The Obelisk Gate

17 Nassun, versus

IT HAS BEEN SO LONG since Nassun was proud of herself that when she becomes capable of healing Schaffa, she runs all the way through town and up to Found Moon to tell him.

“Healing” is how she thinks of it. She has spent the past few days out in the forest, practicing her new skill. It is not always easy to detect the wrongness in a body; sometimes she must carefully follow the threads of silver within a thing to find its knots and warps. The ashfalls have grown more frequent and sustained lately, and most of the forest is patchy with grayness, some plants beginning to wilt or go dormant in response. This is normal for them, and the silver threads prove this by their uninterrupted flow. Yet when Nassun goes slowly, looks carefully, she can usually find things for which change is not normal or healthy. The grub beneath a rock that has a strange growth along its side. The snake—venomous and more vicious now that a Season has begun, so she only examines it from a distance—with a broken vertebra. The melon vine whose leaves are growing in a convex shape, catching too much ash, instead of concavity, which would shake the ash off. The few ants in a nest who have been infected by a parasitic fungus.

She practices extraction of the wrongness on these things, and many others. It’s a difficult trick to master—like performing surgery using only thread, without ever touching the patient. She learns how to make the edge of one thread grow very sharp, and how to loop and lasso with another, and how to truncate a third thread and use the burning tip of it to cauterize. She gets the growth off the grub, but it dies. She stitches together the edges of broken bone within the snake, though this only speeds what was already happening naturally. She finds the parts of the plant that are saying curve up and convinces them to say curve down. The ants are best. She cannot get all or even most of the fungus out of them, but she can sear the connections in their brains that make them behave strangely and spread the infection. She’s very, very glad to have brains to work on.

The culmination of Nassun’s practice occurs when commless raiders strike again, one morning as dew still dampens the ash and ground litter. The band that Schaffa devastated is gone; these are new miscreants who don’t know the danger. Nassun is not distracted by her father anymore, not helpless anymore, and after she ices one of the raiders, most of the others flee. But she detects a snarl of threads in one of them at the last instant, and then must resort to old-style orogeny (as she has come to think of it) in order to drop the ground beneath the raider and trap her in a pit.

The raider throws a knife at Nassun when she peeks over the edge; it’s only luck that it misses. But carefully, while staying out of sight, Nassun follows the threads and finds a three-inch wooden splinter lodged in the woman’s hand, so deep that it scrapes bone. It is poisoning her blood and will kill her; already the infection is so advanced that it has swollen her hand to twice its size. A comm doctor, or even a decent farrier, could extract the thing, but the commless do not have the luxury of skilled care. They live on luck, what little there is in a Season.

Nassun decides to become the woman’s luck. She settles nearby so that she can concentrate, and then carefully—while the woman gasps and swears and cries What is happening?—she pulls the splinter free. When she looks into the pit again, the woman is on her knees and groaning as she holds her dripping hand. Belatedly Nassun realizes she will need to learn how to anesthetize, so she settles against the tree again and casts her thread to try to catch a nerve this time. It takes her some time to learn how to numb it, and not just cause more pain.

But she learns, and when she is done she feels grateful to the raider woman, who lies groaning and in a stupor in the pit. Nassun knows better than to let the woman go; if she lives, she will only either die slowly and cruelly, or return and perhaps next time threaten someone Nassun loves. So Nassun casts her threads one last time, and this time slices neatly through the top of her spine. It is painless, and kinder than the fate the woman intended for Nassun.

Now she runs up the hill toward Found Moon, elated for the first time since she killed Eitz, so eager to see Schaffa that she barely notices the other children of the compound as they stop whatever they’re doing and favor her with cool stares. Schaffa has explained to them that what she did to Eitz was an accident, and he has assured her they will eventually come around. She hopes he is right because she misses their friendship. But none of that is important now.

“Schaffa!” She first pokes her head into the Guardians’ cabin. Only Nida is there, standing in the corner as she so often does, staring into the middle distance as if lost in thought. She focuses as soon as Nassun comes in, however, and smiles in her empty way.

“Hello, Schaffa’s little one,” she says. “You seem cheerful today.”

“Hello, Guardian.” She is always polite to Nida and Umber. Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners. “Do you know where Schaffa is?”

