“It’s called a station,” Steel explains, after a moment. “It’s old. You would call it a deadciv ruin, although this one is still intact, nestled within another set of ruins that aren’t. A long time ago, people used stations, or rather the vehicles kept within them, to travel long distances far more efficiently than walking. These days, however, only we stone eaters and the Guardians remember that the stations exist.” His smile, which hasn’t changed since he appeared, is still and wry. It seems meant for Schaffa somehow.
“We all pay a price for power,” Schaffa says. His voice is cool and smooth in that way he gets when he’s thinking about doing bad things.
“Yes.” Steel pauses for just a beat too long. “A price must be paid to use this method of transportation, as well.”
“We don’t have any money or anything good to barter,” Nassun says, troubled.
“Fortunately, there are other ways to pay.” Steel abruptly stands at a different angle, his face tilted upward. Nassun follows this, turning, and sees – oh. The sapphire, which has gotten a little closer overnight. Now it’s halfway between them and Jekity.
“The station,” Steel continues, “is from a time before the Seasons. The time when the obelisks were built. All the lingering artifacts of that civilization recognize the same power source.”
“You mean…” Nassun inhales. “The silver.”
“Is that what you call it? How poetic.”
Nassun shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Oh, how the world has changed.” Nassun frowns, but Steel does not explain this cryptic statement. “Stay on this road until you reach the Old Man’s Pucker. Do you know where that is?”
Nassun remembers seeing it on maps of the Antarctics a lifetime ago, and giggling at the name. She glances at Schaffa, who nods and says, “We can find it.”
“Then I’ll meet you there. The ruin is at the exact center of the grass forest, within the inner ring. Enter the Pucker just after dawn. Don’t dawdle reaching the center; you won’t want to still be in the forest after dusk.” Then Steel pauses, shifting into a new position – one that is distinctly thoughtful. His face is turned off to the side, fingers touching his chin. “I thought it would be your mother.”
Schaffa goes still. Nassun is surprised by the flash of heat, then cold, that moves through her. Slowly, while sifting through this strange complexity of emotion, she says, “What do you mean?”
“I expected her to be the one to do this, is all.” Steel doesn’t shrug, but something in his voice suggests nonchalance. “I threatened her comm. Her friends, the people she cares about now. I thought they would turn on her, and then this choice would seem more palatable to her.”
The people she cares about now. “She’s not in Tirimo anymore?”
“No. She has joined another comm.”
“And they… didn’t turn on her?”
“No. Surprisingly.” Steel’s eyes slide over to meet Nassun’s. “She knows where you are now. The Gate told her. But she isn’t coming, or at least not yet. She wants to see her friends safely settled first.”
Nassun sets her jaw. “I’m not in Jekity anymore, anyway. And soon she won’t have the Gate, either, so she won’t be able to find me again.”
Steel turns fully to face her, this movement too slow and human-smooth to be human, though his astonishment seems genuine. She hates it when he moves slowly. It makes her get goose bumps.
“Nothing lasts forever, indeed,” he says.
“What’s that mean?”
“Only that I’ve underestimated you, little Nassun.” Nassun instantly dislikes this term of address. He shifts again to the thoughtful pose, fast this time, to her relief. “I think I’d better not do so again.”
With that, he vanishes. Nassun frowns at Schaffa, who shakes his head. They shoulder their packs and head west.
2400: Eastern Equatorials (check if node network was thin in this area, because…), unknown comm. Old local song about a nurse who stopped a sudden eruption and pyroclastic flow by turning it to ice. One of her patients threw himself in front of a crossbow bolt to protect her from the mob. Mob let her go; she vanished.
— Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars
Syl Anagist: Four
All energy is the same, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.
This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. The great machine called the Plutonic Engine is the instrument. We are its tuners.
And this is the goal: Geoarcanity. Geoarcanity seeks to establish an energetic cycle of infinite efficiency. If we are successful, the world will never know want or strife again… or so we are told. The conductors explain little beyond what we must know to fulfill our roles. It is enough to know that we – small, unimportant we – will help to set humanity on a new path toward an unimaginably bright future. We may be tools, but we are fine ones, put to a magnificent purpose. It is easy to find pride in that.
We are attuned enough to each other that the loss of Tetlewha causes trouble for a time. When we join to form our initializing network, it’s imbalanced. Tetlewha was our countertenor, the half wavelengths of the spectrum; without him I am closest, but my natural resonance is a little high. The resulting network is weaker than it should be. Our feeder threads keep trying to reach for Tetlewha’s empty middle range.
Gaewha is able to compensate for the loss, finally. She reaches deeper, resonates more powerfully, and this plugs the gap. We must spend several days reforging all the network’s connections to create new harmony, but it isn’t difficult to do this, just time-consuming. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to do it.
Kelenli joins us in the network only occasionally. This is frustrating, because her voice – deep and powerful and foot-tingling in its sharpness – is perfect. Better than Tetlewha’s, wider ranging than all of us together. But we are told by the conductors not to get used to her. “She’ll serve during the actual start-up of the Engine,” one of them says when I ask, “but only if she can’t manage to teach you how to do what she does. Conductor Gallat wants her on standby only, come Launch Day.”
This seems sensible, on the surface.
When Kelenli is part of us, she takes point. This is simply natural, because her presence is so much greater than ours. Why? Something in the way she is made? Something else. There is a… held note. A perpetual hollow burn at the midpoint of her balanced lines, at their fulcrum, which none of us understand. A similar burn rests in each of us, but ours is faint and intermittent, occasionally flaring only to quickly fade back to quiescence. Hers blazes steadily, its fuel apparently limitless.
Whatever this held-note burn is, the conductors have discovered, it meshes beautifully with the devouring chaos of the onyx. The onyx is the control cabochon of the whole Plutonic Engine, and while there are other ways to start up the Engine – cruder ways, workarounds involving subnetworks or the moonstone – on Launch Day we will absolutely need the onyx’s precision and control. Without it, our chances of successfully initiating Geoarcanity diminish greatly… but none of us, thus far, has had the strength to hold the onyx for more than a few minutes. We observe in awe, however, as Kelenli rides it for a solid hour, then actually seems unfazed when she disengages from it. When we engage the onyx, it punishes us, stripping everything we can spare and leaving us in a shutdown sleep for hours or days – but not her. Its threads caress rather than rip at her. The onyx likes her. This explanation is irrational, but it occurs to all of us, so that’s how we begin to think of it. Now she must teach us to be more likable to the onyx, in her stead.
When we are done rebalancing and they let us up from the wire chairs that maintain our bodies while our minds are engaged, and we stagger and must lean on the conductors to make it back to our individual quarters… when all of this is done, she comes to visit us. Individually, so the conductors won’t suspect anything. In face-to-face meetings, speaking audible nonsense – and meanwhile, earthspeaking sense to all of us at once.