How he ends the fight, by driving his hand up to the wrist through the underside of Umber’s jaw, is horrifying.
Umber makes an awful sound, jerking to a halt – but an instant later, his hand lunges for Schaffa’s throat again, blurring in its speed. Schaffa gasps – so quickly that it might be just a breath, but Nassun hears the alarm in it – and shunts away the strike, but Umber’s still moving, even though his eyes have rolled back in his head and the movements are twitchy, clumsy. Nassun understands then: Umber’s not home anymore. Something else is, working his limbs and reflexes for as long as crucial connections remain in place. And yes: In the next breath, Schaffa flings Umber to the ground, wrenches his hand free, and stomps on his opponent’s head.
Nassun can’t look. She hears the crunch; that’s enough. She hears Umber actually continue twitching, his movements more feeble but persistent, and she hears the faint rustle of Schaffa’s clothes as he bends. Then she hears something that her mother last heard in a little room in the Guardians’ wing of the Fulcrum, some thirty years before: bone cracking and gristle tearing, as Schaffa works his fingers into the base of Umber’s broken skull.
Nassun can’t close her ears, so instead she focuses on Nida, who’s still fighting to get free from Steel’s unbreakable grip.
“I – I —” Nassun attempts. Her heart’s slowed only a little. The sapphire shakes harder in her hands. Nida still wants to kill her. Steel, who has established himself as merely a possible ally and not a definite one, need only loosen his grip, and Nassun will die. But. “I d-don’t want to kill you,” she manages. It’s even true.
Nida abruptly goes still and silent. The fury in her expression gradually fades to no expression at all. “It did what it had to do, last time,” she says.
Nassun’s skin prickles with the realization that something intangible has changed. She’s not sure what, but she doesn’t think this is quite Nida anymore. She swallows. “Did what? Who?”
Nida’s gaze falls on Steel. There is a faint grinding sound as Steel’s mouth curves into a wide, toothy smile. Then, before Nassun can think of another question to ask, Steel’s grip shifts. Not loosening; turning, with that unnaturally slow motion which perhaps is meant to imitate human movement. (Or mock it.) He draws in his arm and pivots his wrist to turn Nida around, her back to his front. The nape of her neck to his mouth.
“It’s angry,” Nida continues calmly, though now she faces away from both Steel and Nassun. “Yet even now it may be willing to compromise, to forgive. It demands justice, but —”
“It has had its justice a thousand times over,” says Steel. “I owe it no more.” Then he opens his mouth wide.
Nassun turns away, again. On a morning when she has rent her father to pieces, some things remain too obscene for her child’s eyes. At least Nida does not move again once Steel has dropped her body to the ground.
“We cannot remain here,” Schaffa says. When Nassun swallows hard and focuses on him, she sees that he stands over Umber’s corpse, holding something small and sharp in one gore-flecked hand. He gazes at this object with the same detached coldness that he turns upon those he means to kill. “Others will come.”
Through the clarity of near-death adrenaline, Nassun knows that he means other contaminated Guardians – and not half-contaminated ones like Schaffa himself, who have somehow managed to retain some measure of free will. Nassun swallows and nods, feeling calmer now that no one is actively trying to kill her anymore. “Wh-what about the other kids?”
Some of the children in question are standing on the porch of the dormitory, awakened by the concussion of the sapphire when Nassun summoned it into longknife form. They have witnessed everything, Nassun sees. A couple are weeping at the sight of their Guardians dead, but most just stare at her and Schaffa in silent shock. One of the smaller children is vomiting off the side of the steps.
Schaffa gazes at them for a long moment, and then glances sidelong at her. Some of the coldness is still there, saying what his voice does not. “They’ll need to leave Jekity, quickly. Without Guardians, the commfolk are unlikely to tolerate their presence.” Or Schaffa can kill them. That’s what he’s done with every other orogene they’ve met who isn’t under his control. They are either his, or they are a threat.
“No,” Nassun blurts. Speaking to that silent coldness, not to what he’s said. The coldness increases fractionally. Schaffa never likes it when she says no. She takes a deep breath, marshaling a little more calm, and corrects herself. “Please, Schaffa. I just… I can’t take any more.”
This is rank hypocrisy. The decision Nassun has recently made, a silent promise over her father’s corpse, belies it. Schaffa cannot know what she has chosen, but at the corner of her vision, she is painfully aware of Steel’s lingering, blood-painted smile.
She presses her lips together and means it anyway. It isn’t a lie. She can’t take the cruelty, the endless suffering; that’s the whole point. What she means to do will be, if nothing else, quick and merciful.
Schaffa regards her for a moment. Then he twitch-winces a little, as she has seen him do often in the past few weeks. When the spasm passes, he puts on a smile and comes over to her, though first he closes his hand firmly around the metal bit he’s taken from Umber. “How is your shoulder?”
She reaches up to touch it. The cloth of her sleep-shirt is wet with blood, but not sodden, and she can still use the arm. “It hurts.”
“That will last for a time, I’m afraid.” He looks around, then rises and goes to Umber’s corpse. Ripping off one of Umber’s shirtsleeves – one that isn’t as splattered with blood as the other, Nassun notes with distant relief – he comes over and pushes up her sleeve, then helps her tie the strip of cloth around her shoulder. He ties it tight. Nassun knows this is good and will possibly prevent her from needing to have the wound sewn up, but for a moment the pain is worse and she leans against him briefly. He allows this, stroking her hair with his free hand. The gore-flecked other hand, Nassun notes, stays clenched tight around that metal shard.
“What will you do with it?” Nassun asks, staring at the clenched hand. She cannot help imagining something malevolent there, snaking its tendrils forth and looking for another person to infect with the Evil Earth’s will.
“I don’t know,” Schaffa says in a heavy voice. “It’s no danger to me, but I remember that in…” He frowns for a moment, visibly groping for a memory that is gone. “That once, elsewhere, we simply recycled them. Here, I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere isolated to drop it, and hope no one stumbles across it anytime soon. What will you do with that?”
Nassun follows his gaze to where the sapphire longknife, untended, has floated around behind her and positioned itself in the air, hovering precisely a foot away from her back. It moves slightly with her movements, humming faintly. She doesn’t understand why it’s doing that, though she takes some comfort from its looming, quiescent strength. “I guess I should put it back.”
“How did you…?”
“I just needed it. It knew what I needed and changed for me.” Nassun shrugs a little. It’s so hard to explain these things in words. Then she clutches at his shirt with her uninjured hand, because she knows that when Schaffa doesn’t answer a question, it isn’t a good thing. “The others, Schaffa.”
He sighs finally. “I’ll help them prepare packs. Can you walk?”
Nassun’s so relieved that for the moment she feels like she can fly. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Schaffa!”
He shakes his head, clearly rueful, though he smiles again. “Go to your father’s house and take anything useful and portable, little one. I’ll meet you there.”
She hesitates. If Schaffa decides to kill the other children of Found Moon… He won’t, will he? He’s said he won’t.
Schaffa pauses, raising an eyebrow above his smile, the picture of polite, calm inquiry. It’s an illusion. The silver is still a lashing whip within Schaffa, trying to goad him into killing her. He must be in astonishing pain. He resists the goad, however, as he has for weeks. He does not kill her, because he loves her. And she can trust nothing, no one, if she does not trust him.