The Fifth Season

17 Damaya, in finality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, one day, everything changes.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, it isn’t. Not entirely.

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

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

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

“Yes. Yes. Is that what it’s called? Is it in that big building at the center of the Fulcrum complex? That’s where I thought it might be. Yes.”

Damaya blinks and scowls. “Who. Are. You.” The girl’s right; that’s not really what she means to say. Still, it covers all the salient questions at once.

Binof grimaces. She glances around, thinks a moment, sets her jaw, and finally says, “Binof Leadership Yumenes.”

It almost means nothing to Damaya. In the Fulcrum, no one has use names or comm names. Anyone who was Leadership, before being taken by the Guardians, isn’t anymore. The grits who were born here or brought in young enough have a rogga name, and anyone else is required to take one when they earn their first ring. That’s all they get.

But then intuition turns a key here and makes various clues click together there, and suddenly Damaya realizes Binof is not merely expressing misplaced loyalty to a social convention that no longer applies. It does apply to Binof, because Binof is not an orogene.

And Binof’s not just any still: she’s a Leader, and she’s from Yumenes, which makes her a child of one of the most powerful families in the Stillness. And she has snuck into the Fulcrum, pretending to be an orogene.

It’s so impossible, so insane, that Damaya’s mouth falls open. Binof sees that she understands, and edges closer, dropping her voice. “I told you, I’m not going to get you into trouble. I’ll go, now, and find that room, and all I ask is that you don’t tell anyone yet. But you wanted to know why I’m here. That’s why I’m here. That room is what I’m looking for.”

Damaya closes her mouth. “Why?”

“I can’t tell you.” When Damaya glares, Binof holds up her hands. “That’s for your safety, and mine. There’s things only Leaders are supposed to know, and I’m not even supposed to know them yet. If anyone learns I told you, then—” She hesitates. “I don’t know what they would do to either of us, but I don’t want to find out.”

Crack. Damaya nods, absently. “They’ll catch you.”

“Probably. But when they do, I’ll just tell them who I am.” The girl shrugs, with the ease of someone who has never known true fear in her life. “They won’t know why I’m here. Someone will call my parents and I’ll be in trouble, but I get in trouble all the time anyway. If I can find out the answers to some questions first, though, it’ll be worth it. Now, where’s that room without doors?”

Damaya shakes her head, seeing the trap at once. “I could get in trouble for helping you.” She isn’t a Leader, or a person; no one will save her. “You should leave, however you got here. Now. I won’t tell anyone, if you do.”

“No.” Binof looks smug. “I went to a lot of trouble to get in here. And anyway, you’re already in trouble, because you didn’t shout for an instructor the minute you realized I wasn’t a grit. Now you’re my accomplice. Right?”

Damaya starts, her stomach constricting as she realizes the girl is right. She’s also furious, because Binof is trying to manipulate her, and she hates that. “It’s better if I shout now than let you blunder off and get caught later.” And she gets up and heads for the dormitory door.

Binof gasps and trots after her quickly, catching her arm and speaking in a harsh whisper. “Don’t! Please — look, I have money. Three red diamond chips and a whole alexandrite! Do you want money?”

Damaya’s growing angrier by the minute. “What the rust would I need with money?”

“Privileges, then. The next time you leave the Fulcrum—”

“We don’t leave.” Damaya scowls and yanks her arm out of Binof’s grip. How did this fool of a still even get in here? There are guards, members of the city militia, at all the doors that lead out of the Fulcrum. But those guards are there to keep orogenes in, not stills out — and perhaps this Leader girl with her money and her privileges and her fearlessness would have found a way in even if the guards had tried to stop her. “We’re here because it’s the only place we can be safe from people like you. Get out.”

Suddenly Damaya has to turn away, clenching her fists and concentrating hard and taking quick deep breaths, because she’s so angry that the part of herself that knows how to shift fault lines is starting to wander down into the earth. It’s a shameful breach of control, and she prays none of the instructors sense it, because then she will no longer be thought of as almost ready for the first ring test. Not to mention that she might end up icing this girl.

Infuriatingly, Binof leans around her and says, “Oh! Are you angry? Are you doing orogeny? What does it feel like?”

The questions are so ridiculous, her lack of fear so nonsensical, that Damaya’s orogeny fizzles. She’s suddenly not angry anymore, just astonished. Is this what all Leaders are like as children? Palela was so small that it didn’t have any; people of the Leader use-caste generally prefer to live in places that are worth leading. Maybe this is just what Yumenescene Leaders are like. Or maybe this girl is just ridiculous.

