So you fight your instincts and hide, much as that rankles. There are others here, crouching amid the central circle of tents – the comm’s smaller children, its bare handful of elders, one woman so pregnant that she can’t move with any real flexibility even though she’s got a loaded crossbow in her hands, two knife-wielding Breeders who’ve obviously been charged with defending her and the children.
When you poke your head up to observe the fighting, you catch a glimpse of something stunning. Danel, having appropriated one of the spear-whittled sticks that form the fence, is using it to carve a bloody swath through the raiders. She’s phenomenal, spinning and stabbing and blocking and stabbing again, twirling the stick in between attacks as if she’s fought commless a million times. That’s not just being an experienced Strongback; that’s something else. She’s just too good. But it follows, doesn’t it? Not like Rennanis made her the general of their army for her charm.
It isn’t much of a fight in the end. Twenty or thirty scrawny commless against trained, fed, prepared comm members? This is why comms survive Seasons, and why long-term commlessness is a death sentence. This lot was probably desperate; there can’t have been much traffic along the road in the past few months. What were they thinking?
Their orogene, you realize. That’s who they expected to win this fight for them. But he’s still not moving, orogenically or physically.
You get up, walking past the lingering knots of fighting. Self-consciously adjusting your mask, you step off the road and slip through the perimeter stakes, moving into the deeper darkness of the stone forest. The firelight of the camp leaves you night-blind, so you stop a moment to allow your eyes to adjust. No telling what kinds of traps the commless have left here; you shouldn’t be doing this alone. Again you’re surprised, though, because between one blink and the next, you suddenly begin to see in silver. Insects, leaf litter, a spiderweb, even the rocks – all of it now flickers in wild, veined patterns, their cells and particulates etched out by the lattice that connects them.
And people. You stop as you make them out, well camouflaged against the silver bloom of the forest. The rogga is still where he’s been, a brighter etching against more delicate lines. But there are also two small shapes crouched in a cavelet, about twenty feet further into the forest. Two other bodies, somehow high overhead atop the jagged, curving rocks of the forest. Lookouts, maybe? None of them move much. Can’t tell if they’ve seen you, or if they’re watching the battle somehow. You’re frozen, startled by this sudden shift in your perception. Is this some by-product of learning to see silver in yourself and the obelisks? Maybe once you can do that, you see it everywhere. Or maybe you’re hallucinating all of it now, like an afterimage against your eyelids. After all, Alabaster never mentioned being able to see like this – but then, when did Alabaster ever try to be a good teacher?
You grope forward for a bit, hand out in front of you in case it is some kind of illusion, but if so, it’s at least an accurate one. While it’s strange to put your foot down on a lattice of silver, after a while you get used to it.
The orogene’s distinctive lattice and that still-held torus aren’t far, but he’s somewhere higher up than the ground. Maybe ten feet above where you stand. This is explained somewhat when the ground abruptly slopes upward and your hand touches stone. Your regular vision has adapted enough that you can see there’s a pillar here, crooked and probably climbable, at least by someone who’s got more than one arm. So you stop at the foot of it and say, “Hey.”
No response. You become aware of breathing: quick, shallow, pent. Like someone who’s trying not to be heard breathing.
“Hey.” Squinting in the dark, you finally make out some kind of structure of stacked branches and old boards and debris. A blind, maybe. From up there in the blind, it must be possible to see the road. Sight doesn’t matter for the average orogene; untrained ones can’t direct their power at all. A Fulcrum-trained orogene, though, needs line of sight to be able to distinguish between freezing useful supplies, or just freezing the people defending same.
Something shifts in the blind above you. Has there been a catch in the breathing? You try to think of something to say, but all that’s in your head is a question: What’s a Fulcrum-trained orogene doing among the commless? Must have been out on an assignment when the Rifting occurred. Without a Guardian – or he’d be dead – so that means he’s fifth ring or higher, or maybe a three- or four-ringer who’s lost their higher-ranked partner. You envision yourself, if you’d been on the road to Allia when the Rifting struck. Knowing your Guardian might come for you, but gambling that he might instead write you off for dead… no. That ends the imagining right there. Schaffa would have come for you. Schaffa did come for you.
But that was between Seasons. Guardians supposedly do not join comms when Seasons come, which means they die – and, in fact, the only Guardian you’ve seen since the Rifting was that one with Danel and the Rennanis army. She died in the boilbug storm that you invoked, and you’re glad of it, since she was one of the bare-skin killers and there’s more than the usual wrong with that kind. Either way, here’s another ex-blackjacket out here alone, and maybe afraid, and maybe hair-triggered to kill. You know what that’s like, don’t you? But this one hasn’t attacked yet. You have to find some way to make a connection.
“I remember,” you say. It’s soft, a murmur. Like you don’t want to hear even yourself. “I remember the crucibles. The instructors, killing us to save us. Did they m-make you have children, too?” Corundum. Your thoughts jerk away from memories. “Did they – shit.” The hand that Schaffa once broke, your right hand, is somewhere in whatever passes for Hoa’s belly. You still feel it, though. Phantom ache across phantom bones. “I know they broke you. Your hand. All of us. They broke us so they could —”
You hear, very clearly, a soft, horrified inhalation from within the blind.
The torus whips into a blurring, blistering spin, and explodes outward. You’re so close that it almost catches you. That gasp was enough warning, though, and so you’ve braced yourself orogenically, even if you couldn’t do so physically. Physically you flinch and it’s too much for your precarious, one-armed balance. You fall backward, landing hard on your ass – but you’ve been drilled since childhood in how to retain control on one level even as you lose it in another, so in the same instant you flex your sessapinae and simply slap his fulcrum out of the earth, inverting it. You’re much stronger; it’s easy. You react magically, too, grabbing those whipping tendrils of silver that the torus has stirred – and belatedly you realize orogeny affects magic, but isn’t magic itself, in fact the magic flinches away from it; that’s why you can’t work high-level orogeny without negatively impacting your ability to deploy magic, how nice to finally understand! Regardless, you tamp the wild threads of magic back down, and quell everything at once, so that nothing worse than a rime of frost dusts your body. It’s cold, but only on your skin. You’ll live.
Then you let go – and all the orogeny and magic snaps away from you like stretched rubber. Everything in you seems to twang in response, in resonance, and – oh – oh no – you feel the amplitude of the resonance rise as your cells begin to align… and compress into stone.
You can’t stop it. You can, however, direct it. In the instant that you have, you decide which body part you can afford to lose. Hair! No, too many strands, too much of it distant from the live follicles; you can do it but it’ll take too long and half your scalp will be stone by the time you’re done. Toes? You need to be able to walk. Fingers? You’ve only got one hand, need to keep it intact as long as you can.
Breasts. Well, you’re not planning on having more children anyway.
It’s enough to channel the resonance, the stoning, into just one. Have to take it through the glands under the armpit, but you manage to keep it above the muscle layer; that might keep the damage from impairing your movement and breathing. You pick the left breast, to offset your missing right arm. The right breast is the one you always liked better, anyway. Prettier. And then you lie there when it’s done, still alive, hyperaware of the extra weight on your chest, too shocked to mourn. Yet.