The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  Ykka posts guards at the entrance to the node maintainer’s chamber—“Nobody but us needs to see that shit,” she declares, and by this you suspect that she doesn’t want any of the comm’s stills getting ideas—and on the storeroom. She puts a triple guard on the goat. There’s an Innovator girl from a farming comm who’s been assigned to figure out how to milk the creature; she manages. The pregnant woman, who lost one of her household mates in the desert, gets first dibs on the milk. This might be pointless. Starvation and pregnancy don’t mesh, either, and she says the baby hasn’t moved in days. Probably best that she lose it now, if she’s going to, here where Lerna’s got antibiotics and sterile instruments available and can at least save the mother’s life. Still, you see her take the little pot of milk when it’s given to her, and drink it down even though she grimaces at the taste. Her jaw is set and hard. There’s a chance. That’s what matters.

  Ykka also sets up monitors at the node station’s shower room. They’re not guards, exactly, but they’re necessary, because a lot of people in Castrima are from rough little Midlatter comms and they don’t know how indoor plumbing works. Also, some people have been just standing under the hot spray for an hour or more, weeping as the ash and leftover desert sand comes off their acid-dried skins. Now, after ten minutes, the monitors gently nudge people out and over to benches along the sides of the room, where they can keep crying while others get their turn.

  You take a shower and feel nothing, except clean. When you claim a corner of the station’s mess hall—which has been emptied of furnishings so that several hundred people can sleep ash-free for the night—you sit there atop your bedroll, leaning against the scoria wall, letting your thoughts drift. It’s impossible not to notice the mountain lurking within the stone just behind you. You don’t call him out because the other people of Castrima are leery of Hoa. He’s the only stone eater still around, and they remember that stone eaters are not neutral, harmless parties. You do reach back and pat the wall with your one hand, however. The mountain stirs a little, and you feel something—a hard nudge—against the small of your back. Message received and returned. It’s surprising how good this private moment of contact makes you feel.

  You need to feel again, you think, as you watch a dozen small tableaus play out before you. Two women argue over which of them gets to eat the last piece of dried fruit in their comm share. Two men, just beyond them, furtively exchange whispers while one passes over a small soft sponge—the kind Equatorials like to use for wiping after defecation. Everyone likes their little luxuries, when fortune provides. Temell, the man who now teaches the comm’s orogene children, lies buried in them as he snores on his bedroll. One boy is nestled in a curl at his belly; meanwhile, Penty’s sock-clad foot rests on the back of his neck. Across the room, Tonkee stands with Hjarka—or rather, Hjarka’s holding her hands and trying to coax her into some kind of slow dance, while Tonkee stands still and tries to just roll her eyes and not smile.

  You’re not sure where Ykka is. Probably spending the night in one of the sheds or tents outside, knowing her, but you hope she lets one of her lovers stay with her this time. She’s got a rotating stable of young women and men, some of them time-sharing with other partners and some singles who don’t seem to mind Ykka using them for occasional stress relief. Ykka needs that now. Castrima needs to take care of its headwoman.

  Castrima needs, and you need, and just as you think this, Lerna comes out of nowhere and settles beside you.

  “Had to end Chetha,” he says quietly. Chetha, you know, is one of the three Strongbacks shot by the Rennies—ironically, a former Rennie herself, conscripted into the army along with Danel. “The other two will make it, probably, but the bolt perforated Chetha’s bowel. It would’ve been slow and awful. Plenty of painkillers here, though.” He sighs and rubs his eyes. “You’ve seen that … thing … in the wire chair.”

  You nod, hesitate, then reach for his hand. He’s not particularly affectionate, you’ve been relieved to discover, but he does need little gestures sometimes. A reminder that he is not alone, and that all is not hopeless. To this end you say, “If I succeed in shutting down the Rifting, you may not need to keep the node maintainers.” You’re not sure that’s true, but you hope it is.

