The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  Damaya frowns, confused at first because she just had a regular-sized glass of juice. The reason it takes her a while to understand is that she’s drunk: Someone has slipped alcohol into her juice.

  Orogenes aren’t supposed to drink. Ever. The power to move mountains plus inebriation equals disaster waiting to happen. The instructor who stopped Damaya is Galena, one of the younger four-ringers, who runs the afternoon orogeny drills. He’s merciless in the crucible, but for whatever reason he takes pity on her now. Galena takes her out of lineup and brings her to his own quarters, which are fortunately nearby. There he puts Damaya on a couch and commands her to sleep it off.

  In the morning, as Damaya drinks water and winces at the awful taste in her mouth, Galena sits her down and says, “You need to deal with this now. If any of the seniors had caught you—” He shakes his head. It’s an offense so severe that there’s no standing punishment. It would be terrible; that’s all either of them needs to understand.

  It doesn’t matter why the other grits have decided to bully her. All that matters is that they’re doing it, and that these are no harmless pranks. They’re trying to get her iced. Galena’s right; Damaya’s got to deal with this. Now.

  She decides she needs an ally.

  There’s another girl among the loners that she’s noticed. Everyone notices this girl; there’s something wrong with her. Her orogeny is a precarious, pent thing, a dagger constantly poised to plunge into the earth—and training has only made it worse, because now the knife is sharper. That’s not supposed to happen. Selu is her name, and she hasn’t yet earned or been given an orogene name, but the other grits call her Crack to be funny, and that is the name that has stuck. She even answers to that name, since she can’t seem to stop them from using it.

  Everyone’s already whispering that she won’t make it. Which means she’s perfect.

  Damaya makes her move on Crack at breakfast the next day. (She drinks only water now, which she has drawn from a nearby fountain. She has to eat the food they serve her, but she inspects it carefully before putting anything in her mouth.) “Hi,” she says, setting her tray down.

  Crack eyes her. “Really? Things are bad enough that you need me?”

  It’s a good sign that they can be honest with each other right off. “Yes,” Damaya says, and sits since Crack hasn’t really objected. “They’re messing with you, too, aren’t they?” Of course they are. Damaya hasn’t seen whatever they’re doing, but it only makes sense. There’s an order to life in the Fulcrum.

  Crack sighs. This makes the room reverberate faintly, or so it feels for an instant. Damaya makes herself not react, because a good partnership should not begin with a display of fear. Crack sees this and relaxes, just a little. The judder of imminent disaster fades.

  “Yeah,” Crack says, softly. Damaya realizes all of a sudden that Crack is angry, though she keeps her gaze on her plate. It’s there in the way she holds her fork too tightly, and the way her expression is too blank. All at once Damaya wonders: Is Crack’s control really a problem? Or is it simply that her tormentors have done their best to make her crack? “So what do you want to do about it?”

  Damaya outlines her plan. After an initial flinch, Crack realizes she is serious. They finish eating in silence, while Crack thinks it over. At last, Crack says, “I’m in.”

  The plan is really quite simple. They need to find the head of the serpent, and the best way to do that is to use bait. They decide on Maxixe, because of course Maxixe must be involved. Damaya’s troubles began right after his ostensibly friendly overtures. They wait until he’s in the shower one morning, laughing with his friends, and then Damaya returns to her bunk. “Where are my shoes?” she asks, loudly.

  The other grits look around; some of them groan, all too ready to believe that bullies would be uncreative enough to pull the same trick twice. Jasper, who’s only been in the Fulcrum a few months longer than Damaya, scowls. “Nobody took your shoes this time,” he says. “They’re in your trunk.”

  “How do you know? Did you take them?” Damaya moves to confront him, and he bristles and meets her in the middle of the room, his shoulders back with affront.

  “I didn’t take your crap! If they’re lost, you lost them.”

  “I don’t lose things.” She jabs him in the chest with a finger. He’s a Nomidlatter like her, but thin and pale; probably from some comm close to the Arctic. He turns red when he’s angry; the other kids make fun of this, but not much, because he teases other kids more loudly. (Good orogeny is deflection, not cessation.) “If you didn’t take them, then you know who did.” She jabs him again, and he swats her hand away.