“He is in the crucible with Wudeh.”

“Okay, thanks!” Nassun hurries off, undeterred. She knows that Wudeh, as the next most skilled with Eitz gone, is the only other child in Found Moon who has some hope of connecting to an obelisk. Nassun thinks it is hopeless because no one can train him in the way he needs to be trained, given that he is so small and frail. Wudeh would never have survived Mama’s crucibles.

Still, she is polite to him, too, running up to the edge of the outermost practice circle and bouncing only a little, keeping her orogeny still so as not to distract him while he raises a big basalt column from the ground and then tries to push it back in. He’s already breathing hard, though the column isn’t moving very fast. Schaffa is watching him intently, his smile not as big as usual. Schaffa sees it, too.

Finally Wudeh gets the column back into the ground. Schaffa takes his shoulder and helps him over to a bench, which is plainly necessary because Wudeh can barely walk at this point. Schaffa glances at Nassun, and Nassun nods at once and turns to run back into the mess hall to fetch a glass from the pitcher of fruit-water there. When she brings it to Wudeh, he blinks at her once, then looks ashamed of hesitating, and finally takes it with a shy nod of thanks. Schaffa is always right.

“Do you need help back to the dormitory?” Schaffa asks him.

“I can make it back myself, sir,” Wudeh says. His eyes dart to Nassun, by which Nassun understands that Wudeh probably would like help back, but knows better than to get in between Schaffa and his favorite student.

Nassun looks at Schaffa. She’s excited, but she can wait. He lifts an eyebrow, then inclines his head and extends a hand to help Wudeh up.

Once Wudeh is safely abed, Schaffa comes back over to where Nassun now sits on the bench. She’s calmer for the delay, which is good, because she knows she’s going to need to seem calm and cool and professional in order to convince him to let some half-grown, half-trained girl experiment on him with magic.

Schaffa sits down beside her, looking amused. “All right, then.”

She takes a deep breath before beginning. “I know how to take the thing out of you.”

They both know exactly what she’s talking about. She has sat beside Schaffa, quietly offering herself, as he has huddled on this very bench clutching his head and whispering replies to a voice she cannot hear and shuddering as it punishes him with lashes of silver pain. Even now it is a low, angry throb inside him, pushing him to obey. To kill her. She makes herself available because her presence eases the pain for him, and because she does not believe he will actually kill her. This is folly, she knows. Love is no inoculation against murder. But she needs to believe it of him.

Schaffa frowns at her, and it is part of why she loves him that he shows no sign of disbelief. “Yes. I have sensed you growing… sharper lately, by increments. This happened to the orogenes at the Fulcrum, too, when they were allowed to progress to this point. They become their own teachers. The power guides them along particular paths, by lines of natural aptitude.” His brow furrows slightly. “Generally we steered them away from this path, though.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s dangerous. To everyone, not just the orogene in question.” He leans against her, shoulder warm and supportive. “You’ve survived the point that kills most: connecting with an obelisk. I… remember how others died, making the attempt.” For a moment he looks troubled, lost, confused, as he probes gingerly at the raw edges of his torn memories. “I remember something of it. I’m glad…” He winces again, looks troubled again. This time it isn’t the silver that’s hurting him. Nassun guesses he’s either remembered something he dislikes, or can’t remember something he thinks he should.

She won’t be able to take the pain of loss away from him, no matter how good she gets. It’s sobering. She can remove the rest of his pain, though, and that’s the part that matters. She touches his hand, her fingers covering the thin scars that she has seen him inflict with his own nails when the pain grows too great even for his smiles to ease. There are more of them today than there were a few days ago, some still raw. “I didn’t die,” she reminds him.

He blinks, and this alone is enough to snap him back into the here and now of himself. “No. You didn’t. But Nassun.” He adjusts their hands; now he is holding hers. His hand is huge and she can’t even see a glimpse of her own within it. She has always liked this, being enveloped so completely by him. “My compassionate one. I do not want my corestone removed.”

Corestone. Now she knows the name of her nemesis. The word makes no sense because it is metal, not stone, and it is not at the core of him, just in his head, but that doesn’t matter. She clenches her jaw against hate. “It hurts you.”

