you do this, some of them crack open with a loud and violent hiss, and one of them even pops off, flying off toward the side of the room. (People move out of its way even faster than they moved out of yours.) Then it is done.

Everyone stares at you. You look at Ykka. You’re breathing hard because that degree of fine focus is much, much harder than shifting a hillside. “Need anything shaken?”

She blinks, sessing instantly what you mean. Then she grabs your arm. There is—what? An inversion. A channeling-away, as you would do to an obelisk, except there is no obelisk, and you aren’t doing the channeling even though it’s your orogeny. All at once you hear people exclaim outside, and you glance through the infirmary’s door. The infirmary is a built-building, not carved from one of the giant crystals of the geode; inside it’s lit only by electric lamps. Outside, however, through the uncurtained doorway, you can see the geode crystals glowing noticeably brighter, all over the comm.

You stare at Ykka. She nods back at you in a matter-of-fact, collegial way, as if you should have any clue what she’s just done or as if you should be comfortable with a feral doing something that a ringed Fulcrum orogene can’t. Then Ykka steps over to grab another pair of forceps to help. Lerna’s pulling on one of the beetles again despite his scalded fingers, and this time the thing is coming off. A proboscis as long as its body slides out of the boiled flesh, and—you can’t look anymore.

(You glimpse Ruby Hair again, from the corner of your eye. She’s ignoring Hoa, who stands still as a statue between you, and now she’s smiling at Ykka. Her lips are parted just a little. You glimpse a hint of shining teeth. You blot this from your awareness.)

So you retreat to the far end of the infirmary, to sit down beside Alabaster’s cushion pile. He’s still bent over, breathing like a bellows, although the stone eater has taken hold of his shoulder with one viselike hand to keep him mostly upright. Belatedly you realize he’s holding one of his stumpy wrists to his belly, and—oh, Earth. The gray-brown rock that once only capped his right wrist now sleeves up to his elbow.

He lifts his head; sweat sheens his face. He looks as weary as if he just shut down another supervolcano, although this time he’s at least conscious, and smiling.

“Ever the good pupil, Syen,” he murmurs. “But rusting Earth, is it costly to teach you.”

The shock of understanding rings through you like silence. Alabaster can’t do orogeny anymore. Not without… consequences. Impulse makes you look at Antimony, and your gorge rises as you realize the stone eater’s gaze is fixed on his newly stoned arm. She doesn’t move, however. After a moment Alabaster manages to straighten, throwing a grateful look at her for the supportive hand. “Later,” he says softly. You know this means eat my arm later. She adjusts her hand to support him from behind instead.

The urge to push her aside, put your hand in place to hold him up, is so powerful that you can’t look at this, either.

You push yourself up, brush past everyone else to get outside the infirmary, and then you sit down on the low, flattened tip of a crystal that is only just beginning to grow out of the geode wall. No one bothers you, though you feel the pressure of gazes and hear the echo of whispers. You don’t mean to stay long, but you do. You don’t know why.

Eventually a shadow falls over your feet. You look up to see Lerna standing there. Beyond him, Ykka is walking away with another man who is trying to talk to her; she seems to be angrily ignoring him. The rest of the crowd has dispersed at last, though you can see through the open doorway that there’s still more people in the infirmary than usual, perhaps visiting the poor half-cooked Hunter.

Lerna isn’t looking at you. He’s staring at the far wall of the geode, which is lost in the hazy glow from dozens of crystals between here and there. He’s also smoking a cigarette. The stench of it, and the yellowish color of the outer wrapping, tells you it’s a mellow: derminther mela leaves and flower buds, mildly narcotic when dried. The Somidlats are famous for them, to the degree that the Somidlats can be famous for anything. You’re still surprised to see him smoking one, though. He’s a doctor. Mellows are bad for you.

“You all right?” you ask.

He doesn’t answer at first, taking a long drag on the cigarette. You’re starting to think he won’t speak, when he says, “I’m going to kill him when I go back in there.”

