Hoa doesn’t seem to move at first, but there’s a brief flit of wind against your side, and abruptly a hard hand nudges the back of your soft one. “He will live for an eternity,” Hoa says, as softly as his hollow voice can manage. “For as long as the Earth exists, something of who he was will, too. You’re the one still in danger of being lost.” He pauses. “But if you choose not to finish what we have begun, I will understand.”
You look up and then, for only maybe the second or third time, you think you understand him. He knows you’re pregnant. Maybe he knew it before you did, though what that means to him, you cannot guess. He knows what underlies your thoughts about Alabaster, too, and he’s saying… that you aren’t alone. That you don’t have nothing. You have Hoa, and Ykka and Tonkee and maybe Hjarka, friends, who know you in all your rogga monstrosity and accept you despite it. And you have Lerna – quietly demanding, relentless Lerna, who does not give up and does not tolerate your excuses and does not pretend that love precludes pain. He is the father of another child that will probably be beautiful. All of your children so far have been. Beautiful, and powerful. You close your eyes against regret.
But that brings the sounds of the city to your ears, and you are startled to catch laughter on the wind, loud enough to carry up from the ground level, probably over by one of the communal fires. Which reminds you that you have Castrima, too, if you want it. This ridiculous comm of unpleasant people who are impossibly still together, which you have fought for and which has, however grudgingly, fought for you in return. It pulls your mouth into a smile.
“No,” you say. “I’ll do what needs doing.”
Hoa considers you. “You’re certain.”
Of course you are. Nothing has changed. The world is broken and you can fix it; that’s what Alabaster and Lerna both charged you to do. Castrima is more reason for you to do it, not less. And it’s time you stopped being a coward, too, and went to find Nassun. Even if she hates you. Even if you left her to face a terrible world alone. Even if you are the worst mother in the world… you did your best.
And maybe it means you’re choosing one of your children – the one who has the best chance of survival – over the other. But that’s no different from what mothers have had to do since the dawn of time: sacrifice the present, in hopes of a better future. If the sacrifice this time has been harder than most… Fine. So be it. This is a mother’s job, too, after all, and you’re a rusting ten-ringer. You’ll see to it.
“So what are we waiting for?” you ask.
“Only you,” Hoa replies.
“Right. How much time do we have?”
“Perigee is in two days. I can get you to Corepoint in one.”
“Okay.” You take a deep breath. “I need to say some goodbyes.”
With perfect bland casualness, Hoa says, “I can carry others with us.”
Oh.
You want it, don’t you? To not be alone at the end. To have Lerna’s quiet implacable presence at your back. Tonkee will be furious at not getting a chance to see Corepoint, if you leave her behind. Hjarka will be furious if you take Tonkee without her. Danel wants to chronicle the world’s transformation, for obscure Equatorial lorist reasons.
Ykka, though —
“No.” You sober and sigh. “I’m being selfish again. Castrima needs Ykka. And they’ve all suffered enough.”
Hoa just looks at you. How the rust does he manage to convey such emotion with a stone face? Even if that emotion is dry skepticism of your self-abnegating bullshit. You laugh – once, and it’s rusty. Been a while.
“I think,” Hoa says slowly, “that if you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”
So many layers in the strata of that statement.
Okay, though. Right. This isn’t just about you, and it never has been. All things change in a Season – and some part of you is tired, finally, of the lonely, vengeful woman narrative. Maybe Nassun isn’t the only one you needed a home for. And maybe not even you should try to change the world alone.
“Let’s go ask them, then,” you say. “And then let’s go get my little girl.”
***
To: Yaetr Innovator Dibars
From: Alma Innovator Dibars
I’ve been asked to inform you that your funding has been cut. You are to return to the University forthwith by the least expensive means possible.
And since I know you, old friend, let me add this. You believe in logic. You think even our esteemed colleagues are immune to prejudice, or politics, in the face of hard facts. This is why you’ll never be allowed within a mile of the Funding and Allocations committee, no matter how many masterships you earn.
Our funding comes from Old Sanze. From families so ancient that they have books in their collections older than all the Universities – and they won’t let us touch them. How do you think those families got to be so old, Yaetr? Why has Sanze lasted this long? It’s not because of stonelore.
You cannot go to people like that and ask them to fund a research project that makes heroes of roggas! You just can’t. They’ll faint, and when they wake up, they’ll have you killed. They’ll destroy you as surely as they would any threat to their livelihoods and legacy. Yes, I know that’s not what you think you’re doing, but it is.
And if that isn’t enough, here is a fact that might be logical enough even for you: The Guardians are starting to ask questions. I don’t know why. No one knows what drives those monsters. But that’s why I voted with the committee majority, even if it means you hate me from here on. I want you alive, old friend, not dead in an alley with a glass poniard through your heart. I’m sorry.
Safe travels homeward.
12
Nassun, not alone
Corepoint is silent.
Nassun notices this when the vehimal in which she’s traversed the planet emerges in its corresponding station, on the other side of the world. This is located in one of the strange, slanting buildings that encircle the massive hole at Corepoint’s center. She cries for help, cries for someone, cries, as the vehimal’s door opens and she drags Schaffa’s limp, unresponsive body through the silent corridors and then the silent streets. He’s big and heavy, so although she tries in various ways to use magic to assist with dragging his weight – badly; magic is not meant to be used for something so gross and localized, and her concentration is poor in the moment – she makes it only a block or so away from the compound before she, too, collapses, in exhaustion.
***
Somerusting day, somerusting year.
Found these books, blank. The stuff they’re made of isn’t paper. Thicker. Doesn’t bend easily. Good thing, maybe, or would be dust by now. Preserve my words for eternity! Ha! Longer than my rusting sanity.
Don’t know what to write. Innon would laugh and tell me to write about sex. Right, so: I jerked off today, for the first time since A dragged me to this place. Thought about him in the middle of it and couldn’t come. Maybe I’m too old? That’s what Syen would say. She’s just mad I could still knock her up.
Forgetting how Innon used to smell. Everything smells like the sea here, but it’s not like the sea near Meov. Different water? Innon used to smell like the water there. Every time the wind blows I lose a little more of him.
Corepoint. How I hate this place.
***
Corepoint isn’t a ruin, quite. That is, it isn’t ruined, and it isn’t uninhabited.
On the surface of the open, endless ocean, the city is an anomaly of buildings – not very tall compared to either the recently lost Yumenes or the longer-lost Syl Anagist. Corepoint is unique, however, among both past and present cultures. The structures of Corepoint are sturdily built, of rustless metal and strange polymers and other materials that can withstand the often hurricane-force salt winds that dominate this side of the world. The few plants that grow here, in the parks that were constructed so long ago, are no longer the lovely, designer, hothouse things favored by Corepoint’s builders. Corepoint trees – hybridized and feral descendants of the original landscaping – are huge, woody things, twisted into artful shapes by the wind. They have long since broken free of their orderly beds and containers and now gnarl over the pressed-fiber sidewalks. Unlike the architecture of Syl Anagist, here there are many more sharp angles, meant to minimize the buildings’ resistance to the wind.