But she is orogene, and she can no longer shut off the sesuna than she can sight or sound or touch. Which is why her smile falters, and her joy vanishes, because the instant she sees how the network of threads within him is already beginning to fade, she can no longer deny that he is dying.
It’s slow. He could last a few weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year, with what’s left. But where every other living thing churns forth its own silver almost by accident, where it flows and stutters and gums up the works between cells, there is nothing between his cells but a trickle. What’s left in him mostly runs along his nervous system, and she can see a glaring, gaping emptiness at what used to be the core of his silver network, in his sessapinae. Without his corestone, as he warned her, he will not last long.
Schaffa’s eyes have drifted shut. He’s asleep, exhausted by pushing his weakened body through the streets. But he isn’t the one who did that, is he? Nassun gets to her feet, shaking, keeping her hands on Schaffa’s shoulders. His heavy head presses against her chest. She stares at the little metal shard bitterly, understanding at once why Father Earth did this to him.
It knows she means to bring the Moon down, and that this will create a cataclysm far worse than the Shattering. It wants to live. It knows Nassun loves Schaffa, and that until now she has seen destroying the world as the only way to give him peace. Now, however, it has remade Schaffa, offering him to Nassun as a kind of living ultimatum.
Now he is free, the Earth taunts by this wordless gesture. Now he can have peace without death. And if you want him to live, little enemy, there is only one way.
Steel never said it couldn’t be done, only that it shouldn’t. Maybe Steel is wrong. Maybe, as a stone eater, Schaffa won’t be alone and sad forever. Steel is mean and awful, which is why no one wants to be with him. But Schaffa is good and kind. Surely he will find someone else to love.
Especially if all the world is stone eaters, too.
Humanity, she decides, is a small price to pay for Schaffa’s future.
***
Hoa says that Nassun has gone underground, to Warrant where the Guardians lie, and the panic of this is sour in your mouth as you trot around the hole, looking for a way in. You don’t dare ask Hoa to simply transport you to her; Gray Man’s allies lurk everywhere now, and they will kill you as surely as they did Lerna. Allies of Hoa are present, too; you have a blurry memory of seeing two streaking mountains crash into one another, one driving the other off. But until this business with the Moon is settled, going into the Earth is too dangerous. All of the stone eaters are here, you sess; a thousand human-sized mountains in and underneath Corepoint, some of them watching you run through the streets looking for your daughter. All of their ancient factions and private battles will come to a head tonight, one way or another.
Hjarka and the others have followed you, though more slowly; they do not feel your panic. At last you spot one pylon building that’s been opened – cut open, it seems, as if with an enormous knife; three irregular slashes and then someone has made the door fall outward. It’s a foot thick. But beyond it is a wide, low-ceilinged corridor going down into darkness.
Someone’s climbing out of it, though, as you reach it and stumble to a halt.
“Nassun!” you blurt, because it’s her.
The girl framed by the doorway is taller than you remember by several inches. Her hair is longer now, braided back in two plaits that fall behind her shoulders. You barely recognize her. She stops short at the sight of you, a faint wrinkle of confusion between her brows, and you realize she’s having trouble recognizing you, too. Then realization comes, and she stares as if you are the last thing in the world she expected to see. Because you are.
“Hi, Mama,” Nassun says.
14
I, at the end of days
I am a witness to what follows. I will tell this as such.
I watch you and your daughter face each other for the first time in two years, across a gulf of hardship. Only I know what you both have been through. Each of you can judge the other only on presences, actions, and scars, at least for now. You: much thinner than the mother she last saw when she decided to skip creche one day. The desert has weathered you, drying your skin; the acid rain has bleached your locks to a paler brown than they should be, and the gray shows more. The clothes that hang from your body are also bleached by ash and acid, and the empty right sleeve of your shirt has been knotted; it dangles, obviously empty, as you catch your breath. And, also a part of Nassun’s first impression of the post-Rifting you: Behind you stands a group of people who all stare at Nassun, some of them with palpable wariness. You, though, show only anguish.
Nassun is as still as a stone eater. She’s grown only four inches since the Rifting, but it looks to you like a foot. You can see the advent of adolescence upon her – early, but that is the nature of life in lean times. The body takes advantage of safety and abundance when it can, and the nine months she spent in Jekity were good for her. She’s probably going to start menstruating within the next year, if she can find enough food. The biggest changes are immaterial, though. The wariness in her gaze, nothing like the shy diffidence you remember. Her posture: shoulders back, feet braced and square. You told her to stop slouching a million times, and yes, she looks so tall and strong now that she’s standing up straight. So beautifully strong.
Her orogeny sits on your awareness like a weight upon the world, rock-steady and precise as a diamond drill. Evil Earth, you think. She sesses just like you.
It’s over before it’s begun. You sense that as surely as you sess her strength, and both make you desperate. “I’ve been looking for you,” you say. You’ve raised your hand without thinking about it. Your fingers open and twitch and close and open again in a gesture that is half grasping, half plea.
Her gaze goes hooded. “I was with Daddy.”
“I know. I couldn’t find you.” It’s redundant, obvious; you hate yourself for babbling. “Are you… all right?”
She looks away, troubled, and it bothers you that her concern so plainly isn’t you. “I need to… My Guardian needs help.”
You go stiff. Nassun has heard from Schaffa of what he was like, before Meov. She knows, intellectually, that the Schaffa you knew and the Schaffa she loves are wholly different people. She’s seen a Fulcrum, and the ways in which it warped its inmates. She remembers how you used to go stiff, just the way you are now, at even a glimpse of the color burgundy – and finally, here at the end of the world, she understands why. She knows you better now than ever before in her life.
And yet. To her, Schaffa is the man who protected her from raiders – and from her father. He is the man who soothed her when she was afraid, tucked her into bed at night. She has seen him fight his own brutal nature, and the Earth itself, in order to be the parent she needs. He has helped her learn to love herself for what she is.
Her mother? You. Have done none of these things.
And in that pent moment, as you fight past the memory of Innon falling to pieces and the burning ache of broken bones in a hand you no longer possess, with Never say no to me ringing in your head, she intuits the thing that you have, until now, denied:
That it is hopeless. That there can be no relationship, no trust, between you and her, because the two of you are what the Stillness and the Season have made you. That Alabaster was right, and some things really are too broken to fix. Nothing to do but destroy them entirely, for mercy’s sake.
Nassun shakes her head once while you stand there twitching. She looks away. Shakes her head again. Her shoulders bow a little, not in a lazy slouch, but weariness. She does not blame you, but neither does she expect anything from you. And right now, you’re just in the way.
So she turns to walk away, and that shocks you out of your fugue. “Nassun?”
“He needs help,” she says again. Her head is down, her shoulders tight. She doesn’t stop walking. You inhale and start after her. “I have to help him.”
You know what’s happening. You’ve felt it, feared it, all along. Behind you, you hear Danel stop the others. Maybe she thinks you and your daughter need space. You ignore them and run after Nassun. You grab her shoulder, try to turn her around. “Nassun, what —” She shrugs you off, so hard that you stagger. Your balance has been shot since you lost the arm, and she’s stronger than she was. She doesn’t notice you almost fall. She keeps going. “Nassun!” She doesn’t even look back.