The Fifth Season

8 Syenite on the highroad

IT EVENTUALLY BECOMES NECESSARY FOR Syenite to ask her new mentor’s name. Alabaster, he tells her — which she assumes someone gave him ironically. She needs to use his name fairly often because he keeps falling asleep in his saddle during the long days of riding, which leaves her to do all the work of paying attention to their route and watching out for potential hazards, as well as keeping herself entertained. He wakes readily when she speaks his name, which at first leads her to believe he’s just faking it in order to avoid talking to her. When she says this, he looks annoyed and says, “Of course I’m really asleep. If you want anything useful out of me tonight, you’ll let me sleep.”

Which pisses her off, because it’s not like he’s the one who’s got to have a baby for empire and Earth. It’s also not like the sex takes any great effort on his part, brief and boring as it is.

But perhaps a week into their trip, she finally notices what he’s doing during their daily rides and even at night, while they’re lying tired and sticky in the sleeping bag they share. She can be forgiven for missing it, she thinks, because it’s a constant thing, like a low murmur in a room full of chattering people — but he’s quelling all the shakes in the area. All of them, not just the ones people can feel. All the tiny, infinitesimal flexes and adjustments of the earth, some of which are building momentum to greater movement and some of which are essentially random: Wherever she and Alabaster pass, those movements go still for a time. Seismic stillness is common in Yumenes, but should not exist out here in the hinterlands where node network coverage is thin.

Once Syenite figures this out, she is… confused. Because there’s no point to quelling microshakes, and indeed, doing so might make things worse the next time a larger shake occurs. They were very careful to teach her this, back when she was a grit learning basic geomestry and seismology: The earth does not like to be restrained. Redirection, not cessation, is the orogene’s goal.

She ponders this mystery for several days as they pass along the Yumenes — Allia Highroad, beneath a turning obelisk that glints like a mountain-sized tourmaline whenever it’s solid enough to catch the sunlight. The highroad is the fastest route between the two quartent capitals, built as straight as possible in ways that only Old Sanze would dare: elevated along lengthy stone bridges and crossing vast canyons, and occasionally even tunneling through mountains too high to climb. This means the trip to the coast will take only a few weeks if they take it easy — half what it would take via lowroad travel.

But rusted reeking Earth, highroads are dull. Most people think they’re deathtraps waiting to be sprung, despite the fact that they’re usually safer than ordinary roads; all Imperial Roads were built by teams of the best geoneers and orogenes, deliberately placed only in locations deemed permanently stable. Some of them have survived multiple Seasons. So for days at a time Syenite and Alabaster encounter only hard-driving merchant caravanners, mailpost-riders, and the local quartent patrol — all of whom give Syenite and Alabaster the eye upon noticing their black Fulcrum uniforms, and do not deign to speak to them. There are few comms lining the route’s turnoffs, and almost no shops at which to buy supplies, although there are regular platforms along the road itself with prepared areas and lean-tos for camping. Syen has spent every evening swatting bugs beside a fire, with nothing to do but glare at Alabaster. And have sex with him, but that only kills a few minutes.

This, though, is interesting. “What are you doing that for?” Syenite finally asks, three days after she first noticed him quelling microshakes. He’s just done it again now, while they wait for dinner — cachebread heated with slabs of beef and soaked prunes, yum yum. He yawned as he did it, though of course it must have taken some effort. Orogeny always costs something.

“Doing what?” he asks as he shuts down a subsurface aftershock and pokes at the fire in apparent boredom. She wants to hit him.

“That.”

His eyebrows rise. “Ah. You can feel it.”

“Of course I can feel it! You’re doing it all the time!”

“Well, you didn’t say anything before now.”

“Because I was trying to figure out what you were doing.”

He looks perplexed. “Then maybe you should’ve asked.”

She’s going to kill him. Something of this must translate through the silence, because he grimaces and finally explains. “I’m giving the node maintainers a break. Every microshake I settle eases the burden on them.”

Syen knows of the node maintainers, of course. As the Imperial Roads link the former vassals of the old empire with Yumenes, so do the nodes connect far-flung quartents with the Fulcrum, to extend its protections as far as possible. All over the continent — at whatever points the senior orogenes have determined is best for manipulating nearby faults or hot spots — there is an outpost. Within that outpost is stationed a Fulcrum-trained orogene whose sole task is to keep the local area stable. In the Equatorials, the nodes’ zones of protection overlap, so there’s nary a twitch; this, and the Fulcrum’s presence at its core, is why Yumenes can build as it does. Beyond the Equatorials, though, the zones are spaced to provide the greatest protection for the largest populations, and there are gaps in the net. It’s just not worthwhile — at least, not according to the Fulcrum seniors — to put nodes near every little farming or mining comm in the hinterlands. People in those places fend for themselves as best they can.

Syen doesn’t know any of the poor fools assigned to such tedious duty, but she’s very, very glad no one has ever suggested it for her. It’s the sort of thing they give to orogenes who’ll never make it to fourth ring — the ones who have lots of raw power and little control. At least they can save lives, even if they’re doomed to spend their own lives in relative isolation and obscurity.

“Maybe you should leave the micros to the node maintainers,” Syenite suggests. The food is warm enough; she uses a stick to push it out of the fire. In spite of herself, her mouth is watering. It’s been a long day. “Earth knows they probably need something to keep them from dying of boredom.”

She’s intent on the food at first, and doesn’t notice his silence until she offers him his portion. Then she frowns, because that look is on his face again. That hatred. And this time at least a little of it is directed at her.

“You’ve never been to a node, I take it.”

What the rust? “No. Why would I possibly go to one?”

“Because you should. All roggas should.”

Syenite flinches, just a little, at his rogga. The Fulcrum gives demerits to anyone who says it, so she doesn’t hear it much — just the odd muttered epithet from people riding past them, or grits trying to sound tough when the instructors aren’t around. It’s such an ugly word, harsh and guttural; the sound of it is like a slap to the ear. But Alabaster uses it the way other people use orogene.

