The black-haired woman utters a curse in some language the girl does not know and pulls a knife, plainly intending to rid the city of the girl’s mad menace. “Wait,” Ykka says.
The woman glares at her. “This little monster just killed Thoroa—”
“Wait,” Ykka says again, harder, and this time she stares the black-haired woman down until the furious tension in the woman’s shoulders sags into defeat. Then Ykka faces the girl again. Her breath puffs in the chilly air when she speaks. “Why?”
The girl can only shake her head. “He owed me.”
“Owed you what? Why?”
She shakes her head again, wishing they would just kill her and get it over with.
Ykka watches her for a long moment, her hard face unreadable. When she speaks again, her voice is softer. “You said you learned early how it was done.”
The black-haired woman looks sharply at her. “We’ve all done what we had to, to survive.”
“True,” said Ykka. “And sometimes those things come back to bite us.”
“She killed a citizen of this city—”
“He owed her. How many people do you owe, hmm? You want to pretend we don’t all deserve to die for some reason or another?”
The black-haired woman does not answer.
“A city of people like us,” the girl says. She’s still giddy. It would be easy to make the city shake now, vent the giddiness, but that would force them to kill her when for some impossible reason they seem to be hesitating. “It’ll never work. They used to hunt us down before the rivening for good reason.”
Ykka smiles as though she knows what the girl is feeling. “They hunt us down now, in most places, for good reason. After all, only one of us could have done this.” She gestures vaguely toward the north, where a great jagged red-bleeding crack across the continent has destroyed the world. “But maybe if they didn’t treat us like monsters, we wouldn’t be monsters. I want us to try living like people for awhile, see how that goes.”
“Going great so far,” mutters the black-haired woman, looking at the stone corpse of the vinegar man. Thoroa. Whichever.
Ykka shrugs, but her eyes narrow at the girl. “Someone will probably come looking for you, too, one day.”
The girl gazes steadily back, because she has always understood this. She’ll do what she has to do, until she can’t anymore.
But all at once the girl snaps alert, because the stone-eater is now standing over her. Everyone in the corridor jerks in surprise. None of them saw it move.
“Thank you,” it says.
The girl licks her lips, not looking away. One does not turn one’s back on a predator. “Welcome.” She does not ask why it thanks her.
“And these,” Ykka says from beyond the creature, with a sigh which may or may not be resigned, “are our motivation to live together peacefully.”
Most of the braziers in the corridor are dark, extinguished by the girl in her desperate grab for power. Only the ones at either far end of the corridor, well beyond the ice-circle, remain lit. These silhouette the stone-eater’s face—though the girl can easily imagine its carved-marble smile.
Wordlessly Ykka comes over, as does the black-haired woman. They help the girl to her feet, all three of them watching the stone-eater warily. The stone-eater doesn’t move, either to impede them or to get out of the way. It just keeps standing there until they carry the girl away. Others in the hall, bystanders who did not choose to flee while monsters battled nearby, file out as well—quickly. This is only partly because the corridor is freezing.
“Are you throwing me out of the city?” the girl asks. They have set her down at the foot of the steps. She fumbles with the crutches because her hands are shaking in delayed reaction to the cold and the near-death experience. If they throw her out now, wounded, she’ll die slowly. She would rather they kill her, than face that.
“Don’t know yet,” Ykka says. “You want to go?”
The girl is surprised to be asked. It is strange to have options. She looks up, then, as a sound from above startles her: they are rolling the city’s roof shut against the coming night. As the strips of roofing slide into place, the city grows dimmer, although people move along the streets lighting standing lanterns she did not notice before. The roof locks into place with a deep, echoing snap. Already, without cool outside air blowing through the city, it feels warmer.
“I want to stay,” the girl hears herself say.
Ykka sighs. The black-haired woman just shakes her head. But they do not call the guards, and when they hear a sound from upstairs, all three of them walk away together, by unspoken mutual agreement. The girl has no idea where they’re going. She doesn’t think the other two women do, either. It’s just understood that they should all be somewhere else.
Because the girl keeps seeing the corridor they just left, in the moment before they carried her down stairs. She’d glanced back, see. The stone-eater had moved again; it stood beside Thoroa’s petrified corpse. Its hand rested on his shoulder, companionably. And this time as it smiled, it flashed tiny, perfect, diamond teeth.
The girl takes a deep breath to banish this image from her mind.
Then she asks of Ykka as they walk, “Is there anything to eat?”