  He clasps your hand lightly. It’s been fascinating to realize that he never initiates contact between you. He waits for you to offer, and then he meets your gestures with as much or as little intensity as you’ve brought to the effort. Respecting your boundaries, which are sharp-edged and hair-triggered. You never knew he was so observant, all these years—but then, you should’ve guessed. He figured out you were an orogene just by watching you, years ago. Innon would’ve liked him, you decide.

  As if he has heard your thoughts, Lerna then looks over at you, and his gaze is troubled.

  “I’ve been thinking about not telling you something,” he says. “Or rather, not pointing out something you’ve probably chosen not to notice.”

  “What an opening.”

  He smiles a little, then sighs and looks down at your clasped hands, the smile fading. The moment attenuates; the tension grows in you, because this is so unlike him. Finally, though, he sighs. “How long has it been since you last menstruated?”

  “How—” You stop talking.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  In your silence, Lerna sighs and leans his head back against the wall.

  You try to make excuses in your own head. Starvation. Extraordinary physical effort. You’re forty-four years old—you think. Can’t remember what month it is. The chances are slimmer than Castrima’s were of surviving the desert. But … your menses have run strong and regular for your entire life, stopping only on three prior occasions. Three significant occasions. That’s why the Fulcrum decided to breed you. Half-decent orogeny, and good Midlatter hips.

  You knew. Lerna’s right. On some level, you noticed. And then chose not to notice, because—

  Lerna has been silent beside you for some while, watching the comm unwind, his hand limp in yours. Very softly he says, “Am I correct in understanding that you need to finish your business at Corepoint within a time frame?”

  His tone is too formal. You sigh, shutting your eyes. “Yes.”

  “Soon?”

  Hoa has told you that perigee—when the Moon is closest—will be in a few days. After that, it will pass the Earth and pick up velocity, slingshotting back into the distant stars or wherever it’s been all this time. If you don’t catch it now, you won’t.

  “Yes,” you say. You’re tired. You … hurt. “Very soon.”

  It is a thing you haven’t discussed, and probably should have for the sake of your relationship. It is a thing you never needed to discuss, because there was nothing to be said. Lerna says, “Using all the obelisks once did that to your arm.”

  You glance at the stump unnecessarily. “Yes.” You know where he’s going with the conversation, so you decide to skip to the end. “You’re the one who asked what I was going to do about the Season.”

  He sighs. “I was angry.”

  “But not wrong.”

  His hand twitches a little on your own. “What if I asked you not to do it?”

  You don’t laugh. If you did, it would be bitter, and he doesn’t deserve that. Instead, you sigh and shift to lie down, pushing him until he does the same thing. He’s a little shorter than you, so you’re the big spoon. This of course puts your face in his gray hair, but he’s availed himself of the shower, too, so you don’t mind. He smells good. Healthy.

  “You wouldn’t ask,” you say against his scalp.

  “But what if I did?” It’s weary and heatless. He doesn’t mean it.

  You kiss the back of his neck. “I’d say, ‘Okay,’ and then there would be three of us, and we’d all stay together until we die of ash lung.”

  He takes your hand again. You didn’t initiate it this time, but it doesn’t bother you. “Promise,” he says.

  He doesn’t wait for
your answer before falling asleep.

  Four days later, you reach Rennanis.

  The good news is that you’re no longer plagued by ashfall. The Rifting’s too close, and the Wall is busy carrying the lighter particulates upward; you’ll never have to worry about that again. What you have instead are periodic gusts laden with incendiary material—lapilli, tiny bits of volcanic material that are too big to inhale easily but are still burning as they come down. Danel says the Rennies called it sparkfall, and that it’s mostly harmless, though you should keep spare canteens of water situated at strategic points throughout the caravan in case any of the sparks should catch and smolder.

  More dramatic than the sparkfall, however, is the way lightning dances over the city’s skyline, this close to the Wall. The Innovators are excited about this. Tonkee says there are all sorts of uses for reliable lightning. (This would have made you stare at her, if it hadn’t come from Tonkee.) None of it strikes the ground, though—only the taller buildings, which have all been fitted with lightning rods by the city’s previous denizens. It’s harmless. You’ll just have to get used to it.

