The Stone Sky

by N. K. Jemisin

  Focus. You clear your throat. “Hoa, where is she?”

  When you glance at him, you see he’s adopted a new stance: expression blank, body facing slightly south and east. You follow his gaze, and see something that at first awes you: a bank of buildings, six or seven stories high that you can see, wedge-shaped and blank of feature. It’s easy to tell that they form a ring, and it’s easy to guess what’s at the heart of that ring, even though you can’t see it because of the angle of the buildings. Alabaster told you, though, didn’t he? The city exists to contain the hole.

  Your throat locks your breath.

  “No,” Hoa says. Okay. You make yourself breathe. She’s not in the hole.

  “Where, then?”

  Hoa turns to look at you. He does this slowly. His eyes are wide. “Essun … she’s gone into Warrant.”

  As Corepoint above, so Warrant below.

  Nassun runs through obsidian-carved corridors, close and low ceilinged and claustrophobic. It’s warm down here—not oppressively so, but the warmth is close and omnipresent. The warmth of the volcano, radiating up through the old stone from its heart. She can sess echoes of what was done to create this place, because it was orogeny, not magic, though a more precise and powerful orogeny than anything she’s ever seen. She doesn’t care about any of that, though. She needs to find Schaffa.

  The corridors are empty, lit above by more of the strange rectangular lights that she saw in the underground city. Nothing else about this place looks like that place. The underground city felt leisurely in its design. There are hints of beauty in the way the station was built that suggest it was developed gradually, piece by piece, with time for contemplation between each phase of construction. Warrant is dark, utilitarian. As Nassun runs down sloping ramps, past conference rooms, classrooms, mess halls, lounges, she sees that all of them are empty. This facility’s corridors were beaten and clawed out of the shield volcano over a period of days or weeks—hurriedly, though it isn’t clear why. Nassun can tell the hurried nature of the place, somehow, to her own amazement. Fear has soaked into the walls.

  But none of that matters. Schaffa is here, somewhere. Schaffa, who’s barely moved for weeks and yet is now somehow running, his body driven by something other than his own mind. Nassun tracks the silver of him, amazed that he’s managed to get so far in the moments that it took her to try to reopen the door he used and then, when it would not open for her, to use the silver to rip it open. But now he is up ahead and—

  —so are others. She stops for a moment, panting, suddenly uneasy. Many of them. Dozens … no. Hundreds. And all are like Schaffa, their silver thinner, stranger, and also bolstered from elsewhere.

  Guardians. This, then, is where they go during Seasons … but Schaffa has said they will kill him because he is “contaminated.”

  They will not. She clenches her fists.

  (It does not occur to her that they will kill her, too. Rather, it does, but They will not looms larger in the scope of her reality.)

  When Nassun runs through a door at the top of a short stair, however, the close corridor suddenly opens out into a narrow but very long high-ceilinged chamber. It’s high enough that its ceiling is nearly lost in shadow, and its length stretches farther than her eye can see. And all along the walls of this chamber, in neat rows that stack up to the ceiling, there are dozens—hundreds—of strange, square holes. She is reminded of the chambers in a wasp’s nest, except the shape is wrong.

  And in every one of them is a body.

  Schaffa isn’t far ahead. Somewhere in this room, no longer moving forward. Nassun stops too, apprehension finally overwhelming her driving need to find Schaffa. The silence makes her skin prickle. She cannot help fear. The analogy of the wasp’s nest has stayed with her, and on some level she fears looking into the cells to find a grub staring back at her, perhaps atop the corpse of some creature (person) it has parasitized.

  Inadvertently, she looks into the nearest cell. It’s barely wider than the shoulders of the man within, who seems to be asleep. He’s youngish, gray-haired, a Midlatter, wearing the burgundy uniform that Nassun has heard of but never seen. He’s breathing, although slowly. The woman in the cell beside him is wearing the same uniform, though she’s completely different in every other way: an Eastcoaster with completely black skin, hair that has been braided along her scalp in intricate patterns, and wine-dark lips. There is the slightest of smiles on those lips—as if, even in sleep, she cannot lose the habit of it.

