N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

Only person besides you, you realize with a chill. But no. You can manipulate an obelisk, but you haven’t got a clue how to activate two hundred of the rusting things at once. And can Alabaster do it anymore? Every use of orogeny kills him slowly. Flaking rust— you’re the only one left who even has the potential to open the Gate. But if Gray Man’s pet army kills both of you, his purpose is served either way.

“It means Gray Man wants to wipe out orogenes in particular,” you say to Ykka. You’re abbreviating heavily, not lying. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s what you need to tell Ykka, so that she never learns that orogenes have the potential power to save the world, and so that she never attempts to access an obelisk herself. This is what Alabaster must have constantly had to do with you—telling you some of the truth because you deserve it, but not enough that you’ll skewer yourself on it. Then you think of another bone you can throw. “Hoa was trapped in an obelisk for a while. He said it’s the only thing that can stop them.”

Not the only way, he’d said. But maybe Hoa’s giving you only the safe truths, too.

“Well, shit,” Ykka says, annoyed. “You can do obelisk stuff. Throw one at him.”

You groan. “That wouldn’t work.”

“What would, then?”

“I have no idea! That’s what I’ve been trying to learn from Alabaster all this time.” And failing, you don’t want to say. Ykka can guess it, anyway.

“Great.” Ykka abruptly seems to wilt. “You’re right; I need to sleep. I had Esni mobilize the Strongbacks to secure weapons in the comm. Ostensibly they’re making them ready for use if we have to fight off these Equatorials. In truth…” She shrugs, sighs, and you understand. People are frightened right now. Best not to tempt fate.

“You can’t trust the Strongbacks,” you say softly.

Ykka looks up at you. “Castrima isn’t wherever you came from.”

You want to smile, though you don’t because you know how ugly the smile will be. You’re from so many places. In every one of them you learned that roggas and stills can never live together. Ykka shifts a little at the look on your face anyway. She tries again: “Look, how many other comms would’ve let me live after learning what I was?”

You shake your head. “You were useful. That worked for the Imperial Orogenes, too.” But being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

“Fine, then I’m useful. We all are. Kill or exile the roggas and we lose Castrima-under. Then we’re at the mercy of a bunch of people who would as soon treat all of us like roggas, just because our ancestors couldn’t pick a race and stick to it—”

“You keep saying ‘we,’” you say. It is gentle. It bothers you to puncture her illusions.

She stops, and a muscle in her jaw flexes once or twice. “Stills learned to hate us. They can learn differently.”

“Now? With an enemy literally at the gate?” You’re so tired. So tired of all this shit. “Now is when we’ll see the worst of them.”

Ykka watches you for a long moment. Then she slumps—completely, her back bowing and her head hanging and her ashblow hair sliding off to the sides of her neck until it looks utterly ridiculous, a butterfly mane. It hides her face. But she draws in a long, weary breath, and it sounds almost like a sob. Or a laugh.

“No, Essun.” She rubs her face. “Just… no. Castrima is my home, same as theirs. I’ve worked for it. Fought for it. Castrima wouldn’t be here if not for me—and probably some of the other roggas who risked themselves to keep it all going, over the years. I’m not giving up.”

“It isn’t giving up to look out for yourself—”

“ Yes. It is .” She lifts her head. It wasn’t a sob or a laugh. She’s furious. Just not at you. “You’re saying these people—my parents, my creche teachers, my friends, my lovers—You’re saying just leave them to their fate. You’re saying they’re nothing. That they’re not people at all, just beasts whose nature it is to kill. You’re saying roggas are nothing but, but prey and that’s all we’ll ever be! No! I won’t accept that.”

She sounds so determined. It makes your heart ache, because you felt the same way she did, once. It would be nice to still feel that way. To have some hope of a real future, a real community, a real life… but you have lost three children relying on stills’ better nature.

You grab the runny-sack and get up to leave, rubbing a hand over your locs. Hoa vanishes, reading your cue that the conversation is over. Later, then. When you’re almost at the curtain, though, Ykka stops you with what she says.

“Pass the word around,” she tells you. The emotion is gone from her voice. “No matter what happens, we can’t start anything.” Loaded into that delicate emphasis is an acknowledgment that orogenes are the we she means, this time. “We shouldn’t even finish it. Fighting back could set off a mob. Only talk to the others in small groups. Person to person’s best, if you can, so no one thinks we’re getting together to conspire. Make sure the children know all this. Make sure none of them are ever alone.”

Most of the orogene children do know how to defend themselves. The techniques you taught them work just as well for deterring or stopping attackers as for icing boilbug nests. But Ykka’s right: There are too few of you to fight back—not without destroying Castrima, a pyrrhic victory. It means that some orogenes are going to die. You’re going to let them die, even if you could save them. And you did not think Ykka cold enough to think this way.

Your surprise must show on your face. Ykka smiles. “I have hope,” she says, “but I’m not stupid. If you’re right, and things get hopeless, then we don’t go without a fight. We make them regret turning on us. But up to that point of no return… I hope you’re not right.”

You know you’re right. The belief that orogenes will never be anything but the world’s meat dances amid the cells of you, like magic. It isn’t fair. You just want your life to matter.

But you say: “I hope I’m not right, too.”

The dead have no wishes.

IT HAS BEEN SO LONG since Nassun was proud of herself that when she becomes capable of healing Schaffa, she runs all the way through town and up to Found Moon to tell him.

“Healing” is how she thinks of it. She has spent the past few days out in the forest, practicing her new skill. It is not always easy to detect the wrongness in a body; sometimes she must carefully follow the threads of silver within a thing to find its knots and warps. The ashfalls have grown more frequent and sustained lately, and most of the forest is patchy with grayness, some plants beginning to wilt or go dormant in response. This is normal for them, and the silver threads prove this by their uninterrupted flow. Yet when Nassun goes slowly, looks carefully, she can usually find things for which change is not normal or healthy. The grub beneath a rock that has a strange growth along its side. The snake—venomous and more vicious now that a Season has begun, so she only examines it from a distance—with a broken vertebra. The melon vine whose leaves are growing in a convex shape, catching too much ash, instead of concavity, which would shake the ash off. The few ants in a nest who have been infected by a parasitic fungus.

She practices extraction of the wrongness on these things, and many others. It’s a difficult trick to master—like performing surgery using only thread, without ever touching the patient. She learns how to make the edge of one thread grow very sharp, and how to loop and lasso with another, and how to truncate a third thread and use the burning tip of it to cauterize. She gets the growth off the grub, but it dies. She stitches together the edges of broken bone within the snake, though this only speeds what was already happening naturally. She finds the parts of the plant that are saying curve up and convinces them to say curve down . The ants are best. She cannot get all or even most of the fungus out of them, but she can sear the connections in their brains that make them behave strangely and spread the infection. She’s very, very glad to have brains to work on.