The Fifth Season

21 you’re getting the band back together

YOU,” YOU SAY SUDDENLY TO Tonkee. Who is not Tonkee.

Tonkee, who is approaching one of the crystal walls with a gleaming eye and a tiny chisel she’s produced from somewhere, stops and looks at you in confusion. “What?”

It’s the end of the day, and you’re tired. Discovering impossible comms hidden in giant underground geodes takes a lot out of you. Ykka’s people have put you and the others up in an apartment that’s situated along the midpoint of one of the longer crystalline shafts. You had to walk across a rope bridge and around an encircling wooden platform to reach it. The apartment is level, even though the crystal itself isn’t; the people who hollowed this place out seem not to have understood that no one forgets they’re living in something that leans at a forty-five-degree angle just because the floor is straight. But you’ve tried to put it out of your mind.

And somewhere in the middle of looking around the place and putting your pack down and thinking, This is home until I can escape it, you’ve suddenly realized that you know Tonkee. You’ve known her, on some level, all along.

“Binof. Leadership. Yumenes,” you snap, and each word seems to hit Tonkee like a blow. She flinches and takes a step back, then another. Then a third, until she’s pressed against the apartment’s smooth crystalline wall. The look on her face is one of horror, or perhaps sorrow so great that it might as well be horror. Past a certain point, it’s all the same thing.

“I didn’t think you remembered,” she says, in a small voice.

You get to your feet, palms planted on the table. “It’s not chance that you started traveling with us. It can’t be.”

Tonkee tries to smile; it’s a grimace. “Unlikely coincidences do happen…”

“Not with you.” Not with a child who’d scammed her way into the Fulcrum and uncovered a secret that culminated in the death of a Guardian. The woman who was that child will not leave things to chance. You’re sure of it. “At least your rusting disguises have gotten better over the years.”

Hoa, who’s been standing at the entrance of the apartment — guarding again, you think — turns his head from one to the other of you, back and forth. Perhaps he is watching how this confrontation goes, to prepare for the one you have to have with him, next.

Tonkee looks away. She’s shaking, just a little. “It isn’t. A coincidence. I mean…” She takes a deep breath. “I haven’t been following you. I had people follow you, but that’s different. Didn’t start following you myself until just the last few years.”

“You had people follow me. For almost thirty years?”

She blinks, then relaxes a little, chuckling. It sounds bitter. “My family has more money than the Emperor. Anyway, it was easy for the first twenty years or so. We almost lost you ten years ago. But… well.”

You slam your hands down on the table, and maybe it’s your imagination that the crystal walls of the apartment glow a little brighter, just for a moment. This almost distracts you. Almost.

“I really can’t take many more surprises right now,” you say, half through your teeth.

Tonkee sighs and slumps against the wall. “… Sorry.”

You shake your head so hard that your locks slip loose from their knot. “I don’t want apologies! Explain. Which are you, the Innovator or the Leader?”

“Both?”

You’re going to ice her. She sees that in your eyes and blurts, “I was born Leadership. I really was! I’m Binof. But…” She spreads her hands. “What can I lead? I’m not good at things like that. You saw what I was like as a child. No subtlety. I’m not good with — people. Things, though, things I can do.”

“I’m not interested in your rusting history—”

“But it’s relevant! History is always relevant.” Tonkee, Binof, or whoever she is, steps away from the wall, a pleading look on her face. “I really am a geomest. I really did go to Seventh, although… although…” She grimaces in a way you don’t understand. “It didn’t go well. But I really have spent my life studying that thing, that socket, which we found in the Fulcrum. Essun, do you know what that was?”

“I don’t care.”

At this, however, Tonkee-Binof scowls. “It matters,” she says. Now she’s the one who looks furious, and you’re the one who draws back in surprise. “I’ve given my life to that secret. It matters. And it should matter to you, too, because you’re one of the only people in all the Stillness who can make it matter.”

“What in Earthfires are you talking about?”

“It’s where they built them.” Binof-Tonkee comes forward quickly, her face alight. “The socket in the Fulcrum. That’s where the obelisks come from. And it’s also where everything went wrong.”

* * *

You end up doing introductions again. Completely this time.

