With that, you decide to get some rest, yourself. Your bedroom is wrecked thanks to Hoa’s transformation, and you’re not much interested in sleeping in Tonkee’s bed; it’s been months, but the memory of mildew dies hard. Also, you’ve realized belatedly that there’s no one to watch Ykka’s back. She believes in her comm, but you don’t. Hoa ate Ruby Hair, who at least had an assumable interest in keeping her alive. So you borrow another pack from Temell, and scrounge your apartment for a few basic supplies—not quite a runny-sack, there’s plausible deniability if Ykka protests—and then head to her apartment. (This will have the added purpose of making it hard for Cutter to find you.) She’s still asleep, from the sound of her breathing through the bedroom curtain. Her divans are pretty comfortable, especially compared to sleeping rough when you were on the road. You use your runny-sack for a pillow and curl up, trying to forget the world for a while.
And then you wake when Ykka curses and stumbles past you at full speed, half ripping down one of the apartment curtains in her haste. You struggle awake and sit up. “What—” But by then you, too, hear the rising shouts outside. Angry shouts. A crowd, gathering.
So it’s begun. You get up and follow, and it’s not an afterthought that you grab the packs.
The knot of people is gathered on the ground level, near the communal baths. Ykka scrambles to that level in ways you will not—sliding down metal ladders, hopping over the railing of one platform to swing down to the one she knows is below, running across bridges that sway alarmingly beneath her feet. You go down in the sensible, non-suicidal way, so by the time you get to the knot of people, Ykka is in full shout, trying to get everyone to shut up and listen and back the fuck off.
At the center of the knot is Cutter, clad in nothing but a towel, for once looking something other than indifferent. Now he’s tense, jaw set, defiant, braced to flee. And five feet away, the iced corpse of a man sits on the ground, frozen in mid-scrabble backward, a look of abject terror permanently on his face. You don’t recognize him. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that a rogga has killed a still. This is a match thrown right into the middle of a comm that is dried-out, oil-soaked kindling.
“—how this happened,” Ykka is shouting, as you reach the knot of people. You can barely see her; there are nearly fifty people here already. You could push to the front, but you decide to hang back instead. Now is not the time to call attention to yourself. You look around and see Lerna also lurking at the rear of the crowd. His eyes are wide and his jaw tight as he looks back at you. There’s also—oh, burning Earth—a cluster of three rogga kids here. One of them is Penty, who you know is the ringleader of some of the braver, stupider rogga children. She’s standing on tiptoe, craning her neck for a better look. When she tries to push forward through the crowd, you catch her eye and give her a Mother Look. She flinches and subsides at once.
“Who the rust cares how it happened?” That’s Sekkim, one of the Innovators. You only know him because Tonkee constantly complains that he’s too stupid to rightly be part of the caste and should instead be dumped into something nonessential, like Leadership. “This is why—”
Someone else shouts him down. “Fucking rogga!”
Someone else shouts her down. “Fucking listen! It’s Ykka!”
“Who the rust cares about another rogga monster—”
“Rusty son of a cannibal, I will beat you bloody if you—”
Someone shoves someone else. There are shoves back, more curses, vows of murder. It’s a catastrophe.
Then a man rushes forward from the crowd, crouching beside the iced corpse and trying his best to fling his arms around it. The resemblance between him and the body is obvious even through the ice: brothers, perhaps. His wail of anguish causes a sudden, flustered silence to ripple across the crowd. They shuffle uneasily as his wail subsides into deep, soul-tearing sobs.
Ykka takes a deep breath and steps forward, using the opportunity that grief has provided. To Cutter, she says tightly, “What did I say? What did I rusting say?”
“He attacked me,” Cutter says. There’s not a scratch on him.
“Bullshit,” Ykka says. Several people in the crowd echo her, but she glares them down until they subside. She looks at the dead man, her jaw tight. “Betine wouldn’t have done that. He couldn’t even kill a chicken that time it was his turn to look after the flock.”
Cutter glares. “All I know is, I wanted to take a bath. I sat down to wash and he moved away from me. I figured fine, that’s how it’s going to be, and I didn’t care. Then I went past him to get into the pool and he hit me. Hard, in the back of the neck.”
There is a low, angry murmur at this—but also a troubled shuffle. The back of the neck is rumored to be the best place to strike a rogga. It’s not true. Only works if you hit hard enough for a concussion or a cracked skull, and then that’s what takes them down, not any sort of damage to the sessapinae. It’s still a popular myth. And if it’s true, it might be reason enough for Cutter to fight back.
“Rust that.” This is growled; the man who holds Betine’s faintly hissing corpse. “Bets wasn’t like that. Yeek, you know he wasn’t—”
Ykka nods, going over to touch the man’s shoulder. The crowd shuffles again, pent fury shifting with it. With her, tenuously, for the moment. “I know.” A muscle in her jaw flexes once, twice. She looks around. “Anybody else see the fight?”
Several people raise hands. “I saw Bets move away,” says one woman. She swallows, looking at Cutter; sweat dots her upper lip. “I think he just wanted to get closer to the soap, though.”
“He looked at me,” Cutter snaps. “I know what it rusting means when somebody looks at me like that!”
Ykka cuts him off with a wave of her hand. “I know, Cutter, but shut up. What else?” she asks the woman.
“That was it. I looked away and then when I looked back there was that—swirl. Wind and ice.” She grimaces, her jaw tightening. “You know how you people kill.”
Ykka glares back at her, but then flinches as there are more shouts, this time in agreement with the woman. Someone tries to shove through the crowd to get at Cutter; someone else holds the attacker back, but it’s a near thing. You see the realization come over Ykka that she’s losing them. She’s not going to make her people see. They’re working themselves into a mob, and there’s nothing she can do to stop them.
Well. You’re wrong about that. There’s one thing she can do.
She does it by turning and laying a hand on Cutter’s chest and sending something through him. You’re not actively sessing at the moment, so you only get the backwash of it, and it’s—what? It’s like… the way Alabaster once slammed a hot spot into submission, years ago and a fifth of a continent away. Just smaller. It’s like what that Guardian did to Innon, except localized, and not overtly horrific. And you didn’t realize roggas could do anything like it.
Whatever it is, Cutter doesn’t even have a chance to gasp. His eyes fly wide. He staggers back a step. Then he falls down, with a look of shock on his face to match that of Betine’s fear.
Everyone’s silent. Yours is not the only mouth that hangs open.
Ykka catches her breath. Whatever she did took a lot out of her; you see her sway a little, then get a hold of herself. “That’s enough,” she says, turning to look at everyone in the crowd. “More than enough. Justice has been done, see? Now all of you, go the rust home.”