He continues, still in the same cold tone: “And if you can feel what I’m doing, then you can do it, too.”

This startles Syen more, and angers her more. “Why in Earthfires would I quell microshakes? Then I’ll be—” And then she stops herself, because she was about to say as tired and useless as you, and that’s just rude. But then it occurs to her that he has been tired and useless, maybe because he’s been doing this.

If it’s important enough that he’s been wearing himself out to do it, then maybe it’s wrong of her to refuse out of hand. Orogenes have to look out for each other, after all. She sighs. “All right. I guess I can help some poor fool who’s stuck in the back end of beyond with nothing to do but keep the land steady.” At least it will pass the time.

He relaxes, just a little, and she’s surprised to see him smile. He hardly ever does that. But no, that muscle in his jaw is still going twitch twitch twitch. He’s still upset about something. “There’s a node station about two days’ ride from the next highroad turnoff.”

Syen waits for this statement to conclude, but he starts eating, making a little sound of pleasure that has more to do with him being hungry than with the food being especially delicious. Since she’s hungry, too, Syenite tucks in — and then she frowns. “Wait. Are you planning to go to this station? Is that what you’re saying?”

“We are going, yes.” Alabaster looks up at her, a quick flash of command in his expression, and all of a sudden she hates him more than ever.

It’s completely irrational, her reaction to him. Alabaster outranks her by six rings and would probably outrank her by more if the ring rankings went past ten; she’s heard the rumors about his skill. If they ever fought, he could turn her torus inside out and flash-freeze her in a second. For that alone she should be nice to him; for the potential value of his favor, and her own goals for advancement within the Fulcrum’s ranks, she should even try to like him.

But she’s tried being polite with him, and flattering, and it doesn’t work. He just pretends to misunderstand or insults her until she stops. She’s offered all the little gestures of respect that seniors at the Fulcrum usually seem to expect from juniors, but these just piss him off. Which makes her angry — and strangely, this state of affairs seems to please him most.

So although she would never do this with another senior, she snaps, “Yes, sir,” and lets the rest of the evening pass in resentful, reverberating silence.

They go to bed and she reaches for him, as usual, but this time he rolls over, putting his back to her. “We’ll do it in the morning, if we still have to. Isn’t it time for you to menstruate by now?”

Which makes Syenite feel like the world’s biggest boor. That he hates the sex as much as she does isn’t in question. But it’s horrible that he’s been waiting for a break and she hasn’t been counting. She does so now, clumsily because she can’t remember the exact day the last one started, and — he’s right. She’s late.

At her surprised silence he sighs, already halfway to sleep. “Doesn’t mean anything yet if you’re late. Traveling’s hard on the body.” He yawns. “In the morning, then.”

In the morning they copulate. There are no better words she can use for the act — vulgarities don’t fit because it’s too dull, and euphemisms aren’t necessary to downplay its intimacy because it’s not intimate. It’s perfunctory, an exercise, like the stretches she’s learned to do before they start riding for the day. More energetic this time because he’s rested first; she almost enjoys it, and he actually makes some noise when he comes. But that’s it. When they’re done he lies there watching while she gets up and does a quick basin bath beside the fire. She’s so used to this that she starts when he speaks. “Why do you hate me?”

Syenite pauses, and considers lying for a moment. If this were the Fulcrum, she would lie. If he were any other senior, obsessed with propriety and making sure that Fulcrum orogenes comport themselves well at all times, she would lie. He’s made it clear, however, that he prefers honesty, however indelicate. So she sighs. “I just do.”

He rolls onto his back, looking up at the sky, and she thinks that’s the end of the conversation until he says, “I think you hate me because… I’m someone you can hate. I’m here, I’m handy. But what you really hate is the world.”

At this Syen tosses her washcloth into the bowl of water she’s been using and glares at him. “The world doesn’t say inane things like that.”

“I’m not interested in mentoring a sycophant. I want you to be yourself with me. And when you are, you can barely speak a civil word to me, no matter how civil I am to you.”

Hearing it put that way, she feels a little guilty. “What do you mean, then, that I hate the world?”

“You hate the way we live. The way the world makes us live. Either the Fulcrum owns us, or we have to hide and be hunted down like dogs if we’re ever discovered. Or we become monsters and try to kill everything. Even within the Fulcrum we always have to think about how they want us to act. We can never just… be.” He sighs, closing his eyes. “There should be a better way.”

“There isn’t.”

“There must be. Sanze can’t be the first empire that’s managed to survive a few Seasons. We can see the evidence of other ways of life, other people who became mighty.” He gestures away from the highroad, toward the landscape that spreads all around them. They’re near the Great Eastern Forest; nothing but a carpet of trees rising and falling for as far as the eye can see. Except—

— except, just at the edge of the horizon, she spots something that looks like a skeletal metal hand, clawing its way out of the trees. Another ruin, and it must be truly massive if she can see it from here.

“We pass down the stonelore,” Alabaster says, sitting up, “but we never try to remember anything about what’s already been tried, what else might have worked.”

“Because it didn’t work. Those people died. We’re still alive. Our way is right, theirs was wrong.”

He throws her a look she interprets as I can’t be bothered to tell you how stupid you are, although he probably doesn’t mean it that way. He’s right; she just doesn’t like him. “I realize you only have the education the Fulcrum gave you, but think, will you? Survival doesn’t mean rightness. I could kill you right now, but that wouldn’t make me a better person for doing so.”

Maybe not, but it wouldn’t matter to her. And she resents his casual assumption of her weakness, even though he’s completely right. “All right.” She gets up and starts dressing, pulling her clothes on with quick jerks. “Tell me what other way there is, then.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. She turns to look at him finally, and he’s looking uneasy. “Well…” He edges into the statement. “We could try letting orogenes run things.”