Tonkee is really Binof. But she prefers Tonkee, which is the name she took for herself upon getting into the Seventh University. Turns out it’s Not Done for a child of the Yumenescene Leadership to go into any profession except politics, adjudication, or large-scale merchantry. It’s also Not Done for a child who is born a boy to be a girl — apparently the Leadership families don’t use Breeders, they breed among themselves, and Tonkee’s girlness scuttled an arranged marriage or two. They could’ve simply arranged different marriages, but between that and the young Tonkee’s tendency to say things she shouldn’t and do things that made no sense, it was the last straw. Thus Tonkee’s family buried her in the Stillness’s finest center of learning, giving her a new persona and a false use-caste, and quietly disowned her without all the fuss and bother of a scandal.

Yet Tonkee thrived there, apart from a few raging fights with renowned scholars, most of which she won. And she has spent her professional life studying the obsession that drove her to the Fulcrum all those years ago: the obelisks.

“It wasn’t so much that I was interested in you,” she explains. “I mean, I was — you’d helped me, and I needed to make sure you didn’t suffer for that, that’s how it started — but as I investigated you I learned that you had potential. You were one of those who might, one day, develop the ability to command obelisks. It’s a rare skill, see. And… well, I hoped… well.”

By this point you’ve sat down again, and both your voices have lowered. You can’t sustain anger over this; there’s too much to deal with right now. You look at Hoa, who’s standing at the edge of the room, watching the two of you, his posture wary. Still gotta have that talk with him. All the secrets are coming out. Including yours.

“I died,” you say. “That was the only way to hide from the Fulcrum. I died to get away from them, and yet I didn’t shake you.”

“Well, yes. My people didn’t use mysterious powers to track you; we used deduction. Much more reliable.” Tonkee eases herself into the chair opposite you at the table. The apartment has three rooms — this denlike central space, and two bedrooms leading off. Tonkee needs one room to herself because she’s starting to smell again. You’re only willing to keep sharing your space with Hoa after you get some answers, so you might be sleeping here in the den for a while.

“For the past few years I’ve been working with — some people.” Tonkee abruptly looks cagey, which isn’t hard for her. “Other ’mests, mostly, who’ve also been asking the kinds of questions no one wants to answer. Specialists in other areas. We’ve been tracking the obelisks, all of them that we can, for the past few years. Did you notice there are patterns in the way they move? They converge, slowly, wherever there’s an orogene of sufficient skill nearby. Someone who can use them. Only two were moving toward you, in Tirimo, but that was enough to extrapolate.”

You look up, frowning. “Moving toward me?”

“Or another orogene in your vicinity, yes.” Tonkee’s relaxed now, eating a piece of dried fruit from her pack. Oblivious to your reaction as you stare at her, your blood gone cold. “The triangulation lines were pretty clear. Tirimo was the center of the circle, so to speak. You must have been there for years; one of the obelisks coming toward you had been traveling the same flight path for almost a decade, all the way from the eastern coast.”

“The amethyst,” you whisper.

“Yes.” Tonkee watches you. “That was why I suspected you were still alive. Obelisks… bond, sort of, to certain orogenes. I don’t know how that works. I don’t know why. But it’s specific, and predictable.”

Deduction. You shake your head, mute with shock, and she goes on. “Anyhow, they’d both picked up speed in the last two or three years, so I traveled to the region and pretended to be commless to get a better read on them. I never really meant to approach you. But then this thing happened up north, and I started to think it would be important to have a wielder — obelisk-wielder — around. So… I tried to find you. I was on my way to Tirimo when I spotted you at that roadhouse. Lucky. I was going to trail you for a few days, decide whether I’d tell you who I really was… but then he turned a kirkhusa into a statue.” She jerks her head at Hoa. “Figured it might be better to shut up and observe for a while, instead.”

Somewhat understandable. “You said more than one obelisk was headed for Tirimo.” You lick your lips. “There should’ve only been one.” The amethyst is the only one you’re connected to. The only one left.

“There were two. The amethyst, and another from the Merz.” That’s a big desert to the northeast.

You shake your head. “I’ve never been to the Merz.”

Tonkee is silent for a moment, perhaps intrigued, perhaps annoyed. “Well, how many orogenes were in Tirimo?”