Then you understand. The bugs burned through skin, muscle, maybe even down to bone. With a team of Yumenescene doctors and cutting-edge biomestric drugs, maybe the man could be kept alive long enough to heal—and even then he might never walk again. With just whatever equipment and medicines Castrima has to hand, the best Lerna can do is amputate. The man might survive it. But this is a Season, and every comm-dweller must earn their shelter from the ash and cold. Few comms have use for a legless Hunter, and this comm is already supporting one burned invalid.

(Ykka walking away, ignoring a man who sounds like he is arguing for a life.)

So Lerna is very much not all right. You decide to change the subject, slightly. “I’ve never seen anything like those bugs.”

“The locals say they’re called boilbugs, though no one knew why before now. They breed around streams, carry water inside themselves. Animals eat them during droughts. Usually they’re carrion eaters. Harmless.” Lerna flicks ash from his forearm. He’s wearing only a loose sleeveless shirt due to Castrima’s warmth. The skin of his forearms is flecked with… something. You look away. “Things change during a Season, though.”

Yes. Cooked carrion probably lasts longer.

“You could’ve gotten those things off him the instant you walked in the door,” Lerna adds.

You blink. Then it registers in your mind that this statement was an attack. It’s so mildly delivered, from such an unexpected quarter, that you’re too surprised to be angry. “I couldn’t,” you say. “At least, I didn’t know I could. Alabaster—”

“I don’t expect anything from him. He came to die here, not live here.” Lerna pivots to face you, and all of a sudden you realize that his placid manner has been concealing absolute rage. His gaze is cool, but it’s visible in everything else: his white lips, the flex of muscle in his jaw, his flaring nostrils. “Why are you here, Essun?”

You flinch. “You know why. I came to find Nassun.”

“Nassun’s out of your reach. Your goals have changed; now you’re here to survive, same as the rest of us. Now you’re one of us.” His lip curls in something that might be contempt. “I’m saying this because if I don’t make you understand, you might have a rusting fit and kill us all.”

You open your mouth to reply. He takes a step toward you, though, and it’s so aggressive that you actually sit up. “Tell me you won’t, Essun. Tell me I won’t have to leave this comm in the dead of the night, hoping nobody you’ve pissed off catches me and slits my throat. Tell me I’m not going to have to go back out there, to fight for my life and watch people I try to help die again and again and again, until I get eaten by rusting bugs—”

He cuts himself off with a choked sound, turning away sharply. You stare at his tense back and say nothing, because there’s nothing you can say. This is the second time he’s mentioned your murder of Tirimo. And is that surprising? He was born there, grew up there; Lerna’s mother was still living there when you left. You think. Maybe you killed her, too, that last day.

There’s nothing you can say, not with guilt souring your mouth, but you try anyway. “I’m sorry.”

He laughs. It doesn’t even sound like him, it’s so ugly and angry. Then he resumes his former posture, gazing at the far geode wall. He’s more in control of himself now; the muscle in his jaw isn’t jumping quite so much. “Prove you’re sorry.”

You shake your head, in confusion rather than refusal. “How?”

“Word’s spreading. A couple of the biggest gossips in the comm were with Ykka when she met you, and apparently you confirmed what a lot of the roggas have been whispering among themselves.” You almost flinch at his use of rogga. He was such a polite boy once. “Topside, you said this Season won’t end for thousands of years. Was that an exaggeration, or the truth?”

You sigh and rub a hand over your hair. It’s a thick, curly mess at the roots. You need to retwist your locks, but you haven’t because you haven’t had time and because it feels like there’s no point.

“Seasons always end,” you say. “Father Earth keeps his own equilibrium. It’s just a question of how long it will take.”

“How long?” It’s barely a question. His tone is flat, resigned. He suspects the answer already.