  Rennanis isn’t what you were expecting, quite. Oh, it’s a huge city: Equatorial styling all over the place, still-functioning hydro and filtered well water running smoothly, tall black obsidian walls etched over with dire images of what happens to the city’s enemies. Its buildings aren’t nearly as beautiful or impressive as those of Yumenes, but then Yumenes was the greatest of the Equatorial cities, and Rennanis barely merited the title. “Only half a million people,” you remember someone sneering, a lifetime ago. But two lives ago, you were born in a humble Nomidlats village, and to what remains of Damaya, Rennanis is still a sight to behold.

  There are less than a thousand of you to occupy a city that once held hundreds of thousands. Ykka orders everyone to take over a small complex of buildings near one of the city’s greenlands. (It has sixteen.) The former inhabitants have conveniently labeled the city’s buildings with a color code based on their structural soundness, since the city didn’t survive the Rifting entirely unscathed. Buildings marked with a green X are known to be safe. A yellow X means damage that could spell a collapse, especially if another major shake hits the city. Red-marked buildings are noticeably damaged and dangerous, though you see signs that they were inhabited, too, perhaps by those willing to take any shelter rather than be ashed out. There are more than enough green-X buildings for Castrima, so every household gets its pick of apartments that are furnished, sound, and still have working hydro and geo.

  There are several wild flocks of chickens running about, and more goats, which have actually been breeding. The greenlands’ crops are all dead, however, having gone months unwatered and untended between you killing the Rennies and Castrima’s arrival. Despite this, the seed stocks contain lots of dandelion and other hardy, low-light-tolerant edibles, including Equatorial staples like taro. Meanwhile, the city’s storecaches are overflowing with cachebread, cheeses, fat-flecked spicy sausages, grains and fruit, herbs and leaves preserved in oil, more. Some of it’s fresher than the rest, brought back by the marauding army. All of it is more than the people of Castrima could eat if they threw a feast every night for the next ten years.

  It’s amazing. But there are a few catches.

  The first is that it’s more complicated to run Rennanis’s water treatment facility than anyone expected. It’s running automatically and thus far hasn’t broken down, but no one knows how to work the machinery if it does. Ykka sets the Innovators to the task of figuring that out, or coming up with a workable alternative if the equipment fails. Tonkee is highly annoyed: “I trained for six years at Seventh to learn how to clean shit out of sewer water?” But despite her complaining, she’s on it.

  The second catch is that Castrima cannot possibly guard the city’s walls. The city is simply too big, and there are too few of you. You’re protected, for now, by the fact that no one comes north if they can possibly help it. If anyone does come a-conquering, however, nothing will stand between the comm and conquest except its wall.

  There’s no solution to this problem. Even orogenes can only do so much in the martial sense, here in the shadow of the Rifting where orogeny is dangerous. Danel’s army was Rennanis’s surplus population, and it’s currently feeding a boilbug boom down in the southeastern Midlats—not that you’d want them here, anyway, treating you like the interlopers you are. Ykka orders the Breeders to ramp up to replacement-level production, but even if they recruit every healthy comm member to assist, Castrima won’t have enough people to secure the comm for generations. Nothing to do but at least guard the portion of the city that the comm now occupies, as best you can.

  “And if another army comes along,” you catch Ykka muttering, “we’ll just invite them in and assign them each a room. That ought to settle it.”

  The third catch—and the biggest one, existentially if not logistically—is this: Castrima must live amid the corpses of its conquered.

  The statues are everywhere. Standing in apartment kitchens washing dishes. Lying in beds that have sagged or broken beneath their stone weight. Walking up the parapet steps to take over from other statues on guard duty. Sitting in communal kitchens sipping tea long since dried to dregs. They are beautiful in their way, with wild smoky-quartz manes of hair and smooth jasper skin and clothes of tourmaline or turquoise or garnet or citrine. They wear expressions that are smiles or eye rolls or yawns of boredom—because the shockwave of Obelisk Gate power that transformed them was fast, mercifully. They didn’t even have time to be afraid.