She almost laughs. “That would last for about ten minutes before every Guardian in the Stillness shows up to lynch us, with half the continent in tow to watch and cheer.”

“They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born evil — some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.”

“Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.”

“Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.” He doesn’t say her name often, either. It gets her attention. “Every civilization adds to it; parts that don’t matter to the people of the time are forgotten. There’s a reason Tablet Two is so damaged: someone, somewhere back in time, decided that it wasn’t important or was wrong, and didn’t bother to take care of it. Or maybe they even deliberately tried to obliterate it, which is why so many of the early copies are damaged in exactly the same way. The archeomests found some old tablets in one of the dead cities on Tapita Plateau — they’d written down their stonelore, too, ostensibly to pass it on to future generations. But what was on the tablets was different, drastically so, from the lore we learned in school. For all we know, the admonition against changing the lore is itself a recent addition.”

She didn’t know that. It makes her frown. It also makes her not want to believe him, or maybe that’s just her dislike for him surfacing again. But… stonelore is as old as intelligence. It’s all that’s allowed humankind to survive through Fifth Season after Fifth Season, as they huddle together while the world turns dark and cold. The lorists tell stories of what happens when people — political leaders or philosophers or well-meaning meddlers of whatever type — try to change the lore. Disaster inevitably results.

So she doesn’t believe it. “Where’d you hear about tablets on Tapita?”

“I’ve been taking assignments outside the Fulcrum for twenty years. I have friends out here.”

Friends who talk to an orogene? About historical heresy? It sounds ridiculous. But then again… well. “Okay, so how do you change the lore in a way that—”

She’s not paying attention to the ambient strata, because the argument has engrossed her more than she wants to admit. He, however, is apparently still quelling shakes even as they speak. Plus he’s a ten-ringer, so it’s fitting that he abruptly inhales and jerks to his feet as if pulled by strings, turning toward the western horizon. Syen frowns and follows his gaze. The forest on that side of the highroad is patchy from logging and bifurcated by two lowroads branching away through the trees. There’s another deadciv ruin, a dome that’s more tumbled stone than intact, in the far distance, and she can see three or four small walled comms dotting the treescape between here and there. But she doesn’t know what he’s reacting to—

— and then she sesses it. Evil Earth, it’s a big one! An eighter or niner. No, bigger. There’s a hot spot about two hundred miles away, beneath the outskirts of a small city called Mehi… but that can’t be right. Mehi is at the edge of the Equatorials, which means it’s well within the protective network of nodes. Why—

It doesn’t matter why. Not when Syen can see this shake making all the land around the highroad shiver and all the trees twitch. Something has gone wrong, the network has failed, and the hot spot beneath Mehi is welling toward the surface. The proto-shakes, even from here, are powerful enough to make her mouth taste of bitter old metal and the beds of her fingernails to itch. Even the most sess-numb stills can feel these, a steady barrage of wavelets rattling their dishes and making old people gasp and clutch their heads while babies suddenly cry. If nothing stops this upwelling, the stills will feel a lot more when a volcano erupts right under their feet.

“What—” Syenite starts to turn to Alabaster, and then she stops in shock, because he is on his hands and knees growling at the ground.

An instant later she feels it, a shock wave of raw orogeny rippling out and down through the pillars of the Highroad and into the loose schist of the local ground. It’s not actual force, just the strength of Alabaster’s will and the power it fuels, but she cannot help watching on two levels as his power races — faster than she could ever go — toward that distant radiating churn.

And before Syen even realizes what’s happening, Alabaster has grabbed her, in some way that she’s never experienced before. She feels her own connection to the earth, her own orogenic awareness, suddenly co-opted and steered by someone else, and she does not like it one bit. But when she tries to reclaim control of her power it burns, like friction, and in the real world she yelps and falls to her knees and she has no idea what’s happening. Alabaster has chained them together somehow, using her strength to amplify his own, and there’s not a damned thing she can do about it.

And then they are together, diving into the earth in tandem, spiraling through the massive, boiling well of death that is the hot spot. It’s huge — miles wide, bigger than a mountain. Alabaster does something, and something shoots away and Syenite cries out in sudden agony that stills almost at once. Redirected. He does it again and this time she realizes what he’s doing: cushioning her from the heat and pressure and rage of the hot spot. It’s not bothering him because he has become heat and pressure and rage as well, attuning himself to it as Syen has only ever done with small heat chambers in otherwise stable strata — but those were campfire sparks in comparison to this firestorm. There is nothing in her that can equal it. So he uses her power, but he also vents the force that she can’t process, sending it elsewhere before it can overwhelm her awareness and… and… actually, she’s not sure what would happen. The Fulcrum teaches orogenes not to push past their own limits; it does not speak of what happens to those who do.

And before Syenite can think through this, before she can muster the wherewithal to help him if she cannot escape him, Alabaster does something else. A sharp punch. Something has been pierced, somewhere. At once the upward pressure of the magma bubble begins to ebb. He pulls them back, out of the fire and into the still-shuddering earth, and she knows what to do here because these are just are shakes, not Father Earth’s rage incarnate. Abruptly something changes and his strength is at her disposal. So much strength; Earth, he’s a monster. But then it becomes easy, easy to smooth the ripples and seal the cracks and thicken the broken strata so that a new fault does not form here where the land has been stressed and weakened. She can sess lines of striation across the land’s surface with a clarity that she has never known before. She smooths them, tightens the earth’s skin around them with a surgical focus she has never previously been able to achieve. And as the hot spot settles into just another lurking menace and the danger passes, she comes back to herself to find Alabaster curled into a ball in front of her and a scorchlike pattern of frost all around them both which is already sublimating into vapor.

She’s on her hands and knees, shaking. When she tries to move, it takes real effort not to fall onto her face. Her elbows keep trying to buckle. But she makes herself do it, crawl a foot or two to reach Alabaster, because he looks dead. She touches his arm and the muscle is hard through the uniform fabric, cramped and locked instead of limp; she thinks that’s a good sign. Tugging him a little, she gets closer and sees that his eyes are open, wide, and staring — not with the blank emptiness of death but with an expression of pure surprise.

