The silence almost reverberates. Lerna and the Sanzed healer keep moving, though the people who have been holding the man down draw back and look at each other as if asking what to do now. In the now-silent confusion, you cannot help glancing off toward the far end of the infirmary, where Alabaster still sits unnoticed by the infirmary’s new guests. His stone eater stands where you last saw her, though her gaze is also fixed on the tableau. You can see Alabaster’s face over the beds; his eyes slide over to meet yours, but then they shift away.
Your attention is recaptured by the man on the bed as some of the people around him step back. At first you can’t tell what the problem is, other than that his pants seem oddly wet in patches, caked with muddy ash. The wetness isn’t red, it’s not blood, but there’s a smell that you’re not sure how to describe. Meat in brine. Hot fat. His boots are off, baring feet which still spasmodically twitch a little, the splayed toes relaxing only reluctantly even in unconsciousness. Lerna is cutting open one pants leg with a pair of scissors. What you notice first, as he peels away the damp cloth, are the small round blue hemispheres that dot the man’s skin here and there, each perhaps two inches in diameter and an inch of rounded height, shiny and foreign to his flesh. There are ten or fifteen of them. Each sits at the center of a patch of bloated pink-brown flesh covering perhaps a handspan of the man’s legs. You think the lumps are jewels, at first. That’s kind of what they look like, metallic over the blue, and beautiful.
“Fuck,” says someone, voice soft with shock, and someone else says, “What the rust.” Someone else pushes into the infirmary behind you after a moment’s argument with the people who’ve blocked off the door. She comes to stand beside you and you look over at Ykka, whose eyes widen in confusion and revulsion for an instant before she schools her expression to blankness. Then she says, sharply enough to jerk people out of staring, “What happened?”
(You notice, belatedly or perhaps right in time, that another stone eater is in the room, not far beyond the tableau. She’s familiar—the red-haired one who greeted you along with Ykka when you first came to Castrima. She’s watching Ykka now, avidly, but her stone gaze occasionally drifts toward you, too. You suddenly become hyperaware that Hoa did not follow you from the apartment.)
“Outer perimeter patrol,” says another ash-covered Midlatter man, to Ykka. He doesn’t look like a Strongback, too small. Maybe he’s one of the new Hunters. He comes around the bedside group and fixes his gaze on Ykka as if she is all that prevents him from staring at the injured man until his mind breaks. “We were out by the s-salt quarry, thinking it might be a good place for hunting. There was some kind of sinkhole near a stream runnel. Beled—I don’t know. He’s gone. I heard them both scream at first, but I didn’t know why. I was upstream, looking at some animal tracks. By the time I got there it was just Terteis there, looking like he was trying to climb out of the ash. I helped him out, but they were on him already, and more were crawling up his shoes so I had to cut them off—”
A hiss jerks your eyes away from the speaking man. Lerna is shaking his hand, holding out the fingers stiffly as if they hurt. “Get me the rusting forceps!” he says to another man, who twitches and turns to do so. You’ve never heard Lerna curse before.
“Some kind of boil,” says the Sanzed woman who injected the man. She sounds disbelieving; she’s speaking to Lerna, as if trying to convince him rather than herself. (Lerna just keeps grimly probing the edges of the burns with his uninjured hand, ignoring her.) “Has to be. He fell into a steam vent, a geyser, an old rusted-out geo pipe.” Which would make the bugs just a coincidence.
“—or they would’ve gotten on me, too.” The other Hunter is still talking in his hollow voice. “I thought the sinkhole was just loose ash, but it was really… I don’t know. Like an anthill.” The Hunter swallows, sets his jaw. “I couldn’t get the rest off, so I brought him here.”
