The Fifth Season

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Very. It’s unlikely to blow anytime soon, or ever—but if it ever does, there will be a crater here instead of islands.” He grimaces. “ ’Course, that’s if a tsunami doesn’t get the island first, close as we are to the plate boundary here. There’re so many ways to die in this place. But they know about all of them—seriously—and as far as I can tell, they don’t care. At least they’ll die free, they say.”

  “Free of what? Living?”

  “Sanze.” Alabaster grins when Syen’s mouth falls open. “According to Harlas, this comm’s part of a string of small island comms all along the archipelago—that’s the word for a group of islands, if you didn’t know—that extends from here down almost to the Antarctic, created by that hot spot. Some of the comms in that chain, this one included, have been around ten Seasons or longer—”

  “Bullshit!”

  “—and they don’t even remember when Meov was founded and, uh, carved, so maybe it’s older than that. They’ve been around since before Sanze. And as far as they know, Sanze either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that they’re here. They were never annexed.” He shakes his head. “The Coaster comms are always accusing each other of hosting the pirates, and no one with sense sails this far out; maybe nobody knows these island comms are out here. I mean, they probably know the islands exist, but they must not think anyone would be stupid enough to live on them.”

  No one should be. Syen shakes her head, amazed at these people’s audacity. When another comm child pokes her head above the windowsill, blatantly staring at them, Syen can’t help smiling, and the girl’s eyes grow round as saucers before she bursts out laughing, babbles something in their choppy language, and then gets pulled away by her comrades. Brave, crazy little thing.

  Alabaster chuckles. “She said, ‘The mean one actually smiles!’”

  Rusting brat.

  “I can’t believe they are crazy enough to live here,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t believe this island hasn’t shaken apart, or been blown to slag, or been swamped a hundred times over.”

  Alabaster shifts a little, looking cagey, and by this Syen knows to brace herself. “Well, they survive in large part because they live on fish and seaweed, see. The oceans don’t die during a Season the way the land or a smaller body of water does. If you can fish, there’s always food. I don’t think they even have storecaches.” He looks around, thoughtful. “If they can keep the place stable against shakes and blows, then I guess it would be a good place to live.”

  “But how could they—”

  “Roggas.” He looks at her and grins, and she realizes he’s been waiting to tell her this. “That’s how they’ve survived all this time. They don’t kill their roggas, here. They put them in charge. And they’re really, really, glad to see us.”

  * * *

  The stone eater is folly made flesh. Learn the lesson of its creation, and beware its gifts.

  —Tablet Two, “The Incomplete Truth,” verse seven

  17

  Damaya, in finality

  THINGS CHANGE. THERE IS AN order to life in the Fulcrum, but the world is never still. A year passes.

  After Crack disappears, Maxixe never speaks to Damaya again. When he sees her in the corridors, or after inspection, he simply turns away. If he catches her looking at him, he scowls. He doesn’t catch her often, though, because she doesn’t look at him often. She doesn’t mind that he hates her. He was only a potential friend, anyway. She knows better, now, than to want such a thing, or to believe that she will ever deserve one.

  (Friends do not exist. The Fulcrum is not a school. Grits are not children. Orogenes are not people. Weapons have no need of friends.)

  Still, it’s hard, because without friends she’s bored. The instructors have taught her to read as her parents did not, but she can only do so much of that before the words start to flip and jitter on the page like pebbles during a shake. The library doesn’t have a lot of books that are just for fun and not utilitarian, anyway. (Weapons do not need fun, either.) She’s only allowed to practice her orogeny during Applied, and even though she sometimes lies in her bunk and imagines the lessons over again for extra practice—an orogene’s power is in her focus, after all—there’s only so much of that she can do, too.

  So to occupy her Free Hour, and any other hour when she isn’t busy or sleeping, she wanders around the Fulcrum.

