N. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate

“It will.”

“Eventually.” She shrugs. “Our ’mests have calculated that if we grow enough ’shrooms and such, and strictly limit our population, we might achieve enough sustainability to survive until the Season ends. The odds are better if we take the storecaches of every other comm we encounter, though—”

You roll your eyes because you can’t help it. “You think cachebread’s going to last a thousand years ?” Or two. Or ten. And then a few hundred thousand years of ice.

She pauses until you’re done. “—and if we set up supply lines from every comm with renewables. We’ll need some Coastal comms with oceanic resources, some Antarctics where growing low-light plants might still be possible.” She pauses, also for effect. “But you Midlatters eat too much.”

Well. “So basically, you’re here to wipe us out.” You shake your head. “Why didn’t you just say so? Why the foolishness about getting rid of the orogenes?”

Someone from beyond the pavilion calls, “Danel!” and the woman looks up, nodding absently. This is apparently her name. “Always a chance you’d turn on each other. Then we could just walk in and scrape up the leftovers.” She shakes her head. “Now things have to be hard.”

The dull, insistent buzz that suddenly impinges itself on your sessapinae is a warning as blatant as a scream.

It’s too late the instant you sess it, because that means you’re within range of the Guardian’s ability to negate your orogeny. You turn anyway, half tripping even as you start to spin a huge torus that will flash-freeze the whole rusting town, and it is because you were expecting negation and did not deploy a tight shielding torus that the disruption knife pegs you in the right arm.

You remember Alabaster saying that these knives hurt. The thing is small, made for throwing, and it should hurt given that it’s sunk into your bicep and probably chipping bone. But what Alabaster did not specify—you are irrationally furious with him hours after his death, stupid useless ruster —was that something about this knife seems to set your entire nervous system on fire. The fire is hottest, incandescent , in your sessapinae, even though those are nowhere near your arm. It hurts so much that all your muscles spasm at once; you flop onto your side and can’t even scream. You just lie there twitching, and staring at the woman who steps through the gaggle of Rennanis soldiers to grin down at you. She’s surprisingly young, or so she seems, though appearances are meaningless because she is a Guardian. She’s naked from the waist up, her skin shockingly dark amid all these Sanzeds, her breasts small and almost entirely areola, reminding you of the last time you were pregnant. You thought your tits would never shrink back down after Uche… and you wonder if it will hurt, when you are shaken to pieces the way Innon was.

Everything goes black. You don’t understand what’s happened at first. Are you dead? Was it that quick? Everything’s still on fire, and you think you’re still trying to scream. But you become aware of new sensations then. Movement. Rushing. Something rather like wind. The touch of foreign molecules against infinitesimal receptors in your skin. It is… oddly peaceful. You almost forget your pain.

Then light, startling against the eyelids you hadn’t realized you’d closed. You can’t open them. Someone curses nearby and comes near and hands press you down, which nearly makes you panic because you can’t do orogeny with your nerves exploding like this. But then someone yanks the knife out of your arm.

It is as though a shake siren within you has been suddenly silenced. You slump in relief, into just ordinary pain, and open your eyes now that you can control your voluntary muscles again.

Lerna’s there. You’re on the floor of his apartment, the light is from his crystal walls, and he’s holding the knife and staring down at you. Beyond him, Hoa stands in a pose of entreaty, which he must have been directing toward Lerna. His eyes have shifted to you, though he hasn’t bothered to adjust the pose.

“Burning rusty fuck ,” you groan-sigh. And then, because now you know what must have happened, you add, “Thanks,” to Hoa. Who pulled you down into the earth and away before the Guardian could kill you. Never thought you’d be grateful for something like that.

Lerna’s dropped the knife and already turned away to find bandages. You’re not bleeding much; the knife went in vertically, paralleling rather than cutting across the tendons, and it seems to have missed the big artery. Hard to tell when your hands are still shaking a little; shock. But Lerna’s not moving at that blurring, near-inhuman speed he tends to use when a life is on the line, so you’re encouraged by that.

Lerna says, his back to you as he assembles items, “I take it your attempt at parley didn’t go well.”

Things have been awkward between you and him lately. He’s made his interest clear, and you haven’t responded in kind. You haven’t rejected him, either, though, thus the awkwardness. At one point a few weeks back, Alabaster grumbled that you should just roll the boy already, because you were always crankier when you were horny. You called him an ass and changed the subject, but really—Alabaster’s why you’ve been thinking about it more.

You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply… a thinning of who you are.

And maybe now is not the time to consider your cataclysm of a love life.

“No,” you say. You shrug off your jacket. Underneath you’re wearing a sleeveless shirt good for Castrima’s warmth. Lerna turns back and crouches and begins swabbing away the blood with a pad of soft rags. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone up there. They had a Guardian.”

Lerna’s eyes flick up to yours, then back to your wound. “I heard they could stop orogeny.”

“This one didn’t have to. That damned knife did it for her.” You think you know why, too, as you remember Innon. That Guardian didn’t negate him, either. Maybe the skin thing only works on roggas whose orogeny is still active. That’s how she wanted to kill you. But Lerna’s jaw muscle is already tight, and you decide maybe he doesn’t need to know that.

“I didn’t know about the Guardian,” Hoa says unexpectedly. “I’m sorry.”

You eye him. “I didn’t expect stone eaters to be omniscient.”

“I said I would protect you.” His voice is more inflectionless, now that he’s not in flesh-shape anymore. Or maybe his voice is the same, and you just read it as inflectionless because he has no body language to embellish it. Despite this, he sounds… angry. With himself, maybe.

“You did.” You wince as Lerna starts winding a bandage around your arm tightly. No stitches, though, so that’s good. “Not that I wanted to be dragged into the earth, but your timing was excellent.”

“You were hurt.” Definitely angry with himself. This is the first time he’s sounded to you like the boy he appeared to be for so long. Is he young for one of his kind? Young at heart? Maybe just so open and honest that he might as well be young.

“I’ll live. That’s what matters.”

He falls silent. Lerna works in silence. Between the collective air of disapproval that the two of them exude, you can’t help feeling a little guilty.

Afterward you leave Lerna’s apartment to head to Flat Top, where Ykka has set up an operations center of her own. Someone’s brought the rest of the divans from her apartment, and she’s set them up in a rough semicircle, basically bringing her council out into the open. In token of this, Hjarka sprawls over one divan as she usually does, head propped on fist and taking up the whole thing so no one else can sit down, and Tonkee is pacing in the middle of the semicircle. There are others around, anxious or bored people who’ve brought their own chairs or are sitting on the hard crystal floor, but not as many as you would’ve expected. There’s a lot of activity around the comm, you noticed as you headed to the Flat Top: people fletching arrows in one chamber that you pass, building crossbows in another. Down on the ground level you can see what looks like a longknife-wielding class; a slender young man is teaching about thirty people how to do an over-and-under strike. Over by Scenic Overlook some of the Innovators seem to be rigging what looks like a dropped-rocks trap.