I won’t let them find your boy, Syen. I won’t let them take him, and burn his brain, and put him in the wire chair. I won’t let them find your girl, either, if she’s one of us, or even if she’s Guardian-potential. There won’t be a Fulcrum left by the time I’m done. What follows won’t be good, but it’ll be bad for everyone – rich and poor, Equatorials and commless, Sanzeds and Arctics, now they’ll all know. Every season is the Season for us. The apocalypse that never ends. They could’ve chosen a different kind of equality. We could’ve all been safe and comfortable together, surviving together, but they didn’t want that. Now nobody gets to be safe. Maybe that’s what it will take for them to finally realize things have to change.
Then I’ll shut it down and put the Moon back. (It shouldn’t stone me, the first trajectory adjustment. Unless I underestimate Shouldn’t.) All I’m rusting good for anyway.
After that… it’ll be up to you, Syen. Make it better. I know I told you it wasn’t possible, that there was no way to make the world better, but I was wrong. I’m breaking it because I was wrong. Start it over, you were right, change it. Make it better for the children you have left. Make a world Corundum could have been happy in. Make a world where people like us, you and me and Innon and our sweet boy, our beautiful boy, could have stayed whole.
Antimony says I might get to see that world. Guess we’ll see. Rust it. I’m procrastinating. She’s waiting. Back to Yumenes today.
For you, Innon. For you, Coru. For you, Syen.
***
At night, Nassun can see the Moon.
This was terrifying, on the first night that she looked outside and noticed a strange pale whiteness outlining the streets and trees of the city, and then looked up to see a great white sphere in the sky. It is enormous, to her – bigger than the sun, far larger than the stars, trailed by a faint streak of luminescence that she does not know is the off-gassing of ice that has adhered to the lunar surface over the course of its travels. The white of it is the true surprise. She knows very little of the Moon – only what Schaffa told her. It is a satellite, he said, Father Earth’s lost child, a thing whose light reflects the sun. She expected it to be yellow, given that. It disturbs her to have been so wrong.
It disturbs her more that there is a hole in the thing, at nearly its dead center: a great, yawning darkness like the pinpoint pupil of an eye. It’s too small to tell for now, but Nassun thinks that maybe if she stares at it long enough, she will see stars on the other side of the Moon, through this hole.
Somehow it’s fitting. Whatever happened ages ago to cause the Moon’s loss was surely cataclysmic on multiple levels. If the Earth suffered the Shattering, then the fact that the Moon also bears scars feels normal and right. With a thumb, Nassun rubs the palm of her hand where her mother broke the bones, a lifetime ago.
And yet, when she stands in the roof garden and stares at it for long enough, she begins to find the Moon beautiful. It is an icewhite eye, and she has no reason to think badly of those. Like the silver when it swirls and whorls within something like a snail’s shell. It makes her think of Schaffa – that he is watching over her in his way – and this makes her feel less alone.
Over time, Nassun discovers that she can use the obelisks to get a feel for the Moon. The sapphire is on the other side of the world, but there are others here above the ocean, drawn near in response to her summons, and she has been tapping and taming each in turn. The obelisks help her feel (not sess) that the Moon will soon be at its closest point. If she lets it go, it will pass, and begin to rapidly diminish until it vanishes from the sky. Or she can open the Gate, and tug on it, and change everything. The cruelty of the status quo, or the comfort of oblivion. The choice feels clear to her… but for one thing.
One night, as Nassun sits gazing up at the great white sphere, she says aloud, “It was on purpose, wasn’t it? You not telling me what would happen to Schaffa. So you could get rid of him.”
The mountain that has been lingering nearby shifts slightly, to a position behind her. “I did try to warn you.”
She turns to look at him. At the look on her face, he utters a soft laugh that sounds self-deprecating. This stops, though, when she says, “If he dies, I’ll hate you more than I hate the world.”
It is a war of attrition, she’s begun to realize, and she’s going to lose. In the weeks (?) or months (?) since they came to Corepoint, Schaffa has noticeably deteriorated, his skin developing an ugly pallor, his hair brittle and dull. People aren’t meant to lie unmoving, blinking but not thinking, for weeks on end. She had to cut his hair earlier that day. The bed cleans the dirt out of it, but it’s gotten oily and lately it keeps getting tangled – and the day before, some of it must have wrapped around his arm when she wrestled him onto his belly, cutting off his circulation in a way she didn’t notice. (She keeps a sheet over him, even though the bed is warm and does not need it. It bothers her that he is naked and undignified.) This morning when she finally noticed the problem, the arm was pale and a little gray. She’s loosed it, chafed it hoping to bring the color back, but it doesn’t look good. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if something’s really wrong with his arm. She might lose all of him like this, slowly but surely, little bits of him dying because she was only almost-nine when this Season began and she’s only almost-eleven now and taking care of invalids wasn’t something anyone taught her in creche.
“If he lives,” Steel replies in his colorless voice, “he will never again experience a moment without agony.” He pauses, gray eyes fixed on her face, as Nassun reverberates with his words, with her own denial, with her own growing sick fear that Steel is right.
Nassun gets to her feet. “I n-need to know how to fix him.”
“You can’t.”
She tightens her hands into fists. For the first time in what feels like centuries, part of her reaches for the strata around her. This means the shield volcano beneath Corepoint… but when she “grasps” it orogenically, she finds with some surprise that it is anchored, somehow. This distracts her for a moment as she has to alter her perception to shift to the silver – and there she finds solid, scintillating pillars of magic driven into the volcano’s foundations, pinning it in place. It’s still active, but it will never erupt because of those pillars. It is as stable as bedrock despite the hole at its core burrowing down to the Earth’s heart.
She shakes this off as irrelevant, and finally voices the thought that has been gathering in her mind over all the days she has dwelled in this city of stone people. “If… if I turn him into a stone eater, he’ll live. And he won’t have any pain. Right?” Steel does not reply. In the lengthening silence, Nassun bites her lip. “So you have to tell me how to – to make him like you. I bet I can do it if I use the Gate. I can do anything with that. Except…”
Except. The Obelisk Gate doesn’t do small things. Just as Nassun feels, sesses, knows that the Gate makes her temporarily omnipotent, she knows, too, that she cannot use it to transform just one man. If she makes Schaffa into a stone eater… every human being on the planet will change in the same manner. Every comm, every commless band, every starving wanderer: Ten thousand still-life cities, instead of just one. All the world will become like Corepoint.
But is that really so terrible a thing? If everyone is a stone eater, there will be no more orogenes and stills. No more children to die, no more fathers to murder them. The Seasons could come and go, and they wouldn’t matter. No one would starve to death ever again. To make the whole world as peaceful as Corepoint… would that not be a kindness?
Steel’s face, which has been tilted up toward the Moon even as his eyes watch her, now slowly pivots to face her. It’s always unnerving to see him move slowly. “Do you know what it feels like to live forever?”
Nassun blinks, thrown. She’s been expecting a fight. “What?”
The moonlight has transformed Steel into a thing of starkest shadows, white and ink against the dimness of the garden. “I asked,” he says, and his voice is almost pleasant, “if you know what it feels like to live forever. Like me. Like your Schaffa. Do you have any inkling as to how old he is? Do you care?”