Three. But. “Picked up speed.” You can’t think, all of a sudden. Can’t answer her question. Can’t muster complete sentences. Picked up speed in the last two or three years.

“Yes. We didn’t know what was causing that.” Tonkee pauses, then gives you a sidelong look, her eyes narrowing. “Do you?”

Uche was two years old. Almost three.

“Get out,” you whisper. “Go take a bath or something. I need to think.”

She hesitates, plainly wanting to ask more questions. But then you look up at her, and she immediately gets up to leave. A few minutes after she’s out of the apartment, with the heavy hanging falling in her wake — the apartments in this place have no doors, but the hangings work well enough for privacy — you sit there in silence, your head empty, for a while.

Then you look up at Hoa, who’s standing beside Tonkee’s vacated chair, plainly waiting his turn.

“So you’re a stone eater,” you say.

He nods, solemn.

“You look…” You gesture at him, not sure how to say it. He’s never looked normal, not really, but he’s definitely not what a stone eater is supposed to look like. Their hair does not move. Their skin does not bleed. They transit through solid rock in the span of a breath, but stairs would take them hours.

Hoa shifts a little, bringing his pack up into his lap. He rummages for a moment and then comes out with the rag-wrapped bundle that you haven’t seen for a while. So that’s where he put it. He unties it, finally letting you see what he’s been carrying all this time.

The bundle contains many smallish pieces of rough-hewn crystal, as far as you can tell. Something like quartz, or maybe gypsum, except some of the pieces are not murky white but venous red. And you’re not sure, but you think the bundle is smaller now than it used to be. Did he lose some of them?

“Rocks,” you say. “You’ve been carrying… rocks?”

Hoa hesitates, then reaches for one of the white pieces. He picks it up; it’s about the size of the tip of your thumb, squarish, chipped badly on one side. It looks hard.

He eats it. You stare, and he watches you while he does it. He works it around in his mouth for a moment, as if searching for the right angle of attack, or maybe he’s just rolling it around on his tongue, enjoying the taste. Maybe it’s salt.

But then his jaw flexes. There’s a crunching sound, surprisingly loud in the silence of the room. Several more crunches, not as loud, but leaving no doubt that what he’s chewing on is by no means food. And then he swallows, and licks his lips.

It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him eat.

“Food,” you say.

“Me.” He extends a hand and lays it over the pile of rocks with curious delicacy.

You frown a little, because he’s making less sense than usual. “So that’s… what? Something that allows you to look like one of us?” Which you didn’t know they could do. Then again, stone eaters share nothing of themselves, and they do not tolerate inquiry from others. You’ve read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.

“Crystalline structures are an efficient storage medium.” The words make no sense. Then Hoa repeats, clearly, “This is me.”

You want to ask more about that, then decide against it. If he wanted you to understand, he would’ve explained. And that’s not the part that matters, anyway.

“Why?” you ask. “Why did you make yourself like this? Why not just be… what you are?”

Hoa gives you a look so skeptical that you realize what a stupid question that is. Would you really have let him travel with you if you’d known what he was? Then again, if you’d known what he was, you wouldn’t have tried to stop him. No one stops stone eaters from doing what they damn well please.

“Why bother, I mean?” you ask. “Can’t you just… Your kind can travel through stone.”

“Yes. But I wanted to travel with you.”

And here we come to the crux of it. “Why?”

“I like you.” And then he shrugs. Shrugs. Like any child, upon being asked something he either doesn’t know how to articulate or doesn’t want to try. Maybe it isn’t important. Maybe it was just an impulse. Maybe he’ll wander off eventually, following some other whim. Only the fact that he isn’t a child — that he isn’t rusting human, that he’s probably Seasons old, that he comes from a whole race of people that can’t act on whims because it’s too rusting hard — makes this a lie.

You rub your face. Your hands come away gritty with ash; you need a bath, too. As you sigh, you hear him say, softly, “I won’t hurt you.”

You blink at this, then lower your hands slowly. It hadn’t even occurred to you that he might. Even now, knowing what he is, having seen the things he can do… you’re finding it hard to think of him as a frightening, mysterious, unknowable thing. And that, more than anything else, tells you why he’s done this to himself. He likes you. He doesn’t want you to fear him.

