The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  “A change at this late date?” I glance at the us-woman, Kelenli, to see if she is following the whole conversation. She looks so much like one of them, all that surface coloring and those long bones that make her a head taller than both of us. “Do you have something to do with the project?” I ask her, while also responding to Gaewha’s news about Tetlewha. No.

  My “no” is not denial, just a statement of fact. We can still detect Tetlewha’s familiar hot spot roil and strata uplift, grind of subsidence, but … something is different. He’s not nearby anymore, or at least he’s not anywhere that is in range of our seismic questings. And the roil and grind of him have gone nearly still.

  Decommissioned is the word the conductors prefer to use, when one of us is removed from service. They have asked us, individually, to describe what we feel when the change happens, because it is a disruption of our network. By unspoken agreement each of us speaks of the sensation of loss—a pulling away, a draining, a thinning of signal strength. By unspoken agreement none of us mentions the rest, which in any case is indescribable using conductor words. What we experience is a searing sensation, and prickling all over, and the tumbledown resistance tangle of ancient pre-Sylanagistine wire such as we sometimes encounter in our explorations of the earth, gone rusted and sharp in its decay and wasted potential. Something like that.

  Who gave the order? I want to know.

  Gaewha has become a slow fault ripple of stark, frustrated, confused patterns. Conductor Gallat. The other conductors are angry about it and someone reported it to the higher-ups and that’s why they have sent Kelenli here. It took all of us together to hold the onyx and the moonstone. They are concerned about our stability.

  Annoyed, I return, Perhaps they should have thought of that before—

  “I do have something to do with the project, yes,” interrupts Kelenli, though there has been no break or disruption of the verbal conversation. Words are very slow compared to earthtalk. “I have some arcane awareness, you see, and similar abilities to yours.” Then she adds, I’m here to teach you.

  She switches as easily as we do between the words of the conductors and our language, the language of the earth. Her communicative presence is radiant heavy metal, searing crystallized magnetic lines of meteoric iron, and more complex layers underneath this, all so sharp-edged and powerful that Gaewha and I both inhale in wonder.

  But what is she saying? Teach us? We don’t need to be taught. We were decanted knowing nearly everything we needed to know already, and the rest we learned in the first few weeks of life with our fellow tuners. If we hadn’t, we would be in the briar patch, too.

  I make sure to frown. “How can you be a tuner like us?” This is a lie spoken for our observers, who see only the surface of things and think we do, too. She is not white like us, not short or strange, but we have known her for one of ours since we felt the cataclysm of her presence. I do not disbelieve that she is one of us. I can’t disbelieve the incontrovertible.

  Kelenli smiles, with a wryness that acknowledges the lie. “Not quite like you, but close enough. You’re the finished artwork, I’m the model.” Threads of magic in the earth heat and reverberate and add other meanings. Prototype. A control to our experiment, made earlier to see how we should be done. She has only one difference, instead of the many that we possess. She has our carefully designed sessapinae. Is that enough to help us accomplish the task? The certainty in her earth-presence says yes. She continues in words: “I’m not the first that was made. Just the first to survive.”

  We all push a hand at the air to ward off Evil Death. But I allow myself to look like I don’t understand as I wonder if we dare trust her. I saw how the conductor relaxed around her. Pheylen is one of the nice ones, but even she never forgets what we are. She forgot with Kelenli, though. Perhaps all humans think she is one of them, until someone tells them otherwise. What is that like, being treated as human when one is not? And then there’s the fact that they’ve left her alone with us. We they treat like weapons that might misfire at any moment … but they trust her.

  “How many fragments have you attuned to yourself?” I ask aloud, as if this is a thing that matters. It is also a challenge.

  “Only one,” Kelenli says. But she’s still smiling. “The onyx.”

  Oh. Oh, that does matter. Gaewha and I exchange a look of wonder and concern before facing her again.