As if Damaya’s silence is an answer in itself, Binof grins and dances around in front of her. “I’ve never had a chance to meet an orogene before. The grown-ups, I mean, the ones with rings who wear the black uniforms, but not a kid like me. You’re not as scary as the lorists said you would be. But then, lorists lie a lot.”

Damaya shakes her head. “I don’t understand anything about you.”

To her surprise, Binof sobers. “You sound like my mom.” She looks away for a moment, then presses her lips together and glowers at Damaya in apparent determination. “Will you help me find this room, or not? If you won’t help, at least don’t say anything.”

In spite of everything, Damaya is intrigued — by the girl, by the possibility of finding a way into the room without doors, by the novelty of her own intrigue. She has never gone exploring with someone, before. It is… exciting. She shifts and looks around uncomfortably, but a part of her has already decided, hasn’t it? “Okay. But I’ve never found a way in, and I’ve been exploring Main for months.”

“Main, is that what the big building is called? And yes, I’m not surprised; there probably isn’t an easy way in. Or maybe there was once, but it’s closed off now.” Oblivious as Damaya stares again, Binof rubs her chin. “I have an idea of where to look, though. I’ve seen some old structural drawings… Well, anyway, it would be on the southern side of the building. Ground level.”

That is not in the unused wing, inconveniently. Still, she says, “I know the way,” and it’s heartening to see Binof brighten at these words.

She leads Binof the way she usually goes, walking the way she usually walks. Strangely, perhaps because she is nervous this time, she notices more people noticing her. There are more double takes than usual, and when she spies Instructor Galena by chance on her way past a fountain — Galena, who once caught her drunk and saved her life by not reporting it — he actually smiles before turning his attention back to his chatty companion. That’s when Damaya finally realizes why people are looking: because they know about the strange quiet grit who goes wandering all the time. They’ve probably heard about Damaya via rumors or something, and they like that she’s finally brought someone else with her. They think she’s made a friend. Damaya would laugh, if the truth weren’t so unfunny.

“Strange,” says Binof as they walk one of the obsidian paths through one of the lesser gardens.

“What?”

“Well, I keep thinking everyone’s going to notice me. But instead, almost no one’s paying attention. Even though we’re the only kids out here.”

Damaya shrugs, and keeps walking.

“You’d think someone would stop us and ask questions, or something. We could be doing something unsafe.”

Damaya shakes her head. “If one of us gets hurt and someone finds us before we bleed out, they’ll take us to the hospital.” And then Damaya will have a mark on her record that might prevent her from taking the ring test. Everything she does right now could interfere with that. She sighs.

“That’s nice,” says Binof, “but maybe it’s a better idea to stop kids before they do things that might get them hurt.”

Damaya stops in the middle of the lawn path and turns to Binof. “We aren’t kids,” she says, annoyed. Binof blinks. “We’re grits — Imperial Orogenes in training. That’s what you look like, so that’s what everyone assumes you are. Nobody gives a damn whether a couple of orogenes get hurt.”

Binof is staring at her. “Oh.”

“And you’re talking too much. Grits don’t. We only relax in the dorms, and only when there are no instructors around. If you’re going to pretend to be one of us, get it right.”

“All right, all right!” Binof holds up both hands as if to appease her. “I’m sorry, I just…” She grimaces as Damaya glares at her. “Right. No more talking.”

She shuts up, so Damaya resumes walking.

They reach Main and head inside the way Damaya always does. Only this time she turns right instead of left, and heads downstairs instead of up. The ceilings are lower in this corridor, and the walls are decorated in a way she has never seen before, with little frescoes painted at intervals that depict pleasant, innocuous scenes. After a while she begins to worry, because they’re getting closer and closer to a wing that she has never explored and doesn’t want to: the Guardians’. “Where on the south side of the building?”

“What?” Preoccupied with looking around — which makes her stand out even more than the endless talking did — Binof blinks at Damaya in surprise. “Oh. Just… somewhere on the south side.” She grimaces at Damaya’s glare. “I don’t know where! I just know there was a door, even if there isn’t one anymore. Can’t you—” She waggles her fingers. “Orogenes are supposed to be able to do things like that.”

“What, find doors? Not unless they’re in the ground.” But even as Damaya says this, she frowns, because… well. She can sort of sess where doors are, by inference. Load-bearing walls feel much like bedrock, and door frames feel like gaps in strata — places where the pressure of the building against the ground is lesser. If a door somewhere on this level has been covered over, would its frame have been removed, too? Maybe. But would that place not feel different from the walls around it?