“Good to know,” you say. And then there’s nothing else to say, so you just look at each other for a while.

“It isn’t safe here,” he says then.

“Figured that, yeah.”

The words are out, snide tone and all, before you really catch yourself. And then — well, is it really surprising that you’d be feeling a bit acerbic at this point? You’ve been sniping at people since Tirimo, really. But then it occurs to you: That’s not the way you were with Jija, or anyone else, before Uche’s death. Back then you were always careful to be gentler, calmer. Never sarcastic. If you got angry, you didn’t let it show. That’s not who Essun was supposed to be.

Yeah, well, you’re not quite Essun. Not just Essun. Not anymore.

“The others like you, who are here,” you begin. His little face tightens, though, in unmistakable anger. You stop in surprise.

“They aren’t like me,” he says, coldly.

Well, that’s that, then. And you’re done.

“I need to rest,” you say. You’ve been walking all day, and much as you’d like to bathe, too, you’re not sure you’re ready to undress and make yourself any more vulnerable in front of these Castrima people. Especially given that they’re apparently taking you captive in their nice understated way.

Hoa nods. He starts gathering up his bundle of rocks again. “I’ll keep watch.”

“Do you sleep?”

“Occasionally. Less than you. I don’t need to do it now.”

How convenient. And you trust him more than you do the people of this comm. You shouldn’t, but you do.

So you get up and head into the bedroom, and lie down on the mattress. It’s a simple thing, just straw and cotton packed into a canvas sheath, but it’s better than the hard ground or even your bedroll, so you flop onto it. In seconds you’re asleep.

When you wake, you’re not sure how much time has passed. Hoa is curled up beside you, as he has done for the past few weeks. You sit up and frown down at him; he blinks at you warily. You shake your head, finally, and get up, muttering to yourself.

Tonkee’s back in her room. You can hear her snoring. As you step out of the apartment, you realize you have no idea what time it is. Topside you can tell if it’s day or night, even despite the clouds and ashfall: it’s either bright ashfall and clouds or dark, red-flecked ashfall and clouds. Here, though… you look around and see nothing but giant glowing crystals. And the town that people have, impossibly, built on them.

You step onto the rough wooden platform outside your door and squint down over its completely inadequate safety railing. Whatever the hour, it seems there are several dozen people going about their business on the ground below. Well, you need to know more about this comm, anyway. Before you destroy it, that is, if they really try to stop you from leaving.

(You ignore the small voice in your head that whispers, Ykka is a rogga, too. Will you really fight her?)

(You’re pretty good at ignoring small voices.)

Figuring out how to reach the ground level is difficult, at first, because all the platforms and bridges and stairways of the place are built to connect the crystals. The crystals go every which way, so the connections do, too. There’s nothing intuitive about it. You have to follow one set of stairs up and walk around one of the wider crystal shafts in order to find another set of stairs that goes down — only to find that they end on a platform with no steps at all, which forces you to backtrack. There are a few people out and about, and they look at you with curiosity or hostility in passing, probably because you’re so obviously new in town: They’re clean and you’re gray with road ash. They look well fleshed, and your clothes hang off your body because you’ve done nothing but walk and eat travel rations for weeks. You cannot help resenting them on sight, so you get stubborn about asking for directions.

Eventually, however, you make it to the ground. Down here, it’s more obvious than ever that you’re walking along the floor of a huge stone bubble, because the ground slopes gently downward and curves around you to form a noticeable, if vast, bowl. This is the pointy end of the ovoid that is Castrima. There are crystals down here, too, but they’re stubby, some only as high as your chest; the largest are only ten or fifteen feet tall. Wooden partitions wend around some of them, and in some places you can make out obvious patches of rough, paler ground where crystals have been removed to make room. (You wonder, idly, how they did this.) All of it creates a sort of maze of crisscrossing pathways, each of which leads to some comm essential or another: a kiln, a smithy, a glassery, a bakehouse. Off some of the paths you glimpse tents and campsites, some occupied. Clearly not all the denizens of this comm are comfortable walking along bundles of lashed-together wooden planks hundreds of feet above a floor covered in giant spikes. Funny, that.