  “And the reason I’m here,” Kelenli continues, abruptly insistent upon delivering this important information with mere words, which somehow perversely serves to emphasize them, “is because the order has been issued. The fragments are at optimum storage capacity and are ready for the generative cycle. Corepoint and Zero Site go live in twenty-eight days. We’re finally starting up the Plutonic Engine.”

  (In tens of thousands of years, after people have repeatedly forgotten what “engines” are and know the fragments as nothing but “obelisks,” there will be a different name for the thing that rules our lives now. It will be called the Obelisk Gate, which is both more poetic and quaintly primitive. I like that name better.)

  In the present, while Gaewha and I stand there staring, Kelenli drops one last shocker into the vibrations between our cells:

  That means I have less than a month to show you who you really are.

  Gaewha frowns. I manage not to react because the conductors watch our bodies as well as our faces, but it is a narrow thing. I’m very confused, and not a little unnerved. I have no idea, in the present of this conversation, that it is the beginning of the end.

  Because we tuners are not orogenes, you see. Orogeny is what the difference of us will become over generations of adaptation to a changed world. You are the shallower, more specialized, more natural distillation of our so-unnatural strangeness. Only a few of you, like Alabaster, will ever come close to the power and versatility we hold, but that is because we were constructed as intentionally and artificially as the fragments you call obelisks. We are fragments of the great machine, too—just as much a triumph of genegineering and biomagestry and geomagestry and other disciplines for which the future will have no name. By our existence we glorify the world that made us, like any statue or scepter or other precious object.

  We do not resent this, for our opinions and experiences have been carefully constructed, too. We do not understand that what Kelenli has come to give us is a sense of peoplehood. We do not understand why we have been forbidden this self-concept before now … but we will.

  And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.

  Well. We don’t have much use for words, anyway. But that’s what this is. The beginning. You, Essun, will see the end.

  3

  you, imbalanced

  IT TAKES A FEW DAYS for you to recover enough to walk on your own. As soon as you can, Ykka reappropriates your stretcher-bearers to perform other tasks, which leaves you to hobble along, weak and made clumsy by the loss of your arm. The first few days you lag well behind the bulk of the group, catching up to camp with them only hours after they’ve settled for the night. There isn’t much left of the communal food by the time you go to take your share. Good thing you don’t feel hunger anymore. There aren’t many spaces left to lay out your bedroll, either—though they did at least give you a basic pack and supplies to make up for your lost runny-sack. What spaces there are aren’t good, located near the edges of the camp or off the road altogether, where the danger of attack by wildlife or commless is greater. You sleep there anyway because you’re exhausted. You suppose that if there’s any real danger, Hoa will carry you off again; he seems able to transport you for short distances through the earth with no trouble. Still, Ykka’s anger is a hard thing to bear, in more ways than one.

  Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, exce
pt that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a running pose. Apparently stone eaters get bored, too. Hjarka stays with Tonkee, so that’s four of you. Well, five: Lerna lingers to walk with you, too, angry at what he perceives as the mistreatment of one of his patients. He didn’t think a recently comatose woman should be made to walk at all, let alone left to fall behind. You try to tell him not to stick with you, not to draw Castrima’s wrath upon himself, but he snorts and says that if Castrima really wants to antagonize the only person in the comm who’s formally trained to do surgery, they don’t deserve to keep him. Which is … well, it’s a very good point. You shut up.

  You’re managing better than Lerna expected, at least. That’s mostly because it wasn’t really a coma, and also because you hadn’t lost all of your road conditioning during the seven or eight months that you lived in Castrima. The old habits come back easily, really: finding a steady, if slow, pace that nevertheless eats up the miles; wearing your pack low so that the bulk of its weight braces against your butt rather than pulling on your shoulders; keeping your head down as you walk so that the falling ash doesn’t cover your goggles. The loss of the arm is more a nuisance than a real hardship, at least with so many willing helpers around. Aside from throwing off your balance and plaguing you with phantom itches or aches from fingers or an elbow that doesn’t exist, the hardest part is getting dressed in the morning. It’s surprising how quickly you master squatting to piss or defecate without falling over, but maybe you’re just more motivated after days in a diaper.