She’s already turning, splaying her fingers the way she tends to do when she’s trying to stretch her zone of control farther. In the Applied crucibles there are markers underground — small blocks of marble with words etched into one surface. It takes a very fine degree of control to not only find the blocks but determine the word; it’s like tasting a page of a book and noticing the minute differences between the ink and the bare page and using that to read. But because she has been doing this over and over and over under the instructors’ watchful eye, she realizes that the same exercise works for this purpose.

“Are you doing orogeny?” Binof asks eagerly.

“Yes, so shut up before I ice you by accident.” Thankfully Binof actually obeys, even though sessing isn’t orogeny and there’s no danger of icing anyone. Damaya’s just grateful for the silence.

She gropes along the walls of the building. They are like shadows of force compared to the stolid comfort of rock, but if she’s delicate, she can trace them. And there and there and there along the building’s inner walls, the ones that enclose that hidden chamber, she can feel where the walls are… interrupted. Inhaling, Damaya opens her eyes.

“Well?” Binof’s practically salivating.

Damaya turns, walking along the wall a ways. When she gets to the right place and stops, there’s a door there. It’s risky opening doors in occupied wings; this is probably someone’s office. The corridor is quiet, empty, but Damaya can see lights underneath some of the doors, which means that at least a few people are working late. She knocks first. When there is no answer, she takes a deep breath and tries the latch. Locked.

“Hang on,” Binof says, rummaging in her pockets. After a moment she holds up something that looks like a tool Damaya once used to pick bits of shell out of the kurge nuts that grew on her family’s farm. “I read about how to do this. Hopefully it’s a simple lock.” She begins fiddling with the tool in the lock, her face set in a look of concentration.

Damaya waits awhile, leaning casually against the wall and listening with both ears and sessapinae for any vibration of feet or approaching voices — or worse, the buzz of an approaching Guardian. It’s after midnight by now, though, and even the most dedicated workers are either planning to sleep in their offices or have left for the night, so no one troubles them during the agonizingly long time it takes for Binof to figure out how to use the thing.

“That’s enough,” Damaya says after an eternity. If anyone comes along and catches them here, Damaya won’t be able to play it off. “Come back tomorrow and we’ll try this again—”

“I can’t,” says Binof. She’s sweating and her hands are shaking, which isn’t helping matters. “I gave my nurses the slip for one night, but that won’t work again. I almost got it last time. Just give me another minute.”

So Damaya waits, growing more and more anxious, until finally there is a click and Binof gasps in surprise. “Was that it? I think that was it!” She tries the door, and it swings open. “Earth’s flaming farts, it worked!”

The room beyond is indeed someone’s office: There’s a desk and two high-backed chairs, and bookcases line the walls. The desk is bigger than most, the chairs more elaborate; whoever works here is someone important. It is jarring for Damaya to see an office that’s still in use after so many months of seeing the disused offices of the old wings. There’s no dust, and the lanterns are already lit, though low-wick. So strange.

Binoff looks around, frowning; no sign of a door within the office. Damaya brushes past her, going over to what looks like a closet. She opens it: brooms and mops, and a spare black uniform hanging on the rod.

“That’s it?” Binof curses aloud.

“No.” Because Damaya can sess that this office is too short, from door to far wall, to match the width of the building. This closet isn’t deep enough to account for the difference.

Tentatively she reaches past the broom and pushes on the wall. Nothing; it’s solid brick. Well, that was an idea.

“Oh, right.” Binof shoulders in with her, feeling the walls all over the closet and shoving the spare uniform out of the way. “These old buildings always have hidden doors, leading down into the storecaches or—”

“There aren’t any storecaches in the Fulcrum.” Even as she says it, she blinks, because she’s never thought about this before. What are they supposed to do if there’s a Season? Somehow she doesn’t think the people of Yumenes will be willing to share their food with a bunch of orogenes.

“Oh. Right.” Binof grimaces. “Well, still, this is Yumenes, even if it is the Fulcrum. There’s always—”

And she freezes, her eyes widening as her fingers trip over a brick that’s loose. She grins, pushes at one end until the other end pops out; using this, she pulls it loose. There’s a latch underneath, made of what looks like cast iron.

“—There’s always something going on beneath the surface,” Binof breathes.

Damaya draws near, wondering. “Pull it.”