“It’s just like Hessionite said,” he whispers suddenly, and she jumps because she didn’t think he was conscious.

Wonderful. She’s on a highroad in the middle of nowhere, half dead after her orogeny has been used by someone else against her will, with no one to help her but the rustbrained and ridiculously powerful ass who did it in the first place. Trying to pull herself together after… after…

Actually, she has no idea what just happened. It makes no sense. Seismics don’t just happen like that. Hot spots that have abided for aeons don’t just suddenly explode. Something triggers them: a plate shift somewhere, a volcanic eruption somewhere else, a ten-ringer having a tantrum, something. And since it was so powerful an event, she should’ve sessed the trigger. Should’ve had some warning besides Alabaster’s gasp.

And what the rust did Alabaster do? She can’t wrap her head around it. Orogenes cannot work together. It’s been proven; when two orogenes try to exert the same influence over the same seismic event, the one with the greater control and precision takes precedence. The weaker one can keep trying and will burn themselves out — or the stronger one can punch through their torus, icing them along with everything else. It’s why the senior orogenes run the Fulcrum — they aren’t just more experienced, they can kill anyone who crosses them, even though they’re not supposed to. And it’s why ten-ringers get choices: Nobody’s going to force them to do anything. Except the Guardians, of course.

But what Alabaster did is unmistakable, if inexplicable.

Rust it all. Syenite shifts to sit before she flops over. The world spins unprettily and she props her arms on her updrawn knees and puts her head down for a while. They haven’t gone anywhere today, and they won’t be going anywhere, either. Syen doesn’t have the strength to ride, and Alabaster looks like he might not make it off the bedroll. He never even got dressed; he’s just curled up there bare-assed and shaking, completely useless.

So it’s left to Syen to eventually get up and rummage through their packs, finding a couple of derminther mela — small melons with a hard shell that burrow underground during a Season, or so the geomests say — and rolling them into the remnants of their fire, which she’s very glad they hadn’t gotten around to smothering yet. They’re out of kindling and fuel, but the coals should be enough to cook the mela so they’ll have dinner in a few hours. She pulls a fodder bundle out of the pile for the horses to share, pours some water into a canvas bucket so they can drink, looks at the pile of their droppings and thinks about shoveling it off the highroad’s edge so they don’t have to smell it.

Then she crawls back to the bedroll, which is thankfully dry after its recent icing. There she flops down at Alabaster’s back, and drifts. She doesn’t sleep. The minute contortions of the land as the hot spot recedes keep jerking at her sessapinae, keeping her from relaxing completely. Still, just lying there is enough to restore her strength somewhat, and her mind goes quiet until the cooling air pulls her back to herself. Sunset.

She blinks, finding that she has somehow ended up spooned behind Alabaster. He’s still in a ball, but this time his eyes are closed and body relaxed. When she sits up, he jerks a little and pushes himself up as well.

“We have to go to the node station,” he blurts in a rusty voice, which really doesn’t surprise her at all.

“No,” she says, too tired to be annoyed, and finally giving up the effort of politeness for good. “I’m not riding a horse off the highroad in the dark while exhausted. We’re out of dried peat, and running low on everything else; we need to go to a comm to buy more supplies. And if you try to order me to go to some node in the ass end of beyond instead, you’ll need to bring me up on charges for disobedience.” She’s never disobeyed an order before, so she’s a little fuzzy on the consequences. Really, she’s too tired to care.

He groans and presses the heels of his hands to his forehead as if to push away a headache, or maybe drive it deeper. Then he curses in that language she heard him use before. She still doesn’t recognize it, but she’s even more certain that it’s one of the Coaster creoles — which is odd, given that he says he was bred and raised at the Fulcrum. Then again, somebody had to raise him for those first few years before he got old enough to be dumped in the grit pool. She’s heard that a lot of the eastern Coaster races are dark-skinned like him, too, so maybe they’ll hear the language being spoken once they get to Allia.

“If you don’t go with me, I’ll go alone,” he snaps, finally speaking in Sanze-mat. And then he gets up, fumbling around for his clothing and pulling it on, like he’s serious. Syenite stares as he does this, because he’s shaking so hard he can hardly stand up straight. If he gets on a horse in this condition, he’ll just fall off.

“Hey,” she says, and he continues his feverish preparations as if he can’t hear her. “Hey.” He jerks and glares, and belatedly she realizes he didn’t hear her. He’s been listening to something entirely different all this time — the earth, his inner crazy, who knows. “You’re going to kill yourself.”

“I don’t care.”

“This is—” She gets up, goes over to him, grabs his arm just as he’s reaching for the saddle. “This is stupid, you can’t—”

“Don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” His arm is wire in her hand as he leans in to snarl the words into her face. Syen almost jerks back… but up close she sees his bloodshot whites, the manic gleam, the blown look of his pupils. Something’s wrong with him. “You’re not a Guardian. You don’t get to order me around.”

“Have you lost your mind?” For the first time since she’s met him, she’s… uneasy. He used her orogeny so easily, and she has no idea how he did it. He’s so skinny that she could probably beat him senseless with relative ease, but he’d just ice her after the first blow.

He isn’t stupid. She has to make him see. “I will go with you,” she says firmly, and he looks so grateful that she feels bad for her earlier uncomplimentary thoughts. “At first light, when we can take the switchback pass down to the lowroads without breaking our horses’ legs and our own necks. All right?”

His face constricts with anguish. “That’s too long—”

“We’ve already slept all day. And when you talked about this before, you said it was a two-day ride. If we lose the horses, how much longer will it take?”