  So you’re holding your own, just slowly at first, and you’re getting faster as the days go by. But here’s the problem with all of this: You’re going the wrong way.

  Tonkee comes over to sit by you one evening. “You can’t leave until we’re a lot further west,” she says without preamble. “Almost to the Merz, I’m thinking. If you want to make it that far, you’re going to have to patch things up with Ykka.”

  You glare at her, though for Tonkee, this is discreet. She’s waited till Hjarka is snoring in her bedroll and Lerna’s gone off to use the camp latrine. Hoa is still nearby, standing unsubtle guard over your small group within the comm encampment, the curves of his black marble face underlit by your fire. Tonkee knows he’s loyal to you, though, to the degree that loyalty means anything to him.

  “Ykka hates me,” you finally say, after glaring fails to produce anything like chagrin or regret in Tonkee.

  She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, I know hate. What Ykka’s got is … scared, and a good bit of mad, but some of that you deserve. You’ve put her people in danger.”

  “I saved her people from danger.”

  Across the encampment, as if to illustrate your point, you notice someone moving about clunkily. It’s one of the Rennanis soldiers, a few of whom were captured alive after the last battle. They’ve put a pranger on her—a hinged wooden collar round her neck, with holes in the planks holding her arms up and apart, linked by two chains to manacles on her ankles. Primitive but effective. Lerna’s been tending the prisoners’ chafing sores, and you understand they’re allowed to put the prangers aside at night. It’s better treatment than Castrimans would have gotten from Rennanis if the situations were reversed, but still, it makes everything awkward. It’s not like the Rennies can leave, after all. Even without the prangers, if any one of them escapes now, with no supplies and lacking the protection of a large group, they’ll be meat within days. The prangers are just insult on top of injury, and a disquieting reminder to all that things could be worse. You look away.

  Tonkee sees you looking. “Yeah, you saved Castrima from one danger and then delivered them into something just as bad. Ykka only wanted the first half of that.”

  “I couldn’t have avoided the second half. Should I have just let the stone eaters kill all the roggas? Kill her? If they’d succeeded, none of the geode’s mechanisms would’ve worked anyway!”

  “She knows that. That’s why I said it wasn’t hate. But …” Tonkee sighs as if you’re being especially stupid. “Look. Castrima was—is—an experiment. Not the geode, the people. She’s always known it was precarious, trying to make a comm out of strays and roggas, but it was working. She made the old-timers understand that we needed the newcommers. Got everybody to think of roggas as people. Got them to agree to live underground, in a deadciv ruin that could’ve killed us all at any moment. Even kept them from turning on each other when that gray stone eater gave them a reason—”

  “I stopped that,” you mutter. But you’re listening.

  “You helped,” Tonkee concedes, “but if it had just been you? You know full well it wouldn’t have worked. Castrima works because of Ykka. Because they know she’ll die to keep this comm going. Help Castrima, and Ykka will be on your side again.”

  It will be weeks, maybe even months, before you reach the now-vacant Equatorial city of Rennanis. “I know where Nassun is now,” you say, seething. “By the time Castrima gets to Rennanis, she might be somewhere else!”

  Tonkee sighs. “It’s been a few weeks already, Essun.”

  And Nassun was probably somewhere else before you even woke up. You’re shaking. It’s not rational and you know it, but you blurt, “But if I go now, maybe—maybe I can catch up, maybe Hoa can tune in on her again, maybe I can—” Then you falter silent because you hear the shaky, high-pitched note of your own voice and your mother instincts kick back in, rusty but unblunted, to chide you: Stop whining. Which you are. So you bite back more words, but you’re still shaking, a little.