Ykka’s lips press together, but she rolls up her sleeves and goes over, pushing through the other shocked people nearby. She yells, “Back up! If you don’t mean to help with this, get out of the rusting way.” Some of the milling people start pulling others away. Someone else grabs for one of the jewel-objects and tries to pull it off, then jerks their hand away, yelping as Lerna did. The object changes, two pieces of the shiny blue surface flaking away and lifting before clapping back into place—and suddenly it shifts in your head. It’s not a jewel; it’s a bug. Some kind of beetle, and the iridescent shell is its carapace. In the moment that it lifted its wing covers, you saw that its round body was translucent, with something jumping and bubbling inside. You can sess the heat of it even from where you are, hot as a boil. The man’s flesh steams around it.
Someone gives Lerna the forceps and he tries to pull one of the beetles off. Its wing covers lift again, and a thin jet of something skeets across Lerna’s fingers. He yelps and drops the forceps, jerking back. “Acid!” someone says. Someone else grabs his hand and tries to quickly wipe off the stuff, but you know what it is even before Lerna gasps, “No! Just water. Scalding water.”
“Careful,” says the other Hunter, belatedly. One of his hands bears a line of blisters, you notice. You also notice that he doesn’t look back at the infirmary table or any of the people there.
This is too horrible to watch. The rusting bugs are boiling the man to death. But when you look away, you see that Alabaster is watching you again. Alabaster, who himself is covered in burns, but who should be dead. No one stands near the epicenter of a continent-spanning fissure vent and gets only patchy third-degree burns. He should’ve been ashes scattered over Yumenes’s melted streets.
You realize this as he gazes at you, though his expression is indifferent to another man’s trial by fire. It is a familiar sort of indifference—Fulcrum-familiar. It is the indifference that comes of too many betrayals, too many friends lost for no good reason, too many “too horrible to watch” atrocities seen.
And yet. The reverberation of Alabaster’s orogeny is carelessly powerful, diamond-precise, and so achingly familiar that you have to close your eyes and fight off memories of a heaving ship deck, a lonely highroad, a windy rock island. The torus that he spins is devastatingly small—barely an inch wide, so attenuated that you cannot find its hairpin fulcrum. He’s still better than you.
Then you hear a gasp. You open your eyes to see one of the bugs shiver, hiss like a living teakettle—and then freeze over. Its legs, which had been hooked into the boiled flesh around it, pop loose. It’s dead.
But then you hear a soft groan, and the orogeny dissipates. You look over to see that Alabaster has bowed his head and hunched over. His stone eater slow-grind crouches beside him, something in her posture indicating concern even if her face is as placid as ever. The red-haired stone eater—in internal exasperation you decide to call her Ruby Hair, for now—is gazing at him, too.
That’s it, then. You look back at the man—and your gaze catches on Lerna, who’s looking at the frozen bug in fascination. His eyes lift, sweep the room, stutter across yours, stop. You see the question there, and start to shake your head: No, you did not freeze the bug. But that isn’t the right question, and maybe isn’t even the question he’s asking. He doesn’t need to know if you did. He needs to know if you can.
Lerna, Hoa, Alabaster; today you are driven by silent, meaningful gazes, it seems.
The hot points of the insects sess like geothermal vents as you step forward and focus your sessapinae. Lots of controlled pressure in their tiny bodies; that’s how they make the water boil. You lift a hand toward the man out of habit so everyone will know you’re doing something, and you hear a curse, a hiss, a scramble of feet and jostling bodies as people move back from you, away from any torus you might manifest. Fools. Don’t they know you only need a torus when you have to pull from the ambient? The bugs have plenty of what you need. The difficulty will lie in confining your draw just to them and not the man’s overheated flesh underneath.
Ykka’s stone eater takes a slow
step closer. You sess her movement, rather than seeing it; it’s like a mountain shifting toward you. Then Ruby Hair stops as suddenly there is another mountain in its way: Hoa, stock-still and quietly cold. Where did he come from? You cannot spare another thought for these creatures right now.
You begin slowly, using your eyes as well as your sessapinae to determine exactly where to stop… but Alabaster has shown you the way of it. You spin the torus from their hot little bodies as he did, one by one. As you do this, some of them crack open with a loud and violent hiss, and one of them even pops off, flying off toward the side of the room. (People move out of its way even faster than they moved out of yours.) Then it is done.