That stops him. He blinks and groans and stumbles back, thankfully away from the saddle. Everything’s red in the light of sunset. There’s a rock formation in the distance behind him, a tall straight cylinder of a thing that Syenite can tell isn’t natural at a glance; either it was pushed up by an orogene, or it’s yet another ancient ruin, better camouflaged than most. With this as his backdrop, Alabaster stands gazing up at the sky as if he wants to start howling. His hands flex and relax, flex and relax.

“The node,” he says, at last.

“Yes?” She stretches the word out, trying not to let him hear the humoring the crazy man note of her voice.

He hesitates, then takes a deep breath. Another, calming himself. “You know shakes and blows never just come out of nowhere like that. The trigger for this one, the shift that disrupted that hot spot’s equilibrium, was the node.”

“How can you—” Of course he can tell, he’s a ten-ringer. Then she catches his meaning. “Wait, you’re saying the node maintainer set that thing off?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” He turns to her, his hands flexing into fists again. “Now do you see why I want to get there?”

She nods, blankly. She does. Because an orogene who spontaneously creates a supervolcano does not do so without generating a torus the size of a town. She cannot help but look out over the forest, in the direction of the node. She can’t see anything from here, but somewhere out there, a Fulcrum orogene has killed everything in a several-mile radius.

And then there’s the possibly more important question, which is: Why?

“All right,” Alabaster blurts suddenly. “We need to leave first thing in the morning, and go as fast as we can. It’s a two-day trip if we take it easy, but if we push the horses—” He speeds up his words when she opens her mouth, and rides over her objection like a man obsessed. “If we push them, if we leave before dawn, we can get there by nightfall.”

It’s probably the best she’s going to get out of him. “Dawn, then.” She scratches at her hair. Her scalp is gritty with road dust; she hasn’t been able to wash in three days. They were supposed to pass over Adea Heights tomorrow, a mid-sized comm where she would’ve pressed to stay at an inn… but he’s right. They have to get to that node. “We’ll have to stop at the next stream or roadhouse, though. We’re low on water for the horses.”

He makes a sound of frustration at the needs of mortal flesh. But he says, “Fine.”

Then he hunkers down by the coals, where he picks up one of the cooled mela and cracks it open, eating with his fingers and chewing methodically. She doubts he tastes it. Fuel. She joins him to eat the other mela, and the rest of the night passes in silence, if not restfulness.

The next day — or really, later in the night — they saddle up and start cautiously toward the switchback road that will take them off the highroad and down to the lands below. By the time they reach ground level the sun’s up, so at that point Alabaster takes the lead and pushes his horse to a full canter, interspersed with walking jags to let them rest. Syen’s impressed; she’d thought he would just kill the horses in the grip of whatever urgency possesses him. He’s not stupid, at least. Or cruel.

So at this pace they make good time along the more heavily traveled and intersecting lowroads, where they bypass light carters and casual travelers and a few local militia units — all of whom quickly make way for them, as Syen and Alabaster come into view. It’s almost ironic, she thinks: Any other time, their black uniforms would make others give them a wide berth because no one likes orogenes. Now, however, everyone must have felt what almost happened with the hot spot. They clear the way eagerly now, and there is gratitude and relief in their faces. The Fulcrum to the rescue. Syen wants to laugh at them all.

They stop for the night and sleep a handful of hours and start again before dawn, and still it’s almost full dark by the time the node station appears, nestled between two low hills at the top of a winding road. The road’s not much better than a dirtpacked wilderness trail with a bit of aged, cracking asphalt laid along it as a nod to civilization. The station itself is another nod. They’ve passed dozens of comms on the way here, each displaying a wild range of architecture — whatever’s native to the region, whatever fads the wealthier comm members have tried to bring in, cheap imitations of Yumenescene styles. The station is pure Old Empire, though: great looming walls of deep red scoria brick around a complex comprising three small pyramids and a larger central one. The gates are some kind of steely metal, which makes Syen wince. No one puts metal gates on anything they actually want to keep secure. But then, there’s nothing in the station except the orogene who lives here, and the staff that supports him or her. Nodes don’t even have storecaches, relying instead on regular resupply caravans from nearby comms. Few would want to steal anything within its walls.

Syen’s caught off guard when Alabaster abruptly reins his horse well before they reach the gates, squinting up at the station. “What?”

“No one’s coming out,” he says, almost to himself. “No one’s moving beyond the gate. I can’t hear anything coming from inside. Can you?”

She hears only silence. “How many people should be here? The node maintainer, a Guardian, and…?”

“Node maintainers don’t need Guardians. Usually there’s a small troop of six to ten soldiers, Imperials, posted at the station to protect the maintainer. Cooks and the like to serve them. And there’s always at least one doctor.”

So many headscratchers in so few words. An orogene who doesn’t need a Guardian? Node maintainers are below fourth ring; lowringers are never allowed outside the Fulcrum without Guardians, or at least a senior to supervise. The soldiers she understands; sometimes superstitious locals don’t draw much distinction between Fulcrum-trained orogenes and any other kind. But why a doctor?

Doesn’t matter. “They’re probably all dead,” she says — but even as she says this, her reasoning falters. The forest around them should be dead, too, for miles around, trees and animals and soil flash-frozen and thawed into slush. All the people traveling the road behind them should be dead. How else could the node maintainer have gotten enough power to disturb that hot spot? But everything seems fine from here, except the silence of the node station.

Abruptly Alabaster spurs his horse forward, and there’s no time for more questions. They ride up the hill and toward the locked, closed gates that Syen can’t see a way to open, if there’s no one inside to do it for them. Then Alabaster hisses and leans forward and for an instant a blistering, narrow torus flickers into view — not around them, but around the gate. She’s never seen anyone do that, throw their torus somewhere else, but apparently tenth-ringers can. Her horse utters a nervous little whicker at the sudden vortex of cold and snow before them, so she reins it to a halt, and it shies back a few extra steps. In the next moment something groans and there is a cracking sound beyond the gate. Alabaster lets the torus go as one of the big steel doors drifts open; he’s already dismounting.