  Asleep, and more than asleep. Nassun follows the silver in the people in the cells, feeling out their nerves and circulation, and understands then that each is in something like a coma. She thinks maybe normal comas aren’t like this, though. None of these people seems to be hurt or sick. And within each Guardian, there is that shard of corestone—quiescent here, instead of angrily flaring like the one in Schaffa. Strangely, the silver threads in each Guardian are reaching out to the ones around them. Networking together. Bolstering each other, maybe? Charging one another to perform some sort of work, the way a network of obelisks does? She cannot guess.

  (They were never meant to continue.)

  But then, from the center of the vaulted room, perhaps a hundred feet farther in, she hears a sharp mechanical whirr.

  She jumps and stumbles away from the cells, darting a quick, frightened look around to see if the noise has awakened any of the cells’ occupants. They don’t stir. She swallows and calls, softly, “Schaffa?”

  Her answer, echoing through the high chamber, is a low, familiar groan.

  Nassun stumbles forward, her breath catching. It’s him. Down the middle of the strange chamber stand contraptions, arranged in rows. Each consists of a chair attached to a complex arrangement of silver wire in loops and spars; she’s never seen anything like it. (You have.) Each contraption seems big enough to hold one person, but they’re all empty. And—Nassun leans closer for a better look, then shivers—each rests against a stone pillar that holds an obscenely complicated mechanism. It’s impossible not to notice the tiny scalpels, the delicate forcepslike attachments of varying sizes, and other instruments clearly meant for cutting and drilling …

  Somewhere nearby, Schaffa groans. Nassun pushes the cutting things out of her thoughts and hurries down the row—

  —to stop in front of the room’s lone occupied wire chair.

  The chair has been adjusted somehow. Schaffa sits in it, but he is facedown, his body suspended by the wires, his chopped-off hair parting around his neck. The mechanism behind the chair has come alive, extending up and over his body in a way that feels predatory to her—but it is already retracting as she approaches. The bloodied instruments disappear into the mechanism; she hears more faint whirring sounds. Cleaning, maybe. One tiny, tweezer-like attachment remains, however, holding up a prize that still glistens, faintly, with Schaffa’s blood. A little metal shard, irregular and dark.

  Hello, little enemy.

  Schaffa isn’t moving. Nassun stares at his body, shaking. She cannot bring herself to shift her perception back to the silver threads, back to magic, to see if he is alive. The bloody wound high on the back of his neck has been neatly stitched, right over the other old scar that she has always wondered about. It’s still bleeding, but it’s clear the wound was inflicted quickly and sealed nearly as fast.

  Like a child willing the monster under the bed to not exist, Nassun wills Schaffa’s back and sides to move.

  They do, as he draws in a breath. “N-Nassun,” he croaks.

  “Schaffa! Schaffa.” She flings herself to her knees and scooches forward to look at his face from underneath the wire contraption, heedless of the blood still dripping down the sides of his neck and face. His eyes, his beautiful white eyes, are half-open—and they are him this time! She sees that and bursts into tears herself. “Schaffa? Are you okay? Are you really okay?”

  His speech is slow, slurred. Nassun will not think about why. “Nassun. I.” Even more slowly, his expression shifts, a seaquake
in his brows sending a tsunami of slow realization across the rest. His eyes widen. “There’s. No pain.”

  She touches his face. “The—the thing is out of you, Schaffa. That metal thing.”

  He shuts his eyes and her belly clenches, but then the furrow vanishes from his brow. He smiles again—and for the first time since Nassun met him, there is nothing of tension or falsehood in it. He isn’t smiling to ease his pain or others’ fears. His mouth opens. She can see all his teeth, he’s laughing although weakly, he’s weeping, too, with relief and joy, and it is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She cups his face, mindful of the wound on the back of his neck, and presses her forehead against his, shaking with his soft laughter. She loves him. She just loves him so much.

