Lerna’s there. You’re on the floor of his apartment, the light is from his crystal walls, and he’s holding the knife and staring down at you. Beyond him, Hoa stands in a pose of entreaty, which he must have been directing toward Lerna. His eyes have shifted to you, though he hasn’t bothered to adjust the pose.
“Burning rusty fuck,” you groan-sigh. And then, because now you know what must have happened, you add, “Thanks,” to Hoa. Who pulled you down into the earth and away before the Guardian could kill you. Never thought you’d be grateful for something like that.
Lerna’s dropped the knife and already turned away to find bandages. You’re not bleeding much; the knife went in vertically, paralleling rather than cutting across the tendons, and it seems to have missed the big artery. Hard to tell when your hands are still shaking a little; shock. But Lerna’s not moving at that blurring, near-inhuman speed he tends to use when a life is on the line, so you’re encouraged by that.
Lerna says, his back to you as he assembles items, “I take it your attempt at parley didn’t go well.”
Things have been awkward between you and him lately. He’s made his interest clear, and you haven’t responded in kind. You haven’t rejected him, either, though, thus the awkwardness. At one point a few weeks back, Alabaster grumbled that you should just roll the boy already, because you were always crankier when you were horny. You called him an ass and changed the subject, but really—Alabaster’s why you’ve been thinking about it more.
You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply… a thinning of who you are.
And maybe now is not the time to consider your cataclysm of a love life.
“No,” you say. You shrug off your jacket. Underneath you’re wearing a sleeveless shirt good for Castrima’s warmth. Lerna turns back and crouches and begins swabbing away the blood with a pad of soft rags. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone up there. They had a Guardian.”
Lerna’s eyes flick up to yours, then back to your wound. “I heard they could stop orogeny.”
“This one didn’t have to. That damned knife did it for her.” You think you know why, too, as you remember Innon. That Guardian didn’t negate him, either. Maybe the skin thing only works on roggas whose orogeny is still active. That’s how she wanted to kill you. But Lerna’s jaw muscle is already tight, and you decide maybe he doesn’t need to know that.
“I didn’t know about the Guardian,” Hoa says unexpectedly. “I’m sorry.”
You eye him. “I didn’t expect stone eaters to be omniscient.”
“I said I would protect you.” His voice is more inflectionless, now that he’s not in flesh-shape anymore. Or maybe his voice is the same, and you just read it as inflectionless because he has no body language to embellish it. Despite this, he sounds… angry. With himself, maybe.
“You did.” You wince as Lerna starts winding a bandage around your arm tightly. No stitches, though, so that’s good. “Not that I wanted to be dragged into the earth, but your timing was excellent.”
“You were hurt.” Definitely angry with himself. This is the first time he’s sounded to you like the boy he appeared to be for so long. Is he young for one of his kind? Young at heart? Maybe just so open and honest that he might as well be young.
“I’ll live. That’s what matters.”
He falls silent. Lerna works in silence. Between the collective air of disapproval that the two of them exude, you can’t help feeling a little guilty.
Afterward you leave Lerna’s apartment to head to Flat Top, where Ykka has set up an operations center of her own. Someone’s brought the rest of the divans from her apartment, and she’s set them up in a rough semicircle, basically bringing her council out into the open. In token of this, Hjarka sprawls over one divan as she usually does, head propped on fist and taking up the whole thing so no one else can sit down, and Tonkee is pacing in the middle of the semicircle. There are others around, anxious or bored people who’ve brought their own chairs or are sitting on the hard crystal floor, but not as many as you would’ve expected. There’s a lot of activity around the comm, you noticed as you headed to the Flat Top: people fletching arrows in one chamber that you pass, building crossbows in another. Down on the ground level you can see what looks like a longknife-wielding class; a slender young man is teaching about thirty people how to do an over-and-under strike. Over by Scenic Overlook some of the Innovators seem to be rigging what looks like a dropped-rocks trap.
The spectators perk up as you and Lerna come onto the Flat Top, though; that’s hilarious. Everyone knows you volunteered to go topside to deliver Castrima’s answer to Rennanis. You did this in part to show publicly that you weren’t taking over; Ykka’s still in charge. Everyone seems to be reading it as a sign that you may be crazy, but at least you’re on their side. Such hope in their eyes! It dies down quickly, though. That you are back, and that there is a visibly bloody bandage around one arm, is reassuring to no one.
Tonkee’s in full rant about something. Even she’s ready for battle, having traded her skirt for billowy pantaloons, tied her hair up atop her head in a scruffy pile of curls, and strapped twin glassknives to both thighs. She actually looks kind of stunning. Then you pay attention to what she’s saying. “The third wave will need to be the most delicate touch. Pressure sets them off, see? A temperature differential should make the wind gust enough, the air pressure drop enough. But it has to happen fast. And no shaking. We’re going to lose the forest either way, but shaking will just make them dig in. We need them moving.”
“I can handle that,” Ykka says, though she looks troubled. “At least, I can handle part of it.”
“No, it has to be done all at once.” Tonkee stops and glowers at her. “That’s not rusting negotiable.” She sees you then and stops, her eyes going immediately to the bandage around your arm.
Ykka turns and her eyes widen, too. “Damn.”
You shake your head wearily. “I agreed it was worth a shot. And now we know they can’t be reasoned with.”
Then you sit down, and the people on the Flat Top fall silent as you impart what intelligence you were able to glean from your trip topside. An army of surplus people occupying the houses, a general named Danel, at least one Guardian. Adding this to what you already know—stone eaters on their side, a whole city more of them somewhere in the Equatorials—paints a bleak picture. But it is the unknowns that are most alarming.
“How did they know about the meat shortage?” No one seems to be holding the gray stone eater’s revelation against Ykka, or at least they aren’t doing it right now, even though they now know she was keeping the information from them. Headwomen are supposed to make choices like that. “How are they finding the rusting vents?”
“With enough people, it’s not hard to search,” you start to suggest, but she cuts you off.
“It is. We’ve been using this geode in one way or another for fifty years. We know the land—and it took us years to find those vents. One’s in a damned peat bog further along the river, which stinks to the heavens and occasionally catches fire.” She sits forward, propping her elbows on her knees and sighing. “How did they even know we were here? Even our trading partners have only ever seen Castrima-over.”