N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Just because he doesn’t reply doesn’t mean he’s not listening. She adds, “I asked Mama when we could tell you. I asked her that a lot. She said never. She said you wouldn’t understand.”

Daddy says nothing. His hands are still shaking—less now? Nassun cannot tell. She starts to feel uncertain; is he angry? Is he sad about Uche? (Is she sad about Uche? It does not feel real. When she thinks of her little brother, she thinks of a gabby, giggly little thing who sometimes bit people and still shit his diaper occasionally, and who had an orogenic presence the size of a quartent. The crumpled, still thing back at their house cannot be Uche, because it was too small and dull.) Nassun wants to touch her father’s shaking hand, but she finds herself oddly reluctant to do so. She isn’t sure why—fear? Maybe just because this man is so much a stranger, and she has always been shy of strangers.

But. No. He is Daddy. Whatever is wrong with him now, it’s Mama’s fault.

So Nassun reaches out and grips Daddy’s nearer hand, hard, because she wants to show him that she is not afraid, and because she is angry, though not at Daddy. “I wanted to tell you!”

The world blurs. At first Nassun isn’t sure of what’s happening, and she locks up. This is what Mama has drilled her to do in moments of surprise or pain: lock down her body’s instinctive fear reaction, lock down her sessapinae’s instinctive grab for the earth below. And under no circumstances is Nassun to react with orogeny, because normal people do not do that. You can do anything else , Mama’s voice says in her head. Scream, cry, throw something with your hands, get up and start a fight . Not orogeny.

So Nassun hits the ground harder than she should because she has not quite mastered the skill of not reacting, and she still stiffens up physically along with not reacting orogenically. And the world blurs because she has not only been knocked off the driver’s seat of the wagon, but she has actually rolled off the edge of the Imperial Road and down a gravel-strewn slope, toward a small creek-fed pond.

(The creek that feeds it is where, in a few days, Essun will bathe a strange white boy who acts as if he has forgotten what soap is for.)

Nassun flops to a stop, dazed and breathless. Nothing really hurts yet. By the time the world settles and she begins to understand what’s happened— Daddy hit me, knocked me off the wagon —Daddy has scrambled down the slope and is crying her name as he crouches beside her and helps her to sit up. Really crying. As Nassun blinks away dust and the stars that obscure her vision, she reaches up in confusion to touch Daddy’s face, and finds it streaked wet.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, sweetening. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t, you’re all I have left—” He jerks her close and holds her tightly, although it hurts. She has bruises all over. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—rusting—sorry! Oh, Earth, oh, Earth, you evil son of a ruster! Not this one! You can’t have this one, too!”

These are sobs of grief, long and throat-scraping and hysterical. Nassun will understand this later (and not very much later). She will realize that in this moment, her father is weeping as much for the son he murdered as for the daughter he has injured.

In the moment, however, she thinks, He still loves me , and starts crying, too.

So it is while they are like this, Daddy holding Nassun tight, Nassun shaking with relief and lingering shock, that the rippling shockwave of the continent being ripped in half up north reaches them.

They are nearly a whole day’s travel down the Imperial Road. Back in Tirimo, a few moments previous, Essun has just shunted the force of the wave so that it splits and goes around the town—which means that what comes at Nassun is incrementally more powerful. And Nassun has been knocked half-insensible, and she is less skilled, less experienced. When she sesses the onrush of the shake, and the sheer power of it, she reacts in exactly the wrong way: She locks up again.

Her father lifts his head, surprised by her gasp and sudden stiffness, and that is when the hammer lands. Even he sesses the loom of it, though it comes too fast and too powerfully to be anything but a jangle of run run RUN RUN at the back of his mind. Running is pointless. The shake is basically what happens when a person doing laundry flaps the wrinkles out of a sheet, writ on a continental scale and moving with the speed and force of a casual asteroid strike. On the scale of small, stationary, crushable people, the strata heave beneath them and the trees shake and then splinter. The water in the pond beside them actually leaps into the air for a moment, suspended and still. Daddy stares at it, apparently riveted to this single static point amid the relentless unpeeling of the world everywhere else.

But Nassun is still a skilled orogene even if she is a half-addled one. Though she did not muster herself in time to do what Essun did and break the force of the wave before it hits, she does the next best thing. She drives invisible pylons of force into the strata, as deep as she can, grabbing for the very lithosphere itself. When the kinetic force of the wave hits, incremental instants before the planetary crust above it flexes in reaction, she snatches the heat and pressure and friction from it and uses this to fuel her pylons, pinning the strata and soil in place as solidly as if glued.

There’s plenty of strength to draw from the earth, but she spins an ambient torus anyway. She keeps it at a wide remove, because her father is within it and she cannot cannot cannot hurt him, and she spins it hard and vicious even though she doesn’t need to. Instinct tells her to, and instinct is right. The freezing eye-wall of her torus, which disintegrates anything coming into the stable zone at its center, is what keeps a few dozen projectiles from puncturing them to death.

All of this means that when the world comes apart, it happens everywhere else. For an instant there is nothing to see of reality save a floating globule of pond, a hurricane of pulverized everything else, and an oasis of stillness at the hurricane’s core.

Then the concussion passes. The pond slaps back into place, spraying them with muddy snow. The trees that haven’t shattered snap back upright, some of them nearly bending all the way in the other direction in reactive momentum and breaking there. In the distance—beyond Nassun’s torus—people and animals and boulders and trees that have been flung into the air come crashing down. There are screams, human and inhuman. Cracking wood, crumbling stone, the distant screech of something man-made and metallic rending apart. Behind them, at the far end of the valley they have just left, a rock face shatters and comes down in an avalanche roar, releasing a large steaming chalcedony geode.

Then there is silence. In it, finally, Nassun pulls her face up from her father’s shoulder to look around. She does not know what to think. Her father’s arms ease around her—shock—and she wriggles until he lets her go so that she can get to her feet. He does, too. For long moments they simply stare around at the wreckage of the world they once knew.

Then Daddy turns to look at her, slowly, and she sees in his face what Uche must have seen in those last moments. “Did you do this?” he asks.

The orogeny has cleared Nassun’s head, of necessity. It is a survival mechanism; intense stimulation of the sessapinae is usually accompanied by a surge of adrenaline and other physical changes that prepare the body for flight—or sustained orogeny, if that is needed. In this case it brings an increased clarity of thought, which is how Nassun finally realizes that her father was not hysterical over her fall purely for her sake. And that what she sees in his eyes right now is something entirely different from love.