  “Don’t touch me, you stupid little pig. I’ll break your rusting finger.”

  “What is this?”

  They all jump and fall silent and turn. In the doorway, ready to begin evening inspection, is Carnelian, one of the few seniors among the instructors. He’s a big man, bearded and older and severe, with six rings; they’re all afraid of him. In token of which, the grits immediately scramble into their places before the bunks, standing at attention. Damaya, in spite of herself, feels a bit of trepidation—until she catches Crack’s eye, and Crack gives her a small nod. The distraction was enough.

  “I said, what is this?” Carnelian comes into the room once they’re assembled. He focuses on Jasper, who’s still apple-red, though probably with fear rather than anger this time. “Is there some problem?”

  Jasper glares at Damaya. “Not with me, Instructor.”

  When Carnelian turns to her, she is ready. “Someone stole my shoes, Instructor.”

  “Again?” This is a good sign. Last time, Carnelian simply berated her for losing her own shoes and making excuses. “You have proof it was Jasper who stole them?”

  Here’s the tricky part. She’s never been good at lying. “I know it was a boy. They disappeared during the last shower, and all the girls were in there with me. I counted.”

  Carnelian sighs. “If you’re trying to blame someone else for your shortcomings—”

  “She’s always doing that,” says a red-haired eastern Coaster girl.

  “She’s got a lot of shortcomings,” says a boy who looks like he comes from the same comm, if he’s not a relative of hers outright. Half the grits snicker.

  “Search the boys’ chests.” Damaya speaks over their laughter. It’s something she didn’t ask for last time, because she wasn’t sure where the shoes would be. This time she is sure. “There wasn’t much time to get rid of the shoes. They have to still be here. Look in their chests.”

  “That’s not fair,” says one tiny Equatorial boy, who looks barely old enough to be out of the toddlers’ creche.

  “No, it isn’t,” says Carnelian, his scowl deepening as he looks at her. “Be very certain before you ask me to violate your fellow trainees’ privacy. If you’re wrong, we won’t go easy on you this time.”

  She still remembers the sting of brush-scrubbed feet. “I understand, Instructor.”

  Carnelian sighs. Then he turns to the boys’ side of the dormitory room. “Open your trunks, all of you. Let’s get this over with.”

  There’s a lot of grumbling as they open their chests, and enough glares that Damaya knows she’s made things worse for herself. They all hate her now. Which is fine; if they’re going to hate her, she’d rather they do it for a reason. But that might change once this game has played out.

  Maxixe opens his chest along with the rest, sighing mortally as he does so, and her shoes are right there on top of the folded uniforms. When Damaya sees his expression change from annoyance to confusion and then mortification, she feels bad. She doesn’t like hurting people. But she watches closely, and the instant Maxixe’s expression changes to fury, he swings around and glares at someone. She follows his glare, tense, ready—

  —to see that he’s looking at Jasper. Yes. That was what she expected. He’s the one, then.

  Jasper, though, has suddenly gone pale. He shakes his head as if t
rying to throw off Maxixe’s accusatory look; it doesn’t work.

  Instructor Carnelian sees all of this. A muscle in his jaw flexes as he glances toward Damaya again. He looks almost angry with her. But why? He must understand that she has to do this.

  “I see,” he says, as if responding to her thought. Then he focuses on Maxixe. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Maxixe doesn’t protest his innocence. She can see by the slump of his shoulders and the shaking of his fists that he knows there’s no point. But he’s not going down alone. With his head down, he says, “Jasper took her shoes last time.”

  “I did not!” Jasper backs away from his bunk and the inspection line, into the middle of the room. He’s trembling all over. Even his eyes are trembling; he looks ready to cry. “He’s lying, he’s just trying to pass this off on someone else—” But when Carnelian turns to Jasper, Jasper flinches and goes still. He almost spits the next words. “She sold them for me. Traded them to one of the cleaning commless in exchange for liquor.”

  And then he points at Crack.

  Damaya inhales, everything inside her going still with shock. Crack?

  Crack.