“Wait, give it time to warm up,” Syen begins, but he ignores her and heads toward the gates, not even bothering to watch his step on the slippery frost-flecked asphalt.

Rusting Earthfires. So Syen dismounts and loops the horses’ reins around a listing sapling. After the day’s hard ride she’ll have to let them cool down before she feeds or waters them, and she should rub them down at least — but something about this big, looming, silent building unnerves her. She’s not sure what. So she leaves the horses saddled. Just in case. Then she follows Alabaster in.

It’s quiet inside the compound, and dark. No electricity for this backwater, just oil lamps that have gone out. There’s a big open-air courtyard just past the metal main gates, with scaffolds on the inner walls and nearby buildings to surround any visitors on all sides with convenient sniper positions. Same kind of oh-so-friendly entryway as any well-guarded comm, really, though on a much smaller scale. But there’s no one in this courtyard, although Syen spies a table and chairs to one side where the people who usually stand guard must have been playing cards and eating snacks not so long ago. The whole compound is silent. The ground is scoria-paved, scuffed and uneven from the passage of many feet over many years, but she hears no feet moving on it now. There’s a horse shed on one side of the courtyard, but its stalls are shut and still. Boots covered in dried mud line the wall nearest the gate; some have been tossed or piled there rather than positioned neatly. If Alabaster’s right about Imperial soldiers being stationed here, they’re clearly the sort who aren’t much for inspection-readiness. Figures; being assigned to a place like this probably isn’t a reward.

Syen shakes her head. And then she catches a whiff of animal musk from the horse shed, which makes her tense. She smells horses, but can’t see them. Edging closer — her hands clench before she makes herself unclench them — she peers over the first stall’s door, then glances into the other stalls for a full inventory.

Three dead horses, sprawled on their sides in the straw. Not bloating yet, probably because only the animals’ limbs and heads are limp with death. The barrel of each corpse is crusted with ice and condensation, the flesh still mostly hard-frozen. Two days’ thaw, she guesses.

There’s a small scoria-bricked pyramid at the center of the compound, with its own stone inner gates — though these stand open for the time being. Syenite can’t see where Alabaster’s gone, but she guesses he’s within the pyramid, since that’s where the node maintainer will be.

She climbs up on a chair and uses a nearby bit of matchflint to light one of the oil lamps, then heads inside herself — moving faster now that she knows what she’ll find. And yes, within the pyramid’s dim corridors she sees the soldiers and staffers who once lived here: some sprawled in mid-run, some pressed against the walls, some lying with arms outstretched toward the center of the building. Some of them tried to flee what was coming, and some tried to get to its source to stop it. They all failed.

Then Syen finds the node chamber.

That’s what it has to be. It’s in the middle of the building, through an elegant archway decorated with paler rose marble and embossed tree-root designs. The chamber beyond is high and vaulted and dim, but empty — except at the room’s center, where there’s a big… thing. She would call it a chair, if it was made of anything but wires and straps. Not very comfortable-looking, except in that it seems to hold its occupant at an easy recline. The node maintainer is seated in it, anyway, so it must be—

Oh. Oh.

Oh bloody, burning Earth.

Alabaster’s standing on the dais that holds the wire chair, looking down at the node maintainer’s body. He doesn’t look up as she comes near. His face is still. Not sad, or bleak. Just a mask.

“Even the least of us must serve the greater good,” he says, with no irony in his voice.

The body in the node maintainer’s chair is small, and naked. Thin, its limbs atrophied. Hairless. There are things — tubes and pipes and things, she has no words for them — going into the stick-arms, down the goggle-throat, across the narrow crotch. There’s a flexible bag on the corpse’s belly, attached to its belly somehow, and it’s full of — ugh. The bag needs to be changed.

She focuses on all this, these little details, because it helps. Because there’s a part of her that’s gibbering, and the only way she can keep that part internal and silent is to concentrate on everything she’s seeing. Ingenious, really, what they’ve done. She didn’t know it was possible to keep a body alive like this: immobile, unwilling, indefinite. So she concentrates on figuring out how they’ve done it. The wire framework is a particular bit of genius; there’s a crank and a handle nearby, so the whole aparatus can be flipped over to facilitate cleaning. The wire minimizes bedsores, maybe. There’s a stench of sickness in the air, but nearby is a whole shelf of bottled tinctures and pills; understandable, since it would take better antibiotics than ordinary comm-made penicillin to do something like this. Perhaps one of the tube things is for putting that medicine into the node maintainer. And this one is for pushing in food, and that one is for taking away urine, oh, and that cloth wrapping is for sopping up drool.

But she sees the bigger picture, too, in spite of her effort to concentrate on the minutiae. The node maintainer: a child, kept like this for what must have been months or years. A child, whose skin is almost as dark as Alabaster’s, and whose features might be a perfect match for his if they weren’t so skeletal.

“What.” It’s all she can say.

“Sometimes a rogga can’t learn control.” Now she understands that his use of the slur is deliberate. A dehumanizing word for someone who has been made into a thing. It helps. There’s no inflection in Alabaster’s voice, no emotion, but it’s all there in his choice of words. “Sometimes the Guardians catch a feral who’s too old to train, but young enough that killing’s a waste. And sometimes they notice someone in the grit pool, one of the especially sensitive ones, who can’t seem to master control. The Fulcrum tries to teach them for a while, but if the children don’t develop at a pace the Guardians think is appropriate, Mother Sanze can always find another use for them.”

“As—” Syen can’t take her eyes off the body’s, the boy’s, face. His eyes are open, brown but clouded and gelid in death. She’s distantly surprised she’s not vomiting. “As this? Underfires, Alabaster, I know children who were taken off to the nodes. I didn’t… this doesn’t…”

Alabaster unstiffens. She hadn’t realized how stiff he was holding himself until he bends enough to slide a hand under the boy’s neck, lifting his oversize head and turning it a little. “You should see this.”