  And because she is touching him, because she loves him, because she is so attuned to his needs and his pain and making him happy, her perception slips into the silver. She doesn’t mean for it to. She just wants to use her eyes to savor the sight of him looking back at her, and her hands to touch his skin, and her ears to hear his voice.

  But she is orogene, and she can no longer shut off the sesuna than she can sight or sound or touch. Which is why her smile falters, and her joy vanishes, because the instant she sees how the network of threads within him is already beginning to fade, she can no longer deny that he is dying.

  It’s slow. He could last a few weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year, with what’s left. But where every other living thing churns forth its own silver almost by accident, where it flows and stutters and gums up the works between cells, there is nothing between his cells but a trickle. What’s left in him mostly runs along his nervous system, and she can see a glaring, gaping emptiness at what used to be the core of his silver network, in his sessapinae. Without his corestone, as he warned her, he will not last long.

  Schaffa’s eyes have drifted shut. He’s asleep, exhausted by pushing his weakened body through the streets. But he isn’t the one who did that, is he? Nassun gets to her feet, shaking, keeping her hands on Schaffa’s shoulders. His heavy head presses against her chest. She stares at the little metal shard bitterly, understanding at once why Father Earth did this to him.

  It knows she means to bring the Moon down, and that this will create a cataclysm far worse than the Shattering. It wants to live. It knows Nassun loves Schaffa, and that until now she has seen destroying the world as the only way to give him peace. Now, however, it has remade Schaffa, offering him to Nassun as a kind of living ultimatum.

  Now he is free, the Earth taunts by this wordless gesture. Now he can have peace without death. And if you want him to live, little enemy, there is only one way.

  Steel never said it couldn’t be done, only that it shouldn’t. Maybe Steel is wrong. Maybe, as a stone eater, Schaffa won’t be alone and sad forever. Steel is mean and awful, which is why no one wants to be with him. But Schaffa is good and kind. Surely he will find someone else to love.

  Especially if all the world is stone eaters, too.

  Humanity, she decides, is a small price to pay for Schaffa’s future.

  Hoa says that Nassun has gone underground, to Warrant where the Guardians lie, and the panic of this is sour in your mouth as you trot around the hole, looking for a way in. You don’t dare ask Hoa to simply transport you to her; Gray Man’s allies lurk everywhere now, and they will kill you as surely as they did Lerna. Allies of Hoa are present, too; you have a blurry memory of seeing two streaking mountains crash into one another, one driving the other off. But until this business with the Moon is settled, going into the Earth is too dangerous. All of the stone eaters are here, you sess; a thousand human-sized mountains in and underneath Corepoint, some of them watching you run through the streets looking for your daughter. All of their ancient factions and private battles will come to a head tonight, one way or another.

  Hjarka and the others have followed you, though more slowly; they do not feel your panic. At last you spot one pylon building that’s been opened—cut open, it seems, as if with an enormous knife; three irregular slashes and then someone has made the door fall outward. It’s a foot thick. But beyond it is a wide, low-ceilinged corridor going down into darkness.

  Someone’s climbing out of it, though, as you reach it and stumble to a halt.

  “Nassun!” you blurt, because it’s her.

  The girl framed by the doorway is taller than you remember by several inches. Her hair is longer now, braided back in two plaits that fall behind her shoulders. You barely recognize her. She stops short at the sight of you, a faint wrinkle of confusion between her brows, and you realize she’s having trouble recognizing you, too. Then realization comes, and she stares as if you are the last thing in the world she expected to see. Because you are.

  “Hi, Mama,” Nassun says.

  14

  I, at the end of days

  I AM A WITNESS TO WHAT follows. I will tell this as such.

  I watch you and your daughter face each other for the first time in two years, across a gulf of hardship. Only I know what you both have been through. Each of you can judge the other only on presences, actions, and scars, at least for now. You: much thinner than the mother she last saw when she decided to skip creche one day. The desert has weathered you, drying your skin; the acid rain has bleached your locks to a paler brown than they should be, and the gray shows more. The clothes that hang from your body are also bleached by ash and acid, and the empty right sleeve of your shirt has been knotted; it dangles, obviously empty, as you catch your breath. And, also a part of Nassun’s first impression of the post-Rifting you: Behind you stands a group of people who all stare at Nassun, some of them with palpable wariness. You, though, show only anguish.

