“Ykka’s talked the comm into not killing you,” he says. “I told them about your son. It’s been, ah, mutually agreed that Waineen could’ve killed Penty, hitting her like that. Your overreaction was… understandable.” He pauses. “It helps that Ykka killed Cutter earlier. They trust her more now. They know she’s not speaking for you just out of…” He inhales, shrugs. “Kinship.”
Yes. It’s as the teachers told you back in the Fulcrum: Roggas are one and the same. The crimes of any are the crimes of all.
“No one will kill her.” That’s Hoa. Of course he’s here now, guarding his investment.
Lerna shifts uneasily at this. But then another voice agrees, “No one will kill her,” and you flinch because it is Antimony.
You push yourself up from the huddle slowly. She sits in the same position as always—she’s been here all along—with the stone lump that was Alabaster resting against her as his living body once did. Her eyes are already on you.
“You can’t have him,” you say. Snarl. “Or me, either.”
“I don’t want you,” Antimony says. “You killed him.”
Oh, shit. You try to maintain abject fury, try to use it to focus and reach for the power to defy her, but the fury dissolves into shame. And anyway, you only get as far as that damned obelisk-longknife of Alabaster’s. The spinel. It kicks back your flailing grab for it almost at once, as if spitting in your face. You are worthy of contempt, aren’t you? The stone eaters, the humans, the orogenes, even the flaking obelisks all know it. You are nothing. No; you are death. And you’ve killed yet another person you loved.
So you sit there on your hands and knees, bereft, rejected, so hurt that it is like a clockwork engine of pain gear-ticking at the core of you. Maybe the obelisk-builders could have invented some way to harness pain like this, but they are all dead.
There is a sound that drags you out of grief. Antimony is standing now. Her pose is imposing, straight-legged and implacable. She looks down her nose at you. In her arms is the brown lump of Alabaster’s remains. From this angle it doesn’t look like anything that used to be human. Officially, it wasn’t.
“No,” you say. No defiance this time; it is a plea. Don’t take him. Yet this is what he asked for. This is what he wanted—to be given to Antimony and not Father Earth, who took so much from him. That’s the choice here: Earth or a stone eater. You’re not on the list.
“He left you a message,” she says. Her inflectionless voice is no different, and yet. Somehow. Is that pity? “‘The onyx is the key. First a network, then the Gate. Don’t rust it up, Essun. Innon and I didn’t love you for nothing.’”
“What?” you ask, but then she flickers, becoming translucent. For the first time it occurs to you that the way stone eaters move through rock and the way obelisks shift between real and unreal states are the same.
It is a useless observation. Antimony vanishes into the Earth that hates you. With Alabaster.
You sit where she’s left you, where he’s left you. There are no thoughts in your head. But when a hand touches your arm, and a voice says your name, and a connection that is not the obelisk presents itself, you turn toward it. You can’t help it. You need something, and if it is not to be family or death, then it must be something else. So you turn and grab and Lerna is there for you, his shoulder is warm and soft, and you need it. You need him. Just for now, please. Just once, you need to feel human, never mind the official designations, and maybe with human arms around you and a human voice murmuring, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Essun,” in your ear, maybe you can feel like that. Maybe you are human, just for a little while.
At seven forty-five you sit alone again.
Lerna’s gone to speak to one of his assistants, and maybe to the Strongbacks who are watching you from the infirmary doorway. At the bottom of your runny-sack is a pocket for hiding things. It’s why you bought this particular runny-sack, years ago, from this particular leatherworker. When he showed you the pocket, you thought immediately of something that you wanted to put in it. Something that, as Essun, you didn’t let yourself think about often, because it was a thing of Syenite’s and she was dead. Yet you kept her remains.
You dig through the sack until your fingers find the pocket and wriggle inside. The bundle is still there. You tug them out, unfold the cheap linen. Six rings, polished and semiprecious, sit there.
Not enough for you, a nine-ringer, but you don’t care about the first four, anyway. They clack and roll across the floor as you discard them. The last two, the ones he made for you, you put on the index finger of each hand.
Then you get to your feet.
Eight o’clock. Representatives of the comm’s households gather at the Flat Top.
One vote per comm share is the rule. You see Ykka at the center of the circle again, her arms folded and face carefully blank, though you can sess an undertone of tension in the ambient that is mostly hers. Someone has brought out an old wooden box, and people are milling around, talking to each other, writing on scraps of paper or leather, dropping these into the box.
You walk toward the Flat Top with Lerna in tow. People don’t notice you until you’re nearly across the bridge. Nearly on top of them. Then someone sees you coming and gasps loudly. Someone else yelps an alarm: “Oh, rust, it’s her.” People scramble to get out of your way, almost tripping over themselves.
They should. In your right hand is Alabaster’s ridiculous pink longknife, the miniaturized and reshaped spinel obelisk. By now you have tapped it, resonated with it; it is yours. It rejected you before because you were unstable, floundering, but now you know what you need from it. You’ve found your focus. The spinel won’t hurt anyone as long as you don’t let it. Whether you will or not is an entirely different matter.
You walk into the center of the circle, and the man holding the ballot box scrambles back from you, leaving it there. Ykka frowns and steps forward and says, “Essun—” But you ignore her. You lunge forward and it is suddenly instinctual, easy, natural, to grip the hilt of the pink longknife with both hands and turn and swivel your hips and swing. The instant the sword touches the wooden box, the box is obliterated. It isn’t cut, it isn’t smashed; it disintegrates into its component microscopic particles. The eye processes this as dust, which scatters and glitters in the light before vanishing. Turned to stone. A lot of people are gasping or crying out, which means they’re inhaling their votes. Probably won’t hurt them. Much.
Then you turn and lift the longknife, pivoting slowly to point it at each face.
“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”
Some of them shuffle or look at each other. Ykka stares at you like you are a possibly dangerous creature, which is hilarious. She should know by now that there’s no “possibly” about it. “Essun,” she starts to say, in the kind of even voice one uses with pets or the mad, “this is…” She stops because she doesn’t know what it is. But you do. It’s a fucking coup. Doesn’t matter who’s in charge, but on this one issue, you’re going to be the dictator. You will not allow Alabaster to have died saving these people from you for nothing.
“No vote,” you say again. Your voice is pitched to carry, as if they are twelve-year-olds in your old creche. “This is a community. You will be unified. You will fight for each other. Or I will rusting kill every last one of you.”