“Now you’re interested?” But Binof indeed wraps her hand around the latch, and pulls.

That whole wall of the closet swings loose, revealing an opening beyond lined with the same brick. The narrow tunnel there curves out of sight almost immediately, into darkness.

Damaya and Binof both stare into it, neither taking that first step.

“What’s in there?” Damaya whispers.

Binof licks her lips, staring into the shadowed tunnel. “I’m not sure.”

“Bullshit.” It’s a shameful thrill to talk like this, like one of the ringed grown-ups. “You came here hoping to find something.”

“Let’s go see first—” Binof tries to push past her, and Damaya catches her arm. Binof jumps, arm tightening beneath Damaya’s hand; she glares down at it as if in affront. Damaya doesn’t care.

“No. Tell me what you’re looking for, or I’ll shut this door after you and start a shake to bring the wall down and trap you in there. Then I’ll go tell the Guardians.” This is a bluff. It would be the stupidest thing on Father Earth to use unauthorized orogeny right under the noses of the Guardians, and then to go tell them she’s done it. But Binof doesn’t know that.

“I told you, only Leaders can know this!” Binof tries to shake her off.

“You’re a Leader; change the rule. Isn’t that also what you’re supposed to do?”

Binof blinks and stares at her. For a long moment she is silent. Then she sighs, rubs her eyes, and the tension goes out of her thin arm. “Fine. Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “There’s something, an artifact, at the heart of the Fulcrum.”

“What kind of artifact?”

“I’m not sure. I’m really not!” Binof raises her hands quickly, shaking off Damaya in the process, but Damaya’s not trying to hold her anymore. “All I know is that… something’s missing from the history. There’s a hole, a gap.”

“What?”

“In history.” Binof glares at Damaya as if this is supposed to mean something. “You know, the stuff the tutors teach you? About how Yumenes was founded?”

Damaya shakes her head. Beyond a line she barely remembers in creche about Yumenes being the first city of the Old Sanze Empire, she cannot remember ever hearing about its founding. Perhaps Leaders get a better education.

Binof rolls her eyes, but explains. “There was a Season. The one right before the Empire was founded was Wandering, when north suddenly shifted and crops failed because birds and bugs couldn’t find them. After that warlords took over in most areas — which is what always used to happen, after a Season. There was nothing but stonelore to guide people then, and rumors, and superstition. And it was because of rumors that no one settled in this region for a really long time.” She points down, at their feet. “Yumenes was the perfect place for a city: good weather, in the middle of a plate, water but nowhere near the ocean, all that. But people were afraid of this place and had been for ages, because there was something here.”

Damaya’s never heard anything like this. “What?”

Binof looks annoyed. “That’s what I’m trying to find out! That’s what’s missing. Imperial history takes over after the Wandering Season. The Madness Season happened only a little while afterward, and Warlord Verishe — Emperor Verishe, the first Emperor — started Sanze then. She founded the Empire here, on land that everyone feared, and built a city around the thing they were all afraid of. That actually helped keep Yumenes safe in those early years. And later, after the Empire was more established, somewhere between the Season of Teeth and the Breathless Season, the Fulcrum was founded on this site. On purpose. On top of the thing they were all afraid of.”

“But what—” Damaya trails off, understanding at last. “The histories don’t say what they were afraid of.”

“Precisely. And I think it’s in there.” Binof points toward the open door.

Damaya frowns. “Why are only Leaders supposed to know this?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. So are you coming in with me, or not?”

Instead of answering, Damaya walks past Binof and into the brick-lined corridor. Binof curses, then trots after her, and because of that, they enter together.

The tunnel opens out into a huge dark space. Damaya stops as soon as she feels airiness and breadth around her; it’s pitch black, but she can feel the shape of the ground ahead. She catches Binof, who’s blundering forward in a determined sort of way despite the dark — the fool — and says, “Wait. The ground’s pressed down up ahead.” She’s whispering, because that’s what one does in the dark. Her voice echoes; the echo takes a while to return. It’s a big space.

“Pressed — what?”

“Pressed down.” Damaya tries to explain it, but it’s always so hard to tell stills things. Another orogene would just know. “Like… like there’s been something really heavy here.” Something like a mountain. “The strata are deformed, and — there’s a depression. A big hole. You’ll fall.”

“Rusting fuck,” Binof mutters. Damaya almost flinches, though she’s heard worse from some of her cruder fellow grits when the instructors weren’t around. “We need some light.”