And he deserves your honest, best guess. “Ten thousand years?” For the Yumenes Rifting to stop venting and the skies to clear. Not long at all by the usual scale of tectonics, but the real danger lies in what the ash might set off. Enough ash covering the warm surface of the sea, and the ice might grow at the poles. That means saltier seas. Drier climates. Permafrost. Glaciers marching, spreading. And the most habitable part of the world should that happen, the Equatorials, will still be hot and toxic.

It’s the winter that really kills, during Seasons. Starvation. Exposure. Even after the skies clear, though, the Rift could cause an age of winter that lasts millions of years. None of which matters, because humanity will have gone extinct long before. It’ll be just the obelisks floating over plains of endless white, with no one left to wonder at or ignore them.

His eyelids flicker. “Hnh.” To your surprise, he turns to face you. Even more surprising is that his anger seems to be gone, though it has been replaced by a kind of bleakness that feels familiar. It’s his question, though, that floors you:

“So what are you planning to do about it?”

Your mouth actually falls open. After a moment you manage to reply, “I wasn’t aware there was anything I could do about it.” Just like you hadn’t thought there was anything you could do about the boilbugs. Alabaster is the genius. You’re the grunt.

“What are you and Alabaster doing with the obelisks?”

“What is Alabaster doing,” you correct. “He just asked me to summon one. Probably because—” It hurts to say. “He can’t do that kind of orogeny anymore.”

“Alabaster made the Rift, didn’t he?”

You close your mouth fast enough that your teeth clack. You’ve just said Alabaster can’t do orogeny anymore. Enough Castrimans hear that they’re living in an underground rock garden because of him, and they’ll find a way to kill him, stone eater or not.

Lerna smiles lopsidedly. “It’s not hard to put together, Essun. His wounds are from steam, particulate abrasion, and corrosive gas, not fire—characteristic of being in close proximity to an erupting burn. I don’t know how he survived, but it’s left its mark on him.” He shrugged. “And I’ve seen you destroy a town in five minutes without breaking a sweat, so I’ve got an inkling of what a ten-ringer might be capable of. What are the obelisks for?”

You set your jaw. “You can ask me six different ways, Lerna, and I’ll give you six different versions of ‘I don’t know,’ because I don’t.”

“I think you at least have an idea. But lie to me if you want.” He shakes his head. “This is your comm now.”

He falls silent after that, as if expecting a response from you. You’re too busy vehemently rejecting the idea to respond. But he knows you too well; he knows you don’t want to hear it. That’s why he says it again. “Essun Rogga Castrima. That’s who you are now.”

“No.”

“Leave, then. Everyone knows Ykka can’t really hold you if you put your mind to leaving. I know you’ll kill us all if you feel the need. So, go.”

You sit there, looking at your hands, which dangle between your knees. Your thoughts are empty.

Lerna inclines his head. “You aren’t leaving because you aren’t stupid. Maybe you can survive out there, but not as anything Nassun would ever want to see again. And if nothing else, you want to live so that you can eventually find her again… however unlikely that is.”

Your hands twitch once. Then they resume dangling limply.

“When this Season doesn’t end,” Lerna continues, and it is so much worse that he does it in that same weary monotone which asked how long the Season would last, like he is speaking utter truth and knows it and hates it, “we’ll run out of food. Cannibalism will help, but it’s not sustainable. At that point the comm will either turn raider or simply dissolve into roving bands of commless. But even that won’t save us, long term. Eventually the remnants of Castrima will just starve. Father Earth wins at last.”

It’s the truth, whether you want to face it or not. And it’s further proof that whatever happened to Lerna during his brief commless career changed him. Not really for the worse. It’s just made him the kind of healer who knows that sometimes one must inflict terrible agony—rebreak a bone, carve off a limb, kill the weak—in order to make the whole stronger.

