And why should you have been? What survival skills does any rogga offer? You can keep people from dying in a shake, yay. Fat lot of good that does when there’s no food.
“Enough!” You hear Ykka’s voice from a short distance away, though you can’t see her around the ground-level crystals. She’s shouting. “It’s done! You want to be there for it or stay here wasting breath on me?”
You get up, your knees aching. Head in that direction.
Along the way, you pass a young man whose face is streaked with tears of fury and incipient grief. He storms past you back to the infirmary. You keep going and eventually see Ykka standing near the side of a high, narrow crystal. She’s planted a hand against its wall and stands with her head bowed, her bush of hair falling around her face so you can’t see it. You think she’s shaking a little.
Maybe that’s your imagination. She seems so coldhearted. But then, so do you.
“Ykka.”
“Not you, too,” she mutters. “I don’t want to hear it, Bugkiller.”
Belatedly you realize: By killing the boilbugs, you made this a harder choice for her. Before, she could have ordered the Hunter killed as a mercy, and the bugs would have been at fault. Now it’s pragmatism, comm policy. That’s on her.
You shake your head and step closer. She straightens and turns in an instant, and you sess the defensive orientation of her orogeny. She doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t set a torus or start an ambient-draw, but then, she wouldn’t, would she? Those are Fulcrum techniques. You don’t really know what she’s going to do, this strangely trained feral, to defend herself.
Part of you is curious, in a detached sort of way. The other part notes the tension on her face. So you offer her the still-lit mellow.
She blinks at it. Her orogeny settles into quiescence again, but her eyes lift and study yours. Then she tilts her head, bemused, considering. Finally she puts one hand on her hip, plucks the mellow from your fingers with the other, and takes a long drag. It works quickly; after a moment she turns to lean back against the crystal, her face settling into weary rather than tense lines as she blows out curls of smoke. She offers it back. You settle beside her and take it.
It takes another ten minutes to finish the cigarette, passing it back and forth between the two of you. Both of you linger, however, after it’s done, by unspoken agreement. Only when you hear someone begin to utter loud, broken sobs from the infirmary behind you do you nod to each other, and part ways.
It is unfathomable that any sensible civilization would be so wasteful as fill prime storage caverns with corpses! No wonder these people died out, whoever they were. I estimate another year before we can clear all of the bones, funeral urns, and other debris, then perhaps another six months to fully map and renovate. Less if you can get me those blackjackets I requested! I don’t care if they cost the Earth; some of these chambers are unstable.
There are tablets in here, though. Something in verses, though we can’t read this bizarre language. Like stonelore. Five tablets, not three. What do you want to do with them? I say we give the lot to Fourth so they’ll stop whining about how much history we’re destroying.
INTERLUDE
A dilemma: You are made of so many people you do not wish to be. Including me.
But you know so little of me. I will attempt to explain the context of me, if not the detail. It begins—I began—with a war.
War is a poor word. Is it war when people find an infestation of vermin in some unwanted place and try to burn or poison it clean? Though that, too, is a poor metaphor, because no one hates individual mice or bedbugs. No one singles out for vengeance that one, that one right there, three-legged splotch-backed little bastard, and all its progeny down the hundreds of verminous generations that encompass a human life. And the three-legged splotch-backed little bastards don’t have much chance of becoming more than an annoyance to people—whereas you and all your kind have cracked the surface of the planet and lost the Moon. If the mice in your garden, back in Tirimo, had helped Jija kill Uche, you would have shaken the place to pebbles and set fire to the ruins before you left. You destroyed Tirimo anyway, but if it had been personal, you’d have done worse.
Yet for all your hatred, you still might not have managed to kill the vermin. The survivors would be greatly changed—made harder, stronger, more splotch-backed. Perhaps the hardships you inflicted would have fissioned their descendants into many factions, each with different interests. Some of those interests would have nothing to do with you. Some would revere and despise you for your power. Some would be as dedicated to your destruction as you were to theirs, even though by the time they had the strength to actually act on their enmity, you would have forgotten their existence. To them, your enmity would be the stuff of legend.
And some might hope to appease you, or talk you around to at least a degree of peaceful tolerance. I am one of these.
I was not always. For a very long time, I was one of the vengeful ones… but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times.
That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win.
So this is a confession, my Essun. I’ve betrayed you already and I will do it again. You haven’t even chosen a side yet, and already I fend off those who would recruit you to their cause. Already I plot your death. It’s necessary. But I can at least try my damnedest to give your life a meaning that will last till the world ends.
5
Nassun takes the reins
MAMA MADE ME LIE TO YOU, Nassun is thinking. She’s looking at her father, who’s been driving the wagon for hours at this point. His eyes are on the road, but a muscle in his jaw jumps. One of his hands—the one that first struck Uche, ultimately killed him—is shaking where it grips the reins. Nassun can tell that he is still caught up in the fury, maybe still killing Uche in his head. She doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t like it. But she loves her father, fears him, worships him, and therefore some part of her yearns to appease him. She asks herself: What did I do to make this happen? And the answer that comes is: Lie. You lied, and lies are always bad.
But this lie was not her choice. That had been Mama’s command, along with all the others: Don’t reach, don’t ice, I’m going to make the earth move and you’d better not react, didn’t I tell you not to react, even listening is reacting, normal people don’t listen like that, are you listening to me, rusting stop, for Earth’s sake can’t you do anything right, stop crying, now do it again. Endless commands. Endless displeasure. Occasionally the slap of ice in threat, the slap of a hand, the sickening inversion of Nassun’s torus, the jerk of a hand on her upper arm. Mama has said occasionally that she loves Nassun, but Nassun has never seen any proof of it.