  No one stops grits from doing this. No one guards the grit dormitory during Free Hour or afterward. The instructors do not enforce a curfew; Free Hour can be Free Night, if a grit’s willing to struggle through the next day sleepy. Nor do the adults do anything to prevent the grits from leaving the building. Any child caught in the Ring Garden, which is off-limits to the unringed, or approaching the gates that lead out of the Fulcrum, will have to answer to the seniors. But anything less and the sanctions will be mild, bearable; the usual punishment befitting the crime. That’s it.

  No one gets expelled from the Fulcrum, after all. Dysfunctional weapons are simply removed from the stockpile. And functional weapons should be smart enough to take care of themselves.

  Thus Damaya keeps to the Fulcrum’s least interesting areas in her wanderings—but this leaves plenty to explore, because the Fulcrum complex is huge. Apart from the Garden and the grit training grounds there are clusters of living quarters that house the ringed orogenes, libraries and theaters, a hospital, and places where all the adult orogenes do their work when they’re not off on assignments beyond the Fulcrum. There are also miles of obsidian-paved walkways and greenland that hasn’t been left fallow or kept prepared for a possible Fifth Season; instead, it’s landscaped. It’s just there to be pretty. Damaya figures that means someone should look at it.

  So it is through all this that Damaya walks, in the late hours of the evening, imagining where and how she will live once she joins the ranks of the ringed. The adults in this area mostly ignore her, coming and going about their business, talking with each other or muttering to themselves alone, focused on their adulty things. Some of them notice her, but then shrug and keep walking. They were grits once. Only on one occasion does a woman stop and ask, “Are you supposed to be here?” Damaya nods and walks past her, and the woman does not pursue.

  The administrative buildings are more interesting. She visits the large practice chambers that the ringed orogenes use: great ampitheater-like halls, roofless, with mosaic rings etched into the bare ground in concentric circles. Sometimes there are huge blocks of basalt lying about, and sometimes the ground is disturbed, but the basalt is gone. Sometimes she catches adults in the chambers, practicing; they shift the blocks around like children’s toys, pushing them deep into the earth and raising them again by will alone, blurring the air around themselves with deadly rings of cold. It is exhilarating, and intimidating, and she follows what they’re doing as best she can, though that isn’t much. She’s got a long way to go before she can even begin to do some of these things.

  It’s Main that fascinates Damaya most. This building is the core of the Fulcrum complex: a vast domed hexagon larger than all the other buildings combined. It is in this building that the business of the Fulcrum gets done. Here ringed orogenes occupy the offices and push the papers and pay the bills, because of course they must do all of these things themselves. No one will have it said that orogenes are useless drains on the resources of Yumenes; the Fulcrum is fiscally and otherwise self-sufficient. Free Hour is after the main working hours for the building, so it’s not as busy as it must be during the day, but whenever Damaya wanders the place, she notices that many of the offices are still lit with candles and the occasional electric lantern.

  The Guardians have a wing in Main, too. Now and again Damaya sees burgundy uniforms amid the clusters of black, and when she does, she turns the other way. Not out of fear. They probably see her, but they don’t bother her, because she’s not doing anything she’s been told not to do. It is as Schaffa told her: One need only fear Guardians in specific, limited circumstances. S
he avoids them, however, because as she grows more skilled, she begins to notice a strange sensation whenever she’s in a Guardian’s presence. It is a… a buzzy feeling, a jagged and acrid sort of thing, something more heard and tasted than sessed. She does not understand it, but she notices that she is not the only orogene to give the Guardians a wide berth.

  In Main, there are the wings that have fallen into disuse because the Fulcrum is larger than it needs to be, or so Damaya’s instructors have told her when she asks them about this. No one knew how many orogenes there were in the world before the Fulcrum was built, or perhaps the builders thought that more orogenes would survive childhood to be brought here than has proven true over time. Regardless, the first time Damaya pushes open a conspicuous-looking door that no one seems to be using and finds dark, empty hallways beyond it, she is instantly intrigued.

