“Where, then?”
Hoa turns to look at you. He does this slowly. His eyes are wide. “Essun… she’s gone into Warrant.”
***
As Corepoint above, so Warrant below.
Nassun runs through obsidian-carved corridors, close and low ceilinged and claustrophobic. It’s warm down here – not oppressively so, but the warmth is close and omnipresent. The warmth of the volcano, radiating up through the old stone from its heart. She can sess echoes of what was done to create this place, because it was orogeny, not magic, though a more precise and powerful orogeny than anything she’s ever seen. She doesn’t care about any of that, though. She needs to find Schaffa.
The corridors are empty, lit above by more of the strange rectangular lights that she saw in the underground city. Nothing else about this place looks like that place. The underground city felt leisurely in its design. There are hints of beauty in the way the station was built that suggest it was developed gradually, piece by piece, with time for contemplation between each phase of construction. Warrant is dark, utilitarian. As Nassun runs down sloping ramps, past conference rooms, classrooms, mess halls, lounges, she sees that all of them are empty. This facility’s corridors were beaten and clawed out of the shield volcano over a period of days or weeks – hurriedly, though it isn’t clear why. Nassun can tell the hurried nature of the place, somehow, to her own amazement. Fear has soaked into the walls.
But none of that matters. Schaffa is here, somewhere. Schaffa, who’s barely moved for weeks and yet is now somehow running, his body driven by something other than his own mind. Nassun tracks the silver of him, amazed that he’s managed to get so far in the moments that it took her to try to reopen the door he used and then, when it would not open for her, to use the silver to rip it open. But now he is up ahead and —
— so are others. She stops for a moment, panting, suddenly uneasy. Many of them. Dozens… no. Hundreds. And all are like Schaffa, their silver thinner, stranger, and also bolstered from elsewhere.
Guardians. This, then, is where they go during Seasons… but Schaffa has said they will kill him because he is “contaminated.”
They will not. She clenches her fists.
(It does not occur to her that they will kill her, too. Rather, it does, but They will not looms larger in the scope of her reality.)
When Nassun runs through a door at the top of a short stair, however, the close corridor suddenly opens out into a narrow but very long high-ceilinged chamber. It’s high enough that its ceiling is nearly lost in shadow, and its length stretches farther than her eye can see. And all along the walls of this chamber, in neat rows that stack up to the ceiling, there are dozens – hundreds – of strange, square holes. She is reminded of the chambers in a wasp’s nest, except the shape is wrong.
And in every one of them is a body.
Schaffa isn’t far ahead. Somewhere in this room, no longer moving forward. Nassun stops too, apprehension finally overwhelming her driving need to find Schaffa. The silence makes her skin prickle. She cannot help fear. The analogy of the wasp’s nest has stayed with her, and on some level she fears looking into the cells to find a grub staring back at her, perhaps atop the corpse of some creature (person) it has parasitized.
Inadvertently, she looks into the nearest cell. It’s barely wider than the shoulders of the man within, who seems to be asleep. He’s youngish, gray-haired, a Midlatter, wearing the burgundy uniform that Nassun has heard of but never seen. He’s breathing, although slowly. The woman in the cell beside him is wearing the same uniform, though she’s completely different in every other way: an Eastcoaster with completely black skin, hair that has been braided along her scalp in intricate patterns, and wine-dark lips. There is the slightest of smiles on those lips – as if, even in sleep, she cannot lose the habit of it.
Asleep, and more than asleep. Nassun follows the silver in the people in the cells, feeling out their nerves and circulation, and understands then that each is in something like a coma. She thinks maybe normal comas aren’t like this, though. None of these people seems to be hurt or sick. And within each Guardian, there is that shard of corestone – quiescent here, instead of angrily flaring like the one in Schaffa. Strangely, the silver threads in each Guardian are reaching out to the ones around them. Networking together. Bolstering each other, maybe? Charging one another to perform some sort of work, the way a network of obelisks does? She cannot guess.
(They were never meant to continue.)
But then, from the center of the vaulted room, perhaps a hundred feet farther in, she hears a sharp mechanical whirr.
She jumps and stumbles away from the cells, darting a quick, frightened look around to see if the noise has awakened any of the cells’ occupants. They don’t stir. She swallows and calls, softly, “Schaffa?”
Her answer, echoing through the high chamber, is a low, familiar groan.
Nassun stumbles forward, her breath catching. It’s him. Down the middle of the strange chamber stand contraptions, arranged in rows. Each consists of a chair attached to a complex arrangement of silver wire in loops and spars; she’s never seen anything like it. (You have.) Each contraption seems big enough to hold one person, but they’re all empty. And – Nassun leans closer for a better look, then shivers – each rests against a stone pillar that holds an obscenely complicated mechanism. It’s impossible not to notice the tiny scalpels, the delicate forcepslike attachments of varying sizes, and other instruments clearly meant for cutting and drilling…
Somewhere nearby, Schaffa groans. Nassun pushes the cutting things out of her thoughts and hurries down the row —
— to stop in front of the room’s lone occupied wire chair.
The chair has been adjusted somehow. Schaffa sits in it, but he is facedown, his body suspended by the wires, his chopped-off hair parting around his neck. The mechanism behind the chair has come alive, extending up and over his body in a way that feels predatory to her – but it is already retracting as she approaches. The bloodied instruments disappear into the mechanism; she hears more faint whirring sounds. Cleaning, maybe. One tiny, tweezer-like attachment remains, however, holding up a prize that still glistens, faintly, with Schaffa’s blood. A little metal shard, irregular and dark.
Hello, little enemy.
Schaffa isn’t moving. Nassun stares at his body, shaking. She cannot bring herself to shift her perception back to the silver threads, back to magic, to see if he is alive. The bloody wound high on the back of his neck has been neatly stitched, right over the other old scar that she has always wondered about. It’s still bleeding, but it’s clear the wound was inflicted quickly and sealed nearly as fast.
Like a child willing the monster under the bed to not exist, Nassun wills Schaffa’s back and sides to move.
They do, as he draws in a breath. “N-Nassun,” he croaks.
“Schaffa! Schaffa.” She flings herself to her knees and scooches forward to look at his face from underneath the wire contraption, heedless of the blood still dripping down the sides of his neck and face. His eyes, his beautiful white eyes, are half-open – and they are him this time! She sees that and bursts into tears herself. “Schaffa? Are you okay? Are you really okay?”
His speech is slow, slurred. Nassun will not think about why. “Nassun. I.” Even more slowly, his expression shifts, a seaquake in his brows sending a tsunami of slow realization across the rest. His eyes widen. “There’s. No pain.”
She touches his face. “The – the thing is out of you, Schaffa. That metal thing.”
He shuts his eyes and her belly clenches, but then the furrow vanishes from his brow. He smiles again – and for the first time since Nassun met him, there is nothing of tension or falsehood in it. He isn’t smiling to ease his pain or others’ fears. His mouth opens. She can see all his teeth, he’s laughing although weakly, he’s weeping, too, with relief and joy, and it is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She cups his face, mindful of the wound on the back of his neck, and presses her forehead against his, shaking with his soft laughter. She loves him. She just loves him so much.
And because she is touching him, because she loves him, because she is so attuned to his needs and his pain and making him happy, her perception slips into the silver. She doesn’t mean for it to. She just wants to use her eyes to savor the sight of him looking back at her, and her hands to touch his skin, and her ears to hear his voice.