“Nassun’s strong like you,” he continues, softly and brutally. “Say she survives Jija. Say you find her, bring her here or any other place that seems safe. She’ll starve with the rest when the storecaches empty, but with her orogeny, she could probably force others to give her their food. Maybe even kill them and have the remaining stores for herself. Eventually the stores will run out, though. She’ll have to leave the comm, scrape by on whatever forage she can find under the ash, hopefully while not running afoul of the wildlife or other hazards. She’ll be one of the last to die: alone, hungry, cold, hating herself. Hating you. Or maybe she’ll have shut down by then. Maybe she’ll just be an animal, driven only by the instinct to survive and failing even at that. Maybe she’ll eat herself in the end, the way any beast might—”

“Stop,” you say. It’s a whisper. Mercifully, he does. He turns away again instead, taking another long drag of his half-forgotten mellow.

“Have you talked to anyone since you got here?” he asks finally. It’s not really a change of subject. You don’t relax. He nods toward the infirmary. “Anyone but Alabaster and that menagerie you’ve been traveling with? More than a meeting; talked.”

Not enough to count. You shake your head.

“The rumor’s spreading, Essun. And now everyone’s thinking about how slowly their children will die.” He finally flicks away the mellow. It’s still burning. “Thinking about how they can’t do anything about it.”

But you can, he doesn’t need to say.

Can you?

Lerna walks away so abruptly that you’re surprised. You hadn’t realized he was done. It’s an ingrained flinch at the idea of waste that makes you go pick up his discarded cigarette. Takes you a moment to figure out how to inhale without choking; you’ve never tried before. Orogenes aren’t supposed to ingest narcotics.

But orogenes aren’t supposed to live, either, during a Season. The Fulcrum had no storecaches. No one ever mentioned it, but you’re pretty sure that if a Season ever hit Yumenes hard enough, the Guardians would have swept the place and slaughtered every one of you. Your kind is useful in preventing Seasons, but if the Fulcrum ever so failed in its duty, if ever the worthies of the Black Star or the Emperor had felt a whiff of a thought of a tremor, you and your fellow Imperial Orogenes would not have been rewarded with survival.

And why should you have been? What survival skills does any rogga offer? You can keep people from dying in a shake, yay. Fat lot of good that does when there’s no food.

“Enough!” You hear Ykka’s voice from a short distance away, though you can’t see her around the ground-level crystals. She’s shouting. “It’s done! You want to be there for it or stay here wasting breath on me?”

You get up, your knees aching. Head in that direction.

Along the way, you pass a young man whose face is streaked with tears of fury and incipient grief. He storms past you back to the infirmary. You keep going and eventually see Ykka standing near the side of a high, narrow crystal. She’s planted a hand against its wall and stands with her head bowed, her bush of hair falling around her face so you can’t see it. You think she’s shaking a little.

Maybe that’s your imagination. She seems so coldhearted. But then, so do you.

“Ykka.”

“Not you, too,” she mutters. “I don’t want to hear it, Bugkiller.”

Belatedly you realize: By killing the boilbugs, you made this a harder choice for her. Before, she could have ordered the Hunter killed as a mercy, and the bugs would have been at fault. Now it’s pragmatism, comm policy. That’s on her.

You shake your head and step closer. She straightens and turns in an instant, and you sess the defensive orientation of her orogeny. She doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t set a torus or start an ambient-draw, but then, she wouldn’t, would she? Those are Fulcrum techniques. You don’t really know what she’s going to do, this strangely trained feral, to defend herself.

Part of you is curious, in a detached sort of way. The other part notes the tension on her face. So you offer her the still-lit mellow.

She blinks at it. Her orogeny settles into quiescence again, but her eyes lift and study yours. Then she tilts her head, bemused, considering. Finally she puts one hand on her hip, plucks the mellow from your fingers with the other, and takes a long drag. It works quickly; after a moment she turns to lean back against the crystal, her face settling into weary rather than tense lines as she blows out curls of smoke. She offers it back. You settle beside her and take it.

It takes another ten minutes to finish the cigarette, passing it back and forth between the two of you. Both of you linger, however, after it’s done, by unspoken agreement. Only when you hear someone begin to utter loud, broken sobs from the infirmary behind you do you nod to each other, and part ways.