  The first day, everyone edges around the statues. Tries not to sit in their line of sight. To do anything else would be … disrespectful. And yet. Castrima has survived both a war that these people initiated, and life as that war’s refugees. It would be equally disrespectful of Castrima’s dead to let guilt eclipse this truth. So after a day or two, people start to simply … accept the statues. Can’t do anything else, really.

  Something about it bothers you, though.

  You find yourself wandering one night. There’s a yellow-X building that’s not too far from the complex, and it’s beautiful, with a facade covered in etched vinework and floral motifs, some glimmering with peeling gold foil. The foil catches the light and flickers a little as you move, its angles of reflection shifting to create the overall illusion of a building covered in living, moving greenery. It’s an older building than most of those in Rennanis. You like it, though you’re not sure why. You go up to the roof, finding only the usual apartments inhabited by statues along the way. The door here is unlocked and stands open; maybe someone was on the roof when the Rifting struck. You check to make sure there’s a lightning rod in place before you step through the door, of course; this is one of the taller buildings of the city, though it’s only six or seven stories altogether. (Only, sneers Syenite. Only? thinks Damaya, in wonder. Yes, only, you snap at both, to shut them up.) There’s not only a rod, there’s an empty water tower, so as long as you don’t go leaning on any metal surfaces or linger in the rod’s immediate vicinity, you probably won’t die. Probably.

  And here, poised to face the Rifting cloudwall as if he were built up here, gazing north since the building’s floral motifs were new, Hoa awaits.

  “There aren’t as many statues here as there should be,” you say as you stop beside him.

  You can’t help following Hoa’s gaze. From here, you still can’t see the Rifting itself; looks like there’s a dead rainforest and some hilly ridges between the city and the monster. The Wall is bad enough, however.

  And maybe one existential horror is easier to face than another, but you remember using the Obelisk Gate on these people, twisting the magic between their cells and transmuting the infinitesimal parts of them from carbon to silicate. Danel told you how crowded Rennanis was—so much that it had to send out a conquering army to survive. Now, however, the city is not crowded with statues. There are signs that it was, once: statues deep in conversation wi
th partners that seem to be missing; only two people sitting at a table set for six. In one of the bigger green-X buildings there’s a statue that is lying naked in bed, mouth open and penis permanently stiff and hips thrusting up, hands positioned in just the right places to grip someone’s legs. He’s alone, though. Someone’s horrible, morbid joke.

  “My kind are opportunistic feeders,” Hoa says.

  Yeah, that’s exactly what you were afraid he would say.

  “And apparently very damned hungry? There were a lot of people here. Most of them must be missing.”

  “We, too, put aside surplus resources for later, Essun.”

  You rub your face with your one remaining hand, trying and failing to not visualize a gigantic stone eater larder somewhere, now stuffed full of brightly colored statues. “Evil Earth. Why do you bother with me, then? I’m not as—easy a meal as those.”

  “Lesser members of my kind need to strengthen themselves. I don’t.” There is a very slight shift in the inflection of Hoa’s voice. By this point you know him; that was contempt. He’s a proud creature (even he will admit). “They are poorly made, weak, little better than beasts. We were so lonely in those early years, and at first we had no idea what we were doing. The hungry ones are the result of our fumbling.”

  You waver, because you don’t really want to know … but you haven’t been a coward for some years now. So you steel yourself and turn to him and then say, “You’re making another one now. Aren’t you? From—from me. If it’s not about food for you, then it’s … reproduction.” Horrifying reproduction, if it is dependent on the death-by-petrification of a human being. And there must be more to it than just turning people to stone. You think about the kirkhusa at the roadhouse, and Jija, and the woman back in Castrima whom you killed. You think about how you hit her, smashed her with magic, for the not-crime of making you relive Uche’s murder. But Alabaster was not the same, in the end, as what you did to that woman. She was a shining, brightly colored collection of gemstones. He was an ugly lump of brown rock—and yet the brown rock was finely made, precisely crafted, careful, where the woman was a disorderly mess beneath her surface beauty.