  It’s too dark to see very far within. Nearby she can make out discarded furniture and storage baskets and the like, so she decides against exploring immediately. The chance that she could hurt herself is too great. Instead she heads back to the grit dorms, and all through the next few days, she prepares. It’s easy to take a small glassknife used for cutting meat from one of the meal trays, and the dorm has plenty of oil lanterns that she can appropriate without anyone caring, so she does. She makes a knapsack out of a pillowcase that she nabs while on laundry duty—it has a tattered edge and was in the “discard” pile—and finally when she feels ready, she sets forth.

  It’s slow going, at first. With the knife she marks the walls here and there so she won’t get lost—until she realizes this part of Main has exactly the same structure as the rest of Main: a central corridor with periodic stairwells, and doors on either side leading into rooms or suites of rooms. It’s the rooms that she likes most, though many of them are boring. Meeting rooms, more offices, the occasional space large enough to serve as a lecture hall, though mostly these seem to be used for storage of old books and clothing.

  But the books! A good many of them are the frivolous sort of tales that the library has so few of—romances and adventures and bits of irrelevant lore. And sometimes the doors lead to amazing things. She discovers a floor that was once apparently used as living quarters—perhaps in some boom year when there were too many orogenes to house comfortably in the apartment buildings. For whatever reason, however, it appears that many of the inhabitants simply walked off and left their belongings behind. Damaya discovers long, elegant dresses in the closets, dry-rotted; toys meant for toddlers; jewelry that her mother would have salivated to wear. She tries on some of it and giggles at herself in the flyspecked mirror, and then stops, surprised by the sound of her own laughter.

  There are stranger things. A room full of plush, ornate chairs—worn and moth-eaten now—all arranged in a circle to face each other: why, she can only imagine. A room she does not understand until later, after her explorations have taken her into the buildings of the Fulcrum that are dedicated to research: Then she knows that what she has found is a kind of laboratory, with strange containers and contraptions that she eventually learns are used for analysis of energy and manipulation of chemicals. Perhaps geomests do not deign to study orogeny, and orogenes are left to do that for themselves, too? She can only guess.

  And there is more, endlessly more. It becomes the thing she looks forward to the most in any given day, after Applied. She gets in trouble now and again in learning creche because sometimes she daydreams of things she’s found, and misses questions during quizzes. She takes care not to slack off so much that the teachers question her, even though she suspects they know about her nighttime explorations. She’s even seen a few of them while she wanders, lounging about and seeming oddly human in their off-hours. They don’t bother her about it, though, which pleases her mightily. It’s nice to feel as if she has a secret to share with them, even though she doesn’t really. There is an order to life in the Fulcrum, but this is her order; she sets it, and no one else disrupts it. It is good to have something she keeps for herself.

  And then, one day, everything changes.

  * * *

  The strange girl slips into the line of grits so unobtrusively that Damaya almost doesn’t notice. They’re walking through the Ring Garden again, on their way back to the grit dormitory after Applied, and Damaya is tired but pleased with herself. Instructor Marcasite praised her for only icing a two-foot torus around herself while simultaneously stretching her zone of control to an approximate depth of one hundred feet. “You’re almost ready for the first ring test,” he told her at the end of the lesson. If this is true, she could end up taking the test a year earlier than most grits, and first of any in her year group.

  Because Damaya is so caught up in the glow of this thought, and because it’s the evening of a long day and everyone’s weary and the Garden is sparsely populated and the instructors are chatting with each other, almost no one sees the strange girl slip into line just ahead of Damaya. Even Damaya almost misses it, because the girl has cleverly waited until they’re turning a curve round a hedge; between one step and another she is there, matching their pace, keeping her gaze forward as most of the others do. But Damaya knows she was not there before.

  For a moment Damaya is taken aback. She doesn’t know all the other grits well, but she does know them on sight, and this girl isn’t one of them. Who is she, then? She wonders whether she should say something.

  Abruptly the girl glances back and catches Damaya staring. She grins and winks; Damaya blinks. When the girl turns away again, she keeps following, too flustered now to tattle.