(There it is again, that un-Essun-like sarcasm. Rust it; you’re tired of reining it in.)

It’s actually easy to find the baths because there’s a pattern of damp foot traffic along the gray-green stone floor, all the wet footprints leading in one direction. You backtrail them and are pleasantly surprised to find that the bath is a huge pool of steaming, clear water. The pool has been walled off a little above the natural floor of the geode, and there’s a channel wending away from it, draining into one of several large brass pipes going — somewhere. On the other side of the pool you can see a kind of waterfall emerging from another pipe to supply the pool. The water probably circulates enough to be clean every few hours or so, but nevertheless there’s a conspicuous washing area over to one side, with long wooden benches and shelves holding various accessories. Quite a few people are already there, busily scrubbing before they go into the larger pool.

You’re undressed and halfway done with your own scrubbing when a shadow falls over you, and you twitch and stumble to your feet and knock over the bench and reach for the earth before it occurs to you that maybe this is overreacting. But then you almost drop the soapy sponge in your hand, because—

— it’s Lerna.

“Yes,” he says as you stare at him. “I thought that might be you, Essun.”

You keep staring. He looks different somehow. Heavier, sort of, though skinnier, too, in the same way you are; travel-worn. It’s been — weeks? Months? You’re losing track of time. And what is he doing here? He should be back in Tirimo; Rask would never let a doctor go…

Oh. Right.

“So Ykka did manage to summon you. I’d wondered.” Tired. He looks tired. There’s a scar along the edge of his jaw, a crescent-shaped pale patch that doesn’t look likely to regain its color. You keep staring as he shifts and says, “Of all the places I had to end up… and here you are. Maybe this is fate, or maybe there really are gods other than Father Earth — ones who actually give a damn about us, that is. Or maybe they’re evil, too, and this is their joke. Rust if I know.”

“Lerna,” you say, which is helpful.

His eyes flick down, and belatedly you remember you’re naked. “I should let you finish,” he says, looking away quickly. “Let’s talk when you’re done.” You don’t care if he sees your nudity — he delivered one of your children, for rust’s sake — but he’s being polite. It’s a familiar habit of his, treating you like a person even though he knows what you are, and oddly heartening after so much strangeness and everything that’s changed in your life. You’re not used to having a life follow you when you leave it behind.

He moves off, past the bath area, and after a moment you sit back down and finish washing. No one else bothers you while you bathe, although you catch some of the Castrima people eyeing you with increased curiosity now. Less hostility, too, but that’s not surprising; you don’t look especially intimidating. It’s the stuff they can’t see that will make them hate you.

Then again… do they know what Ykka is? The blond woman who’d been with her up on the surface certainly does. Maybe Ykka’s got something on her, some means of ensuring her silence. That doesn’t feel right, though. Ykka is too open about what she is, too comfortable speaking of it to complete strangers. She’s too charismatic, too eye-catching. Ykka acts like being an orogene is just another talent, just another personal trait. You’ve only seen that kind of attitude, and this kind of comm-wide acceptance of it, once before.

Once you’re done soaking and you feel clean, you get out of the bath. You don’t have any towels, just your filthy ashen clothes, which you take the time to scrub clean in the washing area. They’re wet when you’re done, but you’re not quite bold enough to walk through a strange comm naked, and it feels like summer within the geode anyway. So as you do in summer, you put the wet clothes on, figuring they’ll dry fast enough.

Lerna’s waiting when you leave. “This way,” he says, turning to walk with you.

So you follow him, and he leads you up the maze of steps and platforms until you reach a squat gray crystal that juts only twenty feet or so from the wall. He’s got an apartment here that’s smaller than the one you share with Tonkee and Hoa, but you see shelves laden with herb packets and folded bandages and it’s not hard to guess that the odd benches in the main room might actually be intended as makeshift cots. A doctor must be prepared for house calls. He directs you to sit down on one of the benches, and sits across from you.

