The Fifth Season

5 you’re not alone

NIGHT HAS FALLEN, AND YOU sit in the lee of a hill in the dark.

You’re so tired. Takes a lot out of a you, killing so many people. Worse because you didn’t do nearly as much as you could have done, once you got all worked up. Orogeny is a strange equation. Take movement and warmth and life from your surroundings, amplify it by some indefinable process of concentration or catalysis or semi-predictable chance, push movement and warmth and death from the earth. Power in, power out. To keep the power in, though, to not turn the valley’s aquifer into a geyser or shatter the ground into rubble, takes an effort that makes your teeth and the backs of your eyes ache. You walked a long time to try to burn off some of what you took in, but it still brims under your skin even as your body grows weary and your feet hurt. You are a weapon meant to move mountains. A mere walk can’t take that out of you.

Still, you walked until darkness fell, and then you walked some more, and now you’re here, huddled and alone at the edge of an old fallow field. You’re afraid to start a fire, even though it’s getting cool. Without a fire you can’t see much, but also nothing can see you: a woman alone, with a full pack and only a knife to defend herself. (You’re not helpless, but an attacker wouldn’t know that till it was too late, and you’d rather not kill anyone else today.) In the distance you can see the dark arc of a highroad, rising above the plains like a taunt. Highroads usually have electric lanterns, courtesy of Sanze, but you’re not surprised this one’s dark: Even if the shake from the north hadn’t occurred, Seasonal standard procedure is to shut down all nonessential hydro and geo. It’s too far to be worth the detour, anyway.

You’re wearing a jacket, and there’s nothing to fear in the field but mice. Sleeping without a fire won’t kill you. You can see relatively well anyway, despite the lack of fire or lanterns. Rippling bands of clouds, like hoed rows in the garden you once kept, have covered the sky above. They’re easy to see because something to the north has underlit the clouds in bands of redglow and shadow. When you stare that way, there’s an uneven line of mountains against the northern horizon, and the flicker of a distant bluish gray obelisk where its lower tip peeks through a knot of clouds, but these things tell you nothing. Closer by there’s a flitter of what might be a colony of bats out feeding. Late for bats, but all things change during a Season, the stonelore warns. All living things do what they must to prepare, and survive.

The source of the glow is beyond the mountains, as if the setting sun went the wrong way and got stuck there. You know what’s causing this glow. It must be an awesome thing to see up close, that great terrible rent spewing fire into the sky, except you don’t ever want to see it.

And you won’t, because you’re heading south. Even if Jija hadn’t started out going in that direction, he would surely have turned south after the shake from the north passed through. That’s the only sane way to go.

Of course, a man who would beat his own child to death might not still fit the label of sane. And a woman who found that child and stopped thinking for three days… hmm, not you, either. Nothing to do but follow your crazy, though.

You’ve eaten something from your pack: cachebread smeared with salty akaba paste from the jar you stuffed into it a lifetime and a family ago. Akaba keeps well after it’s opened, but not forever, and now that you’ve opened it you’ll have to eat it for the next few meals until it’s gone. That’s okay because you like it. You’ve drunk water from the canteen that you filled a few miles back, at a roadhouse’s well pump. There’d been people there, several dozen, some of them camping around the roadhouse and some of them just stopping there briefly. All of them had the look you’re starting to identify as slow-building panic. Because everyone’s finally begun to realize what the shake and the redglow and the clouded sky all mean, and to be outside of a community’s gates at a time like this is — in the long run — a death sentence, except for a handful who are willing to become brutal enough or depraved enough to do what they must. Even those only have a chance at survival.

None of the people at the roadhouse wanted to believe they had that in them, you saw as you looked around, assessing faces and clothes and bodies and threats. None of them looked like survival fetishists or would-be warlords. What you saw at that roadhouse were ordinary people, some still caked in filth after digging themselves out of mudslides or collapsed buildings, some still bleeding from wounds haphazardly bandaged, or untreated entirely. Travelers, caught away from home; survivors, whose homes no longer existed. You saw an old man, still wearing a sleeping gown half ragged and dusty on one side, sitting with a youth clad in only a long shirt and smears of blood, both of them hollow-eyed with grief. You saw two women holding each other, rocking in an effort at comfort. You saw a man your own age with the look of a Strongback, who gazed steadily at his big, thick-fingered hands and perhaps wondered if he was hale enough, young enough, to earn a place somewhere.