Lights appear on the ground up ahead, one by one. There is a faint clicking sound — which echoes as well — as each activates: small round white ones near their feet and in twin lines as they march forward, and then much larger ones that are rectangular and butter-yellow, spreading outward from the walkway lights. The yellow panels continue to activate in sequence, and spread, slowly forming an enormous hexagon and gradually illuminating the space in which they stand: a cavernous atrium with six walls, enclosed by what must be the roof of Main high above. The ceiling is so distant they can barely make out its radiating spoke of supports. The walls are featureless, the same plain stone that comprises the rest of Main, but most of the floor of this chamber has been covered over in asphalt, or something very like it — smooth, stonelike but not stone, slightly rough, durable.

At the core of it, however, there is indeed a depression. That is an understatement: It’s a huge, tapering pit with flat-sided walls and neat, precise edges — six of them, cut as finely as one cuts a diamond. “Evil Earth,” Damaya whispers as she edges forward along the walkway to where the yellow lights limn the shape of the pit.

“Yeah,” says Binof, sounding equally awed.

It is stories deep, this pit, and steep. If she fell in, she would roll down its slopes and probably break every bone in her body at the bottom. But the shape of it nags at her, because it is faceted. Tapering to a point at the very bottom. No one digs a pit in that shape. Why would they? It would be almost impossible to get out of, even with a ladder that could reach so far.

But then, no one has dug this pit. She can sess that: Something monstrously heavy punched this pit into the earth, and sat in the depression long enough to make all the rock and soil beneath it solidify into these smooth, neat planes. Then whatever-it-was lifted away, clean as a buttered roll from a pan, leaving nothing but the shape of itself behind.

But wait; the walls of the pit are not wholly smooth. Damaya crouches for a closer look, while beside her, Binof just stares.

There: Along every smooth slope, she can see thin, barely visible sharp objects. Needles? They push up through fine cracks in the smooth walls, jagged and random, like plant roots. The needles are made of iron; Damaya can smell the rust in the air. Scratch her earlier guess: If she fell into this pit, she would be shredded long before she ever hit the bottom.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Binof breathes at last. She’s speaking in a hush, maybe out of reverence, or fear. “Many things, but… not this.”

“What is it?” asks Damaya. “What’s it for?”

Binof shakes her head slowly. “It’s supposed to be—”

“Hidden,” says a voice behind them, and they both jump and whirl in alarm. Damaya is standing closer to the edge of the pit, and when she stumbles there is a terrible, vertiginous moment in which she’s absolutely certain she’s going to fall in. In fact she relaxes, and doesn’t try to lean forward or rebalance herself or do any of the things that she would do if she had a chance of not falling. She is all-over heavy, and the pit yawns with inevitability behind her.

Then Binof grabs her arm and yanks her forward, and abruptly she realizes she was still a good two or three feet from the edge. She would only have fallen in if she’d let herself fall in. This is such a strange thing that she almost forgets why she nearly fell, and then the Guardian comes down the walkway.

The woman is tall and broad and bronze, pretty in a carved sort of way, with ashblow hair shorn into a bristly cap. She feels older than Schaffa, though this is difficult to tell; her skin is unmarked, her honey-colored eyes undented by crow’s feet. She just feels… heavier, in presence. And her smile is the same unnerving combination of peaceable and menacing as that of every Guardian Damaya has ever seen.

Damaya thinks, I only need to be afraid if she thinks I’m dangerous.

Here is the question, though: Is an orogene who goes where she knows she should not dangerous? Damaya licks her lips and tries not to look afraid.

Binof doesn’t bother, darting a look between Damaya and the woman and the pit and the door. Damaya wants to tell her not to do whatever she’s thinking of — making a break for it, likely. Not with a Guardian here. But Binof is not an orogene; maybe that will protect her, even if she does something stupid.

“Damaya,” the woman says, though Damaya has never met her before. “Schaffa will be disappointed.”

“She’s with me,” Binof blurts, before Damaya can reply. Damaya looks at her in surprise, but Binof’s already talking, and now that she’s started, it seems as though nothing will stop her. “I brought her here. Ordered her here. She didn’t even know about the door and this — place — until I told her.”

That isn’t true, Damaya wants to say, because she’d guessed that the place existed, just hadn’t known how to find it. But the Guardian is looking at Binof curiously, and that’s a positive sign because nobody’s hands have been broken yet.

“And you are?” The Guardian smiles. “Not an orogene, I gather, despite your uniform.”