“I left Tirimo the day after you did,” he says quietly. “Oyamar — Rask’s second, you remember him, complete idiot — was actually trying to hold an election for a new headman. Didn’t want the responsibility with a Season coming on. Everybody knew Rask should never have picked him, but his family did Rask a favor on the trade rights to the western logging trace…” He trails off, because none of that matters anymore. “Anyway. Half the damned Strongbacks were running around drunk and armed, raiding the storecaches, accusing every other person of being a rogga or a rogga-lover. The other half were doing the same thing — quieter, though, and sober, which was worse. I knew it was only a matter of time till they thought about me. Everybody knew I was your friend.”

This is your fault, too, then. Because of you, he had to flee a place that should have been safe. You lower your eyes, uncomfortable. He’s using the word “rogga” now, too.

“I was thinking I could make it down to Brilliance, where my mother’s family came from. They barely know me, but they know of me, and I’m a doctor, so… I figured I had a chance. Better than staying in Tirimo, anyway, to get lynched. Or to starve, when the cold came and the Strongbacks had eaten or stolen everything. And I thought—” He hesitates, looks up at you in a flash of eyes, then back at his hands. “I also thought I might catch up to you on the road, if I went fast enough. But that was stupid; of course I didn’t.”

It’s the unspoken thing that’s always been between you. Lerna figured out what you were, somewhere during your time in Tirimo; you didn’t tell him. He figured it out because he watched you enough to notice the signs, and because he’s smart. He’s always liked you, Makenba’s boy. You figured he would grow out of it eventually. You shift a little, uncomfortable with the realization that he hasn’t.

“I slipped out in the night,” he continues, “through one of the cracks in the wall near… near where you… where they tried to stop you.” He’s got his arms resting on his knees, looking at his folded hands. They’re mostly still, but he rubs one thumb along the knuckle of the other, slowly, again and again. The gesture feels meditative. “Walked with the flow of people, following a map I had… but I’ve never been to Brilliance. Earthfires, I’ve barely left Tirimo before now. Just once, really, when I went to finish my medical training at Hilge — anyway. Either the map was wrong or I’m bad at reading it. Probably both. I didn’t have a compass. I got off the Imperial Road too soon, maybe… went southeast when I thought I was going due south… I don’t know.” He sighs and rubs a hand over his head. “By the time I figured out just how lost I was, I’d gone so far that I hoped to just find a better route if I kept going the way I’d gone. But there was a group at one crossroads. Bandits, commless, something. I was with a small group by then, an older man who’d had a bad gash on his chest that I treated, and his daughter, maybe fifteen. The bandits—”

He pauses, his jaw flexing. You can pretty much guess what happened. Lerna’s not a fighter. He’s still alive, though, which is all that matters.

“Marald — that was the man — just threw himself at one of them. He didn’t have weapons or anything, and the woman had a machete. I don’t know what he thought he could do.” Lerna takes a deep breath. “He looked at me, though, and — and I–I grabbed his daughter and ran.” His jaw tightens further. You’re surprised you can’t hear his teeth grinding. “She left me later. Called me a coward and ran off alone.”

“If you hadn’t taken her away,” you say, “they would’ve killed you and her, too.” This is stonelore: Honor in safety, survival under threat. Better a living coward than a dead hero.

Lerna’s lips quirk thinly. “That’s what I told myself at the time. Later, when she left… Earthfires. Maybe all I did was just delay the inevitable. A girl her age, unarmed and out on the roads alone…”

You don’t say anything. If the girl’s healthy and has the right conformation, someone will take her in, if only as a Breeder. If she has a better use name, or if she can acquire a weapon and supplies and prove herself, that will help, too. Granted, her chances would’ve been better with Lerna than without him, but she made her choice.

“I don’t even know what they wanted.” Lerna’s looking at his hands. Maybe he’s been eating himself up about this ever since. “We didn’t have anything but our runny-sacks.”

“That’s enough, if they were running low on supplies,” you say, before you remember to censor yourself. He doesn’t seem to hear, anyway.

“So I kept on, by myself.” He chuckles once, bitterly. “I was so worried about her, it didn’t even occur to me that I was just as bad off.” This is true. Lerna is a bog-standard midlatter, same as you, except he hasn’t inherited the Sanzed bulk or height — probably why he’s worked so hard to prove his mental fitness. But he’s ended up pretty, mostly by an accident of heritage, and some people breed for that. Cebaki long nose, Sanzed shoulders and coloring, Westcoaster lips… He’s too multiracial for Equatorial comm tastes, but by Somidlats standards he’s a looker.