“As it should. I have betrayed it.” His jaw tightens briefly. “But I accepted the consequences of doing so, Nassun. I can bear them.”

This makes no sense. “It hurts you. I could stop the hurt. I can even make it stop hurting without taking it out, but only for a little while. I’d have to stay with you.” She learned this from that conversation with Steel, and watching what the stone eater did. Stone eaters are full of magic, so much more than people, but Nassun can approximate. “But if I take it out—”

“If you take it out,” Schaffa says, “I will no longer be a Guardian. Do you know what that means, Nassun?”

It means that then Schaffa can be her father. He is in every way that matters already. Nassun does not think this in so many words because there are things she is not yet prepared to confront about herself or her life. (This will change very soon.) But it is in her mind.

“It means that I will lose much of my strength and health,” he says in reply to her silent wishing. “I will no longer be able to protect you, my little one.” His eyes flick toward the Guardians’ cabin, and she understands then. Umber and Nida will kill her.

They will try, she thinks.

His head tilts; of course he is instantly aware of her defiant intent. “You couldn’t defeat them both, Nassun. Even you aren’t that powerful. They have tricks you haven’t yet seen. Skills that…” He looks troubled again. “I don’t want to remember what they’re capable of doing to you.”

Nassun tries not to let her bottom lip poke out. Her mother always said that was pouting, and that pouting and whining were things only babies did. “You shouldn’t say no because of me.” She could take care of herself.

“I’m not. I mention that only in hopes that the urge for self-preservation will help convince you. But for my own part, I do not want to grow weak and ill and die, Nassun, which is what would happen if you took the stone. I am older than you realize—” The blurry look returns for a moment. By this she knows he does not remember how old. “Older than I realize. Without the corestone to stop it, that time will catch up with me. A handful of months and I’ll be an old man, trading the pain of the stone for the pains of old age. And then I’ll die.”

“You don’t know that.” She is shaking a little. Her throat hurts.

“I do. I’ve seen it happen, little one. And it is a cruelty, not a kindness, when it does.” Schaffa’s eyes have narrowed, as if he must strain to see the memory. Then he focuses on her. “My Nassun. Have I hurt you so?”

Nassun bursts into tears. She’s not really sure why, except… except maybe because she’s been wanting this, working toward it, so much. She’s wanted to do something good with orogeny, when she has used it to do so many terrible things already—and she wanted to do it for him. He is the only person in the world who understands her, loves her for what she is, protects her despite what she is.

Schaffa sighs and pulls Nassun into his lap, where she wraps herself around him and blubbers into his shoulder for a long while, heedless of the fact that they are out in the open.

When the weeping has spent itself, though, she realizes that he is holding her just as tightly. The silver is alive and searing within him because she’s so close. His fingertips are on the back of her neck, and it would be so easy for him to push in, destroy her sessapinae, kill her with a single thrust. He hasn’t. He’s been fighting the urge, all this while. He would rather suffer this, risk this, than let her help him, and that is the worst thing in all the world.

She sets her jaw, and clenches her hands on the back of his shirt. Dance along the silver, flow with it. The sapphire is nearby. If she can make both flow together, it will be quick. A precise, surgical yank.

Schaffa tenses. “Nassun.” The blaze of silver within him suddenly goes still and dims slightly. It is as if the corestone is aware of the threat she poses.

It is for his own good.

But.

She swallows. If she hurts him because she loves him, is that still hurt? If she hurts him a lot now so that he will hurt less later, does that make her a terrible person?

“Nassun, please.”

Is that not how love should work?

But this thought makes her remember her mother, and a chilly afternoon with clouds obscuring the sun and a brisk wind making her shake as Mama’s fingers covered hers and held her hand down on a flat rock. If you can control yourself through pain, I’ll know you’re safe.

She lets go of Schaffa and sits back, chilled by who she has almost become.

He sits still for a moment longer, perhaps in relief or regret. Then he says quietly, “You’ve been gone all day. Have you eaten?”

Nassun is hungry, but she doesn’t want to admit it. All of a sudden, she feels the need of distance between them. Something that will help her love him less, so that the urge to help him against his will does not ache so within her.

She says, looking at her hands, “I… I want to go see Daddy.”