Binof jumps a little, as if she’s forgotten that she’s been playing little lost grit. “Oh. Um.” She straightens and lifts her chin. “My name is Binof Leadership Yumenes. Your pardon for my intrusion, Guardian; I had a question that required an answer.”

Binof’s talking differently, Damaya realizes suddenly: her words evenly spaced and voice steady, her manner not so much haughty as grave. As if the world’s fate depends upon her finding the answer to her question. As if she isn’t just some spoiled girl from a powerful family who decided on a whim to do something incredibly stupid.

The Guardian stops, cocking her head and blinking as her smile momentarily fades. “Leadership Yumenes?” Then she beams. “How lovely! So young, and already you have a comm name. You are quite welcome among us, Binof Leader. If you had but told us you were coming, we could have shown you what you wanted to see.”

Binof flinches minutely at the rebuke. “I had a wish to see it for myself, I’m afraid. Perhaps that was not wise — but my parents are likely by now aware that I have come here, so please feel free to speak to them about it.”

It’s a smart thing to do, Damaya is surprised to realize, because before now she has not thought of Binof as smart. Mentioning that others know where she’s gone.

“I shall,” says the Guardian, and then she smiles at Damaya, which makes her stomach tighten. “And I shall speak to your Guardian, and we shall all speak together. That would be lovely, yes? Yes. Please.” She steps aside and bows a little, gesturing for them to precede her, and as polite as it looks, they both know it’s not a request.

The Guardian leads them out of the chamber. As they all step into the brick tunnel again, the lights go out behind them. When the door is shut and the office is locked and they have proceeded into the Guardians’ wing, the woman touches Damaya’s shoulder to stop her while Binof keeps walking for a step or two. Then when Binof stops, looking at them in confusion, the Guardian says to Damaya, “Please wait here.” Then she moves to rejoin Binof.

Binof looks at her, perhaps trying to convey something with her eyes. Damaya looks away, and the message fails as the Guardian leads her farther down the hall and into a closed door. Binof has already done enough harm.

Damaya waits, of course. She’s not stupid. She’s standing in front of the door to a busy area; despite the hour, other Guardians emerge now and again, and look at her. She doesn’t look back, and something in this seems to satisfy them, so they move on without bothering her.

After a few moments, the Guardian who caught them in the pit chamber returns and leads her through the door, with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Now. Let’s just talk a bit, why don’t we? I’ve sent for Schaffa; fortunately he’s in the city right now, and not out on circuit as usual. But until he gets here…”

There’s a large, handsomely apportioned, carpeted area beyond the door, with many small desks. Some are occupied and some not, and the people who move between them wear a mix of black and burgundy uniforms. A very few aren’t wearing uniforms at all, but civilian clothing. Damaya stares at all of it in fascination until the Guardian puts a hand on her head and gently, but inexorably, steers her gaze away.

Damaya is led into a small private office at the end of this chamber. The desk here is completely empty, however, and the room has a disused air. There’s a chair on either side of the desk, so Damaya takes the one meant for guests.

“I’m sorry,” she says as the Guardian sits down behind the desk. “I–I didn’t think.”

The Guardian shakes her head, as if this doesn’t matter. “Did you touch any of them?”

“What?”

“In the socket.” The Guardian’s still smiling, but they always smile; this means nothing useful. “You saw the extrusions from the socket walls. Weren’t you curious? There was one only an arm’s length below where you stood.”

Socket? Oh, and the iron bits poking out of the walls. “No, I didn’t touch any of them.” Socket for what?

The Guardian sits forward, and abruptly her smile vanishes. It doesn’t fade, and she doesn’t frown to replace it. All the expression just stops, in her face. “Did it call to you? Did you answer?”

Something’s wrong. Damaya feels this suddenly, instinctively, and the realization dries the words from her mouth. The Guardian even sounds different — her voice is deeper, softer, almost hushed, as if she’s saying something she doesn’t want the others to hear.

“What did it say to you?” The Guardian extends her hand, and even though Damaya puts her hand out immediately in obedient response, she does not want to. She does it anyway because Guardians are to be obeyed. The woman takes Damaya’s hand and holds it palm up, her thumb stroking the long crease. The lifeline. “You can tell me.”

Damaya shakes her head in utter confusion. “What did what say to me?”

“It’s angry.” The woman’s voice drops lower, going monotonous, and Damaya realizes she’s not trying to go unheard anymore. The Guardian is talking differently because that’s not her voice. “Angry and… afraid. I hear both gathering, growing, the anger and the fear. Readying, for the time of return.”