Everyone stares at you. You look at Ykka. You’re breathing hard because that degree of fine focus is much, much harder than shifting a hillside. “Need anything shaken?”
She blinks, sessing instantly what you mean. Then she grabs your arm. There is—what? An inversion. A channeling-away, as you would do to an obelisk, except there is no obelisk, and you aren’t doing the channeling even though it’s your orogeny. All at once you hear people exclaim outside, and you glance through the infirmary’s door. The infirmary is a built-building, not carved from one of the giant crystals of the geode; inside it’s lit only by electric lamps. Outside, however, through the uncurtained doorway, you can see the geode crystals glowing noticeably brighter, all over the comm.
You stare at Ykka. She nods back at you in a matter-of-fact, collegial way, as if you should have any clue what she’s just done or as if you should be comfortable with a feral doing something that a ringed Fulcrum orogene can’t. Then Ykka steps over to grab another pair of forceps to help. Lerna’s pulling on one of the beetles again despite his scalded fingers, and this time the thing is coming off. A proboscis as long as its body slides out of the boiled flesh, and—you can’t look anymore.
(You glimpse Ruby Hair again, from the corner of your eye. She’s ignoring Hoa, who stands still as a statue between you, and now she’s smiling at Ykka. Her lips are parted just a little. You glimpse a hint of shining teeth. You blot this from your awareness.)
So you retreat to the far end of the infirmary, to sit down beside Alabaster’s cushion pile. He’s still bent over, breathing like a bellows, although the stone eater has taken hold of his shoulder with one viselike hand to keep him mostly upright. Belatedly you realize he’s holding one of his stumpy wrists to his belly, and—oh, Earth. The gray-brown rock that once only capped his right wrist now sleeves up to his elbow.
He lifts his head; sweat sheens his face. He looks as weary as if he just shut down another supervolcano, although this time he’s at least conscious, and smiling.
“Ever the good pupil, Syen,” he murmurs. “But rusting Earth, is it costly to teach you.”
The shock of understanding rings through you like silence. Alabaster can’t do orogeny anymore. Not without… consequences. Impulse makes you look at Antimony, and your gorge rises as you realize the stone eater’s gaze is fixed on his newly stoned arm. She doesn’t move, however. After a moment Alabaster manages to straighten, throwing a grateful look at her for the supportive hand. “Later,” he says softly. You know this means eat my arm later. She adjusts her hand to support him from behind instead.
The urge to push her aside, put your hand in place to hold him up, is so powerful that you can’t look at this, either.
You push yourself up, brush past everyone else to get outside the infirmary, and then you sit down on the low, flattened tip of a crystal that is only just beginning to grow out of the geode wall. No one bothers you, though you feel the pressure of gazes and hear the echo of whispers. You don’t mean to stay long, but you do. You don’t know why.
Eventually a shadow falls over your feet. You look up to see Lerna standing there. Beyond him, Ykka is walking away with another man who is trying to talk to her; she seems to be angrily ignoring him. The rest of the crowd has dispersed at last, though you can see through the open doorway that there’s still more people in the infirmary than usual, perhaps visiting the poor half-cooked Hunter.
Lerna isn’t looking at you. He’s staring at the far wall of the geode, which is lost in the hazy glow from dozens of crystals between here and there. He’s also smoking a cigarette. The stench of it, and the yellowish color of the outer wrapping, tells you it’s a mellow: derminther mela leaves and flower buds, mildly narcotic when dried. The Somidlats are famous for them, to the degree that the Somidlats can be famous for anything. You’re still surprised to see him smoking one, though. He’s a doctor. Mellows are bad for you.
“You all right?” you ask.
He doesn’t answer at first, taking a long drag on the cigarette. You’re starting to think he won’t speak, when he says, “I’m going to kill him when I go back in there.”