Schaffa is silent a moment longer. He disapproves. She doesn’t need to see or sess to know this. By now, Nassun has heard of what else transpired on the day that she killed Eitz. No one heard what Schaffa said to Jija, but many people saw him knock Jija down, crouch over him, and grin into his face while Jija stared back with wide, frightened eyes. She can guess why it happened. For the first time, however, Nassun tries not to care about Schaffa’s feelings.

“Shall I come with you?” he asks.

“No.” She knows how to handle her father, and she knows that Schaffa has no patience for him. “I’ll be back right after.”

“See that you are, Nassun.” It sounds kindly. It’s a warning.

But she knows how to handle Schaffa, too. “Yes, Schaffa.” She looks up at him. “Don’t be afraid. I’m strong. Like you made me.”

“As you made yourself.” His gaze is soft and terrible. Icewhite eyes can’t be anything but, though there’s love layered over the terrible. Nassun is used to the combination by now.

So Nassun climbs out of his lap. She’s tired, even though she hasn’t done anything. Emotion always makes her tired. But she heads down the hill into Jekity, nodding to people she knows whether they nod back or not, noticing the new granary the village is building since they’ve had time to increase their stores while the ashfalls and sky occlusions are still intermittent. It’s an ordinary, quiet day in this ordinary, quiet comm, and in some ways it feels much like Tirimo. If not for Found Moon and Schaffa, Nassun would hate it here the same way. She may never understand why, if Mama had the whole of the world open to her after somehow escaping her Fulcrum, she chose to live in such a placid, backwater place.

Thus it is with her mother on her mind that Nassun knocks on the door of her father’s house. (She has a room here, but it isn’t her house. This is why she knocks.)

Jija opens the door almost immediately, as if he was about to leave and go somewhere, or as if he has been waiting for her. The scent of something redolent with garlic wafts out of the house, from the little hearth near the back. Nassun thinks maybe it is fish-in-a-pot, since the Jekity comm shares have a lot of fish and vegetables in them. It’s the first time Jija has seen her in a month, and his eyes widen for a moment.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says. It’s awkward.

Jija bends and before Nassun quite knows what’s happening, he’s picked her up and swept her into an embrace.

Jekity feels like Tirimo, but in a good way now. Like back when Mama was around but Daddy was the one who loved her most and the stuff on the stove would be duck-in-a-pot instead of fish. If this were then, Mama would be yelling at the neighbors’ kirkhusa pup for stealing cabbages from their housegreen; Old Lady Tukke never did tie the creature up the way she should. The air would smell like it does now, rich cooking food mingled with the more acrid scents of freshly chipped rock and the chemicals Daddy uses to soften and smooth his knappings. Uche would be running around in the background, making whoosh sounds and yelling that he was falling as he tried to jump up in the air—

Nassun stiffens in Jija’s embrace as she suddenly realizes: Uche. Jumping up. Falling up, or pretending to.

Uche, whom Daddy beat to death.

Jija feels her tense and tenses as well. Slowly he lets go of her, easing her to the ground as the joy in his expression fades to unease. “Nassun,” he says. His gaze searches her face. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay, Daddy.” She misses his arms around her. She can’t help that. But the epiphany about Uche has reminded her to be careful. “I just wanted to see you.”

Some of the unease in Jija fades a little. He hesitates, seems to fumble for something to say, then finally stands aside. “Come in. Are you hungry? There’s enough for you, too.”

So she heads inside and they sit down to eat and he fusses over how long her hair has gotten and how nice the cornrows and puffs look. Did she do them herself? And is she a little taller? She might be, she acknowledges with a blush, even though she knows for certain that she is a whole inch taller than the last time Jija measured her; Schaffa checked one day because he thought he might need to requisition some new clothes with Found Moon’s next comm share. She’s such a big girl now, Jija says, and there is such real pride in his voice that it disarms her defenses. Almost eleven and so beautiful, so strong. So much like—he falters. Nassun looks down at her plate because he’s almost said, so much like your mother.

Is this not how love should work?

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Nassun makes herself say. It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things. “I miss her, too.” Because she does, in spite of everything.

Jija stiffens slightly, and a muscle along the curve of his jaw flexes a little. “I don’t miss her, sweetening.”