  They proceed through the Garden and into the barracks and then the instructors depart for the evening, leaving the grits to Free Hour before bedtime. The other kids disperse, some going to fetch food from the sideboard, the newer ones dragging off to bed. A few of the more energetic grits immediately start some sort of silly game, chasing each other round the bunk beds. As usual they ignore Damaya and anything Damaya is doing.

  So Damaya turns to the grit who is not a grit. “Who are you?”

  “Is that really what you want to ask?” The girl looks honestly puzzled. She is Damaya’s age, tall and lanky and more sallow-skinned than most young Sanzeds, and her hair is curled and dark instead of stiff and gray. She’s wearing a grit’s uniform, and she’s actually tied her hair back the same way the other grits with loose hair have done. Only the fact that she’s a total stranger breaks the illusion.

  “I mean, you don’t actually care who I am, do you?” the girl continues, still looking almost offended by Damaya’s first question. “If I were you, I’d want to know what I was doing here.”

  Damaya stares at her, speechless. In the meantime, the girl looks around, frowning a little. “I thought a lot of other people would notice me. There aren’t that many of you—what, thirty in this room? That’s less than in my creche, and I would notice if somebody new suddenly popped in—”

  “Who are you?” Damaya demands, half-hissing the words. Instinctively, though, she keeps her voice down, and for added measure grabs the girl’s arm, hauling her over to an out-of-the-way corner where people are less likely to notice. Except everyone’s had years of practice at paying no attention to Damaya, so they don’t. “Tell me or I yell for the instructors.”

  “Oh, that’s better.” The girl grins. “Much more what I was expecting! But it’s still weird that you’re the only one—” And then her expression changes to one of alarm when Damaya inhales and opens her mouth, clearly preparing to shout. Quickly she blurts, “My name’s Binof! Binof! And you are?”

  It’s such a commonplace sort of thing to say, the pattern of courtesy that Damaya used for most of her life before coming to the Fulcrum, that she answers automatically. “Damaya Strong—” She has not thought of her use name, or the fact that it no longer applies to her, in so long that she is shocked to almost hear herself say it. “Damaya. What are you doing here? Where did you come from? Why are you—” She gestures helplessly at the girl, encompassing
the uniform, the hair, Binof’s existence.

  “Shhh. Now you want to ask a million questions?” Binof shakes her head. “Listen, I’m not going to stay, and I’m not going to get you in trouble. I just need to know—have you seen anything weird around here somewhere?” Damaya stares at her again, and Binof grimaces. “A place. With a shape. Sort of. A big—a thing that—” She makes a series of complicated gestures, apparently trying to pantomime what she means. It is completely nonsensical.

  Except, it isn’t. Not entirely.

  The Fulcrum is circular. Damaya knows this even though she can only get a sense of it when she and the other grits transit the Ring Garden. The Black Star looms to the west of the Fulcrum’s grounds, and to the north Damaya has seen a cluster of buildings tall enough to peek over the obsidian walls. (She often wonders what the inhabitants of those buildings think, looking down on Damaya and her kind from their lofty windows and rooftops.) But more significantly, Main is circular, too—almost. Damaya has wandered its dark hallways often enough by now, with only a lantern and her fingers and sessapinae to guide her, that when she sees Binof make a hexagonal shape with her hands, she knows at once what the strange girl means.

  See, Main’s walls and corridors aren’t wide enough to account for all the space the building occupies. The building’s roof covers an area at its heart, into which its working and walking spaces do not extend; there must be a huge empty chamber within. Courtyard, maybe, or a theater, though there are other theaters in the Fulcrum. Damaya has found the walls around this space, and followed them, and they are not circular; there are planes and angles. Six of each. But if there is a door that opens into this hexagonal central room, it isn’t anywhere in the unused wings—not that she’s found yet.

  “A room without doors,” Damaya murmurs, without thinking. It is what she started calling the unseen chamber in her head, on the day she realized it must exist. And Binof inhales and leans forward.