They move the girl to a cell whose floor is wood over metal. The walls are wood too, and padded with leather sewn over thick layers of cotton. There are chains set into the floor here, but thankfully they do not use them on her.
They bring the girl food: broth with yeast flakes, coarse flat cakes that taste of fungus, sprouted grains wrapped in dried leaves. She eats and grows stronger. After several days have passed, during which the girl’s digestive system begins cautiously working again, the guards give her crutches. While they watch, she experiments until she can use them reliably, with minimal pain. Then they bring her to a room where naked people scrub themselves around a shallow pool of circulating steaming water. When she has finished bathing, the guards card her hair for lice. (She has none. Lice come from being around other people.) Finally they give her clothing: undershorts, loose pants of some sort of plant fiber, a second tighter pair of pants made of animal skin, two shirts, a bra she’s too scrawny to need, fur-lined shoes. She dons it all, greedily. It’s nice to be warm.
They bring her back to her cell, and the girl climbs carefully into the bed. She’s stronger, but still weak; she tires easily. The knee cannot bear her weight yet. The crutches are worse than useless—she cannot sneak anywhere while noisily levering herself about. The frustration of this chews at her, because the vinegar man is out there, and she fears he will leave—or strike—before she can heal. Yet flesh is flesh, and hers has endured too much of late. It demands its due. She can do nothing but obey.
After she rests for a time, however, she becomes aware that something vast and mountain-still and familiar is in the room again. She opens her eyes to see the stone-eater still and silent in front of the cell’s door. This time it has a hand upraised, the palm open and ready. An invitation.
The girl sits up. “Can you help me find someone?”
“Who?”
“A man. A man, like—” She has no idea how to communicate it in a way the stone-eater will understand. Does it even distinguish between one human and another? She has no idea how it thinks.
“Like you?” the stone-eater prompts, when she trails off.
She fights back the urge to immediately reject this characterization. “Another who can do what I do, yes.” One of twenty-three. This is a problem she never expected to have.
The stone-eater is silent for a moment. “Share him with me.”
The girl does not understand this. But its hand is still there, proffered, waiting, so she pushes herself to her feet and, with the aid of the crutches, hobbles over. When she reaches for its hand, there is an instant in which every part of her revolts against the notion of touching its strange marbled skin. Bad enough to stand near where she can see that it does not breathe, notice that it does not blink, realize her every instinct warns against tasting it with that part of herself that knows stone. She thinks that if she tries, its flavor will be bitter almonds and burning sulfur, and then she will die.
And yet.
Reluctantly, she thinks of the beautiful place, which she has not allowed herself to remember for years. Once upon a time there was a girl who had food every day and warmth all the time, and in that place were people who gave these things to her, unasked, completely free. They gave her other things, too—things she does not want now, does not need anymore, like companionship and a name and feelings beyond hunger and anger. That place is gone, now. Murdered. Only she remains, to avenge it.
She takes the stone-eater’s hand. Its skin is cool and yields slightly to the touch; her arms break out in gooseflesh, and the skin of her palm crawls. She hopes it does not notice.
It waits, until she recalls its request. So she closes her eyes and remembers the vinegar man’s sharp-sweet taste, and hopes that it can somehow feel this through her skin.
“Ah,” the stone-eater says. “I do know that one.”
The girl licks her lips. “I’m going to kill him.”
“You’re going to try.” Its smile is a fixed thing.
“Why are you helping me?”
“I told you. The others will fight you.”
This makes no sense. “Why don’t you destroy the city yourself, if you hate it so much?”
“I don’t hate the city. I have no interest in destroying it.” Its hand tightens ever-so-slightly, a hint of pressure from the deepest places of the earth. “Shall I take you to him?”
It is a warning, and a promise. The girl understands: she must accept its offer now, or it will be rescinded. And in the end, it doesn’t matter why the stone-eater helps her.
“Take me to him,” she says.
The stone-eater pulls her closer, folding its free arm around her shoulders with the slow, grinding inexorability of a glacier. She stands trembling against its solid inhumanity, looking into its too-white, too-dark eyes and clutching her crutches tight with her arms. It hasn’t ever stopped smiling. She notices, and does not know why she notices, that it smiles with its lips closed.
“Don’t be afraid,” it says without opening its mouth, and the world blurs around her. There is a stifling sense of enclosure and pressure, of friction-induced heat, a flicking darkness and a feel of deep earth moving around her, so close that she cannot just taste it; she also feels and breathes and is it.
Then they stand in a quiet courtyard of the city. The girl looks around, startled by the sudden return of light and cold air and spaciousness, and does not even notice the stone-eater’s movements this time as it slowly releases her and steps back. It is daytime. The city’s roof is rolled back and the sky is its usual melancholy gray, weeping ashen snow. From inside, the city feels smaller than she’d imagined. The buildings are low but close together, nearly all of them squat and round and dome-shaped. She’s seen this style of building in other cities; good for conserving heat and withstanding shakes.
No one else is around. The girl turns to the stone-eater, tense.
“There.” Its arm is already raised, pointing to a building at the end of a narrow road. It is a larger dome than the rest, with smaller subsidiaries branching off its sides. “He’s on the second floor.”
The girl watches the stone-eater for a moment longer and it watches her back, a gently-smiling signpost. That way to revenge. She turns and follows its pointing finger.
No one notices her as she crutches along, though she is a stranger; this means the city’s big enough that not everyone knows everyone else. The people she passes are of many races, many ages. Sanzed like Ykka predominate, or maybe they are Cebaki; she never learned tell one from another. There are many black-lipped Regwo, and one Shearar woman with big moon-pale eyes. The girl wonders if they know of the twenty-three. (Twenty-four, her mind corrects.) They must. Her kind cannot live among ordinary people without eventually revealing themselves. Usually they can’t live among ordinary people at all—and yet here, somehow, they do.
Yet as she passes narrower streets and gaps in the buildings, she glimpses something else, something worse, that suddenly explains why no one’s worried about twenty-four people who each could destroy a city on a whim. In the shadows, on the sidewalks, nearly camouflaged by the ash-colored walls: too-still standing figures. Statues whose eyes shift to follow her. Many of them: she counts a dozen before she makes herself stop.
Once there was a city full of monsters, of whom the girl was just another one.
No one stops her from going into the large dome. Inside, this building is warmer than the one in which she was imprisoned. People move in and out of it freely, some in knots of twos and threes, talking, carrying tools or paper. As the girl moves through its corridors, she spies small ceramic braziers in each room which emit a fragrant scent as well as heat. There are stacks of long-dead flowers in the kindling piles.