“Maybe.” Tonkee shrugs, either not noticing your attempt to be obnoxious, or not caring. Probably the latter. “Mentioning the Shattering was a great way to set off a five-hour argument in the colloquium. Stupid old farts.” She smiles to herself, remembering, and then abruptly sobers. You understand at once. Dibars, the city that housed Seventh, is in the Equatorials, only a little west of Yumenes.
“I don’t believe it, though,” Tonkee says, when she’s had a moment to recover. “That we’ve always had Seasons.”
“Why not?”
“Because of us.” She grins. “Life, I mean. It’s not different enough.”
“What?”
Tonkee leans forward. She’s not quite as excited as she gets about obelisks, but it’s clear that just about any long-hidden knowledge sets her off. For a moment, in the gleam of her open, cheeky face, you see Binof; then she speaks and becomes Tonkee the geomest again. “‘All things change during a Season,’ yes? But not enough. Think of it this way: Everything that grows or walks on land can breathe the world’s air, eat its food, survive its usual shifts in temperature. We don’t have to change to do that; we are precisely the way we need to be, because that’s how the world works. Right? Maybe people are the worst of the lot, because we have to use our hands to make coats instead of just growing fur… but we can make coats. We’re built for that, with clever hands that can sew and brains that can figure out how to hunt or grow animals for fur. But we aren’t built to filter ash out of our lungs before it turns into cement—”
“Some animals are.”
Tonkee gives you an ugly look. “Stop interrupting. It’s rude.”
You sigh and gesture for her to go on, and she nods, mollified. “Now. Yes, some animals grow lung-filters during a Season—or start breathing water and move into the ocean where it’s safer, or bury themselves and hibernate, or whatever. We’ve figured out how to build not just coats, but storecaches and walls and stonelore. But these are afterthoughts.” She gestures wildly, groping for the words. “Like… when a cartwheel blows a spoke and you’re halfway between comms, you improvise. See? You put a stick or even a bar of metal into the space where the broken spoke was, just to keep the wheel strong enough to last until you can reach a wheelwright. That’s what’s happening when kirkhusa suddenly develop a taste for meat during a Season. Why don’t they just eat meat all the time? Why haven’t they always eaten meat? Because they were originally built for something else, they’re still better at eating something else, and eating meat during Seasons is the slapdash, last-minute fix nature threw in to keep kirkhusa from going extinct.”
“That’s…” You’re a little awed. It sounds crazy, but it feels right, somehow. You can’t think of any holes to poke in the theory, and you’re not sure you want to. Tonkee’s not someone you mean to go toe-to-toe with in a battle of logic.
Tonkee nods. “That’s why I can’t stop thinking about the obelisks. People built them, which means that as a species we’re at least as old as they are! That’s a lot of time to break things, start over, and break them again. Or, if the Leadership stories are true… maybe it’s enough time to put a fix in place. Something to tide us over till the real repairs can be made.”
You frown to yourself. “Wait. The Yumenescene Leadership thinks the obelisks—leftover deadciv junk—are the fix?”
“Basically. The stories say the obelisks held the world together when it would have come apart. And they imply there might someday be a way to end the Seasons, involving the obelisks.”
An end to all Seasons? It’s hard even to imagine. No need for runny-sacks. No storecaches. Comms could last forever, grow forever. Every city could become like Yumenes.
“It would be amazing,” you murmur.
Tonkee glances sharply at you. “Orogenes might be a kind of fix, too, you know,” she says. “And without the Seasons, you’d no longer be needed.”
You frown back at her, not sure whether to be disquieted or comforted by that statement, until she starts finger-combing her remaining hair and you realize you’ve run out of things to say.
Hoa is gone. You’re not sure where. You left him behind in the infirmary, staring down Ruby Hair, and when you returned to your apartment to try to get a few more hours’ sleep he was not beside you when you woke. His little bundle of rocks is still in your room, next to your bed, so he must be planning to return soon. It’s probably nothing. Still, after so many weeks, you feel oddly bereft without his strange, subtle presence. But perhaps this is just as well. You have a visit to make, and it might go easier without… hostility.
You walk to the infirmary again slowly, quietly. It’s early evening, you think—always hard to tell in Castrima-under, but your body is still acclimated to the rhythms of the surface. For now, you trust in that. Some of the people out on the platforms and walkways stare as you pass; this comm spends plenty of time gossiping, clearly. That doesn’t matter. All that does is whether Alabaster has had time enough to recover. You need to talk.
There’s no sign of the dead Hunter’s body from that morning; everything’s been cleaned up. Lerna’s inside, in fresh clothing, and he glances at you as you come in. There’s still a distance in his expression, you note, though he only meets your gaze for a moment before nodding and turning back to whatever he’s doing with what look like surgical instruments. There’s another man near him, pipetting something into a series of small glass vials; the man doesn’t even look up. It’s an infirmary. Anyone can come in.
It’s not until you’re halfway down the infirmary’s long central aisle, walking between the rows of cots, that you consciously notice the sound you’ve been hearing all along: a kind of hum. It seems monotonous at first, but as you concentrate on it, you detect multiple tones, harmonies, a subtle rhythm. Music? Music so alien, so difficult to parse, that you’re not sure that word really applies. You can’t figure out where it’s coming from, at first. Alabaster is still where you saw him that morning, on a pile of cushions and blankets on the floor. No telling why Lerna hasn’t put him on a cot. There are flasks on a nightstand nearby, a roll of fresh bandages, some scissors, a pot of salve. A bedpan, thankfully unused since its last cleaning, though it still stinks near him.
The music is coming from the stone eater, you realize in wonder as you settle into a crouch before them. Antimony sits cross-legged near Alabaster’s “nest,” utterly still, looking as though someone bothered to sculpt a woman sitting cross-legged with one hand upraised. Alabaster’s asleep—though in an odd, nearly sitting-up posture that you don’t understand until you realize he’s leaning back against Antimony’s hand. Maybe that’s the only way he can sleep comfortably? There are bandages on his arms today, shiny with salve, and he’s not wearing a shirt—which helps you see that he’s not as badly damaged as you first thought. There are no patches of stone on his chest or belly, and only a few small burns around his shoulders, most of those healed. But his torso is nearly skeletal—barely any muscle, ribs showing, belly almost concave.
Also, his right arm is much shorter than it was that morning.
You look up at Antimony. The music is coming from somewhere inside of her. Her black eyes are focused on him; they haven’t moved with your arrival. It’s peaceful, this strange music. And Alabaster looks comfortable.
“You haven’t been taking care of him,” you say, looking at his ribs and remembering countless evenings putting food in front of him, glaring while he wearily chewed it, conspiring with Innon to get him to eat at the group meals. He always ate more when he thought people were looking. “If you were going to steal him from us, the least you could’ve done was feed him properly. Fatten him up before you ate him, or something.”