  “You rusting cannibalson whore!” Crack clenches her fists. “You let that old pervert feel you up for liquor and a letter, you know full well he wouldn’t give it to us just for shoes—”

  “It was from my mother!” Jasper’s definitely crying now. “I didn’t want him to, to, but I couldn’t… they wouldn’t let me write to her…”

  “You liked it,” Crack sneers. “I told you I’d tell if you said anything, didn’t I? Well, I saw you. He had his fingers in you and you moaned like it felt good, just like the little wannabe Breeder you are, only Breeders have standards—”

  This is wrong. This is all wrong. Everyone’s staring at each other, at Crack as she rants, at Damaya, at Jasper as he weeps, at Carnelian. The room is full of gasps and murmurings. That feeling is back: the pent, fraught, not-quite-reverberation that is Crack’s orogeny unfurling itself, and everyone in the room is twitching with it. Or maybe they’re twitching at the words and what they mean, because these aren’t things grits should know, or do. Getting in trouble, sure, they’re kids and kids do that. Getting in trouble like this, no.

  “No!” Jasper wails the word at Crack. “I told you not to tell!” He’s sobbing openly now. His mouth works but nothing more comes out that’s intelligible, nothing but a low, despairing moan—or maybe it’s just a continuation of the word no. Impossible to tell, because everyone else is making noise now, some of them hissing at Crack to shut up, some sniffing with Jasper, some of them giggling nervously at Jasper’s tears, some of them stage-whispering at each other for confirmation of things they knew but didn’t believe—

  “Enough.” The room goes silent with Carnelian’s quiet command, except for Jasper’s soft hitching. After a moment, Carnelian’s jaw flexes. “You, you, and you.” He points at Maxixe, Jasper, and Crack. “Come with me.”

  He walks out of the room. The three grits look at each other, and it’s a wonder none of them combust from the sheer hatred in these looks. Then Maxixe curses and moves to follow Carnelian. Jasper scrubs a forearm across his face and does the same, his head hanging and fists tight. Crack glares around the room, defiant—until her eyes meet Damaya’s. Then Crack flinches.

  Damaya stares back, because she’s too stunned to look away. And because she is furious with herself. This is what comes of trusting others. Crack was not her friend, wasn’t even someone she liked, but she’d thought they could at least help each other. Now she’s found the head of the snake that’s been trying to eat her, and it’s halfway down the gullet of a completely different snake. The result is something too obscene to look at, let alone kill.

  “Better you than me,” Crack says softly, into the room’s silence. Damaya hasn’t said anything, hasn’t demanded an explanation, but Crack gives one anyway, right there in front of everyone. No one says a word. No one even breathes loudly. “That was the idea. One more slip-up and I’m done for, but you, you’re Little Citizen Perfect. Top scores on all the tests, perfect control in Applied, not a wrinkle out of place. The instructors wouldn’t really do much to you, not yet. And while they were trying to figure out how their star pupil suddenly went wrong, everyone would stop waiting for me to blow up a mountain. Or trying to make me do it… for a while, anyway.” Her smile fades, and she looks away. “That was the idea.”

  Damaya can’t say anything. She can’t even think. So after a while Crack shakes her head, sighs, and moves to follow the others after Carnelian.

  The room is still. Nobody looks at anybody else.

  Then there’s a stir at the door as two other instructors come in and begin examining Crack’s bunk and trunk. The grits watch as one woman lifts the mattress, and the other ducks under it. There’s a brief ripping sound, and the instructor reappears with a big brown flask, half full, in one hand. She opens the flask and sniffs its contents, grimaces, and nods to the other woman. They both leave.

  When the echoes of their steps fade, Damaya goes to Maxixe’s trunk to retrieve her shoes. She closes the lid; the sound is very loud in the silence. No one moves until she goes back to her own bunk and sits down to put the shoes on.

  As if this is a signal, there are several sighs, and some of the others start moving, too—retrieving books for the next lesson, filing off to first crucible, going over to the sideboard where breakfast waits. When Damaya goes to the sideboard herself, another girl glances at her, then away, quickly. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m the one who pushed you in the shower.”