She doesn’t want to, but she looks anyway. There, across the back of the child’s shaved head, is a long, vining, keloided scar, embellished with the dots of long-pulled stitches. It’s just at the juncture of skull and spine.

“Rogga sessapinae are larger and more complex than those of normal people.” When she’s seen enough, Alabaster drops the child’s head. It thumps back into its wire cradle with a solidity and carelessness that makes her jump. “It’s a simple matter to apply a lesion here and there that severs the rogga’s self-control completely, while still allowing its instinctive use. Assuming the rogga survives the operation.”

Ingenious. Yes. A newborn orogene can stop an earthshake. It’s an inborn thing, more certain even than a child’s ability to suckle — and it’s this ability that gets more orogene children killed than anything else. The best of their kind reveal themselves long before they’re old enough to understand the danger.

But to reduce a child to nothing but that instinct, nothing but the ability to quell shakes…

She really should be vomiting.

“From there, it’s easy.” Alabaster sighs, as if he’s giving an especially boring lecture at the Fulcrum. “Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny.” Just as Syenite can’t understand why she’s not sick, she’s not sure why he’s not screaming. “But I suppose someone made the mistake of letting this one wake up.”

His eyes flick away, and Syenite follows Alabaster’s gaze to the body of a man over by the far wall. This one’s not dressed like one of the soldiers. He’s wearing civilian clothes, nice ones.

“The doctor?” She’s managed to adopt the detached, steady voice that Alabaster’s using. It’s easier.

“Maybe. Or some local citizen who paid for the privilege.” Alabaster actually shrugs, gesturing toward a still-livid bruise on the boy’s upper thigh. It’s in the shape of a hand, finger marks clearly visible even against the dark skin. “I’m told there are many who enjoy this sort of thing. A helplessness fetish, basically. They like it more if the victim is aware of what they’re doing.”

“Oh, oh Earth, Alabaster, you can’t mean—”

He rides over her words again, as if she hasn’t spoken. “Problem is, the node maintainers feel terrible pain whenever they use orogeny. The lesions, see. Since they can’t stop themselves from reacting to every shake in the vicinity, even the microshakes, it’s considered humane to keep them constantly sedated. And all orogenes react, instinctively, to any perceived threat—”

Ah. That does it.

Syen stumbles away to the nearest wall and retches up the dried apricots and jerky she made herself swallow a-horseback on the way to the station. It’s wrong. It’s all so wrong. She thought — she didn’t think — she didn’t know—

Then as she wipes her mouth, she looks up and sees Alabaster watching.

“Like I said,” he concludes, very softly. “Every rogga should see a node, at least once.”

“I didn’t know.” She slurs the words around the back of her hand. The words don’t make sense but she feels compelled to say them. “I didn’t.”

“You think that matters?” It’s almost cruel, the emotionlessness of his voice and face.

“It matters to me!”

“You think you matter?” All at once he smiles. It’s an ugly thing, cold as the vapor that curls off ice. “You think any of us matter beyond what we can do for them? Whether we obey or not.” He jerks his head toward the body of the abused, murdered child. “You think he mattered, after what they did to him? The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

But standing here, with the ultimate proof of the world’s hatred dead and cold and stinking between them, she can’t even flinch this time. Because. If the Fulcrum can do this, or the Guardians or the Yumenescene Leadership or the geomests or whoever came up with this nightmare, then there’s no point in dressing up what people like Syenite and Alabaster really are. Not people at all. Not orogenes. Politeness is an insult in the face of what she’s seen. Rogga: This is all they are.

After a moment, Alabaster turns and leaves the room.

* * *

They make camp in the open courtyard. The station’s buildings hold all the comforts Syen’s been craving: hot water, soft beds, food that isn’t just cachebread and dried meat. Out here in the courtyard, though, the bodies aren’t human.

Alabaster sits in silence, staring into the fire that Syenite’s built. He’s wrapped in a blanket, holding the cup of tea she’s made; she did, at least, replenish their stores from those of the station. She hasn’t seen him drink from the cup. It might’ve been nice, she thinks, if she could’ve given him something stronger to drink. Or not. She’s not really sure what an orogene of his skill could do, drunk. They’re not supposed to drink for that exact reason… but rust reason, right now. Rust everything.

“Children are the undoing of us,” Alabaster says, his eyes full of the fire.

Syenite nods, though she doesn’t understand it. He’s talking. That has to be a good thing.

“I think I have twelve children.” Alabaster pulls the blanket more closely about himself. “I’m not sure. They don’t always tell me. I don’t always see the mothers, after. But I’m guessing it’s twelve. Don’t know where most of them are.”

He’s been tossing out random facts like this all evening, when he talks at all. Syenite hasn’t been able to bring herself to reply to most of the statements, so it hasn’t been much of a conversation. This one, though, makes her speak, because she’s been thinking about it. About how much the boy in the wire chair resembles Alabaster.

She begins, “Our child…”

He meets her eyes and smiles again. It’s kindly this time, but she’s not sure whether to believe that or the hatred beneath the smile’s surface.

“Oh, this is only one possible fate.” He nods at the station’s looming red walls. “Our child could become another me burning through the ring ranks and setting new standards for orogeny, a Fulcrum legend. Or she could be mediocre and never do anything of note. Just another four-or five-ringer clearing coral-blocked harbors and making babies in her spare time.”

He sounds so rusting cheerful that it’s hard to pay attention to the words and not just his tone. The tone soothes, and some part of her craves soothing right now. But his words keep her on edge, stinging like sharp glass fragments amid smooth marbles.

“Or a still,” she says. “Even two roggas—” It’s hard to say the word, but harder to say orogene, because the more polite term now feels like a lie. “Even we can make a still.”

“I hope not.”

“You hope not?” That’s the best fate she can imagine for their child.