“When I passed through Castrima,” he continues, “it looked abandoned. I was exhausted, after running from — anyway. Figured I’d hole up in one of the houses for the night, maybe try to make a small hearth fire and hope no one noticed. Eat a decent meal for a change. Hold still long enough to figure out what to do next.” He smiled thinly. “And when I woke up, I was surrounded. I told them I was a doctor and they brought me down here. That was maybe two weeks ago.”

You nod. And then you tell him your own story, not bothering to hide or lie about anything. The whole thing, not just the part in Tirimo. You’re feeling guilty, maybe. He deserves the whole truth.

After you’ve both fallen silent for a while, Lerna just shakes his head and sighs. “I didn’t expect to live through a Season,” he says softly. “I mean, I’ve heard the lore all my life, same as everyone else… but I always figured it would never happen to me.”

Everyone thinks that. You certainly weren’t expecting to have to deal with the end of the world on top of everything else.

“Nassun’s not here,” Lerna says after a while. He speaks softly, but your head jerks up. His face softens at the look that must be on yours. “I’m sorry. But I’ve been here long enough to meet all the other ‘newcomers’ to this comm. I know that’s who you’ve been hoping to find.”

No Nassun. And now no direction, no realistic way to find her. You are suddenly bereft of even hope.

“Essun.” Lerna leans forward abruptly and takes your hands. Belatedly you realize your hands have begun shaking; his fingers still yours. “You’ll find her.”

The words are meaningless. Reflexive gibberish intended to soothe. But it hits you again, harder this time than that moment topside when you started to come apart in front of Ykka. It’s over. This whole strange journey, keeping it together, keeping focused on your goal… it’s all been pointless. Nassun’s gone, you’ve lost her, and Jija will never pay for what he’s done, and you—

What the rust do you matter? Who cares about you? Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Once, you did have people who cared about you. Once there were children who looked up to you and lived on your every word. Once — twice, three times, but the first two don’t count — there was a man you woke up next to every morning, who gave a damn that you existed. Once, you lived surrounded by the walls he built for you, in a home you made together, in a community that actually chose to take you in.

All of it built on lies. Matter of time, really, till it fell apart.

“Listen,” Lerna says. His voice makes you blink, and that makes tears fall. More tears. You’ve been sitting there in silence, crying, for a while now. He shifts over to your bench and you lean on him. You know you shouldn’t. But you do, and when he puts an arm around you, you take comfort in it. He is a friend, at least. He will always be that. “Maybe… maybe this isn’t a bad thing, being here. You can’t think, with — everything — going on. This comm is strange.” He grimaces. “I’m not sure I like being here, but it’s better than being topside right now. Maybe with some time to think, you’ll figure out where Jija might have gone.”

He’s trying so hard. You shake your head a little, but you’re too empty to really muster an objection.

“Do you have a place? They gave me this, they must have given you something. There’s plenty of room here.” You nod, and Lerna takes a deep breath. “Then let’s go there. You can introduce me to these companions of yours.”

So. You pull it together. Then you lead him out of his place and in a direction that feels like it might bring you to the apartment you were assigned. Along the way you have more time to appreciate just how unbearably strange this comm is. There’s one chamber you pass, embedded in one of the whiter, brighter crystals, that holds racks and racks of flat trays like cookie sheets. There’s another chamber, dusty and unused, that holds what you assume are torture devices, except they’re incompetently made; you’re not sure how a pair of rings suspended from the ceiling on chains are supposed to hurt. And then there are the metal stairs — the ones built by whoever created this place. There are other stairs, more recently made, but it’s easy to tell them from the originals because the original stairs don’t rust, haven’t deteriorated at all, and are not purely utilitarian. There are strange decorations along the railings and edges of the walkways: embossed faces, wrought vines in the shape of no plants you’ve ever seen, something that you think is writing, except it consists solely of pointy shapes in various sizes. It actually pulls you out of your mood, to try to figure out what you’re seeing.