Then you understand. The bugs burned through skin, muscle, maybe even down to bone. With a team of Yumenescene doctors and cutting-edge biomestric drugs, maybe the man could be kept alive long enough to heal—and even then he might never walk again. With just whatever equipment and medicines Castrima has to hand, the best Lerna can do is amputate. The man might survive it. But this is a Season, and every comm-dweller must earn their shelter from the ash and cold. Few comms have use for a legless Hunter, and this comm is already supporting one burned invalid.
(Ykka walking away, ignoring a man who sounds like he is arguing for a life.)
So Lerna is very much not all right. You decide to change the subject, slightly. “I’ve never seen anything like those bugs.”
“The locals say they’re called boilbugs, though no one knew why before now. They breed around streams, carry water inside themselves. Animals eat them during droughts. Usually they’re carrion eaters. Harmless.” Lerna flicks ash from his forearm. He’s wearing only a loose sleeveless shirt due to Castrima’s warmth. The skin of his forearms is flecked with… something. You look away. “Things change during a Season, though.”
Yes. Cooked carrion probably lasts longer.
“You could’ve gotten those things off him the instant you walked in the door,” Lerna adds.
You blink. Then it registers in your mind that this statement was an attack. It’s so mildly delivered, from such an unexpected quarter, that you’re too surprised to be angry. “I couldn’t,” you say. “At least, I didn’t know I could. Alabaster—”
“I don’t expect anything from him. He came to die here, not live here.” Lerna pivots to face you, and all of a sudden you realize that his placid manner has been concealing absolute rage. His gaze is cool, but it’s visible in everything else: his white lips, the flex of muscle in his jaw, his flaring nostrils. “Why are you here, Essun?”
You flinch. “You know why. I came to find Nassun.”
“Nassun’s out of your reach. Your goals have changed; now you’re here to survive, same as the rest of us. Now you’re one of us.” His lip curls in something that might be contempt. “I’m saying this because if I don’t make you understand, you might have a rusting fit and kill us all.”
You open your mouth to reply. He takes a step toward you, though, and it’s so aggressive that you actually sit up. “Tell me you won’t, Essun. Tell me I won’t have to leave this comm in the dead of the night, hoping nobody you’ve pissed off catches me and slits my throat. Tell me I’m not going to have to go back out there, to fight for my life and watch people I try to help die again and again and again, until I get eaten by rusting bugs—”
He cuts himself off with a choked sound, turning away sharply. You stare at his tense back and say nothing, because there’s nothing you can say. This is the second time he’s mentioned your murder of Tirimo. And is that surprising? He was born there, grew up there; Lerna’s mother was still living there when you left. You think. Maybe you killed her, too, that last day.
There’s nothing you can say, not with guilt souring your mouth, but you try anyway. “I’m sorry.”
He laughs. It doesn’t even sound like him, it’s so ugly a
nd angry. Then he resumes his former posture, gazing at the far geode wall. He’s more in control of himself now; the muscle in his jaw isn’t jumping quite so much. “Prove you’re sorry.”
You shake your head, in confusion rather than refusal. “How?”
“Word’s spreading. A couple of the biggest gossips in the comm were with Ykka when she met you, and apparently you confirmed what a lot of the roggas have been whispering among themselves.” You almost flinch at his use of rogga. He was such a polite boy once. “Topside, you said this Season won’t end for thousands of years. Was that an exaggeration, or the truth?”
You sigh and rub a hand over your hair. It’s a thick, curly mess at the roots. You need to retwist your locks, but you haven’t because you haven’t had time and because it feels like there’s no point.
“Seasons always end,” you say. “Father Earth keeps his own equilibrium. It’s just a question of how long it will take.”
“How long?” It’s barely a question. His tone is flat, resigned. He suspects the answer already.
And he deserves your honest, best guess. “Ten thousand years?” For the Yumenes Rifting to stop venting and the skies to clear. Not long at all by the usual scale of tectonics, but the real danger lies in what the ash might set off. Enough ash covering the warm surface of the sea, and the ice might grow at the poles. That means saltier seas. Drier climates. Permafrost. Glaciers marching, spreading. And the most habitable part of the world should that happen, the Equatorials, will still be hot and toxic.