  Tonkee shakes her head, an expression on her face that might be sympathy, or maybe it’s just rueful acknowledgment of how pathetic you sound. “Well, at least you know it’s a bad idea. But if you’re that determined, then you’d better get started now.” She turns away. Can’t really blame her, can you? Venture into the almost certainly deadly unknown with a woman who’s destroyed multiple communities, or stay with a comm that at least theoretically will soon have a home again? That’s barely even a question.

  But you should really know better than to try to predict what Tonkee will do. She sighs, after you subside and sit back on the rock you’ve been using for a chair. “I can probably wrangle some extra supplies out of the quartermaster, if I tell them I need to go scout something for the Innovators. They’re used to me doing that. But I’m not sure I can convince them to give me enough for two.”

  It’s a surprise to realize how grateful you are, for her—hmm. Loyalty isn’t the word for it. Attachment? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that you’ve been her research subject for all this time already, so of course she’s not going to let you slip away when she’s followed you across decades and half the Stillness.

  But then you frown. “Two? Not three?” You thought things were working out with her and Hjarka.

  Tonkee shrugs, then awkwardly bends to tuck into the little bowl of rice and beans she has from the communal pot. After she swallows, she says, “I prefer to make conservative estimates. You’d better, too.”

  She means Lerna, who seems to be in the process of attaching himself to you. You don’t know why. You’re not exactly a prize, dressed in ash and with no arm, and half the time he seems to be furious with you. You’re still surprised it’s not all the time. He always was a strange boy.

  “Anyway, here’s a thing I want you to think about,” Tonkee continues. “What was Nassun doing when you found her?”

  And you flinch. Because, damn it, Tonkee has once again said aloud a thing that you would have preferred to leave unsaid, and unconsidered.

  And because you remember that moment, with the power of the Gate sluicing through you, when you reached and touched and felt a familiar resonance touch back. A resonance backed, and amplified, by something blue and deep and strangely resistant to the Gate’s linkage. The Gate told you—somehow—that it was the sa
pphire.

  What is your ten-year-old daughter doing playing with an obelisk?

  How is your ten-year-old daughter alive after playing with an obelisk?

  You think of how that momentary contact felt. Familiar vibration-taste of an orogeny which you’ve been quelling since before she was born and training since she was two—but so much sharper and more intense now. You weren’t trying to take the sapphire from Nassun, but the Gate was, following instructions that long-dead builders somehow wrote into the layered lattices of the onyx. Nassun kept the sapphire, though. She actually fought off the Obelisk Gate.

  What has your little girl been doing, this long dark year, to develop such skill?

  “You don’t know what her situation is,” Tonkee continues, which makes you blink out of this terrible reverie and focus on her. “You don’t know what kind of people she’s living with. You said she’s in the Antarctics, somewhere near the eastern coast? That part of the world shouldn’t be feeling the Season much yet. So what are you going to do, then, snatch her out of a comm where she’s safe and has enough to eat and can still see the sky, and drag her north to a comm sitting on the Rifting, where the shakes will be constant and the next gas vent might kill everyone?” She looks hard at you. “Do you want to help her? Or just have her with you again? Those two things aren’t the same.”

  “Jija killed Uche,” you snap. The words don’t hurt, unless you think about them as you speak. Unless you remember your son’s smell or his little laugh or the sight of his body under a blanket. Unless you think of Corundum—you use anger to press down the twin throbs of grief and guilt. “I have to get her away from him. He killed my son!”

  “He hasn’t killed your daughter yet. He’s had, what, twenty months? Twenty-one? That means something.” Tonkee spies Lerna coming back toward you through the crowd, and sighs. “There are just things you ought to think about, is all I’m saying. And I can’t even believe I’m saying it. She’s another obelisk-user, and I can’t even go investigate it.” Tonkee utters a frustrated grumbly sound. “I hate this damn Season. I have to be so rusting practical now.”