“This is madness,” you say, running your fingers over a decoration that looks like a snarling kirkhusa. “This place is one big deadciv ruin, just like a hundred thousand others all over the Stillness. Ruins are death traps. The Equatorial comms flatten or sink theirs if they can, and that’s the smartest thing anyone’s ever done. If the people who made this place couldn’t survive it, why should any of us try?”

“Not all ruins are death traps.” Lerna’s edging along the platform while keeping very close to the crystal shaft it wends around, and keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. Sweat beads his upper lip. You hadn’t realized he’s afraid of heights, but then Tirimo is as flat as it is boring. His voice is carefully calm. “There are rumors Yumenes is built on a whole series of deadciv ruins.”

And look how well that turned out, you don’t say.

“These people should’ve just built a wall like everyone else,” you do say, but then you stop, because it occurs to you that the goal is survival, and sometimes survival requires change. Just because the usual strategies have worked — building a wall, taking in the useful and excluding the useless, arming and storing and hoping for luck — doesn’t mean that other methods might not. This, though? Climbing down a hole and hiding in a ball of sharp rocks with a bunch of stone eaters and roggas? Seems especially unwise.

“And if they try to keep me here, they’ll find that out,” you murmur.

If Lerna hears you, he does not respond.

Eventually you find your apartment. Tonkee’s awake and in the living room, eating a big bowl of something that didn’t come from your packs. It looks like some kind of porridge, and it’s got little yellowish things in it that make you recoil at first — until she tilts the bowl and you realize it’s sprouted grains. Standard storecache food.

(She looks at you warily as you come in, but her revelations were so minor compared to everything else you’ve had to face today that you just wave a greeting and settle down opposite her as usual. She relaxes.)

Lerna’s polite but guarded with Tonkee, and she’s the same with him — until he mentions that he’s been running blood and urine tests on the people of Castrima to watch for vitamin deficiencies. You almost smile when she leans forward and says, “With what kind of equipment?” with a familiar greedy look on her face.

Then Hoa comes into the apartment. You’re surprised, since you hadn’t realized he’d gone out. His icewhite gaze flicks immediately to Lerna and examines him ruthlessly. Then he relaxes, so visibly that you only now realize Hoa’s been tense all this time. Since you came into this crazy comm.

But you file this away as just another oddity to explore later, because Hoa says, “Essun. There’s someone here you should meet.”

“Who?”

“A man. From Yumenes.”

All three of you stare at him. “Why,” you say slowly, in case you’ve misunderstood something, “would I want to meet someone from Yumenes?”

“He asked for you.”

You decide to try for patience. “Hoa, I don’t know anyone from Yumenes.” Not anymore, anyway.

“He says he knows you. He tracked you here, got here ahead of you when he realized it was where you were headed.” Hoa scowls, just a little, as if this bothers him. “He says he wants to see you, see if you can do it yet.”

“Do what?”

“He just said ‘it.’” Hoa’s eyes slide first to Tonkee, then to Lerna, before returning to you. Something he doesn’t want them to hear, maybe. “He’s like you.”

“What—” Okay. You rub your eyes, take a deep breath, and say it so he’ll know there’s no need to hide it. “A rogga, then.”

“Yes. No. Like you. His—” Hoa waggles his fingers in lieu of words. Tonkee opens her mouth; you gesture sharply at her. She glares back. After a moment, Hoa sighs. “He said, if you wouldn’t come, to tell you that you owe him. For Corundum.”

You freeze.

“Alabaster,” you whisper.

“Yes,” says Hoa, brightening. “That’s his name.” And then he frowns more, thoughtfully this time. “He’s dying.”

* * *

MADNESS SEASON: 3 Before Imperial–7 Imperial. The eruption of the Kiash Traps, multiple vents of an ancient supervolcano (the same one responsible for the Twin Season believed to have occurred approximately 10,000 years previous), launched large deposits of olivine and other dark-colored pyroclasts into the air. The resulting ten years of darkness were not only devastating in the usual Seasonal way, but resulted in a much higher than usual incidence of mental illness. The Sanzed warlord Verishe conquered multiple ailing comms through the use of psychological warfare designed to convince her foes that gates and walls offered no reliable protection, and that phantasms lurked nearby. She was named emperor on the day the first sunlight reappeared.

— The Seasons of Sanze