  Nassun is as still as a stone eater. She’s grown only four inches since the Rifting, but it looks to you like a foot. You can see the advent of adolescence upon her—early, but that is the nature of life in lean times. The body takes advantage of safety and abundance when it can, and the nine months she spent in Jekity were good for her. She’s probably going to start menstruating within the next year, if she can find enough food. The biggest changes are immaterial, though. The wariness in her gaze, nothing like the shy diffidence you remember. Her posture: shoulders back, feet braced and square. You told her to stop slouching a million times, and yes, she looks so tall and strong now that she’s standing up straight. So beautifully strong.

  Her orogeny sits on your awareness like a weight upon the world, rock-steady and precise as a diamond drill. Evil Earth, you think. She sesses just like you.

  It’s over before it’s begun. You sense that as surely as you sess her strength, and both make you desperate. “I’ve been looking for you,” you say. You’ve raised your hand without thinking about it. Your fingers open and twitch and close and open again in a gesture that is half grasping, half plea.

  Her gaze goes hooded. “I was with Daddy.”

  “I know. I couldn’t find you.” It’s redundant, obvious; you hate yourself for babbling. “Are you … all right?”

  She looks away, troubled, and it bothers you that her concern so plainly isn’t you. “I need to … My Guardian needs help.”

  You go stiff. Nassun has heard from Schaffa of what he was like, before Meov. She knows, intellectually, that the Schaffa you knew and the Schaffa she loves are wholly different people. She’s seen a Fulcrum, and the ways in which it warped its inmates. She remembers how you used to go stiff, just the way you are now, at even a glimpse of the color burgundy—and finally, here at the end of the world, she understands why. She knows you better now than ever before in her life.

  And yet. To her, Schaffa is the man who protected her from raiders—and from her father. He is the man who soothed her when she was afraid, tucked her into bed at night. She has seen him fight his own brutal nature, and the Earth itself, in order to be the parent she needs. He has helped her learn to love herself for what she is.

  Her mother? You. Have done none of these things.

  And
in that pent moment, as you fight past the memory of Innon falling to pieces and the burning ache of broken bones in a hand you no longer possess, with Never say no to me ringing in your head, she intuits the thing that you have, until now, denied:

  That it is hopeless. That there can be no relationship, no trust, between you and her, because the two of you are what the Stillness and the Season have made you. That Alabaster was right, and some things really are too broken to fix. Nothing to do but destroy them entirely, for mercy’s sake.

  Nassun shakes her head once while you stand there twitching. She looks away. Shakes her head again. Her shoulders bow a little, not in a lazy slouch, but weariness. She does not blame you, but neither does she expect anything from you. And right now, you’re just in the way.

  So she turns to walk away, and that shocks you out of your fugue. “Nassun?”

  “He needs help,” she says again. Her head is down, her shoulders tight. She doesn’t stop walking. You inhale and start after her. “I have to help him.”

  You know what’s happening. You’ve felt it, feared it, all along. Behind you, you hear Danel stop the others. Maybe she thinks you and your daughter need space. You ignore them and run after Nassun. You grab her shoulder, try to turn her around. “Nassun, what—” She shrugs you off, so hard that you stagger. Your balance has been shot since you lost the arm, and she’s stronger than she was. She doesn’t notice you almost fall. She keeps going. “Nassun!” She doesn’t even look back.

  You’re desperate to get her attention, to get her to react, something. Anything. You grope and then say, to her back, “I—I—I know about Jija!”

  That makes her falter to a halt. Jija’s death is still a raw wound within her that Schaffa has cleaned and stitched, but that will not heal for some time. That you know what she has done makes her hunch in shame. That it was necessary, self-defense, frustrates her. That you have reminded her of this, now, tips the shame and frustration into anger.