It’s like… like someone else is inside the Guardian, and that is who’s talking, except using the Guardian’s face and voice and everything else. But as the woman says this, her hand begins to tighten on Damaya’s. Her thumb, which rests right on the bones that Schaffa broke a year and a half ago, begins to press in, and Damaya feels faint as some part of her thinks, I don’t want to be hurt again.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want,” she offers, but the Guardian keeps pressing. It’s like she doesn’t even hear.

“It did what it had to do, last time.” Press and tighten. This Guardian, unlike Schaffa, has longer nails; the thumbnail begins to dig into Damaya’s flesh. “It seeped through the walls and tainted their pure creation, exploited them before they could exploit it. When the arcane connections were made, it changed those who would control it. Chained them, fate to fate.”

“Please don’t,” Damaya whispers. Her palm has begun to bleed. In almost the same moment there is a knock at the door. The woman ignores both.

“It made them a part of it.”

“I don’t understand,” Damaya says. It hurts. It hurts. She’s shaking, waiting for the snap of bone.

“It hoped for communion. Compromise. Instead, the battle… escalated.”

“I don’t understand! You’re not making any sense!” It’s wrong. Damaya’s raising her voice to a Guardian, and she knows better, but this isn’t right. Schaffa promised that he would hurt her only for a good reason. All Guardians operate on this principle; Damaya has seen the proof of it in how they interact with her fellow grits and the ringed orogenes. There is an order to life in the Fulcrum and this woman is breaking it. “Let go of me! I’ll do whatever you want, just let go!”

The door opens and Schaffa flows in. Damaya’s breath catches, but he doesn’t look at her. His gaze is fixed on the Guardian who holds Damaya’s hand. He isn’t smiling as he moves to stand behind her. “Timay. Control yourself.”

Timay’s not home, Damaya thinks.

“It speaks only to warn, now,” she continues in a drone. “There will be no compromise next time—”

Schaffa sighs a little, then jabs his fingers into the back of Timay’s skull.

It’s not clear at first, from Damaya’s angle, that this is what he’s done. She just sees him make a sudden sharp, violent movement, and then Timay’s head jerks forward. She makes a sound so harsh and guttural that it is almost vulgar, and her eyes go wide. Schaffa’s face is expressionless as he does something, his arm flexing, and that’s when the first blood-lines wend around Timay’s neck, beginning to sink into her tunic and patter into her lap. Her hand, on Damaya’s, relaxes all at once, and her face goes slack.

That is also when Damaya begins to scream. She keeps screaming as Schaffa twists his hand again, nostrils flaring with the effort of whatever he’s doing, and the sound of crunching bone and popping tendon is undeniable. Then Schaffa lifts his hand, holding something small and indistinct — too covered in gore — between his thumb and forefinger. Timay falls forward then, and now Damaya sees the ruin that was once the base of her skull.

“Be silent, little one,” Schaffa says, mildly, and Damaya shuts up.

Another Guardian comes in, looks at Timay, looks at Schaffa, and sighs. “Unfortunate.”

“Very unfortunate.” Schaffa offers the blood-covered thing to this man, who cups his hands to receive it, carefully. “I would like this removed.” He nods toward Timay’s body.

“Yes.” The man leaves with the thing Schaffa took from Timay, and then two more Guardians come in, sigh as the first one did, and collect her body from its chair. They drag her out, one of them pausing to mop up with a handkerchief the drops of blood from the table where Timay fell. It’s all very efficient. Schaffa sits down in Timay’s place, and Damaya jerks her eyes to him only because she must. They gaze at each other in silence for a few moments.

“Let me see,” Schaffa says gently, and she offers him her hand. Amazingly, it does not shake.

He takes it with his left hand — the one that is still clean because it did not rip out Timay’s brain stem. He turns her hand, examining it carefully, making a face at the crescent of blood where Timay’s thumbnail broke the skin. A single drop of Damaya’s blood rolls off the edge of her hand, splatting onto the table right where Timay’s blood had been a moment before. “Good. I was afraid she’d hurt you worse than this.”

“Wh—” Damaya begins. She can’t muster any more than that.

Schaffa smiles, though this is edged with sorrow. “Something you should not have seen.”

“What.” This takes a ten-ringer’s effort.

Schaffa considers a moment, then says, “You are aware that we — Guardians — are… different.” He smiles, as if to remind her of how different. All Guardians smile a lot.

She nods, mute.