Alabaster stretches out his hands to the fire to warm them. He’s wearing his rings, she realizes suddenly. He hardly ever does, but sometime before they reached the station, even with fear for his child burning in his blood, he spared a thought for propriety and put them on. Some of them glitter in the firelight, while others are dull and dark; one on each finger, thumbs included. Six of Syenite’s fingers itch, just a little, for their nakedness.

“Any child of two ringed Fulcrum orogenes,” he says, “should be an orogene, too, yes. But it’s not that exact a thing. It’s not science, what we are. There’s no logic to it.” He smiles thinly. “To be safe, the Fulcrum will treat any children born to any rogga as potential roggas themselves, until proven otherwise.”

“But once they’ve proven it, after that, they’ll be… people.” It is the only hope she can muster. “Maybe someone will adopt them into a good comm, send them to a real creche, let them earn a use name—”

He sighs. There’s such weariness in it that Syen falls silent in confusion and dread.

“No comm would adopt our child,” he says. The words are deliberate and slow. “The orogeny might skip a generation, maybe two or three, but it always comes back. Father Earth never forgets the debt we owe.”

Syenite frowns. He’s said things like this before, things that hark to the lorists’ tales about orogenes — that they are a weapon not of the Fulcrum, but of the hateful, waiting planet beneath their feet. A planet that wants nothing more than to destroy the life infesting its once-pristine surface. There is something in the things Alabaster says that makes her think he believes those old tales, at least a little. Maybe he does. Maybe it gives him comfort to think their kind has some purpose, however terrible.

She has no patience for mysticism right now. “Nobody will adopt her, fine.” She chooses her arbitrarily. “What, then? The Fulcrum doesn’t keep stills.”

Alabaster’s eyes are like his rings, reflecting the fire in one moment, dull and dark the next. “No. She would become a Guardian.”

Oh, rust. That explains so much.

At her silence, Alabaster looks up. “Now. Everything you’ve seen today. Unsee it.”

“What?”

“That thing in the chair wasn’t a child.” There’s no light in his eyes now. “It wasn’t my child, or anyone else’s. It was nothing. It was no one. We stabilized the hot spot and figured out what caused it to almost blow. We’ve checked here for survivors and found none, and that’s what we’ll telegraph to Yumenes. That’s what we’ll both say if we’re questioned, when we get back.”

“I, I don’t know if I can…” The boy’s slack-jawed, dead gaze. How horrible, to be trapped in an endless nightmare. To awaken to agony, and the leer of some grotesque parasite. She can feel nothing but pity for the boy, relief for his release.

“You will do exactly as I say.” His voice is a whip, and she glares at him, instantly furious. “If you mourn, mourn the wasted resource. If anyone asks, you’re glad he’s dead. Feel it. Believe it. He almost killed more people than we can count, after all. And if anyone asks how you feel about it, say you understand that’s why they do these things to us. You know it’s for our own good. You know it’s for everyone’s.”

“You rusting bastard, I don’t know—”

He laughs, and she flinches, because the rage is back now, whiplash-quick. “Oh, don’t push me right now, Syen. Please don’t.” He’s still laughing. “I’ll get a reprimand if I kill you.”

It’s a threat, at last. Well, then. Next time he sleeps. She’ll have to cover his face while she stabs him. Even lethal knife wounds take a few seconds to kill; if he focuses his orogeny on her in that brief window, she’s dead. He’s less likely to target her accurately without eyes, though, or if he’s distracted by suffocation—

But Alabaster is still laughing. Hard. That’s when Syenite becomes aware of a hovering jitter in the ambient. A looming almost in the strata beneath her feet. She frowns, distracted and alerted and wondering if it’s the hot spot again — and then, belatedly, she realizes that the sensation is not jittering, it’s jerking in a rhythmic sort of way. In time with the harsh exhalations of Alabaster’s laughter.

While she stares at him in chilled realization, he even slaps his knee with one hand. Still laughing, because what he wants to do is destroy everything in sight. And if his half-dead, half-grown son could touch off a supervolcano, there’s really no telling what that boy’s father could do if he set his mind to it. Or even by accident, if his control slips for a moment.

Syen’s hands clench into fists on her knees. She sits there, nails pricking her palms, until he finally gets ahold of himself. It takes a while. Even when the laughter’s done he puts his face into his hands and chuckles now and again, shoulders shaking. Maybe he’s crying. She doesn’t know. Doesn’t really care, either.

Eventually he lifts his head and takes a deep breath, then another. “Sorry about that,” he says at last. The laughter has stopped, but he’s all cheer again. “Let’s talk about something else, why don’t we?”

“Where the rust is your Guardian?” She hasn’t unclenched her hands. “You’re mad as a bag of cats.”

He giggles. “Oh, I made sure she was no threat years ago.”

Syen nods. “You killed her.”

“No. Do I look stupid?” Giggling to annoyance in half a breath. Syen is terrified of him and no longer ashamed to admit it. But he sees this, and something in his manner changes. He takes another deep breath, and slumps. “Shit. I… I’m sorry.”

She says nothing. He smiles a little, sadly, like he doesn’t expect her to. Then he gets up and goes to the sleeping bag. She watches while he lies down, his back to the fire; she watches him until his breathing slows. Only then does she relax.

Though she jumps, again, when he speaks very softly.

“You’re right,” he says. “I’ve been crazy for years. If you stay with me for long, you will be, too. If you see enough of this, and understand enough of what it all means.” He lets out a long sigh. “If you kill me, you’ll be doing the whole world a favor.” After that he says nothing more.

Syen considers his last words for longer than she probably should.

Then she curls up to sleep as best she can on the hard courtyard stones, wrapped in a blanket and with a saddle as an especially torturous sort of pillow. The horses shift restlessly, the way they have been all evening; they can smell the death in the station. But eventually, they sleep, and Syenite does, too. She hopes Alabaster eventually does the same.

Back along the highroad they just traveled, the tourmaline obelisk drifts out of sight behind a mountain, implacable in its course.

* * *

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all.

— Arctic proverb