Another call from somewhere far away, and the people carrying you come to a halt. They glance at each other and set you down with the ease and uniformity of people who’ve practiced doing the same maneuver in unison many times. You feel the stretcher settle onto a soft, powdery layer of ash, over a thicker layer of ash, over what might be a road. Then your stretcher-bearers move away, opening packs and settling down in a ritual that is familiar from your own months on the road. Breaktime.
You know this ritual. You should get up. Eat something. Check your boots for holes or stones, your feet for unnoticed sores, make sure your mask – wait, are you wearing one? If everyone else is… You kept that in your runny-sack, didn’t you? Where is your runny-sack?
Someone walks out of the gloom and ashfall. Tall, plateau-broad, identity stripped by the clothes and mask but restored by the familiar frizzy texture of the ashblow mane. She crouches near your head. “Hnh. Not dead, after all. Guess I lose that bet with Tonkee.”
“Hjarka,” you say. Your voice rasps worse than hers does.
You guess by the flexing of her mask that she grins. It feels odd to perceive her smile without the usual undercurrent of menace from her sharp-filed teeth. “And your brains are probably still intact. I win the bet with Ykka, at least.” She glances around and bellows, “Lerna!”
You try to lift a hand to grab her pants leg. It feels like trying to move a mountain. You ought to be able to move mountains, so you concentrate and get it halfway up – and then forget why you wanted Hjarka’s attention. She glances around then, fortunately, and eyes your upraised hand. It’s shaking with the effort. After a moment’s consideration, she sighs and takes your hand, then looks away as if embarrassed.
“Happening,” you manage.
“Rust if I know. We didn’t need another break this soon.”
Not what you meant, but it takes too much of an effort to try to say the rest. So you lie there, with your hand being held by a woman who clearly would rather be doing anything else, but who’s deigning to show you compassion because she thinks you need it. You don’t, but you’re glad she’s trying.
Two more forms resolve out of the swirl, both recognizable by their familiar shapes. One is male and slight, the other female and pillowy. The narrow one displaces Hjarka at your head and leans in to pull off the goggles that you hadn’t realized you were wearing. “Give me a rock,” he says. It’s Lerna, making no sense.
“What?” you say.
He ignores you. Tonkee, the other person, elbows Hjarka, who sighs and rummages through her bag until she finds something small. She offers it to Lerna.
He lays a hand on your cheek while holding the object up. The thing starts to glow with a familiar tone of white light. You realize it’s a piece of a Castrima-under crystal – lighting up because they do that in contact with orogenes, as Lerna is now in contact with you. Ingenious. Using this light, he leans in and peers closely at your eyes. “Pupils contracting normally,” he murmurs to himself. His hand twitches on your cheek. “No fever.”
“I feel heavy,” you say.
“You’re alive,” he says, as if this is a completely reasonable response. No one is speaking a language you can understand today. “Motor skills sluggish. Cognition…?”
Tonkee leans in. “What did you dream?”
It makes as much sense as Give me a rock, but you try to answer because you’re too out of it to realize you shouldn’t. “There was a city,” you murmur. A bit of ash falls onto your lashes and you twitch. Lerna puts your goggles back on. “It was alive. There was an obelisk above it.” Above it? “In it, maybe. I think.”
Tonkee nods. “Obelisks rarely linger directly over human habitations. I had a friend back at Seventh who had some theories about that. Want to hear them?”
Finally it sinks in that you’re doing something stupid: encouraging Tonkee. You put a mighty effort into glaring at her. “No.”
Tonkee glances at Lerna. “Her faculties seem intact. Little sluggish, maybe, but then she always is.”
“Yes, thank you for confirming that.” Lerna finishes doing whatever he’s doing, and sits back on his heels. “Want to try walking, Essun?”
“Isn’t that kind of sudden?” asks Tonkee. She’s frowning, which is visible even around her goggles. “What with the coma and all.”
“You know as well as I do that Ykka’s not going to give her much more recovery time. It might even be good for her.”
Tonkee sighs. But she’s the one to help when Lerna slides an arm under you, levering you up from prone to sitting. Even this takes an effort of ages. You get dizzy the instant you’re upright, but it passes. Something’s wrong, though. It’s a testament to how much you’ve been through, maybe, that you seem to have developed a permanently crooked posture, your right shoulder sagging and arm dragging as if
as if it is made of
Oh. Oh.
The others stop bothering you as you realize what’s happened. They watch you heft the shoulder, as much as you can, to try to drag your right arm more into view. It’s heavy. Your shoulder hurts when you do this, even though most of the joint is still flesh, because the weight pulls against that flesh. Some of the tendons have transformed, but they’re still attached to living bone. Gritty bits of something chafe within what should be a smooth ball-and-socket. It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would, though, after watching Alabaster go through this. So that’s something.
The rest of the arm, from which someone has stripped your shirt and jacket sleeves in order to bare it, has changed nearly past recognition. It’s your arm, you’re pretty sure. Beyond the fact that it’s still attached to your body, it’s got the shape you know like your own – well. Not as graceful and tapered as it used to be when you were young. You were heavyset for a while, and that still shows along the plush-looking forearm and slight sag under your upper arm. The bicep is more defined than it used to be; two years of surviving. The hand is clamped into a fist, the whole arm slightly cocked at the elbow. You always did tend to make fists while you were wrestling with a particularly difficult bit of orogeny.
But the mole, which once sat in the middle of your forearm like a tiny black target, is gone. You can’t turn the arm over for a look at your elbow, so you touch it. The keloid scar from where you once fell is impossible to feel anymore, though it should be slightly raised compared to the skin around it. That level of fine definition has vanished into a texture that is gritty and dense, like unpolished sandstone. Perhaps self-destructively you rub it, but no particles break off beneath your fingertips; it’s more solid than it looks. The color is an even, allover grayish tan that looks nothing like your skin.
“It was like this when Hoa brought you back.” Lerna, who has been silent throughout your examination. His voice is neutral. “He says he needs your permission to, ah…”
You stop trying to rub your stone skin off. Maybe it’s shock, maybe fear has robbed you of shock, maybe you’re really not feeling anything.
“So tell me,” you say to Lerna. The effort of sitting up, and seeing your arm, have restored your wits a little. “In your, uh, professional opinion, what should I do about this?”
“I think you should either let Hoa eat it off, or let one of us take a sledgehammer to it.”
You wince. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think anything lighter would put a dent in it. You forget I had plenty of chances to examine Alabaster when this was happening to him.”
Out of nowhere, you think of Alabaster having to be reminded to eat because he no longer felt hunger. It’s not relevant, but the thought just pops in there. “He let you?”
“I didn’t give him a choice. I needed to know if it was contagious, since it seemed to be spreading on him. I took a sample once, and he joked that Antimony – the stone eater – would want it back.”
It wouldn’t have been a joke. Alabaster always smiled when he spoke the rawest truths. “And did you give it back?”
“You better believe I did.” Lerna runs a hand over his hair, displacing a small pile of ash. “Listen, we have to wrap the arm at night so that the chill of it doesn’t depress your body temperature. You’ve got stretch marks on the shoulder where it pulls your skin. I suspect it’s deforming the bones and straining the tendons; the joint isn’t built to carry this kind of weight.” He hesitates. “We can take it off now and give it to Hoa later, if you like. I don’t see any reason why you have to… to do it his way.”