  Damaya looks at her and sees lurking fear making the skin around her eyes tight.

  “It’s okay,” she says, softly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The other grits never give Damaya trouble again. A few days later Maxixe returns with broken hands and haunted eyes; he never speaks to Damaya again. Jasper does not return, but Carnelian tells them he’s been sent to the satellite Fulcrum up in Arctic, since the Fulcrum of Yumenes holds too many bad memories for him. This was meant as a kindness, perhaps, but Damaya knows an exile when she sees one.

  It could be worse, though. No one ever sees or mentions Crack again.

  * * *

  FUNGUS SEASON: 602 Imperial. A series of oceanic eruptions during the eastern Equatorial monsoons increased humidity in the region and obscured sunlight for six months. While this was a mild Season as such things go, its timing created perfect conditions for a fungal bloom that spread across the Equatorials into the northern and southern midlats, wiping out then-staple-crop miroq (now extinct). The resulting famine is included in the official geomestric record, extending the Season’s length to four years (two years for the fungus blight to run its course, two more for agriculture and food distribution systems to recover). Nearly all affected comms were able to subsist on their own stores, thus proving the efficacy of Imperial reforms and Seasonal planning. In its aftermath, many comms of the Nomidlats and Somidlats voluntarily joined the Empire, beginning its Golden Age.

  —The Seasons of Sanze

  12

  Syenite finds a new toy

  MY COLLEAGUE IS ILL,” SYENITE tells Asael Leadership Allia as she sits facing the woman across a desk. “He sends his apologies for being unable to assist. I will clear the blockage in your harbor.”

  “I’m sorry to hear of your senior’s illness,” says Asael, with a little smile that almost makes Syen’s hackles rise. Almost, because she knew it was coming and could thus brace for it. It still rankles.

  “But I must ask,” Asael continues, looking overly concerned. “Will you be… sufficient?” Her eyes flick down to Syen’s fingers, where Syen has taken great care to put her rings on the four fingers a casual observer would be most likely to see. Her hands are folded, with the thumb of that hand tucked out of the way for the moment; let Asael wonder if there’s a fifth one there. But when Asael’s eyes meet Syen’s again, Syen sees only skepticism. She is
unimpressed by four rings or even five.

  And this is why I will never, ever take a mission with a ten-ringer again. Like she has a choice. She feels better thinking it anyway.

  Syenite forces herself to smile, though she doesn’t have Alabaster’s knack for exaggerated politeness. She knows her smiles just look pissed-off. “In my last mission,” she says, “I was responsible for demolishing three buildings out of a block of five. This was in downtown Dibars, an area with several thousand inhabitants on a busy day, and not far from the Seventh University.” She uncrosses and recrosses her legs. The geomests had driven her half mad on that mission, constantly demanding reassurances that she wouldn’t create a shake any stronger than a 5.0. Sensitive instruments, important calibrations, something like that. “It took five minutes, and no rubble landed outside of the demolition zone. That was before I earned my latest ring.” And she’d kept the shake to a fourer, much to the geomests’ delight.

  “I’m pleased to hear you’re so competent,” says Asael. There is a pause, which makes Syen brace herself. “With your colleague unable to contribute, however, I see no reason for Allia to pay for the services of two orogenes.”

  “That’s between you and the Fulcrum,” Syen says, dismissively. She honestly doesn’t care. “I suspect you’ll get an argument from them because Alabaster is mentoring me on this trip, and overseeing my work even if he isn’t actually doing it.”

  “But if he isn’t here—”

  “That’s irrelevant.” It galls, but Syenite decides to explain. “He wears ten rings. He’ll be able to observe what I’m doing, and intervene if necessary, from his hotel room. He could do it while unconscious. Moreover, he’s been quelling shakes in this area for the past few days, as we’ve traveled through it. That’s a service he provides as a courtesy to local node maintainers—or to your comm, rather, since such a remote location doesn’t have a node station nearby.” As Asael’s expression tightens into a frown, probably at the perceived insult, Syen spreads her hands. “The biggest difference between him and me is that I’m the one who needs to see what she’s doing.”