These are the stories the stonelore prepared you for, tragic as they are. There is nothing in stonelore about husbands killing children.

You’re leaning on an old post that someone jammed up against the hill, maybe the remnants of a fence that ended here, drifting off with your hands tucked into your jacket pockets and your knees drawn up. And then, slowly, you become aware that something has changed. There’s no sound to alert you, other than the wind and the small prickles and rustles of the grass. No smell transcends the faint sulfur scent that you’ve already gotten used to. But there’s something. Something else. Out there.

Someone else.

Your eyes snap open, and half your mind falls into the earth, ready to kill. The rest of your mind freezes — because a few feet away, sitting crosslegged on the grass and looking at you, is a little boy.

You don’t realize what he is at first. It’s dark. He’s dark. You wonder if he’s from an eastern Coastal comm. But his hair moves a little when the wind soughs again, and you can tell that some of it’s straight as the grass around you. Westcoaster, then? The rest of it seems stuck down with… hair pomade or something. No. You’re a mother. It’s dirt. He’s covered in dirt.

Bigger than Uche, not quite as big as Nassun, so maybe six or seven years old. You actually aren’t sure he’s a he; confirmation of that will come later. For now you make a judgment call. He sits in a hunched way that would look odd in an adult and is perfectly normal for a child who hasn’t been told to sit up straight. You stare at him for a moment. He stares back at you. You can see the pale glisten of his eyes.

“Hello,” he says. A boy’s voice, high and bright. Good call.

“Hello,” you say, at last. There are horror tales that start this way, with bands of feral commless children who turn out to be cannibals. Bit early for that sort of thing, though, the Season having just started. “Where did you come from?”

He shrugs. Unknowing, maybe uncaring. “What’s your name? I’m Hoa.”

It’s a small, strange name, but the world is a big, strange place. Stranger, though, that he gives only one name. He’s young enough that he might not have a comm name yet, but he had to have inherited his father’s use-caste. “Just Hoa?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He nods and twists aside and sets down some kind of parcel, patting it as if to make sure it’s safe. “Can I sleep here?”

You look around, and sess around, and listen. Nothing moving but the grass, no one around but the boy. Doesn’t explain how he approached you in total silence — but then, he’s small, and you know from experience that small children can be very quiet if they want to be. Usually that means they’re up to something, though. “Who else are you with, Hoa?”

“Nobody.”

It’s too dim for him to see your eyes narrow, but somehow he reacts to this anyway, leaning forward. “Really! It’s just me. I saw some other people by the road, but I didn’t like them. I hid from them.” A pause. “I like you.”

Lovely.

Sighing, you tuck your hands back into your pockets and draw yourself out of earth-readiness. The boy relaxes a little — that much you can see — and starts to lie down on the bare earth.

“Wait,” you say, and reach for your pack. Then you toss him the bedroll. He catches it and looks confused for a few moments, then figures it out. Happily he rolls it out and then curls up on top of it, like a cat. You don’t care enough to correct him.

Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he is a threat. You’ll make him leave in the morning because you don’t need a child tagging along; he’ll slow you down. And someone must be looking for him. Some mother, somewhere, whose child is not dead.

For tonight, however, you can manage to be human for a little while. So you lean back against the post, and close your eyes to sleep.

The ash begins to fall in the morning.

* * *

They are an arcane thing, you understand, an alchemical thing. Like orogeny, if orogeny could manipulate the infinitesimal structure of matter itself rather than mountains. Obviously they possess some sort of kinship with humanity, which they choose to acknowledge in the statue-like shape we most often see, but it follows that they can take other shapes. We would never know.

— Umbl Innovator Allia, “A Treatise on Sentient Non-Humans,” Sixth University, 2323 Imperial/Year Two Acid Season