“There is a… procedure.” He lets go of her hand for a moment, touches the back of his own skull, beneath the fall of his long black hair. “A thing is done to make us what we are. An implantation. Sometimes it goes wrong and must then be removed, as you saw.” He shrugs. His right hand is still covered in gore. “A Guardian’s connections with his assigned orogenes can help to stave off the worst, but Timay had allowed hers to erode. Foolish.”

A chilly barn in the Nomidlats; a moment of apparent affection; two warm fingers pressed to the base of Damaya’s skull. Duty first, he had said then. Something that will make me more comfortable.

Damaya licks her lips. “Sh-she was. Saying things. Not making. Sense.”

“I heard some of what she said.”

“She wasn’t. Her.” Now Damaya’s the one not making sense. “She wasn’t who she was anymore. I mean, she was someone else. Talking as if… someone else was there.” In her head. In her mouth, speaking through it. “She kept talking about a socket. And ‘it’ being angry.”

Schaffa inclines his head. “Father Earth, of course. It is a common delusion.”

Damaya blinks. What? It’s angry. What?

“And you’re right; Timay wasn’t herself any longer. I’m sorry she hurt you. I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m so sorry, little one.” And there is such genuine regret in his voice, such compassion in his face, that Damaya does what she has not since a cold dark night in a Nomidlats barn: She begins to cry.

After a moment Schaffa gets up and comes around the table and picks her up, sitting in the chair and letting her curl in his lap to weep on his shoulder. There is an order to life in the Fulcrum, see, and it is this: If one has not displeased them, the Guardians are the closest thing to safety a rogga will ever have. So Damaya cries for a long time — not just because of what she’s seen tonight. She cries because she has been inexpressibly lonely, and Schaffa… well. Schaffa loves her, in his tender and terrifying way. She does not pay attention to the bloody print his right hand leaves on her hip, or the press of his fingers — fingers strong enough to kill — against the base of her skull. Such things are irrelevant, in the grand scale.

When the storm of weeping subsides, though, Schaffa strokes her back with his clean hand. “How are you feeling, Damaya?”

She does not lift her head from his shoulder. He smells of sweat and leather and iron, things that she will forever associate with comfort and fear. “I’m all right.”

“Good. I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

He squeezes her gently, encouraging. “I’m going to take you down the hall, to one of the crucibles, and there you will face the first ring test. I need you to pass it for me.”

Damaya blinks, frowning, and lifts her head. He smiles at her, tenderly. By this she understands, in a flash of intuition, that this is a test of more than her orogeny. After all, most roggas are told of the test in advance, so that they can practice and prepare. This is happening for her now, without warning, because it is her only chance. She has proven herself disobedient. Unreliable. Because of this, Damaya will need to also prove herself useful. If she cannot…

“I need you to live, Damaya.” Schaffa touches his forehead to her own. “My compassionate one. My life is so full of death. Please; pass this test for me.”

There are so many things she wants to know. What Timay meant; what will happen to Binof; what is the socket and why was it hidden; what happened to Crack last year. Why Schaffa is even giving her this much of a chance. But there is an order to life in the Fulcrum, and her place within it is not to question a Guardian’s will.

But…

But…

But. She turns her head, and looks at that single drop of her blood on the table.

This is not right.

“Damaya?”

It isn’t right, what they’re doing to her. What this place does to everyone within its walls. What he’s making her do, to survive.

“Will you do it? For me?”

She still loves him. That isn’t right, either.

“If I pass.” Damaya closes her eyes. She can’t look at him and say this. Not without letting him see the it isn’t right in her eyes. “I, I picked a rogga name.”

He does not chide her on her language. “Have you, now?” He sounds pleased. “What?”

She licks her lips. “Syenite.”

Schaffa sits back in the chair, sounding thoughtful. “I like it.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do. You chose it, didn’t you?” He’s laughing, but in a good way. With her, not at her. “It forms at the edge of a tectonic plate. With heat and pressure it does not degrade, but instead grows stronger.”

He does understand. She bites her lip and feels fresh tears threaten. It isn’t right that she loves him, but many things in the world are not right. So she fights off the tears, and makes her decision. Crying is weakness. Crying was a thing Damaya did. Syenite will be stronger.

“I’ll do it,” Syenite says, softly. “I’ll pass the test for you, Schaffa. I promise.”

“My good girl,” Schaffa says, and smiles, holding her close.

* * *

[obscured] those who would take the earth too closely unto themselves. They are not masters of themselves; allow them no mastery of others.

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