The stairs nearly kill her. It takes some time to figure out a method of crutching her way up that does not force her to bend the damaged knee. She stops after the third set to lean against a wall, trembling and sweating. The days of steady food have helped, but she is still healing, and she has never been physically strong. It will not do for her to meet the vinegar man and collapse at his feet.
“You all right?”
The girl blinks damp hair out of her eyes. She’s in a wide corridor lined by braziers; there is a long, patterned rug—pre-rivening luxury—beneath her feet. The man standing there is as small as she is, which is the only reason she does not react by jerking away from his nearness. He’s nearly as pale as the stone-eater, though his skin is truly skin and his hair is stiff because he is probably part Sanzed. He has a cheerful face, which is set in polite concern as he watches her.
And the girl flinches when she instinctively reaches out to taste her surroundings and he tastes of sharp, sour vinegar, the flavor of smelly pickles and old preserved things and wine gone rancid, and it is him, it is him, she knows his taste.
“I’m from Arquin,” she blurts. The smile freezes on the man’s face, making her think of the stone-eater again.
Once there was a city called Arquin, far to the south. It had been a city of artists and thinkers, a beautiful place full of beautiful people, of whom the girl’s parents were two. When the world broke—as it often breaks, as the rivening is only the latest exemplary apocalypse of many—Arquin buttoned up against the chill and locked its gates and hunkered down to endure until the world healed and grew warm again. The city had prepared well. Its storecaches were full, its defenses layered and strong; it could have lasted a long time. But then a stranger came to town.
Taut silence, in the wake of the girl’s pronouncement.
The man recovers first. His nostrils flare, and he straightens as if to cloak himself in discomfort. “Everyone did what they had to do, back then,” he says. “You’d have done it too, if you were me.”
Is there a hint of apology in his voice? Accusation? The girl bares her teeth. She has not tried to reach the stone beneath the city since she met Ykka. But she reaches now, tracing the pillars in the walls down to the foundation of the building and then deeper, finding and swallowing sweet-mint bedrock cool into herself. There isn’t much. There have been no shakes today. But what little power there is is a balm, soothing away the past few days’ helplessness and fear.
The vinegar man stumbles back against the corridor’s other wall, reacting to the girl’s touch on the bedrock as if to an insult. All at once the sourness of him floods forth like spit, trying to revolt her into letting go. She wants to; he’s ruining the taste. But she scowls and bites more firmly into the power, making it hers, refusing to withdraw. His eyes narrow.
Someone comes into the corridor from one of the rooms that branch off it. This stranger says something, loudly; the girl registers that he is calling for Ykka. She barely hears the words. Stone dust is in her mouth. The grind of the deep rock is in her ears. The vinegar man presses in, trying again to wrest control from the girl, and the girl hates him for this. How many years has she spent hungry, cold, afraid, because of him? No, no, she does not begrudge him that, not really, not when she has done just as many terrible things, he’s completely right to say you would too, you did too—but now? Right now, all she wants is power. Is that so much to ask? It’s all he’s left her.
And she will shake this whole valley to rubble before she lets him take one more thing that is hers.
The rough-sanded wood of the crutches bites into her hands as she bites into imagined stone to brace herself. The earth is still now, its power too deep to reach, and at such times there’s nothing left to feed on save the thin gruel of smaller movements, lesser heat. The rose-flavored coals of the nearby braziers. The jerky twitchy strength of limbs and eyes and breathing chests. And, too, she can sup motions for which there are no names: all the infinitesimal floating morsels of the air, all the jittery particles of solid matter. The smaller, fast-swirling motes that comprise these particles.
(Somewhere, outside the earth, there are more people nearby. Other tastes begin to tease her senses: melon, warm beef stew, familiar peppers. The others mean to stop her. She must finish this quickly.)
“Don’t you dare,” says the vinegar man. The floor shakes, the whole building rattles with the warning force of his rage. Vibrations drum against the girl’s feet. “I won’t let you—”
He has no chance to finish the warning. The girl remembers soured wine that she once drank after finding it in a crushed Arquin storehouse. She’d been so hungry that she needed something, anything, to keep going. The stuff had tasted of rich malts and hints of fruit. Desperation made even vinegar taste good.
The air in the room grows cold. A circle of frost, radiating out from the girl’s feet, rimes the patterned rug. The vinegar man stands within this circle. (Others in the corridor exclaim and back off as the circle grows.) He cries out as frost forms in his hair, on his eyebrows. His lips turn blue; his fingers stiffen. There’s more to it than cold: as the girl devours the space between his molecules, the very motion of his atoms, the man’s flesh becomes something different, condensing, hardening. In the earth where flavors dwell, he fights; acid burns the girl’s throat and roils her belly. Her own ears go numb, and her knee throbs with the cold hard enough to draw tears from her eyes.
But she has swallowed far worse things than pain. And this is the lesson the vinegar man inadvertently taught her when he killed her future, and made her nothing more than a parasite like himself. He is older, crueler, more experienced, perhaps stronger, but survival has never really been the province of the fittest. Merely the hungriest.
Once the vinegar man is dead, Ykka arrives. She steps into the icy circle without fear, though there is a warning-tang of crisp green and red heat when the girl turns to face her. The girl backs off. She can’t handle another fight right now.
“Congratulations,” Ykka drawls, when the girl pulls her awareness out of the earth and wearily, awkwardly, sits down. (The floor is very cold against her backside.) “Got that out of your system?”
A bit dazed, the girl tries to process the words. A small crowd of people stands in the corridor, beyond the icy circle; they are murmuring and staring at her. A black-haired woman, as small and lithe as Ykka is large and immovable, has entered the circle with Ykka; she goes over to the vinegar man and peers at him as if hoping to find anything left of value. There’s nothing, though. The girl has left as much of him as he left of her life, on a long-ago day in a once-beautiful place. He’s not even a man anymore, just a gray-brown, crumbly lump of ex-flesh half-huddled against the corridor wall. His face is all eyes and bared teeth, one hand an upraised claw.
Beyond Ykka and the crowd, the girl sees something that clears her thoughts at once: the stone-eater, just beyond the others. Watching her and smiling, statue-still.
“He’s dead,” the black-haired woman says, turning to Ykka. She sounds more annoyed than angry.
“Yes, I rather thought so,” Ykka replies. “So what was that all about?”
The girl belatedly realizes Ykka is talking to her. She is exhausted, physically—but inside, her whole being brims with strength and heat and satisfaction. It makes her lightheaded, and a little giddy, so she opens her mouth to speak and laughs instead. Even to her own ears, the sound is unsteady, unnerving.