This is so obviously a lie that Nassun stares and forgets to pretend to agree with him. Forgets lots of things, apparently, including common sense, because she blurts, “But you do. You miss Uche, too. I can tell.”

Jija goes rigid, and he stares at her in something that falls between shock that she would say this out loud and horror at what she has said. And then, as Nassun has come to understand is normal for her father, the shock of the unexpected abruptly transforms into anger.

“Is that what they’re teaching you up in that… place?” he asks suddenly. “To disrespect your father?”

Suddenly Nassun is more tired. So very tired of trying to dance around his senselessness.

“I wasn’t disrespecting you,” she says. She tries to keep her voice even, inflectionless, but she can hear the frustration there. She can’t help it. “I was just saying the truth, Daddy. But I don’t mind that you—”

“It isn’t the truth. It’s an insult. I don’t like that kind of language, young lady.”

Now she is confused. “What kind of language? I didn’t say anything bad.”

“Calling someone a rogga-lover is bad!”

“I… didn’t say that.” But in a way, she did. If Jija misses Mama and Uche, then that means he loves them, and that makes him a rogga-lover. But. I’m a rogga. She knows better than to say this. But she wants to.

Jija opens his mouth to retort, then seems to catch himself. He looks away, propping his elbows on the table and steepling his hands in the way he so often does when he’s trying to rein in his temper.

“Roggas,” he says, and the word sounds like filth in his mouth, “lie, sweetening. They threaten, and manipulate, and use. They’re evil, Nassun, as evil as Father Earth himself. You aren’t like that.”

That’s a lie, too. Nassun has done what she had to do to survive, including lying and murder. She’s done some of these things in order to survive him. She hates that she’s had to, and is exasperated by the fact that he apparently never realized it. That she’s doing it now and he doesn’t see.

Why do I even love him anymore? Nassun finds herself thinking as she stares at her father.

Instead she says: “Why do you hate us so much, Daddy?”

Jija flinches, perhaps at her casual us. “I don’t hate you.”

“You hate Mama, though. You must have hated U—”

“I did not!” Jija pushes back from the table and stands. Nassun flinches despite herself, but he turns away and starts to pace in short, vicious half circles around the room. “I just—I know what they’re capable of, sweetening. You wouldn’t understand. I needed to protect you.”

In a sudden blur of understanding as powerful as magic, Nassun realizes Jija does not remember standing over Uche’s body, his shoulders and chest heaving, his teeth clenched around the words Are you one, too? Now he believes he has never threatened her. Never shoved her off a wagon seat and down a hill of sticks and stones. Something has rewritten the story of his orogene children in Jija’s head—a story that is as chiseled and unchangeable as stone in Nassun’s mind. It is perhaps the same thing that has rewritten Nassun for him as daughter and not rogga, as if the two can be fissioned from each other somehow.

“I learned about them when I was a boy. Younger than you.” Jija’s not looking at her anymore, gesticulating as he talks and paces. “Makenba’s cousin.” Nassun blinks. She remembers Miss Makenba, the quiet old lady who always smelled like tea. Lerna, the town doctor, was her son. Miss Makenba had a cousin in town? Then Nassun gets it.

“I found him behind the spadeseed silo one day. He was squatting there, shaking. I thought he was sick.” Jija’s shaking his head the whole time, still pacing. “There was another boy with me. We always used to play together, the three of us. Kirl went to shake Litisk and Litisk just—” Jija stops abruptly. He’s baring his teeth. His shoulders are heaving the same way they were on that day. “Kirl was screaming and Litisk was saying he couldn’t stop, he didn’t know how. The ice ate up Kirl’s arm and his arm broke off. The blood was in chunks on the ground. Litisk said he was sorry, he even cried, but he just kept freezing Kirl. He wouldn’t stop. By the time I ran away Kirl was reaching for me, and the only thing left of him that wasn’t frozen was his head and his chest and that arm. It was too late, though. I knew that. It was too late even before I ran away to get help.”

It does not comfort Nassun to know that there is a reason—a specific reason—for what her father has done. All she can think is, Uche never lost control like that; Mama wouldn’t have let him. It’s true. Mama had been able to sess, and still, Nassun’s orogeny from all the way across town sometimes. Which means Uche didn’t do anything to provoke Jija. Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son’s birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father’s hatred.

So Nassun is almost prepared when Jija’s gaze suddenly shifts to her, sidelong and suspicious. “Why haven’t you cured yourself yet?”

No reasoning. But she tries, because once upon a time, this man was her whole world.

“I might be able to soon. I learned how to make things happen with the silver, and how to take things out of people. I don’t know how orogeny works, or where it comes from, but if it’s something that can be taken out, then—”

“None of the other monsters in that camp have cured themselves. I’ve asked around.” Jija’s pacing has gotten noticeably faster. “They go up there and they don’t get better. They live there with those Guardians, more of them every day, and none of them have been cured! Was it a lie?”

“It isn’t a lie. If I get good enough, I’ll be able to do it.” She understands this instinctively. With enough fine control and the sapphire obelisk’s aid, she will be able to do almost anything. “But—”

“Why aren’t you good enough now? We’ve been here almost a year!”

Because this is hard, she wants to say, but she realizes he does not want to hear it. He does not want to know that the only way to use orogeny and magic to transform a thing is to become an expert in the use of orogeny and magic. She doesn’t answer because there’s no point. She cannot say what he wants to hear. It isn’t fair that he calls orogenes liars and then demands that she lie.

He stops and rounds on her, instantly suspicious of her silence. “You aren’t trying to get better, are you? Tell the truth, Nassun!”

She is so rusting tired.

“I am trying to get better, Daddy,” Nassun replies at last. “I’m trying to become a better orogene.”

Jija steps back, as if she has hit him. “That isn’t why I let you live up there.”

He isn’t letting anything; Schaffa made him. He’s even lying to himself now. But it is the lies he’s telling her—as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life—that really break her heart. He’s said that he loved her, after all, but that obviously isn’t true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene’s father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.

And she is tired. Tired and done.

“I like being an orogene, Daddy,” she says. His eyes widen. This is a terrible thing that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself. “I like making things move, and doing the silver, and falling into the obelisks. I don’t like—”

She is about to say that she hates what she did to Eitz, and she especially hates the way that others treat her now that they know what she is capable of, but she doesn’t get the chance. Jija takes two swift steps forward and the back of his hand swings so fast that she doesn’t even see it before it has knocked her out of the chair.

It’s like that day on the Imperial Road, when she suddenly found herself at the bottom of a hill, in pain. It must have been like this for Uche, she realizes, in another swift epiphany. The world as it should be one moment and completely wrong, completely broken, an instant later.

At least Uche didn’t have time to hate, she thinks, in sorrow.

And then she ices the entire house.

It isn’t a reflex. She’s intentional about it, precise, shaping the torus to fit the dimensions of the house exactly. No one past the walls will be caught in it. She shapes twin cores out of the torus, too, and centers each on herself and her father. She feels cold along the hairs of her skin, the tug of lowered air pressure on her clothing and plaited hair. Jija feels the same thing and he screams, his eyes wide and wild and sightless. The memory of a boy’s cruel, icy death is in his face. By the time Nassun gets to her feet, staring at her father across a floor slick with plates of solid ice and around the fallen-over chair that is now too warped to ever use again, Jija has stumbled back, slipped on the ice, fallen, and slid partially across the floor to bump against the table legs.

There’s no danger. Nassun only manifested the torus for an instant, as a warning against further violence on his part. Jija keeps screaming, though, as Nassun gazes down at her huddled, panicking father. Perhaps she should feel pity, or regret. What she actually feels, however, is cold fury toward her mother. She knows it’s irrational. It is no one’s fault except Jija’s that Jija is too afraid of orogenes to love his own children. Once, however, Nassun could love her father without qualification. Now, she needs someone to blame for the loss of that perfect love. She knows her mother can bear it.

You should have had us with someone stronger, she thinks at Essun, wherever she is.

It takes care to walk across the slick floor without slipping, and Nassun has to jiggle the latch for a few seconds to scrape it open. By the time she does, Jija has stopped screaming behind her, though she can still hear him breathing hard and uttering a little moan with every exhalation. She doesn’t want to look back at him. She makes herself do it anyway, though, because she wants to be a good orogene, and good orogenes cannot afford self-deception.

Jija jerks as if her gaze has the power to burn.

“Bye, Daddy,” she says. He does not reply in words.